He Played for His Wife and Other Stories

by Anthony Holden

  Violence, abandon.

  But we were like sky-blue suits in a retirement home, safari suits on testosterone.

  The court didn’t fly, it wasn’t going to survive, we could tell at the first game. Wilson put the last nail in the coffin by rolling out an anecdote where he took his girlfriend, a spotless fashion girl, up against a tree in a vacant lot and then dashingly whipped out a silk square to wipe her clean. ‘Then,’ he said, ‘I just dropped the silk right there, in the scrub, out of privacy and courtesy for her.’

  We could only take a last look at the cashmere, the loafers, the earnest Pimpernel gaze. And say, ‘Shit, that the time already?’

  ‘Bye, Wilson.’

  ‘Later, Wilson.’

  Even so, as if all roads lead to Rome, especially when it’s burning, one thing did come out of Wilson’s game that led to the final strand of poker DNA in this calculation. It was a face I bumped into again, another player that day, friend of Wilson’s called Nestor who reminded you of the cookie monster, or anyway one of those puppets that pop up out of dustbins with furry brows. I don’t know how friendly they were, buddies moved fast in that neighbourhood where honour and bullshit flowed like lava. They may have only known each other a week but it was impossible to tell because they played this lifelong soul-mate card the moment you met. Nestor had the type of face that can grin without any warmth creeping into his eyes. Straight, black, firewalled eyes with big tufts of lash and brow sprouting around them.

  Nestor was from Independencia but didn’t want to be. Independencia is a clump of towers on the other side of the ring-road from our leafy patch of life. He came over the highway like a rat and wore leafy-patch clothes and said leafy-patch things in order to fish in our richer waters. We didn’t know at the time that he came from there, not that it would matter per se. But it was the tip of an iceberg of stuff we didn’t know. He drove a brand new Lincoln without registration plates, which in our part of the world meant he was either a federal cop or a minister’s kid. Something untouchable by law, anyway. I also drove without plates at the time, because the protocol was honoured by traffic cops who wouldn’t risk pulling over an untouchable. But I was only bluffing, whereas Nestor had a whiff of real untouchability about him, and the car also looked the part, with heavily tinted glass and all the bells and whistles of a bullet-proof limo. It took some balls to bluff untouchable because if your arrogance wasn’t flawless or the car didn’t live up to the scam, real untouchables would seize it and keep it for themselves without even passing your cigarettes back out of the glove box. So there was a sense in which the city’s fancy unregistered cars were a moving kitty like the mobile stakes of a poker table. Nestor looked the part. His rangy, spider-like swagger, his outreach and his impact on the surrounding world didn’t let his shtick down. And like all that crew he behaved like a lifelong soul mate within ten minutes of meeting you, which on one hand you took with a ton of salt, but on the other could be hard to override.

  It at least called for the benefit of the doubt. That was the clincher.

  We discovered that Nestor carried a gun after one of us on a tourism and hospitality course took exception to a teacher at a hotel reception desk where they were training, and launched a typewriter at his head. That genuine soul mate of ours decided to test the lifelong brother card with his new acquaintance Nestor, who flew over brandishing a gun before any cops arrived. We gave double benefit of the doubt after that.

  Then we started playing poker with him.

  My position in life at the time was that I was cashing up to move away. One of the things I was selling was a professional film rig, five grand’s worth of camera and monitor with accessories, almost mint in its box.

  Nestor liked it. ‘Let’s play for it,’ he said.

  ‘No way,’ I said, ‘I’m cashing up to move.’

  In the meantime we played poker on a round wooden table in an apartment on the third floor of a building in the city. Although Nestor was the only player I knew who cheated at that table, it was he who pulled out the revolver one day. A gun at the table is disquieting enough by itself, it’s even hairier when it belongs to the only cheater. He first passed around the cylinder loaded with one bullet to see if we would prove our lifelong soul-mate status over a game of Russian roulette. Then he purposefully loaded it and laid it in the middle of the table where it spoiled the fun.

