Where the Rain Gets In (7 page)

“It couldn’t – not unless you were very
accomplished. If they saw you concentrating on the cards to that extent, they’d
ask you to leave.”

Mike waited for Eugene to continue, but
Eugene said nothing.

“So?” asked Mike. “Are you going to tell
us about the card counting trick – the card counting thing?”

“It’s possible to observe which cards
are laid down in a game of cards,” said Eugene. “It’s easier than tracing the
shuffle of a deck. In a casino, the cards that have been laid down once cannot
be laid down again until the dealer reaches the end of the deck; this tells us
which cards are still there to be dealt.”

“But they use up to six decks in the
shoe at a time,” said Mike.

“The same principles apply,” said
Eugene. “I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m just saying it can be done.”

“The shoe?” asked Katie.

“The box from which the dealer gives out
the cards,” explained Mike. “Once the cards are shuffled, the shoe dispenses a
card at a time; it prevents any sleight of hand by the dealer.”

“But what advantage could you hope to
gain?” asked Katie. She looked first to Eugene and then to Mike.

“There is a way,” said Mike. “In blackjack
– or pontoon, as you might know it – or twenty-one, the advantage is with the
player if there’s a run of high cards. The house will always pay out over a
certain number, say seventeen, and the dealer will never choose to go higher,
for fear of going bust. You’re likely to be dealt a better hand if the cards in
the deck are higher, while the dealer is more likely go bust. But Eugene,” he
said, “you’d have to be concentrating like fuck to remember all the cards that
are laid down, and to think about your own game at the same time.”

“It’s not essential to remember each
individual card,” said Eugene. “Experienced card counters all have a system –
generally a plus or a minus value for all the low cards that have been dealt.”

“So you keep track of a running score?”
asked Mike.

“And your running score counts for more
the further into the deck you go,” said Eugene.

“Again?” said Mike.

“Just as Katie’s chances improved after
picking up that first card. If lots of low cards have come out the deck, there
are lots of high cards still there to be dealt. But because there are fewer
cards left in the deck, the odds are even better that you’ll be dealt a high
card. And that the dealer will go bust if he takes a third card.”

This was all beyond Katie.

“You’re still talking odds,” she said.
“It’s still a game of chance.”

“Yes,” said Eugene, “but you’ve used
your intelligence to make an educated guess.”

“And you’d put your money on that?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Eugene. He sneaked a
glance at Katie. “But I think Mike would.”

Apart from Katie’s vodka and orange once
a week in the White Horse, her only other outlet from study was the gym. The
facilities were basic, primitive even by the standards of the late seventies,
and the whole gym experience was different back then. This was not a hip place
for beautiful young bodies to hang out and show off their tans; the gym was the
preserve of sportsmen hoping to regain their strength after injury, and just a
few serious body builders – the gym was not a glam place to be seen by your
friends. Katie had come across weight machines while she was still in care; it
was encouraged as a way of calming unsettled minds. She liked the solitude and
she liked to push herself hard against the machines. What it did for her head,
she didn’t know – she was in such a mess anyway; it could do her no harm. The
facilities in the college were free and close to where she lived; she often
carried her gear with her so she could call in on the way home from the
library. There was a pool there too, but this was obviously out of bounds for
Katie.

A few weeks after meeting Mike and
Eugene in the White Horse, Katie saw their friend Bruno at the gym. She
recognised him immediately, but tried to make out she didn’t know who he was.
Bruno came over anyway.

“You’re Mike’s friend, Katie,” he said,
and stood by her machine. He wasn’t built like the rest of the guys in the gym.
He was tall but not hugely built, more hard and wiry like Katie.

Katie stopped what she was doing. She
wasn’t comfortable with Bruno watching her, and she could feel his eyes on her
body.

“You’re Bruno,” she said.

Katie waited for him to speak or move
away, but he did neither. She didn’t want her sessions at the gym to be spoilt
by Bruno being there each time.

“Well, I’ll see you around,” she said.

Katie had no choice but to start up
again on the machine. Bruno watched for a while, and then walked away.

When Katie next met Mike, she asked him
about Bruno.

“Who is he? What does he do?”

“He does law, the same as us.”

“But he’s never at any lectures,” said
Katie, “or in the library.”

“No,” said Mike, “I don’t think Bruno’s
quite cut out for college life. I can’t see him making it through the first
year, somehow – the first term, come to that.”

“But why?” asked Katie. “Why bother
getting on to the course in the first place?”

“You’d have to ask him that,” said Mike.

“I saw him at the gym; he gives me the
creeps.”

“Yes, he told me,” said Mike. “He also
said you were rude.”

“I don’t like him,” said Katie.

Mike smiled.

“Who do you like, Katie? Here,” he said,
“I’ve bought you a present, so you have to at least pretend to like me.”

Mike handed her a ticket; it was for a
Buzzcocks concert for the following week. Katie was delighted.

“Mike, thanks – but let me pay you for the
ticket. Will you be there?”

“If you paid me for the ticket,” said
Mike, “then it wouldn’t be a present, would it? And yes, I am going, but I have
to warn you – Bruno’s going too, and there’ll be a big crowd of us.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” said Katie, “I’ll be
there.”

In all there were twenty of them in a
row together, the strangest collection of people Katie had ever seen,
particularly for a Buzzcocks concert. Katie saw Eugene and Rory; they were sat
with two other students – who could only have been mathematicians – looking
expectantly at the empty stage. Katie wandered through to the bar, but Mike was
nowhere to be seen. Bruno was the only person she recognised.

“Did Mike buy tickets for all these
people?” she asked him.

