Inside Straight

by Ray Banks

  Pollard took a step towards me, his voice lowering. "I'm going to rob the place, Graham, and I want you to be a part of it."

  We were in the frozen section now. Blind panic had brought me here and utter incomprehension kept me rooted to the spot. I looked at Pollard. Behind him were rows of Ben and Jerrys; their jaunty flavour names were like a dozen badly-timed and poorly-written jokes. My basket was heavy. I wanted to swap it to my other hand, but I didn't have the strength or the force of will.

  I tried to say something like "Excuse me?" but my throat kept closing like a panicked sphincter and all that came out were a series of quiet, choking squeaks.

  "It's okay."

  I moved my mouth. I started to shake my head. "Wuh-we—"

  "Don't think about it too hard, Graham. I'm not asking you to tool up. Only thing I need off you is a bit of information."

  "I don't know anything." I put my basket down on top of the freezers.

  "Nah, you know more than you think, son."

  A middle-aged woman pushed a trolley between us. She looked appalled at the price of ice cream. I was glad of the interruption, watching her shopping glide past us as I tried to work some saliva back into my mouth. My wrist itched and burned at the same time.

  When she turned at the top of the aisle, I moved back against the freezers, pressed my wrist against the cool glass. "I can't. I mean, I don't know what you want to know but I can't give you that information. Even if I knew it. Which I don't. I mean, I just arrived, I can't—"

  Pollard held up a hand. I hated myself for shutting up. "Don't start talking bollocks just yet, alright? I know it's a bit of a leap for you, goody-fuckin'-two-shoes that you are. I know you'll probably need a bit of time to get your head round it an' that. So here's what I'm willing to do—"

  "No." I blurted it out, too loud and too high.

  "You what?"

  "I can't do it. You can't make me."

  Pollard frowned. He dug one hand into the pocket of his coat. I opened my mouth. He put a finger to his lips.

  My first thought – Jesus, he has a gun.

  My second thought – wait, people don't get murdered in a Sainsbury's. An Aldi or a Lidl or a Tesco Metro attached to a petrol station, yes. But not a Sainsbury's. It'd be like getting raped in Waitrose – it just didn't happen.

  "Wait." I moved up against the freezers, nudged my basket. I felt it move, saw it slip from the glass and drop to the floor. The hot chocolate smashed open, coughing 70% cocoa into the air. I blinked at it. Everything was going wrong. "Mr Pollard—"

  "Easy, son." Pollard showed me a mobile phone. It was small, cheap and disposable.

  And now, apparently, mine.

  "I don't want it."

  He grabbed my left hand. I wanted to scream. He forced my fingers open and slapped the phone into my raw palm. "Just give us a call when you've had a proper think about it."

  I shook my head. I couldn't look at him. My wrist hurt. I wanted to cry.

  I stared at the floor, making my mouth tight so my lip wouldn't tremble.

  "Graham." Pollard's voice was hard.

  I shook my head. Focused on the hot chocolate that dusted the floor.

  "We're going to do this. It's going to happen, with or without you. But it's going to be a lot quicker and a lot cleaner if you help us out." He leaned down so I couldn't avoid him. "Someone on the inside means less people get hurt. Do you understand what I'm saying, Graham?"

  I nodded. He made a move to pat me on the shoulder, but I flinched out of it.

  Pollard smiled. "Sorry."

  I watched him walk away out of the corner of my eye. He turned at the end of the aisle, where the ice cream sauces and meringues were, and then disappeared. I straightened slowly and stood against the freezers, uncurling my fingers from around the phone. I wanted to fling it down the aisle, but I couldn't find the energy.

  Instead, I looked at my basket. I needed another one. I needed to start all over again.

  And more than that, I needed to stop crying.

  6

  When I was a kid, I used to scream at the sea.

