Sin City (15 page)

“Look,” I say. “I know you didn't steal it. It was a stupid place to hide it, anyway, when you're bound to plump the cushions up. In fact, it only shows how well you do your job. I should have phoned reception, asked someone to come up and explain that wretched safe.”

She doesn't understand. She's still pleading with me, begging, in that shrill and desperate jangle. I peel a crisp ten-dollar bill from the top of the pile. “Here”, I say. “Take this. God! I feel like a damned superior capitalist pig handing out sops to the exploited.” I'm talking to myself, but still out loud. They must assume it's some mere variation on “Awful weather”, since the cringing terror has changed to cringing smiles. I hate myself. For staying in a $600-a-night suite when six hundred dollars would keep their entire (extended) family for a month or two; for acting like a Beechgrove Friend and feeling smug about it. I stuff the rest of my money in my handbag, have trouble shutting it. Now I'm doubly determined to win – just so I can stalk back here and hand them fifty thousand each. And a few cool thousand for that lavatory attendant. I'll win so much, I'll hire a helicopter and scatter hundred-dollar bills all along the Strip, marked “Maids and workers only. Hands off filthy rich, especially all psychiatrists and magistrates.”

“Listen,” I say. “This could be the last day of your lives you ever make a bed or scrub a floor.”

The smiles bob back again, though I suspect I could be saying “chicken soup and noodles” for all they understand. Actually, they must think I'm dismissing them, because they're bowing to me, leaving, tripping down the stairs. Once they're gone, I glance around the bedroom which I've hardly taken in yet, except the fact it's red and grand again, and with so many mirrors, I can see at least a dozen Caroles. I've obviously been cloned and these are my reserves. I grin at them. They all grin back. I'm feeling stronger all the time. Twelve of me to win now.

I'm also relieved to see twin beds instead of one huge double – though, once again, the language needs upgrading. “Beds” is fine for our narrow two-foot-six affairs at Beechgrove, with their iron frames and thin and lumpy mattresses. These are thrones, or altars; raised up on sort of platform-things, and made even more imposing with velvet hangings, carved and gilded wood surrounds, and crowned with swanky shields. Winners' beds.

I close the door, walk slowly down the stairs again. Winners all around me in those gloating gods. Don't
I
deserve a laurel crown? I won that competition out of thirty thousand entrants. That's not bad. And I plan to go on winning.

I touch my finger to Zeus's wreath as he sits preening on his throne on the top peak of Olympus. “Bring me luck,” I pray.

I make straight for the champagne. Winners need fuelling first. The crowds are even thicker in the restaurant now, which reminds me of Wembley on Cup Final day combined with Harrods's sale. The bubbly shows no sign of giving out, though a chain of empty cannisters are lying like beached whales. Once my glass is full, I heap my plate, concentrating this time on the array of Chinese foods. I hesitate a moment over Dim Sum (dumplings) and deep-fried prawn balls, both oozing grease and calories. But a glance around the tables reassures me. I'm actually quite dangerously thin, at least compared with most of the women here. A party of seven blue-rinsed matrons (whose combined weight must top the hundred-stone mark) are gorging cakes and pastries, fat fingers scooping cream off treble chins; spare flesh dangling from vast upper-arms or oozing over chair-backs. And it's not just the women. The man beside me looks eight months gone with twins. I feel very frail and puny in comparison, help myself to five prawn balls (the pregnant man takes eight); some crispy duck, sweet and sour pork, and Hung Shao Yu because I like the name.

Our table is still miraculously free, though there's no sign of Norah yet. Did that attendant understand, or is she marching Toomey to the health spa or solarium, or booking her a private gambling lesson? I put my plate down, remove a Keno ticket from the rack. I'm here to win, not worry. If Norah can negotiate the miles of Beechgrove corridor, then a few yards of Gold Rush passage shouldn't faze her. She's always slow, in any case, likes to take her time.

I stare down at my ticket. Can that flimsy bit of nothing, badly printed on cheap and dingy paper, really change my luck? Yes. I must have faith. The Bow-Tie Man said Luck is a great lady who rewards those who believe in her. I crayon “$2” in the upper right-hand corner, try to decide which numbers to pick out. Perhaps I'll concentrate on ones – 1, 11, 21, and so on. After all, I'm on my own, basically, so I'd better learn to like it, look after number one, as Jon's mother used to say. Jon … I chew my crayon. I wish I could forget him. Okay, I know he wasn't right for me, but at least he made me real. I existed in his head (and bed), as well as just in mine. I tear the ticket up, take another. Who wants ones? Lonely feeble failures.

