The Last Card (14 page)

I
n an alleyway off Vallance Road in Whitechapel, the back door of a shebeen burst open with the force of a kick. As the door flew open three burly Bengali men piled out dragging a struggling and dishevelled H. Once out into the cool of the night, H was tossed like a sack of potatoes on to a smelly, sweating pile of rubbish. Looking down at H without pity, Shohidur, one of the Bengali men, dug his hand into the pocket of his cargo trousers and pulled out a thick coil of notes.

‘Take a taxi, H. Get some sleep.’ Shohidur peeled off a twenty pound note and tossed it at him. The night was airless and the note fluttered back and forth, falling gently to the greasy ground. H,
bleary-eyed
and reeking of smoke and alcohol, sat up on the rubbish to face his persecutors. He ignored the note lying next to him, examining instead the tear that had appeared along the seam of his lucky suit, under his right arm. He looked up at Shohidur. One of the other Bengali men smiled down at H and said something in Sylheti. All three of the Bengalis laughed and H’s face darkened.

‘Ask me, Shohidur. ‘H was aware of a thick burr to his voice, put there by the six shots of Jack Daniels he’d had in quick succession.

‘Ask you what?’

‘Ask me why the three of you look so fucking ugly when you laugh!’ The three stopped laughing. ‘You’re like the three fucking gargoyles on the corners of the Chrysler building in New York. You know the one I mean? Yeah, yeah, the three of you are like, like, like masterpieces of gothic masonry. It’s the extended foreheads and the big mouths full of brown stained …’

That was as far as H could get before the side of Shohidur’s shoe
caught him a glancing blow on his cheek. Luckily he’d seen it coming and had just managed to move his head. Had he caught its full weight it could have been all she wrote. Shohidur leant down and picked up the twenty pound note he’d so casually dropped for H’s taxi-ride home.

And with that the three Bengalis were gone. H heard the door being heavily bolted and barred from inside.

He sat on the pile of rubbish for several minutes, his chin resting on his hands. As he stared blankly into the blackness of the night he gradually became aware of the poster on the wall opposite. It was a billboard poster of a boxer. The poster was old, advertising an
up-and-coming
fight that had, in fact, long gone. The boxer whose picture hung smiling in the blackness of that grubby, Whitechapel alleyway was Henry ‘Bugle Boy’ Mancini.

H had come straight down from the Grundy Park Leisure Centre to this Bengali-run shebeen in Whitechapel. Operated by the diminutive VJ, Whitechapel’s longest-running illegal gambling shebeen was a haven for less-than-devout Muslims from all over London. As well as the Muslims, the usual West End habitués often stopped in to give VJ’s a run and the games were accompanied by entertainingly raucous and sometimes violent discussion about world affairs. The mood H had been in that night meant it was exactly the atmosphere he needed: a reminder that the world had problems bigger than his.

H didn’t necessarily have to participate in these discussions; just listening was entertainment enough. He could remember one
particularly
entertaining night when the topic of discussion had been about Bill Clinton, and his ill-fated affair with that intern Monica Lewinski. A number of the clientele in the shebeen that night were big fans of Clinton. They couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

The topic in the house on this particular evening was the continuing presence of George W. Bush’s American troops in Iraq. As H sat himself down at the table with worries of his own swirling around in his head, the discussion was already in free flow. Since the
ramifications
of Bush’s decision were of particular significance to the largely Muslim gamblers, the mood round the table was as raucous as usual but less humorous.

‘That fucking Bush! He needs to be dealt with,’ scowled a young Pakistani mechanic called Harwant who had arrived in London from Birmingham two or three years ago. He threw his beaten hand into the
middle of the table in disgust. ‘They should deal with him like the IRA used to; shoot off his kneecaps.’ The violence of his comment was no doubt prompted by the failure of his pair of aces to result in a win.

Whatever the reason, it was received with general nods of approval – despite Harwant’s failure to outline who ‘they’ should be. H,
meanwhile
had also lost the last hand and as his worries mounted he listened to the conversation flowing around him with only half an ear.

