Player Two

Danny is thirty-eight and Kev is forty-one and every Wednesday at eight one of them drives to the other's house with a controller in his jacket pocket. It started when Kev moved out. Nineteen years ago, a flat above a chip shop, and Danny had turned up the first Wednesday with a console under his arm because, he said, Kev's telly was bigger. That was the whole reason, the telly. Nobody said anything about it being a thing. It just kept happening. They've played through marriages. Kev's, then Danny's, then Kev's ending. They've played through Danny's kids being born and through the year Kev didn't speak to their dad. They played the night before Mum's funeral, four hours of some racing game neither of them could remember the name of afterwards, not really saying anything, just driving. Tonight it's Danny's house. His wife Sara has taken the girls to her sister's, because she knows. The living room's got Lego on the floor and the good chair's been claimed by the dog, so they're both on the sofa, the way they used to be. "What are we on?" "The one with the boats." "We finished the one with the boats." "There's a second one with the boats." Kev loads it up. It's a co-op thing, two characters, one screen, the kind that hardly gets made anymore. You have to work together to get anywhere. One of you holds a door while the other runs. One of you distracts a thing while the other one sneaks. For nineteen years Kev has been Player One. It has never been discussed. They play. It's a good level, a bit tricky, a lighthouse where you have to time the beam. Danny gets it wrong three times and Kev, who would once have shouted, just says "again" and they go again. "Work all right?" Kev says, during a loading screen. "Yeah. You?" "They're restructuring." "Ah." "Might be fine." "Might be." Loading screen ends. They do the lighthouse. Fourth time, they get it, the beam swings past and they're through and up the stairs and there's a little cutscene, the two characters looking out at the sea, and Danny catches Kev's face in the light off the telly and thinks: he's getting old. We're getting old. We're two old men on a sofa with a dog.

"Kev." "What." "If the restructure goes bad. You know. There's the spare room." Kev doesn't look away from the screen. "I know." "Right." "Sara'd have me?" "Sara likes you better than me." "That's true." The cutscene ends. Next level. It's a cave. There's always a cave. "Your go on the door," Kev says. "It's always my go on the door." "You're Player Two. Player Two does the door." Danny holds the door. Kev runs through. They've got about an hour before Sara's back and there's a boss at the end of the cave, apparently, and neither of them is in any hurry to get there.