Then it comes to my father. He’s been diligently watching everyone make their move, but when it comes to his play he never looks up. He just licks his lips and throws a couple of fifties into the middle. Seemingly without a second thought for the face value of the ante, the landlord and Argyle drop the same. Six eyes turn expectantly on me again.
Fuck this.
‘I fold.’
I’m sure the others thought nothing of it. After all, I was new to the table and it’s only natural for a new player to take some time in working out the way that the other members operate. However, after the twelfth consecutive time, their patience wears thin.
‘What’s wrong Lou–wee?’ my father asks in the same deplorable, arrogant manner with which he has taken eight of the previous hands. ‘Waiting for the deck to sprout another suit, are you?’
Neither of the others laugh at his dig. It’s been too long a night, one that has seen them lose their patience, along with most of their money, to my father. After fourteen hours, they are plain bored of his mind games.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I reply, taking their impartiality as silent support. ‘Why don’t you just get on with the game, eh?’
He looks down at his column of money. ‘Oh, I am, in case you haven’t noticed. We’re waiting for you to start, sunshine.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ll chip in when I’m good and ready.’
‘That’s good to hear, really it is, but don’t be taking too long, will you, Lou-wee? That pile won’t last all night if you just keep taking from it, now will it?’
The question slides into a rasping low whine of a laugh that makes my temperature soar.
Did he laugh at Bebe like that the night he left?
I can feel my lid starting to rattle, but rather than react, I do what I’ve been doing for the last thirty-six hours: quash the steam with another drink.
Argyle picks up on my agitation. ‘Give it a rest, Shill. There’s no need. You’ve already bounced one player from the game and you’re starting to give me a fucking headache.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, do you want me to fetch you a paracetamol?’
‘Fuck you, Shill,’ Argyle snarls.
‘Well, it’s been a long night, old chap, I completely understand if you’re feeling the strain. If you want, I can take this,’ my father pats what he knows is the largest pile of cash on the table, ‘and we can call it a day… if you’re not up to it.’
Argyle glares across at him. Suddenly the landlord assumes his role as patron and peacekeeper.
‘Now come on, gents, let’s keep this constructive. No one’s walking away from the table unless they’re skint or we all agree on it, right?’
The two of them acquiesce. I raise my eyebrows submissively.
That settles it. I’m going nowhere.
‘Right,’ he continues, ‘now deal the cards, Shill.’
With his sneer stapled even higher, my father distributes the two cards of a new hand to each of us. From the lazy manner in which he does it, I’d say he even begrudges giving them away.
I’m the first to make my move this time. I tentatively pick up my hand.
Two jacks.
It’s the first decent pair I’ve been dealt all night. Given the mood at the table, it’s worth betting on. Looking up, I see that none of the others have picked up their cards. They are keenly watching me instead.
Have I let anything slip? Has my face already betrayed my good fortune?
I try not to think about it. Instead, I lay my cards face down, fold my arms and stare calmly at the middle of the table. My father snorts.
‘Well, at least you haven’t folded yet. I check.’
On hearing that, the landlord throws down a fifty. Argyle matches it and so do I.
‘Well, I suppose it would be rude to back out now that Lou-wee has finally decided to start playing,’ my father sniggers, and raises the ante by three hundred.
It’s the largest single bet placed since I’ve been in the game, but the other two equal it without thinking.
What is this? Are they toying with me? It’s three hundred quid we’re talking about. Three hundred quid!
It takes a second to silence the voice. I match the ante.
‘Excellent,’ my father leers. ‘We’re out of the traps at last.’ He lays the community cards down in the middle of the table.
♦ ♣ ♦
2 3 7
I’m in good shape. With such a low drop, my two jacks are a strong hand. One of the others might have a better pair. Or they might not. Sod it. There’s still two cards left to come. Anything could still happen. Play it safe. If an ace, four or another diamond comes out then I’ll fold. I have to. There’s no way I can bluff these guys out. Just play it straight.
Then comes the second round of betting and, after the landlord waves the looks along, this time it’s Argyle’s turn to lay down a fifty. It’s a small enough raise for me to retain my calm, but as soon as I match the amount, my father picks up his commentary again.
‘Just a fifty? Surely we can generate some more heat in here? Tell you what; let’s see what another hundred does for the temperature?’
If he’s trying to get everyone’s back up then it’s working. All three of us want to wipe that smirk from his face now. We dutifully dole in.
‘That’s more like it,’ my father continues, and lays down the fourth card.
♦ ♣ ♦ ♥
2 3 7 8
He whistles, in mock surprise, when he turns over the eight.
The landlord waves his turn on without betting and the stakes follow the same pattern until it returns to our smarmy dealer.
‘Two hundred in,’ my father says without missing a beat.
The landlord shakes his head. Throws down his cards.
‘Fuck it, that’s me out.’
With his pile almost depleted, I can see that Argyle is considering the same course of action, but after exchanging an icy look with my father, he eventually matches the ante.
All eyes turn to me.
Without touching my cards I pull four fifties from the still banded pile of notes and lay them carefully in the middle.
