Page 32 of A Midlife Gamble

He might as well have pointed to a crocodile, or an approaching grizzly bear. Kay pulled back in fear. The table Tony pointed to had a sign floating above it. Only this one didn’t say,1c. This one said$10, minimum bet.

Tony looked at her. ‘Is that what you were thinking?’

Matchsticks. She swallowed. If she’d been thinking anything, it was matchsticks. The leap to ten dollars a hand was a leap to another world.

Tony smiled, a kind smile that reached his eyes. ‘Why don’t you just watch me for a hand or two?’ he said. ‘Join in when you’re ready… or not at all.’

‘Is that allowed?’ She was so unsure of the protocol, the rules, the etiquette of a casino that she felt like a child, like one of the kids she taught.

’Sure it is,’ he grinned. ‘We’re in Vegas! Everything’s allowed!’

Oddly disappointed, Kay followed him across. A part of her, she was beginning to understand, would have responded to some persuasion on his behalf to get her to play, wanted in fact to be persuaded, but he hadn’t even tried. Risk, she supposed, just wasn’t in her DNA, and he probably sensed this. She was, after all, an overweight, fifty-plus maths teacher from suburbia.

But a mere thirty minutes later,and any feelings of disappointment were as lost to Kay as size eight jeans. She was deep in the game, the lost song of all those childhood Sunday evenings, playing with her dad, coming back to her. Because the game, it turned out, was the same wherever it was played. And because she knew the rhythm of it in her bones, she’d only had to be reminded. Tony, she could see, knew it too. Despite his self-absorbed ramblings of earlier, his mind as far as Blackjack was concerned was sharp as a scalpel. He was now – she did a swift tally of his chips – up three hundred dollars. Whereas the player opposite had, in the time she’d been watching, lost just short of five hundred. And although the numbers made her palms sweaty, the game didn’t. Swap out those ten-dollar chips for matchsticks, and she’d play. She knew she would. She knew she could. Already she’d begun to second guess the bets Tony would make. A rusty old calculator rising up from her pool of memory and cranking into life, running odds in her head, tossing up probabilities and coming, she could see, to the same conclusions as Tony. And he was three hundred dollars up in… Twisting in her chair, Kay looked for a clock. There was, of course, no clock to be found. It didn’t matter. Three hundred dollars! Three hundred dollars… That was half a week’s wages, and clock or no clock, if there was one thing Kay was sure of, it was that she hadn’t been sat here on this stool for half a week. Again, autonomously, that calculator started up. How much over the course of a day? If she played the same strategy…

Two things happened at once that, together, jerked her out of her reverie.

Abruptly, Tony stood up, handed the dealer a pile of his chips and took fewer different-coloured ones in return. At the same time, she felt, through the fabric of her handbag, the vibration of her phone.

‘Are you done?’ she asked, disappointment rising again.

Tony shifted his tokens into one pocket, slipped his hand in and stretching the fabric jiggled them around. ‘May I give you a tip?’ he said, but he didn’t wait for her to answer. ‘Quit when you’re winning, Kay.Alwaysquit when you’re winning.’

Kay smiled. ‘Of course.’ She looked down at her phone. It was a text. From Helen. Two words.

I’m lost!

Phone pressed to her chin,both arms waving in the air, Helen rose onto her tiptoes and yelled. ‘Here! I’m here!’ She’d caught sight of a head of silver hair and had followed it, waiting, hoping, praying that it belonged to Tony, who should be with Kay. It was essential they saw her. They might walk past, they might not notice her at all, and she didn’t think she could face another minute in this whistling, jangling, horn-blowing, electronic hell. She’d given up with the claw long ago, and for what felt like an age now had walked around in circles trying to find someone, anyone that she recognised. Every time, every single time, she’d ended up back where she’d started.

‘Here!’ she yelled again.

And to her immense relief, Kay waved back.

‘Thank God!’ Helen sighed. ‘Did you play?’ she asked as they approached.

‘Tony did. He won three hundred.’

Helen’s jaw went slack. ‘Three hundred! You've had a great afternoon!’

‘Yep,’ Tony said, nodding amiably, as if winning hundreds of dollars was something he did every day.

‘Where’s Caro?’ Kay asked. ‘And Marianne?’

Helen shook her head. ‘When I told her that Caro was playing Titanic, she left to try and find her. For all I know she's still looking, this place is a maze. I've been walking in circles for ages.'

Tony laughed. 'They do it on purpose, to keep you from leaving.'

'Well it works,' Helen muttered.

‘Oh boy.' Kay sighed as she surveyed the plain of slot machines stretching away on all sides. ‘How on earth will we find them?’

‘That’s easy, ladies,’ Tony grinned. 'I suggest you follow me.' And he turned and set off the way he and Kay had come.

Astonishingly,for Helen, within a short minute they had found both Marianne and Caro. They were still playing Titanic, Caro banging on the play button with a jaw as rigid as a steel box and Marianne standing to one side, shifting her weight from hip to hip, impatiently waiting her turn. Both of them so engaged, a flying elephant could have passed by and they wouldn't have noticed.

‘It’s so stupid!’ Marianne cried, as they came closer. ‘There was plenty of room.’

'What's stupid?' Tony called.

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