“What are the odds again?” I said.
“They’re ten to one.”
“So that means I win…”
“You win ten times your stake, plus you get your stake back.”
“Ok. So if I put a pound on, I win…”
“Ten pounds. Exactly.”
“Plus I get my original pound back, right?”
“Correct.”
“Guess that’s fair.”

-------------------------------------------------------

I looked around the betting shop. It was pretty empty, but there were still a handful of people sitting in the tall-seats, up against the counters that ran alongside the walls. All were men, sitting on their own, staring at a personal monitor hanging from the ceiling – some were watching the dogs, some the horses and the rest just staring at the multi-coloured teletext screens. It was quiet – just the occasional cough, or sniff, or rustle of paper. No one was crying or whooping with joy, or stamping their feet in frustration. I was a little disappointed. I had hoped for a little more excitement today. As I looked down at the sticky carpet scattered with dog-ends and empty fast-food containers, I wondered whether that insistent smell of stale smoke and vinegar that I’d noticed when I first walked in was actually the smell of ruin.

I turned back and looked at my betting slip, lying flat on the counter. I picked up a short blue biro from a box marked “Have a pen!” and ticked the appropriate race, scribbling in the horse’s name. Then it was the stake, and as I considered what I was doing, I looked up at the guy behind the screen. He was wearing his usual red waistcoat over a white shirt. The waistcoat was presumably meant to look smart and possibly add a touch of glamour to proceedings, but it was stretched over his stomach so tightly, the gold buttons put under such strain, that I was grateful for the toughened glass that stood between us. He was lazily jabbing away at the keyboard beneath the counter and making strange snorting sounds. According to the shiny plate on his ample chest his name was Windsor though I doubt I’d ever used it.

I gave the completed slip to Windsor, and he acknowledged it with little more than a well-practiced grunt. This clearly wasn’t the first time I was risking so much. As Windsor tapped away, I stared out at the largely empty room and considered how much of my life had been sucked away down those cathode ray tubes.

-------------------------------------------------------

“You did what?!” my wife had said.

For once she had actually been looking at me when she said it. Normally she would be looking at something or somebody else – anything but me. I had, perhaps, touched a nerve.

“I put it on a horse.” I said again, very slowly.

She had stared at me. Her mouth was ajar and her eyes were flickering. Without breaking her line of sight, she came and sat down opposite me, pulling a chair out from beneath the breakfast table with a shriek of metal on ceramic tiles. She lowered her slender shoulders and leaned forward, her pale fingers gripped the edge of the table. I remember the wedding ring was conspicuous by its absence. I had held the stare and clenched my fists, resisting the Pavlovian urge to smile.

“When is it running?” she asked in a languid and deliberate manner, like a teacher questioning a retarded child.

“It’s running” I recall replying slowly, mirroring her tone, “at three thirty. At Kemptown.”

“I don’t care where it’s running,” she snapped.

The thing I remember most was her pupils. They seemed to be slowly pulling away, like tube trains disappearing down bright blue tunnels. I had glanced at my watch. It was a quarter past three. The bookies were at least twenty minutes away. I could tell she didn’t know what time it was, and that she didn’t want to look down in fear of conceding defeat. Finally she took a surreptitious look at my wrist, which I’d left purposely on the table. There were maybe three or four seconds of frantic and silent calculation before she found my eyes again. The pupils were back, wide and deep, but she appeared lost for words. I let the moment hang. Two seconds, four, ten. Finally she found something to say.

“If you lose it all, you shit, I will kill you.”

She had held her stare for a second or two more, before a little twitch in the corner of my mouth drew her eyes away momentarily. I pulled back my arm and clenched my fists tight beneath the table, digging nails into palm. She threw back her chair so it slammed into our furiously expensive granite-topped units, and stormed out of the room. I heard the downward thump of the stairs, the scrabbling in the bowl by the door and the telltale slam – the letter-flap adding an extra rattle. I waited and listened to the car start and lurch away, the wheels spitting gravel onto the living room windows like hailstones. Then it was quiet. I knew where she had gone. It was no secret between us.

Fact is, I did lose it all. In the end I actually lost much more than I had wagered.

--------------------------------------------------------

Windsor finished tapping and looked up at me blankly.

“Are you sure you want to bet this much? It’s a lot.”

He didn’t really care how much I bet. Perhaps he was duty bound to ask punters before they threw away their lives.

“Yes thanks Windsor.” Now we were accomplices.

“Ok. Your risk,” he said pointing out the obvious. “How do you want to pay the stake?”

I reached into my inside jacket pocket and held the envelope that contained the sum total of my life’s endeavour.

--------------------------------------------------------

"It's not that we don't value what you've done here, it's just that... well... we really had no choice."

A career without so much as a blemish in twenty-five years – a model of discrete and professional conduct – can suddenly end with terrifying speed and purpose. I’d planned to enjoy the remaining years of my somewhat limp career from the safety of a corporate backwater, and that was largely to be expected. There was no one left to impress or disappoint. That was all in the past. But they caught me a little on the hop.

