Читать книгу For Richer, For Poorer - Victoria Coren - Страница 10

4

TUESDAY

‘Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world . . . One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

– Albert Camus

We’re all talking about Robert’s cock. We haven’t seen it for ages.

‘I miss it,’ says James. ‘It’s been such a long time, I’m starting to forget what Robert’s cock looks like.’

It can’t be denied: ‘There was always something reassuring about looking up after a bad beat and seeing Robert’s cock pressed against the window.’

‘His large, impressive cock,’ says Trouts, dreamily.

‘If you want to see it again,’ says Robert, ‘we’ll have to play at my house.’

Quite why Robert should have a large wooden cock in his kitchen window is anybody’s guess. But his flat, in a council block off Chalk Farm Road, is full of odd things that he’s picked up over the years. Outside is all concrete, graffiti and pissy lift shafts. Inside is a cosy cave of antiquarian books, chess sets, obscure records, china bowls and hand-carved wooden items of no obvious purpose. Robert is a hoarder. If I’m ever trying to offload any unwanted Christmas presents, videos, crockery, random ephemera, he will always carry it away and squirrel it somewhere.

Yes, Robert’s wooden cock, his inexplicable decorative cockerel. Not his penis. The other boys are not so comfortable talking about that. They all made retching noises earlier tonight as he told us, again, the story of the Italian waiter who promised Robert, one drunken Christmas Day in a local restaurant, that he would be able to give him an erection. Always open-minded, Robert gave him the opportunity right there at the dinner table. But the waiter was wrong.

‘Come on, Robert,’ says The Sweep impatiently. ‘Imagine it was your turn to act – what would you do?’

It’s been Robert’s turn to act for about five minutes. He has a short attention span. It may be the drink. Robert plays tennis every Tuesday evening, drinking throughout, then turns up at the game with a beer tin clutched in his hand. He’s about 50, probably. A good-looking man with thick silver hair, dressed in a stained old tracksuit as though he sleeps on a park bench. He does sometimes sleep on a park bench. Not because he’s homeless, but because he’ll sleep anywhere.

‘I raise the pot,’ says Robert. ‘Blind.’

Everybody calls. Turns out Robert, who hadn’t yet looked at his cards, has got the nuts. He scrapes in a generous pot.

♠

James is in a bad mood. He’s been arguing with Pierre again. James runs a voiceover business and he made the mistake of forming a partnership with French Pierre, one of his ‘voices’. This has caused nothing but trouble. James is tense all the time now. When Hugo complains that James’s dog is farting under the table, James snaps at him. James loves that dog.

Pierre comes to the game, too. Pierre looks like a Goscinny & Uderzo cartoon. He has a walrus moustache, blazing tattoos and a comedy French accent. You’d think he was gay, if his conversation didn’t make it quite so obvious that he isn’t.

Pierre takes so long to act, he makes Robert look like the March Hare. But he’s one of the stars of the game. He gambles like a lunatic. And J.Q. loves to be shocked by Pierre’s tales from the sexual underworld. This week, Pierre is eagerly describing a Parisian fashion for urinating on a piece of bread for one’s lover to eat. Pierre doesn’t use those words.

♠

James cheers up when he remembers that he’s got a new personalized number plate which looks a bit like it says ‘poker’, if you squint. We congratulate him on faring better than Gary ‘The Choirboy’ Jones, who bought the number plate P1OKER and showed it off with great pride until someone in the Vic pointed out that it looked like PLONKER.

I try to charm James further by complimenting his new, short haircut. The plan works. James starts humming the theme tune from The Banana Splits, and re-raises Hugo the pot.

‘It’s that fucking haircut,’ says Hugo, angrily mucking his cards. ‘He thinks he’s Jean-Claude Van Damme.’

♠

Trouts, an IT support man who plays in a suit and tie, is doing impressions of Mr Burns from The Simpsons. Trouts loves The Simpsons. But not as much as he loves Friends. Trouts watches an episode of Friends every night before going to bed. He has seen them all a hundred times. He watches carefully until the last episode of the last series, then goes back to the beginning again.

Trouts eats meat. Only meat. No vegetables, barely even a potato. He likes a platter of beef, nothing on the side. Hugo, the erstwhile Sweep, worries for the state of Trouts’s intestines.

The Sweep’s own constitution is delicate. He is always either famished, or feeling sick because he ate too much. He’ll say, ‘I’m dying of starvation, when’s dinner, when’s dinner?’, then take one bite and groan, ‘I’m bloated.’ He can’t bear to play poker with anyone who has a cold. He thinks that if he sits too close to an open window, he might get polio. At our Christmas game, he always refuses to wear a paper crown because he says it gives him a headache. He thinks he’s got a ‘sensitive head’. Tonight he is nervous because his Creme Egg has got a hole in it, and The Sweep is afraid – genuinely afraid – that someone at the factory might have made the hole and injected liquid mercury into it.

♠

‘I’m losing again,’ says James. ‘I can’t believe Trouts will go home with another cheque of mine in his pocket. That’s terrible.’

