He Played for His Wife and Other Stories

by Anthony Holden

  Victoria

  by Tena Štivičić

  ‘We knew it was going to happen,’ Leah said unhelpfully, followed by nothing. No plan, no suggestion, no course of action. She was impatient, almost out of the door when Hana got off the phone. Not a good time for this conversation.

  Hana stood there, staring into a spot, worries agonisingly multiplying behind her eyes. It was going to take a long time to untangle them, relieve them of the explosive power they had when they came all at the same time, like an avalanche. They both stood there, Leah eager to go, not daring to say, I have to go. Hana, hoping that Leah would stay, already sensing the fury, which would hit her when she doesn’t stay.

  ‘Hana, darling, we knew it was going to happen. It’s not that much of a surprise. We’ll deal with it.’

  ‘We’ll never find anything this good at this price. And moving just bleeds money. We’ll have to use our savings. Our savings, which are for . . .’ She stopped herself before finishing the thought. Leah knows what they’re for. She knows all this. ‘There’s no time to start saving all over again. That’s the thing. Biologically speaking, there’s no time.’

  ‘Look, those two are not necessarily related . . . anyway it’s a longer conversation and—’

  ‘You have to go—’

  ‘Well . . . I do have to go . . . The tournament starts at two, as you well know.’

  Hana thought of herself as a tolerant person. She prided herself in not judging and she felt that if judgement did occur but was quashed before it could hit the object of judgement, then that was tolerance of an even higher order.

  Other people judge. People back home judge. Sometimes they have a look about them, something resembling pity. She hates pity. She always hated pity. The look they give her, sometimes, is the somewhat uncomfortable look of not wanting to be the one to break it to her that she is living in a problem relationship. And if she were to try to volunteer an explanation that it wasn’t actually anything like what they think, it would appear a little too defensive, given that nobody asked. Oh, fuck them. Fuck them and their small-mindedness. Which she left behind, anyway, a long time ago.

  What had just happened was one of those moments when one, not small, but manageable piece of news landed on top of a delicately balanced heap of concern and resentment, toppling the whole thing into the abyss. One can’t be expected not to resort to some unreasonable arguments in such situations. So she didn’t mean it, really, when she said that her mother was right all along.

  ‘A bit of a leap, don’t you think?!’

  What Hana’s mother said, on a visit a while ago and sort of en passant, was that people who don’t go to bed together don’t make babies. She said it, despite it being glaringly inapposite. Despite the fact that no amount of shared bedtime between two wombs, a situation by then accepted as the permanent state of things, was going to make a baby. But a universal truth confirmed by years of life experience should not let something so profane as a biological technicality undermine it. She said it, because some people are just talented that way, able to string together words so elegantly loaded with meaning beyond what they first seem.

  The people who go to bed at a reasonable hour and sleep, next to their partner, when the world is meant to be sleeping, have a decent chance of having a solid, healthy, sound life. With perhaps a house of their own and some children in it. Perhaps free of such disturbing phone calls as the one they just received from the landlord informing them the time had finally come and the house was set for demolition under the new construction plans for the neighbourhood.

  On the other hand, the people who spend their nights playing poker at the computer, in dark rooms, unable to break away from the strings of blue screen lights like some helpless alien abductees, while their partners sleep alone – those people are screwed. And it would come as no surprise to her mother that such people would put what they call a hobby (but is more likely an addiction) before staying at home and talking through a situation of genuinely existential proportions with their partner.

  The fact that Hana’s parents had been going to bed together for forty-two years – you could hear the click of their bedside lamps going out with freakish synchronicity – and yet were no strangers to ample amounts of marital misery, didn’t come to mind quickly enough for Hana. They did, after all, have a house, two children, a dog and plenty of empty space, which could be filled with grandchildren.

  No matter how rationally Hana explained things, it would never quite stop hanging in the air, her sharing a life with a gambler. More importantly this fact was somehow going to affect the most momentous next step of her life, having children. Technically it didn’t apply, because the act of conception would take place elsewhere, away from both their bodies. But it sort of applied in the way intimacy worked, in the way people are with each other. That was the crux of it, the bloody ‘sort of’ that had things both applying and not applying to their situation; all of that was causing Hana a lot of grief. So when she said to Leah, in the heat of the moment, ‘my mother was right all along’, she used these factually inaccurate words to express a wealth of things that were bothering her, but managing to convey hardly any of it.

  ‘I’m only trying to say that—’

  ‘Because whatever wisdom comes from the woman who calls me Dead-eyes is, you understand, not going to leave me best disposed for the argument we’re about to plunge into.’

  ‘Glass-eyed. She calls you Glass-eyed. Only sometimes. That’s very different.’

  ‘Oh. I do apologise.’

  ‘You deliberately won’t understand the subtext of what I’m—’

  ‘What your mother said clearly indicates that neither she, nor your dad for that matter, ever accepted who you are. And they certainly never accepted me.’

  ‘It’s not fair what you expect of her. She just thought it was a little too much.’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘You know perfectly well which bit.’