This time I mark the twos – 2, 12, 22, etcetera – Jon and Carole, Virgil and Carole, Zeus and Carole – and I up my stake as well – five dollars instead of two. Risks are part of winning, and the sooner I win, the more we'll have to spend for the rest of the ten days. It's economic sense. I take another ticket – one for Norah. If the numbers are drawn just as she returns, she may feel out of things. She's been a loser all her life. Time she won, or at least participated. I decide on threes for her. This is my third ticket and threes are always lucky. I cross through 3, 13, 33 … No – not 13 – I score that out again, continue with 43, 53 … Woah! Not too many. I think you win more cash with fewer numbers. Actually, I'm not that clear about the rules. They say Keno's very simple, but by the time I've read the (so-called) explanatory leaflet in the rack, I'm totally confused, not just by odds and numbers (and combinations of numbers), but also by special deals such as the Catch-All Rate, the High-Five Special, and the Fifteen-Dollar Combination ticket, which looks the best, since it's starred in red and printed extra large. I call the Keno girl, ask her to explain it.

“Well, honey, you pay just fifteen dollars which gives you as many as fifteen different possible ways to win, using four groups of two combination. Let me give you some examples …”

She starts showering me with dollars – dollars in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. All I have to do to win them is group the numbers I've already marked in twos, circling them with my crayon. I do the same on Norah's ticket. Must be fair.

“That'll be thirty dollars,” the girl says, checking both the tickets.

“Thirty?”

“Yeah, fifteen each.”

Even I can work that out. It's just the sound of it which scares me. Thirty dollars is almost a week's dole, a skirt or pair of jeans, a hundred tins of Heinz baked beans, at least two hundred eggs.

“Look, I'm not sure if …”

“Ya don't have that much time, honey. This game's closing in three minutes.”

I hand her six five-dollar bills, gulp my champagne, start stuffing in my food. I need courage, instant strength. Thirty dollars is
not
a load of groceries, or a few cheap chain-store clothes. It's an investment, a downpayment for the future. I shovel in a piece of duck, using just my fork. The fingers of my other hand are crossed. “Win,” I whisper between mouthfuls. “Believe.”

The Keno girl returns with copies of both tickets and a dazzling smile. (I suppose her dentist cost so much, she's keen to show him off.) “Good luck,” she whispers huskily.

I nod, continue eating, though I hardly taste the food. My eyes are fixed on the Keno board which is set up on the wall (several of them all around the room, so you can see one from wherever you are sitting). The numbers drawn at the central desk flash up on these boards in coloured lights, so there's no need to leave your seat. I check my watch, which I suspect is jet-lagged, actually, since I've never known it quite so slow and sluggish. Even the second-hand seems drugged. “Come
on
,” I urge, swallowing my Hung Shao Yu which could be plastic Keno-board itself for all I'm relishing the flavour. It's numbers that I'm eating, not mere food, sucking Norah's threes, spinning out slow delicious mouthfuls of my own twos and twenty-twos.

Oh, God! They're coming up now. A 48 is winking on the board, followed by an 8. I push my plate away, put the tickets in its place, use my fork as a pointer. It hovers over 22. I check the board again. No. Damn. It's 26, one I didn't mark. I glance back at the board. A 4 comes up and then a 70, a 13 (unbelievable), a 7. I cram a prawn ball in my mouth, whole, hold it there, not chewing. My stomach is a war-zone. Not one of mine or Norah's has come up yet, not one single one. But wait – more numbers – flashing up so fast now, it's difficult to check through both the tickets.

Relax, girl. If you get so damn uptight, you'll miss them when they do come up. I force the prawn ball down. It sticks halfway. I try a gulp of coke. It tastes bitter, poisonous – bitter like the fact that neither I nor Norah have marked a single number on that board. I check once more, try to concentrate. I'm new to this and with all the noise and clatter in the restaurant, the babbling voices, clash of cutlery, not-so-background music, I could be missing things. I start at 1, go slowly down to 80, up and down each line. No – I'm right – not one. Near misses, yes: 34 instead of 33; 1 and 21, both of which I marked originally. I should have stayed a single, looked after number one.

