fold, and went for the showdown. It was three weeks until pension day, and Jerry would have nothing left to live on.
He didn’t understand what he was seeing when the other guy’s cards came up. There was a moment of disconnect as his eyes flicked between the open cards and Bizznizz’s cards. It looked as if the idiot only had a pair of threes!
Only when the money came rattling into his account did he realise it wasn’t a misunderstanding. The idiot had sat there bluffing with a low pair, and then been stupid enough to go for the
He didn’t play any more that night. The game had given him an important insight. There were any number of total idiots out there playing on the net. Idiots with money. All he had to do was find them, and make sure he ended up at the same table.
Jerry began by methodically scanning every website, blog and discussion forum that had anything to do with poker. He gathered information. After a couple of weeks he had a fairly clear picture of the kind of people who played on the net, at least in Sweden. It was true that most used different aliases and usernames when they played and when they were in a discussion, but some were so attached to their names that they couldn’t help using them even when money was involved.
Jerry’s stroke of genius was to start secretly reading forums for people who were likely to have a knack for earning money quickly and easily. Stockbrokers and the IT crowd. He even looked at some of the forums on
He was actually looking for any mention of internet poker. Someone who had recently come into money, for example, had entered the forum to ask for advice on their newly acquired Abyssinian. The cat was so lively, shredding the Svenskt Tenn designer curtains-what could he do? The cat owner might get into conversation with another owner, and poker would be mentioned in passing.
That was the key: in passing. These nouveau riche types thought it was fun to mention
That kind of comment. Made in passing.
It was a time-consuming and tedious task. Often Jerry would find a perfect candidate, but then never see that person on the poker site. Either he was no longer playing, or he was using a different handle.
But he compiled a list, and as time went by one of these rich or slightly less rich idiots would turn up at the table. Then it was time to join the game.
There was no ideology behind it. No Robin Hood fantasies on Jerry’s part. On the contrary. Since the opportunities to skin rich people were so rare, he also gathered information on ordinary players, gambling addicts and poor people. The main thing was that they played badly.
To tell the truth, it gave him even more satisfaction to fleece someone he knew to have problems. He found Wheelsonfire on a forum for caravan owners, complaining that he couldn’t afford a new fridge for his caravan-did anyone know where he could find a second-hand one? The fact that he was a bad poker player was mentioned in a different context.
When Wheelsonfire popped up on Partypoker and Jerry managed to take four thousand off him, he felt a deep, sincere and malicious pleasure.
His fear of other people and his unease around them grew neither better nor worse. But his contempt increased. As did his income. A year or so after he had begun playing and gathering information, he was bringing in eight to ten thousand a month, as a general rule, money that the tax office hadn’t yet realised they should be enquiring about.
He sat there in his little apartment in Norrtalje, dipping his virtual fingers in the global river of money. He played for five or six hours a day, and regardless of whether he won or lost, he was never gripped by greed. It didn’t matter to him. The important thing was that he had a little power base where he could sit and let his lash whistle across the backs of all those world-wide idiots. He could flog them hard and almost hear them whimper. Sometimes he even felt something that resembled happiness.
When the girl was about twelve years old, she became listless. Nothing seemed to reach her anymore. Day in and day out she sat on her bed staring at the wall, doing nothing. She didn’t sing, she didn’t talk, she barely moved, and she had to be fed baby food from the jar with a spoon; that was still the only thing she would eat.
It became quite frightening after a while, and Lennart and Laila began to have serious discussions about whether they should give her up and let the professionals take care of her. Drive somewhere no one knew them and just leave her at a hospital, then drive away without saying anything. But it felt too cold, too terrible not to know what might become of her. So they waited.
After all, everything seemed to have gone so well. The girl had learned to write using the typewriter, she could form whole words and sentences. She spent a long time typing out every single word from an old copy of the local paper. Articles, adverts, the speech bubbles in the cartoon strips, the TV guide. It took her almost four months to type out the entire newspaper onto sixty pages of A4.
It was when this project was almost finished that something happened. Laila saw the first sign when she went down to the cellar one morning and found the girl staring into the washing machine; she closed the door, then looked inside the tumble drier. Then the laundry basket.
‘What are you looking for?’ Laila asked, but as usual the girl ignored her.
Another day Laila stood silently by the workshop door watching the girl opening drawers and looking in cupboards just as she had done when she was little, just as Laila had done.
The girl had grown to be beautiful with her curly golden hair, and there was something deeply upsetting about seeing this lovely creature wandering around and around like a swan in a cramped cage, searching for something that didn’t exist. The dark, gloomy cellar, the rattling as she pulled out yet another drawer of random tools, while her golden hair cascaded over her shoulders.
Laila tapped on the door frame with the crutch she had started to use to help her get down the stairs, and the girl immediately stopped searching, went to her room and sat on the bed. Laila sat down beside her.
‘Little One? What is it you want?’
The girl didn’t answer.
A week or so later, Laila had gone down to the cellar one evening to get a pair of gloves from the storeroom. She stood in the doorway of the girl’s room, watching her as she slept. With her hair spread over the pillow, her arms resting straight down by her sides, she looked like a very beautiful corpse. Laila shuddered.
Then she caught sight of the typewriter. There was a blank piece of paper in it, a pale glow in the reflection of the cellar light. No. Not blank. There was something written on it. After checking that the girl really was asleep, Laila went into the room and carefully pulled out the sheet of paper.
The girl’s writing ability also seemed to have deteriorated. There was just one line, without any punctuation. It was the first thing Laila had seen that the girl had come up with for herself. It said:
‘Where love how love colour feels how it is where’
Laila read the line several times, then her gaze slid over to the bed. The girl’s eyes were open, shining faintly as she lay there looking at Laila. She sat down on the edge of the bed with the piece of paper in her hand.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘Is it love you’re searching for, Little One?’
But the girl had closed her eyes again, and didn’t answer.