‘It is terrible,’ agrees Trouts. ‘You must start bringing cash.’

♠

Dinner’s ready. Pasta for everyone, but a defrosted meat pie for Trouts. I bring in the plates. Conrad says thank you; the others remain silent. I carry the plates out again immediately. They jump up and rush into the kitchen with compliments. They remember the time I was so irritated by the lack of thanks, I scraped everybody’s dinner into the bin. They had to order a pizza.

But Conrad always says thank you. Conrad is awfully polite, very pukka. I think he might be related to an earl. He is easy-going and smiley, possessed of a genuinely optimistic temperament. God knows what he’s doing playing poker. Must have taken a wrong turn one day. He runs a charity tournament every Christmas, to raise money for a cancer hospital. He’s the nicest guy that ever comes here.

♠

Joe is teaching us a new variant. ‘It’s seven stud hi-lo, pairs wild for the low, leaners for the high, wheel’s the low.’

The Sweep gets excited. ‘We needed a new variant.’

It’s the last thing we needed. As if split pots, multiple flops, wild cards and draws weren’t enough, J.Q. has been keeping busy inventing new variants entirely; for weeks, we have been trying to get our heads around ‘Middles For Diddles’ and ‘Poker Baccarat’. I’d like to see Huck Seed apply his Game Theory to those.

Joe cleans up, wins the lot. Who allowed a professional into this game?

♠

Ashley’s a professional too, different sort of professional. He grinds it out, night after night in the Vic. Except Tuesdays, when he comes here. He plays online at home all day. I try to make a home-cooked meal every week, because Ashley is one of the people I worry would never get one otherwise.

Ashley always has a story to tell about someone in the Vic who annoyed him. Most people annoy him. He is a fiftysomething teenager. He wears a leather jacket and plays online under ‘Iconoclast’. He’s sarcastic, cynical and funny. He and The Sweep get along very well. They talk a lot about music. Ashley’s off the drugs these days, but he needs a cup of coffee every twenty minutes.

♠

‘My deal,’ says James. ‘How about regular seven stud, but if you manage to burp as you receive your up card, it’s wild?’

‘Banned,’ I say. ‘It’s on the list with baseball, fiery cross and burning ring. No burping wild cards.’

‘Oh,’ says Robert, disappointed. ‘I was just gearing one up.’

But he’s soon distracted by a race with Kira to see whose Jaffa Cake can melt faster.

♠

Robert’s asleep. J.Q. insists that we deal him in anyway, as he might wake up at any moment and want to bet the pot blind.

Val is watching sadly as Ashley felts Warren with two pair. Warren buys another stack of chips.

‘I would have flopped a straight,’ murmurs Val.

‘All right,’ says Hugo. ‘No need to tell us your life story.’

Val is a journalist, a reporter of the old school. He is dressed like James Stewart playing a journalist in a film. Proper shirt, knitted tie, brown waistcoat and jacket. But his trousers are taped at the bottom, for safety on his bicycle ride home. He is nearly as patrician as Conrad, and hasn’t belched or sworn in ten years at this game. But he always laughs at the others.

Val is feeling a little down because he has just published a book about his allotment, called One Man And His Dig, and The Sweep has told him it should have been called Sunday Muddy Sunday. His spirits are further lowered by spending three hours building up an impressive stack over a series of strategic Omaha coups, then blowing the lot in a single, terrible hand of Shifting Sands.

♠

J.Q. hasn’t said much tonight. That’s because he is trying to think of knock-knock jokes based on the choruses of popular songs. Last week, The Sweep turned up with

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Warrior.

Warrior who?

Warrior wanna make those eyes at me for . . .

And he sang the punchline. Ever since then, J.Q. has been obsessed with creating the longest possible sung punchline to a knock-knock joke. He is currently working on Matchstick Men And Matchstick Cats And Dogs.

He’s got as far as

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Andy, Payne, Ted, Matt, Chip, May, Nan, Matt, Chip, Cass, Anne . . .

But he’s not happy with it. He thinks ‘Chip’ isn’t quite right. He’s too stubborn to use the obvious Polish name Maçek. He thinks that would be cheating. And Val is insisting that it’s not ‘matchstick’ in the song anyway, it’s ‘matchstalk’. This is very problematic.

♠

It is last week, this week, next week. It is at Robert’s place, in James’s office, at The Sweep’s temporary home in Waterloo, at my flat, in all the future flats and houses we might inhabit. Within a year of my first visit, whatever else happens on Tuesday nights – birthdays, book launches, first nights, fire sales – the game is where I am. Always Tuesdays, in tribute to the old Alvarez/Holden/Spanier school of the 1980s.

Some of these players drop out of the game, some of them are yet to come. They will get married, get divorced, get drunk, have babies, end up in court over inadvisable business partnerships. James’s dog, Skala, is going to die.

Well – we’re all going to die.

But, until death comes, any of them could be back at any time. They appear and disappear again, as Feste dips in and out of Illyria.

