by Neal Doran
I’d walked straight into it. I’d forgotten the rule that said that unsolicited enquiries into whether you have any plans for a specific time in the future should always be treated as a prelude to an invitation you might want to have an excuse to avoid.
‘Um, yeah, sure, sounds good, although surely you don’t want someone nearly thirty acting like everyone’s parents, do you?’
‘No worries, it’s going to be a very refined, chilled night now we’re all grown-ups and have proper jobs. I’ll probably wear a cravat and a silk dressing gown. D’ya think French birds like that sort of thing?’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘Wicked. I’ll send you the details.’
‘Great.’
With a punch in the arm, Jamie was gone. At least now I had an excuse to avoid any plans Rob or Hannah might have been thinking of for me. And it sounded as if Delphine was going too. Over the course of a couple of weeks, my hopeless crush on her had become one of the more rational things in my life, which I found strangely comforting. Alone at last at my desk, I opened an Excel file of busy work as a cover, and went to my email.
The only non-spambot generated communication in my entire inbox was a reminder from Angus saying poker kick-off was at seven-thirty, and to make sure that we eat first as he was only doing a few light savouries for later in the night and not cooking a dinner. Of course, Angus’s idea of a couple of snacks would usually involve half a dozen different types of canapés, and several elaborate quiches he’d had left over from the weekend. This was usually a little more fancy than anything offered when it was one of the other guys’ turn to host, when taking the Pringles out of the tube and in a bowl was considered making an effort.
This was my opportunity, I decided. I sent a blokey ‘reply all’ response about how they should also remember to bring a change of clothes, because by the time I’d finished winning I’d have the shirts off their backs. As I expected, Rob was hard at work in his office too, and a similarly laddish reply-all response from him immediately came in, suggesting it wasn’t the first time I’d tried to get them all half naked. Two emails between the guys before the camp sexual slurs came out. I think that was a new record for restraint.
A personal reply from Rob came hot on its heels.
Sport! Where’ve you been? I was beginning to think you’d breached the conditions of your parole and were back in the slammer without access to your mobile. And how come I’m hearing about your private and personal humiliations from my wife? A man with a less well-developed sense of his personal worth might begin to feel left out of his own social experiment…
Sifting through for clues as to what was going on, it seemed he and Hannah hadn’t had any big talks yet about his supposed infidelity, and so far I was still off the hook too. Get us and our tangled webs, I thought to myself as I pinged back a quick reply.
Sorry, headaches all night, slept all day so been totally out of it. Also, the campaign for the ethical treatment of animals are beginning to question your cruel testing methods, and half a dozen Hollywood starlets have been explaining to me I’m a victim of man’s terrible inhumanity to other living creatures. Still won’t let me shag them, though.
It seemed we were still OK, which was good, because this was where my loyalties lay, whatever he’d been doing, I reminded myself. Weren’t you supposed to stick by friends in situations like this even if you didn’t agree with their choices?
In what passed for difficult times in my life so far — when Kate left, when I lost my first job, even when I was finding university a bit much but was too embarrassed to admit I was homesick and on the verge of quitting, Rob was always looking out for me. It wasn’t usually helping in obvious ways, and half the time it felt as if it certainly wasn’t the right way — a night stuck in Soho being persuaded by two very large men to spend all the cash we could get out of the ATM on champagne for bored Eastern European strippers was not the ideal way to try to get over losing what might have been the love of my life. But he did it, and he stuck around for the months after, when I couldn’t cope with the nights sitting watching the telly when everything on seemed to remind me of being with Kate and had to tell someone about it.
But then hadn’t I suspected he always seemed happiest when he felt most in charge of situations and could dispense his wisdom to the needy? That was a harsh way of looking at a friendship, I told myself, and I should be ashamed for even thinking like that. Sitting at my desk, looking at my reflection in my computer monitor, I could still almost feel where Hannah’s face had been pressed against my neck and her hands had hooked over my shoulders. I probably shouldn’t tell Rob that at poker tonight.
Unless I really needed to distract him when I was bluffing.
Later in the morning I was in the stationery cupboard and frustratingly unable to get any mobile signal so I could watch telly on my phone. I’d decided to duck into the cramped room — overly lit and oppressively warm because it doubled as the office server room — when word reached me from above that a client tour was about to take place and I was to make myself scarce. If there’d been somewhere to sit down I think I could have happily gone to sleep, but as it was I was left pacing and rooting through boxes of office supplies looking for something that might be worth nicking. I wondered if life could get more straightforward again if I had a load of transparent A4 wallets to tidy everything into at home, and had just started putting together an armchair made of stacked-up reams of copier paper when the door opened and Janice slid into the room.
I said hello, and with a small yelp Janice jumped and landed in what looked a lot like a kung-fu pose, before identifying me, lurking behind a stack of Post-its®, as a friend not foe.
‘Dan, Dan Superman!’ she said cheerily. ‘You gave me a fright — I almost lacerated your windpipe because I thought you were a dangerous assailant.’
‘No, no, just me. Looking for pens,’ I reassured her.
‘You know, you could kill a man with the barrel of a disposable biro.’
