The Last Card (2 page)

T
he room was cold and dark, the cloakroom of an old, Victorian dance hall. The fact that it had once possessed a quiet grandeur did nothing to improve H’s mood. He sat on a low bench, a grille with hooks for coats over his head, staring at nothing. Steam rose from his overheated body as he allowed the cool of the room to evaporate his sweat. His hands, still encased in bulbous boxing gloves, hung by his sides and his back sagged as he slouched against the grille. H was tired.

The door was suddenly thrust open and Matt strode in. Now a sturdy young man of twenty-three, he wore a chunky gold chain around his neck and an equally chunky ID bracelet on his wrist. He flicked on the light. He was surprised to see H sitting in the dark.

‘What’s up with you? You’ve got a face like a well-slapped arse!’

H looked at him out of a partially closed eye. He said nothing.

Setting down his trusty bucket and sponge, Matt pulled up a wooden stool and dropped it in front of H. Without a word H rose and sat on the stool, his back to Matt. Matt removed the towel from round his neck and slowly began to rub H’s head, shoulders and back.

‘Don’t worry about it, H, you were fucking robbed. You know it, I know it and the punters know it. The only one who doesn’t know it is the one-eyed, bald-headed, cunt who calls himself a referee. That cunt is a fucking disgrace. He should be struck off.’

H continued to stare at nothing, the throbbing from the black eye becoming more pronounced.

Matt’s practised fingers kneaded the baby dreads that sprouted from H’s scalp. The relationship between them went back almost
fifteen years. H felt his head bob rhythmically back and forth as his friend worked his fingers in the towel, going from the base of the skull, down the neck to the shoulders and then the back. H raised his arms, one of them more gingerly than the other, so that Matt could gain a greater purchase on his back.

‘What’s the matter, H? Why so quiet?’

H turned to look back at him but still said nothing. Matt finished rubbing down his spine. He then pulled up another stool and sat himself in front of H. He pulled a pocket-knife from his tracksuit and opened it up. H extended his gloved hands out in front of him and Matt moved on to the second part of the ritual. He unlaced H’s boxing gloves, first one then the other. H’s fists were tightly packed in thick, white masking-tape. Matt took his knife and carefully cut through the taping of H’s right hand. Every so often he looked up. H was staring at him out of his one good eye.

‘Come on, mate, snap out of it.’ It seemed Matt couldn’t take the silence any longer. ‘It wasn’t that fucking bad, I’ve seen worse. You didn’t see Taps’ fight last week. Taps had this black geezer from Brixton – big fucker he was! – Taps had him down twice in the second round, it was a six-round fight, knocked him spark off his feet in the fifth, and the ref gave it to your man from Brixton! Couldn’t fucking believe it! It was a joke!’

‘How come they gave it to the guy from Brixton?’

‘Fucked if I know. Could’ve had something to do with the cut Taps had on his bonce. It was pretty deep, but Christ Almighty, Taps had this bloke looking like a fucking amateur. He is a fucking amateur! He works down at the Fridge as a fucking bouncer, d’you know what I mean?! There should have been a fucking riot. Taps is a class above.’

‘What class is that, then?’

‘What?’

‘You said Taps was a class above: what class is that, then?’

H wasn’t really trying to be difficult. It was just that today, he’d had one low-rent fight too many, in front of a clearly unqualified
adjudicator
, before a small but ignorant audience who had no real idea of what they were watching. H was not the fighter he once was. While he used to be ridged with hard, distinct muscle, those very same muscles were now soft; while his waist always used to be
11-and-a-half
inches smaller than his chest, it was now only six inches smaller;
and while his feet used to dance and shuffle with the precision of a Gene Kelly … H’s feet now slipped and shuffled with the dexterity of an old man tottering carefully on an icy pathway.

This last point had been rammed home with callous cruelty when, earlier that evening, H had again tried to evoke the memory of the fighter he had once been. In the third round the forty-one-year-old brickie that H was fighting had caught him with one too many body shots. H could see them coming. The problem was that when his brain, crisp and clear as ever, told his stubborn and perverse body to move, it refused to obey him. Consequently his ribs took a pounding that they should not have taken. H had tried to shuffle out of harm’s way. The move that used to bring crowds of two, three, four thousand people to their feet in admiration now brought twenty-five drunken louts to a state of heightened derision. They were laughing at him! For as H had tried to shuffle, his thirty-two-year-old feet had somehow become entangled with each other and H had crashed, without grace or style, on to his elbow.

