“Lucky bastard!”
“For fuck’s sake!”
“If that happens again …”
“This control is fucked!”
“It’s fucking fucked!”
He got even angrier if he missed a shot, or if I scored a point, but I didn’t care. The sheer enjoyment of that game was enough, its mesmerising acoustics, the white dot travelling geometrically across the small, portable black-and-white TV screen. I revelled in its simplicity.
Sometimes, when my brother was out of the house, I would sneak into his room to play the game, setting it so I could play the computer on a medium-paced level. I enjoyed playing the game alone, knowing that if I were ever to be caught I would be in serious trouble with my brother. Once, after a marathon gaming spell, the bat seemed to stop of its own accord. Like it had given up responding to my instruction or something. I lost control of the game all of a sudden, the bat sitting there in the blackness, unable to move, flickering slightly, like there had been a malfunction, a short fuse in the circuitry. Somehow, the white dot had become caught, ricocheting off the bat and onto the parameter wall, or the outer boundary, and back again onto the bat at high speed. I watched this repetitive process before me on the small TV screen, the pinging white dot surrounded by the blackness. When I followed its trajectory, I noticed it was following a perfect triangle, over and over again. I began to feel strangely exhilarated, wondering if this was going to continue forever on its own. I waited and waited, watching the triangular trajectory of the white dot, the blackness engulfing it, outside it, within the trajectory, the dull ping of the white dot hitting the bat, over and over, flooding the entire room with its elementary timbre, pouring out from the small speaker on the side of the TV. I stared at the screen, mesmerised by what was happening before me. It felt like technology, mathematics, this new stuff made with computer chips and electricity fed into TV screens from boxes covered in dials and switches, had taken control; as if it was trying to tell me something, or give me a code to decipher, in a perpetually triangular motion from bat to wall and back again. I must have watched this phenomenon for a good two hours. It must have been that long, before I came to and switched off the game console, fearing my brother’s return.
Walking back to my room, across the small hallway, I began to tingle all over, thinking about what I had witnessed: the triangular loop, the constant pinging in my ears, the loop acting out its triangular trajectory ad infinitum. I had never seen anything quite like it before that day.
The next time my brother left the house I waited until he had walked up the street and out of my line of vision. I watched him through my bedroom window, and when he had vanished from my sight I dashed into his room to set up his games console. But this time I didn’t play the computer at ping-pong. Instead, I purposely set the positioning of the bat up towards the right-hand corner of the TV screen, as best I could remember from my previous encounter of the phenomenon. With the game in motion, and the computer thinking that I was legitimately playing, I waited until the white dot became trapped again, until it began ricocheting, of its own accord, in an elongated figure eight this time, bouncing from the bat, onto the opposing bat, down to a wall, off that wall and onto the opposite wall, and then crossing the screen and back onto the original bat — over and over again, the pinging from the TV set filling, not the blackness on the screen, but the space of my brother’s room, around me, around his things, everything. I must have left it like this all afternoon. I can’t begin to describe how right it felt, watching the white dot’s trajectory, feeling part of it, knowing that it was never going to stop if I left it like that.
I can’t begin to describe how that simple act of repetition back then made me so ecstatically happy — but it did. It was probably the happiest I have ever been. The sad thing about it is that I wasn’t aware of it back then.
twenty-three
I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked to the canal. It felt odd knowing that she was gone and that she would never turn up again. Even though she had been dead a number of weeks by then, it still hadn’t properly hit me — although the weight of it all was evident in each of my deadened footfalls. The sun was shining above me and its rays were twinkling as they bounced off the canal. In the end, the dredger had done its job well. The canal looked cleaner now that things had settled — only the water remained; the silt and the shit had all but disappeared. The water looked calm. It looked peaceful, as if it had always looked like that, motionless and quite unaffected by things.
I walked towards the bridge, from the direction of where the bench used to be, where we used to sit, doing nothing every day, barely speaking, watching it all go by. I stood still for a moment and looked back. The recently erected wooden partition that separated the towpath from the newly forming concrete structures on the other side had been covered in graffiti. Some of it I could read: PACK CREW N1 spray-painted crudely a number of times across its surface, the markings of a territory, like cartographic markings on a map. The rest was meaningless to me, a jumble of elaborately formed letters, some coloured, others outlined or shaded in, all put there for someone to read, to see, to decipher — but not for me.
I looked up. A Beoing 747 was banking above me, well on its descent towards Heathrow. It banked quickly. It cut through some cloud, slicing it. It moved away from me at speed, far quicker than usual it seemed, straightening itself out and moving farther away from me. I watched it until I could see it no more. The whole scene lasting no longer than ten seconds. And then it was gone, and things were silent.
I turned back around and faced the bridge ahead of me, the whitewashed office block across the canal to my right. I stared at the bridge. It was the first time I had looked at it since it had happened. It was a simple bridge, hardly noticeable amongst the buildings that surrounded it. Even the canal beneath it seemed somehow detached. Yet, there it stood, connecting one side of the canal with the other, completing everything. The whitewashed office block was urging me to look over. I knew each of the office workers was inside, busying away at things — I also knew they would be there, sitting at their desks, sending each other their secret emails, waiting to sneak outside, or waiting to meet inside The Rheidol Rooms café at lunch. I tried not to look over, but the temptation was too much for me: I could clearly see each of the office workers sitting at their desks, or standing by the water cooler, chatting in groups, or on the phone. I observed them for a long time — observed their movements, scurrying about the office like lab rats on a task. I have never been able to understand the things of work. I’ve never been able to fathom why it has taken us so long to develop a system of existence that makes no sense to me. I really don’t know if this is my failing or theirs, or whether I am somehow unhinged, or different — but the feeling is that I now know something, something blindingly obvious, something they can’t see.
Before I reached Shepherdess Walk, where the path led up towards the bridge, I noticed the tree to my left. The same tree I had climbed as a child, the same tree I had scraped her initials into that wet afternoon with my front door key. The bark had hardened and lightened in colour where it had dried out in the sun. A lip had formed around the outline of her initials where the bark had begun the process of self-repair; her initials now looked like they could have been scraped into the bark years ago. The bark had dealt with the trauma, the cutting and chipping away with the key. I stood and looked at the initials, her initials, and smiled. Then I turned back to the spot where she fell with the swan, the dead swan in her arms, the life bleeding out from her fractured skull. I walked over to the exact spot by the side of the canal where her head had hit the cold, wet stone. I crouched down and traced my fingers where she had lay. I half expected to find something there, something she might have left behind for me, some trace of her being there. But the stone looked like all the others that lined the banks of the canal. There was nothing, no trace of her, no deposit for me to scrutinise … Nothing remained where she once lay to help denote the fact that some thing had happened there. I let my fingers trace the cold, textured surface of the stone one last time, but I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, so I quietly walked away. I was close to the water, close to the canal; I could smell it, feel its presence next to me. It was strange thinking about her. The things she said to me before she died. It was strange knowing that she no longer existed, knowing she was dead.