so there I am, loading tokens into a Streetfighter deck, about to lose to some peppery girl almost half my age while she waits nerves akimbo for the call-up.
‘I’ve actually never played Streetfighter,’ I say, suddenly aware of how it feels to be one of those antique judges for whom the Rolling Stones is a description of a chain gang.
‘Yeah, I can tell,’ Samantha replies. ‘But that’s all right.’ She winks at me and pushes her hair back again. ‘I ain’t gonna hammer you straight off. Wouldn’t be sporting, would it?’
Apparently Sam and I inhabit the same real-life world, but you wouldn’t know it.
Outside in the foyer a line of Streetfighter decks has been set up for the competition, alongside a sound system, a string of mikes and an outside broadcast unit. A computerized scoreboard hangs suspended from the escalator. About fifty kids, boys, are lined up along the row of decks, hands on joysticks, arms beating out the moves of the final leg of the third round. Behind a cordon another six hundred teens await their call-up for the fourth round. And behind them, so distant you can’t see their faces, another eight or nine hundred folk watching, tip-toeing to catch glimpses of their sons, brothers, nephews, grandsons, stepsons, whatever.
A boy with pudding-bowl hair detonates from the shadow of the arcade, looks Samantha almost in the eye, mumbles:
‘I got fucking mashed, man, and now I ain’t got no more money.’
‘You see my pockets bulging, man?’ asks Samantha in return, hard, with her hands on her thighs, calluses pressed in.
‘This is my brother. Jez.’ Her eyes fill with mock impatience.
‘Sisterly love,’ grins the brother, hair part-concealing a face crazy with electric messages.
Sam and her brother came specially for the tournament, but Jez got knocked out in the second round by a Chinese boy from an arcade in Oxford Street. She hadn’t seen him since. She says he’s not a good loser, but it’s his own fault. He gets too cocky and doesn’t practise enough.
‘Why don’t you play and I’ll pay.’
‘Oh no, man, you don’t have to do that.’ Samantha’s voice sings high with guilty insincerity.
‘I can’t play anyway,’ I insist. ‘I’d rather watch. It’ll be like training.’
‘Wicked,’ says Jez, moving up to the console. ‘You going down.’ This from Jez, his right palm levitating over the start button, tongue coiled against lower lip in anticipation. ‘Which character?’
‘Ken,’ says Sam.
‘Man, you’re always Ken.’
‘I got the expertise.’ So Sam plays as Ken, the karate beach punk, and Jez plays as Blanka, the mutant Brazilian. Jez toggles the setting to a beach in America. Adrenaline drifts around them like heatwaves off sand. Jez raises his palm, holds the position as if startled into it, brings the force of his hand stamping down on start.
‘You dead man, dead,’ Jez’s voice twisted with the moment.
‘No, you dead, right?’ replies his sister.
A second’s stillness, like a snarl-up in a projection room, and brother and sister bear down on their joysticks with a series of spastic jerks and swings, closing in on the screen, elbows pumping like pistons. Jez flaps his tongue against his chin, then moves back from the console, eyes momentarily drifting across the room, but sightlessly, with a kind of narcoleptic thrill written on his face. Sam stays close in, rocks slightly. Two ghosts competing for the machine.
A boy wanders up from behind, comes to a standstill and fixes his stare on the deck. Jez, sensing his presence, chooses not to acknowledge the boy, maybe doesn’t know him. All over the arcade, pairs of stiffened kids are hanging over a console with an array of onlookers beside, by turns bored and in the thrall of it.
‘Spike it, give it some wellie.’
‘Combo Combo. Block, block, block.’ The boy uses his fists to scrub canals into the seams of his baggies.
‘C’mon, twist it, man,’ says Jez, keyed up and trying to control Blanka with a series of hops and piston movements.
Sam moves Ken in, charges Blanka with a close-range round-house kick. Blanka is in trouble.
‘Head butt him, Blanka,’ squeals the boy, thumping his thigh.
Too late. Sam and Jez slip from the console like drowned hands leaving driftwood.
‘I mashed you, man, first round over.’ Samantha leans back, unlocks her shoulders, breathes deep and smacks her lips in a sly way. Jez has had an idea.
‘Replay,’ he spits, wheeling round, glaring at the boy. ‘That boy fucking put me off. Unfair disadvantage.’
‘You just a bad loser,’ replies his sister.
‘C’mon, man.’ Jez holds his arms close to his chest, eyes grinning at me.
I shrug and smile off the appeal.
‘Replay, no way,’ says Samantha.
Round four opens with the star player, a boy from one of the Chinatown arcades with control-pad buttons for eyes, who has won all fifty of his games. A block of twitchy adrenaline he is, buoyed up with Coke. A couple of dozen nervous kids, Samantha included, scout the electronic running order, in search of their numbers, hoping they’re not pitched against Button-Eyes.
The constant flow of kids from the tournament consoles to the practice machines in the arcade leaves a matt stain from their sneakers across the linoleum. Sam’s number, 437, appears on the electronic call sheet.
‘You been to America?’ Jez has followed me out into the foyer.
I narrow my eyes to slits and nod.
‘Yeah, but I never met Michael Jordan, or Michelle Pfeiffer or Pam Anderson or Mickey Mouse or anybody anyone’s ever heard of.’ The words burn up in the acrid atmosphere of my remembrance. Whenever America is mentioned I feel sour and fondly protective, like a child forced to lend out a treasured possession.
‘Did you get a go on the Sony Playstation?’ Jez has not noticed my sullen mood. ‘They got them all over America.’
‘They’ve got everything in America.’ Jez ignores me, lost in some internal reverie.
‘I’m getting the import version’, he says. ‘The official English version’s bound to be slow speeds.’ Then, in a righteous gush of consumer patriotism, ‘It’s sick how they rip the English off with slow speeds.’
A queue gathers around one of the Streetfighter decks, and the boy in the baggies is there, egging on a teen combatant. It’s pretty quiet now. A party of Arabs sits in a row at the camel-racing booth. Next to them their bodyguards. Shift changes at the token counter. Brazilian hands over to Brazilian, smiles at the bouncer, heads for the black matt door in the black matt wall marked ‘Staff