‘Excellent,’ my father says, only this time his rasping laughter is ominously absent. It makes the remaining silence feel suddenly sinister.
My father shifts eagerly in his seat. He’s the only person moving within the room. The rest of us are staring expectantly at the empty space at the end of the cards, which, after pausing for dramatic effect, Mallory Shill eventually fills.
♦ ♣ ♦ ♥ ♥
2 3 7 8 6
The landlord covers his eyes and sighs.
‘What’s the matter?’ my father asks. ‘You didn’t need that card, by any chance, did you?’
The sneer widens.
The landlord looks suspiciously across. He’s trying to work out if – no, not if – he’s trying to work out how he’s cheated him.
‘Well, with you missing out, that probably means that Argyle has nothing,’ my father says, shifting his focus.
Argyle’s tired eyes look at the cards and then at the landlord. Was the deck rigged? All of a sudden he’s having doubts of his own.
In the end he decides against paying to find out and throws down his cards. He gathers what remains of his money.
‘Fuck this,’ he says, shaking his head at the landlord. ‘That’s it for me, Jim. I don’t give a shit what we agreed, I’m not listening to his voice anymore. I’m finished.’ He pushes back from the table.
Unperturbed, and before the inquest can go any further, my father turns his attentions to me.
‘Last hand of the night then, Lou-wee. We better make it a good one, hmm?’
I keep my eyes fixed on the cards and consider the options. From my own perspective, I’m still sitting on a decent pair, but there is a dangerously close run of cards on the table, which my father might well have made a run from by now. He might also have a better pair, or even three of a kind.
Shit, for
all I knew of the game he could have anything.
I study the golliwog money. That’s something that I’ve done a great deal of since I found it and the bundle of notes has come to represent much more than mere capital. My mother’s life savings. It was all that I had left to remind me of her. With that money I could actually do something constructive with my life. Bebe could still influence the direction that it took. Maybe even bring me happiness. Didn’t it deserve to be spent on something better than a hand of...
‘Wakey wakey,’ my father shouts, snapping me from my train of thought. ‘It’s time to wake up, because it’s time to make up.’
With my heart racing, I shoot a vengeful look across at his loathsome, leering face. He doesn’t return eye contact, perhaps for fear of escalating my anger further. Instead he leans back, lowers his head and lifts his cards, just ever so slightly, so that he might consider them one last time.
And that’s when I see it.
*
I’ve always considered myself to be a fairly self-assured liar. It’s not a skill I call upon often, but when you work for a living, it’s something you quickly learn to master – for the sake of your career. Whether it was convincing senior managers that I believed in their latest arse-covering scheme, or reassuring my boss that I was parked outside a customer’s office when I was sitting at home watching daytime TV, I’d say I’m pretty good at passing my version of events off as the truth. I can usually look people in the eye while I’m doing it too. However, until recently I’d never been able to transfer this talent to my domestic life.
As I explained earlier, Bebe could read me like a road sign on a one-way street, but to make matters worse, it was also a skill that my wife developed soon after we met. Katharine told me later, in one of our quieter moments, that my inadvertent openness was one of the things that had attracted her to me, because it meant that, one way or the other, she always knew the truth. No matter how elaborate a tale I spun or how I attempted to cover my tracks, there could never be any dishonesty. Shit, she got so good at it that she even trained our daughter to recognise the telltale signs.
For years my transparency both baffled and frustrated me. I couldn’t get away with the smallest thing. Then one night, after she had enjoyed herself too much at a party, I overheard my wife bragging to a friend who was complaining about her duplicitous husband, and how she feared he was cheating on her.
‘You need to speak to his mother,’ had been my wife’s advice. ‘That’s what I did with Felix. She told me all of his little tricks before we even got married.’
Of course, it all made sense. Bebe was forever telling me that deceit was like cancer to a marriage, and so I had little trouble believing Katharine.
When the woman at the party went on to ask for specifics, my wife was only too keen to divulge her technique. She explained that whenever she suspected I was lying, she would deliberately pretend not to listen. Then, once she understood what I was trying to pass off, she would apologise and ask me to repeat it. However, during the recap, she would deliberately ignore my words and focus solely on my face.
Apparently, just at the moment that I told the lie, my expression would contort – for the tiniest of split seconds – into one of distress. Blink and she might miss it, but it was always there. I might be laughing, frowning or concentrating on something else, but as long as she looked hard enough, she was sure to see it.
Of course, once I knew about the flaw, I was able to repress it. I would look away when she asked me to repeat my answer or, if that didn’t work and Katharine managed to corner me, I would overcompensate or make sure that my face remained absolutely rigid. That’s how, when she asked me had I found any money when we’d been cleaning out Bebe’s house, I was able to keep the golliwog money a secret. In poker terms, I tamed my tell.
*
You can just imagine my amazement then, when I glance across and see my father apparently exhibit the exact same flaw!
It’s not much, in fact it’s so fast that it’s almost subliminal, but just when I turn to glare at him, his look is a paroxysm of pure fear. I make a double check.
Did I just see that right?