‘Wha’ you tarkin’ about? You cian’ do dat to the President!’ This was the elderly and feisty Sanjay, the Trinidadian Indian who had lived in London for the last twenty-five years and who smoked incessantly.

‘Why not? They shot the Kennedys, they shot that black leader, Martin Luther King; they can shoot Bush!’ Harwant drained his shot of rum and coke and held up his empty glass. A plump woman in a sari silently took it from him and went away to refill it.

‘You don’ see de man ’ave body guard aroun’ him 24-7?!’ Sanjay was so incensed by Harwant’s naiveté that he coughed and hawked loudly into a handkerchief. He carefully examined the result of his loud lung evacuation, wrapped it up and slipped it into his trouser pocket.

‘I don’t care about that; he’s a dangerous man.’

‘And you don’t think Bin Laden is equally dangerous?’ Devinder was a Bengali man in his late 60s and was generally accepted as being the most widely read of the shebeen’s habitué as well as being a fair poker player. In keeping with the esteem with which he was held by the other Muslim players he spoke in a soft voice.

‘Bush is a colonialist and the world has seen enough of
colonialists
!’

‘Dis is not a colonial war. Were you not dere to see the pictures of the two towers in New York burning?’ H was only vaguely aware of who Devinder was but by this point in the evening he didn’t care. Things were not going well for him and an element of desperation had entered his play. His customary coolness under pressure had deserted him and he was still waiting for his first win of the night.

VJ always allowed the alcohol to flow freely and despite the number of Muslims in the house, the drinks were always consumed with enthusiasm. H was no slouch in the drinking stakes and was well into his third Jack Daniels.

‘Terrorism is an evil! It’s an evil! It has been taken to a new low. And it has made the world a much more dangerous place.’

‘And who are you to define who is a terrorist and who is not a terrorist?’ This was Manmohan, the manager of the petrol station on Cambridge Heath Road.

‘More dangerous than terrorism is that black woman who hangs on Bush’s shoulder like a vulture. What’s her name? Something Rice?’

‘She’s a hawk, not a vulture.’

‘She looks like a love machine. I quite like her.’

‘That’s because you haven’t had sex in a long time, sir.’

‘Fucking hell! That woman should be forcibly strapped in a burqa.’

‘And that is precisely my point,’ said Devinder in a silky voice. ‘The burqa is an instrument of repression that is holding much of the population in the Middle East in bondage.’

Devinder’s observation made the others stop and think. But not so deeply that they would look at the plump woman in the sari in a new light as she returned with Harwant’s rum and coke. Devinder now waved her over. He handed her his full glass of whiskey and water.

‘This tastes like mosquito piss, take it back. Bring it back with a decent amount of whiskey in it.’ He imperiously waved her away and turned back to more important things. ‘You see the problem with the worst excesses of Islam, fundamentalists like those bastards the Taliban, is that the oppression of women is a wastage of human resources. The state of much of the Middle East today suggests to me that they cannot afford to waste fifty per cent of their intellectual resources.’

‘You tarkin’ like you smart, Devinder, but you tarkin’ shit! You see my wife?’ Sanjay squinted at the hand that had just been dealt to him. ‘I would love to hol’ ’er in a burqa.’ He suddenly whip-lashed his index finger and the finger next to it together with loud crack. Evidently Sanjay was pleased with the cards he had been dealt. ‘I tell she me is a man an’ I want to come out and pass some time wid de boys,’ he smiled broadly at his cards as he sorted them out in his hand, ‘an’ she want to start!’ He looked up and around the table. ‘Who going firs’?’

For H, who went first no longer mattered. He would usually have interjected his own thoughts into the conversation and banter that
flowed all around him. Tonight, however, was not one of those nights. He lost his hand and over the next two hours he lost many more. It was at the loss of his last £20 pounds – from the £300 that had been his purse from the evening’s boxing – that he finally lost his temper and rose unsteadily to his feet, grabbed the edge of the gambling table and tipped the whole thing – cards, money, drinks – over on its side. The shouting, cursing and threats that followed were ended when the Houseman, Shohidur, and his henchmen grabbed H. They frogmarched him to the exit at the rear of the shebeen and threw him into the rubbish.