  ‘Your mother thinks I turned you. Though, in fact, your track record is far longer than mine. Now, having already inflicted my lesbianism on you, she would prefer it if I were a doctor or a lawyer rather than a part-time radio producer and film-maker, with something wholesome like gardening as a hobby, rather than poker, which is I believe the bit that’s a little too much. It’s really quite shockingly blinkered, believing that her daughter, even if lesbian, should be financially looked after by her partner, even if also lesbian.’

  ‘As per usual, you’re twisting things. You know how unfair it is to use your superior arguing powers against me—’

  ‘Well, permit me to descend to your level – my parents are not exactly ecstatic with an Eastern European daughter-in-law. They, too, think I could have done better. They think any woman would be lucky to have me and they were hoping for someone with at least an OBE. Which, granted, reveals them as royalists, but at least they’re not homophobic . . .’

  ‘I know what you’re doing. You never say Eastern European except to deliberately annoy me. Not even your parents say that because they know how reductive and false and—’

  ‘That’s right, they don’t. Because they’re also not xenophobic.’

  ‘They served borsch three times before they worked out it was a traditional dish about four hundred miles away from my country.’

  ‘Well, that’s patronising, perhaps colonialist at worst, but not xenophobic.’

  ‘I hate beetroot.’

  ‘Whereas your father thinks I have funny feet.’

  ‘Not because you’re black.’

  ‘He didn’t say it. That doesn’t mean he didn’t think it.’

  ‘Leah, please don’t make me justify my politically incorrect, embarrassing parents, who don’t know better than to . . . you know this . . . Why are we arguing about our p—’

  ‘I do know that, and as I said, I have elevated myself to the Zen plane of not caring, until you come out with such things as “my mum was right all along”.’

  Obviousl
y Leah was right. It was only at moments of great insecurity that Hana felt so benevolent towards her parents’ reactionary worldview.

  But she did feel increasingly they were like a comedy couple, with overtones of the grotesque. Their overwhelming otherness, now soon to be rooflessness. The song had always annoyed her, how could a room without a roof possibly be happy? It was only at these low moments that she let her convictions wobble and the judgement seep in.

  ‘There’s a difference between a parent wanting their child to be kept by a partner and not wanting their child to end up homeless because their partner is a gambler.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more. But if we can just clarify – when we say gambler do we mean me? And how is the house we’re about to lose in any way connected to poker?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ – Hana started slowly, with a lot of effort – ‘it’s that you leaving to play in a tournament . . . I mean, given the situation, at a time when we should be working through this unsettling news is . . . an indication of priorities . . . which show to me that . . . in terms of far reaching consequences—’

  ‘You know, in film-making there’s a rule that if you can’t say what your story is about in one sentence, there’s something wrong with your story.’

  Hana looked away.

  Leah exhaled, shifting gears.

  ‘Have I ever put you or you and me and our livelihood in jeopardy?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘Have I ever been reckless in any way that caused you any harm or damage?’

  ‘You haven’t but—’

  ‘Have I not in fact been supplementing our relatively irregular income with regular cash injections of winnings?’

  ‘They’re not regular, Leah, for fuck’s sake. You can’t use the word regular with something that largely relies on the luck of the draw.’

  ‘It doesn’t largely rely on the – it largely relies on skill! Another thing your family don’t understand. They think I go and hit keys on fruit machines like some monkey.’

  ‘Leah. Can we drop my parents from this? Please. It’s . . . I’m just . . . frustrated . . . because . . . because . . . we’re waiting . . . we’re waiting to start our lives . . . and to . . . You know what I mean . . . to have a family . . . We’re running out of time . . . and . . . Look outside. Just see what the skyline looks like. Remember what it was like six, seven years ago?’

  Over the course of a few years, the skyline had in Hana’s mind become a metaphor for everything that was wrong with their lives. While Leah spent her days away from the house, in breakfast, brunch, lunch, cocktail hour and dinner meetings, recording features, in the edit, always on the move, always with people, Hana sat at home. She wrote articles for a number of independent international media outlets, which seemed to get their funding cut with eerie predictability, shortly after Hana joined the team. She wrote staring from the ground floor of their house at the increasingly oppressive Islington skyline, peppered with cranes and tall, lean luxury tower blocks, feeling physically squashed by the inevitable super-state future of this city.

  It was a stroke of luck she’d found this tiny house seven years ago when she and Leah decided to live together. Squeezed between a row of terraced Georgian houses and a housing estate, it was somehow overlooked and left in peace by a number of architectural generations adding to the landscape. The owner said, with how things were going, it wouldn’t be long before he had to sell and the house was torn down. Which was fine because Hana and Leah were going to be off to bigger and better places in life before that happened. Seven years on, it had finally happened; the house would be torn down. The neighbourhood was unrecognisable. And Hana and Leah were still in exactly the same place.

