Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant Page 4
“What?” I say. “What?”
And he sits stiff-backed in double denim and says: “In my bowels. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.”
And I say Jesus, I say Jesus Fucking Christ. What is with everyone getting cancer?
And he says, I know.
And we drive in silence back to the town and we line up more beers in another pub and meet some friends and he tells them he thinks he has cancer (“In my bowels,” he says. “Blood. Bad blood, that black blood. They did a test. I’m waiting on the scans.”) and he starts crying so much the landlord very quietly asks us to leave the pub because, quote-unquote, we are really bringing the vibe down, and then the next pub we go into we are also asked to leave because of the crying thing, too. And at the funeral a week later I ask him if he’s coping okay and he says a cheerful “Yep!” and then proceeds to not ever mention cancer or die over cancer at any point over the next three years, and I figure there is something about death that brings out the weird little crevices in all of us.
My parents are dead, and it’s a year or so later and everyone thinks that I’m fine including me. I’m cat-sitting for my sister, my boys, my big beautiful boys, but there’s something wrong with Boz: he’s thin when he used to be plush, he’s quiet when he used to be loud, he keeps coming up to me, shaking and feeble, just leaning on me with all the little weight that he has. One morning, before I leave for work, I find him after calling him for breakfast, and there he is, shaking under a shelf: I coax him half out, bring him a small plate of biscuits, swaddle him with a towel. Boz has been my best little mate since I was eleven and he was six months old, and now I look into his huge orange eyes and I know that he is dying. Moww, he says, and I say moww back, and I cry, and cry and cry and cry, and kiss his little head, and cry and cry and cry, and I’m crying now, and I cry and cry and cry and cry, and I suppose that’s when it all hits me—me, on the floor, cat biscuits on my fingers—that’s when it hits me most of all.
* * *
—
My parents are dead, and I’m starting to get to the age where my friends’ parents are dying, too, and I feel I should know what to say to them. And I never really do: instances of grief, I have found, are unique, two never coming in the same shape, and it can be piercing and hard-edged or it can be like passing through deep dark treacle or it can be like a long, slow-passing cloud; it can make everything gray or everything sharp; it can hit you like a truck or it can hit you like cholesterol. There is no one single catchall solution to dealing with the worst life has to throw at you because life has such a habit of swinging you curveballs.
But what I do always say is: Oh man, this is going to suck.
And I always say: You need two fewer death certificates than you think you need.
And I say: Snakes will come up from the grass and you will want to hurt them.
And: At one point you are going to become keenly aware that everyone is judging you for the exact way you outwardly behave when someone close to you dies, and I need to tell you that that is nonsense. You are going to feel a dirty little feeling of guilt. If there’s a long illness involved, there might be this horrible, metallic-tasting feeling of relief, one too hard and real for you to admit to yourself is there. You will do weird things and behave weirdly and not even know it is happening. You will offer up a portion of your psyche to the grief gods and say to them in the rain: Take this and do what you want with it. Suddenly your body is not your own, your mind, your home. There’s no right way of dealing with it, but there are a thousand differently angled wrong ways. You’ll cycle through all of them.
I’m on my fourth Christmas without parental guidance now, and I suppose I am okay. There are still times when I feel unutterably alone—times when all I need is my mum’s roast, or a voice that knows me on the other end of a phone to tell me things will be all right again, or what I need to do to make things all right; times when I’d give anything to go for one pint with my dad, or drive around in his smoky old Volvo listening to Fleetwood Mac. It’s weird what you miss: every holiday we had, when I was a kid, was foreshadowed on the morning of travel by my dad getting the shits—every single time, without fail—and our journey to Cleethorpes or Scarborough or Whitby or Filey would be delayed by Dad, in the bathroom, making the air sharp and sour, groaning through the door, and Mum, on her tenth or eleventh furious cigarette, hissing, “Every. Bloody. Time. Tony! Every. Fucking. Time.” through her teeth, and I don’t know. Holidays don’t seem the same without this consistent element of intestinal chaos beforehand.
