Page 31 of A Midlife Gamble

Tony pointed it out.

‘Shall we try?’ Marianne said. ‘I’m fed up with this machine. It’s always whistling at me.’ She turned to Tony.

‘Ah.’ Tony turned his winning chips over in his hand. ‘If you don’t mind.’ He turned to Marianne. ‘I was thinking of playing a couple of hands of cards? I’m a little clumsy with that thing.’

‘Do you play?’ Kay asked, her face suddenly animated.

‘A little. You?’

‘Oh, not really. Not at the level I suppose they do here.’

Tony nodded. ‘Understand. You need your wits about you to play it here.’

‘Ha!’ Helen snorted. ‘Kay’s got wits coming out of her ears. She’s a maths teacher.’ The line was delivered with more punch than she’d intended, but something in Tony’s manner really irritated her. A superciliousness. As if he were the only one in possession of wit.

Tony put his head to one side, his eyes narrowing as he studied Kay. ‘Want to join me?’

‘Oh… I don’t…’ Kay hesitated. She looked first at Marianne, who said, 'Go. I think I'm going to find this Titanic.' And then at Helen, who said, ‘Go!’ And for the first time Helen felt thankful that Tony had turned up. It was as clear as day that Kay was tempted. ‘Go,’ she urged. ‘I’ll stick with the claw. That’s about my level.’

14

‘And then reality TV became the big new thing. They came knocking of course.Dancing with the Stars?I said to them, I’m an actor. I’ve worked with the greats. Mel Gibson once watched me deliver a death sentence to an empty chair and slapped me on the back after for a job well done! I’m supposed to waltz for my supper now?’ One confident stride ahead, Tony stopped walking and turned back to Kay. ‘The boozy who should have been in the chair by the way, was flat out drunk in his trailer. But the show must go on, huh, Kay? Anyway, here we are!’

Snapping to attention, Kay rewound the last words she’d heard. ‘Reality TV,’ she managed. ‘Yes, it’s very big now.’ It was the best she could do. She’d stopped listening. At some point, in the few minutes it had taken them to navigate their way from the slots, through the electronic gaming machines, all the way to the back of the casino floor where the games room was situated, she had switched off. She’d had to. Tony talked non-stop. Working his way through four seasons ofGeneral Hospitalthen, without taking a breath, moving ontoDays of Your Lives.She’d stopped listening around 1998. She looked up and a soft‘Oh’escaped. There was nothing about the room in front of them that she understood, or had anticipated.

The carpet was a geometrically patterned blaze of red and gold, the chairs were striped and the felt-covered tables shaped as randomly as if a five-year-old had been let loose with a pastry cutter. Dark wood panels lined the walls. The carpet under her feet was thicker than it had been in the slots room, the lighting more subdued, the ambient noise muffled by the thick green baize of the tables. The stakes, it was clear, were higher here. And, as she looked across at all the players, she began to feel an intense embarrassment creeping up from her toes to her knees, her stomach and her face. She was an overweight, fifty-plus maths teacher from suburbia. Back home, on that afternoon in the coffee shop, Helen had asked her where in the world, and she hadn’t hesitated. She’d found her answer easily, and hadn’t given it any thought, not even after Caro had put the ticket in her hand. This daydream of a land that her mother had sung along to as she’d washed dishes on a Sunday afternoon. Abba’s ‘Money, Money, Money’ on the transistor in the corner of the kitchen, her father and her playing cards at the kitchen table. Gambling away whole packets of matchsticks!

Shall we go, Kay?he would tease.Win our fortune? Buy your mum a hostess trolley.

We’ll go,Martin had promised.We’ll definitely go,after she went out and blew a week’s wage on that jacket.