  One thing I can tell you about being the gun owner at a table: your cheating skills suffer. He was stuck between abandon and finesse, the place where one inner voice warns not to call up four aces every time but to make it look credible, and even lose occasionally – and another says fuck it, you have the gun. In the end he played this way and that but his timing was way off. We were getting lucky by natural causes. He ended up cheating his way into worse hands than we were honestly dealt. Tension rose and rose. No laughter came to break it. He found nothing hilarious.

  ‘Fuck this,’ he finally said. ‘Let’s play for real.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sudden death or something, double or nothing.’

  He was lining up for one master stroke. We could see the night’s pot disappearing before our eyes. The best we could do was argue him round to a hand of Blind Baseball, the vicious nine-card face-down stud game where threes and nines are wild and four earns an extra card. A game that can make you rich or poor before you even know what happened. A drain unblocker like a nuclear bomb.

  After three hands he was poor before he knew what happened. We had to play the lifelong soul-mate card in earnest, blowing an ozone-layer’s worth of smoke up his ass just to get out of the room alive with any winnings. In the end he must have earmarked us for a rematch, because although he fondled the gun, cocked and uncocked it, used it like a finger to point at us all, he still let us out alive.

  It was the last time I ever saw him, save for one glimpse years later in an airport, a glimpse of him by me, not me by him. Which is just as well.

  My camera rig soon sold to a shiny guy from a good family whose cheque went on to bounce across the country. Then I discovered he was a Nestor soul mate. The cheque turned out to be stolen. Nestor liked that rig all along.

  I rang around our crew trying to track him down, even tried Wilson. But he was gone. Then after a while, talk filtered back that Nestor was in bigger trouble than just the rig. Whatever it was led him to hide his beloved Lincoln with a soul mate while he left town. But he picked our soul mate, the one he saved at the hotel. I phoned him straight up:

  ‘Give me the keys,’ I urged. ‘I’ll take full responsibility.’

  ‘You crazy? He entrusted them to me as a brother.’

  ‘But who was your first brother?’ I said. ‘Him or me?’

  I picked the car up and stashed it out of town in a garage that belonged to a nice girl we knew. Nice innocent girl unknown to guns and poker.

  For all I know the car is still there.

  In return Nestor left me with a final key to poker DNA. Obvious when you think about it, but poker is the one game you can win even when you’re losing. A bullshitter’s game. So on one side you find it’s a valve for happy children, as I was at my aunt’s table, the child bastard in us all who wants to be celebrated for his deceit. But on the other side you find the mass of players who play because they know they’re going to hell anyway. You know who they are. In a milieu beyond your simple non-smoker who can rout a pack of your tabs during a night lies a deeper world of the truly empty. The empty, damaged and haunted. Not professional hustlers but the untrustworthy fucked-up middle classes, the ones who’ve figured hell out and are just killing time between purgatories. Maybe the court of poker miracles is as close as they can get to love, to achievement.

  Maybe that’s close enough.

  A game you can still win when you’re losing. A border between the real and unreal, between loss and gain. Good winners, bad winners, good losers, bad losers.

  Place to see who we really are, and maybe why we really are.


  And why we so badly need a court of miracles.

  So cut that deck and deal the cards.

  Lady Luck

  by Lucy Porter

  About an hour out of Paddington, the refreshments trolley came clinking down the aisle.

  ‘Green tea, please,’ said Steph.

  As the guy poured out her hot water, Steph glanced sideways at the little bottles of wine and vodka, tantalisingly within reach.

  ‘That’ll be two pound ten please, madam . . . hey, Steph, it’s you! Oh my God, listen, I know it’s probably really annoying, but can I have a selfie?’

  As he was getting his phone out, Steph slipped a few miniatures off his trolley and into her bag. She gave the guy a massive kiss for the photo and he grinned shyly.

  ‘So are you going all the way through to Cardiff, Steph?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, babe, I’m doing a telly thing? It’s for the Lad Channel? Some poker game? I dunno what it’s all about. Make sure you watch it, though? I’ll blow you a big kiss through the screen!’

  Steph winked at the guy as he wheeled his trolley away.

