A Gambler Born and Bred 18

In October, she decided that we deserved a break and bought tickets for Florence and Venice.
She’d bought a large house in Chelsea and all her belongings would be transferred to this house for our return.
Unbeknown to her, whilst I’d been twiddling my fingers with her at college, I’d taken to going to the pub of an afternoon with her Yorkshire Terrier, Boseley.
One particular fruit-machine had me in its grip and I was busy blowing all my wages away.

‘But where’s it all gone?’ she’d asked, dismayed.
I didn’t want to lie to her but there was no way out of it. She’d have seen me for what I was if I hadn’t and I feared she’d give me the boot.

‘I’ve owed my Mum money for ages, and one of my sisters,’ I replied. Although this was true, I hadn’t been paying them back at all.

I felt awful and couldn’t get the lie, or my weakness for gambling, out of my head.

We went to Florence first but I’d changed. I didn’t like being paid for and it showed.
She wanted to stay in a five star but I was insistent on a two star near the Duomo.
When I got toothache, I became angry and tiresome, causing needless quarrels in public, so she found a dentist and he whipped a tooth out for me. That was bliss, but I couldn’t eat properly till we got to Venice.
When we arrived there, Helen was so upset with my behaviour that she insisted on splashing out on a top hotel, but they were all booked, so we ended up at Hotel Londra.

Having brought the camera, she was keen to film something but wouldn’t tell me what.
One morning, bright and early, she pulled me from the bed and led me to St Mark’s Square with the camera.
Here, she set up the tripod in the middle of the square and bought a pile of bird feed, then she asked me to lie on the floor facing up.
I still had no idea what she had in mind until she poured the feed all over my body and the birds descended upon me.
It was an eerie feeling, pecks here and there, feathers tickling my face and arms, a swarm of pigeons covering me, but I stayed put. If this was what she wanted, I was happy to do it.
When I got up, I felt like a complete baffoon. People had come to watch and were laughing at me; human bird feed.

We left and went for lunch at Harry’s Bar, then she insisted on buying some clothes. I enjoyed watching her change from one outfit to another, fully aware that the cost was irrelevant to her. She could have bought the whole shop, even the street, if she’d wanted to.
At the end of the day, laden with bags, she made me try an Armani elephant-cord jacket and bought it for me. I couldn’t say no. It was the most beautiful item of clothing I’d ever worn.

Before leaving London, I’d learnt how she had broken down following a previous relationship with a swindler whose father had extorted thousands of pounds from her under the dubious pretence of an offshore deal.
The trauma caused by their split, immediately after she’d given his father the money, saw her go through a serious bout of psychosis brought on by cocaine and alcohol.

Crazy as it may sound (and I still believe this to be true), she had been outside her house believing she was possessed by demons when a pair of passing nuns befriended her and took her back to their dwellings to bring her back to reality.
After this, she went to the Priory, where, by coincidence, the father of her estranged ex had been taken after nearly drinking himself to death.
She flourished while he was duly cast out.
Helen had also confided in me that both her grandmother and her mother had become clinically insane after giving birth to their first, and only, child.
This had happened at twenty-two; Helen’s age at that time, and I vowed never to make her pregnant until she was good and ready, for fear of being the man responsible for her genetically cyclical madness, which I prayed she would be able to break free from.
Typically paradoxical, Helen was the first girl I’d wanted children with, and not for any other reason than love.

As time went by, I found my role as her boyfriend increasingly difficult to master in the company of her friends. My insecurity told me that they saw me as a sleazy gold-digger, which may have been true before falling in love. Now, though, the thought of being seen in this light was unbearable, and she could sense my discomfort.
Although she respected me for my working class attitude, I was aware that this would go against me in the end. Either way, I knew I couldn’t win.

Back in London, I could feel Paris pulling at my lapels. The new house was immense, an old stable joined to the next house, but cracks were beginning to appear in my mind-set. Besides feeling out of place, I had unfinished business in Paris. London held little for me apart from the love of my life.
I’d bumped into old friends and been out clubbing but I couldn’t help feeling nothing for the scene in London. It was all coke, money and oneupmanship; everything that I’d run away from.
If a friend came to visit at Helen’s house, they’d look at me with different (resentful) eyes and leave with a smirk on their face. They could go to hell for all I cared.

Later that month, I drove to Paris and rented a small venue near La Bastille for a party I called Game Boy. I did the flyers on paper with black print to save on costs and did the snide by cancelling a few London DJ at the last minute, not knowing what the turn out would be.
We packed it out and I made about 20,000 francs.

In November, craving to write a novel, Helen gave me the keys to the villa on the Cap d’Antibes and I flew down there.
I wrote constantly for the first week, always at night in front of a big fire in the sitting-room, and slept in late, only going out for cigarettes and a newspaper form the little café tabac down the road. By the second week, I needed a joint so badly that I used the old Mercedes in the garage and went to Le Bar de la Porte du Port, where I found an Australian with only one leg called Digger.
He’d lost his leg after cutting it badly with his shovel while digging a grave and falling into it drunk on whisky. By the time someone found him, the leg was so badly infected that he had to have it amputated.
I bought a large chunk of Moroccan hash and a few rounds of Guinness, had a few games of pool, noticed that the picture of the clown sitting outside the circus tent was still there and returned to the villa.

I became mad, I suppose, in that second week, writing insane text with a brain so full of hash it was turning to mush. What I had started to write became part of me and I couldn’t properly separate reality from the vision I had constructed in the novel, set in 2065, in a world where the poor had been sectioned off for the rich to enjoy the spoils of the world.
I called Helen.

‘It’s mad, Hel,’ I said. ‘There’s this big drinks hall where everyone drinks and takes drugs, but they can’t leave and they eat food pills and Dads don’t exist. I think I’m onto something here. What d’you reckon?’

She was silent for a moment because I’d made her cry again. ‘I think you should come back right away, Richard. I want you back in one piece.’
I got the picture and she booked me a ticket back on her credit card for the next day. I’d only ever had a cashpoint card and that never had any money in it for long because of my gambling habits.

When I got back, I felt very strange. I’d written the novel on a large sketch-pad but it was unfinished. I wanted to finish it more than anything, imagining that the thread would be lost if I let go of it, but whenever I sat down to write, the urge to go out and play fruit-machines overpowered me.
After two weeks, I’d finished it but I wasn’t happy at all with the ending.

On December 22nd of that year, Helen and I made love in such a way that I started to imagine that we were angels entwined in heaven. When the time came for me to pull out, she held me inside her and I became powerless to separate from her. I saw the image of our child in my mind’s eye as I came.

After that, everything started to go wrong.

Helen became pregnant and I reacted badly.
Part of me so wanted this baby that I’d envisaged in the act of conception and the other part told me that I’d send Helen to permanent madness and beyond, which I couldn’t let happen.
In the end, we went halves on an abortion.

Just as I’d laughed after being told of my beloved grandmother’s death, I treated the death of our unborn baby in much the same way. Unable to dwell with my deepest thoughts, I made light of the situation by cutting off my emotions.

As we drove to the clinic in Ealing, I tried to cheer Helen up with stupid, childish jokes.
‘Oh look, Hanger Lane!’

I was pathetic.
While she was on the slab, I went down to the shops across the green and bought a copy of Mixmag and a cappuccino.
When she came out of surgery, I skirted the reality of the situation by asking the doctor if he’d give me the address of the oxygen supplier, ‘for a party, of course’.

I don’t think Helen ever forgave me for my behaviour that day.