We move piecemeal into proper premises. This, again, is through Ralf’s family’s property contacts. There is a heritage cable TV company rapidly haemorrhaging in a building not half a block from our basement den. So we hire rooms, one by one, in their offices, and like insects, we begin to eat our host from the inside. Over the course of a year we pick up their outgoing CFO, their personnel manager and their PA/receptionist. To our neighbours it must seem that the building is being steadily and stealthily infiltrated by the mentally disturbed. Abstracted young men and women in fashionable glasses are constantly wandering in and out of the building. They walk a little way, a few metres, and maybe they get as far as the corner of the street, when some internal battery fails them, and they begin to slow. They come at last to a complete stop, heads raised to the middle distance, oblivious to the business around them. There they stand, in the middle of the pavement, peering up and through delicatessens, hairdressing salons, bars and production offices, as though lost in a jungle. They stare and stare. Eventually, they wander back to the office again. What do they see? What do they hear?
Indoors, insulated from real-world distractions, we dream up proofs-of-concept. We calculate the physics needed to sail a boat through London’s flooded streets, and brainstorm a gondoliering game, where you have to navigate through the shallower waterways and you fall into the water if you punt your boat out of its depth. Over a single, frantic weekend, we write the bible for a speed-boat racing platform. Our games are games you can play outside, on foot or on a bicycle or from the passenger seat of a car. We web them through the real – skeins of narrative and incident and dayglo animation. They’re not subtle, and they’re not meant to be. They’re not very easy to play, and they do not have to be. They stutter and tilt, not quite welded to the world they are trying to inhabit; their glitches will be ironed out in time. Meanwhile our office walls vanish under flowcharts and storyboards, sketches and wireframes and quickly rendered avatars with bulging pecs and massive breasts.
Six months into our work, Ralf is invited to dinner by the chief operations officer of a major telecommunications company.
I’ve had a bone-shakingly bad day; everyone has been shouting at me, so it’s hardly surprising I take the news the way I do. I’ve lost Ralf. The company is done for. I spend until about half past two in the morning drinking at my desk, trying to work out my exit strategy.
In the morning Ralf comes into work as normal and asks me how you’re meant to tackle a crème brulée. ‘I mean, are you supposed to eat the topping or what?’ I know then that our business relationship is safe. Cast iron.
In the year that follows, and as our reputation spreads, Ralf gets invited to dinner after dinner. They’re a lot longer and more expensive than any dinners I’m ever invited to. At least once a month, some headhunter or high-echelon executive sits Ralf down in front of the incomprehensible tasting menu at a prestigious hotel (‘What’s ceviche?’). It’s my turn now to play the backroom boy, arguing contractual points over a working lunch of finger food and soup. I’m in my thirties, old enough not to mind the chop and change of status, but Ralf’s dominance – I’m tempted to say his celebrity – does surprise me sometimes. You should see the girls he goes out with now. The terror on his face.
Ralf is Loophole’s golden goose, there’s no hiding the fact, and everybody wants a piece of him. Eventually the temptation gets too much and I ask him, straight out, why he stays. ‘Because, you know, you could write your own ticket.’
His face falls. You would think I was jilting him. ‘We’re having fun, aren’t we?’
He is, after all, the same old Ralf.
By the time we’ve all reached our mid-thirties, what Hanna and Michel most resemble – this adventurous yachtswoman and her bestselling husband – are a couple who work in financial services. They have that kind of house, garden, summerhouse and car. They have that kind of life, their talk less conversation now than camouflage, as they adopt the political coloration of their highland home.
I see them regularly because of this godparent business. The pressure of his success is taking Michel away from home at weekends, to conventions, launches, premieres, private screenings. When the event is something Hanna wants to go along to, I come over and take care of Agnes for them. We go to zoos and parks, visit festivals and wave our flags in civic parades, we watch movies and tap our feet in folk concerts. It’s exhausting. One afternoon while I’m clearing up their kitchen I go to put bread in the bread bin and I find a tortoise in there. A wind-up plastic tortoise. For one horrible second it looked like some sort of super-cockroach. I take it out, stare at it, run it under the cold tap, shake water out of the mechanism and put it on the draining rack. Outside, a sudden gust sends rain rattling against the rigid plastic tunnel that covers their swimming pool. The wind sweeps off the mountains here without warning. The evening sky glitters uneasily. Far off, too far off to be heard, there is lightning.
Loudly, over the sound of her platform game, I ask, ‘Agnes? Do you want an umbrella?’
Agnes glances round. She’s five now, and insists on wearing scaled-up versions of the clothes her dolls wear. The controls of her games system come with safety straps to stop her accidentally hurling them at the TV. She looks like the prisoner of a dystopic police state. Her look is blank, uncomprehending. She hasn’t eaten anything in hours.
‘I think you should have an umbrella.’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Agnes, you need an umbrella. A banana. I mean a banana. Oh, God.’
One warm weekend in October I take Agnes to the coast for a last-chance spot of beachcombing. It’s so hot when we get there, Agnes is shedding her clothes all over the rocks. She’s still scared of the sea. When I suggest that we follow a line of wooden markers across the sand to a low wooded island, its all-year conifer green flecked pink and turquoise with rental bikes and ice-cream, she balks, as though the tide were pouring in already on great coasters.
‘I’m sure it’s fine.’
Children and dogs are scampering through the bright standing shallows. It looks from here as though they are stamping a vast mirror to pieces. Agnes shakes her head, wide eyed and solemn. Instead, she wants me to splash with her across a tidal puddle that has formed at the foot of the boat ramp, far away from the sea.
‘Again.’
‘Let’s go again.’
‘Come on, I’ll take your hand.’
We’re playing this game for at least half an hour, and I have this vision of myself, in clear view of the ocean, striding back and forth across this puddle like a trained dolphin swirling round its pool, not quite bright enough to understand the nature of its imprisonment.
Come early evening I’m driving Agnes back home, crawling up the motorway with an operetta hammering the speakers, when she says, ‘Will you come to ours for Christmas?’
‘I don’t know, love.’
‘Mummy and Daddy are going to ask you.’
‘Are they?’
‘They say you shouldn’t be alone at Christmas time.’
Hanna and Michel are back home by the time we arrive. Michel’s already in his summerhouse, working. Hanna makes a pot of coffee for me, to set me up for the drive back to the capital. ‘Thanks for today.’
‘It was no problem at all.’ I take a seat at their kitchen table and leaf through Agnes’s storybooks. She’s tucked up in bed now, but she’s not asleep. I can hear her, faintly, cheerfully chuntering to herself. She has a torch in there. She stays up all hours, playing, telling stories. I wonder why they’ve not had a second child.
While the coffee is heating up on the hob (for all their creature comforts they have never succumbed to a complicated coffee machine) Hanna moves around the kitchen, stacking, sorting, putting away. She has help – cleaners, an au pair off and on. I think she is making all this work for herself now just to avoid me. It doesn’t often happen that we’re alone, without Michel or Agnes somewhere around. I’m surprised Hanna’s put Agnes to bed, to be honest. The girl’s sharp as razors – an effective chaperone. Which reminds me. I repeat to Hanna what Agnes said to me in the car.