"I met Hideo Kojima once, well, I say met, I was standing behind him in a chip shop in Burnham-on-Sea called ‘The Battered Husband’ as he ordered fish, chips and mushy peas with loads of vinegar and lashings of brown sauce. Due to his seeming inability to truncate anything combined with how he couldn’t work his way through even a basic sentence without resorting to heavy-handed metaphors relating to existential crises, by the time he had finished reciting his order, his reasons for it and the history behind his reasons for it, the shop had closed and we were ushered hungrily outside. Turning to me, he said that he had never been to Burnham-on-sea before* and asked if I knew of anywhere that would be open that still served food.
Being native to the area, I replied in the affirmative and took him through the winding cobbled streets and down some narrow stone stairs to a seedy underground pie shop that sold a variety of questionable meats encased in a shortcrust pastry that smelt faintly of hospital corridors. As I bit into my mystery meat, a smell escaped the cracked pastry that clearly offended Hideo, he crinkled up his nose and said, “I’m not eating that, what else do you sell, midnight pie merchant?”**
After some haggling and eventually moving away from pies and pastries to sundries, Hideo and myself exited the shop, me with a full stomach of vague offal and Hideo carrying an oversized jar of pickled eggs. As we sat by the sea on a wooden bench beneath the darkening sky, I told Hideo that I was a games developer myself and described some of the games I had worked on. As I listed the titles, Kojima was robotically inserting pickled egg after pickled egg into his open mouth and swallowing them whole, looking more and more queasy with each forced mouthful.
I was in the middle of telling him of the game that I was currently working on - ‘I Can Smell Your Breath Through the Letterbox and I’m Up in the Attic, Dad’, a text adventure for the Nintendo Game Boy - when his glazed eyes looked towards the shore and opened in terror. Dashing down the coastal path in the twilight, the jar, now bereft of eggs sloshed vinegar around as he cradled it, mid-run. I followed him closely down the path and onto the beach to the shoreline where Hideo had obviously seen something from the bench that was hidden to my eyes.
As we got closer, I could see that it was a small doll, the clothes had been torn off by the tides and it stared up at us from the sandy shore, seawater sloshing around it, jostling it gently. Kojima picked it up and held it out behind him, passing it to me. “I…thought…it was a child” he gasped. He had also started turning green and looking a bit peaky, I assume it was eating forty pickled eggs sequentially and then running down to the beach whilst carrying a heavy jar that had upset his stomach and he dropped to his hands and knees and began vomiting into a hastily-dug hole that he had fashioned in the sand with his bare hands.
I thought he would be a while so I decided to roll a cigarette. Of course, I was holding the doll in one hand and the large jar of pickling vinegar in the other, thinking on my feet, I unscrewed the lid, popped the doll in the jar and then rolled and lit a cigarette, standing quietly as I waited for my companion to regain his composure.
After several minutes, Hideo wiped his mouth and raised himself to his feet, patted himself down to get the loose sand off himself and turned to face me…where his face froze in shock.
What I’ve failed to mention up until now is that this whole time, I had been dressed up as a Medieval packhorse as I was trying to get used to the costume for a small part in a local play I had volunteered for in a bid to meet new people. Not only was I standing on the beach holding a pickling jar with a floating doll inside but I had strapped numerous crates filled with cloth to my back and they tottered, unsteadily over my head, held down with roughly-tied hemp. This must have looked quite the sight already but I had recently watched and become oddly fixated on the = forgettable == teen thriller, Gossip, and was oddly enthralled by the greasy, rat-faced character, Travis and so I had fashioned a mask crafted in his image, woven from pigskin and with dog hair smeared with Vaseline to give the appropriately greasy look, which I now wore.
Hideo Kojima looked at me for what seemed like hours, apparently in the form of some sort of epiphany before running off, open-mouthed into the distance shouting what, to my ears at the time appeared to be “Come and lead us!” as he sprinted down the beach. Now, of course, I believe that he was screaming “Norman Reedus” for reasons which, at the time at least, weren’t apparent to me. I never saw Hideo Kojima again.
Ah yeah, the review. It’s boring but it looks nice, a bit like my Nan’s mantelpiece before she put all those doilies on it and covered up the marblework."
*This took him twenty minutes.
**I’m simplifying for time, this was actually a good half-hour’s worth of conversation.
Arthur Parallax
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