Where the Rain Gets In (11 page)

The magazine was a success, but suffered
from a lack of investment. Mike wanted it to work well enough to attract a
major buyer; it was a good idea, but it became a drain on his resources. Bruno
had done well, but he was bored already and likely to go off the rails at any
given time. His drugs intake was phenomenal and it was impossible for him to
sustain a regular lifestyle.

Their trips to the casino continued, but
they were becoming less welcome wherever they went. This was partly due to
their behaviour – there was always someone who had drunk too much or taken too
many drugs – and the pit bosses recognized Mike as a consistently big winner,
and they didn’t like it. Katie saw that the purpose of their large group was to
distract attention away from Mike as the main player, but twice now Mike had
been told that they didn’t want to see him again. He was doing nothing illegal,
and they weren’t exactly sure how he was managing it, but it was up to the
casinos if they wanted him in their club.

Mike bankrolled the visits to the casino
but it was on the understanding that if you went along, you had to work for
your supper. Based on what Eugene had told Mike in the White Horse, they all
sat at various blackjack tables and kept count of the cards passing through the
shoe. If a low card was played, that added to the positive count; if a high
card was played, that took away from the count. Anything more sophisticated
would have been apparent to the casino and impossible for the players to keep
track, but it did tell them if there were mostly high cards left in the shoe.
Mike stepped into the game when he was given a signal that the cards were in
his favour.

As it was, some of Mike’s friends were
of more use to him than others – the likes of Eugene saw it as a fascinating
mental challenge, while Rory would get carried away with the game and forget to
keep count. There were advantages in even this. It was sometimes obvious to the
pit bosses that Eugene was keeping track of the cards, but he won so little, it
was of no consequence. In fact, more often than not, Eugene lost; but he lost
only small amounts of money, while Mike never played with less than a hundred
on each bet. And if the others couldn’t give Mike such good information, they
at least acted as a distraction and confused the casino into thinking they
weren’t with Mike. Best of all, though, were Katie and Bruno; they were
accurate counters without appearing to be so. Katie looked stunning and Bruno
looked dangerous – it took longer for the casino to pick up on Mike when these
two were around.

But there were frustratingly small
returns for Mike. It was possible to view each trip to the casino as a bit of
fun where he made a little money, but still Mike wanted more. Mike had Eugene
make out probability tables he could memorize; colour-coded charts that Mike
studied more closely than the
Financial Times.
He often played with
several hands when the shoe was in his favour, but the possibility of really
taking the casinos for a serious amount of money was still tantalisingly out of
Mike’s reach.

“There are too many variables
remaining,” said Eugene. “You require a more accurate count.”

“Yes,” said Katie, “but unfortunately
we’re not operating under laboratory conditions.”

Mike tended to agree – anything more
sophisticated would be too easy for the casino to spot, and more likely to lead
to mistakes.

“The problem is,” said Mike, “I need a
large enough bankroll to see me through the bad patches. Even when the count is
good, I still sometimes lose.”

“You could flip a coin forever,” said
Eugene, “and you would bet on it landing on heads at least once, but it might
only ever land on tails.” He spoke as if in awe of this statistical
possibility.

“Or,” said Mike, “and this is more
likely – it could land on tails until I run out of money, and then land on
heads,” said Mike. “I don’t know, I think I make more money on the stock market
than I do in the casino.”

Katie thought of pointing out that this
was maybe the way it should be, but she knew Mike could never let it go; he was
convinced of some golden payday in the future. They started travelling further
afield, first to Leeds and then to London, where at least they weren’t so well
known. Mike couldn’t cover the cost for them all to go on these trips, so he
took Bruno and Katie, who were more use to him; for Katie, the trips held the
added attraction of seeing other cities for the first time.

Katie eventually made her peace with
Bruno – she had to if she was to spend time with Mike. By the end of their
second year, the group had crystallised into a friendship between these three.
Katie was never totally at her ease in Bruno’s company, and avoided being alone
with him for any length of time, but she knew she was not the easiest of
characters herself. Whatever chemistry had brought them all together in the
first place – and Katie continued to believe that chemistry was Mike – the
dynamic held strong for the three of them.

Bruno continued to stretch Katie’s
tolerance to the limit. He turned up at a drinks party to celebrate the end of
that year’s exams, and deliberately antagonised Rory with Irish jokes. It was
the time of the hunger strikes, and Bruno’s jokes split the room in two; some
laughed, while the others felt as though they shouldn’t.

“What’s Bobby Sands’ phone number?”
Bruno asked.

Rory looked away and didn’t answer.

“Ate nothing, ate nothing, ate nothing,”
said Bruno.

Rory wasn’t strong enough to stand up to
Bruno, and besides, Bruno was too high to care. Katie watched and listened from
across the room. Bruno saw her looking and smiled, but Katie didn’t smile back.

“What?” asked Bruno, but Katie said
nothing.

She already knew that come the following
year, Rory and Eugene were likely to drift away – not so much because of Bruno,
but the ever-increasing demands of college work. Katie only saw them
occasionally around the campus, or less often at the gym; for the most part
Rory and Eugene’s wild days were over.

Mike cited the hunger strikes as his
reason for choosing to work in Manchester that summer, but Katie thought there
was more to it than that. She suspected Mike had a sweetheart back home in
Belfast, though if he did, he wasn’t saying. Katie and Mike worked together as
traders in the stock broking firm, but Mike’s heart wasn’t in it. Katie, on the
other hand, became the star trainee in the company, and it was obvious she had
a future there if she wanted it.

