"53" - a short story

impr0v

“Caso!” A year and a half in and we had long reached the point of real fluency in the language, the point at which one swears instinctively in ones adopted tongue. Darci went to the TV and gave the cabinet a sharp slap with the base of her palm. Dust rose and danced and the evening sun coming through the shutters cut her into even slices. The lines of static see-sawed and cleared abruptly and she sat back down beside me.

The second number rolled from the drum, “Ventiquattro”. I watched her from the corner of my eye for a reaction but failed to discern any. This evening’s Darci was less animated than yesterday’s, her silence was a lot harder to read.

“Ventiquattro” An old lady disappointedly relayed the number to someone hard of hearing in one of the other bedsits below, the intonation of her voice dropping with the syllables. The sense that the whole country was hanging on this draw was palpable. With us it was the case that the country was hanging on it, or at least our continuing presence in the country. Unable to sleep in the heat, overnight I had considered changing my mind and telling Darci that we would just go, rather than leave that decision to the vagaries of chance. At least that way I would have done something manifestly and directly for her. It had been apparent for some time that she had become disillusioned with what was initially supposed to be an idyllic existence, work for her was hard to come by this far south, and repeatedly reading advertisements for paid fashion shoots in the north had stung more and more when she was demeaning herself taking football shots and making la Gazzetta once a month at best. Her sentiments were becoming more and more clear as time went on, but since she hadn’t vocalized them, it left the easy option of feigning ignorance open to me. I knew I was in her debt for sticking with it for so long, but my selfishness won out again. I left the house before she awoke this morning, telling myself that it was a done deal by then.

Another numbered ball settled and the digits six and zero took shape. “Sessanta!” The studio crowd cheered, which immediately made it evident that they had been prompted to do so. They, like every second person in the country, had their money riding on the one number. I had relayed the facts to Darci the evening before.

“The last time it was seen was in May of 2003, 178 draws ago. It means that statistically it’s way, way, overdue.” She had to have seen the fuss about it, she couldn’t have missed it, the papers were reveling in the tales of the devastation it was wreaking across Italy, the queues forming for the tax on dreams and the fallout when they didn’t come true. Bankrupt husbands had shot themselves and bank clerks, unable to repay their borrowings from customers accounts, had turned themselves in to police after the midweek draw.
“Michael, it’s eventually going to happen, that’s for definite. It might even be probable that it will come out this weekend, but it’s by no means certain. Sure if we had money to play with, money to throw away, then I’d be happy for us to gamble some of it, but the fact is we don’t, and you know it.” There was a tiredness in her voice, also discernable in her face, despite the dim light.
“I do know it, that’s why I haven’t bought a ticket in the past five weeks, despite everyone’s advice, but since it didn’t come out in those five weeks it means that’s ten extra draws added to the run, it’s even more likely to appear now.”
“Likely won’t keep us here Michael, we’re almost broke, what will we do if it doesn’t come out? If we don’t do it, we’ll be able to last another month, at least a month, that’s more concrete than a ‘likely’.”
“If we don’t win it, we’ll go. We’ll go home and get work there, I’ll teach for a while, we’ll recover.”
She paused at this point, looked at me. I wasn’t sure I had said it either, but in hindsight I must have at least considered it prior to this. After all, if the number didn’t show there was no other option, as much as it pained me. A door had banged in the hallway outside and a muffled shouting was seeping through. She turned towards it and the sweat glistened on her forehead, a dark lock of hair stuck to her temple.
“You don’t really mean that, you said yourself it’s too early to give up”. I had said it, and I still felt it, but I was starting to consider myself naive to have thought that this would work at all. Move to Italy straight after our honeymoon and paint, paint a perfect existence through the heat haze in Tuscany, colour-drunk and wrapped up in the romanticism of imagining how the Duomo would appear over Firenze in the morning. In other words, ship boatloads of browning, bruised, snow up to Greenland and hope to sell it to the eskimos. Florence had turned into a stay on a farm outside Cortona, once the lease on the apartment became too expensive, working to earn our keep as part of an agricultural initiative. Before long, that started to feel too much like home in the bad old days, so we moved south where our money lasted longer. I knew that if I left now my self-belief would suffer as much as, if not more than my pride, but I had suddenly stopped seeing options. Perhaps the time I had spent on the scholarship had rendered me blind to the financial realities of the outside world, blind, idealistic and stubborn. Perhaps I had always been that way. She fished a packet of cigarettes out of the bag at her feet. “Tourist numbers are picking up, there’ll be more exhibitions, we can hit Roma at the weekend and try the galleries there, something will work out.” She ducked down again for her lighter, “What you’re producing now is better than anything you’ve done before, to risk that on one number from 90, that’s insane.” The heat really was stifling, even three floors up and this late in the evening. The shouting continued down the hall, tempers frayed, everyone burning with the 53 fever. My mind was made up.
“Nah, let’s just do it, we might as well go out with a bang, saying we lost our money on gambling sounds a lot more respectable than saying we gave up, or that we didn’t make it. I have to collect a canvas from Ravello tomorrow, and you have the bank book, isn’t there a machine in the shop where you get prints?” She didn’t say anything, just lit a cigarette, the clink-clink of her lighter, but I could feel her eyes on me as I lay flat on the bed and looked at the ceiling.

