Goodness, who would have expected such sexism from an antipodean soft-porn mag? But I make a note to be more careful, in future, about my flirtatious tactical sighing. Sometimes I forget that there are people watching. And some of those people are idiots.
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