“You know how it is,” they had said.

At the time I was looking out of the window, so I didn’t see the attempt at a sympathetic smile. There wasn't much point in maintaining eye contact. The knife had already been applied. Instead I preferred to look at the treetops and little chimneys puffing out smoke. It was windy outside – the treetops were swaying and the smoke was swept away as soon as it emerged. I could see litter being blown along the street and birds straining upstream, then shooting past in the opposite direction.

"Your cheque is in the envelope."

The diminutive man, whom I had never really considered either friend or enemy, reached over his leather-topped desk and I took the small, white envelope. I just held it on my lap and stared at the printed name on the front. There are others then, I thought. That was mildly gratifying.

"We feel it's more than generous. Although of course, if you're really not happy, then you have full recourse to a tribunal. Naturally, we hope it would never come to that."

It never came to that. I left the firm as quickly as I had joined it. Punched in and punched out, a quarter century shift.

------------------------------------------------------------

I’d taken the little white envelope I was given and exchanged its contents for cash, the remains of which were now stuffed inside the larger, brown envelope in my jacket pocket. For a moment I struggled to pull it out as the corners snagged on the lining of my coat, but I dismissed the chance it was an omen and, once it was free, handed it gingerly to Windsor. He took it and set it down behind the counter, out of sight. Then he picked up the phone.

“Dave, it’s Windsor. You got a moment? Got a big’un. Can you come down? Cheers.”

I waited for Dave to come down, which only took thirty seconds. I had to stifle a smile when he arrived through the door marked “Staff Only” – he was bigger than Windsor. Fortunately he’d been spared the indignity of wearing a waistcoat.

He sidled up to the counter. Suddenly there wasn’t a great deal of room behind the glass screen. Dave looked at me like anyone would at a man that had walked in off the street and wagered a large sum of money on something completely out of his control. His expression was of mild amusement. My neck felt hot.

“How much is it?” He was looking at me, but his head was turned slightly to address Windsor. At least I thought it was, so I said nothing. Neither did Windsor.

“Hello? How much is it?”
Windsor was fiddling with the back of the card machine and seemingly oblivious to Dave’s question. So I told him

“And you’re paying cash right? Normally we’d be a bit careful about this y’know, but seeing as it’s only one bet, and a long one, should be alright. You’d be a bit stupid to launder at those odds.”

He didn’t smile. He mashed a few keys on the PC, narrowed his little eyes and pursed his lips while he read something on screen. A few moments later and perhaps satisfied that I wasn’t cleaning some illicit bounty, he muttered something to Windsor while his back was turned and shuffled off back upstairs.

I got back a printed slip showing the details of the bet and a receipt that listed the amount and the tax deduction. I put them in my wallet, in the zipped bit that normally held stamps. I thanked Windsor and walked slowly over to my usual chair – one of those in the middle of the floor, on a small raised dais, like a betting command post. It was twenty minutes to the race, so I settled down and thought about how it had all started.

-------------------------------------------------------

Once I had cleared my desk I walked back to the car that was no longer welcome on the tarmac, I fingered the envelope in my pocket and considered my options. Maybe take a trip, see something different. I paused with my fingers on the door handle and looked back at the grubby grey box I had spent so much of my life in. It looked rather sad and vacuous, like an empty Hoover bag. The lights were coming on inside as the last of the sun was blown below the horizon. I couldn't see my window; it was round the other side. There was a rumble as a squat, shining coupe loped past from the spaces reserved for the Board. Trailing in the wash of red metallic paint and carbon monoxide, I had left my car behind and wandered up to the high street in search of something to delay my return home.

I passed the pubs – I didn’t want to drink it away – and ignored the shops. What was there left to buy? Then something had caught my eye. It was the picture of a horse, a huge chestnut brown horse, flying over a towering, impossible hurdle. The photo had been taken with a fish-eye lens so the horse’s head was disproportionately large and the jockey tiny and partially hidden. I stood and stared at it for a moment. It looked about to jump through the window and into the street. As I stood on the pavement, the wind was pushing me sideways and it had an increasingly cold edge in the darkness. To my left, the doorway to the bookmakers was open and it looked warm inside – I could see the flicker of TV’s and bright lights.

When I had walked into the bookies for the very first time and seen its isolated, single-celled punters, I felt strangely welcome. It was, and still is, largely alien to me – I still don’t really have any idea about the mechanics of betting, or the likely chance of really making it. Despite the amount of money that I’ve seen disappear, I still regard the whole process as rather mystical, a black box of tips and tricks. Sometimes what you put in comes back multiplied, sometimes nothing comes back at all. But, to be fair, I have won my share of bet. I’ve had halcyon days when everything I pick turns to gold. They’re always enough to keep you in it for the long haul, those brief moments of magic that convince you you’re on right track.

-------------------------------------------------------

“So, what happens if my horse comes second?”
“Nothing. You lose.”
“Nothing at all? What about my stake?”
“You lose your stake. That’s the point. If you win you win, if you don’t win you lose. If you want it each way then you get lower odds.”
“Guess that’s fair,” I had said.