Eleven

by Sarah Rayne

  The first is the way ninety per cent of people play, at Christmas when the old green box is excavated from the loft, or when a family get-together outlasts the duration of all the family’s collected reminiscences, or when a rainy day destroys a summer fête. Quite simply, it involves politely tacking word after word at angles to one another: the E of a horizontal SNAKE becomes the base of a vertical AGREE, which branches out into GREAT, and so on, a succession of mild 10–15-point words, the players casually totting up the scores, until one of them inches in front by happening almost apologetically upon a triple-word score. This is the generally understood method of playing Scrabble, almost as a collaborative exercise in word-building rather than a contest. If you play this way against a serious player, you will always lose, as Murray found when he challenged Xavier once in a hotel, and lost five times in a row. Xavier, as a serious player, understands the second method of playing, which is to treat it as a battle of strategy, not vocabulary. The main ways to win a game of Scrabble are to make sure you score at least one Bingo (a 50-point bonus for using all seven letters at once), and to milk X, Z, Q and J for as many points as possible – these are the heavyweights of the Scrabble board, Scrabble being a sort of inverse universe in which the alphabet’s least useful letters become its most precious. A player who plays a pretty word like ICICLE for 12 points will invariably lose to a player who puts down JA or XU or ZA on a triple and collects 50. Which brings us to the key to Scrabble: the two-letter words. A real Scrabble player knows them all, all fifty or so, including JO (a companion or sweetheart), QI (a word from Chinese philosophy, describing a life force, or energy), and XI, defined by the Scrabble dictionary simply as a Greek letter, and a potential match-winner all by itself.

  The afternoon passes more or less as expected. Although almost all the players there are at least aware of the two-letter words, not many can match Xavier’s speed: in competitive Scrabble you only get a minute to move, before the electronic timer, with an accusatory series of bleeps, cuts you off. Xavier’s other main weapon is his knack for the seven-letter anagram: indeed, ANAGRAM (61 points, with bonus) is one of the blows with which he fells an opponent in the second game; others are slaughtered by GECKOES and LIMINAL. As time passes, Xavier can see his chief adversary Vijay making his way through the competition with similar ruthlessness on the other side of the hall. At half past five the two of them sit down together for the final. The customary £150 is at stake. The defeated players, with a couple of exceptions, crowd around the board to watch this finale: the Xavier–Vijay showdown is as much a traditional part of the afternoon as their own involvement in the earlier games.

  The final is a best-of-three match. Xavier and Vijay study each other across the board, with the affection of old rivals. In the first game, Xavier gets the luckier hand: a blank and an S in the same crop of tiles allow him to spell out ROCKETS early in the match for a 50-point bonus. Vijay eventually assembles a retaliatory Bingo, but too late. When they shake hands, Xavier is one game up, and needs one more for the overall victory.

  The second game is a far more defensive affair. Vijay holds a slender advantage from an early J which he turned into 40 points, and now begins to close down every possible scoring square. Xavier is forced to scrape short words here and there, unable to place a Bingo because Vijay’s strategy congests different parts of the board until there’s no room for one. Xavier shuffles in his chair, feeling hot, partly because of the pressure of the game, and partly because of the church hall’s rudimentary heating system: the bald organizer errs on the side of clammy warmth, rather than the dispiriting cold which church buildings of all kinds are noted for.

  The crowd around the board maintains an attentive silence. When the faded pop star’s phone goes off, he takes it outside to answer it. Emergency-vehicle sirens wail outside: there has been a car accident, caused by someone speeding down the hill parallel to Bayham Road. Vijay completes his suffocation of Xavier’s prospects and the game is his. As usual with these two players, it will come down to a decider.

  There is a brief pause for everyone to ‘stretch their legs’, as the bald organizer invariably puts it. The spectators chat in low tones – even though there’s no need for quiet in this intermission, a certain solemnity always seems to surround the latter stages of the competition. Xavier and Vijay remain at the board, talking amiably.

  ‘How’s the studying?’ Xavier knows that Vijay is researching something to do with artificial intelligence, at UCL.

