Ghostwritten (40 page)

There are four flights of stairs between the bar and my room. It’s a stiff climb, and the stairwell can be quite spooky at night, and sometimes in the daytime, too. The building goes back centuries. From my window there’s a fine view over the Thames, as it curves around towards Greenwich and becomes an estuary. Upstream you can see Tower Bridge. It was a clear evening, and I could see streetlights coming on as far away as Denmark Hill and Dulwich.

If I did ever go to live in County Cork, I’d be on a boat back within a fortnight.

I opened the door to my room and my heart went into contractions when I saw the answerphone winking. Surely not Digger. He said I wouldn’t have to pay him back until the following Tuesday. My dole cheque comes on Monday, and I’ll be able to persuade Barry to give me £30 for this leather jacket of Roy’s. Four messages.

But first I bit the bullet and opened the letter from the credit-card company. If they type my name and address in upper case, it’s just a statement. If they use lower-case letters, I’m in trouble. This was upper case.

Even so, it hurt. Where had this money gone? A shoe shop, restaurants, music equipment, a modem. There was a nice little bit at the bottom saying that my credit limit had been extended by £300! Are these people stupid?

Nope. They’re not remotely stupid.

Next hurdle on the Marco Steeplechase: the answer machine.

‘Marco, this is Wendy. I know I promised not to call for a while, but I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry. Well, I’m fine. I got that place at St Martin’s. I thought you’d like to know. I told my boss today that I was quitting. Like you said I should, I just told him. Straight out. No beating around the bush. I told him, and that was that. I know you said we should have a cooling-off period, but if you wanted to celebrate with me, I could get a cheap bottle of champagne in and I’d cook you whatever you wanted. So if you’re interested, phone me. Okay? Wendy. Ti amo, bellissima. Ciao.’

Ah, poor kid. She’ll get over me at art college, and learn her gender endings. One down, three possible Diggers to go.

‘Ah, Marco, sorry to bother you, this is Tim Cavendish. We’re having a slight family crisis. It appears that my brother’s law firm in Hong Kong has gone down the tubes. It’s all a bit of a mess . . . there’s the Chinese police, asset freezing, and whatnot . . . Erm, why don’t you drop in middle of next week and we’ll see how this might affect my ability to run Alfred’s book . . . Erm, terribly sorry about this. Bye.’

Digger would have been better.

‘Marco, this is Rob. I’m leaving the band to go and shack up with Maxine in San Francisco. Bye.’

No problem, Rob leaves the band once a month. And I can stop trying to write songs that feature handbells. Last hurdle, God, please don’t let it be Digger. If he can’t contact me he can’t threaten me.

‘Dear Marco, this is Digger at Fungus Hut Recording Studios. How are you? I’m fine, thanks. This is just a friendly little message to remind you that you owe us £150 and unless you pay by 5 o’clock on Tuesday, then on Wednesday I will sell your drum kit for whatever the pawn shop in Tottenham Court Road will give me for it and spend the money on chocolate chip cookies for our cleaning staff. Best wishes, your loving uncle Digger.’

Sarcastic bastard. All this fuss for a piddling £150! I’m an artist, for Christ’s sake! I bet he isn’t such an arsehole if Mick Jagger owes him money. I’ll work something out somehow.

Some evenings I like to open the windows and meditate as the room empties into the ebbing dusk. But now I needed a crap, a shower, a joint and a nap, in that order, before I met Gibreel in the bar downstairs around 9.30.

I tried to phone Poppy but the line was engaged. Jealousy, with nowhere to put it. A pigeon fluttered onto my window ledge, and glanced around my room. Was that the same bastard bird whose dried shit I just washed out of my hair?

Pigeon paranoia.

Time for a joint with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. The last of Josh’s Moroccan Brown . . . Ah, the joys of being flat broke and Generation X and surrounded by women and being miserably alone.

My room is too much like a Methodist chapel. I’m more of a Church of the Feral Pagan type. What I need is a classy chair from a more elegant century, like Katy Forbes’s. Weird. I could remember her chair, her pepper-mill and the shape of her nipples, but not her face. She’d had a birthmark shaped like a comet.

I got clean, rolled my joint, and as I smoked it the ceiling lost definition. Ah! Peat fire in the hollow of the golden bough . . . Josh gets his hands on the very best. That Happy Gulliver-tied-down-by-Lilliputians feeling sagged my organs, and the next thing I knew the moon was framed by the window and Gibreel was standing over me. ‘Put on your zoot suit, Marco boy!’

