Page 325 of Double or Nothing

Music.

Clothes.

Food.

Her laugh.

She learned to like jazz for one and motor racing for another. She stopped curling her hair because a man called Graham said she looked better with it straight.

I hated Graham. He was an absolute cunt who compared her to other women all the fucking time. I hated all of them, actually.

Not because they took my mother from me, but because she handed herself over willingly. Desperate.

Whenever one of them called, everything changed. Dinner got moved. Plans got cancelled. I got sent upstairs because she needed the living room, or got told to get myself some cereal for breakfast instead of waiting for her to make pancakes, because some asshole called Rob had stayed the night.

Then they left.

They always left.

Mum would cry behind her closed bedroom door, night after night, before emerging with fresh mascara and a different lipstick, ready to begin the same fucking cycle again.

She needed somebody to choose her so badly that she forgot to choose herself. But worse than that, she forgot to choose me.

My love was just never enough for her. My adoration and loyalty meant fuck all compared to a guy with cheesy compliments and a dick to back them up.

On the flip side, my father was different after the divorce. Happy and carefree.

He got lucky with gambling and moved into a flat with glass walls and a balcony overlooking the river. He bought a red sports car and filled his fridge with champagne. Women came and went, each younger and more mesmerised by him than the last. I got to meet some of them, and they fawned over me, and told me how lucky I was to look like him.

I believed them.

Dad drank like a fucking fish.

Gambled like a billionaire with nothing to lose.

Travelled the world over and then some.

Had fun.

Lots of fucking fun.

“You’ve only got one life, Jack,” he told me while teaching me poker at his kitchen table. “Never let anyone trap you into wasting it. Tell them to go fuck themselves, give them the middle finger, and find someone more fun to spend your time on.”

I worshipped my father.

Not the long waits in hotel lobbies while he finished drinks with someone upstairs. Not the weekends he cancelled because an opportunity had come up in Monaco or New York.

I worshipped the idea of him.

The freedom.

He never sat crying because someone had left. Never changed himself to earn another person’s love. Never seemed to need anything he couldn’t buy, drink or replace by morning.

My dad was the one I wanted to emulate, not my mum.

Never Mum.

I would want people, but never need them. I’d have fun and nothing more.