‘Really? Right. That’s…good to know. Sorry to scare you. Client about, so I was sent into exile so I didn’t frighten them with my hideous Elephant Man features,’ I said, doing my best impression of John Hurt from the movie.
‘Poor love,’ she said, ‘and it sounds like you’ve got a cold too.’
‘No, that was just…’
‘I could see if one of the girls has got a Lemsip?’
‘Thanks, but it was only an impression.’
‘An impression?’
‘Of the Elephant Man? The movie? “I am not an animal!”?’
‘Is that Disney? It doesn’t sound much like an elephant to me.’
Janice started flicking switches on different bits of ominous-looking hardware, and tapping away at a laptop linked up to the server.
‘So are you all right, Superman Dan?’ she asked as she worked.
‘Me? Great. The eye doesn’t really hurt. It was just a trip.’
‘I mean more generally, are you all right? We’ve hardly seen you this year, and we’ve missed you in the Zetland.’
‘I’m fine. Fine.’
‘Are you sure? Because you’ve not been yourself. Just yesterday I’d been talking to Delph and she was saying the same thing. We’ve been worrying.’
It was her eyes that sometimes made Janice look a bit unhinged, the way they would dart around and narrow at the hint of a slight, or go overly wide with a new conspiracy theory. But they were also what could make her knuckle-bitingly attractive when she was being a bit soulful, big and deep brown against pale skin and hair the staff in my local Boots would have me believe was called sun-kissed summer blonde.
‘Oh, you know, the January blues,’ I said with a shrug.
I’m not saying I was playing it to get sympathy, but the ‘head down and look up’ move I used did remind me of those pictures you see of Princess Diana in the tabloids all the time.
‘And I know full well how it works when someone gets a black eye and has to convi
nce everyone it was just an accident,’ she continued, ‘but it doesn’t help when people pry. I’m around if you want to talk.’
I felt terrible at right about that point for all the mad Janice thoughts I’d ever had, realising that there was probably a lot of stuff I didn’t know about that explained why she was like what she was like.
‘There we go,’ she said chirpily, ‘email upgrade finished. Now let’s just check into my account to see everything’s OK.’
Her voice took on an artificial tone. The cloud of crazy had descended again.
‘Oh. A message from Gary in Financial Services? It seems he’s accidentally forwarded everybody in the office some emails he was swapping with a lady at one of our clients. My goodness, that’s not the sort of imagery you’d expect to see in a workplace email. Doing that would certainly be in breach of corporate health and safety guidelines. And would probably break the photocopier.’
‘Gary?’ I said. ‘I thought he’d just started seeing Mandy on Reception?’
‘Yes, that’s what she’d thought too, until he mentions some other strumpet to the poor girl on, you know, the morning after… Still at least now she knows what kind of sleaze he is. I mean, this doesn’t make him look very respectful to women, does it? Especially if he’s thinking of doing that — it’d leave a nasty welt at the very least.’
I peered over Janice’s shoulder to read the email messages that had been plucked from the obscurity of the hundreds that poured out of here every day, and a shiver worked its way up to my shoulders. A distractedly smiling Janice nudged her head against my cheek, and stood up from the server monitor screen.
‘I’d better go and see him. He’ll probably want to see if I can get that message recalled. I hope it’s not too late and somebody hasn’t decided to forward it externally to all their friends. That would be embarrassing for him. You coming to Jamie’s party on Saturday?’
‘It looks like it, yes.’
‘Yay! Chris and Delph and me are going too, and we can hang out like in the pub but at somebody’s house!’
With a little finger wave she was gone, and shortly after I decided to follow her. I expected Gary was going to be in here getting a storage box to collect up all his personal effects. I didn’t fancy bumping into him in the circumstances, especially considering the vivid plans he’d had for what he could get up to with the Accounts Receivables lady on top of a boxful of printer cartridges.
Back at my desk the office was humming with murmurs of Gary’s misdemeanours as I sat down to check my mail yet again. I didn’t know how often I’d sat there and pressed send/receive over the course of the morning and afternoon, but it must have been a number close to umpteen.
Nothing from Hannah still.
It’d seemed we’d been in nearly hourly contact since we started this dating experiment, and no texts, or calls, or messages for two days felt an eternity. Of course, I could have sent her something, but I just had no idea what to say.
There was a message from Delphine entitled ‘hey bruiser’ asking if I wanted to go for a drink after work, no doubt to try and get to the bottom of blackeye-gate again. Turning her down for drinks was getting to be a habit for me, but I had too many things on my mind. I’d have to admit that the extra attention being a little more mysterious was getting me was giving me a boost too. I rattled off a quick reply to her, citing prior commitments and, just as a PS, mentioned that I might be a bruiser, but she looked like a knockout today.
And with that I shut my computer down, grabbed my coat, and headed out into the street, to head for poker, sharing a lift with a shell-shocked ex-financial services analyst who had apparently been dismissed over alleged misuse of the office twelve-inch ruler.
Chapter Sixteen
‘I’ll bet a tenner,’ said Martin.
‘Call,’ said Angus.
‘Fold,’ I said.
‘Fold,’ said Jim.
