The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  TEN

  When the tea was ready we drank it quietly. “Drink,” she said. “You’re dehydrated.” I slept again. The wind soughed as it swept through a thousand trees. I watched her beetle-shell hair drift over the edge of the cup and then over her forearms, where the sleeves of a Shetland sweater had been pushed back. The watch had been removed, stowed away. She opened a packet of McVities chocolate biscuits and we dipped them into the oolong, then nibbled the soft edges. I noted the TV set standing on a small plaster column and the boxed writing paper sitting on top of it. To whom did she write letters by hand? There was not a single photograph in the place, no trace of family or affections, and there was no sign that other lives were present within hers. There was just the view through the window and a painting of a monastery on a postcard slipped behind the corner of a wall-mounted mirror, a place that might have been familiar to her. It must have been Sando.

  Before long I was stretched out on the tatami again, now with a quilt over me, and I was sleeping long and hard, a response in all likelihood to total disintegration, the last remnants of pride and coherence swept away. It was a ragged, formless unconsciousness. Even inside it I could relish the exhaustion. The rustle of the rain and the sound of the wind rolling down the hillside. When I woke it must have been hours later and I sensed that I was alone. It was night. I saw at once a candle lit inside a stone box and a saucer of oil placed on top of it whose aroma had filled the room. She had left it there while I slept and the flame had run low. I saw, too, that the window view had filled with far-off lights, the lamps around the plaza and the string of restaurants, the cement villas with their doors covered with stickers of good-luck cats. I got up and went to the kitchenette, where a note written in English lay on the table suggesting that I was to help myself from the fridge but wait till she got back later that night before making myself something proper to eat. She was going to bring something special from the city. I went out onto the balcony and tried to imagine where I was. I looked down at the muddy road, where dogs stood under a lamp wagging their tails and waiting. The trees writhed, the field of bright green bamboo rippling and seething. The house next door was shuttered down in darkness, the windows sealed with metal blinds. I turned on the heater and wrapped myself in the quilt. An hour went by and I grew restless. I always do. I put on my shoes and went downstairs to the locked door of the lower level that she had asked that I not open. I tried the handle but it wouldn’t yield. I peered through the crack. All I saw was the streetlamp filtering through onto a concrete floor. At that moment, moreover, I heard distant footfalls and I knew that it was her. I crept back upstairs and took off my shoes again, laying them against the door.

  Dao-Ming came up the stairs with a box of goose eggs, some food in take-out boxes, and a bottle of Yellowtail wine. She was in a waterproof motorcycle jacket and goggles and her hair was wrapped in a see-through plastic bag, which she tore off as she laid the items down on the kitchen bar. She smiled when she saw me huddled in the quilt and told me she had bought goose eggs to make me feel better and fried wontons and other things that were reputed to be restorative. We made a little dinner out of it. I ate the goose eggs cracked into a glass and whisked with soy milk. Then the wontons. I hardly noticed the storm now lashing the house, the cables singing outside. She made us gin and tonics, with the rinds of lemons cut like fingernails. The wine was for later.

  She was relaxed, which she wouldn’t have been after a client. Perhaps she had not had one. We sat around the low table and ate the last two uncooked eggs, breaking them and separating the whites and the yolks into the two shells and drinking them one after the other. She talked as slowly as a woman can talk, her vowels dragged out as she gave her sentences weight, and her thoughts sat upon them like tiny riders upon horses who don’t use bits or spurs.

  She said, “You slept for a whole day, a whole night. I’ve never seen a man sleep like that.”

  “I’ve never slept like that.”

  She sipped her gin and tonic.

  “I have been thinking. It was so remarkable to see you at the Intercontinental. When I saw you I thought—I thought you were a ghost. It was as if you were dead. You were dead and I had come across you all the same.”

  “I wasn’t quite dead,” I said.

  “But almost, no?”

  “I crashed at the tables. I burned out.”

  Was that death of sorts?

  She took off her slippers.

