Free When The Devil Drives by Christopher Brookmyre Page B

he was trying to think of something else to talk about: something light, that would indicate the previous matter was closed and there were no lingering issues about it, which only served to underline how the opposite was true.
    They had to be adults about this. She wanted to know how he really felt, and why.
    ‘You disagree, though, don’t you,’ she said. ‘You don’t have topretend, Drew. In fact, you can’t, not to me. There’s very few can lie to me across a short table and get away with it. If it was up to you, you’d let him play it, wouldn’t you?’
    Drew looked flustered and defensive, and not a little put-upon, like he was resentful at receiving precisely the scolding he had feared.
    ‘I haven’t seen the game in question, so I couldn’t say.’
    ‘Yes, but in general you don’t think playing these games is inappropriate for Duncan. You just go along with me because you know I don’t like them.’
    ‘That’s not fair,’ he replied. ‘There are plenty of games I wouldn’t want the boys seeing, let alone playing. I’ve never shown them anything from our
Hostile
series, despite the added curiosity of them being the games Daddy makes.’
    ‘But you let them play other violent games, not just the wrestling one. Even Fraser gets to play that
Serious Sam
thing.’
    Fraser was the factor that upped the stakes for Catherine on this issue, because she knew that any game Duncan got, he would be watching over his shoulder and asking for a shot. She knew it was not fair on Duncan that everything he played or watched should be acceptable for his wee brother, at an age when two years of maturity was practically a generation. But equally she didn’t want Fraser growing up too fast, and certainly didn’t want him exposed to anything so disturbing that it had been given a fifteen certificate.
    ‘It’s set so that the monsters spray flowers instead of blood when you shoot them. It’s the equivalent of shooting wooden ducks at the fairground.’
    ‘But don’t you think the violence itself is the issue?’
    Drew sighed more loudly this time, looking all the more like he didn’t want to get into this, because he was aware it was a fight he couldn’t win.
    ‘I just think that clicking on a cursor is a long way distant from pulling a trigger. Nobody’s worried about
Gran Turismo
making people go out and drive their cars at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, or
SimCity
making people want to be town planners.’
    ‘But those are representations of racing, or managing resources and designing landscapes. This
Trail of the Sniper
game is aboutshooting people in the head, Drew. All these games are about shooting people. I don’t want my sons getting desensitised to the idea of that.’
    ‘That’s your prerogative as their mother, and that’s why I’m content to back you up all the way. I’ll tell Duncan he’s not on, and I’ll make it plain that it’s my judgment, not yours. I’m not arguing with you about this.’
    ‘But you don’t agree,’ she re-stated, not quite sure why this bothered her so much.
    For some reason, Catherine had always assumed she’d have girls. There was no rationale behind this, just the vision she had always enjoyed of being a mother. Instead, she had got two boys, and was frequently dismayed by the insights they provided into their gender.
    She had nonetheless been of the opinion that boys didn’t have to turn out to be feral, hyper-masculine monsters obsessed with the brutal and the disgusting. To that end, theirs was a house that didn’t tolerate violence, raised voices or displays of excessive temper. Duncan and Fraser’s gender role models were progressive, enlightened and far from conventional. Their dad was home more than their mum and did more than his share of the cooking, shopping and other domestic chores; their mum was a police officer, out fighting crime and catching bad guys. Yet none of this had prevented them becoming, well, feral, hyper-masculine monsters