Freckles(48)

They finally break up and look up at Tristan and I expect them to give a shit that their boss has walked in on them like this, but they don’t. I can’t tell if he’s annoyed he wasn’t a part of the game or because they’re not working. They don’t seem to care either way and excitedly fill him in on who scored what and who is next to play.

The phone rings in the hallway at Jazz’s desk. She doesn’t move. She eyes me warily.

Jazz, the phone, he says gently. His tone is notable.

Come on, he says to me, I’ll show you the rest.

If you’re going that way, you can answer it, Jazz says breezily.

He answers the phone. I sigh. Wuss. I walk away from him, down the corridor. Steps lead downstairs. I take them. I’ll give myself the tour. The basement level is broken up into cubicles. I look in the rooms and see computers with seats, headsets. The walls are soundproofed and are decorated in photographs, cuddly toys, postcards, funny beer mats, personal items. Like each isolation unit has been personalised.

Game pods, he says suddenly behind me. This is where we test the games and film for YouTube.

I then notice the cameras inside, attached to the computers. More pets wander around the halls. The cat from before and another dog. Each room is empty. No work being done in this building at all. We head upstairs, back to ground level and up again. The pug tries to catch up with us and races through my legs. There are only two offices upstairs.

This is Uncle Tony’s office. I want you to meet him, he says, knocking and entering. There’s no one inside. A large office that takes up the front of the building, with a stunning view. Over the tennis club. The sea. The one that reminds me of home. I can see my bench at the corner. I can see a lot of my beat. You could watch me move around the town like a mouse in a maze from here.

He should be back soon, he says, leading us to his own office. It’s not as impressive. It’s at the back, overlooking rooftops and chimneys, the uglier parts of the village, the working parts. The backs of kitchens and salons and shops. Staff parking, alleyways, skips. It’s not an awful view at all. I can see the hair salon. The marina, the estuary. A van with hazards on double yellow lines.

Look at you, Tristan says laughing, you’re like a predator sniffing out blood.

I sit on the leather couch and look around at all his things. It’s not as neat and tidy as the rest of the building. His is a working desk, a working office. I don’t know him well but it feels like him all right. Avenger figures. Merchandise. Gaming phrases framed on the walls such as I’m a gamer, I don’t die, I respawn. Piles of paperwork on his desk. A lot of computers; a large Mac, two laptops, a large flat-screen on the wall, computer console, PlayStation, Nintendo, a Wii, Xbox, a driving seat with a wheel before an enormous flat screen, and some other consoles I don’t recognise. He has old ones piled on open cluttered shelves, a Nintendo and Nintendo Game Boy from the Nineties, everything updated and replaced over time but kept. Honoured, even. The walls have framed posters of Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Pac-Man, Tetris. All his pin-ups. His shelves are lined with how-to business books; The Essays of Warren Buffet, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Shoe Dog, The Greatest Salesman in the World, The Lean Startup, all of which go to explaining his Jim Rohn regurgitation. Behind his desk is a large canvas of an old computer with rudimentary graphics.

Space War, he says. The first computer game ever invented. The platform is a PDP-1. It was made in 1962 and influenced the first commercial arcade video games.

He’s animated, speaks with excitement. Loves his videos and facts.

I like this room best, I say.

Thanks.

You’re obviously doing really well to have a place like this. To employ all of these people.

I did do well. But we’ve only just begun. We’re developing our own games but we’re at the early stages.

That’s exciting, I say.

Yeah … I needed to grow the business. I’ve always had ideas about games, I saved them up over time. Think I got as high as I could go as a YouTuber. It’s a competitive arena. Feels like now’s the perfect time to move into my own business. Uncle Tony was the business brains, saw me playing on YouTube all the time and saw the possibilities before anyone else did. He got me the endorsements, sponsorship, merchandise, all that stuff. Got me from just being a kid who liked playing games to … well … He throws his arms up to display his surroundings.

To an older kid who likes playing games, I say.

He laughs. Yeah, maybe. An older kid who likes developing games. Hopefully successful games. Tony thinks I should have kept going as I was, you know, Rooster on YouTube, just playing other people’s games, but I had to give it a go. I took the risk. It needs to work now.

Suddenly the business classes and inspirational quotes make sense to me.

How’s it going, I ask.

Honestly, slowly. I was hoping to have launched the first game by now. It’s not moving as fast as I’d like.

I wonder why, I say.

He misses my sarcasm. That’s the reality of business I guess, he says.

Hard to move fast when your staff are busy playing a Pac-Man tournament I suppose.

Oh that. Well, he shrugs, then lights up. Want to see some of my sample games, he asks, excited. He goes through his stuff like a little boy showing me his toys in his bedroom, talking fast and quickly about ideas and how they’re not right but they’re almost there and please give your honest opinion but the blood and guts in this one needs to be better and I was thinking of literally being able to blow heads off but being more Tarantino about it and make it animated instead of real because the age is, well I don’t know, we’re debating that. This character literally got his sound from a food waste disposal in a sink, this guy is based on my physics teacher who was a monster.