As H sat and contemplated his fate, he looked away from the image of the smiling Mancini, apparently sent to taunt him, and dipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket. He pulled out his talisman. He looked at it for a long time, waiting for it to explain why his life was going so badly wrong. He had four days left with which to find £15,000 pounds. Four days! Having stared drunkenly at the lighter for a while and found no answers, H slipped it back into his pocket, eased himself off the rubbish heap and headed for the end of the alley.

Back on Vallance and rubbing the cheek where he’d been kicked, H turned right and walked with difficulty to Hanbury Street, where his car was parked in the shadow of a tower block. The first thing he saw was the broken glass on the passenger’s seat. Suddenly he knew this night could still become worse. He walked round the car and saw that the front window had been smashed. The stereo had been ripped out. Adding insult to injury was the front door on the driver’s side, unlocked. The smashed windows were a wanton act of vandalism. H walked around the car to see if any other damage had been done. The front two tyres had been slashed. Why?

‘Fucking … Jesus Christ!’ H swore under his breath. The insult to his gun-metal grey, vintage Mercedes, circa 1973, sobered him. He stood up straight, hoping to see the vandal. The streets were empty. He turned, pulled up the collars on his lucky suit and wandered off, back past the shebeen to the Whitechapel Road. He didn’t know where he was going but did know that he couldn’t face
his empty flat in Battersea.

Tired and footsore, H walked down Wardour street. He hadn’t been heading anywhere in particular, but as he neared the centre of town it seemed natural to aim for Blackie’s shebeen. The night was warm and H had walked all the way from Whitechapel. And while he walked, H thought. About Beverley, about Akers, about his boxing, about his life.

Did he really love Beverley? Or was she just a convenience? Certainly he loved Cyrus but the fact that he was less certain about Beverley worried him. He was deeply hurt by her abandonment of their relationship. Why had she done that? Of course, he knew why she’d done it, but still … why had she done it? Then he thought about his boxing. Why did he continue? Was he trying to prove
something
? Did he even enjoy boxing any more? And what about the connection Beverley saw between his gambling and the boxing? Was she right about that?

And finally H came back to the £15,000 he owed Akers! £15,000 pounds! Why was it that H was walking along the embankment with absolutely no money to his name? None! Zero! How was it that H, a grown man of thirty-two, could possibly have allowed this to happen? England is the fourth richest nation in the world; was it that H was so dumb, so inadequate, that he couldn’t carve himself a slice of that wealth?

All these thoughts and more ran round and round H’s head. And the more they ran the more one single thought seemed to dig into him. It was a rising sense of panic that somehow he was becoming invisible. He was walking past people, watching them, and they all seemed to be oblivious to him, to his presence, to his physicality. He was like a ghost, like a shadow, flitting though the streets of London. He wanted to shout, he wanted to jump up and down, wave his arms about: Hey! Look at me! I’m here! I exist! I’m not a shadow, I’m real, I exist!

So deep in thought was H that he missed the turning to Blackie’s shebeen and continued on down Wardour Street. As he was passing Meard Street, on the left, he saw a small crowd of people, hanging around outside the nightclub Gossips. He stopped. The vague bass line thump of Burning Spear’s ‘Marcus Garvey’ insinuated itself into his head. With its lilting melody a memory floated into H’s mind. He
and Spiky Conway, a white school friend, had first heard this track in a record shop in Brixton. Something about it immediately appealed to both of them and H had promptly started skanking – the popular dance style of the day – right there in the record shop. As H bent his knees and poked out his small bottom, bobbing it up and down in time to the music, Spiky began to copy him. Neither H nor Spiky could dance particularly and the sight of the two of them – they couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old – had the shop assistants in stitches as they bobbed and bounced in time with the music …

H’s eyes suddenly pricked with tears.

