Patrick Thompson - Execution Plan

‘Not to talk to. I’ve seen them. They’re not the sort of people I’d talk to.’

‘No? You’re a snob mate. They probably don’t want to talk to you. Any more of this wine then, Roger?’

Roger went to get another bottle from the attic.

‘What are we going to do about him?’ Tina asked.

‘Our Mick?’ asked Dermot. ‘We’ll have to get him to take an interest. We’ll have to get him a hobby. Bring him out of himself.’

‘I think he’s been out of himself,’ said Tina. They exchanged a look.

‘Then we’ll have to sort his life out,’ Dermot said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my life,’ I said. ‘Except for my friends.’

Roger returned with another bottle.

‘This should stand,’ he said.

‘Stand it here,’ said Dermot.

Tina and Dermot got on fine after that. They seemed to have something in common, a shared way of seeing the world. I remembered how Tina had once tried to get me to swim in the frigid Borth sea. She and Dermot shared some sort of adventurous or mischievous gene. They were ready to do something ridiculous, any time.

Whenever the four of us went out, Roger and I would sit and disapprove of them while they talked up a storm.

I suppose I was detached. I didn’t have any great interest in other people. I liked them around. I didn’t want to know their life stories.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Not even now, knowing all that I know. There’s nothing wrong with being detached.

Better that than being attached to something dangerous.

Nothing changed for years. We all kept in touch, I kept getting better jobs, programming moved on and I followed it at a safe distance.

In 1998, my years of staring at monitors did the inevitable damage. Like everyone else, I read the warnings about spending ten minutes an hour away from the monitor. Like everyone else, I ignored them. I was spending most of my time either playing video games or programming, and screen resolutions were getting higher every six months. New graphics cards meant that you could get more dots per inch on the screen, and every time that happened the rez went up and the text got smaller. Ten-point Times New Roman – which used to look like a headline – now looks like it’s in the next room.

I was squinting, and getting headaches. I had begun to get strange visual effects, shadows off at the edges of my vision, dots flickering in and out of my field of view.

‘Go to the fucking optician ,’ advised Dermot. Tina agreed with him. Roger agreed with both of them.

I went to the optician, and discovered that I was short-sighted. Everything more than a couple of feet away was blurred. He tested me out and gave me a prescription. I went to a big High Street store to get the frames, because they had a better selection. A week later I picked up my spectacles. I tried them on, and everything went from a cheap fuzzy lo-rez to a sharp digital hi-rez.

About that time, Les Herbie did a column about the same sort of thing. I cut it out and kept it. Of course, I kept everything. I didn’t like to throw anything away. Perhaps it was something to do with my parents.

I have these spots in front of my eyes. I get more of this sort of thing these days. It’s because I’m getting old. Things are closing down. Non-essential services are being run down. Manpower is being diverted elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s not that. Perhaps it’s a brain tumour pushing my eyeballs out of shape.

I go to the doctor. I say I have spots on front of my eyes. He refers me to an optician. Opticians do eyes, he explains. Perhaps it’s eyestrain, he tells me.

You didn’t think it was a brain tumour, did you? he asks.

No, I tell him. Never even thought about it. Never even crossed my mind.

He knows I’m lying. Everyone lies to him. We don’t make anything of it.

I go to see the optician. He makes me read things I can’t read. He tries different lenses out.

Suddenly I can read all of the rows on his chart.

He tells me one eye has a focal length half the focal length of the other. One of them is round. The other is egg-shaped. That’ll need correcting. He can do that with lenses. That’s what he does.

He does me a prescription for lenses. I choose some frames. It’s risky doing that before I can see properly, but I don’t have a choice. I don’t want computer programmer frames. I don’t want trainspotter frames. I want to choose good frames, right now.

They’ll be ready in a week. In a week I go and get them. I put them on. I can see everything. I don’t look a lot like a computer programmer. I don’t look much like a trainspotter. I can get away with it. I can carry it off.

I go outside and read things. I read road signs. I read everything, because now I can.

I wonder how one eyeball got egg-shaped. What made it do that? Was it happier that way?

I think about brain tumours. Perhaps a brain tumour has pushed one of my eyeballs out of shape.

I have these spots in front of my eyes.

And now I can see them really clearly.

I didn’t want bifocals. I could see things clearly without my specs if they were close to me. I could see everything within a few feet perfectly with my unaided eyes. I could see the monitor when I programmed or played games. With them on, I could see everything else. Switching from one to the other, just after I put them on or took them off, there would be a moment while my eyes readjusted and focussed. My left eye was more short-sighted than my right eye, and they had to get used to working together.

Sometimes, in the moments while my eyes got their act together, I would see things. Dots crawling up the walls, shadows, nothing substantial. After I blinked once or twice, it’d be gone.

Not long before the end of 1999, with autumn feeling very like winter and a freezing wind blowing through Dudley, getting in through the gaps between door and jamb, I was trying to finish a game I’d been playing. It was the first in what was to become a very successful series, and it had got me frustrated almost to the point of throwing the keyboard through the window.

I kept killing off the lead character. Whatever I tried, she fell to death on one or another of what seemed to be a million sets of spikes. My reactions weren’t good enough for that sort of game any more. I turned off the PC two hours later than I’d planned to, having got nowhere. I put on my spectacles and looked out of the window, to give my poor battered eyes some relief.

From the front window of my flat, there’s a view down Dudley High Street. I can see about half way down it, as far as Woolworth’s and one of the grisly butcher shops. It was about one in the morning and the market was empty. The red and white stripes of the awnings wouldn’t settle in my vision. A woman walked into view at the far end of the High Street. She was carrying a pair of guns, one in each hand. She looked cartoonish, and not all that well rendered. She looked a little like the character I’d been unwittingly dropping into spiked pits for the last few hours, but not enough like her to infringe anyone’s copyright. I had a very careful imagination, apparently.

She wasn’t real. I knew that. She was some sort of hallucination. She walked under the awnings of the market, went out of sight for a moment, and then reappeared close to the statue of Duncan Edwards.

Duncan Edwards was a footballer, and one of Dudley’s famous sons. There is a statue of him on the High Street, up on a pedestal, poised on the verge of kicking a metal football. There is a road named after him, too. On one side of the road is a sign saying: