Having vowed on Tuesday to destroy everything he has written to date and start all over again with Steve Bruce as his literary mentor, Frank begins in earnest with an exciting short story…
His office was comfortable. There was a computer on the desk. It was a desktop PC running the Windows Vista operating system. This had been launched by Microsoft in 2007 and much criticised. If the villains in films such as Die Hard 4.0 starring Bruce Willis tried to upload computer viruses to government mainframes using Windows Vista, reflected Terry Barnes, their evil plans would be easily thwarted. It was the kind of thing Tony Barnes liked to reflect on. He was an intelligent man, despite a lack of formal education. He had left school with two O Levels, in Biology and Geography, in the days before O Levels had been replaced by GCSEs. That showed how old he was. He was a man from a different age. Sometimes he felt this keenly. Like today, sitting in his comfortable office with the computer on the desk.
The desk came from IKEA. Terry Burnes liked to leaf through the IKEA catalogue looking at all the product names. Billy. Lack. Ektorp. Kivik. Klippan. Klobo. Benno. Laiva. Tobo. Mavas. Linnarp. It was like a code. He wondered if he would ever crack it.
Not today. He stood up in his comfortable office and walked over to the window. Through the window, he looked down at the car park below. There were a lot of cars parked in the car park, of different makes and different colours. Tony Burnes liked cars. Looking down through the window of his comfortable office at the cars parked in the car park he saw his own car. He had driven it to the office that morning, just as he did every morning, except at weekends. In the evenings he drove the car back home again. When he was at the office he parked the car in the car park, but when he was at home he parked it in the driveway of his house. Tommy Barnes liked driving his car. The route between his home and the office, and back again, was so familiar to him that he did not need to use Satnav, although his car came equipped with Satnav. He reflected that “Satnav” sounded like an IKEA product range. It was the kind of thing he liked to reflect on. It occurred to him that “Vista” sounded like an IKEA product range too. Were all these things connected, IKEA and Satnav and Windows Vista?, he wondered. And he also reflected that if the villains in action films like the Die Hard series, starring Bruce Willis, attacked computer systems like Windows Vista, then they might attack IKEA and Satnav too. These days, villains were usually terrorists. It was a worrying world, and Tommy Burnes was a man out of time, with his two O Levels, in Biology and Geography.
He turned away from the window and sat back in his chair. His office was comfortable. There was a computer on the desk.
For those of you trying to comprehend the many levels of meaning in this piece, here is what I wrote in linking to it from Hooting Yard:
“Astute readers will note a particularly clever metafictional sally in my piece. Brit points to Bruce’s repeated use of fundamental spelling inconsistencies in proper names, and is dismissive of the idea that these may be due to a lack of proofreading or copy editing. I have followed Bruce in giving my hero’s name in a number of variations, and I also refer more than once to the actor Bruce Willis. Not only is there a pleasing Bruce / Bruce echo, but of course Willis once reputedly wrote on an online forum the immortal words “proofreading is for pussies”. I leave you to untangle that one.”
Where is Marxist critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek when you need him? This needs interrogation.
He’s here, interrogating some New England street furniture.
Wonderful stuff, Frank,
This is brilliant writing, I cant wait for next week’s installment where hopefully Terry Burns gets to kill some Iraqis with his bare hands
Oddly, Bruce/Barnes in the original ‘Sweeper!’ and ‘Striker!’ books performs very little in the way of violent heroics. He mostly investigates using his two great mental attributes: dogged persistence and plain old common sense. Sometimes he runs away.
On the few occasions when things do get physical, he is required to apply his soccer skills to unusual situations. Memorably, he disarms a terrorist (of some ill-defined Israeli/Palestinian sort) with a brilliantly-executed sliding tackle of the sort that many First Division strikers of the late 80s and early 90s will recognise all too well.