A
s a burst of weak sunlight streamed in through grimy windows, H lay sprawled and sleeping on his mattress. He was still in his lucky suit, still wearing his shoes. Lying next to him on the floor was his talisman and, next to that, his goldfish, swimming in its bowl.

H’s eyes opened as he slowly came to. Jesus Christ! His head was killing him. He didn’t move a muscle except the small ones that controlled his eyes. He needed these to stare up at the ceiling. His head was pounding, throbbing in waves. For the first time, and it was a surprise to him, he saw what a terrible job somebody had done in painting up the bedroom. H wondered why he had never noticed that before.

H tensed his neck and then moved his arms as he propped his body up. He groaned as he looked around. The room was a mess. He swung his feet round, clambered off the mattress and walked stiffly through to the kitchen.

In the cupboard above the small cooker, sitting on top of a tin of pilchards, was a bottle of Aspirin. He swallowed two with a glass of water and then looked in the fridge. Inside, lurking at the back, was half a carton of milk, a dry, crusty lump of cheese and a mango. H lifted out the carton and put it to his nose. He withdrew it quickly and poured its curdled contents down the sink.

Above the sink was a window that looked out over the back of the flats. Leaning his forehead against the glass, H watched the life of the estate continue; oblivious to his problems. Reggie was outside tinkering with his ancient BMW, which H was sure he had been working on for as long as the two of them had been neighbours. A
number of small children played on the nearby swings. Two old ladies, one white, one black, walked slowly arm in arm along the grass verges that surrounded the estate. Life went on.

H took off his jacket and threw it over the wooden chair, the only piece of furniture left in the room. He ran the cold tap in the kitchen sink and dunked his head under it, feeling the revitalising cold of the water. Unable to find a tea-towel, he grabbed his good, Lilliard jacket and used it to dry his face.
Plus ça change!

Feeling refreshed, H stared blankly out of the window again. Slowly he nodded his head, resigning himself to what he would do next.

Dressed in jeans and a clean t-shirt, H opened the holdall he used for his training kit and stood before his boxing trophies. Carefully, he packed them into the holdall, zipped it up and left the flat.

H knew of a pawn shop in Islington which would take the trophies. He wouldn’t get what they were worth, he knew that. But he also knew that for them to go, to justify their passing, that moment, that second, would have to be a new beginning …

The rays of the afternoon’s weak sunlight had given up their
struggle
and now hid behind a quickly greying sky. Rain threatened. H looked at the pawn shop on the corner of St. John Street and Goswell Road. It was an old Victorian premises and H had been there a number of times in the past as his preoccupation with gambling had increased. On his last visit he’d pawned his Tag Heuer 2000 watch, bought with the winnings of one of his largest purses. It had been a particularly unpleasant occasion since he’d known he was unlikely to ever redeem it. He had sworn then that he would never be back. H navigated St John Street and cautiously entered the shop. The bell tinkled as he crossed the threshold. Fortunately there were no other customers inside; H was in no mood to face the panoply of London’s poor and disenfranchised – giving up their baubles, trinkets and the consumer goods that made struggling lives seem less of a struggle.

A middle-aged man, pale and sour-looking, with thinning ginger hair, stepped forward. He eyed H with no particular warmth.

‘You again. What can I do for you?’

Grimly, H lifted up his holdall and one by one, took out his most prized possessions. These were the trophies of a lifetime’s
endeavour
,
the tangible symbols of hard-earned excellence; these few possessions gave much of H’s life meaning.

The shopkeeper picked up, turned over, felt the heft of and closely examined each of the statuettes and trophies with meticulous, professional care.

‘I’ll give you a hundred pounds for the lot.’

Walking with a heavy tread H approached the door of his good friend Blue. Despite being twenty-nine, Blue still lived with his parents in Willesden. The lash of gentrification that had affected other parts of the city had not touched this part of North-west London, but house prices were still rising quickly. It was fortunate that he got on well with his parents as there was little chance for a man like Blue to either buy or rent his own place.

