William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

He was the only person waiting who was alone apart from herself, and he didn’t seem interested in the announcements about which buses were arriving or about to go. He didn’t look up when people came in. He hadn’t glanced once in her direction.

In the end, if nothing happened, Jasmin knew she would have to be brazen. She called it that to herself because it was what it amounted to, because you didn’t get anywhere if you weren’t. All your life you’d be carrying teas to the lorrymen in the diner, wiping down the tables and clearing away plastic plates, doing yourself an injury because you were soaking up the lorrymen’s cigarette smoke. ‘Now, you don’t be brazen, Angie,’ her mother used to scold her when she was no more than five or six and used to reach up for the cooking dates or a chocolate bar in Pricerite, opening whatever it was before her mother saw.

‘You carry that to a woman doing the shelves. You say a mistake, you tell her that. Brazen you are,’ her mother always ended up. ‘You just watch it, girl.’ She kept quiet herself. She never approached a woman who was arranging the shelves, just put whatever she’d taken behind the cornflakes or the kitchen rolls.

Jasmin was her own choice of name, since she’d always detested Angie and considered it common when she was older. ‘Oh, la-di-da!’ her mother’s riposte had been to this further evidence of brazenness. ‘Listen to our madam!’ she would urge Holby, trying to draw the husband she had now into it, but Holby had become fly about things like that, having learned a lesson when he’d been drawn into a no-go marriage. It wasn’t even the way you spelled it, her mother witheringly commented, no ‘e’ at the end was your bloody Muslim way. But when her mother wasn’t there Holby said all that was a load of rubbish. ‘You spell your name like it suits you,’ he advised. ‘You stick to how you want it.’ Her mother was a violent woman, Jasmin considered, and knew that Holby did too.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, crossing to where the man was waiting. ‘I’m Jasmin.’

He smiled at her. He had a peaky face, his teeth crowded at the front, light-coloured hair left long. He was wearing flannel trousers and a jacket, and that surprised her. A kind of speckled navy-blue the jacket was, with a grey tie. And shoes, not trainers, all very tidy. What surprised her more than anything was that he could have been mid-thirties, maybe a few years older. From his voice on the chat line, she’d thought more like nineteen.

‘You fancy a coffee, Jasmin?’ he said.

She felt excited when he spoke. The first time, on the chat line, she’d felt it when he’d called her Jasmin. Then again yesterday, when he’d said why don’t they meet up?

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said.

All the time he kept his smile going. He was the happy sort, he’d told her on the chat line, not the first time, maybe the third or fourth. He’d asked her if she was the happy sort herself and she’d said yes, even though she knew she wasn’t. Droopy was what she was, she’d heard her mother saying when Holby first came to live in the house; and later on, when her mother wasn’t there, Holby asked her what the trouble was and she said nothing. ‘Missing your dad?’ Holby suggested. Seven she’d been then.

‘You like to go in here?’ the man suggested when they came to a McDonald’s. ‘You all right with a McDonald’s, Jasmin?’

Just coffee, she said when he offered her a burger, and he said he’d bring it to her. Her father had gone when he found out her mother was going with Holby. Her mother said she didn’t care, but six months later she made Holby marry her, because she’d been caught, she maintained, having not been married to Jasmin’s father.

‘I like a McDonald’s,’ the man said, coming with the coffee.

He was smiling again, and she wondered if he had smiled all the time at the counter. She didn’t know his name. Three weeks ago she first heard his voice on the chat line. ‘I’m Jasmin,’ she’d said, expecting him to say his name also, but he hadn’t.

‘I could nearly tell your age,’ he said now. ‘From talking to you I nearly could.’

‘Sixteen.’

‘I thought sixteen.’

They sat at the counter that ran along the window. People on the pavement outside were in a hurry, jostling one another, no cars or buses allowed in this street.

‘You’re pretty,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty, Jasmin.’

She wasn’t really. She couldn’t be called pretty, but he said it anyway, and he wondered if there was a similar flattery he would particularly enjoy himself. While they watched the people on the street he thought about that, imagining the baby voice in which she gabbled her words saying something like he knew his way around, or saying he had an easy way with him.

‘You think I’d be younger?’ he asked her.

‘Yeah, maybe.’ She gave a little shrug, her thin shoulders jerking rapidly up and down. The blue anorak she wore wasn’t grubby but had a faded, washed-out look. Other girls would have thrown it away.

‘I like your charm,’ he said, and pointed because she didn’t know he meant the brooch that was pinned to the flimsy pink material of her dress. Her chest was flat and he could have said he liked that too because it was the truth. But the truth didn’t always do, as he had long ago learned, and he smiled instead. Her bare, pale legs were like twigs stripped of their bark and he remembered how he used to do that, long ago too. Her shoes were pinkish, high-heeled.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said, referring to her brooch. She shrugged in the same jerky way again, a spasm it seemed almost, although he knew it wasn’t. ‘A fish,’ she said. ‘It’s meant to be a fish.’

‘It’s beautiful, Jasmin.’

‘Holby gave it to me.’

‘Who’s Holby then?’

‘My mother got married to him.’

‘Your father, is this?’

‘Bloody not.’

He smiled. In one of their conversations he’d asked her if she was pretty and she’d said maybe and he’d guessed she wasn’t from the way she’d said it. They went in for fantasy, they put things on. Well, everyone did, of course.

‘Same age as you, Jasmin—you think that when we talked? What age you think?’

‘You didn’t sound a kid,’ she said.

She had a stud in one side of her nose and a little coil pierced into the edge of one ear. He wondered if she had something in her belly-button and wanted to ask her but knew not to. He wanted to close his eyes and think about a gleam of something nestling there, but he smiled instead. Her hair was lank, no frizziness left in it, brightened with a colouring.

‘You take trouble,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be the kind. I could tell you’d take trouble with yourself.’

Again there was the shrug. She held the paper coffee mug between her hands as if for warmth. She asked him if he was in work and he said yes, the law.

‘The law? With the police?’ She looked around, an agitated movement, her eyes alarmed. He could take her hand, he thought, a natural thing to do, but he resisted that too.

‘The courts,’ he said. ‘If there’s a dispute, if there’s trouble I have to put a case. No, not the police, nothing to do with the police.’

She nodded, unease draining away.

‘You going to be a nurse, Jasmin? Caring for people? I see you caring for people, Jasmin.’

When they asked, he always said the courts. And usually he said he could see them caring for people.

The Gold Mine was a place he knew and they went there to play the fruit machines. He always won, he said, but today he didn’t. He didn’t mind that. He didn’t raise the roof like Giggs did when his money went for nothing. He didn’t say the whole thing was fixed. Good days, bad days, was all he said.