I picked up his camera, recently. I think a lot of people my age and of my generation get this delayed obsession with film—that gauzy, blurry, physical quality of it, haunted eyes reflected back from a flash bang, a fraction of a second of light that could have exploded, just for a moment, a day ago, or a week, a year, one hundred—more a frozen moment in time, somehow, than anything digital—and I asked my sister to dig out his old Nikon. I turn thirty this year, a moment that will be marked with me living more of my life without him than I ever did with, and it was curious, looking into that bag, reminding myself of a time left behind me: an old emergency pack of Rizlas, the gnarled old piece of tights material he used as a lens cleaner, the ephemera of a life left behind. The bag smelled of him. I held the camera up to my face, put my eye where his eye had been, nestled my nose where, years before, he would have squashed his. Click. You wonder what they would make of you now. Click. How they might be proud of what you’ve become. Click.
The Murderer Who Came to Tea
Dad taught me how to make a prison bomb once. I do not think my mum ever knew about this. This was not on the family curriculum. But we were playing cards one day when I was ten, and “Oh,” Dad said, as if recalling some vital lesson all fathers teach to their children that he had somehow neglected, “right: You know you can make a bomb out of this?” And I said: I’m listening.
You can make a prison bomb out of a pack of cards, Dad explained, if you cut all the little red pieces out—the hearts and the diamonds, and any red ink-like paste that might be smeared on the back—and mush them into a wet paste, which you cram down a radiator pipe or some such. When the pipe heats up—it’s an inelegant art, and results vary, so don’t, like, sleep close to it, especially not headfirst—some chemical reaction will happen, which causes it to explode, dismantling the wall behind it and creating a hole through which you—he motioned at me in a very confident way, as if to say, “You, my sweet large son, are destined for prison”—through which you escape. And that’s a prison bomb. And that’s rummy.
I didn’t really question this at the time because Dad was always talking about war stuff and cannons and stuff, and also because he went to prison once. This, again, was one of those strange things that was never explained to me as being abnormal—Dad got stopped for drunk driving once and given a warning, and then he was stopped again and given a fine, and seeing as we were poor and couldn’t pay the fine he did three weeks in prison, one week maximum security and then another fortnight—after they realized how truly meek and unthreatening he was—in an open prison somewhere near Leicester. “How was prison, Dad?” I asked, when he came back again. He said: “Not bad.” He genuinely looked quite healthy. Prison wore well on my father.
We didn’t talk about prison much after that, mainly because it was such a pathetic stretch he did—I mean I never even had to draw a heartbreaking crayon-colored picture of our family, labeled “MUMMY,” “DADDY?,” “ME” about it—and also because Mum very strictly forbid us talking about it (she was really mad about that time he had to go to prison). But one day I answered the phone—one of my pathological childhood obsessions, for a while, was snatching the phone up and answering it in my politest singsong—and a strange voice on the other end growled: “Is that Joel?”
Yes, I said.
“Hello, Joel,” he said. (Imagine the voice is more prison-y than th
at. You are not reading it prison-y enough, and I can tell.) “Hello, Joel,” the prison voice said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Is your dad there?”
And I said, Sure, who is it.
And he said, John.
And so I yelled up the stairs, D-AAAA-D, JOHN’S ON THE PHONE.
And my dad appeared before me like Death had learned to shit his pants in fear.
“Yeah,” my dad said, shakily, tentatively answering the phone as I watched on. “Yeah. Yeah. Yep. No, I’ll—Yeah. No, I’ll come to you. Yeah. Yep. See you there.” And then he hung up and turned and swiveled into a crouch down next to me and said, Don’t Tell Your Mother.
I’m not saying who told her, but she found out.