‘Taps is a boxer!’ Matt snapped. ‘He’s not a fucking brawler! He understands what the game is all about.’ This answer afforded H no satisfaction whatsoever.

‘I woke up this morning and pulled a pubic hair from my groin.’

Matt gave H a cheeky grin. ‘Ey, ey! You dirty bastard! One of Bev’s I hope.’

‘No, Matt, it wasn’t one of Bev’s, it was one of mine. And it was grey.’

This was not the male patter that Matt was expecting and he remained silent while he finished cutting through the tape on H’s right hand. Moments later, flexing his freed fingers, H dunked the hand into the bucket in front of him. It was two-thirds full of iced water. Matt began to cut his way through the tape of the left hand.

‘It gets us all in the end, mate. When the grey ones outnumber the black ones,’ Matt continued ‘that’s when you have to worry. You’ve got a few years yet, sunshine.’

H cast him a withering look. ‘I need a holiday.’ He said the words as though the idea had just occurred to him. It had. ‘I need a holiday,’ he said again, more conviction this time.

Matt looked at him with surprise. ‘I’m not trying to be funny, H, but … you don’t even have a job!’

H rose abruptly, wincing from the pounding his ribs had taken, and walked over to his nearby kit-bag. The battered old leather holdall was chained to the coat rack with a huge bicycle lock. H pulled out his mobile. He had a text message from Beverley. Later for that. Ignoring the text H found the number and dialled.

‘You’re right, I don’t have a job,’ H said to Matt, listening to the telephone ringing at the other end. ‘But, man … I’m really tired.’

The Mercedes was gun-metal grey. It was a 1973 model, a classic, the bodywork in mint condition. H parked it and then eased his bruised body out, pausing before deciding whether he should lock it after him. One of the few things that actually worked properly in the car was a cheap cassette deck. If anyone wanted to steal it, it was better to leave the car unlocked rather than risk a window getting smashed. But something about leaving his Mercedes unlocked offended H’s sense of ownership. He did what he usually did; he left the car unlocked, turned and walked down towards Oxford Street.

It was a cool, clear, spring night, just after half-past ten and the centre of the city was teeming. Clubbers, tourists, the gay crowd, trendies, workers, drinkers, diners, streetwalkers, theatre-goers, cab drivers … the list was endless and it was one of the things H loved about the city. Whatever the nature of London’s unpredictable weather, the city teemed with life. As he strode purposefully towards Blackie’s shebeen, wearing his lucky suit, H momentarily felt a part of all that was good about London.

Truth to tell, H did indeed look good. He had on his one good suit, a two-piece, charcoal grey, one-hundred-per-cent wool affair, made by the black designer, Derek Lilliard. It was his lucky suit, the suit that he wore on his special gambling holidays. For that’s where H was going, into the throbbing, underground heart of the gambling shebeens of Soho.

H turned off noisy Wardour Street, into the quieter Broadwick Street. He paused outside Agent Provocateur before crossing the road and heading into Duck Lane. Duck Lane finished in a dead end, but a little way before that H came to a plain, metal door. He rapped on it twice. Almost immediately, with the slow grinding squeal of metal on concrete, the door opened.

H entered a dimly-lit hallway. In front of him, leading the way, was a short, dumpy, doughy-faced, Chinese woman. She led him up two flights of stairs, both barely lit, and then into the room where the gambling went on. It was Spartan and dark. In the centre of the room stood a large green baize gambling table, and eight wooden chairs. On either side of this were two smaller tables. The far end of the room was a small kitchen area and on the kitchen counter were
sandwiches
and drinks.

High on one of the walls, a silent TV was showing a fight. H’s eyes immediately turned to it: there was Mancini; in the middle of an
elimination
bout H knew would earn him a crack at the world title. In a packed-out Albert Hall Mancini was putting the final touches to the destruction of Colin ‘Sweetwater’ Joseph. Joseph may have been sweet before this meeting, but he wasn’t sweet tonight. In the seven years since H had fought Mancini, the Bugle Boy from the bad side of Manchester had gone from strength to strength. His upper body had bulked, he’d learnt one or two classy combinations and someone, somewhere, had taught him how to bob and move. Mancini could now box. The Trinidadian was finding it out the tough way.