  ‘Baffling, as usual.’

  Vijay is in his forties, has a boyish smile and always wears denim shirts. He’s the sort of person who will be connected with academic establishments for his whole life.

  ‘And how is everything with you?’ asks Vijay.

  ‘Not bad at all, thanks.’

  This is as deep as they ever delve into one another’s lives, which suits them both perfectly.

  In game three, Xavier gets his nose in front and is still comfortably ahead with about thirty tiles remaining. Then, Vijay begins to swap his tiles.

  At any point before the endgame, a Scrabble player may trade between one and all of his seven tiles for fresh ones, in exchange for forfeiting his turn. Everyone knows this, but most casual and even some advanced players only do so if completely confounded by their letters (all vowels or all consonants, perhaps), regarding the forfeited turn as too great a price to pay. Even Xavier only does it as a necessary measure, rather than as a way of striking out ambitiously in the direction of a new word. Vijay, on the other hand, thinks nothing of it. This is the principal difference between their approaches to the game.

  As this decisive match advances, Vijay takes the seemingly untenable risk of swapping his tiles again and again. He always spends the first forty-five of his sixty seconds pondering the board, his eyebrows low over his eyes, and then with a slight lilt of one brow he nods at the bald organizer who passes him the velvet bag.

  ‘Swapping two,’ says Vijay, and delves into the bag for new tiles.

  It is unsettling for any player when his opponent keeps declining his turn. Xavier can only concentrate upon building up a bigger and bigger lead, shutting down the board as clinically as he can, and hope that Vijay is either bluffing, or heading down a blind alley. For a while this does seem to be the case. Xavier collects 20 points, 23, 20 again, while Vijay keeps trading, examining the new letters with eyes that give nothing away, fingering each tile meditatively as it comes out of the bag. Some of the more studious spectators walk behind one player then the other, in turn, to have the benefit of seeing both racks of tiles, like tennis-watchers turning their heads to and fro. Xavier suspects that Vijay has the X, or J, neither of which has appeared yet, and is waiting until he can muster a seven-letter word including one of them. This is going to be difficult even for him. Xavier keeps amassing modest words until his lead is a commanding 70 points. When Vijay elects to swap yet again, there is an undercurrent of incredulous giggling, even though everyone has seen him play this way before.

  But just when Xavier begins to believe he might be able to reach the finish line from here, Vijay serenely lays down the word BANJAXED, hooking onto the D of PLAID and sliding like a slick of toxic oil across a triple-word square which Xavier had thought inaccessible. With both J and X involved and the 50-point bonus, it is worth a crushing 122 points. There’s a collective intake of breath and then applause. Vijay doesn’t smile or crow or gloat, acknowledging the acclaim only with a very slight nod. Xavier feels a momentary plunge of disappointment in his belly. The game’s as good as over now. There is more applause when Vijay confirms his victory and the bald organizer hands him the £150 in ten- and twenty-pound notes.

  ‘Good game,’ says Xavier.

  ‘I was beginning to fear my tactics were too ambitious,’ Vijay admits, pocketing his spoils.

  He puts a jacket on over his denim shirt and invites everyone for a drink at the pub, which he always does, despite not drinking alcohol himself. When Xavier wins, he too extends
this courtesy to the other players.

  They have one drink in the Crown and Anchor. Some people discuss the day’s football results. The kayaking couple lead a conversation about Bulgaria as a holiday destination or a good place for an investment property. As usual, all the talk is general and superficial. This is one of the reasons Xavier feels comfortable among this group; even if, as is perfectly possible, one or two of them recognize his voice from the radio, the subject is unlikely to come up.

  After the drink, everyone decides they should get going, and at around eight o’clock Xavier gets on a number 19 bus. He picks up a creased Evening Standard, which has circulated between passengers since the day before, when a shopper left it on the seat. With vague interest he studies the first thing to catch his eye: a very negative review of a restaurant in town called Chico’s.

  The mean-spirited write-up has an impact upon everyone at Chico’s, from the insulted head chef right down to Julius Brown, the overweight teenager who, for £5 an hour, washes up in the teeming kitchen.

