The Person Controller. David Baddiel
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Fred and Ellie Stone were twins. But they were never sure whether or not they could call themselves identical. They certainly shared exactly the same birthday (20th September, eleven years ago) and they had the same mum and dad (Eric and Janine). But their names were Fred and Ellie. And a boy and a girl are, clearly, not identical.fn1
Yet they felt identical. They sometimes even felt that they knew what one another were thinking. And, even if they were 200 metres apart, they could mouth words at each other and always know what the other one was saying. They did look pretty identical too. They both wore glasses and, most of the time, their school uniforms (even though uniform wasn’t compulsory at their school). And they both, at the point at which this story begins, had braces on their top teeth.
They also both liked the same things. These included: superheroes; Japanese fantasy animation films; comics; maths (yes, they actually liked maths – sometimes they played a game called ‘Who Can Name More Decimal Places of Pi?’); and, most importantly, video games. All video games, but their favourites were FIFA, Street Fighter, Super Mario and Minecraft. The one thing they would save up their not-very-much pocket money to buy was the most up-to-date versions of these games. Ellie, though, was better than Fred at video games.fn2 Which Fred didn’t mind. He knew she had quicker fingers and better hand-to-eye coordination. And, even though he sometimes got frustrated at losing, other times he just liked watching her fingers speed across her controller, as if she was playing a classical concerto by heart. And, when I say her controller, I mean her controller. Ellie and Fred always used their own ones. Ellie in particular was always very definite about which one was hers. The feel and the weight of her controller – even if, to the untrained eye/hand, both of them may have looked/felt exactly the same – suited her style perfectly.
Which was why what happened to it was quite so upsetting.
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.fn1
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.fn2
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’s poking 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.