Page 37 of Lost Souls

“I don’t have credit cards, Arnie. As my dear mum always said, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’”

“Of course she did. Well, my credit cards are kaput, thanks to Mel— thanks to mellifluously donating to animal charities and the blessed evangelists and stuff. And I’ve only got…” He looks in his wallet and sighs. “Eight dollars. So, if you want new clothes in this burg, Noreensweetheart, it looks like there’s only one thing to do.”

Noreen nods in complete understanding. From her voluminous handbag, she deftly extricates a large bundle of wool skewered with needles. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

Arnie’s eyes go skyward. Looking for me, perhaps. “Lord, give me strength.”

No, straight to board level.

Grabbing Noreen – and her hefty handbag – he drags her out of the room.

Chapter Twenty-One

Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold.

(Yiddish proverb)

Arnie Garth hasa pretty good idea that no one he knows (or, more critically, who knows him), especially no one here in Vegas for the prestigious NECA awards ceremony this evening, will be gambling their lives away in the tiny For Luck’s Sake Casino, just a few short yards down the dingy alleyway from their motel. Or, indeed, would be seen dead anywhere near this part of town (although this is a notion that, right now, he doesn’t care to examine too earnestly).

He is, of course, all too aware that in even the most rarefied and sumptuous of establishments in this unique city, the level of glamour rarely approaches those heights that the great unversed are led, from movies and beach reads, to expect with all their yearning hearts. CasinoRoyales they are not – with handsome, tuxedoed men making lickerish eye contact over roulette wheels with glamorous women dripping in diamonds, Valentina and unbridled lust. Yet Arnie still realises that in this less-than-royal casino, his country’s legendary oasis of neon and kitsch has struck a new, depressing low.

At first glance, a visitor might believe that they have stumbled into the annual convention of morbidly obese geriatrics, Middle America chapter. The fat is almost moving on its own, as ageing players attempt to fit their massive legs under gambling tables or squidge onto tiny, groaning stools, like human blueberry muffins. Noreen can’t help but notice the bulging body of an elderly man being wheeled out of the room on an extra-large gurney, his pale and rigid hand still gripped vice-like onto the now severed handle of a slot machine. His wife, remaining seated at her own machine, watches him in sadness, until the sound of dropping coins lures her back.

“It’s how he’d have wanted to go,” she tells the oddly dressed and gawping Englishwoman.

Noreen isn’t even listening. Not that she can hear much above the cacophony of bells, balls and bullshit. She simply stares around her, as the South American natives must have stared when they first saw the Spanish galleons emerging out of the mist. This is so outside anything we have ever seen or could reasonably have imagined, therefore it cannot, in fact, be real.

“I don’t understand, Arnie. Are these peoplegambling?”

“I’m afraid they must be, Noreen. I am so sorry, I had no idea,” he apologises. “I thought it was a clothes shop. But now that we’re here…”

“My poor mum always told me gambling was wrong.”

“It kills me I’ll never meet her,” mutters Arnie, at the same time squatting down a few inches.

“In fact, one of my charities is… What are youdoingdown there, Arnie?” she asks, glancing floorwards to his balding head.

“Eh? Er… your handbag – well, shopping bag – was coming open. There are some bad people here.” He smiles up at her and talks softly, then realises that this is impossible, as the noise around them is almost deafening. So, he shouts upwards in the direction of her ear. “Hey, gamblingiswrong, Noreen. If you lose. But we don’t have that luxury.” He pulls out a reasonably impressive wad of British five-pound notes from whatever is lurking in the stringy, home-knitted cave. “Awwww shit! What’s this? Don’t you have any real money?”

“Arnie, please don’t touch that money! It’s for the new hydrotherapy wing at the Ullswater Hospital for Serious Childhood Diseases.”

“Now, you just made that up,” he tells her, as he flashes the wad to a passing cashier. “Hey, toots, what can I get for this?”

Moments later, Arnie and Noreen are sitting beside the frayed and fading cloth of a crowded blackjack table. As ever, it is occupied by frayed and faded people, obsessively guarding their piles of chips like bloated squirrels.

Noreen clasps her bag tightly into her woolly cardigan, mindful of Arnie’s warnings. As all of her cash, however, is currently sitting in little plastic discs on the table, she now has precious little remaining on her person to be stolen, except perhaps for her virtue, and that is looking pretty safe right now.

The dealer, a swarthy, cadaverous man who seems as if he is on a starvation diet just to make his customers feel bad, deals them their first card.

“Thank you very much, sir,” says Noreen with a smile, causing the dealer to glare at her, sensing some sort of dangerously foreign sarcasm beneath the almost impenetrable accent.

She starts to examine the card with an embarrassed smile, as if she has just been handed a billet-doux and isattempting to decipher its intent.

“The object of the game, Noreen, is to get as near to twenty-one as you can,” explains Arnie, “but not more than twenty-one. I know it sounds complicated, but—”

Noreen is suddenly beside herself with giddily grateful excitement. “It’s Pontoon!” she shrieks. The perspiration already on her brow, perhaps from wearing an excess of cardigans in the desert, begins to glide down her face, intermingling with very tiny tears of joy. “Oh, Arnie. I used to play it with my mum for peanuts.”

“Nothing changes, does it?” says Arnie.