  Julius leaves for work at 7 p.m.; it takes him an hour on a combination of buses. He’ll wash up until one in the morning. He’d like a job nearer home, but every time he walks into a place to ask for an application form he sees straight away the disapproving eyes of the manager taking stock of his flabby bulk. He’s tried for jobs in IT, in technical support, in call centres, jobs in places where nobody has to see you; but those, being well paid, are in demand, and as he’s still at school he can’t commit to full-time hours.

  It has been a tiring day for Julius even before he gets to work. He managed a full two hours at the gym: an hour on the treadmill, plodding gamely above the whine of the moving platform, sweat discolouring his grey T-shirt, collecting behind his knees, in the crooks of his arms, the small of his back. He ignored the glances of people going twice as fast on neighbouring machines. Then he did two circuits of the weights, a programme of bench-presses, and finished with a series of warm-down exercises. Feeling as though his limbs were full of wet sand he trudged to the changing rooms and waited for one of the private showers, not wanting to stand in the open-plan ones, with his blancmange of a body laid bare to the critical eyes of the fitness freaks who make up most of the gym’s regulars. He weighed himself; there was no change since last week.

  On the way out, the attendant reminded Julius that he needed to pay for another month’s membership on his next visit. She looks amused every time he appears. As he walked down the street Julius caught sight of a pretty girl from his maths class at school, a girl called Amy with tortoiseshell glasses, chatting to another girl outside the cinema: he lowered his eyes as he went by. He could hear them laughing behind him.

  When he gets to the kitchen, Julius is warned that the restaurant’s manager is in a ‘terrific bad mood’ by his slightly better paid supervisor, Boris, a Ukrainian. There is even more shouting than usual. The splenetic chef harries waiters furiously to clarify muddled orders. ‘What the fuck does that say? Is that a two or a three? Fuck’s sake!’ The sous-chef, octopus-armed, frantically tosses vegetables in one pan, cajoles skewers of meat in another, inspects a tray of caramelized desserts and shakes his head, swearing. In and around the huge sinks, a mountain of soiled dishes is already taking form.

  ‘Going to be a terrific bad night, man,’ Boris predicts gloomily.

  He’s saving money to send home to his over-extended family, wishing that one day he could bring them here to see how people in London eat.

  When Xavier gets home, he immediately feels unsettled: something is not right. More gingerly than usual and without any specific reason for his caution, he walks up the stairs (‘Here we go, here we go, here we go again,’ exhorts the lady on the TV from behind Mel’s door) and enters his flat. The unease lasts a couple of minutes as he slings his coat on the bed and goes into the kitchen. Then the realization dawns: it’s not that something is wrong, but something is different. The flat has had another vicious going-over from Pippa. He’d forgotten she was here this afternoon.

  Even though the place was still in pretty good shape from the improvements she made last week, its appearance has risen several more notches this time around. The stairs leading up to the flat have been vacuumed; the worn, dated carpet is almost springy under his feet. The study is spotless, everything in its perfect place. The bedcover is as smooth as the surface of a lake, and beneath it the sheets are like new paper. Gradually, still more of Pippa’s efforts begin to emerge. There’s a vase of flowers on the kitchen table. The vase, now scrubbed clean, had been in a cupboard since Xavier moved in; the flowers she must have brought with her. There’s a bar of soap beside the bathroom sink; again, unless she dug it out of some nook he’s never discovered, Xavier has the impression that Pippa supplied this herself. When he looks in the cupboards, he sees almost all the food has been rounded up and disposed of.

  It’s here that Xavier finds a handwritten note from Pippa. She’s used a pad of paper from the study and the writing is large, full of loops, voluptuous – somehow reminiscent of her.

  I have taken the liberty of binning quite a lot of your food. It was quite seriously out of date.

  Over the course of the next hour, Xavier discovers more notes.

  You need to buy some more mugs. A couple of these can’t really be saved, not even by me.

  You ought to get a lavatory brush!

