gullybogan

Dear Reader,

Can you believe that we’re *still* in the past?

It’s now the evening of the day after xmas day.

Sybylla has spent last night and the whole of today at Astraboy’s house. She’s rung up late in the afternoon to ask if it’s alright for the two of them to come over. She wants to open her Guitar Hero World Tour, which is sitting unopened beneath our tree.

The tree she so legendarily carried home from the tree shop, singlehandedly.

I say that i don’t really want to have anything more to do with Astraboy if he is drunk; that i’m well and truly over him being rude and disrespectful to my Princess. I don’t say anything on the subject of my feelings about him being rude and disrespectful to Sybylla herself.

We’ve had that conversation already.

She assures me that he won’t be drunk.

They arrive a few hours later, and he has a can of VB in his hand.

« He’s not drunk, » Sybylla assures me, and then concedes, « But he has been drinking… »

Sybylla opens the Guitar Hero package, and we spend half an hour setting it all up. Astraboy helps out, and – remarkably – he is actually quite useful.

« Got one of these meself, » he explains. « Well, not this fucken one, but Guitar Hero 3, anyway. » He then goes on to regale us with tales of how expert he is at it all, how whenever he’s played, all his mates have heartily wished that they were him, and that Him And His Mates Incorporated would have taped him performing Through the fire and the flames (*the* hardest song on GH3) and put it on YouTube, but none of them own a video camera.

Having established himself as the Most Important And Authoritative Person In The Room when it comes to anything Guitar Hero related, he sets himself on a course of speaking down to the rest of us mere mortals from his higher plane of Guitar Hero Existence, a course that he clearly intends to last the rest of the evening, at the very least.

We begin playing, and – surprise! – it very rapidly develops into an ugly situation.

He begins from the first moment enthusiastically verbally abusing each of the three of us either in turn or in subsets for our many shortcomings in manipulating the musical-instrument-shaped game paddles. Sybylla is on drums, Princess is on vocals, i myself am on bass (using Sybylla’s GH3 guitar), and Astraboy – of course – is on lead guitar. None of the other three of us are any good, by his estimation, at anything, and he insists that we all three be put on what he calls “The Girlfriend Setting”. This setting involves the jewels on our highway being reduced to simple purplish bars, requiring us to merely press any fret-button, sing any note, or hit any drum skin/cymbal when the bar reaches the bottom of the highway.

He, of course, is on expert level, and – despite his being the soi disant Chosen One of the Guitar Hero Universe – we soon see that he is actually not all that good.

We spend an hour and a half working on trying to finish a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. Each time we fail and have to retry, he blames the three of us for messing it up.

« How fucken useless are you cunts? » he implores us at the end of what must be the thirtieth failed attempt.

There is an indicator on screen that has been showing all along that it is, in fact, he himself who is failing to complete the song. He seems unaware of this, and the three of us are too polite to point it out.

Until, that is, the thirtyfirst failure.

« For Christ’s fucken SAKE! » he explodes, taking the guitar-shaped paddle from around his neck and slamming it down on the couch with such force that it threatens to snap in at least two. He then makes what we writerly folk describe as an animal noise, even though no animal would ever make this noise. It’s a roar; a wordless human roar of anger and frustration.

He’s about to launch into a tirade listing, no doubt, the numerous personal failings and ineptitudes which cumulatively contribute to our utter inability to support him in his manifest Guitar Hero destiny, when i say, « It was you. »

Just like that.

He replies by suggesting that i do things of a sexual nature to myself that i’ve not even imagined doing to Princess, and then he picks up his VB can and informs Sybylla that she and he are fuckenwell leaving, rather than be spoken to like that.

Sybylla sits resolutely at the drumkit-shaped game paddle, looking down at the sticks in her hands.

« I’ve got work in the morning, » she says, in a small voice. « I really should sleep here the night. »

Astraboy stands glaring at her for a few moments. Then he makes a decision.

« Right, » he declares. « Fuck yez all. »

Within seconds he’s left the room, the house, the driveway.

We listen to the indignant raspberries of his little Polish car’s exhaust fading into the background noise of the Boxing Day night suburb, as the smell of furiously spun tyres seeps into the house through the open front door.

After a few minutes’ silence, Sybylla says, « You’re really not seeing him at his best. I think i have to stop him drinking altogether, when he comes over. That’s probably the problem. »

I ask if she’s ever seen him when he’s not been drunk.

« Not really, » she admits. « Sometimes he’s been sober, but then he gets drunk pretty much straight away… »

We change the setting of our game paddles to something more challenging, choose a different song, and play our way successfully through a number of dusty old hits from the seventies and eighties before something goes wrong in the drumkit-shaped paddle’s wireless doo-dad, and it abruptly stops talking to the console.

This, apparently, is a common problem with the drumkit-shaped game paddle in Guitar Hero World Tour on the PS2.

We search through the supplied manuals for something that will tell us how to fix it, but they just say to plug it all in and turn it all on. The assumption is that it will all just work.

Except it doesn’t.

There’s a number of buttons you can press that make lights flash on the paddle and console at different rates, and we figure that this must have something to do with fixing it. We try a range of different combinations and sequences of pressing buttons, but to no avail.

Despite the constant failures, we keep “trying one more time” to get it working, but it’s slowly becoming impossible to believe that this course is anything other than a waste of time.

Finally we reach the point where we can’t pretend any longer that it’s going to work.

Sybylla shrugs and says she’s going to bed.

As she mumbles goodnight, her eyes, the ring around the one she “bumped on a doorframe” on xmas eve even darker now, show none of the twinkle that usually lives there.

« I’ll try to organise something in the next couple of days where he’s definitely not drinking, OK? » she says as she pauses in the frontroom doorway. « It’s probably just, you know, xmas, and all the drinking ppl do at xmas. »

She nods, apparently to herself, and then goes to bed.

Princess and me stay up for another hour, sitting amongst the ridiculous fake musical instruments, discussing what we can possibly do to Make Things Better.

Of course, we both know that there’s nothing we can do. If anything is going to Make Things Better, it has to come from Sybylla herself.

She has to figure out the Thing To Do that will resolve the problem. To get it all working.

And right now, in this part of the past, that doesn’t seem likely to happen.

Yours,
Gullybogan