by Milton Johanides

Created on: December 17, 2011

"What's the big deal, mum?" I asked.

We were sitting in the front room at Niko´s house listening to mum and dad quarrelling.

"Your father! He stay out again to play all-night poker!"

Niko seemed to know something. The girls came back from the kitchen where they had been finishing off the dishes and sat down with us in the lounge where we discussed the future of our family. Dad's shameful story was out. Apparently he had got back into debt with Vasili, and the more he had been playing to try and repay the old gangster the deeper in he had waded. By the time mum finished explaining to everyone the predicament, she could no longer conceal her broken heart and sobbed inconsolably in Maria's arms. Dad did not react to any of this but remained silent and tight-lipped, seated upright, proud, the glow of a table lamp kissing the thin greying strands on his head.

"How much?" I asked.

"A lot," Niko said. "More than they've got."

"More than they've got?" I repeated. "What, more than they've got in the bank?"

"No," Mario said. Even he knew. Everyone knew except me. Nobody told me anything. I never felt valued and somehow that upset me more than the debt. "More than they've got even if they cashed in everything tomorrow; the house, the car, the pension..."

The house? The car? The pension? As much as that? What was left? Nothing. Vasili had won. He had it all. This had been his plan all along, for as long as I could remember, to finish us. I wondered how Gerry, my new room-mate, would describe that in neurological terms. He had a theory that everything was chemicals, little globules in the nerve ends. Jealousy, murder, rape, all hormones. Shock, trauma, despair,  all predetermined by the genes. But how does it play out? What part of the brain deals with hatred and revenge? When does the brain inform the heart, and the heart tell the hands to pick up the gun? Predetermined? Was Vasili´s fate tied up with mine? I was an undergraduate studying literature, yet a part of my chemical make-up was right now gearing up for action.

"How much?" I asked again, preparing myself.

"One hundred and twenty five thousand pounds," came Ianni's soft voice and from him, the quietest and calmest of us all, it sounded like the gravest of recriminations. It was a lot of money back then.

"Fine," I said. "We're finished." I began to calculate all the possible scenarios.

"And dad wants to go back for one more game," Niko continued. "He thinks that's the only way to recover his money.

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