The drum gave birth to ball four, the studio crowd were cheering before it stopped in the cradle underneath, but the cheering fizzled out when the numbers became legible.
“Diciassette,” said Darci.
“Diciassette,” said the studio host.
“Diciassette, merda,” said the old lady downstairs.
Darci turned to me, “are you ready to say goodbye to our penthouse if the last one isn’t it?”

It would sadden me to go, not only because I would be giving up on the idea using my supposed talents to pay my way for the first time. As spartan as it was, this stuffy bedsit was where we had spent the longest period of our marriage so far, and as such, it felt like it belonged to us. While it sometimes seemed that we were spending more time worrying about the trivialities of everyday life than even thinking about our relationship, we jokingly agreed that was the only way to make marriage last, within these four walls there was no distance between us. The one room of our ‘penthouse’ already seemed to hold more good memories for me than my home did at this point. And the thoughts of teaching held absolutely no attraction to me, being completely bereft of the patience necessary to teach someone how to do something that I considered second nature. We could go to Darci’s home, a nice town near the French-Swiss border, but it would be harder for me to find work there without any contacts, and bringing daddy’s girl back to him, penniless, would be tantamount to turning up a wearing a skirt in his eyes. No, it was definitely home, unappetizing as it was, that was our only real option.

Frothing bubbles in the drum, a slowing of the rotor and here it came, destiny.

Before the ball even shuddered to a halt in front of the greedy eye of the camera I looked at her and said “Sorry.” She reached for my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. I switched off the tv and we sat in silence for a while. I kissed her.

Later, after the sun had set we lay in bed under one sheet, wrapped up in each other, logistics put off until tomorrow. Sadness was quarantined somewhere within me, safe where she couldn’t read it, and where I couldn’t find it too easily. She remained hard to read, impossible to divine how she felt about the prospect of leaving, though she must have been somewhat happy about it. I loved her for a lot of reasons, but at the moment it was for not saying anything.
“Michael?” Her breath brushed my neck.
“Yes?”
“I still have the money.”
“You didn’t put it on?”
“No.”
A small breeze trickled through the syrupy air of the bedsit. I pulled her closer.
“What if we had won?” I asked after a pause.
“It’s more likely now next week.”
“That’s true,” I said.

Adapted from an article by Paddy Agnew in The Irish Times, 26th January

impr0v

Comments and insults welcome, but go easy on me, I don't write much.

BEAT

I have mixed feeling's about the structure but in the end it is a good short story.
I'd like to see some more of your work if you have any available

MojoMaker

Lol, put it this way - let's hope Paddy Agnew doesn't read this board! Nice version though.

impr0v

MojoMaker wrote:

Lol, put it this way - let's hope Paddy Agnew doesn't read this board! Nice version though.

The story is mine, I have only used factual information from his article, such as the fact that the number 53 hasn't been seen in 178 draws, that people are gambling huge amounts on it, and that there have been suicides and arrests as a consequence. I only referenced his article as it provided the idea for the story, there is no plagarism involved.

Sleepy

I liked it, in snatches it reminds me of Douglas Coupland's earlier stuff and that's about as good a complement as I can give!

MojoMaker

impr0v, what I meant was if Paddy Agnew read that he'd be kicking himself. A very credible story. Nice one.

BEAT

yes it is very good, I love the perspective it is written from...I felt like I was right there in the room with them. I felt the beads of heat rolling down thier foreheads and saw the smoke circling the room.
very descriptive,
well written.