  “That’s how I know that look.”

  “All gamblers—”

  “Yes, you burn out.”

  “I lost it all,” I said. “Everything. Everything.”

  “You have to forget all the money you’ve lost.”

  I told her how much it was.

  “It’s all right,” she replied. “I’ve heard of worse.”

  “But other men are millionaires,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter if they are. They can lose everything, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “You couldn’t pay at the hotel. I know.”

  I laughed.

  “If you hadn’t been there—”

  She smiled.

  “You’d be washing the dishes.”

  I’d be deported, I thought.

  And yet, I wanted to say, I couldn’t help myself. I was compelled.

  “I just want you to eat,” she said.

  “All right, I will. Sihk faan.”

  She made some soup with squid, and we got drunk on the gin. The squid so fresh a spoon could scoop it. She brought out a lemon cake from the fridge.

  “You made a mistake,” she went on. “It’s a very simple thing to do. One can change, however.”

  I didn’t say anything, because I don’t believe in change. We are who we are; a loser loses. She cut the cake and made me eat a slice off her hand.

  “It’s not the mistake you think. You made a mistake thinking I didn’t know. You can’t hide your desperation. You don’t have to hide your desperation.”

  She ate the cake as well, and she said she had a bottle of rum intact.

  “Disgusting but good. Shall we?”

  She laughed, covering her mouth.

  “I was sure you are an alcoholic,” she went on. “You behave like one. Alcoholics always lie about their problems.”

  “Maybe I am just a liar.”

  “Is everything you do a lie?”

  I nodded.

  “I also have some red opium if you don’t like the rum. We can smoke it the old-fashioned way. With cake.”

  She lit another oil lamp and set it on the floor next to us. She took out a glass pipe and prepared it; we angled it against us and puffed for a while. It was good stuff, juicy and pungent, and because I hadn’t smoked it in years it had the power of nostalgia. I noticed how oily my lips had become, and how the slime of the goose egg had coated the inside of my mouth, undissolved by the other foods. She laid out the sofa bed and we lay with the oil lamp flickering against the wet window listening to the cables, continuing to smoke. From down in that imponderable darkness I could hear the sea, angry as always, and the buoys clicking far out. We mixed the pipe with shots of rum.

  She took off her clothes piece by piece, folding each one and laying it down in a pile next to her. There was an indescribable neatness about her. She folded and stashed everything, just as she had that first night at the Hotel An-Ma. When she was naked she rolled on her side and brought the quilt up against her chin and she asked me to tell a story. If I wouldn’t do that, I was to tell her what my family had really been like, and what my childhood had really been like, and not the lies I had told her before.

  She inhaled deeply and her eyes began to slink away.

  “Lies are stories, too,” she said. “But I don’t want lies now.”

  I told her about Haywards Heath, my life as a lawyer in Cuckfield. I described my village school in Lindfield; I told her about law school in Nottingham. I made no mention of lordship or manors. I told the truth. I said: My father
was a salesman for a vacuum cleaner company in Croydon. Thirty-five years with Silverliner Air Systems. He was in debt all his life. Died of an infarction on the commuter train to work at Bolney station one summer morning in 1979. Dropped dead like a stone reading the Daily Telegraph with a scone on his lap. Crumbs everywhere. Nothing left to the wife and son. Buried in Pyecombe cemetery with his parents. The Silverliner Anti-Static Dust-Buster 2070 left suspended in midair, his house reclaimed by the bank.

  “Ever since,” I said, “I’ve had a strange relationship with vacuum cleaners. I think of them as demonic in some way.” He was a teetotaler, a drab. He organized campaigns against bingo in Haywards Heath. Bingo, the work of Satan! He wore ties with the Middlesex cricket insignia and arrived at work at 7:59 every morning for thirty-five years. He never swore, not even in the bath. He swept his Brown and Taylor suits every night with an anti-lint brush, read The Hobbit to me in bed when I was nine, and led in general a life of honor and pride, a rock to his family and community, a true man in the quiet English way that no one today understands. A man in gentle debt merely because he kept to his word with regard to his wife and his garden. My role model for most of my life, until I rolled heavily into debt myself.