It turns out Dad had made friends, in prison, as he was wont to do as he was a very mellow and agreeable man, especially friends with his bunkmate, John, who had murdered someone. “Yeah, come over,” Dad said into the bunk above him, confident this man would never be released from prison ever in his life. “We’ll get a drink. Kip on the sofa until you sort yourself out.” And then John fucking got parole, and instantly called the only phone number he had on his person, which was my dad’s, and asked if he could stay with us, promising not to do a murder again. The row between my parents that night—the Red Corner fighting “Can a murderer stay on our sofa?” and the Blue Corner fighting out of “Absolutely fucking not”—went on so long our neighbors kept flicking their bedroom lights on and off in a really passive-aggressive way, slamming their flat palms against the shared wall that ran over our alleyway.
John never stayed, in the end—“Because of the murder,” I imagine my dad saying over the pint they eventually shared at a pub far, far away from our house, and I like to think John was a gentlemanly murderer who waved his hand and said, “I understand”—but I always like that my dad even tried it: that he thought a murderer could stay with us, for anywhere between one day and six months, really says a lot about him, his gentle trusting nature and his inability to operate anywhere within the sensible laws of society.
I often imagine how I would do in prison. Quietly, I think I’d thrive. The Boys there would at first be suspicious of my smart mouth and bookish ways, and look to teach me a violent lesson, but I think after the first two or three beatings they would take a begrudging shine to me—“He does reading,” they will say, proudly, to their bunkmates; “He’s helping me write a letter to my lawyer”—and that, over time, would evolve into a quiet sort of respect. One day a young upstart would try and beat me with a metal pipe on his first day to prove some sort of point, and the more seasoned inmates would jump to my defense—“Leave him alone!” they’d say, “He’s just a harmless little soft prick!”—and I would say, Thank You, Lads, dusting my prison uniform off, going back to my eccentric little hobby of cutting all the red bits out of cards. And then one day, just like Daddy taught me, I’d blow every one of those fuckers up to kingdom come and sprint off into the night, hooting and hollering with delirium, until the police shot me to death with tasers. But I still wouldn’t fucking invite a murderer to dinner, would I? Because I’m not mad.
Twitch Dot TV
I’ve got to tell you that there is something singularly amusing about watching a Dutch teenager swear in a flurry of American slang. Fucking shit, bro, fuck, man, Jord is swearing. Fucking shit, man, my mom. Jord just got down to the last five of the game—a hundred players whittled down to a handful over a grinding thirty-five minutes—and the circle draws ever tighter, pushing those last few remaining players in, and they are all concentrated on this one small patch of bush grass, and Jord is just lining up his shot: he’ll go through the back of the head of this guy, then hop over and loot his ammo, then use it to take out the final two players a little over the ridge—this is a very high-tension thing—and then his mum stumbles in and the mic is abruptly muted and we watch, thousands of us, in silent horror, as Jord’s entire head is shot to pieces while he pliantly talks to his mum. He turns back to the screen and sees himself as a mess of blood and ammo. Fuck, man, my mom, he explains. Fuck. He rubs his eyes and regains composure. No, man, she—I don’t mean that. She means well. Exit to lobby, new game, the tide washes in with the moon.
Or: JASONR needs to piss. It is midgame—that gauzy time when the initial flurry of desperate gun hunting and easy-pickings inner-city kills have quieted down, and so now it is a case of picking your way through the expanse, picking up improved helmets and gun sights and vehicles, taking tactical positions up on hills and the roofs of houses—and he is swimming across a small river to get to the other side of the island. But he isn’t: Jason has left his character automatically swimming—“I gotta pee, man”—and everyone in the chat is deliriously tense in his absence. I’ve seen Jason die like this, one chatter says. Another: It’s a long shot, but he can take him out. Jason’s teammate, some guy a thousand miles across the country, pings to no one on the audio chat. Jason? Jase. Jase. He’s gone a really, really long time. He bobs in the water. When he returns from his piss, I am once again allowed to breathe.
