Gambling Lives

Playing cards in the pub, drinking and chatting. The kings carousing with the jacks while the jokers make away with the queens. Nine months later and there's cross-bred cards in the deck - a six of jokers, a joker ace. No king could fail to love an ace of any description, but the six was left out in the cold. He ended up knocking around with some of the other half-breeds - the results of previous debauchery among the royal courts - a three of clubbed-hearts, a four of diamond-spades, and their leader, a jack of queens. This motley crew, cast-out by the conventional deck, not even permitted to hang around in the box with rules card, took to wandering the gaming tables looking for their place in life.

It was while on the road between those well known gambling-holes Skegness and Hull that they met Lady Luck, a lorry driver-cum-slot machine, the unholy offspring of some desperate coupling in a 24-hour services off the M1. They would sneak into bars so Lady Luck could collect a few quid off eager drunken punters to buy a pork pie and some crisps. Though there needs were modest, this way they scraped by a living, sleeping in working-men's clubs and pool halls, drinking the dregs and smoking ashtray butts. It wasn't much of a life, but here and there the whiff of a certain romance lingered as they considered the dreams of those they drank alongside. They were married to the wind, answered to no man, and did everything just as they pleased.

It was a happy life for a few hands, but things gradually became too much for ignoble cards to handle. The more they indulged their wants, the more they wanted. And lust began to rear it's ugly head among them. Lady Luck was no lady, but she wasn't everyone's for anything either. She ended up being shot and stuffed by collectors while snoozing on a curb one morning and now resides in a museum in Hove. The cards retired and became bookmarks spread through shelves across the country, from a tiny bookcase under the stairs of a sprawling house converted to second-hand emporium in Barton, to the stalest dusty corner of Bromley Central Library, somewhere near the Russian Literature and World History. Sometimes, you might spot one out of the corner of your eye while you browse these quiet forgotten crannies, but they will swiftly dart behind a page or under a more respectable card whence you will suppose a slip of the eye must have created such a phantasm. Look close!

Mathew Jonson - Automatic (from Automatic)