  I knew I was talking to myself, and soon she was sleeping against me as if she had never been listening at all. I laid her head on the pillow next to me. I reached back and turned off the oil lamp and for some time I lay there agonizing about my cloudy future. Then, as if a counterweight, the past came back again and soon I was immersed in it in the way that you fall quietly into a nightmare and cannot climb out. How meaningless and repetitive a human life is, and how mechanical mine had been, I thought, until I discovered baccarat and the Chinese. A degree from Nottingham in something as useless as the law, a job at Klein and Klein, a year in Hong Kong with one of the big firms and then my employment in Haywards Heath at Strick and Garland settling wills (a lot of rich old widowers in that part of the world, as I have mentioned, rich and easy pickings for a smart young man). I became a secret gambler. I went to Paris once to help settle a claim for a client and while I was there I went to the little casino at Enghien-les-Bains. The casino sat by the lake with a suburban respectability and it was filled with off-duty policemen and failed businessmen, and what is sadder in the human world than a failed French businessman? It was nothing more than curiosity that drew me in there, but once inside it was a revelation.

  I had some cash on me so I played at roulette, lost a few euros, and played and lost a few more. That night there was an old paratrooper who had fought in Algeria at the same table as me, and as I continued to lose—we being virtually the only two players at the table—he took off the patch that covered a missing eye and laid it on the table in front of him as a mark of respect. Up to that moment I hadn’t known what it would be like to lose money in this way—so pointlessly—and this curious offhand gesture reassured me, I didn’t know why. The vacated eye was sealed over with pale scar tissue, and this made the other working eye exceedingly jaunty. “It’s like losing the men in your unit,” he said half-seriously. “The mission goes on.”

  Then he said: “Un homme qui ne joue pas c’est comme un homme qui s’est jamais marié—c’est a dire un petit con.” A man who doesn’t play the tables is like a man who has never married—a little shit.

  That was the beginning of it. I’ve had fond memories of Enghiens-les-Bain ever since. It was nothing more than a taste for solitude, a capacity for solitude. Thereafter I went every month on business and gambled on the side. It became a secret hobby, as it often does. I started to play baccarat online, sometimes winning hundreds of pounds a month. I became a sharp at it. And then I began to lose. Soon, I was traveling to Birmingham at the weekends to play the tables. You could not imagine anything more pathetic. I thought of nothing else. It was like a grudge. I was convinced I had been stiffed the previous weekend when I had lost everything. I couldn’t accept it. And of course there was nowhere serious to gamble in Sussex in those days, or even in London. I felt cut adrift. It really didn’t seem fair. I went to Paris, too, and got into the swing of roulette, a terrible game really. There was no adrenaline in it, but it was better than nothing. One only has to play a given game for a few months before it becomes second nature; I became good at everything I played, though that did not mean I won consistently. What I discovered was a taste for losing. I understood in some way that playing something well and losing at it had something to do with playing it over the long haul. But I didn’t care, and I dare say no player does.

  She was now awake and relit the pipe and we had another go at it, and soon the balance of our talk had shifted again and she began to tell her own story, as if mine needed to be evened out by hers. I had become a secret player inside a fairly comfortable life, but she had migrated from Kham.

  “When I left Sando, I had to hitch a ride to Daocheng. My mother hoped I would help her eat, so she didn’t stop me.”

  She sucked in the smoke and sank back onto the sofa bed.

  “I didn’t mind. I was happy to wait the whole night in Daocheng for the bus.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen. It was illegal to leave. I walked to the bus station and waited there all night. There was a bus south in the morning. I had enough to get all the way south. I got a job as a hostess in Guangzhou. I bought some makeup and some dresses. Some shoes. I became good at it. I had the looks, the youth. I made hard cash every week under the table. I shared an apartment with five girls. We all cooked together. In the summer we went to Hainan and slept with old men. We worked the hotels.”

