themselves on their avidity for going all-in. One or two more knockouts and they could start a cash game of their own. Roger made it to the final table, which had been his minimum goal; but his stack had been eaten away by the increasingly large blinds, and he had to go all-in with a marginal hand, a pair of fives. He had given in to the need for a couple more whiskies and had a pleasant sense of how the alcohol was mixing with the adrenalin inside him so that he was sharp/blurred, tired/elated, eager for victory but quite keen to go home and sleep. His bet was called by Mark, with ace-jack suited; Mark hit his jack and Roger was knocked out. He pushed back from the table; it was one in the morning but he’d gone too far to leave without finding out who won.
The winner turned out, greatly to his surprise, to be Mark, who knocked Michelle out at quarter to four in the morning. Mark was so fidgety and shifty and twitchy that he was very hard to read; he touched himself constantly, his wrist, his ear, his sleeve, his chest; it was a kind of St Vitus’ dance. He appeared to be equally nervous all the time, which made him hard to decode; in fact it was hard to sit across the table from him. His nervousness made other people start to feel nervous. But it was no bar to his winning the ?5,000. The crew, most of them drunk and loud, were shouting, joshing, leaning on each other. Tony was asleep on a sofa. There were plans made for shared taxis, or alternatively to head for a place in Spitalfields that stayed open all night and began serving full English breakfasts at four.
The dealer had already left. The waiter, a Filipino, lingered a while for tips. He wasn’t paid – tips were his whole income. They were variable; some mornings he went home with nothing, but his record was a thousand pounds. On this occasion, Roger slipped him two hundred quid as he and two others half-carried Mark out into the street. From the waiter’s point of view, it was a happy ending.
50
Piotr was still not speaking to Zbigniew. So Zbigniew was no longer speaking to Piotr. But they still lived together. It was awkward sharing a room with someone and not talking to him. In the moments when he was not angry with Piotr, he thought it was going to be something they would one day find very funny. For now, most of the time, he was simply furious. Piotr’s Catholic moralising streak, which had always been the worst part of him, had for the moment ended their friendship.
This was a problem, because if it weren’t for the fact that they temporarily hated each other and weren’t speaking, Zbigniew could have done with his old friend’s advice. He realised that he was going to have to break up with Davina and he needed to do it soon, because the longer he left it the more entangled he felt and the more difficult it would be. It was easy to make bold plans to tell her in her absence; after leaving her flat, going home and all the next day, Zbigniew would have no difficulty crafting messages which perfectly expressed the sentiment: you’re dumped, it’s over, it’s not you it’s me, we mustn’t see each other for a while, but we’ll always be friends, only let’s not call or see each other. He would possess a rocklike certainty about what he needed to do, and how to do it. At about the halfway point between the last time they met and the next time they were due to meet, the certainty would begin to fade, and then as the time to see Davina grew closer, he would get more and more nervous, and his sense of how things were likely to go would become darker and more realistic. He would mumble, he would say everything wrong, the message was stupidly mixed, it was impossible to dump someone and stay on good terms, besides Davina was hysterical, a madwoman, she would go crazy, she would scream, she would beg, she would shout and throw things, she would weep, she would clutch his leg, it would be impossible, a disaster.
Then, when they met, the thing he always forgot to allow for would kick in. At her flat on the saggy sofa, in the pub, in the cinema bar, at the pizza place, he would sit opposite her, get a good look at her, and feel a surge of lust. He was thinking about ways of dumping her at the same time as he was wanting to have sex with her; and in these circumstances it was always possible to postpone the break-up, while the sex would seem increasingly urgent – after all, it would be the last time! The very last! Then things would take their course, and the sex would be over, and there Davina and Zbigniew would be, on the sofa, or the floor, or the bed, and Zbigniew would be filled with a tormenting mix of complete physical well-being and utter emotional misery. He felt weak, and a coward, and it was worse because in those moments Zbigniew also felt a warmth towards Davina, a sense of emotional closeness and gratitude, which made him feel even more of a shit and weakling. Zbigniew disliked disliking himself.
Texting – there was always that. He could dump her by text. This was so unthinkable that Zbigniew enjoyed thinking about it.
Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it. Zbigniew knew that. He was working on a house in Clapham which the wife was redecorating because the husband had run off with his secretary. She was painting the walls purple – an angry purple. People did break up with people. It was difficult but it happened all the time. People had final, definitive arguments, and said things which could not be unsaid; people woke up in the morning and realised that they could not go on with their lives, as they were currently constituted. People decided that they were no longer in love, so they left. And it was amicable, sometimes, too. The person being broken up with often turned out to be thinking about breaking up, too. It was often surprisingly easy. For the best – people agreed that breaking up would be for the best. It happened all the time!
This was therefore, for all these reasons, the day. Zbigniew had decided the day before that today was the day, and his first thought when he had got up in the morning was that today was still the day. He had woken, ignored Piotr, gone to the loo, got dressed, ignored Piotr a little more, eaten some cereal, set out for work, been let into the house by the crazy divorced lady, painted the hallway purple, had a break for lunch, checked his share portfolio, painted some more walls purple, talked a little bit with the crazy lady about how long the rest of the job would take and pretended to ignore her while she had a fifteen-minute conversation on the phone with someone about how much she hated her ex-husband and how she didn’t blame ‘that whore’, only him; then he had gone home to change out of his work clothes, ignored Piotr again, and gone out to the bar by the edge of the Common, the one where they’d met for the first time, to meet Davina, to dump her. All this time he had been possessed by the certainty that today was the day for the break-up, and had been working on how to say it. From experience, Zbigniew knew that the information needed to be conveyed clearly and at the start of the conversation; after that, he could say nice things, if she were amenable to being spoken to, and if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t matter, he would just run away. The worst would be over.
‘My grandmother is dying. I must go home to Poland. We can never see each other again.’
‘I am gay.’
‘I have Aids.’
‘I am gay and I have Aids.’
‘I am gay and I have Aids and my grandmother is dying in Poland, also of Aids, and I have to go back to Poland and my mobile contract is about to lapse so you can’t call me.’
That might be too much.
Zbigniew arrived in the bar fifteen minutes early. The choice of venue was the product of a great deal of thought about whether to have the talk in public or in private. This boiled down to whether she was more or less likely to explode if there were other people around. He had decided that a public place was better; and had then realised that this was probably a mistake, but it was too late to change his mind now, because if he did that would be a good reason to postpone the split-up, and he wouldn’t do that.
He bought himself a glass of sparkling water. If he had alcohol it would increase the chance he would end the evening by having sex with Davina.
The bar was crowded for a Tuesday night – but then it was always crowded, like everywhere else around this part of town. If Zbigniew had to sum up London in a single image, there would be a number of candidates: a group of young Poles sitting in a flat watching television in their socks; two dustbins outside a house, with a plank of wood balanced between them, to reserve a parking space for a builder’s van; the Common on a sunny weekend day, with exposed white skin stretching to the horizon. But the winner would be the high street on a busy evening, full of young people bent on getting drunk – the frenzy of it, the particular pitch of the noise, the sex and anger and hysteria. Zbigniew had once had a sense of the British as a moderate, restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn’t true at all. They drank like mad people. They drank to make themselves happy, and because alcohol was an end in itself. It was a good thing and people want good things, want more and more of them. So, because alcohol was good, the British wanted more and more of it. With drink, they were like Buzz Lightyear: to