  I grew up in Blackpool, not far from the beach, and whenever the pressure got too much – whenever Mam and Dad turned the air blue and dotted the inch-long shag with blood; or, even worse, when they tried to be civil to each other, muttering platitudes through gritted teeth – I used to wake up early in the morning, just before it got light, and I dressed, sneaked down the stairs, put on my frog-eyed wellies and then toddled off down to the pier. I walked with a heavy, thumping head; each step I took closer to the sea made the pressure inside grow until it felt as if my eyes were bugging out of my skull. And then, when I reached the end of the pier, I exploded. The worse the weather, the better it was. The darker and more dangerous the storm, the more it ripped the yell from my throat and swallowed it in its own howl, until I could feel my scream tear out of me but heard little more than the wind buffeting my ears. I kept screaming until my throat was raw and the spit burned the inside of my mouth, until my chest felt packed with ground glass and my legs struggled to remain steady against the wind. Then, finally, I would drop to the end of the pier and let my feet dangle, leaning forward to see between the boots at the rocks below. The wind would lash rain at my head, but I barely felt it. Sometimes I found the energy to cry; most of the time I didn't. Either way, I sat there, numb and motionless, until the clouds lifted from my mind and I felt well enough to return home.

  I left school at sixteen, worked as a valet until I was old enough to train as a dealer, and soon after that I found that I didn't need to go down to the sea anymore. The pressure and frustration were gone. There were rules here. Rules as to how a game would be dealt, and rules that dictated a dealer's conduct from the moment he strapped on his dicky at the start of the evening to the moment he left the club. The job gave me purpose, it gave me structure, and it worked me long enough hours to exhaust me both mentally and physically and make me think I'd achieved something. I was safe in the pit, surrounded on all sides by gaming tables. It was my fort, my sanctuary, and it remained constant and controllable.

  My parents weren't happy, of course. They wanted me to go to university. They wanted me to have a career. They wanted me to do a lot of things that I wasn't going to do, because what they wanted didn't matter. They didn't control me anymore. I was my own man, in charge of my own life, and I'd made my own decisions.

  Or so I thought.

  These days, the nearest large body of water was forty miles away. Manchester had canals, right enough, but they weren't the same. If you screamed at the sea, nobody heard you; scream at the canal, the next person you spoke to would be wearing a police uniform. And the police were the last people I wanted to talk to right now.

  That shouldn't have been the case. I was a law-abiding citizen with a strong moral compass. I should've called the police the moment the front door was shut and double-locked, but I didn't. Instead, I went and sat in a silent living room and stared at a dead television.

  I couldn't call the police. It wouldn't do any good. The police wouldn't do anything except maybe bring Pollard in on suspicion. Plus, if I told them what he had planned, there was a good chance they'd tell me to keep in with him, string him along, and jump him in the act. More pressure. And if Pollard found out, I had no doubt that he'd murder me. I thought about calling Clive to see what his take was, but then he was the most amoral man I'd ever known, so I knew he wouldn't be much help. He'd suggest I go along with it, see how much money I could make. Anything for a quiet life and quick cash.

  So I needed to work this out for myself. In the meantime, Pollard's phone was my ball and chain. I couldn't leave it anywhere in case he called, but I couldn't keep it on me at work for the same reason. So I kept it turned off, but stashed in my coat pocket when I was at work, and sat on the coffee table when I was at home. I knew it was ridiculous, but I didn't know what else to do. I tried to ignore it. I watched classic Who – Fifth Doctor only, my childhood Doctor, my
comfort Doctor – and read comics I'd already read a million times before. I found myself trawling the net looking for game torrents to use with my newly-downloaded Amiga emulator, bought a LucasArts combo pack of two Indiana Jones games and Loom and pointed and clicked my way through them, one eye on eBay for second-hand Fighting Fantasy books. I dived into distraction, and the day shifts staggered by. I ran efficient but unremarkable pits. Anywhere else, people would talk; at the Riverside, they were just grateful for a nine o'clock surplus.

  And all the while, my focus kept returning to the mobile phone in my coat pocket and what it meant.

  Pollard and his gang – I supposed it was a gang, but the word didn't sit right in my head because it suggested handkerchief disguises and six-shooters – were going to rob the place. That robbery was a dead cert, an indisputable fact of the future. It had been promised regardless, and the only variable was my participation. If I said yes, it would be easier on everyone. If I said no, then people would get seriously hurt, and that group of people would probably – no, definitely – include me.

