A Gambler Born and Bred 3

1973

One day, aged eight, I was passing a neighbour’s car when I thought I noticed a twenty-pound note inside. I spun around on my bike and there it was, sat by the hand brake.
Although I had narrowly escaped punishment for my sins of the past year and had changed schools for one reason or another, I knew that I had a bad reputation in the local area for theft and vandalism.
Perhaps for this reason, I was gripped by fear that the note had been placed there as a trap by the police in cahorts with my neighbour to catch me redhanded.
Maybe I thought that my time was up. Maybe my neighbour wanted to punish me for setting fire to his front gate with a box of household matches, some leaves and a Daily Express last summer. Maybe I’d been watching too much Z Cars.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t bring myself to simply open the car door, which was clearly unlocked, swipe the cash and make a beeline for The Bright Spot.
Equally, I could not get the thought of stealing the money out of my head, teasing myself by cycling past the car every half-hour to check that it was still there.
I waited for night to fall, so that I could do it inconspicuously, like the Pink Panther.
In the end, I chickened out or maybe I fell asleep waiting to pounce.

Days would pass like weeks if I couldn’t afford to go to The Bright Spot. The management began to keep a wary eye on me because I’d developed a habit of nudging the Penny Falls to get it to spill some coins (an alarm was fitted within the year to deter guttersnipes like me from this unseemly activity).

Without money, The Bright Spot was a place of fear for me. I would try to hide from the attentions of the supervisors, befriend a kid to guide him towards a win and tease some coins from him, only to find that he had a parent with him who would turn up at the crucial moment. Either that or, if my insistence became unruly, the supervisors would throw me out.
The management instantly knew if I had money on arrival.
With money, I was Jack the lad, moving fast around the machines to see which one might pay the most. Without it, I would scurry around trying to be invisible, constantly watching someone else play the machines from a distance or at close proximity.
When I had no money to gamble, I found solace from making fires in Dad’s incinerator using the contents of my sisters’ bins.
I could sit on a rock for hours watching molten plastic burn.

1975

When I was ten, I remember going to visit my grandmother, who was very ill with breast cancer at Weston-Super-Mare hospital.

Such is the power of gambling, all I was interested in was squeezing her for a few quid, as usual, to test out Weston’s machines.

Nan could hardly move a muscle but still found the strength to give me three pounds. As soon as I had picked the money out from her weakening palm, I was as good as on the pier in my mind. I just wasn’t there for her. I was checking out which Penny Falls might give way or wondering which machines would be there.

We left the hospital and got back in the car to go to the pier, but there was a silence and then all of my sisters and my Mum burst into tears.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘She’ll be fine.’

Get me to the pier!

It was all that mattered.
The rest of the day was a blur.
The meaning of an obsession is ‘ a thought that rises above all others’.
That was the last time I saw my Nan.

A few weeks passed.
I came back from playing somewhere and went into the kitchen for some squash. Mum and my sisters sat around the table. There was a dead silence.

‘Rick,’ said Sara, my oldest sister. ‘Nan’s dead.’

I didn’t know how to react. My head started to spin and uncomfortable thoughts made me feel dizzy. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t, so I burst out laughing, presumably to counter this unknown state of mind.
I ran upstairs to my room and wanted to cry, but tears eluded me. Then I started to wonder if she had left me any money.

It sounds awful, I know.
I recently heard a story of a fourteen-month baby who failed to say amen after dinner. She was starved to death for this ‘sin’ by her keepers.
Yet here I was, laughing at Nan’s death as if she was a character from Looney Tunes.

After investigation, Mum later confirmed that she had left an equal amount to all of her grandchildren; two hundred pounds.
But I wouldn’t get my hands on it till the next year.

Of all my guilty memories, that is my darkest. My Nan was lovely. She gave me time and love like no other and all I could do to repay her on her deathbed was squeeze her for some spending money and scarper to the pier. I remember her smell and the flat she lived in. I looked forward to visiting her and Christmas was always better with Nan around. She was genuine and kind; everything I had failed to be.