Game On
There I was, and there they were. Game on. A row of plastic packets of Gilette razor blades on a display stand in front of me. I use an electric razor, don’t need razor blades, but as soon as the thought had entered my head it was a challenge, and I never avoid a challenge. That’s weakness, and I avoid weakness because that means becoming like the rest of the herd. So, game on. I took the blades from the shelf, studied them for a moment as if I were really interested in the moisturising properties of the special lubricating strip, and then I slipped them into my coat pocket and wandered away to get on with the rest of my shopping.
I came to the fruit and vegetable section last—I always walk the supermarket backwards, the opposite to the way that they want you to do it, to mock their petty attempts at psychology. I bought some Spanish oranges, a grapefruit from Israel, and pressed my fingers into a honeydew melon to see if it was ready for eating. It was over-ripe and my fingers sank into the flesh right up to the knuckles. That made me angry, so I made my first two fingers stiff, like a knife, and I spat on them and jabbed them hard into every melon that was there.
I counted the items in my wire basket, to make sure that I had everything that I needed. I never used a list. The idea that I could not keep a simple number of products in my head, like some drooling fool who could not remember his own name if he did not have it tattooed on his hands, was laughable. I had fourteen items, so I joined the short queue at the back of the ten items or less till. I always enjoyed seeing whether anyone in the queue dared say anything; the shop assistants never did. If anyone did speak up, pound to a penny it was a bossy and over made-up old woman, convinced of her right to flap her gums and annoy everybody simply by virtue of the fact that she had managed to avoid death longer than most, her sagging, powdered face quivering with righteous indignation at my terrible crime.
The game here was to respond in a different way every time. Once, I said “Oh God, I’m so sorry. My, my wife died last month and I’m just not thinking at the moment, sorry. If you’d prefer, I’ll go and join another queue”. That shut her up. Another time I simply stared back, slack mouthed, and let a long string of drool slide down over my chin. My accuser looked away, and never said another word. Today though, no-one said anything.
The customer behind me was an old man with nothing in his basket but a plastic tray of liver and a carton of milk, and he was not interested in what I had. A young woman in front of me was trying to pay at the same time as mollifying her screaming ugly child in its stained pushchair. She looked a mess, her hair needed washing, and there was a white patch on the shoulder of her coat that looked like vomited-up milk. I don’t like women—they want to control and make you conform, make you be like all the rest, society’s bureaucracy in miniature. Also, they do not know their own minds and they lead you on, and they do not accept the consequences of the game and then they make a fuss and try and trap you and before you know it you’re being questioned in some squalid little room by a dough-faced idiot with bad breath.
The woman finished paying for her basket full of flavoured chemicals that would doubtless make the child even more of a monster than it already was. She bent down to slide her shopping into the wire tray underneath the pushchair, and her skirt rode up at the back. I was distracted and did not hear the assistant telling me how much I owed so I had to ask her again. When she told me she had a sly little smile on her face, as if I could have helped but see what what was right in front of me. That annoyed me, and when she put her hand into the till I was tempted to slam it shut on her fingers, to teach her to mind her own business and not make moral judgements on others, but I took a deep breath and I smiled back, because I know the way to fight back against them all, all the stupid people and their ridiculous rules, is to play a more subtle game. I memorised the name on her badge and would ring the store in a day or two to inform them that I had seen her pocketing money from her till.
When she handed me my change I strode off through the doors into the car park, but my way was blocked by the woman who had been in front of me at the till. She was squatting by the pushchair right in front of the doors—as inconsiderate as you’d expect—fussing over her spawn. I walked out of the door, about to push past her and let my carrier bag catch her on the side of her head, and a siren started shrieking. The woman looked up, then back into the store, her dumb cow’s face a picture of puzzlement. I realised what was going on straight away, because although they try and trap me I am smarter than them, much smarter, and in one smooth move I pulled the razor blades from my pocket and tossed them into the tray underneath the pushchair. As they left my hand, I felt the little plastic bump on the back of the packet that must have triggered the alarm.
A sweating pig of a security guard, ridiculous in his mock American policeman’s uniform, blundered through the doors holding his hand out to stop us. The woman looked at me, looked at him. A rabbit on the motorway. He looked at me. I nodded my head slightly towards the pushchair, raising an eyebrow. The message I was sending was clear. Look at me. Look at her. I was in a suit—I always wear a suit, I bought five some time ago in a clearance sale, a well-cut suit never goes out of style, whatever trivial fashions may come and go—and was well-groomed and radiating respectability. She was dressed in creased clothes out of a pay-monthly catalogue, and her face had that tight pinched look that poverty and too many cheap cigarettes brings.
