"Because I’m seeing stats over people’s heads," I said. "And I think my life just turned into a video game."
The call was still up. I could hear her room, and she was trying to make a sentence fit that had no business existing.
The tinny chatter of whoever she was playing with was going in her headphones, and her mechanical keyboard, which had been rattling away for 10 minutes, stopped dead.
Then a gasp, krrk, the kind you take before you go underwater.
"Pffft."
Then she blew.
"AHAHAHAHAHA!"
It was the big honking roar she had had since we were kids on Cotton Street, the one that makes people at family weddings turn round in their seats. Her headset hit the desk, clack, and I could hear her from 4 feet away from the microphone, wheezing, doubled over in her gaming chair.
I stood in my dark kitchen with the phone hard against my ear and the kettle still warm beside me, and the heat came up my neck and into my face and sat there.
Then something went into the back of my eyes like a thumb pressed on a bruise.
Bzzt.
The kitchen went red. All of it at once, the tap, the tiles, the wet ring on the formica, my own hand coming up off the counter. Then it went out. Then it came back.
[Disclosure Penalty Warning]
Unregistered external disclosure detected.
Logged listener: 1 (Robyn Tate)
Reputation penalty applied.
[First and final warning. On the next external disclosure, this system will be withdrawn.]
The border went on and off like a bulb on its way out, and every time it came on something went up behind my eyes and into the roof of my mouth, and when it went off, that went with it. I got an elbow down on the counter and kept it there.
I shut my eyes and it was still coming through the lids, red, tk, tk, tk.
Then it stopped. The kitchen came back grey, the fridge was humming, water was coming out of both my eyes and down the back of my hand, and something went on pushing at the inside of my forehead after the red had gone.
Robyn was still laughing.
It didn’t say how much, or off what. There was nothing on it to press either, and it folded itself away while I was still looking for one.
I had known it was stupid before any of that got to me. She roared, and I knew. The red just wrote it down.
Plastic scraped, krrk. She had gone down on her knees for the wires on the floorboards.
"Oh, God. Matty."
She was trying to breathe and talk at once and managing neither.
"Oh, that’s good. That’s really bloody good. Level up, did you? I’m in a video game."
What was I supposed to say to that? Yes, Rob. I did. I’m Level 1 and I’ve got 3 EXP out of 50.
"Something like that," I said, and pressed the heel of a cold palm into my eye socket.
"Matty? Are you still there? You’ve gone quiet on me." She was going in gusts now, the way you go when you are trying to stop hiccups. "Oh, that’s brilliant. That’s the best thing anybody’s said to me all year, and I work with people who name their plants."
"I’m here."
"You don’t sound here. You sound like you’re being told off by a headmaster."
"I’m tired."
"Say it again. The whole thing, with the serious voice on. I want it as my ringtone."
"No."
"I’m not being cruel, you know. I’m being supportive. There’s a difference and you’ve never once been able to tell them apart." She lost it again for a second. "Oh, my ribs."
"Are you finished?"
"Right. I’ll stop." She did not stop. "1 more and I’ll stop. Have you got a quest? There’s always a quest. You can’t have a system and no quests, that’s just a spreadsheet, and nobody has ever read a book about a spreadsheet."
"I love it. I love that for you, main character." She blew her nose. "Go on, then. What’s our Josh? What are his stats? Has he got a big glowing sword?"
I thought about the box over my brother’s head in the hall on Saturday night. The crisp font. The green border. The 4 stars.
"Advanced Playmaker," I said. "Vision 176."
"Vision 176." She cackled. "Championship Vision, that. He plays for Everton."
"Premier League."
"Same difference."
Her chair took her weight again and the keyboard started back up, tak-tak-tak.
Robyn was 27. She had a flat over in Salford and 10 hours a day as lead tester at an indie studio in Manchester, finding the things in a game that nobody is supposed to find.
She had violet tips in her hair, up in a knot with a blue biro she had nicked off me 3 years ago, and she still wore my old grey Hallowfield hoodie in every photo she put online.
When I was 16 and took Dad’s car out without asking and clipped the wall at the end of Cotton Street, she was the only one in the family who knew it was me. She had held that for 14 years without letting it slip once.
I looked at myself in the dark window over the sink. 2 days of stubble. Eye-bags gone purple underneath, and both eyes wet, like a man who had walked home into the wind. A streak of dried blood on my jeans from the corner of the coffee table.
If she had believed me, she wouldn’t be laughing. She would be ringing Mum in Fleetwood, and then Josh in Formby, and there would be an ambulance outside by 10 o’clock.
She thought it was a bit. A daft line from her big cousin, who had been shut in a council flat for 7 years playing Touchline Manager with the sound off.
It was the safest thing that could have happened, and I had done nothing to earn it. She is the one who likes me. Anybody else in that family hears it and picks a word, and the word is loser, or off his head.
I counted it up anyway, stood there at the sink with the ache still going behind my forehead. 1 listener, it had said. Robyn.
Martin was somewhere behind her in that flat with the telly on, and it hadn’t counted him, and I didn’t know whether that was because he never heard it or because it wasn’t finished.
First and final.