On bank holidays, people come from most of the Midlands to spend a grim couple of hours struggling along the shore. Children unsuccessfully try to spend their pocket money in the shops. At about five, the town empties. The tourists go home. The wind dies down. The pubs do a miserable trade. In the evening, there’s nothing to see in Borth.
We used to go there in the evenings.
V
By midway through our final year, the student bar had lost any attraction it had once had. Instead, I took Tina to the Running Cow. The pubs in Borth were still pubs at the time, and families weren’t welcome. The choice of meals consisted of either cheese or ham baps, individually wrapped in cling film and left out on the bar to die. There was a choice of beer or lager and a small selection of shorts. Tina had half a lager. I had a pint.
She was wearing black everything. Her hair had been crimped into crinkly submission. In other circumstances, I wouldn’t have found her attractive. In Borth she was the brightest thing around.
We had decided to be friends. Well, she had decided. I was being friends in case it led back to being lovers, which it doesn’t. Twenty years later we’re still friends.
‘How are you for money?’ she asked.
‘I can afford a round or two.’
‘No, you moron. I mean generally.’
Well enough, I thought. I was a little way into debt but not so far that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. By all accounts, computer programming would pay more money than I could handle. I’d be a tax exile inside a decade.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘It’s just that they’re paying people for research. They want two people.’
‘They? Who are they?’
‘Psychology. Dr Morrison is after two volunteers and he’s got a research grant. He’s paying a hundred apiece. I’ve volunteered. Which leaves one place free.’
‘What do we have to do?’
‘He won’t say. It’d prejudice the results.’
‘Maybe it’d prejudice the volunteers.’
‘Perhaps it would. Look, Mick, it’s not as though you have anything else to do.’
‘Just my course.’
‘And how much do you have on at the moment? This is a single afternoon. You won’t miss an afternoon. You can do programming in your sleep.’
‘One afternoon? And I get a hundred quid?’
I didn’t know why I was quibbling. I had already decided to do it. A hundred would buy new games, with maybe some to spare for pens and paper. I could also buy a couple of floppies to save my work onto. The college computers used a variety of floppy disk that I never saw anywhere else, 7¾-inch things with hardly any capacity. Unlike modern floppy disks with their protective plastic covers, these were genuinely floppy. If you waved them in the air they flapped, and you lost all of your data.
‘Cash in hand. Money for next to nothing,’ said Tina, still under the impression that I needed persuading. The bar was quiet, as it always was. The locals went to other pubs if they went anywhere at all. Perhaps they all stayed in.
‘You’re doing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll do it. But if he asks me about my mother I’m leaving.’
She gave me a strange look.
‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?’ she asked.
‘Like?’
‘Any niggling worries? Anything on your mind?’
‘No,’ I said, ignoring the niggling worry about the ‘just friends’ business. I had got used to ignoring that. The only time it became difficult was when I was trying to go to sleep at night.
‘Should there be?’
‘Not if you don’t think so.’
I didn’t think so. We drank our drinks and set out for the walk back to the campus. There was no one out, although I knew that if we scrambled up the sea wall there’d be a few people walking dogs along the hostile beach. There was always someone walking a dog along that beach.
‘Let’s walk on the sea wall,’ Tina said suddenly, already well on her way up.
‘What for? It’s windy up there.’
‘We’ll be able to see more.’
‘More Borth. Who wants to see more Borth?’
‘Oh come on,’ she said, grabbing my arm and hauling me up after her. ‘Look at the sea. Don’t you want to swim in it? Don’t you just want to throw yourself into the sea?’
‘Are you mad? It’s night and it’s cold. There are things in it.’
‘Well do you want to cut through the golf course then?’
What was she getting at? She wasn’t planning to seduce me in a dark corner. We were just friends. We’d both agreed to that except for me.
‘What are you on about?’ I asked her.
‘Ask me again next week,’ she said, and then, as though it was just a throwaway line:. ‘Did I tell you I’d met somebody?’
No, she hadn’t. That explained her peculiar mood.
After that, we had a very quiet walk back.
VI
Although I had been at the college for almost three years, I had never been to the third floor until I turned up to earn my quick hundred quid. I had thought about it, and had decided that it couldn’t do any harm. I was surprised to see that the stairs continued on up past the third floor, through a locked grille. Presumably they led to an attic or loft. The doors were numbered. I was after 304. It was eleven in the morning and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Didn’t they have psychologists in Wales? With all of that research material going free? That seemed a terrible waste.
‘I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ said Tina, trundling round the corner with an armful of brown folders.
‘I’m getting paid for this. We are still getting paid, aren’t we?’
‘We are. Don’t worry about the money. Now, lets see if he’s in.’
She knocked on the door. On the lower floors, the doors had glass panels at head height. Even the door of the server room had one. Up here in the realms of the headshrinkers, the doors were of flimsy but unbroken wood and painted a matte white. She knocked again.
‘Come on in,’ said someone. Tina opened the door and bundled me in.
‘This is him,’ she said, meaning me.
‘Ah,’ said the man in the room. He was a young man, probably no older than twenty, and he was wearing a lab coat. He looked like he might be related or married (or both, this was Borth) to one of the computer technicians from the ground floor.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said in a nervous voice. He gave me a limp, sweaty handshake. It didn’t seem like the sort of contact he was used to. There was a good chance that he wasn’t used