Read by Clareine Cronin
“Listen to this,” Pierre said to his brother-in-law. He was reading from Rousseau. “Watch a little girl spend a day with her doll, changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it … hours go by, even meals are forgotten … she cannot do anything for herself, she has neither the training, nor the talent, nor the strength … she is engrossed in her doll and in due time SHE WILL BE HER OWN DOLL. See? See what I mean?” He slumped as if he’d been hit by an invisible mugger.
“You mean too many dolls?” Frank asked.
“Too many dolls and not enough fighting.” Pierre stuffed the book back on the Childrearing shelf.
With the aid of beer Frank and Pierre had been analysing their daughters’ football match. Frank’s daughter, Johannesburg, had played in the midfield while Pierre’s daughter, Freya, had kept goal. Which of them had shown less understanding of their position had been impossible to tell. In the second half they’d actually swapped, without the coach or the referee noticing. It hadn’t been pretty. Replaying the match on the plasma TV only made it worse.
“Jesus wept. I can’t watch. No, leave it on. I have to suffer.”
They witnessed Freya run from the mouth of her own goal and then, as she reached the loose ball, suddenly pull up to allow the opposing player, who was slightly closer, to take possession as if she didn’t want to be rude and push into a queue.
“You’re outside the frigging box!” Pierre howled.
His daughter’s opponent also stopped, not wishing to be outdone in good manners.
“Unbelievable. Here, you take it! No, you! No, I insist. Oh, I couldn’t possibly! It’s a horror-show.”
“One of them’s gone off,” Frank commented. “They’ve only got ten players.”
“Oh God, what’s she doing now? Jesus Christ, I missed this. No! NO! Don’t help her up! She’s on the other team. Run for the ball!” But it was too late. The shambles continued to the final whistle when the score, as ever, was nil-nil. Pierre and Frank were ready to cry. The World Cup was being played out in Germany and they’d been in a lather of expectation.
They downed two more cans of VB. Frank belched. “What can we do?”
“We have to teach them Taekwondo,” Pierre said. Pierre was a Taekwondo tragic. “How else are they going to get physical?”
Frank shook his head. “Nar. Heather wouldn’t have a bar of it.” Heather was Pierre’s sister. Frank happened to be married to her. “She’s even dark about them kicking the ball.”
They drained two more tinnies.
“Well, what about them doing it on PlayStation?” Pierre suggested.
“Playstation?”
“Yeah, remember Tekken?”
“What? You think they’d play Tekken?”
“Why not? They play Olga’s stupid games.” Pierre rummaged on the TV shelf and grabbed The Sims. “This’s what she bought Freya. You ever played it?”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about living in a house. I kid you not. You have a bath, you cook dinner, you flush the dunny. It’s retarded. Tekken pisses on it.”
“You got a copy?”
“Of Tekken? Yeah. I lent it to you, remember?”
“No.”
“Last year.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Well, look, it doesn’t matter. We’ll rent it.”
*
The day before the World Cup final Freya and Johannesburg drew again, scorelessly. Driving home, their fathers slouched in the front of the Pajero analysing the team’s errors while their daughters eyed the roadside franchises from the rear seats. Eventually they talked their fathers into a stopover at Hungry Jacks after a near collision caused by one of Freya’s stray ballet slippers lodging under the brake pedal. As the cousins chewed on their chips they were told there was a new video game for them at home.
“I thought we already had this,” said Freya when she saw the disk.
“Yeah, but I gave uncle Frank a lend and he lost it,” her father explained.
“I never lost it.”
“Where are the instructions?” Freya asked.
Pierre examined the dilapidated package. “Oh, someone’s pinched them, probably. You don’t need instructions.”
“What if we do something wrong?”
“What if we do something wrong?” Pierre mocked. “Just try it.”
“But we don’t know what you’re supposed to do.”
“You’re supposed to win. Like in football.”
The girls were seated on the lounge, the controllers plugged into the console and the disk inserted. A video clip played showing a night scene with helicopters and then a posturing martial arts exponent with a helmet-shaped, shiny cranium and bulging torso veins, which made him look like a giant fighting penis, except for the spikes of grey hair shooting up from the sides of his head. Frank skipped to the menu.
“Aww,” the girls protested. “Can’t we watch the movie?”
“What for?”
“We won’t know the story.”
“The story’s not important. Just pick a character.”
This seemingly straightforward operation, which Pierre expected to take between one and two seconds, looked as if it was going to occupy his daughter forever. She scrolled through the characters three or four times, but couldn’t decide. Losing his patience Pierre snatched the controller. “That one’s crap, that one’s crap,” he muttered. The cousins giggled. “Here. Be Heihachi. He’s good.”
“But he’s that angry old bald man.”
“Ha ha. Just like your dad,” Frank commented.
“Look, Heihachi’s supposed to be seventy. He’s meant to be bald. It’s his fighting skills, not his frigging hair.”
“Why’s he so angry?” Freya asked.
“Because his child turned out to be a weakling.”
“Can’t you make him have more hair?” Freya pleaded. “I like the other one at the start with the long hair.”
“What? Jin? He’s stupid. Be Heihachi. I used to be an expert at this. Come on, play,” he said.
“Do we have to?”
“Yes.”
Freya passed the other controller to Johannesburg who shrugged before taking it. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked lamely.
“Fight,” Pierre responded.
“How?”
“By pressing the effing buttons. Work out how to make them kick and punch and then fight.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?” Why was not a valid question. It was as if they’d been on the football field and asked why you scored goals. You scored goals because that was the raison freaking d’être of football.
