The Person Controller

Eric Stone was – there is no nice way of saying this – fat. Well, there are nice ways of saying it – and Eric did often use these ways, describing himself as big-boned, or portly, or suffering from terrible water retention – but the truth was he was fat.Because he ate too much. He didn’t have terrible water retention; he had terrible bacon-sandwich retention.

To be fair to Eric, he did – normally after a bit of prompting from his wife, Janine, and his children, Fred and Ellie – go on a lot of diets.

He’d been on the High Fibre diet, and the Low Carb diet, and the Juice diet, and the No Juice diet, and the Cabbage Soup diet, and the Pea and Mint Soup diet, and a diet he made up where he only ate banana muffins and cheese. He’d been on the 5:2 diet and the 6:1 diet and the 4:3 diet and the 2:5 diet and even the 17:28 diet (which meant not eating anything for a minute between 17:27 and 17:29 every day). He’d been to Weight Watchers and Chocaholics Anonymous and Sixteen-stoners’ Self-help and Big-boned Portly Bacon Sandwich Retentors Sit Around in a Circle and Say How it isn’t Really Their Fault (actually this last one was what Janine called all Eric’s diet groups).

Trouble was, the diets didn’t make Eric any lighter. If anything, they made him heavier because every time he finished one – and he did always finish them, normally after only four or five days – he would eat about five times his own weight in bacon sandwiches.

Eric was just tucking into a bacon sandwich – the first one he’d had after giving up on the Jacket Potato Skin diet, which he’d followed for two whole days (it allowed you to eat jacket potato skins and you could put low-fat spread on them, which Eric had decided included mayonnaise) – when it,the thing that happened to Ellie’s controller which was so upsetting,happened.

The bacon sandwich, in a way, was what caused the whole thing. Because, whenever Eric Stone had his first bacon sandwich after a diet, he would become so entranced by the fatty saltiness of the pork rashers and how deliciously it sat against the brown-sauce-smeared white bread that he would forget everything else and close his eyes. He would lose himself in that bacon sandwich.

Unfortunately, the point at which he was losing himself in this particular bacon sandwich was also the point at which he was sitting down, on the sofa, in front of the TV, plate in one hand, sandwich in the other, IN HIS PANTS.

His big, grey, bought-in-1987 Y-front PANTS.

He had been planning to open his eyes shortly and watch TV. But not for a little while. Not until he’d really savoured the saltiness. Not until … “Ow!!!” said Eric, opening his eyes very wide.

“What is it?” said Janine, not bothering to turn away from Cash in the Attic. Janine Stone never missed an episode and was convinced that one day she herself would find something in the attic worth millions of pounds. Which was odd, as the Stone family lived in a ground-floor flat.

“I’ve sat on something, J!” said Eric.

“Well, move off it then,” said Janine, still looking at the screen while stroking the family cat, a white fluffy beast called Margaret Scratcher.

“I can’t!”

“You can’t?”

“I think … I think it’s stuck!”

Eric stood up.

He turned round, facing away from his wife. Interestingly, despite the obvious pain he was in, at no point did he stop eating his bacon sandwich.

“Can you see it?” he said.

“What do you mean can I see it?”

He glanced over his shoulder. “Stop watching Cash in the Attic! Just for a second!”

With a big tut, Janine Stone forced her eyes away from the television and looked across Margaret Scratcher’s fur at her husband’s back. Then she lowered her gaze a fraction.

“What’s that?” she said.

“What’s what?”

“That black thing. Poking out of your pants.”

“That’s what I want to know!” said Eric. “Never mind it poking out, it’spoking me!”

There was another tut from behind him. Eric had once admitted – quietly, to his friends in his works canteen, over a bacon sandwich – that if his wife was a noise, she would be a tut.

“For pity’s sake, Eric. Bend over.”

Eric did as he was told. There was a short pause as Janine – and Margaret Scratcher – peered. Eric felt he could hear them peering. Then she said: “How on earth did you get that stuck up there?”

“How on earth did I get what stuck up there?”

“MY VIDEO-GAME CONTROLLER!!!” said another voice.

Ellie’s voice in fact. Sounding very upset. Reasonably, really, since she had just come into the living room to see her mother reaching out a slightly disgusted hand to retrieve her most prized possession from between the cheeks of her father’s 1987 Y-front-panted bottom.

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As it happened, Ellie’s controller wasn’t actually broken. The toggle had gone a touch floppy and the X button looked like it had been knocked diagonal by whatever G-force it sustained while between Eric’s bottom cheeks. But it worked, kind of. If you ignored the fact that when it shuddered – like controllers do when you hit the bar in FIFA, or there’s an explosion in Call of Duty – it felt, to Ellie, like it was shuddering for another reason.

That reason being that it had been lost, for a short while, in a very bad place.

Basically, Ellie just didn’t really want to touch her beloved controller any more. Which everyone in the family, including Eric, understood. In fact, Eric, who was a nice person and a good dad – even if he loved bacon sandwiches almost as much as his children – went so far as to tell Ellie that he was perfectly willing to pay for a new controller. As long as she didn’t tell anyone what had happened to the old one.

The day after Eric made that promise, Fred and Ellie were in their school computer room. Well, it wasn’t really a computer room. Bracket Wood Comprehensive was a good school – more or less – but it didn’t have any money. And so what it called a computer room was in fact a cleaning cupboard with all the cleaning materials taken out and an eight-year-old laptop on the shelf where there used to be five half-full bottles of Toilet Duck.

However, Fred and Ellie didn’t mind. Because right then they were enjoying going through all their favourite gaming sites and reading reviews of all the latest controllers. Ellie, in particular, was really enjoying herself.

“People who aren’t gamers don’t know this, do they?” she was saying. “They think that controllers just come in black plastic with some buttons, bundled with a console. But they’re so wrong! Look!”

Fred, who tended just to listen when Ellie got very excited about anything to do with gaming, nodded. She was right. Clicking quickly through many different web pages – her skill at video games showing in how expert she also was with a mouse – she pulled up on the screen loads of different types of controller.

Black ones, grey ones, silver ones, rainbow ones, camouflage ones, football team colours ones; ones with big toggles, small toggles, toggles that were gear sticks and steering wheels; controllers with blue lights and white lights and red lights and yellow lights; with ribbed handles and smooth handles and leather-clad handles and handles shaped like hands; with headphones and microphones and speakers attached; and ones you could personalise yourself – you could even have one made in the shape of your own name!

“The two Ls in Ellie could be the handles!” she said excitedly.

“Yes!” said Fred, wondering how that would work with ‘Fred’. Maybe if he went for Frederick the k and the d could be the handles … but, then again, Frederick was probably a bit long for a video-game controller. He’d have to hold his hands really wide apart.

“What browser are you using?” said their sort-of friend Stirling, one of the few other pupils at Bracket Wood who could often be found in the computer room. He was standing behind Ellie, peering at the screen.

“Browser?” said Ellie, not turning round. “I dunno. Safari?”

Stirling looked at his younger sister, Scarlet. They burst out laughing.

“Safari! Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!” they said together.

Ellie raised her eyes at Fred, who raised his own back. Stirling and Scarlet were very technologically aware and very proud of it. This was one reason why, as far as Fred and Ellie were concerned, they were sort-of friends, rather than friends.

“Is that wrong?” said Ellie.

“Well, it’s not wrong, but if you want to be truly up to speed …” said Stirling.

“… both design-wise and speed-wise,” said Scarlet. “As in download speed,” she added helpfully.