“Sure you’ve paid for everything you’ve got there, love?” he said, and she looked flustered and said yes.
“It’s probably just a mistake,” I said soothingly. “Their alarm’s gone wrong, or they’ve forgotten to take a security tag off something that you’ve bought.”
But by then the security guard was starting to look under the pushchair, and I turned and walked away, smiling at the shouts and tears. I had accepted the challenge of another game, and I had won. Again. I usually did. I strode off down the road—only the slow and the weak and the crippled dawdle—and the day seemed brighter than it had before.
Matching my wits against the world and coming off best, that’s the game of games for me. Always has been, ever since that beautiful day in childhood when I realised that I was smarter than either of my parents. From that day on my childhood had been a rehearsal for adult life, a training ground in which I proved myself. I played game after game, and won every one. I don’t think my parents even realised that they were playing.
That early success lulled me into a false sense of security, and I was caught out a few times by society’s deceptions and hidden rules: the traps set to catch people like me who would soar above the rest. I learnt from those mistakes though, and did not make them again, and this made me stronger than ever. Game after game. I’m always playing, and always winning, and that is what makes me truly alive. If someone wrongs me, they pay for it. They won’t know it was me, but I do, and that’s all the counts. If a neighbour does not return my greeting on the street, I phone the authorities and say that they are beating their child. If a shopowner charges an extortionate price for something, I do ten times the cost in damage to their car with my keys. I sometimes think that there isn’t anything that I would not do. And it is that which makes me strong, and all the rest of them weak.
I went back to work refreshed after the weekend, ready to face the daily round of inanity and inconsequential make-work. We were busy all week, but I still kept my eye on what was going on, and who was doing what, and with whom they were doing it. This gave me an idea for a new game, and that brightened up the days and gave me something extra to watch for. I did not talk to my colleagues much. They were a dumb bunch, compliant and unquestioning. They resented my keen intelligence, and knew that I saw through their hypocrisies, and as a result they had little to do with me. Which suited me fine. We had a new starter, a spotty young man who stammered nervously and made little dancing movements with his hands as he spoke. He was the replacement for a man named Michael who had worked in my office for most of his adult life. There had been a real to-do when one of the girls’ purses had gone missing, and had turned up in his desk drawer, along with a pornographic magazine and a half-drunk bottle of whisky. When he stumbled out of the manager’s office and told us in a little, broken voice that he had been dismissed, I clapped him on the shoulder in sympathy and didn’t even mention the fact that I knew that he had stolen the last of my milk from the fridge.
After a week of rain the sun was shining brightly on Thursday, and I decided to take a walk out at lunchtime to buy a sandwich. I was standing outside the cafe on Park Road, looking at the over-priced list of very ordinary food they had blu-tacked to the window, when I felt someone standing too close to me. I hate that. I glanced to the side, saw that it was a scruffy and bent old man, probably a dosser. I looked away again, waiting for the inevitable spiel.
“You,” he said hoarsely, and I looked down at him with contempt, expecting to be asked for money, for the price of a cup of tea. He stared up at me with eyes that were bright blue, like a child’s. He had not shaved properly, and there were little tufts of white hair sticking from his face. And from his ears.
“Go away, scum” I said. “Go and beg somewhere else. And if you touch this suit with those dirty fingers, I’ll snap them like dry sticks.”
“It was you,” he said, “I saw you. I saw you chuck something into that lass’s pram. I told ‘em, and they wouldn’t believe me, thought I was some soft old sod trying to get a young girl off. But I saw you. You bastard. You coward.” His voice was rising with every word, and I looked around. People were looking curiously at us, hearing that what the old man was saying was heated, without hearing what he actually said. He was the man who had been behind me in the supermarket, the man who had been buying nothing other than milk and liver, the pointless and sad fuel for a drab and lonely existence.
I leant close to him. “Leave me alone, or I’ll stick my thumbs in your eyes and you’ll spend the last years you have left on earth as a blind man,” I whispered. Then I walked away before he could cause a scene. People were already looking, and the elderly always have that unfair advantage—they can harass you on the street and no-one cares, but you say one word to them and oh, you’re a monster.