Still, the game goes on, always the same. Even the money’s the same, passed round and round and round the same group of people from week to week and year to year. Same arguments, same jokes. I call . . . was a very good horse. I call . . . was a very good horse.

KING QUEEN SUITED

This is a big hand, even at a full table. In their classic textbook Hold’em Poker For Advanced Players, Malmuth and Sklansky classify it as a ‘Group Two’ hand. Group One hands are AA, KK, QQ, JJ and AK suited. Group Two hands are TT, AQ suited, AJ suited, KQ suited and AK offsuit. All other hands are Group Three or lower. These lists are in rough order of where each hand falls in the group, too – it’s worth noting that AK unsuited (so beloved of the aggressive modern player, who is too quick to shovel all his chips in with that hand before seeing a flop) has been calculated as statistically less lucrative than lower picture cards of the same suit. Malmuth and Sklansky are talking mainly about limit cash games – but limit or no limit, tournament or cash game, KQ suited is a big hand.

Chad Brown raises it up to 38,000, and everyone passes round to my big blind. I find K♣ Q♣.

He’s an interesting character, this Chad Brown. He’s an actor from the Bronx, who has had a few roles in TV shows and films including Basket Case 2. I have actually seen that movie. Years ago, in my teens, I was a devoted horror fan. At least one night a week, my friend Jess and I would curl up on the sofa with a packet of Revels and a VHS in which teenagers with more sexual experience than us would take it in turns to be slashed, chopped, hanged, beheaded and otherwise despatched in grisly ways until one of them (usually the virgin) walked into the sunlight at the end of the film, usually on the arm of a friendly vicar (unless the friendly vicar had turned out to be one of the vampires/werewolves/slashers etc). For some reason, some time in my twenties, I completely lost the ability to watch horror films. Like rollercoasters; I lost my stomach for those, too.

But I still remember a few favourites. Aerobicide: Working Out Can Be Murder (in which the victims were killed off using various different items of gym equipment) was very much a classic of its time. Rawhead Rex was beautifully scary until you actually saw the monster in question, which was patently made out of Blu-Tack and safety pins. Then there was Basket Case, the motto on the box of which was ‘Tisket tasket, what’s in the wicker basket?’ I don’t remember what was in the wicker basket, but it was something pretty gruesome. And the motto of Basket Case 2 was, if I remember rightly, ‘Don’t you dare snicker at the thing in the wicker!’, which sounded a little defensive, as if the producers had lost the courage of their convictions by the time they made the sequel.

Anyway, Chad Brown is mostly known in America now as the presenter of Ultimate Poker Challenge. So he’s a bit like me, maybe – working a lot in televised poker, presenting or commentating or interviewing the professionals, quite keen to prove that he’s a proper player, too. Except he’s got less to prove than me, since he’s had quite a few cashes in the World Series of Poker and other circuit events, and he’s been playing seriously since 1993. He’s dating Vanessa Rousso, a professional player from Canada. The organizers of the EPT will be delighted that he’s bringing some star quality to this final.

Chad’s been a bit quiet at this table lately. He came in as chip leader with 759,000, but he’s lost a few chips since then and has been on the back foot. Ordinarily, I might re-raise with KQ of clubs, but I’m aware that Chad hasn’t raised for ages and might have a big hand. Or he might feel obliged to show strength, whatever he is holding. I don’t want him to get stubborn and four-bet all in. I have got a big draw, and would really like to see the flop. So I just call.

The flop comes 8♣ 10♠ A♥. There’s a middle pin straight draw for me; if I were in position, I could bluff-raise with that, but it’s silly to bet out first when Chad is supposed to raise me whether he’s got an ace or not.

I check. Chad, surprisingly, checks behind. So he either hates the ace (maybe he’s got some kind of pair like JJ or 99?), or loves this flop so much (AK? AT? A set, even?) that he’s scared to lose me.

The turn comes Q♦. Well, now I don’t need to bet. If Chad has a better hand than a pair of queens, he will certainly call; and if he’s got a worse hand, he won’t. I’m better off checking and calling, give him a chance to bluff it.

I check again, and so, obligingly, does Chad. Now I know he doesn’t have two pair or a set, because only a basket case would check that twice.

The river is 9♠, and I check for the same reason I checked the turn. Now Chad bets 35,000. This seems a little curious. I guess he could have hit the nine, or he could just figure that I’ve shown weakness throughout the pot and be trying to pick it up on the end with nothing much. I’m only being asked to call 35,000 to win a pot already containing 119,000 – more than three-to-one my money, and it’s a lot shorter than 3/1 that Chad’s bluffing. I don’t even need to think before calling.

Oh! He’s got A♦ 5♦. That’s unexpected. I wonder why he didn’t bet the flop or the turn? I’m now especially glad I didn’t bet the turn myself, because I would have lost more money. But I doubt that Chad would have called a big re-raise before the flop with A5, so hindsight tells me a more aggressive play was in order. The flat call . . . as that strange man from the bridge club used to say whenever someone lost a trick after playing a finesse the wrong way round: ‘Not best.’