But he put a sock in it. “You need to get some practise in attacking,” he explained like a school coach. “Otherwise we’ll go the whole motherless year without scoring.”
“Uh?”
“Your uncle Frank and I think this will help your football.”
“Oh.” The girls seemed genuinely mystified. “Can’t we listen to CDs?”
“No.”
Pierre activated Versus Mode. The two characters proceeded to leap and kick.
“Ooh, look! My one can do the grand battement,” Johannesburg announced. “Wee! That’s pretty. Wouldn’t Miss Radetsky be pleased?”
“Mine can only do battement en cloche,” Freya commented.
“Press the green button.”
“No, it doesn’t work. His leg’s only halfway up. It’s a battement en cloche, not a grand battement.”
“It’s a flaming dragon kick!” Pierre barked. How he detested ballet. It was the chief amongst his marital gripes. “You’re supposed to maim and kill with that kick.”
The girls looked at him with shock and awe. But they divined that this was something close to their fathers’ hearts.
“Can I please choose another character? This one looks angry.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, all right. Just don’t fuss about their hairstyles.”
“Can you pick their hairstyles?”
“How would I know?”
“I thought you were an expert.”
Frank and Pierre left their children in the media room and retired to the yard to inflame the barbecue. Their wives were at a hens’ night. They were aiming for an early bed so as to be up at 4am to watch the final live from Berlin. They planned to wake the girls too so that they share the excitement. While they were barbecuing they grumbled about mundane things, such as the collapsing standards in public education.
Back in the media room they found that the girls had, in defiance of the earlier ban, loaded the CD player with dance music. Swan Lake was doing battle with the Tekken sound track. Freya steered the handsome silk-jacketed character Lei Wulong about the screen, delivering her own commentary. “I’m Li Cunxin,” she was saying. “I wish to defect from the People’s Republic to dance Swan Lake in the West!”
Johannesburg was guiding the Nina Williams character in her purple boots and G-string. “I am Madame Mao,” she announced, “and I command you not to defect! You must remain in Beijing and dance a thousand performances of Raise the Red Lantern for the comrades, including Sunday matinees.”
“No, no, I will leap away to Houston. See how I leap! Leap! Leap! How do you make him leap, Jo? Make Madam Mao crouch so I can leap over her. Thanks.”
“Now I am Odette in Swan Lake,” Johannesburg announced, “the princess transformed into a white swan by the wicked sorcerer Von Rothbart. You must dance the pas de deux with me, Li Cunxin. Listen! The audience adores us. Just a sec. I need to change characters.” Johannesburg swapped from Nina, the martial arts assassin, to her younger sister, Anna, with her sarong-like dress and patterned tights. “Now I am the black swan Odile. I must perform my 32 fouettés en tournant.”
The two fathers stood gobsmacked. A glance at the stats confirmed their dread: both characters remained on full health. Neither had dealt a scrap of damage to the other.
*
The girls whinged bitterly when stripped of their bed covers at 4am. Regular prodding was needed to keep them awake during the first half. Even so they snoozed through both goals.
“Oh, come on,” Pierre nagged. “You’re missing Zidane. It’s his final match.”
Freya yawned spectacularly. “He looks like that old baldy man.”
Frank sniggered. “Yeah. He’s the football Heihachi.”
“That’s right. He’s the master,” Pierre confirmed.
But when the score was still locked at 1-1 even after a good chunk of extra time Pierre’s confidence started fraying at the edges. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, although to his niece and his daughter the result was promising to be perfectly satisfactory. Then, to the complete astonishment of the several hundred million people watching, came Zidane’s game-shattering headbutt.
“FUCK ME DEAD!” Pierre screamed. “What’s he playing? A video game?”
The girls giggled behind their hands. Pierre and Frank stood open-mouthed in front of the plasma screen, hardly crediting what they saw. They watched the medical officers trot across the turf to the spot where the Italian defender was stretched face down with his gold boots waving in the air. Then the camera followed the Argentine referee as he strode about directing the proceedings while Zidane shifted nervously from one foot to the other, licking his lips.
The stoppage dragged on. “Is that poor man hurt?” Freya enquired softly.
“Of course he’s not hurt!” Pierre exploded. “He’s Italian!”
There was some grim consultation on the sideline and then in another minute the referee was jogging back to the scene of the crime, reaching into his back pocket as he closed in on the hapless Zidane.
“No,” Pierre whimpered. “Not the red card. NOOOOO!”
“OOOH!” Freya yelled suddenly.
“OOOH!” said her cousin, and the pair of them sprung into life and went skittering across the Berber rug until their faces almost touched the screen.
“Did you see that, Jo?”
“Yeah, yeah!”
Pierre looked at them, and all of a sudden his misery was interrupted by the realisation that finally the two girls had grasped the significance of what took place on the football pitch. At last they seemed to have got it. He let out his breath.
Then the video replay showed the referee holding up the red card again.
“OOOH!” Freya repeated. “Look how the referee's lifting up his arm!”
“Oh my God,” said Johannesburg. “What a beautiful move into third position!”
--
Tekken 3 by Simon Barker Carter was read by Clareine Cronin on Tuesday 14th June 2011 at the Liars' League Nature & Nurture event at the Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
Simon Barker is from Sydney. His work has appeared in Eclectica, Word Riot, Storyglossia and elsewhere. In 2009 decomP nominated his story Tarzan of the Danube for a Pushcart Prize.
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