He called something after me, but I was walking too quickly and I was thinking thoughts too loudly, and his quavering voice was too pathetic and weak. I strode into Jubilee Park and a pigeon dithered in my way over some discarded chips, so I kicked it hard and high into the scrubby bushes. Too old, too slow. Like that gargoyle of a man in the street. How dare he? How dare he?
I walked through the park and realised that people there were looking at me, so I took a deep breath, unclenched my fists, and made sure that when I was talking to myself that I was not doing it out loud. I should just forget about it, I thought. A mad old man, he would probably be dead within a year, when the cold weather comes, why worry about it? But I could not let it go, and all through the park I thought: this is how they get you, this is how they bring you down, this is how they cheat to stop you playing the game. They do it because they are jealous, and they know that I am better than them, and they will use any excuse to drag you down.
The old man might see me again, might follow me home and play tattle-tale, gabbling to all of my neighbours before he goes to the supermarket and then to the police, tattling and telling because that’s all old people have left to do. He might see me again and follow me back to work, and he would go through the building like a disease, telling tales on me to all the pretty girls who sit behind their desks and cross and uncross their legs, and never look me in the eye even when I say nice things to them.
I phoned Peter, my supervisor at work, from a call box on the far side of the park and told him that I had been taken ill with a stomach upset and would not be back in that day. He did not sound as if he cared much. I was too angry and upset to go back to the office, I would not have been able to hide my emotions and I could not have them see that. I went home, and calmed myself with my new game, spending the afternoon writing to the addresses that I had copied from the personnel files at work. They were all for people who I had written down in my book, because they had snubbed me or talked about me or were impolite. Now I wrote to their partners, informing them of a whole combination of office affairs. I wrote to Peter’s wife, and asked her if she knew that her husband was a practising homosexual. I had no reason to believe that he was, but then the game did not require it.
I stayed in on Friday, and did not do anything other than sit and think my thoughts. This is another sign of my superior nature: most people could not stand that for more than ten minutes. They would have to put some vacuous programme on the television, or listen to inane music, anything other than spend time with themselves. I could spend days like that. Thinking my thoughts. Planning. Sharpening.
On Saturday I got up early and did my calisthenics, then walked into town. I bought a newspaper and sat on a grafitti-covered bench beside the road that led to the supermarket. I pretended to read the newspaper, but all the time I watched like a bird of prey. The sun came out from behind the clouds, the sun went in again. Vague efforts at drizzle pattered on my newspaper. After two hours, the old man limped down the road and into the supermarket. Habit is a weakness. And old people have nothing left in their lives but habit. I did not move, did not give any indication that I had seen him.
When he came out of the supermarket ten minutes later, with his pathetically limp carrier bag, I made myself read one more page of news about people with no talent doing things that were of no interest. Then I dropped the paper in a litter bin and strolled along the road, relishing the easy grace with which I moved, a contrast to his halting dodder. As he shambled off the main road and into a side street, I quickened my pace.
He had turned down a cul-de-sac of poorly maintained bungalows, their gardens gone to seed. The whole street reeked of old people. I stopped to tie my shoelace, and watched the old man fumble with his keys at the door of the end bungalow. I waited for him to go in, and then I followed. I walked up the short path as if I were going to his front door, but at the last minute I looked to make sure that no-one was watching me, and then stepped to the side and opened the rusting iron gate to the narrow passage that ran along the side of the house. I stepped past wheelie bins and over brushes and shovels, and then I was into his back garden. I stood in an overgrown tangle of bushes and watched the back of his house for a minute, but did not see any movement there. A window was open.
It’s in the rules of the game, the game of life, you can do whatever is necessary to win. Society hates an independent thinker like me, who goes his own way because he can see his own truth in life, not what they try and spoon feed you from the cradle onwards, brainwashing you into becoming nothing more than one of the flock. They hate me, and given half a chance they would bring me down and put me away so that I would not be an example for others to follow. In their way, they would crucify me.
I poured myself in through the gap in the window and into the dim light of the old man’s kitchen. The air smelt of cauliflower, and stale milk. I took a few deep breaths, and felt totally, wonderfully alive. I stepped quietly to the door of the kitchen, which was not quite closed, and pulled it open an inch more with my finger. The old man sat in a chair in the room beyond, watching horse racing on the television. I opened the door a fraction more. It had been his choice to set another challenge, it was all down to him. I opened the door wide and stepped through. Game on.