out numbers and smiles like a bee. The arcade game part was darker so the screens glow brighter and Jean Michel Jarre music was on. I watched kids playing Pacman, Scrambler, Frogger and Grand Prix Racer. The Asteroids was out of order. There’s a new game where you fight the giant robot horses from The Empire Strikes Back, but that was 50p a go. I changed a £1 note into 10p coins from a grebo in the booth reading KE-RRRANG!
The coins in my caged fist rattled like magic bullets.
Space Invaders first. The Taylor Method’s to zap out a duct through my shelter and kill the aliens from a position of safety. It worked for a while but then an alien torpedoed me through my own duct. That’s never happened before. My strategy collapsed and I didn’t even clear the first screen.
Next I had a go on a kung fu game. I was MegaThor. But MegaThor just danced around like an electrocuted spazzo while Rex Rockster kicked the shit out of him. Kung fu games’ll never catch on. I hurt my thumbnail more than I’d hurt Rex Rockster.
I wanted a go on air hockey where a plastic disc floats on a cushion of air. American kids’re always playing it on TV. But you need another human. So I figured I’d get the money I’d wasted on MegaThor back from Eldorado Cascade. Eldorado Cascade’s a sort of console where you roll 10p coins on to mirrored ledges. Moving walls push the coins teetering on the ledges on to the next ledge down; 10p coins falling off that ledge fall into your scoop. Loads of coins were ready to avalanche into my scoop.
Those teetering coins’re glued on, I reckon. I lost 50p!
Then I saw this lush girl.
Three girls spilled out of the photo booth after the fourth nuclear flash. From Eldorado Cascade I’d been watching their six legs and thirty painted toes. Like Charlie’s Angels, one was dark (but chinless), one was straw blonde (extra chin) and one was coppery-freckly. The dark one and the blonde one had a dribbly Cornetto each. (There was an ice-cream stall right by the photo booth.) They pressed their mouths against the slot where the photos come out and yelled unfunny orders into the machine, like, ‘Get a move on!’ When they got bored of that they ducked back into the booth, shared the earphones of a Sony Walkman and sang to ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ by Duran Duran. But the copper one licked a sharp Zoom ice lolly and studied the ice-cream chart. Her top showed her belly button.
She wasn’t as lush as Dawn Madden but I drifted over to study the ice-cream chart too. Magnets don’t need to understand magnetism. She smelt of warm sand. Just standing near her made the tiny hairs on my arms riffle.
I untucked my shirt to let it drape over my accelerating boner.
‘Is that a Zoom?’ God. I’d apparently spoken to the girl.
She looked at me. ‘Yeah.’ I fell a thousand feet up. ‘Zooms’re the best thing they’ve got here.’ Her accent was like off Coronation Street in Manchester. ‘Unless you’re, like, into choc ices.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
I bought a Zoom off a person I remember absolutely nothing about.
‘You on holiday too,’ she spoke to me, ‘or d’you live here, like?’
‘Holiday.’
‘We’re from Blackburn.’ She nodded at the other two, who hadn’t noticed me yet. ‘Where’re you from?’
‘Uh…Black Swan Green.’ I was so nervous that even Hangman’d run off to hide somewhere. It makes no sense but it happens.
‘You what?’
‘It’s a village. In Worcestershire.’
‘Worcestershire? Is that in the middle somewhere?’
‘Yeah. It’s the most boring county, so no one ever knows where it is. Blackburn’s up north, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. So, is Black Swan Green famous for black swans or green swans or something?’
‘No.’ What could I say that’d really impress her? ‘There aren’t even any white swans there.’
‘So there’re no swans in Black Swan Green?’
‘Yeah. It’s sort of a local joke.’
‘Oh. That’s pretty funny, really, isn’t it?’
‘Thanks.’ Sweat pinpricked out from fifty places on my body.
‘Dead nice here, in’t it?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ I wondered what to say next. ‘Dead nice.’
‘You going to eat that lolly, or what?’
The icy Zoom’d stuck to my fingertips. I tried to peel the paper wrapper off but it just shredded dead crappily.
‘You need a bit of technique, like.’ Her ruby fingertips took my Zoom and tore the end off the wrapper. She placed the torn end in her mouth and blew. The wrapper ballooned up, then just slid off. My