My gummy mouth tasted of an inner sole. My clock shone 21.45. When did I last get a good night’s sleep? How did Gibreel get a key? I always lock the door when I smoke. ‘Why? Where are we going?’

‘The casino!’

I felt too mellow for my laugh to bubble up. ‘You’re taking the piss. I owe more money than the government of Burundi. I can’t afford to go to a casino.’

‘Which is exactly
why
we’re going to the casino, Marco! Win it back. Pay it off.’

‘Oh, just like that.’

‘I got the people, Marco. I got a system!’

This time my laughter busted down the door and ran off over the hills.

‘What’s so funny, you stoner?’

I wasn’t sure myself, I didn’t feel remotely amused by anything. It was either this or sob, I guess. I lassoed myself back and wiped the tears away. ‘Anyway, Gibreel, anyway. They don’t just let anybody into a casino. You have to be somebody. I’m definitely only an anybody.’

‘Don’t worry, Marco. My rich cousin from Beirut is over for the weekend. My rich cousin is definitely Somebody. They run out of precious metals to colour his bank cards. Tag along. You could emerge from tonight smelling of fortune.’

‘You’re a very bad influence, Gibreel.’

‘That’s why you hang out with me. King Marco, ruler of Niceland, one day decided that he needed a bit of wickedness. And behold! Yeah, verily his plea was heard by the Angel Gibreel!’ Gibreel’s eyes flashed in the semi-darkness, and the darkness moved. ‘Got any of that hash left, Captain Marcotics?’

We met Gibreel’s cousin some time later at a wine bar in Bloomsbury. I try not to make snap judgments, but I knew right away he was a prize wanker. He didn’t even bother to tell me his name. Sometimes you meet someone, and ten minutes pass before you realise that No, they really never are going to stop talking about themselves. He was too cool to ever remove his sunglasses. With him was a middle-aged Iranian called Kemal who had fled the revolution in the seventies. Kemal’s smile was radioactive. He clapped his hands together. ‘Let’s go, if I’m not mistaken Lady Luck is in the mood for some sweet loving. So, my friend,’ he looked at me, ‘you are a man of the rouge and the noir?’

‘I’ve never used rouge in my life,’ I quipped, and waited for laughter which never came. Make a note of that, Marco. No transvestite jokes with Arabs. ‘Erm, I’m going to be more of a spectator tonight. I have a cashflow problem.’

‘Creditors?’ hissed Gibreel’s cousin in a way which made me glad I wasn’t one of his. It was the first sign of interest he’d shown in me.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t have any.’

‘Excellent! You have no creditors?’

‘No. I have no cashflow.’

‘What is this? Going to a casino, destitute and penniless?’ Kemal fumbled in his shoulder bag and flung a thin stack of paper in my lap. ‘This cannot be, my friend.’ It quivered when it landed in a way that reminded me of banknotes. Jesus, it was banknotes!

‘I can’t—’

Kemal wasn’t listening. He fingered his beard and smiled at Rich Cousin. ‘Our friend Marco will do fine. Beginners are more unpredictable. But I insist on two to one.’

Gibreel’s cousin snorted. ‘Forget it. The odds are even.’

‘Marco will do fine for what?’ A cog clicked in a mechanism way bigger than me.

‘You didn’t tell him?’ Rich Cousin asked Gibreel, who also had a crooked smile.

‘Marco my son,’ began Gibreel, ‘Kemal and my cousin wish to place a bet on whether you or I come out of the casino with most money. You’ve just been given your stake to play with.’

I even felt my smile going crooked. ‘I really don’t feel terribly happy about—’

‘And we get to keep any winnings, plus double the original stake. An extra three hundred.’

‘Three hundred pounds?’

‘No, three hundred Opal fruits. Of course pounds.’

‘He worries too much,’ said Rich Cousin.

‘Way too much,’ agreed Gibreel.

‘It’s just a side dish, for us,’ said Kemal, ‘my friend.’

‘And if I lose all the money?’

‘Then you lose all the money,’ said Kemal, ‘and nobody cares.’

‘And Kemal loses his bet with me,’ observed Rich Cousin.

So there we were. Me, Gibreel, and two dodgy Arabs I’d only known for ten minutes in the back of a taxi on our way to a casino. That made four dodgy Arabs in total.