Mike taught Katie how to drive – another
example of her new found confidence – and she passed her test at the first
attempt. Mike bought an old Jaguar for next to nothing – not for him any old
student run-around. It cost Mike more in petrol than it had to buy. They often
drove out to the hills after work, and called into village pubs for some supper
– they appeared to be quite the couple. Katie loved spending the time with
Mike, especially working together throughout the summer, but she was worried
about where he hoped it was all heading. She suspected he’d stayed in
Manchester out of a misplaced jealousy of Bruno, which was crazy, but just as
crazy was Katie allowing this to continue.

It was a strange time. Katie and Mike
avoided the celebrations on the day of Charles and Diana’s royal wedding. They
escaped in the Jag, up into the hills, as far away as possible from the madness
of the street parties. It was hard to believe that in another part of the
United Kingdom, men were deliberately starving themselves to death for the
right to wear their own clothes in prison.

Towards the end of that day, Katie and
Mike sat in the car, high in the Pennines above Manchester, and looked out over
a reservoir. Katie was in the driver’s seat, Mike in the passenger’s.

“Mike?” asked Katie. “Why do you spend
all your free time with me?”

Mike didn’t reply.

“What’s the point,” she asked, “when
there’s nothing in it for you?”

Mike looked away, down to where the
evening sun was reflected in the water of the reservoir.

“Because,” said Katie, “if you’re hoping
that some day there might be, then I have to tell you – there won’t.”

“I know,” said Mike. “You’ve made that
clear enough, often enough. I know nothing will ever happen between us.”

“Then why bother – where’s the return on
your investment?”

“Can’t I just enjoy spending time with
you?”

“Yes, if that’s all,” said Katie, “but I
don’t think it is.”

“That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t
it?” asked Mike.

Katie shrugged.

“It’s just what I see,” she said,
“that’s all. The way you look at me sometimes.”

“Don’t you like me looking at you?”
asked Mike.

“Yes, I do, but not if it’s going to
lead to . . . complications. I don’t want us to fall out over it.”

“We won’t,” said Mike. “I promise you.”

“But you should be off with someone
else,” said Katie, “someone who can give you what I can’t.”

“You mean sex?”

“I mean, someone who can be close to you
in a way that I can’t.”

“I don’t want to be close to anyone else,”
said Mike. “I’m in love with you.”

“Yes, I know,” said Katie, “and I love
you – in my own way. It’d kill me if . . . if we had to be apart, but that’s
just it – we can’t stay together because this thing will never go away.”

“It might, with time – ”

“No, Mike, it’ll never go away. I’ll
never be close to anyone in that way – physically, I mean. And if you’re hoping
that one day maybe, then eventually it’ll drive you crazy, and you’ll start to
hate me.”

“And you can’t tell me why?” asked Mike.

“No,” said Katie.

They sat in silence for a while.

“I even love you partly because you
never ask me why,” said Katie. “But I can’t tell you, and this will never
change.”

Mike looked out over the water.

“That’s pretty final,” he said, after a
minute or so.

“I’m sorry, Mike.”

“And if I’m good?” he asked. “If I
promise not to hope – can we still be friends?”

“You know we can,” said Katie, “if
that’s what you want.”

“Well,” he said, and smiled. “I’d better
learn to give up hope.”

But of course it killed him and that was
how, or why, over the next two years, Mike came up with the Vegas Plan.

By the time of their Finals, it was
obvious that Katie was going to go into investment banking, in London though
and not in Manchester. It was equally obvious that Mike wasn’t; he had nothing
definite in the pipeline, only that he was going to move back to Belfast for a
while. Katie knew Mike would land on his feet, whatever he chose to do, and she
suspected there was more for him in Belfast than he was letting on about. That
left Bruno alone in Manchester – another factor in Mike coming up with the
Plan.

“I want the three of us to do Vegas,” he
said. “One final trip together to really set us up for the future.”

Katie and Mike were in the White Horse. It
was beginning to feel like the end of things. The buzz wasn’t the same on a
Saturday night; the resident DJ was replaced by a succession of bands that
provided a cover for more and more drug dealing, and this was destroying the
pub. It was one thing to opt out of society, but the White Horse was no longer
the happy place it used to be. In the past year, the mood had changed to match
that of the country as a whole. It was impossible to believe that Thatcher’s
war in the Falklands had resulted in her winning a landslide election; she’d be
around for a few more years, and you could tell she was just itching to finish
what she’d started. Well, it suited some people obviously, but it didn’t suit
most of the customers in the White Horse.

“Mike,” said Katie, “when are you going
to learn? You’re never going to win a fortune in Vegas. Besides, I don’t even
have a passport.”

“Well, apply for one,” said Mike,
“because we’re going – I have funding.”

“What do you mean – you have funding?”
asked Katie.

“It’s not worth our while,” said Mike,
“unless we have enough money to stick around for the really big hands; so I’ve
found a partner to help bankroll the trip.”

“Who – and is Bruno going?”

“Yes,” said Mike, “Bruno’s going; he’s a
major reason for doing this.”

“You mean to soften the blow that you
won’t be around from now on?”

“And neither will you,” said Mike.
“He’ll miss you too.”

“And you’re feeling guilty about leaving
him,” said Katie.

“Aren’t you?”

“No, not at all. I’ll be happy never to
see him again.”

“You don’t mean that,” said Mike.

“I certainly do,” said Katie. “And I
think that secretly you’re relieved too, and that’s why you feel guilty. Who
have you found to bankroll a trip to Vegas?”

“Remember the Chinese casino in town
that we were thrown out of?”

“How could I forget?” asked Katie.

“Well, I went back to them and explained
the card counting thing. They knew we were watching the cards but they didn’t
understand the maths.”