The screen is still now. No more flashing lights. Just twenty numbers mocking there, dead numbers. The odds against that happening must be absurdly unfairly high. It can't be mere bad luck – more like spiteful fate. I wasn't meant to win. I must be programmed as a loser, another Norah. My life was fine (well, bearable) until just last summer. I had a father and a future, a boyfriend and a home. All vanished now. Okay, so it's only one game, and a silly game at that, just a distraction while you're eating, not a serious distinguished game like baccarat or black-jack. All the same, it hurts. I trusted, I believed, and still it let me down. I stuffed myself with kings' food and ended up a lavatory attendant.

I push my plate away. Kings' food, hooey. Soggy batter oozing oil, mounds of slimy rice. How could I have eaten all that greasy fattening rubbish when I'm already a fat slob? I glance around me. A dumpling of a woman dressed in shiny pink, cramming in éclairs as if she's stuffing a silk cushion; a Japanese baby being force-fed by its mother, spewing out creamed spinach both sides of its mouth; an ageing gangster ripping up a chicken breast, sinking yellow china teeth into young white flesh. The noise is terrible. Not just jangling knives and forks, but the yelp of plates as the cleaners scrape and clear them, the groan and slurp of wasted food cascading into pig-bins. No pigs left – just carcasses and bones. Calves and lambs slaughtered in their thousands, pheasants shot in droves, salmon bloodying whole rivers – and all to feed us fatsos.

The background music has changed from a victory march to Christmas carols. “Silent Night.” The “Rest in heavenly peace” is drowned by raucous shouts of “Keno! Keno!”, a sudden bray of laughter from the table opposite. They're drunk. I ignore my own glass, fumble for my bag. I feel sick with stuffing, sick with lies. I push my chair back, struggle down to the exit, past all the loaded tables in the centre. Norah's jelly has collapsed into a multi-coloured mess; the meringue swan has a broken neck, the fish is skin and bone.

I return to the restroom. No sign of Norah, and a new attendant – a gigantic black woman wearing pink rubber gloves to match her overall.

“Norah!” I shout, as I dash through to the cubicles.

The woman follows. “You lookin' for you friend?”

I swing round again. “Yes, I am. Where's she gone? There was another woman here before – Mexican or something. Did they leave together?”

“No. Ramonda's gone to lunch. You friend's in here.” The woman raps a door. “In trouble.”

“What d'you mean, trouble? What's happened?”

“She got the runs.” The attendant heaves with laughter. “Got 'em bad. She come out, yeah, but back she go again, three times. I say to her: ‘That somethin' you ate, hon?' but she didn't get me. Where you friend from?”

I don't bother to reply. I'm talking to Norah, hammering on her door. “Why didn't you
tell
me you had diarrhoea?”

Okay, so Norah's shy, fastidious, but I feel somehow hurt, left out. Friends are meant to share things, even grotty things like bowels. Jan and I discuss our bowels (and periods), breathe on each other before important dates to check we don't need Listerine, borrow each other's laxative or tampons – or used to anyway.

I slump against the wall. I can hear Jan's voice saying “Bon Voyage”, see her walking out as Sister rings the little bell which marks the end of visiting-time. Once she'd left – really left, for Bristol and for Christmas – I felt another awful pang (the worst one yet, in fact) that it was me and some near-stranger jetting off, not me and my best friend. The feeling surges back as I bang on Norah's cubicle again. “Are you still bad?” I shout.

She mumbles something indecipherable. The fact she's in there still is reply enough. I feel a monster dragging poor old Toomey to a sixty-five-course banquet with champagne, when she should have stuck to water and dry toast. But how was I to know? It's usually her bladder, not her bowels.

“You best get her somethin'.” The attendant has followed me again, and is listening in, hand on hip, head cocked. She's obviously enjoying this diversion, this rest from swabbing floors. “Diar-Aid's real good. Don't clog you up for days like some of them things do. An' it's jus' a small white pill, so you friend won't have to swallow all them pints of chalky goop. There's a drugstore jus' three blocks away. You go out the back of the hotel – not the main front entrance – an' take a right, then cross the street an' …”