Patrick Thompson - Execution Plan

‘I don’t mind mirrors,’ I said. Dermot smiled evilly at the barman.

‘Oh yes he does,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like them at all. And now he doesn’t know whether he likes me or not, either. Confusing old world isn’t it? Come on then.’

I followed him.

That afternoon we got ridiculously drunk. I don’t remember much about it. I remember abandoning the burger van halfway down Broad Street in Birmingham. Dermot had, as he’d promised, dumped the deep-fat fryer on the pavement at the business park. We’d left it there, leaking grease and steaming.

‘Off we fucking go then,’ said Dermot, scampering gleefully off into the afternoon crowd. We had a few in the first open bar we came to.

After that my memory skips like a vinyl record. I remember a staircase leading down to some toilets far beneath a dingy club. I remember being brightly sick over a flashing fruit machine. I remember it paying out three jackpots in a row in response.

I remember being in a bathroom with a long mirror of polished metal, Dermot beside me, holding my hand out. His small hands were too strong to resist, like the rest of him.

‘You can touch it,’ he said, meaning the mirror. ‘You can touch it.’

Our blurred reflections looked back at us, mine terrified, his delighted.

‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘Touch it.’

A pair of post-punk punks – all polychromatic hair dye and studded leather – arrived in time to hear that. They moved to flank us.

‘What’s the problem ?’ asked Dermot.

‘Pair of queers in the bog,’ said one. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Where?’ asked Dermot, looking around theatrically.

Something about him made them leave. He looked for a moment like a werewolf, without any transformation. He was suddenly all violence. They backed off, hands up and palms forward. If they’d been dogs they’d have rolled over. The door dragged itself shut behind them.

‘Pair of cunts,’ he said. ‘Not going to touch the mirror, then? Come on. More drinks.’

We had more drinks. How do you become afraid of mirrors? Easily. Here’s how it happened for me.

In 1983 all sorts of things were changing. There were new sorts of amusement arcades and new sorts of amusements. We were living in the most immoral decade since records began. We were moving into the age of image.

I was moving into the final year of a three-year course in software engineering. This was at a tiny college two miles from Borth, which is a small town on the wet Welsh coast in the middle of nowhere. The campus held a few residential blocks, a blocky little student pub, and a three-storey H-block style building that held everything else. It had been built in the seventies, and designed by an architect with a fondness for the T-square and a big gap in his imagination. The computer rooms held out-of-date green-screen workstations linked to an ancient server. The server was tended by unspeaking drones in lab coats. They gave the impression of depthless knowledge; they never provided evidence of it. The server had its own room, locked with state-of-the-art locks for that time. Large windows with embedded wire mesh let you look in and see the server at work. It was the size of a pair of double wardrobes, with enormous switches and great tangles of cables. Banks of reel-to-reel recorders spooled miles of tape in all directions. The technicians would feed punched cards into slots, pull levers, and run for cover as processing began.

Borth college didn’t run many courses, and it didn’t attract many students. It didn’t attract any good ones. I went there because the entry requirements seemed to consist of turning up. This turned out to be true. It was all subsidised by government handouts and charitable donations, otherwise it would have closed down three weeks after it first opened.

The computer courses were run on the ground floor, and so all of the windows had to be barred. This was Wales in the early eighties and green-screen workstations could fetch a few pounds. On the middle floor they ran hairdressing courses. On the top floor the experimental psychologists watched mice run through mazes. In those days higher education took very little of your time and didn’t cost you all that much. I had a lot of spare time on my hands and nowhere to spend it. The campus was situated in a wet wasteland. What seemed to be huge distant mountains were actually small mountains, quite close by. It rained three days out of five. There was a single bus stop, and the bus went between the campus and Borth twice a day each way. If you went there at night you had to get a taxi back, and there were no taxis. Now there are no taxis anywhere in Wales. They were all removed. Now there are only tacsis. There’s lufli.

I made friends, out of necessity. There was nothing else to do. For three years there was only the company of other students. At night the lecturers drove home in Morris Minors and Volkswagens. The hairdressers vanished. You could try and date them, but you wouldn’t get anywhere. They were Welsh and miserably insolent. They were dark-haired, thin, a genotype. They looked like goths, without trying. None of the locals seemed to stay up after eight.

To pass the time, we would go to the student bar. Presumably the college funded it. It didn’t seem to do enough trade to stay afloat.

In the first term of my third year, I met Tina McAndrew. We had an affair that didn’t do either of us any good, but we got out of the wreckage with our friendship intact. That was just as well, as there were few other people there. You couldn’t afford to lose a friend. There were sixteen computer students, the unassailable hairdressers, and the psychologists. Tina was a psychology student. I remember looking out of a window while I was waiting for yet another Cobol program to compile. I saw her walk from one of the residential blocks, wearing one of the long coats that everyone had in those days. She was heavier than the girls I usually fancied. I liked them tiny, and she was my height. She looked as though she’d beat me at arm-wrestling. She had long hair and the Welsh weather was busily fucking it over. I watched her until she walked out of my line of sight.

A couple of nights later I saw her in the student bar and decided to talk to her. I was egged on by Olaf, one of the other computer students. Olaf came from a wealthy family, by early eighties standards. He had a sense of humour that only he understood. You had to decipher him. Olaf wasn’t his real name, obviously. His real name was Peter, but he called himself Olaf.

‘It’s short for “Oh, laugh, for fuck sake”,’ he once told me.

The night Tina turned up, he watched me watching her. I sometimes thought he should have been with the experimental psychologists. He liked observing. I sometimes wondered if he was an experimental psychologist, sneakily studying the computer students. I knew that was paranoid, which hopefully meant that I was sane.

‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘Talk to the lady.’

There was no point ignoring him. After all, I wanted to talk to her. I managed to get to the bar before she was served.

This wasn’t difficult. The student bar had a lone barman, named Sid. He was older than the students and distant in manner. He would strive not to serve people. He would do his best to avoid talking to you.

‘Until he gets to know you,’ Olaf once said. ‘Then he still doesn’t talk to you. But at least he knows you.’

Sid could take a long time to pour a simple pint and girls usually chose more complicated drinks. They’d want mixers and ice; that could take him all night. I sidled closer to Tina, whose name I didn’t know at the time.

‘Hello again,’ she said.