  Their world was the world of freelance artists, of writers and entertainers. The kind of people who used to be drawn to London from every corner of the world. But these days the super-state does not look kindly on their existence. The super-state pities them on a good day, crushes them on a bad day and mocks them on an average Tuesday. The super-state is annoyed that they insist on occupying square footage where luxury towers for absent owners might be built and is in the long game of squeezing them out. It feels, as it has felt for a while, that the threads by which they cling to their chosen lifestyle are thinning. Because their world is also not a world of young aspiring wannabes with a naïve glint in their eye. These are people in their late thirties, forties, fifties. They own no properties, they have no savings, they have no mortgages, they don’t receive a pay cheque every month. They typically have no children, having postponed starting a family until after the big break. They are ostriches. The world around them is manifestly changing, with ever-diminishing windows of opportunity.

  ‘We’re not reckless,’ Hana thinks to herself, ‘Leah isn’t actually reckless at all. We are trying to live responsibly to the best of our abilities. It’s only that our abilities are antiquated.’

  Opportunities present themselves occasionally, bright, hot and ephemeral, like matches on a windy night. But even occasionally hefty fees will never afford them a steady decent life in the super-state, a house, school fees, private healthcare when the NHS is finally dismantled. Still, they can’t stop trying. Because they have at best passed the middle of their lives. What else are they going to do? They are under-qualified and too old even to be receptionists and bartenders.

  They are often in debt, often unemployed for months, their prospects are not improving and they are getting older. At times when there is no work, Hana draws up the bridge, reads books and this takes her down a rabbit hole of existential despair. Leah usually plays poker. At those times, it’s not just a pastime. It actually seems like a more solid source of income. And how could Hana, with her meagre earnings, help but be complicit in it? Help but herself rejoice when the money is won and grumble when it’s lost? But the tunnel is starting to seem circular. The precarious, non-conformist life used to be exciting. Now, with those sinister cranes looming just outside her door, she feels smaller, weaker and less visible by the day.

  She isn’t even sure, when she peers very deep into her soul, whether this desire to have children, which grips her like some sort of a heart condition, restricting her breath, is real or it’s simply her mind grasping for a change.

  ‘Have I ever neglected you – have I ever put playing first, before your needs?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘Oh, Hana, honestly . . .’

  ‘You know what I hate the most?’

  ‘There’s quite a list, I couldn’t say for sure—’

  ‘Condescension.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I knew that one would come up.’

  ‘The banality of my pain, how tiring it is for you . . .’

  ‘Banality of your pain? Do you hear yourself? I asked you if you wanted to do anything this weekend. You said you had no plans. You know how much money is at stake in this tournament—’

  ‘Forgive me for managing my expectations . . .’

  Leah took a second to let that go and take a patient breath.

  ‘You said you didn’t mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind! I don’t mind! Don’t make me into some kind of a controlling, uptight . . . It’s only in my world a biggish piece of news like this merits a conversation . . . an immediate conversation . . . and it trumps . . . ah, fuck it, I feel stupid having to explain.’

  ‘Please, don’t sulk. We can have the conversation tomorrow. Everything will still be there. We can examine all the implications, put it in perspective with literally everything that’s bothering you.’

  ‘Please don’t patronise me.’

  ‘Jesus . . .’

  ‘Yeah, Jesus is the right person to invoke.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing. Just go. Just go. It’s OK. Go.’

  Leah left. Hana cried. They were tears of self-contempt. Because it was exactly what her mum used to do. Say it was OK, then feel mortally wounded if the truth had not been recognised. Say, just go, thinking, please stay
.

  Here comes another night of procrastinating. Her willpower collapsing under what suddenly seemed like a complete lack of options. Going over her past choices. Beating herself over the head for being so laissez-faire about life. Believing that things sort themselves out. But not if you’re foreign. Not if you’re gay. Not if you’re a woman. Honestly, shouldn’t she be entitled to some sort of a grant just by the number of boxes she ticked?

  Before Leah, she gave men what she thought was a good old go. Two in a row. Perhaps she should have at least got pregnant by one of them. It was the second of the two that took her to that party, where she wandered into the poker room and saw Leah, the only woman at a table of men, and couldn’t take her eyes off her. Leah looked focused, merciless and completely in control. She spoke little, in caustic one-liners, impeccably treading the fine line between witty and rude. When she looked up and held Hana’s gaze for a lot longer than would have been expected, so long in fact that a couple of men turned round to look, Hana distinctly remembers thinking: ‘Oh, fuck. Trouble ahead.’

  Now, Leah mostly plays online. Until the early hours. Hana wakes up, middle of the night, alone in bed, checks her watch, rolls her eyes, goes to the bathroom, pops her head into the living room where her presence more often than not goes unnoticed. On the rare occasions Leah stirs and looks up, she meets her with a glass-eyed gaze of someone wired and entirely absent in spirit. Glass-eyes. She doesn’t look focused and merciless, more like a rat in the lab, one of those ones who keep hitting the orgasm button instead of the food button and end up climaxing themselves to death.

  ‘That’s harsh,’ Hana thinks, ‘that’s a really harsh thing to say about her. I must remember never to say it.’

  She spends some time blaming herself for allowing her brain to spin in overtime and falls asleep vaguely grumpy about the day ahead.

  ‘Wake up.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wake up.’ Leah is sitting on the bed, wide-eyed and excited.