Five(41)

But none of that would happen now. He’d run out of time. He stopped going to lectures, doing his work, taking his meds, he just stopped. What was it for? He stared at the walls instead.

He did not tell his mother that he was failing. He didn’t want her to think she had to sweep in and save him on her deathbed from yet another Sonny-made disaster. He wanted her to believe he was on the path she’d paved for him.

After a few weeks of wallowing, he saw a counselor at school. And newly inspired, he got up one morning, got dressed, took his medication, and got ready to go back to class and to talk to his professors and to fix this, the way she taught him to. But when he checked his phone while he ate his cereal, he clicked on an ad for a free bet on a casino site. He’s not sure why he did it. He just did. An impulse.

After the first six hours, he’d won ?3,000. And the elation, the hit of dopamine, the surge of electricity to his brain, the flutter of excitement in his stomach, the endless possibility there in the phone screen, were the answer to his problems. It was so easy: click, click, click. He didn’t think about Luna, he didn’t think about the mess he’d made, he just thought about the click, the spin, the relief.

The losing didn’t matter, the losing meant he just had to keep going so he could get to the high of winning. Because playing, even when he was losing, was better than meds, than running, better than his art and design, because his pure focus on the game made his brain stop buzzing and put the treadmill of his mind on pause. Everything stopped. And he was still. And it was bliss because stillness had always been so elusive.

He lost track of the days after that. He ignored emails from his teachers, messages from friends, letters from the university administration about his ineligibility for graduation. He missed the meetings he was asked to attend, missed the parties his friends invited him to. He kept going to work at the gastropub where he was a waiter, and now that he had abandoned his classes he took on more hours so he could earn more, so he could play more.

As soon as he was paid, he’d type in his debit card numbers and keep playing. He applied for different credit cards, he got offers in the post for them all the time, and then he typed those numbers into the casino sites too and kept playing.

He did not use the card he held jointly with his mother, the one she paid the bills for, the one they used to review together every month to help him learn money management because his mother said people like him often had trouble with money.

He used that card for his living expenses while he was at uni, that was their agreement, but he was tempted, many times, to type those numbers onto the screen, to just play ten or twenty pounds here and there. But he wouldn’t be able to explain away the charges, and he would just picture her face and stop himself.

As she got sicker and sicker and less able to keep track, when those monthly reviews were dropped, overtaken by her illness, he saw his chance. You are such a piece of shit, you are such a piece of shit, he said over and over as he typed in the numbers of that card too and burned with private shame.

The games were all he thought about. Every minute. And when he wasn’t working he was playing. And even when he was working he was playing. It happened enough times, playing on his phone when he should have been waiting tables, that he lost the job. No matter. Soon the new term would start, and his student loan money would come into his account.

He spoke to his mother every day and lied to her and felt awful for it. And when the end of his last year of uni came, he told her not to worry, not to feel bad about not attending his graduation. It was just a lot of speeches and robes after all, it was just a day, it didn’t really mean anything, not with her being ill, and besides he had his friends there. Technically, Sonny told himself, this was not a lie to his dying mother because graduation really did not mean anything to Sonny because he was not, in fact, graduating.

That was three months ago now. He moved back into the spacious garden flat in this boring suburb where he’d grown up. His room was just as he had left it. When he came home, Luna asked to see photos of his last days at uni and he showed her pictures of his friends in their caps and gowns that he had saved from screenshots of their posts. He had even texted her a selfie on the day wearing his roommate’s cap and gown, pretending it was his own. She did not press him for details. She was so ill by the time he got home and on so much medication that she did not have the strength for probing questions. Only acceptance.

He was relieved not to have to devise more lies, but he was also sad that she was not seeing through him. She was not detecting, with that inner sense that only she possessed, that something was wrong. And that was the real sign that she was dying.

Click, click, spin.





?756.72


Click, spin, spin.





?1356.29


Click. Spin.

Shit.

He’s been told that they are now in the last weeks of Luna’s life.

He owes ?3,000 on one credit card, ?5,000 on another, ?10,000 on another. He owes Gabriela ?2,500, a loan he asked for because “it was a tough time and he didn’t want to worry Mum.” There is, of course, his student loan debt, which will have to be paid back too, eventually. There are five to ten friends he is avoiding contact with now because he owes them all money. He doesn’t know how much.

But when he plays, he doesn’t think about all of this, he doesn’t worry about it, his brain is flooded with spinning wheels, and bright colors, and numbers that go up and bring him incredible elation, and numbers that go down, which he is now numb to, which he ignores, waiting for them to go back up again.