  I’m not sure this is any of my business, but there have been some odd noises from upstairs while I’ve been working. Quite a violent argument, I thought, by the sound of it. But you would know them better than I do.

  There are a couple of products I’d like for next time, so that I can do some more specific cleaning. I will text you the names, if that’s all right. The flowers were a cheap bunch, £4, you can pay me back next time if you agree they’re a good addition. The soap is a present.

  Only hours later when he climbs into bed – at a normal time for once, about midnight – does Xavier find inside the fold of his bedcover the final note.

  I’m sorry if it is a bit OTT (over-the-top) of me, leaving all these notes. I’ve only just realized that it might seem like I’m mad. Anyway, see you next time, if you haven’t called the police.

  Xavier grins.

  He thinks back to the two occasions he’s met Pippa, the now almost forgotten speed-date, and then last week. He tries to visualize her face, but is more successful remembering her very fair hair and imposing breasts. He wonders whether joking about being crazy isn’t exactly what someone would do if they were crazy. It’s unsettling to think she has his mobile number and is blithely talking about texting him. She seems the sort of person who might phone in the middle of the night on no pretext at all. Of course, Xavier is normally awake in the middle of the night, but even so.

  He thinks for a while about the Scrabble tournament, wondering if he could have won it, had he been more daring and done what Vijay did, gambled for a bigger score, rather than trying to chip away and win by attrition. Or was it always meant to be Vijay’s day, was it somehow etched into whatever scheme of things there is? But then, if there is a scheme, why did it bring Xavier here, and was everything before this a series of red herrings? Before he can begin to indulge himself in the sort of introspection he tries to warn his callers away from, Xavier reaches for the paper he salvaged from the bus and tries to immerse himself in something else. It’s still folded to the ‘Eating Out’ page. The furore over Chico’s, it says, only emphasizes the dearth of world-class Spanish cuisine in the capital.

  Some time between midnight and 1 a.m. in the steamy kitchen at Chico’s, the weary Julius Brown has the strange experience of falling asleep several times while standing up, just for a few seconds, before snapping back awake. In each interval of sleeping he sees a split-second image, like a shard of a dream which has been broken off from the rest, like a single frame torn away from the millions that make up a film. He is huge, stepping over buildings. Then awake. He’s back in the gym, plodding as fast as he can, but someho
w he knows that the treadmill is about to speed up and send him flying off it. Then awake. He is sitting in front of a computer, with someone waiting for him to fix it, but he can’t work out how to change the operating language into English. Awake again, with a plate still in his hand, streaming suds and water. Boris, the supervisor, is grabbing him by the arm.

  ‘Hey man, tired?’

  Julius nods.

  ‘Me too.’ Boris grimaces. ‘I work at garage this afternoon then I’m working here tonight, then I’m back at garage tomorrow morning.’

  Further forward in the building – being at the back of a restaurant is like being below stairs in an Edwardian household – the owner of Chico’s, Andrew Ryan, sits in the main dining room. The flamenco guitarist who plays on Saturday nights has packed his instrument away and gone home to Hackney with an envelope full of cash. Patrons, full of meat and garlic and oil, have been sent away in cabs. Andrew Ryan is drinking whisky. He gestures to Pascal, head waiter for the night, to refill his shot glass.

  Andrew Ryan, forty-eight, with leathery skin and a yoga-honed body, is angry. The review was just my fucking luck, he thinks. That bitch Carstairs. It was the same with the fucking West End play he put money into, that turned out to be a piece of shit, and now Dubai is haemorrhaging money, Jesus, and then there’s Hayley costing him a fucking arm and a leg with her travels. Gap year, my arse, thinks Andrew Ryan; no one under the age of twenty-five ever does a stroke of work nowadays. Why is it that everything I have touched this past year has turned to shit, he wonders, gulping his whisky and getting up unsteadily to wander around the premises.

  ‘You know, in Kiev, still terrific cold,’ says Boris, loading another clattering rack of the industrial-size dishwasher. ‘This cold is nothing. There is guy in Kiev, he pisses in the street, he is drunk, you know, and it is so cold his dick freezes to the . . .’