That year Lucky Chips was my casino of choice because you could be as scruffy as you liked and it was nice and dark and you could gamble with 20ps on some of the tables. It was full of a certain type of people most of the time so it felt a bit like a secret club for hairy and messy people with spare 20ps who smelt a bit of booze, a bit of fags and not a whole lot of soap or showering, generally speaking. The casino was the main bit, with the manky old tables in the middle of the floor and the fruities all lined up along the sides, and then in one corner was the bar, which only had plastic cups and cans of beer and boxes of wine, and then in the other was a Chinese takeaway slash chicken-and-chips shop without much in the way of ventilation so big clouds of greasy smoke tended to hang around in the air the whole time. Around the balcony along the top were three or four karaoke booths, which I’d never been in even though I was partial to a little singsong now and again, but regardless, I was pretty sure it wasn’t just karaoke that went on in them most of the time.
It was just starting to get busy that time of the evening, lots of people in suits who’d popped in on the way home from work for a flutter or a spot of special karaoke if you catch my drift. There were some students piling into one of the booths and I guessed they probably were actually going to do karaoke and soon enough you’d be able to hear them all bouncing up and down on the sofas and singing the words wrong, even though they had them on the screen for you. I went and sat at an empty spot on one of the tables and changed a couple of quid to chips. I watched the cards being turned over and the chips being raked in and it was nice to just watch and listen and not have to think just for a bit. Looking back now it’s easy to see I was beginning to have the tickly prickly feeling at the bottom of my belly that things weren’t quite how they should be and so maybe that was why I was finding myself in Lucky Chips or on the lappy more and more. I learnt a long time ago that when you’re winning or waiting to win – and you can wait for ages and ages but if you still reckon it will happen one day someday then that’s still all right – any tickly prickly feelings go away. Because everything can change on a gamble, even if it’s made with your feet sticking to the sludgy carpet or with a bloke dribbling on your shoe. Magic’s everywhere if you take a chance on it, and only people who live in the too-late hours in the grimmest of gambling joints know this for sure. Your whole life is waiting for you on the stickiest cards or on the last creaky spin of a wheel. And for me it was like Saffy was too, like a tiny Borrower-size Saffy was peeking out from behind the stacks of chips under the dirty glass in front of the croupier, or just perched on the roulette wheel on black number 7 with her little legs crossed under her, grinning up at me with all her long hair whirling up as the wheel spun round and round. And I knew that one day I’d win and I could bundle up my little beauty in money and love and lovely things and we could stay happy for ever and ever. And that for sure was worth a little flutter on.
Thing was, money wasn’t exactly lying about ready for fluttering. Saffy was studying for her degree so she got a bit of a loan and she still worked at a clothes shop at weekends and on her days off when she could and I kept taking as many extra shifts in the bar as I could, sometimes splits all week. But with the rent and bills and everything, we didn’t have much spare for gambling on dreams. And more and more Saffy was wanting us to use what we had left over to snuffle up our noses. It’s not like I didn’t enjoy a bit of a buzz every now and again, or all the time when we first got together, when it was all highs and woahs and we could just jabber on at each other for hours and hours and float around on happy wonder. And I felt like a bit of a wet, thinking we should give that a rest, but I was starting to think I’d quite like to snuggle up with her every night and drink big buckets of tea and watch the telly and eat our tea and not wake up with mouths that had been PrittSticked up on the insides and runny noses that hurt your head too much to sniff back up. I just wanted me and Saf to have a real life, you know, something that we could still be doing when we were old and grey and didn’t have big enough lungs to snort up a yummy line of gak. But I did want her to have fun and be happy, more than anything ever. And I wanted to have fun with her. Sometimes I just wanted to burst out laughing, right in the middle of us doing the dishes or making the bed, just crack up chuckling, because I was that happy. She just made all the air sing and everyone dance and it was just by being, just by wandering around the world and not even realising how ace she was.
So I guess that’s why when she sent me a text a minute later as a nine of clubs and a five of hearts were turned over, asking if I fancied picking up on my way home, it didn’t take me long to say yes. And to be fair to her, that’s a good hand to twist on.
It only seemed like a bad idea for about five minutes but for those five minutes I sat there all smug and happy with myself, like I was king of the church or head boy. And then I remembered how it felt, just sitting in the same saggy spot of our shit sofa and chatting away to her with all our half-started conversations crashing into each other and carrying on in each other’s directions, and deciding to rack up each line and looking at each other with that naughty face and being the first to say, Shall we … and seeing the sun coming up at the top of the concrete wall through the tiny window and looking at each other with that same naughty face and saying, Oops, but just not caring because we were in a tiny bubble of wonder, where you can talk about everything all at once and still have so much more that there just isn’t time to say. So even before my chips had run out I’d started standing up off my stool and looking for Alice’s number on my phone. Her bloke – who was the same guy she’d sacked me off for on that very first party night, as it goes, so I guess you can’t bear a grudge – had started dabbling in dealing, so I sent her a text asking if I could pick up and I got my stuff and shoved the last couple of sticky-chip-fat Lucky Chips chips in my pocket and I walked towards the door.
It’s always a bit confusing, seeing that little rectangle of daylight through the glass in Lucky Chips’s doors when you feel like it’s been nighttime for about a million years, but that’s just the magic of casinos – they have all sorts of tricks for you, like having no windows and making the carpets all swirly-whirly so that you can’t see your chips if you drop ’em and you can’t see the sick you’re walking in and so on and so forth. But I blinked my mole eyes at the light and then I made it out and I walked slow waiting for Alice to text me so I could have a little diversion round there to pick up a present for the Safster.
Across the road and down a bit from Lucky Chips was a concrete square with a couple of bus stops around the edges and concrete blocks as benches in the middle and a big screen that showed the news to the pigeons and the crisps packets which were scuttling around and to the two people waiting at opposite stops where I’d never seen a bus stop ever. Up on the screen Fate Jones was having a little flick of her hair and the newsreader was telling us that it was three days now and she was still missing. I felt a bit shit actually, looking up at her and wondering what had happened to her. From what they were saying, her parents were proper nice folks, well off but into charity and all of that, nice little sister and a boyfriend who loved her. I stopped and watched for a bit, waiting for the jumpy buzz of my phone in my pocket. They were doing a video-link interview with a police bloke, who was still asking people who’d been around that night to come forward. She’d been at a pub quiz at her local, the same one she went to each week with the same group of mates, only this time round she’d left early, on her tod, because she was feeling a bit dodgy. Nobody had seen her since. It made you think about how it’d feel to be one of the mates, and whether or not you’d have been different and left with her and got her home okay, or whether you’d have just taken a chance because it was the same place you went every week and things that are the same feel safe.
My phone was buzzing in my pocket and it was time to chip off. I looked up at Fate Jones’s fluttery hair and I had a little secret thought, which said, Hope you’re all right, chick, and then I scarpered off to Alice’s.
It got to Friday, with the happy end-of-the-week feeling bursting out of both of us and we decided to have a couple of people round. We went through phases, me and Saffy, where sometimes we just wanted to live under a duvet for as many hours as we could stretch a weekend into, and sometimes we wanted to