.

of the van had been cut open and brutalized into a serving hatch.

      There was no queue. There was no menu.

      ‘What do you have?’ I asked.

      The proprietor looked down at me from behind the crusted sauce bottles. He had black curly hair and a round nose. He looked like a cartoon Irishman, and as it turned out that summed him up pretty well, apart from his accent. His accent was all over the place, and as I soon discovered, he put heavy emphasis on at least one word in almost every sentence.

      ‘I have fucking burgers, what do you think I have? Truffles?’

      ‘What sort of burgers?’

      ‘Cheap ones.’

      ‘Do you sell many?’

      ‘Not round here I don’t. They’re all in there, eating really cheap burgers.’ He nodded towards the restaurant. ‘They’re all in the fucking tuck shop. Have you noticed that? It’s like a campus here. It’s like a university. They’ve all got the same clothes. They’ve got tie clips. Fucking tie clips. Jesus.’

      He looked at my tie.

      ‘Did you tie that? Was the light on when you did it? You have to be a computer man.’

      I told him I was.

      ‘Fucker of a day this is turning out to be. Only one customer and he’s a computer man. I’m sick of this. Do you want a drink?’

      ‘I want a burger.’

      ‘I’ll give you a fucking burger. It’s your funeral. Then can we go for a drink? They have a bar in there?’

      I nodded.

      ‘Right we are then. Settled. Here.’

      He dropped a burger into a bap and passed it to me.

      ‘Sauce is there if you want it.’

      He closed the hatch. I heard a door close on the far side of the van, and then he walked around it. He was shorter than me but not by much, and far more alive. He was more alive than anyone I’d ever met. He was all energy.

      I took a bite of my burger.

      ‘There’s a bin there,’ he said, pointing. ‘Take my word for it, throw that fucking thing into it.’

      ‘I thought it was my funeral.’

      ‘And it’s my fault. Do they have beer in here or is it all wine and shite in bottles?’

      ‘They have beer.’

      ‘In tiny fucking bottles or in pints?’

      ‘Both.’

      ‘Fair enough. You had enough of that?’

      I had. I dropped it into the next bin.

      ‘First sensible thing you’ve done. For the second one, you can buy the drinks.’

      ‘I’m buying the drinks?’

      ‘Of course you are, you cheeky cunt. I bought lunch.’

      V

      If you’re old enough to remember a time when there were no video games, then you’ll know that the first time you saw Pong it was a vision into a new place. Cyberspace is the place you look into when you look into a monitor, past the screen and into the game world. In there – out there – everything is possible. You can control events there.

      In the real world, events control you.

      I used to be a student. You don’t need to be a student to get into software. Most early coders – the ones on the frontier, the ones on the cutting edge – taught themselves. They had to. There were no landmarks. Now, you need qualifications and experience. I learned how to code from a ZX Spectrum, trying to write games that would make me a millionaire like Matthew Smith. You’d see pictures of him in computer magazines, this long-haired seventeen-year-old said to have a million-plus bank account. This was in the early eighties, when a million was big money. The computer magazines of the time used to have long listings of programs, endless pages of hopeless code for you to type in at the keyboard of your computer. They always contained typos. If you typed them in correctly, they failed to run. You had to interpret and debug the code. You’d spend days typing this stuff in, saving it to a C90 cassette every now and then. Saving took minutes in those days. You had to watch the tape run and listen to a high-pitched electronic squealing.

      Sometimes, even now, I hear that sound as I fall asleep.

      I corrected the code in magazines and got programs to run. I got jerky stick-men to stroll across the screen. I got fifty bad versions of Space Invaders to run. I got bad eyesight and pale skin.

      I gave up on programming games. With games the cutting edge is always somewhere else. In computing the cutting edge is in all directions, and you can’t keep up with it. You have to find a wave and ride it. You have to pick a direction and head that way.

      I learned computing by myself, and then couldn’t get a job. The first wave had gone. The second wave was coming up behind me, schools full of kids learning to program. I didn’t have a wave to go with, so I got stuck in the trough. I needed more experience. I had some money in my bank account, left to me thanks to helpful deaths on remote branches of the family tree. I invested it in myself and took a degree course at Borth College. That’s where I learned about other worlds. That’s where I learned that they’re bad places. And then, like all students, I forgot everything I’d learned.

      VI

      Dermot looked at the interior of the restaurant.

      ‘Look at the state of this place. Is this tacky or fucking what?’

      A barman in an anonymous black suit watched us nervously. He looked too young to be behind a bar. He looked much too young to deal with Dermot.

      ‘We want beer,’ Dermot told him. ‘We need beer. We’ve been having a hard old time. I’ve been shifting commodities all morning and I’m thirsty. What have you got?’

      The barman listed drinks; designer lagers made up most of the options.

      ‘Two pints of lager then,’ Dermot said. ‘Fizzy piss but you haven’t got anything else. You want to talk to the brewery about it. I have friends in catering. I could put a word in. Would you like me to do that? Would you like me to see what I can do?’

      ‘It’s not up to me,’ said the barman.

      ‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Dermot. ‘I’d imagine not. We’ll have two whiskies to go with them.’

      ‘I’m driving,’ I said.

      ‘I’ll drink them then. That’s two lagers, two whiskies, and have one yourself.’

      ‘I’m not really allowed to drink.’

      ‘But I want you to have one. I’ll be offended. I’d take it as a rebuff. Who says you can’t have one?’

      ‘It’s how it works.’

      ‘Don’t say I didn’t try. Don’t say I didn’t offer. Just the lagers and whiskies then, thanks. He’s paying.’

      I checked my wallet. I didn’t know what the prices were like. The training people had paid for all of the meals until then. Which was fair enough as the training was costing thousands of pounds. I checked the room for clues about costs. There was a lot of flimsy wood panelling and acres of flat red cloth. Glass ashtrays the size of dustbin lids held mounds of smouldering butts. The waitresses were teenage girls with the facial expressions of expiring fish apart from one older woman who, on first inspection, appeared