Execution Plan. Patrick Thompson

breaching germ warfare regulations. I’d had curries from places the health inspectors only visited under duress.

      I didn’t know what the symptoms were, other than wobbly cows. I didn’t think it was that. Thinking about it, the kebabs and curries were more likely to contain domestic pets and rodents than farm animals.

      I didn’t feel dizzy or sick. I didn’t feel confused. I wasn’t suffering from mood swings. It was just that what appeared to be an anonymous video-game character had waltzed along Dudley market and thrown herself at my window, guns blazing.

      I wondered whether it might have been a trick, perhaps an image projected onto my window from somewhere. I rejected that theory. She’d stayed in scale with the background. That would have been close to impossible to code. Plus, she’d left a few pixels in my room, like coloured scales from the wings of a butterfly. More convincingly, she was how I’d imagined the character to look. She was my version of a popular myth, something I’d invented rather than something I’d seen.

      I put it down to tiredness. I decided to go to bed.

      I really didn’t feel like playing that game any more.

      IV

      I tried to keep videogaming to a minimum for a while. I had early nights and took vitamins. I read books instead of playing games. I called Dermot and Tina and arranged to go out as often as I could.

      The trouble with my flat was that it was boring. It wasn’t that there was nothing to look at. There was plenty of junk. There was everything I’d bought in the last twenty years because I couldn’t face throwing any of it away.

      ‘You’re a hoarder,’ Dermot had said on one of his visits. ‘The fucking council will come in here with rubber clothes and a big fucking skip.’

      Most of the space was full of my history. I didn’t want to look at any of that, I’d already had to live through it. There were hundreds of books and magazines, but nothing I wanted to read. Like Tina and Roger, I had stuck with the five terrestrial TV channels and there wasn’t anything on I wanted to watch. The BBC had limited their output to programmes about people who were:

      Detectives.

      Doctors.

      Vets.

      Detectives who were also vets or doctors.

      The rest of it was worse. There was nothing to watch and the radio stations played generic dance music. If I sat and read I’d fidget and end up picking skin from around my fingers, which made me think of Betts, which upset me.

      I hadn’t been in any serious relationships for years and I wasn’t in one then. I had no one to distract me.

      Dermot had a theory about that.

      V

      ‘Your problem is that you’re dragging all your ghosts around,’ he said. ‘You keep your history with you.’

      We were in the Slipped Disc, a pub two miles from anywhere. It stood by itself on the long road between Kidderminster and Worcester and there was nothing else nearby. You had to drive there, so a significant proportion of the clientele was always reasonably sober. They did a good trade early in the evenings, mostly catering for unfussy families out for simple meals.

      By nine thirty the place was all but deserted. From the outside it looked like a warehouse set in a vast car park. From the inside it looked like a hasty warehouse conversion. The tables seemed dwarfed by the high ceilings, and the small amount of lively atmosphere had a hard time filling the huge rooms. Dermot was delighted with it.