Is Jack There?

Who are all these creepy characters so keen to see my son?

Changes afoot at Lily’s house

Dusk was descending and the Hallowe’en lanterns on doorsteps were giving out an eerie glow when I answered the door to a vampire.

I was surprised. The beautiful young girl looked too old for Trick or Treat. “Is Jack in?” she asked. “Jack?” I queried. My troglodyte son, wedded to that computer of his, rarely saw the light of day.

“Yes, Jack,” she murmured, smiling and showing her fangs. “Is he in?” “He is.” I stood aside. “Come in.” In fact, he was rarely out. Other than college, it was a fight to get him out of the door. Garth and I worried about him.

“It’s not good for him,” I’d say. “He could be hacking into the Pentagon website or something. We could have men in black turning up on our doorstep.”

That was my fear. That the men in black would come. Garth worried about the dark web. You could see and buy all sorts of illegal things on there apparently.

“I’ll let him know you’re here,” I said now. “And who shall I say it is?”

“Kasmira.” “What a beautiful name. So … exotic.” “One of its many meanings is, unable tobeatrest.” “Just like a vampire,” I blurted out. She smiled then, and once again I was struck by her beauty. Was she Jack’s girlfriend? It was difficult to know with Jack – he could have had a secret girlfriend, or even boyfriend, for ages and we wouldn’t have had a clue.

Mustn’tjumptoconclusions, I thought, as I went up the stairs.

“Jack,” I said, tapping on his bedroom door, “Kasmira’s here to see you.” He opened his door almost instantly. “Kas! Just send her up, Mum.” “Er… can I get you anything?” “No thanks, Mum, we’re good.” I tried to gauge their body language as they disappeared into the bedroom. Not that I was being nosey. It was just the novelty of the situation. My son, as far as I knew, had never had a girl in his bedroom before.

Ihurried back downstairs and into the kitchen. “You’ll never guess,” I said breathlessly to Garth. “Jack’s entertaining a young lady in his room.” “Never!” His eyebrows shot up. We looked at each other as a hundred questions jostled in our thoughts. She could just be a friend, or another computer nerd, or… a horrible thought clutched at my heart. “She’s not an undercover spy, is she?” “Lily, what on earth are you on about?’ “For the men in black. Jack’s hacked into some system that he shouldn’t…”

“Lily, ever since that young man in the papers was threatened with extradition to the States you’ve fixated on that subject. Jack’s not a hacker and he has not hacked into NASA or the FBI.”

But he could have. He was clever enough. And I didn’t want to lose him. In spite of being a six-foot, secretive computer nerd, he was still my baby boy. “How do you know?” Garth waffled about having faith in his son not to do the wrong thing but the truth was, Jack’s world was a closed book to us. Our son spouting algorithms and data structures to us went right over our heads.

“Anyway,” said Garth changing the subject, “what’s Kasmira like?”

I thought of her long, dark red hair, her wide-spaced eyes and the trickle of

painted-on blood running from her full red lips.

“She has long hair like Morticia in The AddamsFamily and –”

The sound of the doorbell cut me off in mid-flow. I answered the door with some sweets in my hand. But it was not kids trick-or-treating. It was a witch. She could have walked right out of a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “Is Jack in?” she asked. “Yes, he’s upstairs with Kasmira,” I said, in case she needed to be forewarned.

“Oh great, Kas is already here,” she said smiling, showing her blackened, tombstone teeth. I suppose she was really pretty beneath all that gruesome make-up.

“Two young women, in his room!” exclaimed Garth, shaking his head. “A vampire and a witch. Maybe he’s making up for lost time.” “You don’t think he’s into sex sites?” Garth appeared to think about this and suddenly I felt a failure as a mother. I should know what my son gets up to.

“I mean, you have spoken to him about pornography and how it isn’t about love and real relationships?” “Yes, Lily, I have – years ago.” “Perhaps we should have had a parental lock on his computer.” ‘He’s nineteen!” “I meant when he was younger,” I said, nursing my new worry. It was awfully quiet upstairs.

“It wouldn’t have made any difference if we had. Even then, he would have been clever enough to work his way round it.”

“That’s true. Short of cutting off broadband, we have no control over what he gets up to.”

“Hey,” said Garth, putting the kettle on, “we’ve always wanted our son to have a social life. And now he has, we’re worried about it.”

“True – but perhaps we should have a word with John.”

John was Garth’s brother and he knew enough about what Jack did to buy him appropriate gifts for Christmas. The pair of them sometimes holed up to look at a video or something.

Iwas still thinking about it when the doorbell went again. “It’s getting a bit like Piccadilly Circus in here,” I murmured, opening the door to a ghost.

“Hi, Casper,” I said. “He’s upstairs with Kasmira and another girl.”

Casper was Stuart, who had once arrived at the door with a “mother board”. He and Jack had built a computer together. ‘That will be Winnie,” Stuart said. “Winnie,” I said to Garth in the kitchen. “Winnie the Witch – are they for real? I used to read that story to Jack when he was a toddler!”

A thump from upstairs followed by a sudden burst of laughter caused us to look to the ceiling.

“It’s probably turned into an orgy now,” Garth mused.

I hit him on the arm. “Stop winding me up. They could be going out to a fancydress party or something.”

“A party!” exclaimed Garth. “I can’t imagine Jack emerging from his cave to go to a party. He would rather cut out his tongue and eat stewed prunes.”

“I’ve just remembered,” I said. “I’m sure Jack did mention something. But I got all this psycho-babble and I stopped listening. But I would have remembered if he had mentioned fancy dress.”

We lapsed into silence then. Over the years we had discussed how we would tackle the problems of drugs, alcohol and girls with him. You know, the usual things. But we had been unprepared for having a computer genius who was so anti-social that we sometimes wondered if he was on the cusp of the autistic scale. And now here he was entertaining a vampire, witch and ghost in his bedroom.

“I just wish he would get out more,” I said, sighing, “and get a life beyond that damned computer.”

“I think you are just about to get your wish,” Garth replied, as feet thundered down the stairs.

We banged into to each other in our rush to get to the hall. And there we bumped into – Dracula.

“Very convincing,” I said to Jack. “Going to a fancy-dress party?”

Four pair of eyes looked at me in horror. I had committed a cardinal error.

“No way. I told you, Mum. We’re going to the College Gaming Society. It’s a big tournament tonight.”

“Hardcore stuff,” put in Casper, alias Stuart, enthusiastically. “Computers?” asked Garth. “It can be PC or console,” said Kasmira in the tone of an explanation.

“B-but w-why the dressing up?” I asked, out of my depth.

“We’re dressed as the video game’s characters,” said Winnie. ‘It will give us the competitive edge. Our team’s the favourite to win.”

“Gamers!” exclaimed my husband in a lightbulb moment.

I’d committed a CARDINAL ERROR. Four PAIRS OF EYES looked at me in HORROR

As we watched from the window while they walked down the road, Garth explained it to me – the lightning flash reactions needed to guide their characters through their trials and tribulations on the screen. I was disappointed. “It’s still to do with a computer screen, though,” I complained.

And then I noticed Jack edge closer to Kasmira and put his arm round her waist. She turned and kissed him and together they walked on, hip to hip. “Yes!” we shouted. Then we turned to each other and high-fived. Our hermit son was finally getting a life.