Backseat

Nadia does not play video games. This is a fact about her that she states often and firmly, usually while sitting on the sofa next to Tom with a blanket over her knees, watching him play video games. "Don't go in there." "I have to go in there. That's where the thing is." "You don't know that's where the thing is." "The map says it's where the thing is." "The map's lied before." Tom pauses. This is the eleventh hour of a game about a woman with a bow who has to cross a mountain to find her brother, and Nadia has been present for all eleven hours, and has not once touched the controller, and has strong opinions about every single decision. "Who's playing this?" "You are." "Right." "Doesn't mean I can't have thoughts." He goes in there. There's a bear. He dies. Nadia says nothing. She says nothing in a way that fills the entire living room. They've been doing this for three years, since the first winter in the flat when the heating was broken and they'd sat under two duvets and he'd played a game about a boy and a wolf and she'd cried at the end, actually cried, and been furious at him about it for a day. She'd tried playing once. He'd handed her the controller in some easy bit, a field with nothing in it, and she'd walked the character into a tree for fifteen seconds and handed it back and said, "No, I don't like being in charge of it. I like watching you be in charge of it." And that was that. What she likes, he's worked out, is the story. She doesn't care about the bear or the map or the crafting menu. She cares that the woman finds her brother. She talks about the characters like they're people from work. "She's going to regret trusting him," she said last week, about a man in a village, and she was right, and she's been insufferable about it since. He reloads. Goes round the bear this time. Finds the thing. "Told you."

"You told me not to go in." "I told you the map lied. It did. The thing was round the side." "The thing was inside. I went inside." "Round the side of inside." He lets it go. There's a cutscene. The woman with the bow finds a letter from her brother and reads it in a voice that cracks a bit on the last line. Nadia pulls the blanket up. Tom doesn't look at her, because if he looks at her she'll say she's fine, and she's not fine, she's a person who doesn't play video games and is crying at one. "Keep going," she says, after. "You sure? It's late." "Keep going. He's in the next village. I can feel it." He keeps going. She's probably right. She usually is, about the story. It's only the map she's wrong about.