Looking up at the big Victorian house, H thought back to his
relationship
with his own parents, before they returned to Montserrat. Both had been young teachers when they came to England in the 1950s and had arrived at these shores with the zeal and enthusiasm common to most of that first wave of immigrants. At last! They were feasting in the bosom of the mother country!

Unfortunately, the mother country had other ideas. The
depressing
weather, the frosty attitude of the people and the lack of job opportunities saw that initial immigrant zeal drift away into memory. Gone! Like the Caribbean sunshine!

Joseph, H’s father, eventually settled into work in a paint factory. His mother, Sara, after a number of manual jobs, drifted into
secretarial
work in an unemployment office.

These facts needn’t have blighted H’s life, but they had. Again, like most immigrants, H’s parents had wanted better for their son. They wanted him to have the kind of career they had been denied: a good, professional job as a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher. When H had first showed prowess as an athlete, his parents had been proud. Particularly his father. Joseph had loved to go to the fights and watch his son dance his way to victory. But as it became clear that Hilary, their youngest son, and the most academic, was gradually allowing
the thrill of this game, this hobby, to take precedence over his studies, their pride slowly turned to annoyance. When annoyance turned to anger, H’s relationship with his parents became
increasingly
difficult.

By the time Joseph and Sara returned to Montserrat H was barely in contact with them. He’d moved out some time before and was living in various short-term rooms paid for with part-time work as either a postman or as a builder, depending on the season.

With all the career opportunities that England offered, H’s parents never understood their son’s lifestyle. In the days when H was winning fights and journalists spoke of him as a world
championship
contender, they found it difficult. But when things began to slide, when, having turned professional, H was mostly losing his fights, they were able to say to him ‘You see? I tol’ you dis fightin’ is not a t’ing for a man like you! Wid all you education! Why you don’ look a proppa job? Proppa!’

Six years ago, both his parents had died in a road accident. That was the worst. And in a way, that was when H had realised that he couldn’t stop the boxing. For him to stop a piece of him would have to die. And with the loss of his trophies, a piece of him had.

H knocked on Blue’s door. A moment later it opened and Blue stood before him, in white vest and jeans, tall and dramatic, locks hanging down his back. Blue embraced him in a hug.

‘Long time, man, how you doing, H?’

‘Not too good, man, not too good.’

‘Yeah? Come inside, talk to me, man. Tell me all your troubles. You know I’m gonna make them all go away.’ The two entered the house and walked through a hallway leading to the large kitchen at the back. ‘I’ve got a friend here but he’s going soon, then we can talk.’

On the way through the hallway they passed the front room, where a photographer was taking pictures, Blue’s mother looking on proudly. H poked his head through the doorway and called over to the sprightly Jamaican woman.

‘Hello, Mrs. G, how are you?’

‘Oh, hello, Hilary, I’m all right, t’ank you very much.’

‘I see you finally made the cover of
Good Housekeeping
then?’ He nodded towards the tall photographer. Mrs. Groover laughed appreciatively.

‘Oh, no! Dis young man is a journalist. From The Voice. ’E’s doin’ a piece on … on, what was it again, young man?’

The journalist stopped taking photos and turned to face H. They shook hands.

‘Hi. Kolton. I’m doing a piece for Black History Month on the aesthetics of the West Indian Front Room.’

‘Das right, ’is name is ‘Kolton’, not ‘Carlton’.’

‘The West Indian Front Room?’ H said, puzzled.

‘You know, the aesthetics of the flowery wallpaper, the colourful doilies,’ he waved a hand airily round the room. ‘The plastic that covers the sofa and chairs; where all that stuff comes from, why our parents, the first generation that came over from the Caribbean, designed their front rooms like that.’

‘Cool. I’ll look out for the article.’ H waved again at Mrs. G and went to join Blue in the kitchen.

Blue stood at the cooker pouring hot water into two mugs. He handed one to H, and passed the other to another man, who was sitting at a round breakfast table to one side of the room.

‘H, meet Wha Gwan, Wha Gwan, this is H.’