  There was only one thing to do, and that was retreat. If I wasn't working at the Riverside, then I'd be useless as an inside man. My second day back, I called the Palace from the admin office and asked for Dave. Lorraine told me in her crisp little teacher's voice that he was busy, but the statement came too quickly and emphatically for it to be anything but a lie. I told her it was urgent, that I knew he was avoiding my calls, and that I didn't want to have to go Regional without discussing the matter with Dave first.

  And sure enough, he was on the line in less than a minute. "Graham, great to hear from you. What was it you wanted to talk about?"

  "When am I coming back?"

  "I thought you said this was urgent."

  "It is. When am I coming back to the Palace, Dave?"

  "Well, we've not really had a chance to discuss anything along those lines, Graham, not with the robbery—"

  "That was a week ago."

  "Have you talked to Jacqui about it?

  "It's got nothing to do with Jacqui. I'm employed by the Palace—"

  "You're employed by Sovereign."

  "To work at the Palace, which happens to be the club on my pay slip." I struggled to keep the desperation out of my voice as I spoke. "Look, Dave, if Jacqui needs staff, she can source them from somewhere else. I'm sure there are some half-dead pit bosses up at the Union who'd love a change of scenery."

  "I don't want to leave her in the lurch, Graham."

  "You won't. All she needs is a body in the pit."

  "And that's a good thing, right? Just what you need, a bit of a respite from the pressure—"

  "I'm not stressed." Too loud, too harsh. I paused, mouth hanging open, turning that rage inside out for a split-second before I shook it off with a long blink and a deep breath. There was some dry skin on the back of my hand. I picked it off. "I know that's the way you sold it to Jacqui. I dare say you told Regional something similar. Good for you, pass off your bad night as someone else's, I don't care, but we both know that stress didn't put me here, Dave, so when am I coming back to the Palace?"

  Dave didn't say anything. I heard noise in the background, someone asking him for something. It sounded like Lorraine, and it sounded as if she'd been prompted. "Okay, look, Graham, I've really got to go. Leave it with me."

  "I left it with you already, Dave."

  "I can't do this."

  "Can't or won't?"

  He hung up. I blinked at the phone. Thought about hurling it across the room for a second, then hung up myself. Hard. Then I did it again, harder, for good measure.

  Of course Clive was right. He might have been a lot of things, but he wasn't a liar, and he wasn't one to make up gossip for the hell of it.

  I wasn't going back to the Palace.

  Regional had swallowed Dave's story – I was overworked, I was stressed, I couldn't handle the busy nights anymore, if only there was somewhere I could go – and the dance of the lemons had begun in earnest. I should have recognised what he was doing the moment he sat me down in the restaurant. I'd seen it so many times already. Thanks to the unions and the nature of the job, management couldn't dump their staff without some kind of gross misconduct. If a dealer or inspector burned out, there was a good chance that it was the long hours and lack of support that had done it to them, so if management bumped them, they'd bounce back with an unfair dismissal claim packed with health and safety concerns. And even if the burnout's case was as shambling and incoherent as they were, Sovereign liked to maintain the kind of "one big happy family" reputation that didn't have room for emotionally exhausted and bitterly litigious members of staff.

  So the organisation didn't like to sack anyone. It was too much work. What they preferred was their problem staff to leave of their own accord, and so they invented the dance of the lemons, where the burned out, non-compliant or downright incompetent waltzed from club to club until they either broke down or dropped out.

  The only difference was that I wasn't a lemon. I was a good pit boss. I was the best they had. Which meant it was personal.

  "You okay?"

  Jacqui stood just inside the doorway to the admin office. I hadn't noticed her come in. I glanced at my watch. "You're early tonight."

  She nodded. "Were you just talking to Dave Randall there?"

  "Yes." She must've seen my tantrum. She didn't appear shocked by it, which meant she knew more than she'd originally let on. "Paul Barlow isn't coming back any time soon, is he?"

