Lee Rourke - The Canal

It was during the summer holidays. At least I think it was; both my brother and myself were in the house all day long, which was quite unusual — the weather must have been bad that year, that’s the only reason why I can think we were in the house together for so long. In fact, thinking back it most definitely was the summer holidays, as it was just after my brother’s birthday, and his birthday fell just before the summer holidays started. Our parents had bought him an Atari home game console. I can’t remember if this particular game console was the original model, Pong , the one that is now a collector’s item; it might have been a later model. I remember being quite jealous of him, whichever model it was. I thought nothing of the game console’s simple, two-dimensional graphics back then. In fact, despite that it was my brother’s, I found the whole thing quite exciting.

My brother — who already had his own portable black-and-white TV set — had installed the game console up in his bedroom, pulling his bed over to the cabinet where his TV was placed, so he could lie directly in front of it whilst playing. We spent most of the day playing ‘ping-pong’, our favoured game on the console, competing against each other, game after game after game.

The small TV screen was predominantly black. The blackness was horizontally divided-up into two equal halves, with a white line from the bottom to the top of the screen, where a crude scoreboard relayed the ongoing score to the players. Each half of the screen contained what I can only describe as a bat —each bat looked like an upturned hyphen and nothing like an actual bat. Each could be manipulated vertically, up and down the screen in each of the designated halves, controlled by players via handsets. Each time the game began a white dot, no more than four large pixels, would appear in the player’s half who was serving. Each player had to manoeuvre the bat to return the white dot, as one would return the ball in an actual game of ping-pong, back and forth, back and forth, until a mistimed return was made and the white dot was missed, the aim of course being to defeat the opponent by earning a higher score.

I suppose it was the sound of the game I enjoyed the most: a rather dull ‘ping’ each time the bat struck the white dot. After about ten minutes of playing, the clumsy mechanics of the game console were soon forgotten. My brother had become quite adept at this game — and, to be honest, I didn’t mind the relentless defeats I suffered as a result. Sometimes he would become unnecessarily aggressive, though: shouting at me if I slowed down the game, or made a pathetic attempt at a passing shot. He would mutter things to himself, half sentences, little snippets, in varying degrees of anger and frustration:

“Lucky bastard! ”

“For fuck’s sake! ”

“If that happens again …”

“This control is fucked! ”

“It’s fucking fucked! ”

He got even angrier if he missed a shot, or if I scored a point, but I didn’t care. The sheer enjoyment of that game was enough, its mesmerising acoustics, the white dot travelling geometrically across the small, portable black-and-white TV screen. I revelled in its simplicity.

Sometimes, when my brother was out of the house, I would sneak into his room to play the game, setting it so I could play the computer on a medium-paced level. I enjoyed playing the game alone, knowing that if I were ever to be caught I would be in serious trouble with my brother. Once, after a marathon gaming spell, the bat seemed to stop of its own accord. Like it had given up responding to my instruction or something. I lost control of the game all of a sudden, the bat sitting there in the blackness, unable to move, flickering slightly, like there had been a malfunction, a short fuse in the circuitry. Somehow, the white dot had become caught, ricocheting off the bat and onto the parameter wall, or the outer boundary, and back again onto the bat at high speed. I watched this repetitive process before me on the small TV screen, the pinging white dot surrounded by the blackness. When I followed its trajectory, I noticed it was following a perfect triangle, over and over again. I began to feel strangely exhilarated, wondering if this was going to continue forever on its own. I waited and waited, watching the triangular trajectory of the white dot, the blackness engulfing it, outside it, within the trajectory, the dull ping of the white dot hitting the bat, over and over, flooding the entire room with its elementary timbre, pouring out from the small speaker on the side of the TV. I stared at the screen, mesmerised by what was happening before me. It felt like technology, mathematics, this new stuff made with computer chips and electricity fed into TV screens from boxes covered in dials and switches, had taken control; as if it was trying to tell me something, or give me a code to decipher, in a perpetually triangular motion from bat to wall and back again. I must have watched this phenomenon for a good two hours. It must have been that long, before I came to and switched off the game console, fearing my brother’s return.

Walking back to my room, across the small hallway, I began to tingle all over, thinking about what I had witnessed: the triangular loop, the constant pinging in my ears, the loop acting out its triangular trajectory ad infinitum. I had never seen anything quite like it before that day.

The next time my brother left the house I waited until he had walked up the street and out of my line of vision. I watched him through my bedroom window, and when he had vanished from my sight I dashed into his room to set up his games console. But this time I didn’t play the computer at ping-pong. Instead, I purposely set the positioning of the bat up towards the right-hand corner of the TV screen, as best I could remember from my previous encounter of the phenomenon. With the game in motion, and the computer thinking that I was legitimately playing, I waited until the white dot became trapped again, until it began ricocheting, of its own accord, in an elongated figure eight this time, bouncing from the bat, onto the opposing bat, down to a wall, off that wall and onto the opposite wall, and then crossing the screen and back onto the original bat — over and over again, the pinging from the TV set filling, not the blackness on the screen, but the space of my brother’s room, around me, around his things, everything. I must have left it like this all afternoon. I can’t begin to describe how right it felt, watching the white dot’s trajectory, feeling part of it, knowing that it was never going to stop if I left it like that.

I can’t begin to describe how that simple act of repetition back then made me so ecstatically happy — but it did. It was probably the happiest I have ever been. The sad thing about it is that I wasn’t aware of it back then.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked to the canal. It felt odd knowing that she was gone and that she would never turn up again. Even though she had been dead a number of weeks by then, it still hadn’t properly hit me — although the weight of it all was evident in each of my deadened footfalls. The sun was shining above me and its rays were twinkling as they bounced off the canal. In the end, the dredger had done its job well. The canal looked cleaner now that things had settled — only the water remained; the silt and the shit had all but disappeared. The water looked calm. It looked peaceful, as if it had always looked like that, motionless and quite unaffected by things.

I walked towards the bridge, from the direction of where the bench used to be, where we used to sit, doing nothing every day, barely speaking, watching it all go by. I stood still for a moment and looked back. The recently erected wooden partition that separated the towpath from the newly forming concrete structures on the other side had been covered in graffiti. Some of it I could read: PACK CREW N1 spray-painted crudely a number of times across its surface, the markings of a territory, like cartographic markings on a map. The rest was meaningless to me, a jumble of elaborately formed letters, some coloured, others outlined or shaded in, all put there for someone to read, to see, to decipher — but not for me.