My father’s parents socialized only with other members of the family. They were actually related to each other, distant cousins, even before they got married; they’d never have met otherwise. They went through a fashionable phase as newlyweds, going to horse races and spiritualist meetings in the 1930s, but always with a safe group of uncles and in-laws. My father, an only child, broke that tradition among many others and we don’t see much of the extended Corens. But we hear tales of Uncle Sid who nicked the silver at Dunkirk, Great-Grandpa Dave who went away for GBH on his own son-in-law, Fat Sam’s spat with Ginger Phil, the Wet Fish Corens of Southgate, and the ones who threw their lives away in betting shops. It’s close enough for my father to be glad he has left it behind. But I’m not. Whenever we do see the relatives, gathered together for weddings or funerals, I love them all. And I always loved sitting at the kitchen table with Grandpa while he smoked and dealt and chuckled, ‘It’d take a lot of this to kill ya.’ I didn’t care that I lost. I just liked playing.
The bridge comes from my mother’s side. Grandma Isabel has a heavy accent, wears big earrings, bakes chocolate-walnut cakes, and bids very loudly because she is deaf. She plays bridge with fellow Hungarian émigrés from one end of St John’s Wood to the other. But she has always been very patient about playing with me, even when I was so small that I could only hold eight cards at once and I had to keep putting them down to check things in my little yellow Book Of Bridge Rules. She may be a tiny, frail, foreign lady with a bad hip replacement and a faulty hearing aid, but my grandma sparkles like a chandelier. She’s the life and soul of a room. If you make an encouraging bid she will immediately go for slam, shouting, ‘Don’t invite me to a party if you don’t expect me to dance!’ She can’t walk but she always dances.
♠
I hate being at school and I love being at home. Especially when the house is full of Giles’s friends. Boys show off and tell jokes, and shout when they’re angry. They don’t smile and ask personal questions, then bitch behind your back and share your secrets with the class. They don’t write diaries, all sweetly floral and girlish on the outside, for you to be unable to resist flicking through at break-time, which say things like, ‘I hope Vicky leaves school soon, we all hate her, the fat cow,’ and then smile at you across the tuck shop and ask if you want a Highland Toffee.
Boys say what they think to your face. Bit harsh, sometimes, but straightforward. This room feels, for all its billowing smoke and whisky fumes, safe and healthy.
And they are playing this game . . . you get two cards face-down and one face-up, and you put chips in the pot if you like your cards, and more get dealt. Or sometimes you only have two cards, and three are dealt face-up in the middle, and you hope that the three in the middle will chime somehow with your secret two. But even if they don’t, you can pretend that they do. And if you pretend right, you can double your pocket money.
It is a serious game. I don’t know if they play well or not, since I barely understand the rules myself, but they play seriously. Lots of macho stuff and poker jargon, pocket rockets and big slick (or is it big stick? I’m not sure and don’t want to ask) that Matt has picked up from books and his trip to Vegas. It’s really cool. One time, we played all night and whoever won the most money took us all up to the Coffee Cup in Hampstead and bought us breakfast.
My entire poker strategy is based on one of Matt’s phrases, ‘Don’t disgrace an ace.’ I never pass any hand with an ace in it. I sit waiting for aces to come.
♠
I don’t want to go back to school. It’s the first day of term, dark as a maths book and cold as its owner’s wit. The warmth and laughter of the holidays are already shrinking into a walnut of memory. Yesterday I was a happy, funny, bright kid, playing games and laughing with my family. Today I am fat, clumsy, uncool, living in the wrong part of town, wearing the wrong clothes. And I haven’t even got on the bus yet.
My brother walks me up the hill and gives me a cigarette to stop me from crying, and promises that I won’t be at school for ever.
♠
On the other side of the ocean, Johnny Chan is winning the 1988 World Series of Poker. Johnny Chan is nicknamed ‘The Orient Express’, for obvious reasons: he arrived in America before political correctness did.
He was born in the Guangzhou province of China, and in 1962 moved to Texas, where his family ran restaurants. What must they have thought, that good and hardworking Chinese family, when their number one son dropped out of the University of Houston to become a full-time gambler in Las Vegas? He had been majoring in hotel and restaurant management. He was going to be big in catering. And off he ran to piss it up the wall in the Nevada desert. Or so they must have thought. That’s what usually happens.
It works out for Johnny, though. He wins the World Series of Poker in 1987 and 1988, the fourth man to win back-to-back world titles. In the 1988 tournament, there are 167 players and Johnny Chan reaps the grand prize of $700,000. The field includes some of the great names of poker history: Jack ‘Treetop’ Straus, Puggy Pearson, Crandall Addington, Jack Keller, Johnny Moss, ‘Amarillo Slim’ Preston. They’re pretty much all from Texas.
Betty Carey is the only female player in the field. There’s a story about the time she lost a big heads-up match to Amarillo Slim, after he tricked her by asking whether she liked her cup of tea. She said, ‘Yes, sure, Slim, it’s great.’ And then, an hour or so later, during a big pot, he asked whether she liked her hand. And when she said she liked her hand, in a slightly different tone of voice from when she said she liked her tea, he knew she was bluffing and he took her money.
My sympathies are with Betty. I like a nice cup of tea at the table, too.
♠
In a dream, I am just in the middle of folding a 67 offsuit when I am tapped on the shoulder by another me. She is older, filled out in some places, slimmed down in others, still looking very comfortable in the card room.
She says, ‘I’d have raised with that.’
I laugh.
‘No kidding,’ she says. ‘It’s a lucky hand.’
‘So has it all turned out all right?’ I ask.
‘Pretty good,’ she nods. ‘You’ve grown up happy enough. You sometimes wish that you were still a teenager, but only because you’ve forgotten what it was like. You play poker all the time now, because there’s nobody to stop you. The game has taken over your life. You’ve won a million dollars. You’ve been to the World Series of Poker. And Al Alvarez has sent you an email, congratulating you on becoming the European Champion.’
‘What’s an email?’ I say.
‘It’s something that took over everybody else’s life,’ my older self replies.
I think for a little while.
‘Have I got a husband and babies?’ I ask nervously. ‘And a nice house with a big garden?’
She has her own little think now. Maybe she doesn’t want to scare me. But she also wants me to know that girls are more honest when they’re older.
‘No,’ she says eventually. ‘You could probably afford the house and garden, what with the million dollars. But you’ll quite like