The White Hawk

It was the black blankness of space which surprised me when I first played Space Hawk. Deep blackness and an inertia which I couldn't pronounce (given that, at the age of 11, I didn't know the word). The screen was a flat abyss before which the effigy of my human form lay prone, a distant Promethean figure; only just perceivable to me, sitting crosslegged in front of the tv in my mother's living room. Space Hawk was immediately a game which confused and disorientated me. All moments seemed to be inhabited by another, more significant force than the myself - the force which sent the Hawks, perhaps, or that which had placed me there, prone in that depthless space.

It was the first and, as far as I can remember, the only game which I'd bought for the computer my mother had given me at Christmas. Given with a certain expectant pleasure I imagine and received (my present self now recalls) with a blunt lack of interest. I wonder if she was pleased to see me playing with it - now I'd found this alluring cartridge - or whether she'd noticed the obsessive look forming on my face. And whether, turning to leave the living room, drying her hands on that (then new - white) school tea-towel which I'd given her when I came home one afternoon, two years before (reticent, no doubt, as she was when she gave me the computer - wanting the response and wordlessly letting it sit, unanswered) - she'd thought to herself, "Well, ok..."

Because I was obsessed; gripped every evening in mesmeric deep-space combat with the unending Hawks - calling out death to me in their intergalactic, sea-gullian tongue - and me beating them back with my one-pixel laser-gun. The whole thing was a futile struggle - the last gasp of an heroic character flung out into space -  it was a final scene, but one you could prolong.  

I find myself asking, why, at the age of eleven, was I so excited by this strange, disconcerting videogame? Trouble at school? Friends I couldn't make or couldn't maintain? It seems too early an age to say it was a girl, but who knows? I simply can't remember. And why am I now drawn back to it? I wonder if on my death bed  - a snow globe rolling out of my hand - or a globe of  my mother's messy living room (where instead of snow newspapers fly about, or crumbs from our dinner) - will I whisper to the longsuffering nurse: 'Space Hawk'...?

I think I even dreamt of the fluorescent white hawk dive bombing our house. I remember rings of translucent colour firing across my vision causing a sort of visual pitching effect; sending my sight off balance. I was entirely disorientated and found myself alone walking down a corridor, dark like late evening, looking for the light switch or the door to my bedroom. I realised that the hawk had gone but also that my mother had too. Did the hawk take her, or did she leave of her own accord? It would've been a good time to sneak out quietly - 'he seems alright, I'll just leave,' she must've thought. No malice just politely leaving me to it.

To the empty late evening corridor.

I can't remember when I had this dream. Its current vividness suggests it was recent; placed in the past by the images it conjured. Those of the white hawk, the living room, the corridor; which I do remember walking down, late in the evening when my mother had gone to bed and I'd stayed up by myself. Even after she'd asked me to, for once, get an early night.