I’ve spent 30 years trapped in a grisly game of tag
One of this year’s Hollywood releases is about a group of men who have been playing an intermittent game of “you’re it” for 30 years.
Tag, starring Ed Helms and Jon Hamm, is based on the true story of 10 friends, now in their 40s, who resort to increasingly outré manoeuvres to catch one another, flying across continents, hiding in car boots, breaking into one another’s houses.
Let me declare an interest.
I have been playing a similar game with four school friends since 1988. Our game, though, has a more macabre aspect. It began, as it would in some Stephen King novel, with the five of us, aged 16, spending a weekend at Tom’s holiday cottage in Frinton.
At some point, seized by a passing madness, our friend Al bought a hideous smurf from a local charity shop.
Reader, I wish I could describe the malice in that two-foot-tall stuffed toy, the evil in its silent gaze. By the end of the weekend (it was that kind of weekend), we had convinced ourselves that it was some sort of witch’s familiar.
When I got home, I found that someone had stuffed the grisly creature into my bag. I said nothing, and bided my time until, more than a year later, I secreted it in the flat that Al and Tom shared during their gap year.
Thus began the horror.
For three decades we have been planting the malevolent imp on one another through a variety of subterfuges. Often, we rope in third parties, persuading a receptionist to seat it at someone’s office desk, for example, or convincing one of their relatives to wrap it up as a Christmas present.
On one occasion my then flatmate, who used to leave for work before 5am, was induced to place the monster in my bed as I slept. The scene when I woke up was like the horse’s head sequence in The Godfather.
Weddings were off limits at first – the other WAGs vetoed the idea of presenting a new bride with a leering blue incubus.
But by the time the last of us, Johnnie, tied the knot five years ago, the wives had hardened their hearts – or, if you prefer, joined the game – and a gift-wrapped smurf joined the other presents.
Four years passed. Had Johnnie’s new wife thrown the thing out and ended the whole phantasmagoric saga?
No. At a dinner in Hampton Court in May, I arrived to find the smurf smirking in my chair.
I kept it until last week, when I planted it on Nic, a publisher, via a literary agent.
I did once try to return the smurf to the charity shop in Frinton, rather in the manner of Frodo casting the Ring into the fires where it was forged. But the shop had closed.
The Cracks of Doom were sealed. The demon is going to pursue us until the last of the five is in his grave.