Capital

Roger was pretty sure she’d be setting up her table image with not much. If he had any hand at all he would call, but with 8-6 offsuit, that would just be stupid. Roger was in the small blind, Slim Tony in the big, so when Roger folded, the table’s only semi-professional player was left thinking about what to do.
    ‘You’ve got naff-all, I can tell,’ said Slim Tony. Michelle said nothing, did nothing. ‘Typical girl. They either fold every time you play back at them or they try and pretend to have a cock. Not just any cock, a really massive one. Big, big cock. Have you got a big, big cock, Michelle?’
    Roger did a good job of pretending not to be shocked; one or two of the boys were smiling, one or two others frowning; Tony and Michelle knew each other pretty well so he must have a sense of whether or not he was crossing the line. At least Roger hoped so. Michelle, you had to give it to her (as it were), had no expression at all. She was just sitting there. It occurred to Roger that Tony was needling her the wrong way round – if Michelle did have nothing, and was being aggressive with nothing, this would be something she had rehearsed very deeply, so goading her about it would be pushing at a firmly closed door. If Michelle minded people accusing her of being phonily aggressive she would have caved in at work years ago. So Tony would get no information by teasing her about her imaginary cock. Roger had a sudden intuition: she has a good hand. Tony’s got this wrong. Just as he thought that, Tony used his forearm to push all his chips into the middle of the table, and said, ‘All in.’
    Michelle flipped her cards over. Ace-king of hearts. Her reputation for acting aggressively had made him think she was pretending to be over-aggressive with a rubbish hand, where in fact she had a monster. Tony, to give him credit, laughed. ‘Fuck!’ He turned his cards over and stood up – he had nothing, king-jack offsuit. The dealer burnt a card and then flipped the three next cards in one move. There was nothing to help Slim Tony. The turn card came; it was an ace, and Tony was drawing dead – there was no way he could win. He put his hands above his head and said, ‘I surrender!’, to general laughter. But before he did that, Roger caught his expression as he looked at Michelle, and it was one of sincere and complete loathing.
    Team-building – oh, the wonder of it.
    Michelle was nice about it though; she didn’t do more than the minimum necessary gloating. Tony signed to the waiter and ordered a bottle of champagne, which he then drank in about forty minutes. By then three other players had been knocked out; the traders, being traders, were for the most part crazily macho, and seemed to prize themselves on their avidity for going all-in. One or two more knockouts and they could start a cash game of their own. Roger made it to the final table, which had been his minimum goal; but his stack had been eaten away by the increasingly large blinds, and he had to go all-in with a marginal hand, a pair of fives. He had given in to the need for a couple more whiskies and had a pleasant sense of how the alcohol was mixing with the adrenalin inside him so that he was sharp/blurred, tired/elated, eager for victory but quite keen to go home and sleep. His bet was called by Mark, with ace-jack suited; Mark hit his jack and Roger was knocked out. He pushed back from the table; it was one in the morning but he’d gone too far to leave without finding out who won.
    The winner turned out, greatly to his surprise, to be Mark, who knocked Michelle out at quarter to four in the morning. Mark was so fidgety and shifty and twitchy that he was very hard to read; he touched himself constantly, his wrist, his ear, his sleeve, his chest; it was a kind of St Vitus’ dance. He appeared to be equally nervous all the time, which made him hard to decode; in fact it was hard to sit across the table from him. His nervousness made other people start to feel nervous. But it was no bar to his winning the £5,000. The crew, most of them drunk and loud, were shouting, joshing, leaning on each other. Tony was asleep on a sofa. There were plans made for shared taxis, or alternatively to head for a place in Spitalfields that stayed open all night and began serving full English breakfasts at four.
    The dealer had already left. The waiter, a Filipino, lingered a while for tips. He wasn’t paid – tips were his whole income. They were variable;