Or: Shroud is falling apart. “My eye is twitching, guys, I don’t know why.” The chat moves so fast you can hardly see it: it’s caffeine, the chat says, or you need special blue-lens glasses to play in. Shroud is hardly watching because he is focusing on just ruining the brains of the schoolyard of players who have landed around him, so his fans take it into their own hands: donations of $10 or more get read out over the screen by a robotic voice, and they use it to communicate with their god. “I’m not buying those blue glasses,” he tells one donor. Another message flashes up on screen: You have a magnesium deficiency, it says. You need to buy supplements. Shroud mulls this over while he kills two guys, perfect headshots, boom. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.” He stares at the screen without blinking for five more hours. What sustains him also kills him.
Or: Shroud, again, midgame, again, and he’s talking about his living arrangement. How he couldn’t rent this place—he gestures around him, the immaculate unfurnished flat wall behind him—because he had no credit history. But it turns out the landlord’s daughter knew who he was, how he made money, how much of it he banked, so they agreed to let the apartment to him, figuring he wouldn’t make much noise anyway. Boom, pshht, headshot out of nowhere. “Well, didn’t see that,” he says, reloading the game all over again. Piss, eyes, moms, rent. Heads exploding without warning. Periodic reminders that our gods are still mortal.
I have to tell you that I am really into watching people play videogames now. I want to be clear about this: I own the means with which to play videogames myself. I have a console and a controller and a TV and games. I can, if I want to, play the videogames. But that is like saying I have a soccer ball in my garden, so why do I have to bother watching Messi. Yes, I can play videogames. I can take back the means of control. But also I am very bad at them, in a way I cannot communicate to you. I can play videogames, but it’s actually far better to watch people who are good.
Twitch is a website where you watch other people play games, and I did not understand it until I got Really Into Watching Other People Play Games. The game I am obsessed with watching is Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, which Jord and Shroud and JASONR are fantastic at, and I am appallingly bad at. Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, in short: a hundred-man battle royale set across a digital island, where you parachute in and loot empty buildings until you find enough guns and lickspittle armor to mount an attack on your fellow players. The game’s active area slowly shrinks—this adds a vital layer of urgency to proceedings, to stop people camping out and games lasting eight to nine hours each—until, after about thirty-five minutes, the once island-sized game map is crushed into the size of a single field, and it becomes a kill-or-be-killed hellscape. The first time I played it I died within one minute and proclaimed the game to be “bad” or “shit” (I forget which). Second time I made it until about three minutes in, before I was
cleanly dispatched by an Uzi for an overall ranking of around #89. My friend Max then took over, and came out #2 overall, after a forty-minute standoff, a jeep chase, an exquisite sniper takeout, and this one time where he threw a grenade into a room. The final battle saw him and one other fight for supremacy around the edge of a hill, and he was taken out by a single bullet to the side of the head. Here is an impression of me, sitting on a computer chair at Max’s shoulder, trying not to breathe too loudly and so put him off his aim: “[Hands held over mouth, breath held, voice coming out strangled and high-pitched] Fuck! Shit shit shit! Fuck!” It was the most exhilarating gaming moment I had ever seen. I mean, Christ, man. I live a relatively empty life. It was possibly the most exhilarating anything moment I had ever seen. So you see now how instantly I was hooked.
But as we have discussed, I am terrible at the game (my simple mind cannot, however I try, get my head around the W-A-S-D keyboard movement system, and for now PUBG is PC-only), so instead I watch Jord play it on Twitch. Or: I watch Shroud on Twitch, because his American time zone means it’s easier to watch in the evenings (on weekends, when I want to wake up and watch someone who isn’t me playing videogames, I watch American streamers who stay up deliberately late in their time zone to catch the European early-morning audience, and they all wear caps and have obnoxious catchphrases, and I universally hate all of them). I watch this guy called JASONR sometimes, too, and though I don’t like him as a human, I respect him as a player. All three of them have this preternatural reaction time, a kind of hardwired cold-bloodedness and resistance to panic, unerring accuracy with digital rifles even over long distances, and also this relentlessness: they wear their rare losses lightly, so when their heads explode in the middle of a gray-brown field, they, instead of wailing and gnashing with the sting of loss, boot up the game and go again. Essentially: the mind-set of highly tuned professional athletes, but in the bodies of slightly awkward nerd teens.