Excerpt from "The English Call it Patience"



The English Call it Patience



There wasn’t much talk about the craic surrounding the televised game of Patience here in the Mullen house. Last time it had seen an end to the money for the holiday, Mary Mullen's tooth had been knocked loose and she’d been pulled out into the street by her hair again. He was up for the craic as always, that was certain. By the way he’d swung in from work, barely touching the sofa before he was up in the bath, this was going to be the craic from hell, for her.

In the Barrack Bar he’d be there gurning up at the television again, talking the talk as the cards flew to their various homes, making with the bonhomie and raucous charm even as he lost, for the benefit of the others in the bar.  She’d just have to wait until he appeared hours later, crumbling under the ordeal of his happiness at having lost the pot, pissed the lot and having sung every predictable song in the book. It no longer mattered to her if he had won or lost, this was the position that she was forced into. If he won, he would find another way to lose it, and quickly. If he lost, he’d be spouting alternating chevrons of bitterness and stoicism, guiding him round the angry blind bend again, to hit that “silly bloody whore” for daring to talk to him. She would wait, and greet him with a stern face, providing all the excuses he needed, because at least it cleared the air quickly, and they could go back to being the kind of people that enjoyed the craic.

But tonight he had arrived home early, and sober, and deadly concentrated. This was unique and a troubling state for him to be in, at any time. When she heard the turning of the key at half past ten, she was so sure it wasn’t him that she was expecting the appearance of one very louche burglar. She sat on the sofa and adopted a waiting position with all her body, eyes and opinions in place. His head appeared round the corner of the door, with an almost shy hesitancy. She ran through all the permutations, he was about to tell her of his new affair, of leaving her; he hadn’t even got to the pub before losing every penny they owned and he’d been sitting in the park with the pigeons pecking at crumbs of guilt inside himself. But it wasn’t any of these.

He fell into the dip that was his dip in the sofa. His hands travelled to his head and then he leant forward and spoke in a tone slow and heavy with implication. They’d won. The lot. A seven card prediction topped up with the first column decision of the game. The odds were so huge they were written in the starched cuneiform of algebra.  Right now he was the heir to all the losing tickets for two hundred miles or more, a fortune. And this was a tragedy. It meant the end to all that lovely detail in petty losing, petty winning. It meant that he’d won so much that he could never lose it again even if he knocked up in a consortium with a professional albatross hunter. As a man in love with scraping the barrel, he was ruined. The money would interfere once and for all with his concrete justification for all this shite.

copyright martin holdcroft 1998