I know that I have. I’m sure of it. Positive. That was no trick of fatigue. That was confirmation. In that fleeting instant I understand where my tic originates. It’s genetic.
A whimper of delight escapes from me, one that he interprets as panic.
‘So, what’s it going to be Lou-wee?’ he goads.
But I’m not floundering anymore. Now I’m wearing a smile to match his. It’s like I can see through the red and white weave on the back of the cards.
‘You’re bluffing, pal.’ Then with that I reach down and placed two hundred pounds in the middle of the table.
‘Really?’ my father says, his tone rising in pitch. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yeah, I do. And I’m willing to bet all this to prove it.’
The landlord and Argyle can hardly believe what they are seeing. Their eyes sparkle for the first time in hours.
‘And how much you got in there?’ my father asks, pointing to my stack of notes. Suddenly it’s a different person who speaks to me. He’s not intimidated, but the sarcasm has gone and there’s an intense seriousness to him.
‘Three thousand, six hundred.’
I pitch it into the middle.
Impressed, my father counts out the same amount and separates it from his main pile.
‘I see. Now, just so that we’re clear, that is all that you have, right?’
I nod.
His smirk returns.
‘Well, that’s a shame, Lou-wee, because I have a hell of a lot more here than that. So, you see, whatever you lay down, I’ll just bet your pot… and a pound more. And if you can’t afford to see me…’ he sniggers with delight, ‘…then you can’t afford to see these.’
He taps his cards.
My breathing stops.
‘No,’ I stammer. ‘No, that’s not right. That can’t be right. You can’t buy the pot, you can’t do that in this game, I’m sure of it.’
I only need to look at Argyle’s bemused face to see that I’m right, but neither he nor the landlord are about to point that out to my father. They just want to see what happens next.
Mallory Shill hardens again.
‘Who says that I can’t do it? You don’t know what game we play here. For all you know we play with fake money. Perhaps next time you should check what the house rules of the game are before you get involved.’
‘You motherfucker,’ I snarl, finding no comfort in the irony of my outburst. ‘I know that you’re bluffing.’
‘Well, you see, I don’t care what you do or do not think. For me, it is very simple; you either have the money to find out, or you don’t.’ Then, taking a one-pound coin from his pocket, he exaggerates the laying of it on top of the three thousand six hundred.
‘But you can’t,’ I reply, my anger audibly turning into self-pity. ‘You can’t take it like that. That’s my mother’s money. That’s her life savings. She squirreled that away over the years.’ I can feel my throat swelling. ‘This is not right.’
But my father isn’t listening. He is picking up his money and placing it on top of the mountain of cash that now stands in the middle of the table. For a second he pauses, as if waiting for some machine to register the transaction, and I foolishly allow myself to imagine that this has all been one long joke. But my hopes are dashed when he leans forward, his arms open, and his teeth bared, ready to embrace his winnings.
Watching him take my mother’s money like that, after having stolen all that he had from her years before, I feel so ashamed, so stupid. Now, not only am I broke, I’m beaten, and that knowledge brings with it the kind of pain that I know time can never heal. I bury my head in my hands. What a fool I am.
Then, through the darkness of my self-loathing, I hear Argyle speak.
‘Hold on a second, Shill,’ he says. ‘This isn’t over yet.’
&nbs
p; I look up to see my father hunched over the money, frozen in his place.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
Argyle ignores him. He turns to me.
‘Is that real?’ he asks.
My mouth is hanging open in confusion. I think I’m crying.
‘What?’
Argyle glances down at my hand. ‘Your watch, is it a genuine Breguet?’
‘Erm, yeah, as far as I’m aware. My mother gave it to me.’
‘Let me have a look at it then. Don’t worry,’ he says in response to my look, ‘I know what I’m doing, I’m a jeweller.’
With the watch still attached to my wrist, I extend my right arm so that he can conduct his examination. The briefest of glances is all it takes to quash his doubts, and he looks earnestly back at me.
‘How badly do you want to see those cards, son?’
‘This much.’ I begin to hurriedly work on the clasp.
‘Right,’ says Argyle. ‘Shill, you better work out what you have left because that’s how much I’m paying for this watch.’
I just can’t get over the irony. That watch, that ugly, godforsaken watch, the one thing that my father left behind, which I’ve worn all these years as a reminder of how not to be, is about to be his undoing.
My father’s sneer has dropped from his face and a tone of desperation fractures his voice.
‘You can’t do that and you know it, Argyle. You can’t loan people money in the middle of a game.’
‘Who said anything about loaning money? I’m buying a watch for less than half price. I got myself a nice little deal here. Now sit down and finish the hand.’
My father does no such thing. He continues his murderous, wordless reproach until at last the landlord gets to his feet.
‘You heard him, Mallory, they’re your rules, remember? If you want to play by them then you can fucking well sit down and finish the game. Now.’
Realising that he has no other choice, my father falls back into his chair. On his way down he pushes the table back into Argyle’s lap, knocking a glass over in the process. His eyes flash.
‘Fuck you, and fuck this,’ he says. Then in one swift movement, he grabs his bundle of money and makes for the door.
Felix Shill Deserves to Die Page 27