  But then she talked at greater length. Her father had been a welder working on hotel projects of Chengdu, and he was never home. He had found a better life. Her mother worked in the fields.

  She was the only child. She had gone to school in the village, bright, industrious, and seemingly little connected to her cold, fractious parents. It was rumored in the village that the father had run off to the big city with a waitress from a tourist hotel in Litang, and it was probably true. Her mother, half-abandoned, labored on grimly without mentioning it to her daughter. In the winters he would sometimes come back and make his awful “Zhang wine” in huge glass vats. He fermented them all winter with medicinal herbs and then drank himself into oblivion. He spoke to Dao-Ming in Mandarin, and to his wife in Zhang. He had picked up some airs in the big city.

  The winters in those high lands were unimaginable. Before they were snowed in and the road between Daocheng and Litang was closed, her mother took her on their motorbike into the hills where Zhang farmers in their tall Stetson hats and pointed boots sold medicinal roots to passing cars. In the autumn and the early spring they rode into Litang and spun the gold-plated prayer wheels in the temple and bought gas canisters for the house. They went to another temple outside Daocheng, that bitter and wind-blasted town, a place of white stupas along the banks of a rippling, stone-filled river, where the grassland was flat and white with ice. The mountains there were strewn with lines of prayer flags that ran from the summits into the ravines below and made them look like immense cakes. They could walk from village to village, her mother flipping her little prayer wheel in one hand and summoning Buddha to mind with recitations.

  It was a holy land. In spring they would see picnic parties of monks in brilliant boat-shaped gold hats sitting in the new grass with yak herds dotting the dark green slopes. The tents of the Zhang nomads with walls around them. In the villages at the bottom of the gorges the houses were whitewashed. Their flat roofs were piled with drying straw and the windows and lintels painted with the violent colors of the Tibetan afterlife. The swollen rivers churned through them like floodwaters; in the awakening rose gardens the old women stood in their straw hats like ghosts, but their eyes were alive.

  But before spring came around they were trapped in the valley. They were enclosed alongside the monastery in their gaunt, dark-brown fortress houses, around which the shallow rivers ran. The monastery’s wood
en gates and loggias were painted with gods and demons. In the woods below it lay the adobe huts of the monks. Dao-Ming went into the temple every day with a renminbi note, climbed the ladder to the first floor, and walked on the balcony that curled around the shrine. With the truck drivers and the traveling mechanics, she dropped her note onto the floor below and wished for her father to come back from the city and stay. He never did. The yak butter candles glittering in the dark never answered her prayer. She began to understand why he had left.

  When her mother took her to the temple outside Daocheng, she told her that the dead were not really dead, they were merely being reborn, but sometimes being reborn was worse than suffering extinction.

  “If you disappeared, you wouldn’t suffer. Being reborn forever—no wonder the Communists told us it was an evil religion.”

  “It isn’t evil,” Dao-Ming said. “It’s just true. Whatever is the truth is bound to be horrifying.”

  She prayed herself, and worked the fields when she was thirteen; she was never sick and the snow never affected her. No one knew what was going to become of her. She was too refined and aloof for the local boys. She was never going to be a truck driver’s wife, or a farmer. She was never going to stay in the beautiful valleys of Kham. “I’m a hardheaded peasant,” she said, “but not hardheaded enough, or too much so. Or maybe I’m not as much of a true peasant as I think I am. I admire them, though. To me, the word is a compliment. I wish I were more like my mother. Enduring.”

  She turned onto her back and the smoke shot up from her mouth. There was a steeliness in the way she remembered her own life. She put down the pipe.

  “They thought I was haughty and would come to nothing. Well, I did come to nothing. But not in the way they predicted. I could have studied—but I was impatient. I didn’t want to be just another pharmacist in some run-down industrial town. I wanted some good luck. I wanted—as we say—the open sky. I can’t say whether I found it or not. I found you.”