‘But you didn’t have me with you. We have to do this.’
Alberto stared at me as if I was a new species he had never encountered. ‘To make eighty thousand euros?’
I let his question hang in the air a while. I noticed, in the relative quiet, that my tinnitus was louder than ever. But I didn’t mind it. Tinnitus from a night of joyful music was an entirely different thing to tinnitus that just existed for no reason. A negative with no cause is a source of deep misery. So if you can give a negative an equal-value positive cause you can turn it into a zero.
After eight seconds, I answered Alberto.
‘Mmm. Yes. I know under normal circumstances it wouldn’t be entirely ethical to use the talents in this way. But there is very little about these circumstances that are normal. But you two, you go home…It’s very late and tomorrow is going to be a big day.’
Marta shook her head and stifled a burp. She was a little tipsy and had a piece of confetti stuck to her forehead. I peeled it off for her. ‘Gracias, hermana,’ she said. (‘Thanks, sister’ – I liked that idea.) ‘I had my nap earlier. That is all I need. I may never have experienced a blessing from La Presencia but I was born in Ibiza. My circadian rhythms are negotiable.’
So, as we clambered into the taxi, Marta gave the instruction.
‘Hello, taxi driver,’ she said, pretending to be English for my amusement. ‘Casino de Ibiza, please, sir.’ And then we were off, with a worldly total of forty-seven euros between us.
Laurel
The Casino de Ibiza was in the affluent district known as the golden mile. I inhaled the balmy air and gazed around at expensive modern apartments and even more expensive modern yachts, with evenly spaced palm trees lining the road and well-manicured flowerbeds and patches of perfectly mown grass.
After we paid the taxi a cat stepped out from beneath a hedge and came up to Alberto. A stray, dappled white and black and orange. A cat full of questions and philosophy and curiosity. Animals loved Alberto. He was a magnet for them. He crouched down with a flinch on account of his old knees and stroked the creature and conversed with her a little while.
Marta, as ever, had a spirit of humoured frustration with him. ‘Papá, now is not the time to be Dr Dolittle.’
‘She is telling me about the pleasure of watching headlights. She enjoys watching the moving lights of cars and the caress of the breeze…’ But then he said his goodbyes and wished the creature good luck with her mouse-hunting.
I had once thought him mad, but now I realised he had just been understanding things that others didn’t. Maybe that was what madness was: the loneliness of understanding what others can’t.
The casino itself was very much in keeping with the billion-euro aesthetic. Modernist design. A potted laurel tree outside so immaculately clipped it looked like it had just won a topiary contest. The exterior of the building was weathered steel, with an artfully rusted appearance. You couldn’t see inside, but it was spotlit in such a way that it looked like some kind of decadent heaven was situated within.
I had never been to a casino in my life. I had been to a bingo hall once, with Angela from the charity shop, but that was very different. The doorman – slicked-back hair, sharp suit, infinity symbol tattooed on his wrist – told us we couldn’t come in.
‘I am sorry, but we are full,’ he said. ‘And you are all too casual.’ He looked at Marta and the glitter on her face. Then he pointed to Alberto, and his ripped shorts and flip-flops and his open Hawaiian shirt and his forest of unseemly chest hair. ‘Especially you. This is a sophisticated place.’
Marta began speaking to him in Spanish, earnestly and with considerable hand gestures, but the conversation wasn’t going well.
‘Change his mind,’ Alberto whispered to me. ‘I’m finding it too hard. He is clenched like a…’ He searched for the perfect poetic simile. ‘…a rabbit’s anus.’
So I tried to, well, unclench the doorman’s mind. It was actually considerably easier to enter than the casino.
He was called Javier. He was originally from Cádiz. He liked swimming and watching MMA fights and eating pork and Padrón peppers. He had recently been unfaithful to his wife with a Scottish tourist he had met on the beach at Playa d’en Bossa. The tourist was called Alice.
So I now pretended he was someone I knew but had only just recognised. ‘Javier!’ I said. ‘Wow. It is Javier, isn’t it?’
He eyed me suspiciously. His mind an orange desert of confusion. ‘Um. Yes.’
‘So great to meet you! I’m Helen!’
Javier frowned. ‘Helen? I don’t know any Helens. Now, please, step aside…’
‘Alice’s mum.’ And then, feeling cocky: ‘La madre de Alice.’
It was like I had slapped him. He was speechless.
‘She has shown me the picture of you and her together,’ I said, doing my best clueless mum impression. ‘The one of you two at a jolly nice daytime disco. Oh, and that one of you drinking caipirinhas together at a busy café by the sea in San Antonio. Café Mambo. She said you were a lovely man. Had her best interests at heart.’
Javier was flustered. His colleague, a squat fellow with a sardonic, grizzled vibe, was looking on with interest.
‘I don’t know what you are talking about, lady.’
‘Poor Alice,’ I went on, enjoying myself now. ‘She is quite besotted with you. She wants to tell the whole world.’ I leaned in, to pat his chest and give him a conspiratorial whisper. ‘But I have told her that just maybe you might not want the whole world to know. Especially a certain person.’
He gulped. He nodded. He understood. ‘What do you want?’
I took a breath and said in my most reasonable tone: ‘I would really like for me and my two friends here to be able to play a game of poker.’
Javier looked defeated. I had only seen the expression once before. In the eyes of our recently castrated Pomeranian.
The poor chap then preceded to beckon us through.
Marta elbowed me, stifling a giggle. Her sleepy mind suddenly as vibrant as a sky full of fireworks. ‘Look at us,’ she said, ‘Ocean’s Three.’
‘Okay, be cool,’ said Alberto, about as cool as a sauna. ‘Let’s get to work.’
Roulette
There was a quiet solemnity inside. The kind you might find in a church. People seated at tables or leaning over roulette wheels, sending silent prayers.
We passed the blackjack table and Marta made a questioning face, but I shook my head. There was no point trying to win money playing blackjack, because anyone with determination and basic addition and subtraction skills can learn to cheat at blackjack by counting cards. You give dealt cards lower than seven a +1 and cards higher than seven a -1 and you can work out the probability of the next card being high or low. Casinos are always on the lookout for people who do this. The roulette wheel was safer. So that is where we went.
