PLAYING THE GAME

by
Jason Jackson

We were playing the game. The one where you have to imagine you’re talking to an alien, explaining stuff to them. It’s a stupid fucking game, but you know. We were stoned.

Whatever.

Sav was the alien. Good choice. In a way, Sav really was an alien. He was from Serbia. An illegal immigrant. That’s why he was always being nice to everyone. Piss someone off, and he could be on the next plane home. Sav, he knew what he was doing, smiling and laughing and playing along. He’d been screwing Alice for two and a half months and you could see it in his eyes that he couldn’t stand her anymore. But he couldn’t piss her off, or that’d be it. Bye-bye London.

Bye-bye England.

It was Janey who picked Sav to be the alien, but I’m sure she didn’t see the irony. Janey never saw anything. Me and Janey, we’d been together a long time, six, maybe seven months, and we almost never screwed anymore. Sometimes, she’d lie in bed, rubbing her brown nipples until they got hard. Then she’d put my hand on them, make me do the same. We’d lie there like that, me rubbing her, until eventually she’d roll over, pick up a magazine, fall asleep maybe.

She was beautiful, Janey. Really beautiful. But it wasn’t enough. Not for either of us.

In the game, it was Alice who picked the first scrap of paper out of the pile on the table.

‘Oooh!’ she yelped. ‘This is a good one!’

If you don’t know how to play the game, it’s easy: everyone writes ten things on the scraps, puts them in the middle of the table. Whoever picks first has to describe what’s on the scrap they pick so the alien can guess. But you can’t say the words on the paper. There’s other rules, stuff that makes it more difficult, but basically, that’s it.

And that’s how the four of us were spending our Sunday night.

Anyway, this scrap that Alice picked, it wasn’t one of mine. It couldn’t be. The things I’d written on the scraps, they wouldn’t have got that kind of reaction out of Alice. She was laughing, rocking on the cushion. Whatever was on her scrap, she thought it was fucking great.

‘Go on,’ I said. I took a swig of my drink. ‘Hurry up.’

‘OK, listen Sav’ giggled Alice. ‘This is a great, great album. It has all his best tracks on it.’

‘All whose best tracks?’ asked Sav.

‘I can’t say! It’s cheating!’

I looked at Janey. ‘You wrote down album titles? Janey, tell me you didn’t write down album titles.’

Janey lit a cigarette. ‘Why not?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘ this game isn’t about fucking music.’

‘Why not? You didn’t invent the fucking game.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right. But the whole point of the game is to explain concepts, to explore more esoteric ideas.’

‘Esoteric?’ said Janey, looking straight at me. ‘Jesus!’

Alice turned away from us, tapped Sav on the knee. ‘Listen. It’s easy!’ She giggled, looked at the paper again. ‘I can tell you he’s the best singer-songwriter in the world.’

‘Bruce Springsteen!’ yelled Sav.

I looked at him. ‘Bruce Springsteen?’

‘Am I right?’ he said, eyes eager under their heavy lids.

‘No,’ I said. I looked at Alice, who was shaking her head and giggling. ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s on the paper. You might be right, Sav. But if you’re right, then whoever wrote that scrap, and Alice, they’re both wrong.’ I sighed. ‘Bruce fucking Springsteen!’

‘Would you mind explaining to me,’ said Janey quietly, ‘what the fuck esoteric means?’

I looked at her. She was leaning over the table, taking out some papers to roll with.

‘Complicated.’ I said, passing Janey the bag of grass.

‘I don’t care if it’s fucking complicated. Explain it to me. I’m not stupid, despite what you think.’

‘Esoteric,’ I said quietly. ‘It means complicated. ‘I took a swig of lager. ‘More or less.’

Alice was rubbing Sav’s thigh. ‘Try again.’

‘More clues, more clues!’ laughed Sav.

‘Right,’ said Alice, and she started humming. We all looked at her. At first it didn’t sound like anything, but after a couple of bars it turned into an approximation of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

‘I know! I know! Billy Joel!’ yelled Sav. He jumped up, knocking his lager all over the floor.

Alice collapsed on the floor, laughing. ‘Jesus, Sav!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s Bob fucking Dylan! God, you’re such a fucking foreigner, sometimes.’ She grabbed Sav’s hand and dragged him to the floor next to her. ‘And anyway, what’s on the scrap is the name of the album, not the artist!’

I took another swig of my drink. Janey was concentrating on rolling, and Alice and Sav were kissing now, laughing, rolling around on the floor in the puddle of lager.

‘Why does the game have to be about complicated concepts, Rob? said Janey. ‘Why can’t it just be about Bob fucking Dylan?

‘Because then it’s too easy,’ I said.

‘And that would be bad?’ she had almost finished the joint, and she brought the papers to her lips, licked them quickly. ‘All of a sudden easy is bad, right?’

I looked at Alice and Sav, kissing. I looked at Janey, head down, searching for the lighter, and I looked out of the window at the London sky.

‘Yes,’ I said, standing up. ‘Easy is bad.’

I walked over to the door, picking my coat up off the floor on the way.

‘My turn again,’ said Alice, ignoring me. Her hair was in her eyes, and she brushed it away with her hand. There was a second of silence as she read the word on the scrap of paper. Then she looked up at me. ‘Schadenfreude?’ she said, mispronouncing almost every syllable. ‘What’s Schadenfreude?’

I looked at her, at Sav, and at Janey. ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

I could still hear them laughing after I’d closed the door behind me.

© Jason Jackson
Reproduced with permission