  "Not for a while."

  "Do you know when?"

  "Not yet."

  "So it isn't paternity."

  "It is, but he's asked for a sabbatical."

  I smiled; it made my mouth feel tight. "I didn't even know we did those."

  "In some special cases, yes."

  "Lucky him."

  "He's a good pit boss. We didn't want to lose him permanently."

  "Yeah, I'm well aware of how this organisation treats its good pit bosses." I looked at her shoes. They were shiny. "So I'm here for the foreseeable, then."

  "Yes."

  "Lucky me."

  She bristled a little. "I don't know if you've noticed, Graham, but the Riverside is a much larger club than the Palace."

  "Yes, I had noticed that as a matter of fact. It's all the empty space that does it."

  "Okay. Look, I meant to tell you, Graham." She looked sincere, which made it worse. "I really did. I just couldn't find the right time."

  "It wasn't up to you to tell me." I rubbed my nose, checked my finger to make sure I hadn't dislodged anything. "It was Dave Randall. I just wish I'd known. Still, it doesn't matter. I know now, don't I?"

  "I suppose so." She tilted her head to one side. "Are we okay?"

  I nodded, pushed off the desk. As I eased past her, I caught a whiff of perfume that shook something inside my chest.

  "You sure?"

  I couldn't lie and tell her I was fine, but I could move my head and she'd still believe me.

  She watched me go, smiling. "Okay, then."

  I went back to the pit, tugged my shirt cuff over the angry red patch of skin on the back of my left wrist. I must have been scratching it unconsciously. I had to watch that. It didn't look professional. There were dealers in every club for whom gossip was the main currency, and I knew they would've just loved to get their hands on my little one-act tragedy. No doubt some of them were already aware of the stress rumours and had made a mental note to keep a beady eye on me, just in case. Any physical discomfort was grist to the mill, so I had to keep it out of sight.

  They wouldn't get anything out of me. If there was one thing I'd learned over the last sixteen years, it was how to keep my stronger emotions under wraps. It was a key part of the pit boss job description. If you kept your composure, you kept their respect.

  I unhooked the rope instead of hopping it and walked to the middle of the pit, where I turned my attention first to the sheet and then to the monitor. Slow
ly I started to feel at home again. The pit desk had a way of levelling me out. It was my calm in the middle of the storm.

  The doors to reception opened and I looked up to see Alan Slater walking into the club, a smartly-dressed Asian man at his side. I thought Beale was supposed to be on a club-wide ban, and I'd assumed that Slater would have joined him, but that clearly wasn't the case. I wasn't surprised that Dave had buckled on the ban – he was a six-foot yellow streak, after all – but I wasn't about to allow Les Beale into the Riverside. And just like Mary's little lamb, wherever Slater went, Beale was sure to follow.

  I watched Slater as he crossed the gaming floor, turned to see him head for an older Asian man who was sitting near the back of the club. This older man was well-dressed, too, but had a more flamboyantly expensive look to him, as if he belonged in one of those kaleidoscopic Bollywood movies where the women danced like metronomes and sang like strangled cats. It was an odd sight, Alan Slater palling around with a couple of Asians, given his mate's obvious prejudices, but maybe he was trying to close a deal. There was no room for bigotry in business, after all. I watched him take a seat and talk to the older man.

  There it was, right in front of me, plain as day – you could be involved in GBH on the gaming floor, put a lad in hospital, stain the carpet with blood, and after a couple of weeks, the organisation would let you come back to blow your dough. Sovereign didn't care about anything but their take.

  "You got any dealers in here today or what?"

  Pollard sat at BJ One, his thick fingers spread on the layout and an even thicker grin spread across his face. I looked around for a dealer, then realised that I'd just sent him on his break. "Sorry, Mr Pollard. We'll have someone out in a minute for you."

  "Good." He raised his chin. "I don't like waiting around, know what I mean?"

  "Yes. And I do apologise. Normally we'd have someone on the table, but we're a little short-staffed at the moment."

  "That why you're still on the days, is it?" He kept smiling. It made him look like a shark.