Dad's Save File

The console was still plugged in. That was the first thing. Mum hadn't touched it, hadn't touched anything in the back room really, and it sat there under the little telly with the light on standby, waiting. I didn't turn it on for three weeks. Then one Sunday when Mum was at church I did. Dad had one game. That's not quite true, he had a few, but he had one game he played, the farming one, the one where you plant things and they grow in real time and you look after chickens and fix fences. He'd got it when he retired because my brother Owen said it would "keep his brain going", which Dad had found so funny he'd said it every time he turned it on. Keep my brain going, Jean. Off to keep my brain going. Six years. Six years he'd played it. Never talked about it much. Just went in the back room after tea and you'd hear the little music through the wall. The save loaded. There was his farm. I want to try and describe it. It was enormous. I don't know what I'd expected, a little plot maybe, a few crops. It was a whole valley. Fields in neat rows, each one a different colour. An orchard. A pond he'd dug out himself with, I found out later, a hundred and forty in-game days of work. There were animals everywhere, with names. A pig called Owen. A goat called Jean, which is my mum's name and also mine, so I've decided it's about her. And it was all still going. That's the thing that got me. The game had been paused, obviously, since the last time he'd played, which was the Wednesday before. But when I unpaused it the crops started growing again. Little sprouts. Some of them were nearly ready. I sat there and I didn't know what to do. If I didn't harvest them, they'd rot. That seemed wrong. If I did harvest them, then I'd be playing it, and it was his. I harvested them. I've been going in every few days now. Just to keep it ticking over. I've learned where he kept the tools, which is the wrong place, in a chest by the pond instead of in the barn, and I've left them there because that's where he kept them. I feed the goat. I fixed a fence that had fallen down in the north field, and I got a little message from one of the game characters thanking me, and I had to go and stand in the garden for a bit.

Owen came round last week and I showed him. He's not a game person. He looked at the screen with the face he uses for things he doesn't understand. "He did all this?" "All of it." "Six years." "Six years." He looked at the pig called Owen for a long time. "Fat, isn't he," he said eventually, and his voice went, and that was the first time either of us had cried in front of the other since the hospital. There's a mailbox in the game. The characters send you letters. I found one from years back that Dad had saved, from the in-game shopkeeper, that just said: the farm's looking lovely, you should be proud. Dad had kept it. You can delete them and he'd kept it. The console's still in the back room. Mum knows I go in. She hasn't asked what I do in there and I haven't said. But last Sunday she put a cup of tea down beside me without a word and stood behind the chair for a minute, watching the little fields go by, and then she said, "That'll be the goat," and went back through.