  Steph picked up her bag and went into the toilet. She sniffed the cherry air freshener, which wasn’t bad at first, until she noticed the stench it was trying to conceal. She wrenched the top off a tiny bottle of gin and sniffed that instead. Her phone started ringing. JESS OFFICE flashed up on the screen.

  ‘All right, gorgeous,’ she answered. ‘Yeah, chill out, I’m on the train now . . . No, I’m in the bog as it goes. I’ve just gotta wipe . . .’

  Steph covered the mouthpiece, downed the gin in one and continued.

  ‘Babe, I’m not sure doing this show is a brilliant idea . . .’

  Her agent sighed and said, ‘Listen, Steph, you know I would never make you do anything you don’t want to do, but you have to do this. You’ve only been on TV twice this year, and both of those appearances were complete clusterfucks.’

  It was true. In January, Steph appeared on BBC1’s Tonight’s The Night. Though she couldn’t remember much about it, she’d seen the YouTube clip of herself falling down the stairs. Then, in June, she’d gone on a Channel 5 reality show where celebrities had to learn circus skills. It’d started off OK, but then an unfortunate incident with a troupe of Chinese acrobats got her kicked off the series. Steph winced with embarrassment as she recalled it, then tuned back in to hear Jess saying, ‘I’ve pulled so many strings to get you this poker gig. It’s your last chance. You have to prove that you can do live TV without being drunk or racist. How did you get on in rehab this time?’

  Steph took a miniature vodka out of her bag and opened it quietly.

  ‘It was great, thanks, honey. Really nice bunch of people, lovely rooms, much better than that place in Sussex. They had Maunder and Parry toiletries in the bathroom, which was nice.’

  ‘Well, Steph, we’re all rooting for you here, you know that,’ replied Jess. ‘I wasn’t sure if I should mention this right now, but the UK Beautiful Homes Channel have been in touch. I know it’s only a shopping channel, but they have a huge, loyal viewership and there’s a decent amount of money in it for you. They want to offer you a weekly slot.’

  Steph zipped her handbag shut.

  ‘I love the Beautiful Homes Channel. I’d be perfect for it!’

  ‘I know!’ Jess laughed. ‘You might have gone bankrupt twice, but you decorated both the houses you lost really nicely. And everyone loved those magazine spreads you did. Even if you are a spendthrift junkie, you’ve got great taste. When you were being evicted from your last place, loads of people wrote in wanting to know where you got that antique rug you were trying to wrestle back off the bailiffs . . .’

  Steph was thrilled.

  ‘It was gorgeous, wasn’t it? Nineteenth-century Persian. Cost me a packet.’

  ‘. . . and when you were on the front of the Sun for smashing that vase over the head of your last boyfriend,’ Jess continued, ‘Heals sold clean out of them in a day. The Beautiful Homes Channel just want you to coo over their soft furnishings and appliances.’

  Steph’s heart was racing.

  ‘It’s the job I was born for, babe, I’d be amazing at it – and imagine how much free stuff I’d get! Just tell me what I have to do.’

  ‘They just want to see that you’re not a total liability,’ Jess said. ‘You’re still incredibly popular with the public, despite everything, and God knows you’ve had an amazing journey . . .’

  Steph knew she’d been lucky. She was just an ordinary girl from Croydon, drifting between bar jobs, getting drunk, having a laugh, and sleeping with awful men. Then her mates persuaded her to go on Speedmatch, the late 1990s Channel 4 dating programme. The nation saw her as an idiot with a heart of gold, and immediately fell in love with her. Jess signed her up after just two episodes. Over the next five years Steph appeared on endless reality shows and panel games, had a novelty pop hit, put her name to a ghost-written kids’ book and even launched her own fragrance.

  Everything had happened so fast. Steph couldn’t pinpoint when it started to go wrong, but in the last few years the wheels had come off. The tabloids blamed the booze and drugs, but Steph worried there was something more fundamentally wrong with her. She was still getting drunk, having a laugh, and sleeping with awful men, but having the world watching had taken all the fun out of it.