‘I’ll see your ten, raise you one hundred,’ said Rob.
‘How much have you got in front of you there?’ replied Martin.
‘About three hundred and fifty.’
‘All right, I’m putting you all in.’
Gasps of shock went around the table as Rob and Martin squared off, putting unprecedented amounts of money on the table in bets. It had been a funny night already — the usual smooth ironic banter and joshing was minimally off kilter, like watching digital TV when the words that people were saying and the way their lips were moving were not quite syncing. And it had just got markedly tenser.
Angus, the only other player aside from Martin and Rob left in the hand, folded and for once he remained in his seat rather than springing up to refresh drinks and pass around little stuffed peppers. Jim even stopped his constant checking of the BBC News headlines on his phone to watch how things unfolded. Rob called the bet for all the money he had on the table.
The chips in front of the two last remaining players towered in the middle of the felt-covered table, brightly illuminated by the low shaded light in an otherwise darkly lit room. When we were playing poker it was easy to forget sometimes that each one of those chips had a cash value away from the game and we tossed them around gambling a bit more casually than we would if we considered their monetary worth. But seeing this many up for grabs in the centre brought that reality rushing back to the front of our minds.
‘Let’s get them on their backs,’ said Rob in his role as dealer as he and Martin turned their two cards face up ahead of the deal of the final two communal cards — there’d be no more betting now all their chips had been committed. The rest of us quickly analysed the two players’ hands against the shared cards on the table and, with some murmuring about potential for straights and flushes, could see that Rob was looking good with an Ace in his hand paired with another Ace on the board, and with the Jack of Clubs as a kicker, beating the pair of tens Martin was displaying in front of him.
‘OK, here comes the turn.’
He snapped off the top card and slid it onto a pile of discards before flipping over another and sliding it next to the three cards already dealt — a Jack of Diamonds. A small tortured squeak emitted from Angus suggesting that, not only had this card put Rob in an even stronger position against Martin in the hand, but that if Angus had stayed in, he would have had something better than both of them at this point.
‘And we’ll take it to the river,’ continued Rob, burning another card then turning over the final card to come into play.
The money on offer was huge, more than a thousand in chips just sitting there, waiting to be converted into cash at the end of the night — and a thousand in chips would be the most anyone had ever won in a single hand.
It was the ten of hearts — one of the only two cards in the entire pack that could win the hand for Martin. An enormous ‘oooh’ went around the table, followed by a round of applause for Martin as he hauled the chips towards him.
One thousand pennies in cash. Ten whole pounds.
‘You do realise what a terrible hand you played there, don’t you?’ asked Rob as Martin began sorting his chips into neat stacks.
‘I could afford to have a few more terrible hands like that,’ said Martin.
‘I was winning from the flop and you had two outs in the whole deck. Morally, I still feel like the winner.’
‘I’m not sure a cabbie’s going to accept a moral victory if you’re a tenner short on the fare home, though,’ pointed out Angus.
‘No, no, it’s fine, keep playing like that, fellas, and it’s all coming back to me in the long-term. You can’t beat the odds for ever. Here’s ten more.’
Rob pulled another note from his wallet, and Angus counted out more chips for him. OK, so it’sprobably clear by now that our Tuesday night game was not really one for high rollers, but it had been a monthly institution for years, going back to the time Rob and I first shared a flat together and fancied ourselves as The Odd Couple. The ten-quid buy-in usually lasted everyone all night, and it was pride and compe
titiveness that raised the stakes.
Martin and Jim rounded out the numbers, a former colleague of Rob’s and an old flatmate of Angus’s respectively. I couldn’t help but think of them as the grown-ups, maybe because I didn’t know them away from the poker table. Jim was a serious sort, who did something for some form of government-backed institute that did something we didn’t understand — or had just never asked about. We weren’t even sure if he was very important or just an anonymous minor cog, although every now and then he’d mention something that made us think he might be secretly running the country.
Martin, meanwhile, was the most settled of us all, an area manager for a retail chain, married with twin toddler daughters. He also seemed the most transformed of the poker gang over the years we’d been playing, a wideboy who’d worked in marketing with Rob and who, before he got married, used to joke about how he was going home to one of his girlfriends to ‘play with the twins’. These days the saying was no longer a smutty euphemism.
It was his turn to deal, but we had to wait for him to finish counting up his newly won chips first, the stacks forming one tall central column, flanked by a shorter stack on each side, making all the phallic posturing of the game just that little bit less understated. As the cards started flying out, landing somewhere in the vicinity of each of us, he started firing out questions too.
‘So, Dan, as the last single man standing, anything to report back from the frontline?’
‘He’s been a busy boy, haven’t you, sport?’ answered Rob instantly on my behalf. ‘H and I have been setting him up on dates left, right and centre, and have you seen the women in his office? Hff, he’s in a bachelor dreamland, I tell you.’
‘You don’t get a shiner like that unless you’ve been living it up a bit, I bet,’ agreed Martin.
‘And don’t forget last time he was here, he was dancing on this very table with a woman nearly young enough to be his daughter,’ added Angus. ‘I’ve only just got the scuff marks off.’