was what was I doing in an illegal poker game round the back of Islington with men called Riverboat anyway. My parents tried their best. French lessons, ballet lessons, lots of books, careful elocution. Yet I seem to have grown up into Nicely Nicely Johnson.
‘Are you not going to take Mile End Road?’ I ask.
‘Nah,’ says Ray. ‘Solid traffic. We’ll go the back way.’
As he launches into another unlucky Omaha story, I drift away a little. I don’t think Ray would mind. We tell these gloomy tales to exorcise them, not because we need them listened to. The rhythm of his words . . . up and down . . . with the flush draw . . . bet the pot . . . the turn comes over . . . is like a gentle piece of familiar background music.
If I were driving my own car, I’d be listening to my poker tape. The story of my life, the soundtrack of the imaginary film, which I have played from Liverpool to the Isle of Man, from London to Baden, from Nice to Monte Carlo, from Los Angeles to Vegas.
The Gambler is on there, of course, which I first heard twenty years ago when it was recommended by the boys in my brother’s game. Better Not Look Down by B.B. King, which reminded me, before those first tournaments in the Stakis basement, to be brave. Rescue Me by Fontella Bass, which made me laugh en route to Late Night Poker when I had no idea what I was doing. There Is Always One More Time by Johnny Adams, from when I first met the Hendon Mob, saw the hope in their eyes and the visions they hatched, and learned from it. Beyond The Blue Horizon, because that could inspire anyone to feel hopeful.
Killing Me Softly, which was playing in the cab as we drove back to McCarran airport in the magical Moneymaker year. Desperado by The Eagles, which filled my head with the romantic glamour of flying solo through life, until I got my heart broken and it stopped being funny for a while.
Come And Get It from The Beatles’ Anthology 3, which makes me thump the steering wheel and think positive, tell myself I’m a winner like a man would. Take Another Little Piece Of My Heart by Janis Joplin, because I came to understand that tournament poker is a bruising, crippling, endlessly disappointing and rejecting enterprise so you have to embrace the masochism, and I love the way she sounds like she is begging for the pain. Then Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head by B.J. Thomas, because it’s only a game.
You Can Get It If You Really Want by Jimmy Cliff, because it turned out I can win just like anybody else can, everything can click and flow, cards can fall right, spells can be cast, fireworks can go off, and if your trophy isn’t shining yet, then you have to keep believing.
Only New York Going On by Francis Dunnery, because everything happens at 4 a.m. All the winning, all the losing, all the adrenaline, all the pain, and all the staring out of windows in empty hotel rooms, with money or without.
And Let The River Run by Carly Simon, because that is what it’s all about. The river runs its own course, at its own pace, according to its own will, and all you can do is learn how to raft without drowning.
Funny how so many of them are about being alone. All of them, really. And yet, poker is the most companionable thing I do. The Tuesday game is my only regular social fixture. The Vic is my home from home. So much laughter and friendship and adventure – and money. It hasn’t been lonely, has it?
I started playing poker to make friends and meet boys. Now I’m turning up with £5,000 in my pocket, thinking I can beat the world champion. I don’t know if something went very right, or very wrong.
‘You’ve gone quiet,’ says Riverboat Ray as we clunk through the iron gates of the studio.
‘Well . . . it’s been a long journey,’ I reply. ‘From there to here.’
Ray says, ‘It would’ve been longer if I took Mile End Road.’
PART ONE
1
1988
The World Series of Poker might as well be the moon.
My brother’s game is on the other side of that wall. It makes the whole house smell of smoke. It sounds like a murmur and a clatter at once. Clop-clop go the clay chips, like a sound effect for horses’ hooves. Clink-burble go the ice cubes and the whisky in the glasses. The conversation is low, male, rumbly, burst sometimes by laughter or howls of injustice. It is a rebellious, beckoning sound. I want to be there.
We’re doing Twelfth Night this term. I’m enjoying it. I like Illyria, the magical island of nowhere. I like Feste, who drifts in and out. Where does he come from? Where does he go? Nobody knows. I like the madness below stairs, the rebellion of the uncontainable games, the playfulness and cruelty, disguises and secrecy, the whirligigs of time bringing in their revenges.
But right now, I can’t read it. I’ve been staring at the same page for an hour. Don’t want to study Shakespeare. Don’t want to solve equations, don’t want to write up the effects of iodine on saliva, don’t want to learn the dates of Henry VIII or draw an oxbow lake. Don’t want to go to bed. Clink-burble-clatter go the chips and the drinks in the other room. The smoke floats and the boys laugh. I want to be there.
♠
The boys speak a weird language of ‘trips’, ‘bullets’, ‘cowboys’ for kings and ‘a nugget’ for a pound. Matt wears a T-shirt which says NOT ALL TRAPPERS WEAR FUR HATS. He is going out with Al Alvarez’s daughter. That’s why the boys play this funny game that nobody else does, because Alvarez led the way. Al Alvarez has climbed mountains and written poetry, and he’s been to the World Series of Poker, which might as well be the moon, and he has written a book about it. Al Alvarez is God.
And God knows why they are suddenly letting me play. What do they think? Maybe it’s funny. Giles’s kid sister – short, chubby, bookish, growing up slowly – putting her pocket money on the table and trying to fit in with the boys. I don’t want to flirt with them. I want to be them. Big, brash, confident, 18-year-old boys.
Other girls at school have boyfriends. They have properly old boyfriends, who wear belts and drive cars. Other girls at school are willowy and graceful, flirty and coquettish, flawlessly bred and perfectly dressed, confident like 35-year-old bankers’ wives. I still like climbing trees and visiting my grandma.
They know I’m from different stock. My bus home goes north, through Kilburn and up towards Golders Green, instead of west to elegant Richmond and Putney. I’m not glamorous.
And I don’t want a boyfriend. When we were eleven years old, we did an exchange programme with our ‘brother school’ and had mixed lessons for a week. It was brilliant. The boys mucked around in class, played practical jokes, spent break-time kicking footballs around instead of putting nail varnish on. It was the most fun I’ve ever had at school. Then the exchange programme finished and all the boys went away again. I miss them.
I did kiss a boy once. It was at a party in a park. I’d stolen some of my brother’s dope to impress everybody. I’d never had it before. Somebody held my hair while I threw up. I was no fool; I knew for a fact they were plotting to kill me. Plus there were those deadly herons everywhere. A few hours later, after a snooze in a flower bed, I found myself kissing a boy called Brian, who wanted to be a pilot. It was awkward, embarrassing and uncomfortable. I won’t be doing that again for a while. A