As H nodded at Wha Gwan and Wha Gwan nodded back, H looked at him closely. He had half of his hair tightly bound in a cane row style, but the other half was loose, a style favoured amongst the brothers in North London. H was sure he’d seen him before but he couldn’t remember where.

‘Is that fool from The Voice still doing his interview with your Mum?’ The question was squeezed through a scowl that seemed to grip Wha Gwan’s entire body.

‘Relax, man, my Mum likes showing the “nice young man” around. It’s not often she gets the chance to show people her doilies and t’ings, you know’t I mean!’

‘It’s a piece for Black History Month, apparently,’ said H.

‘Black History Month! That’s a joke!’ snapped Wha Gwan.

‘Like that’s the only time of the year our history’s relevant, you know what I mean!’ Blue added.

‘You know’t I mean,’ echoed Wha Gwan, with special emphasis.
‘Listen my friend, white people in this country, they don’t want people to know our history. They don’t even want people to know their history because it’s a history of cruelty, barbarity and exploitation. Pure and simple. Hmph! Black History Month!’ Wha Gwan dunked a digestive biscuit aggressively into his coffee.

Blue looked across at H.

‘Wha Gwan is a Science Fictionist. He’s got a theory that White People …’

‘…Aren’t human like alla we.’ Wha Gwan needed no prompting to expound on his own theory. ‘They are another species of human altogether and their sole aim is to destroy the planet.’ Wha Gwan paused while he bit into the moist digestive. ‘They’re going to destroy it through the enslavery of other races; the black man, the yellow man, the brown man and the red man. They’re also going to destroy the planet’s resources; rinse out all the oil in the Middle East, mash up the rain forests, tear out the ozone layer and unleash genetically modified foods on people.’ Wha Gwan stared at H as though
challenging
him to dispute the truth of his statements.

‘That’s a radical theory,’ said H, not quite sure how best to respond.

‘These are not theories, my friend, these are facts. Facts! The war between white people in the east and white people in the west, has ended. That was the cold war. The war between the Germans and other Europeans has ended. The second European war – which they called the World war. Now that they’ve finished fighting each other, they’re concentrating on taking over everything from everybody. America and Europe. White people.’

H nodded wisely, wondering how, exactly, he was going to ease himself out of this conversation. He’d come round to talk to Blue about his problems with Akers and Beverley, not argue with a Science Fictionist over his theories of Caucasian world domination.
Unfortunately
, Wha Gwan seemed to be on a roll.

H had met many black people, who, when the pressure of being black and a minority in a white man’s world became too much, invented all sorts of elaborate reasons for the white man’s social, political and cultural dominance. Wha Gwan’s Science Fictionist idea was one of the more outlandish, but that seemed merely a testament to Wha Gwan’s intelligence and imagination. H’s reality however, was
bound up in a more physical realm. All the things that you couldn’t control, all the petty injustices in life, all of that could be shed in one place: the boxing ring. For H, the ring didn’t lie.

‘So what’s your solution to the plight of the black man?’

‘The pen and the sword.’ Having reached this point in his train of thought Wha Gwan seemed to calm down. ‘You see we need to educate the yout’. Dem man runnin’ road, playin’ gangster but dey don’t know nutten about history and dey don’t know nutten about respect. All dey want to do is chat ‘grime’. No, man, we need the pen to educate; to educate is to liberate. And then we need the sword; because in this society, education is not enough. We need the sword to smite dem! Because you know what? I’m going to get mines! And when I get mines …’

H looked down at his coffee. Jesus Christ! Did this guy ever stop talking? He was past caring about Wha Gwan’s theory! He looked over at his good friend Blue, who was listening intently. H sighed. It wasn’t often that he really needed someone to talk to. He glanced at Wha Gwan, barely hearing the words but still watching the man’s jawbone working overtime: up, down, up, down.

‘…A powerful man is a dangerous thing,’ cried Wha Gwan. ‘A man that knows himself, knows his worth and the power he has as an individual …can accomplish many things!’