"You never."
"Did too.
"Gri-im! So come on, then, let's try again. And I promise I won't touch anything this time."
"Ah – so you admit you messed the tone up last time, then?"
"Shut up!"
"Wally!"
"You wally!"
Ian and Anthony never got anything done quickly – but back then there were some things that did take a-a-ages. Some things were well well boring. That was just the way it was. It was rub-bish.
Ber-dip. Ber-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle. Ber-dip.
The ZX Spectrum 48k was definitely the most space-age thing Anthony owned. It was loads more futuristic than his digital watch, no question (it wasn't even a Casio). And although AT-ATs were pretty neat, they weren't real. His didn't count, anyway, 'cause it had come from a car boot fair and one of the guns had obviously been chewed off. Real battle damage, he used to say, trying to convince himself it was cool, but he would have preferred one that was perfect.
The Spectrum was almost perfect. A couple of the keys hadn't quite recovered from Daley Thompson's Kill-Your-Computer-A-Thon and it would have been better if he'd had a +3 so he could've loaded games dead quick from disks rather than tapes. Otherwise, it was the best thing ever. And the best Spectrum game ever, Anthony & Ian agreed, was Forwarde'n'Bakk. It was Forwarde with an 'e' and Bakk with two 'k's - even the spelling was exciting. It was super-fast, it was super-tricky, and it was super-addictive. Basically, it was amazing - when it loaded …
Ber-dip. Ber-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle. Ber-dip.
Ian thought that this was what music might sound like in the future. He wasn't sure if Dan Dare had a Walkman – he was always too busy being heroic when you saw him in Eagle – but if he did, this was probably what he listened to. Maybe with someone rapping on top of it. In Venusian or Martian … Suddenly he was aware of the lack of the noise.
"Oi! Anthony! 'Sloaded!"
"Hold up a mo. Won't be a sec."
Somehow, even after what seemed like years of hanging about for it to load, the moments of waiting for Anthony to flush and maybe wash his hands were almost unbearable.
"Hurry up, slowcoach!"
"Com-ing!"
Then they stopped being two boys sat in the spare room of a semi in the most boring town in the world. They stopped being Ian and Anthony. They began to play Forwarde'n'Bakk. The screen was split down the middle and each of them concentrated utterly on his half. Ian (Kempston joystick) had the left-hand side and he was Sir Geoffrey Forwarde, a knight, racing forward from the middle-ages, through all of history (left-to-right). Anthony (user defined keys – Q, A, O, P, and symbol-shift) was Bakk X1, a robot, zooming back through time, (right-to-left) from a space-station orbiting Jupiter sometime in the twenty-third century.
Forwarde'n'Bakk had to fight their separate ways through millions of baddies, stay clear of trillions of bullets and lasers and stuff – and at some point, if they were good enough, they'd meet in the middle. Then the game would be over. And they could tell everyone that, yeah, they'd completed Forwarde'n'Bakk, no sweat, and, actually, thinking about it, perhaps it was a bit too easy for Spec-geniuses like them. Or maybe that would just be the end of a level. Now was no time to think about it. Now was no time to think about anything at all – now was time to shoot, to dodge, and, above all, not to lose a life.
2) 2027
Men get nostalgic about the strangest things: that was the only way Janet could begin to understand it. Ian – this was her husband Ian, the father of her children Ian, the reasonably-successful businessman Ian, not some wanker in an "and finally" story on the news – Ian had spent more money than she could bear to think about on buying a half-century old piece-of-shit computer that her mobile could eat for breakfast.
"You paid how much?"
"It doesn't matter. I can afford it."
"It's your money now, is it?"
"Alright. We can afford it."
"We might like to know what we're spending our money on in future, that's all I'm saying."
"Don't go on. We're not broke any more."
He was an idiot – but least he was an idiot with cash. He was right: they weren't going to starve, the mortgage was still going to get paid, and they wouldn't have to start travelling by train (other than the Eurostar but that didn't count). This was all true. But he was still an idiot.
Ber-dip. Ber-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle. Ber-dip.
She turned up the volume on her show to try to drown out the awful noise coming from the spare room. What the fuck was he up to? Why was he so excited? Why didn't he care any more who the killer was? He wanted to know last week. Or he said he did.
Ber-dip. Ber-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle. Ber-dip.
Thank Christ it had stopped. She'd always been good at blocking out background noise. She'd been able to sleep through anything. She'd been able to follow the plot of films on telly at Christmas through the endless burble of family chatter. It all changed when they had the kids. Noises off made her twitchy. There could be accidents. Things could be being broken, children being hurt. She could only relax when the TV was framed in silence. And, finally, after an age of awful electronic squealing, there was silence. At last, she could really concentrate on the murd… Now what? It sounded like – but it couldn't be. He was in a brilliant mood. The twat. No. It definitely was. She offed the machine and went through to see what was going on.
"Darling?"
Now she was really confused. She hadn't understood it when he'd bought the damn thing, but she had at least thought it would make him happy (or shut him up for a while which sometimes seemed like the same thing). So why was the man she married sitting sobbing in front of a stone-age 'Game Over' screen, spilling tears onto an antique rubber keyboard?
"Are you alright?"
And why did he have two chairs lined-up in front of the screen? Surely he didn't think she was going to want to play?
3) 2007
He just wished he hadn't got the letter. It was bad enough that Anthony was dead. Ian really wished the letter had got lost in the post – god knows enough things did. If the letter had been misdelivered, dropped in a pond, eaten by a dog or, or something, then things would still be alright. No, not alright – but they'd be better. He wouldn't've discovered that 'traffic accidents' aren't always so accidental and he wouldn't've had to think about how even the brightest minds can be shadowed by the blackest of clouds. He wouldn't've felt this alone.
But he had got the letter. He supposed he'd have to show it to the police, to Anthony's family. It was going to be awful - especially explaining why it was signed 'Bakk X1'. There was no chance of a high-score this go but all Sir Geoffrey could do was keep on running anyway.
Ian felt the numbness loading into him.
Ber-dip. Ber-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle-diddle-iddle. Ber-dip.
--
Forwarde & Bakk by Toby Smith was read by Jack Fortescue at the Liars' League Past & Future event on Tuesday June 12 2007.
Toby Smith grew up in Leatherhead but is now based on The Isle Of Dogs. If it doesn't have a stupid name, he's not willing to live there. He has worked in TV for almost ten years and is currently a development producer - so don't mention anything to him unless you're happy to see it formatted into a neat daytime vehicle for that awful woman off Big Brother.
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