  Back in the bog, Steph realised that Jess was still talking to her.

  ‘This poker show is a really easy way to prove that you’ve still got it.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything about poker,’ Steph said, downing another miniature. ‘There must be something else I can do to get back on television? What about a weight-loss DVD?’

  ‘No, no,’ Jess replied. ‘When you lose weight everyone knows you’re back on the coke.’

  ‘How about a sex tape?’ Steph blurted.

  ‘Not again!’ Jess snorted. ‘The last one killed off the family audience for your kids’ book. I guess there were a lot of porn lovers who wanked off to it, then felt too creepy reading your book to their kids.’

  Steph took her vape out of her bag. ‘But everyone loved me back in the day. Can’t we get a reality TV gig again? Milk the whole “she’s so stupid but lovable” angle?’

  ‘Listen, Steph. Absolutely everyone on TV is stupid but lovable these days, it’s not a USP any more.’

  ‘But surely there’s something I haven’t done yet?’ Steph whined.

  ‘Well, I suppose you could kill someone . . .’ Jess said flatly.

  After a few moments’ silence, Jess laughed. ‘I am joking by the way,’ she added. ‘Look, I don’t care what you do, just don’t drink on the job tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if you win or not. In fact, better you don’t win – we don’t want people thinking you’re actually smart. Just comment on the decor in the studio . . . slag off the lighting and the sofas . . . that way the Beautiful Homes people will know you’re on board.’

  Steph pulled hard on the vape and exhaled languorously. This sounded quite easy.

  ‘Yep, got it, babe! Can do! Go us!’

  She rang off, sat back down on the toilet, unzipped her handbag and downed a miniature rum. Then she went back to her seat and snoozed lightly, woken by the voice of the train guard over the Tannoy saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Cardiff Central, our final destination.’

  A nice man at the station holding a sign drove Steph to her hotel, where someone from the show was waiting for her. The young production runner – he couldn’t have been older than seventeen – told her to come to the hotel bar at eight o’clock to meet the other contestants for a poker tutorial. The show was going out live at one o’clock in the morning, so they would only have a few hours in the hotel before the cars arrived to take them to the studio.

  By eight o’clock, Steph had hit the minibar pretty hard. She weaved her way down the stairs with some difficulty. The other celebrities taking part in the show were playing cards on a table in the corner of the bar.

>   The production runner showed Steph to an empty seat at the table. She’d really rather have sat at the bar on her own, but she found herself in between Carly and Denise, a couple of comedians from a Channel 4 all-female sketch show. They told Steph how much they liked her outfit, but given that they were both dressed like homeless men Steph found it hard to believe them.

  Still, at least they had a bottle of wine, and they got an extra glass for Steph.

  There was an older, quite handsome guy opposite Steph, who handed her two playing cards and said, ‘OK, kiddo, let’s see what you can do with these!’

  Steph recognised him vaguely; she thought he had been a snooker player that her dad liked. He held out his hand for her to shake.

  ‘Martin,’ he croaked, in a smoky Cockney accent. ‘Although I do also answer to “The Cyclone”.’ He winked at Steph.

  Next to Martin there was another older guy, although this one was a lot less handsome. He was wearing a ridiculous trucker’s hat and lots of gold jewellery. This guy held out a hand with a load of gold rings on it.

  ‘Clive, although I do answer to “Donkey Dick”.’

  Everyone at the table laughed politely, and Steph realised that she’d seen him before on the BBC1 show Men on the Job. He was a builder from the North East who’d become a national treasure because he always cried when they built a conservatory for a sick child or a loft conversion for a war veteran.

  The young runner said, ‘Right, now that you’re all here, we can begin the tutorial.’ Martin, the snooker player, stood up to leave, grabbing Steph by the shoulders as he walked off.

  ‘No offence, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘It’s just that these tutorials are for beginners, and I don’t want to give away anything about my play in case you’re smarter than you look! Mind you, that seems bloody unlikely!’

  He laughed maniacally right in Steph’s face and, although it annoyed her, she found herself laughing along.