the turning was amongst the hectic whir of flashing graphics on-screen. It wasn’t often he missed his old glasses, cracked, scuffed and discarded a lifetime ago, but he certainly missed them now.
Easing back further on his pedal, the engine noise, pumping out of the seat speakers either side of his head, dropped in timbre from a high-pitched Formula One scream to the throaty roar of a performance car. He picked out the turning ahead and was spinning the wheel in both white-knuckled hands when Nathan’s glistening Lotus blurred past, shunting him into a barrier for good measure and leaving him in his wake as he accelerated up the dual-lane Tokyo highway. The boys gathered around Nathan’s booth, leaning on the headrest, roaring with laughter, slapping his shoulders and urging him on.
Jacob struggled to reverse out of the barrier as other cars barged past him knocking him back into it, one after the other. He could hear fresh choruses of laughter coming from the other player booths further along.
Yeah, everyone pick on me, why don’t you?
He muttered under his breath, not concerned that anyone was actually going to hear him over the pumping beat of music and the mechanical whine of a dozen racing cars. There was no one gathered round his booth urging him on.
He was just about managing to disentangle himself once more from the barrier when the words RACE OVER punched their way out of the screen.
Everyone howled in unison as the results flashed up on-screen. He could see Nathan hadn’t won, but had done well, fourth out of twelve. Jacob watched his friend, several booths along, clamber out of his seat casually knuckling and high-fiving the swarm of boys around him.
Jacob climbed out of his seat and was quickly replaced by another, smaller, boy lingering nearby, eager to get in on the next race.
A strobe on the large circular lighting rig above the stage kicked in amidst whirling spotlights that cast multicoloured beams down through the thin pall of cigarette smoke above. The strobe made everyone appear to move with a jerkiness that reminded him of one of those Victorian moving picture-show drums that played a looped animation you could view through a slit. He squinted. His eyes were already tired from concentrating on the race and stinging from the smoke. The strobe wasn’t helping things.
He caught sight of Nathan’s face over the heads and shoulders of his fan club. Eye contact for a brief moment. His friend nodded and winked at him as he took a pull on a long crinkly cigarette pressed into his hand by someone.
Jacob wasn’t ready for that. Not for the dope. Not that anyone had bothered asking him yet.
Then Nathan was gone, whisked away by several boys, shouting over each other, wanting to see how big a deal he was on ‘StreetFighter’. Nathan said something that had them all roaring with laughter again as they bustled him away through the maze of machines.
Jacob slurped another mouthful from his can. The cider had tasted pretty good with the first bubbly mouthfuls. But now, running flat, he could taste the burn of alcohol. Not a particularly nice taste but at least the buzz he was beginning to get from it was making him feel a little better.
Another race had started and boys were cheering and jeering and trash-talking each other. Nathan was gone. He felt self-conscious standing amidst the carnival of flashing computer game colours and the press of sweaty bodies, pushing hurriedly past him from one group of arcade machines to the next. Holding on to his can of cider and looking for someone, anyone, to talk to, he felt conspicuously alone.
He wished Leona was here.
She’d be loving this, the lights and the pumping sound system. He imagined it was just like one of those rock festivals she used to go to. He looked around. He presumed there’d be more girls than he could see here, though, at a rock festival. Amongst the fifty or sixty boys at the party and not on duty, he’d counted only about a dozen girls. All of them about Helen’s age or thereabouts, drinking and smoking, getting the occasional go on the pinball machines.
His eyes followed them, glancing at their bare midriffs, the odd enticing flash of a pale leg, the curve of a slender shoulder. Some of them wore make-up smudged on so thick they looked like the models he’d seen on faded advertising billboards; all charcoal dark eyes, ghost-pale cheeks and coral-pink lips.
He was