And now she was here, she’d finally made it and it was a revelation to realise how unexamined this long-held, quietly stored dream had been. She hadn’t even needed to leave home to find it in the first place. The lyrics of a song on the radio? The gentle teasing from her father? Was that all it had taken? She’d put it together, and put it away and, if she was honest, never really tried to follow through. It was this last thought that hit the target. That had her smiling weakly at Tony as she followed him in, like a lamb, or a child, certainly a someone who had never even tried to follow dreams. It was Caro who had asked why she hadn’t gone. Caro whose whole life had been a process of one foot in front of the other, to get where she wanted to be, regardless of the hurdles, the setbacks. So, what had stopped her? A family event she hadn’t wanted to miss? A lack of funds? A leave-it-to-tomorrow attitude? Twenty-five years later and she had no idea of a single one of those over-riding, terribly important, couldn’t be avoided reasons fornotcoming. What had been so difficult about fulfilling a dream? She wished she knew. She really wished someone had come along twenty years ago and given her a huge shove. Had told her how fast the years before Alex would fly by, warned her what was waiting, when the years of Alex were over. Kay! She adjusted the strap on her handbag, fingers nervously playing with the catch.Youshould have given yourself the shove, she thought. You should have shoved yourself.

Heart thumping, she followed behind Tony as he nodded at the croupiers in their smart two-tone waistcoats, and momentarily placed a hand on the shoulder of an old man sitting at a poker table they passed. Sometimes they stopped to watch the play. The pace was fast. Cards flipped and folded, chips stacked and swept. Strange words snatched up and thrown across the baize,colour up, yo eleven, he’s a wonger.Even so, she recognised the games. Poker, Baccarat, Blackjack. She almost recognised the players, because, to her astonishment, the room was stuffed full of the most normal-looking, thick-waisted people she’d ever seen.People like her.Dressed in baseball caps and hoodies and jeans. People that she might find herself queueing behind at Tesco’s meat counter. Or people like Sammy from her chemo group. Sammy who was, probably at this very minute, on her way to Blackpool to fulfil that dream of seeing a fake George Michael, Sammy whom she’d laughed at the afternoon of the workshop when she’d turned and said,Why, Kay? Why didn’t I ever go and see the real thing?Surrounded by the strange juxtaposition of the familiar and the extraordinary, Kay remembered how Sammy had answered her own question.I’ll tell you why. It was easier not to and I always assumed there would be another time.

Well. Her lungs filled, her chest swelled, her eyes went glassy, her mouth dry. Now that nowhere was easy, now thatanother timehad taken on the scarcity of summer snow, here she finally was, in the games room of a Vegas casino. She was as mixed up inside as a tin of Quality Street, soft with excitement, crunched up with fear. This was no daydream of a far land. These people were as normal as her. She was an overweight, fifty-plus maths teacher from suburbia and she fitted in perfectly.Dad!She wanted to laugh it out loud, throw her head back and call across the ocean that divided them.DAD! I’m here.But as swiftly as it had arisen, the urge to laugh died. She stared across the room. If this was so easy, what else might she have done, if she’d ever taken the time to follow dreams?

‘What’s your game, Kay?’ Tony turned to her.

‘Game? Oh…’ Kay took a deep breath. She looked over at the roulette table, the huge fast-moving wheel. Then she turned to the table where all the yelling was coming from. ‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘Craps,’ Tony answered.

Kay watched. The craps table looked fun. It was by far the noisiest, and surrounded by a group of people who looked as if they were playing a team game as they cheered and groaned in unison. But the table itself was the most confusing thing she’d ever seen. The green baize covered in piles of red chips with white dots, or blue chips with white dots, marked with yellow lines and black circles and indecipherable script:Insurance Pays, Pass, Don’t Pass.A casino worker stood at one end, another in the middle, translating the constant flow of chips and dice in a game that everyone around the table obviously understood. It was fascinating and intimidating, like walking into a secret club and not having a clue about the password.

‘It’s a game of chance,’ Tony said. ‘Not my bag.’

‘Isn’t everything?’ Kay smiled. But inwardly she agreed. There had been a strategy to the games she’d played with her father. ‘Blackjack,’ she said, ‘is what I mostly played when I was younger.’

Tony’s face broke out into a wide grin. ‘Good choice.’

‘Is it?’

‘Oh yes. Best chance of winning of any game.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘If you’re going to spend an hour in here, Kay, Blackjack is what you should be playing. And…’ raising his hand, he pointed across the room. ‘There’s a couple of openings at that table over there.’

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