“Mike doesn’t buy anything,” said Bruno
above the noise, “least of all tickets.”

“So how does he – ”

“He’ll have persuaded somebody,
somewhere, that it was a good idea to let him have twenty tickets. Though why
he thinks it’s a good idea to invite some of these characters to this, I
wouldn’t know.”

“Why does Mike like mathematicians?”
asked Katie.

“It’s not just mathematicians,” said
Bruno. “Any egghead will do. I think Mike wishes he was good enough to be one
of them.”

“A mathematician – Mike?”

Bruno shrugged.

“He’s good, but he’s not that good and
he knows it. Most of these guys here” – he nodded in the direction of the
others at the bar – “are all business types, accountancy or banking and
suchlike. A few medics but they tend to be chemists who just happen to be
studying medicine.”

“Now there’s something I never
understood,” said Katie. “Chemistry, I mean. All those symbols, and that stupid
periodic table – I just don’t get it.”

“But everything in the world has to do
with chemistry,” said Bruno. “The glass you’re holding, the drink you’re drinking,
the floor you’re standing on, the air you’re breathing, the smoke in the bar –
everything. Every single thing in the world is made up of chemicals.”

“I think I must have had a poor
teacher,” said Katie. “Whatever the lesson, he’d always go back to amino acids
or something like that, as though we all knew what the fuck he was talking
about.”

“But he’s right – we wouldn’t be alive
or here at this gig without the amino acids in our body.”

“Now you’re at it,” laughed Katie.“I
don’t see any other lawyers here.”

“No,” said Bruno, “Mike can’t stand
lawyers. I sometimes think that’s why he’s studying law himself – so he never
has to deal with another lawyer.”

“But we get in?” said Katie.

“Oh yes, we’re special.”

“Where is he, anyhow?”

“Nice Guy Mike? He couldn’t make it. One
of his medical friends had a bit of an accident today.”

“What happened?” asked Katie.

“This guy is studying dentistry,” said
Bruno. “He gave an anaesthetic without reading the patient’s notes, so – no
more patient.”

“You mean he died?”

Bruno shrugged again, as if to say –
shit happens.

“So what’s Mike hoping to do?” asked
Katie.

“Make him feel better about himself?”
suggested Bruno. “Or at least not feel quite so bad. I don’t know, as I say –
Nice Guy Mike.”

Bruno knocked back his drink.

“Come on,” he said. “Joy Division are
the support band – they’re the reason I’m here.”

Bruno walked away from the bar. Katie
had wanted to ask him why he never attended any lectures – how he ever hoped to
survive the course – but she didn’t get the opportunity. She followed Bruno
into the concert hall.

Katie had heard of Joy Division but she
didn’t know what to expect. She knew they were from Manchester and presumed
they had the gig on the strength of that. A few hundred people came through
from the bar but most of the crowd didn’t bother. Eugene and the
mathematicians, though, they were on their feet already and Katie looked from
them down to the stage and saw they were mimicking the actions of the singer.
The music was harsh and disturbing. Katie had never heard music like this
before, and she’d never seen anyone act like that on stage before. Part of her
wanted to laugh, but then she saw Bruno’s reaction: he was totally immersed in
the music, his eyes closed, and his head jerking forward like he was kicking
someone on the ground.

They sang a song called ‘She’s Lost
Control’, and Katie had to sit down – images of cutting her legs flashed
through her mind.

I have to stop doing this, she thought.
I have to find a way to stop.

When the band finished, the
mathematicians were ecstatic.

“Are you okay?” Bruno asked Katie.

“Yes,” she said. “I need a drink.”

“That boy needs some help,” said Bruno,
referring to the singer. Somehow this was more damning coming from Bruno, as
though he knew a thing or two about needing help.

The Buzzcocks were disappointing in
comparison – no, The Buzzcocks were just plain terrible. They stopped a song
halfway through and the singer said it was shit!

“I agree,” said Bruno. “Come on, let’s
go.”

The mathematicians shouted down
obscenities to the stage, and all twenty of them left together – or eighteen,
because Mike and his dentist friend were missing.

Bruno shook his head.

“What a fucking circus,” he kept saying.
“What a fucking circus.”

They all went into the bar for a drink.

Katie’s first Christmas as a college
student was hard. She was used to being on her own and this had never been a
problem to her, but she hadn’t realised how much she’d come to rely on Mike
and, to a lesser extent on Bruno, for company. She felt the difference in their
ages for the first time; for all Mike’s sophistication, he seemed suddenly very
young again when he told Katie he’d be returning to his parents’ house in
Belfast for the holidays.

“You know,” said Mike, “you’re more than
welcome to come over to Belfast.”

Katie couldn’t imagine what that would
be like – Christmas amongst Mike’s large extended family – but she knew it
wasn’t for her. She was grateful for Mike’s offer, but didn’t like to think
that he’d picked up on her loneliness.

“Bruno will still be around,” Mike told
her. Katie had developed a parallel friendship with Bruno, but she still wasn’t
quite at her ease in his company. She tried to avoid seeing him when they
weren’t all together in a crowd.

“It’s not an issue,” she said.

“I’ve bought you a Christmas present,”
said Mike, before he left. He handed Katie an envelope. “It’s a membership card
for the new gym and fitness centre in town – brand new facilities and
everything. You’ll love it.”

“I don’t want this,” said Katie and then
she corrected herself. “I mean, thank you, but I don’t want you to be buying me
presents.”

“Well,” said Mike, “if truth be told, I
didn’t actually buy it, and it’s not just for you – we all have one, so we can
all use the gym together.”

“You’re going to start using the gym?”
said Katie, and smiled.