It was £150, in £5 notes so new they felt squeaky. A pert little coincidence, that. Exactly enough to pay Digger and get my drums back. Unfortunately, Gibreel’s cousin and Kemal showed me to the cashier to exchange the dosh for chips before I could think of a way to vanish down the nearest tube entrance.

So I had to grin and bear it as I exchanged my drumkit for thirty little plastic discs.

‘Now,’ said Kemal, ‘let us go our separate ways. I am a man of poker. We will meet in the upstairs lobby at midnight. Gibreel and Marco, midnight. Not a minute later, or the bet is void and you turn back into pumpkins.’

Rich Cousin strutted into the bar to flash money and select a woman.

‘Gibreel,’ I hissed, as we walked into the main roulette lounge, ‘they’re using us as toys. It sucks. Why do they do it?’

‘Because they are bored, rich, little boys who need new toys. The money is nothing to them.’

‘And anyway, doesn’t the Koran forbid gambling?’

‘Muhammad doesn’t patrol London. With non-Muslims, on non-Muslim territory, it’s kosher. Let’s gamble, and may the best man win.’

I wandered around for a while before sitting down, taking it all in. The carpet, magenta plush, made me want to put on a pair of slippers and a smoking robe. Men in dinner jackets mingled with women in silk. There were some rare and exotic females here, at home under the chandeliers. Smiling characters locked away in the decompression chambers of dreams. A Hooray Henry hoorayed and an old lady cawed like a crow. The green of the baize and the gold of the wheels were stolen from the land of faeries, under the hill. The roulette wheel spun so fast that it seemed to be motionless, the ball an atom of gold. When I leave three centuries will have passed. The glum and the bored and the quietly desperate and the manic jolly and the spectators. The croupiers worked like cyborgs, avoiding eye contact. I looked up to try to spot the cameras, but the ceiling was hidden in black like that of a TV studio. There were no windows, no clocks. Walnut panelling, prints of racehorses and greyhounds. I wandered into a room where blackjack and poker were being played. Kemal was already in a game. I came back and sat down on the side where I could watch the roulette, and asked for a coffee, hoping it was free. It was ten o’clock. I’d watch for forty-five minutes, and work out how to play.

Twenty minutes passed. A man who looked like Samuel Beckett a few weeks before he died sat next to me, fumbling for cigarettes. I offered him one of mine. He nodded, took a couple, and sedately rocked.

‘You’re a beginner wondering where to begin.’

‘I’m wondering how I can win,’ I said.

‘Let’s see now,’ he lit up, sucking the cigarette as an asthmatic does his inhaler. ‘Which game?’

‘Roulette?’

He spoke around his cigarette, his lips barely moving. ‘Well, the American Table has two zeros, so the odds against you are greater. Stick to the French Table. If you bet on the numbers the odds against you are 2.7 per cent. If you bet on the colours, then the odds against you are 1.35 per cent.’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’

Samuel Beckett did a Gallic shrug. ‘It adds up. It depends how long you play. After a hundred coups, fifty-two per cent of gamblers will be losing. After a thousand, sixty-six per cent. After ten thousand, ninety-two per cent of gamblers will be losing.’

‘Is there a way to . . . erm . . .’

‘At blackjack, yes. You memorise a bookful of algorhithmic probability patterns, and then you keep count. Bet heavily when the odds swing for you, bet lightly when they’re against you. In principle, it’s that simple. You have to be very good, though, or you’ll be spotted and escorted to the dustbins. It’s probably easier to become a London cabbie.’

‘I only got a grade “C” at maths. Would poker—’

‘Poker? At poker, you get what you deserve.’

‘Ah. I don’t think I want what I deserve. So, is there a way of winning at roulette?’

‘I’ll swap you that secret for a road-map to Xanadu. There’s plenty of ways for the casino to cheat – microscopic needles, electromagnets . . . but for the punter, the only hope is to miniaturise aerospace trajectory technology, and use it to plot the course of the ball. That’s been done.’

‘Successfully?’

‘In the laboratory, yes. But in Vegas the team got their circuitry shorted. I gather it was painful.’

‘I suppose I’d better rely on chance, then.’

Samuel Beckett indicated with a twist of his face that in that case, the conversation was over. My £300 cut of Kemal’s winnings was waiting.

I sat down, afraid of being unmasked as an impostor. I put my first chip on red. I was about to lose my casino virginity. I watched the ball bounce and hurl itself around the wheel. What’s the ball like, ghostwriter? Give us a metaphor.

Very well. It’s like a genie, spending its fury until nothing is left.