H looked away. He could no longer stand watching boxing on television.

Various unsavoury characters milled about the room, drinking and chatting. Some H recognised, some he didn’t. In the middle of one group sat Ghadaffi, the smartly-suited, Oxbridge-educated, Libyan nightclub owner; beside him was Boo, Nigerian hard man and petty thief. Sharon, a thin, pale junkie from East London, was helping himself to a sandwich and ignoring Stammer, a big but dumb-looking Jamaican in an white shell-suit and large gold chains, who played alone, as usual, on a one-armed bandit. There was Sammy, South London’s hardest-working mini-cab driver; and finally Dipak, a Ugandan Asian, who had seen good days, bad days, and was old enough to know that gambling was an addiction. Dipak owned the
all-night
grocer’s on Shepherd’s Bush Green and was one of Blackie’s best punters.

Sitting at the large table stacking chips sat a soberly dressed, dark-skinned Jamaican, Blackie. Blackie’s skin was so black it almost looked blue. He was the Houseman; this was his shebeen, newly moved from a spot in Ladbroke Grove.

Blackie wasn’t big but nobody ever crossed him. Not twice anyway. The last person to do that, as far as H could remember, was Cookie, a young, smooth-talking Tunisian. Cookie loved the sound of his own voice and could talk his way out of any kind of problem. Cookie especially loved to talk on mobiles, loudly and without
inhibition
. Women loved to hear him because he could string together wonderfully fragrant phrases; sentences that could charm a nun. H winced as he remembered the story. Blackie had been playing a big game in a shebeen in North London; five-card poker, or stud poker as some people call it. It was a big hand, there was a lot of money on the table, and the man playing opposite Blackie was a fish. He had his own carpentry business and was loaded. Blackie had, apparently, been stringing him along all evening, allowing the fish to win just enough of the small hands to sucker him into a big hand where Blackie would move in for the kill. As the hand approached its climax, a hush had descended over the game. Blackie was slowly reeling the fish in when Cookie entered the room, talking on his mobile. Checking out the clientele Cookie had doubtless seen a number of attractive women in the house. And so, instead of lowering his voice as protocol dictated – given the stage of the hand Blackie was playing – Cookie raised it. Braying loudly into his phone, he looked around to see who was listening in to his conversation.

Blackie, apparently, didn’t react immediately. According to the story he kept his focus, his eyes trained on the businessman. The man’s forehead glowed as he chomped with apparent nonchalance on a fat cigar. It was his move. For Blackie this moment was the difference between collecting the pot as it stood, or at least doubling it. The moment was tense. But for Cookie’s braying. Anyone who looked closely would have seen the vein in Blackie’s left temple begin to throb: the first indication that all was not well. When his right hand began to paw distractedly at the baize of the table, it should have been a clear warning for anyone who knew Blackie. But Cookie wasn’t looking at Blackie. He was looking at the full, frank bosom of an attractive Ghanan woman..

Finally, Blackie turned to Cookie. ‘Stop oonu blood clat chat, no man! You cian’ see we playin?!’

Cookie looked round, startled. But at that moment Blackie was undone. Once he had taken his eyes away from the businessman,
the man felt the pressure ease. He folded his hand. Blackie was going to walk away with over two thousand pounds, but with the losses he had taken he would clear maybe eight hundred. He had been looking at a score of just under five grand.

Without a word and without even pausing to collect his winnings, Blackie rose from the table and barged his way out of the room. A few moments passed, during which hindsight established he had flown down to the kitchens at the back of the shebeen, before Blackie returned wielding a meat cleaver. The panic that ensued did not prevent Blackie catching Cookie, slamming his right hand to the flat of the gambling table and chopping it off. It may or may not have been a coincidence that this was the hand Cookie had been holding his mobile with.

Cookie survived the maiming but his smooth patter was never quite as smooth again. Soon after this incident Cookie disappeared. The word on the street was that he had returned to Tunisia.

H crossed the room and slapped Blackie on the back.

‘Blackie, man, wassup!’ Blackie turned to H, a smile of
recognition
creasing his scarred, battered, fifty-three-year-old face.