Fighting My Demons

My dad is a gambler

CHAPTER 2

My Dad Is A Gambler

I was in the kitchen when I heard the front door bang and my mother scream.

I dropped everything and ran to the parlour. What I saw stopped me cold.

My father stood in the middle of the room, drunk and swaying on his feet, holding my mother at gunpoint. His eyes were red and glassy, his shirt half undone. I had never seen him drunk a day in my life. Not once. Not ever.

"Give me the new house document before I blow your head off."

The words came out of his mouth and I genuinely could not process them. This man, this person pointing a gun at my mother, could not be my father.

"Dad, what are you doing? Do you want to kill Mum?"

My voice came out smaller than I intended.

"Shut up, Boma!" He didn't even look at me. "Stella, give me the house document. The new house document!"

He stressed those last three words like they were the only ones that mattered in the world.

My mother did not flinch. She stood her ground even with a gun aimed at her chest, and something about that terrified me more than the gun itself. Before any of us could move, my father fired a shot into the ceiling.

The sound was enormous.

I had never heard a gunshot that close before. It tore through the room and ricocheted off my eardrums, rattling something deep inside my skull. My mother and I both jolted violently, shaking so hard I thought my knees would give. For a wild second I genuinely believed my ears were bleeding.

"Fine, Michael. Fine." My mother's voice was impossibly calm. "I will get it."

She walked to her room, steady and deliberate, with my father and me close behind her. She pulled open the cabinet beside her bed, the one that held every important document our family owned, and I felt my stomach drop.

The new house document was the last one left.

She handed it over without a word. My father snatched it from her hand, grabbed me by the arm and used me as a shield to back himself out of the house. Once he was outside, he shoved me back through the door and slammed it shut behind him.

I stood in the hallway, trembling from my head down to my feet.

Is that man really my father? What has happened to him? Who is this person?

My mother was already moving toward the door.

"Boma, stay home. I am going after your father."

"No." The word came out before I could think about it. "No, Mum. I am coming with you. I am tired of being kept in the dark. I won't stay behind again."

She looked at me for a moment, reading my face.

"Alright. Get your jacket and my car keys. Quickly."

I took the stairs two at a time and was back in seconds, breathless.

"Got them."

"Good. It is nearly impossible to get a taxi around here. We may be able to reach him before he finds one."

We jumped into the car and tore down the street.

We spotted him at the roundabout on Houston Street, a quiet, out of the way road that I had never understood why my parents chose to live near. He was climbing into a taxi just as we pulled up.

"There he is!" I pointed, already rolling down my window to snap a photo of the cab's number plate.

Mum said nothing. She kept her eyes fixed on the taxi and pulled out smoothly behind it, keeping just enough distance not to be noticed. The cab made a sharp U-turn at the roundabout and veered onto a narrow side road. Tyres screeched. We followed.

It stopped outside a building I had never seen before.

My father stepped out of the cab, and I leaned forward to read the sign above the entrance.

My Gamble.

The words were painted in large, bold letters, shameless and unapologetic.

"Oh my God." I felt my heart constrict slowly, like something squeezing the air out of it. "A gambling house."

I could not finish the thought after that.

Mum pulled up across the street and cut the engine.

"Stay here. I will be back."

"No, Mum." I was already unclipping my seatbelt. "I am going in there with you."

She looked at me, then reached under her seat and pulled out a medium-sized box. She opened it and my breath caught in my throat.

A gun.

She said nothing. She loaded it efficiently and tucked it into the waistband behind her shirt, then got out of the car.

We crossed the street together.

At the entrance, she put her hand on the door handle and paused, just for a second, before pushing it open. The smell hit me like a wall. Stale alcohol, cigarette smoke, sweat and trapped heat all rushed out at once. My eyes watered. My stomach turned. I pressed my lips together and forced myself to breathe through my mouth.

This is where people come to lose everything.

We stood just inside the doorway, scanning the room without moving. The noise was thick, laughter and argument and the slap of cards on tables. I spotted my father almost immediately, seated at a crowded table near the centre of the room.

"I brought it!" he was saying, loud enough to carry above the noise, his voice edged with a desperate kind of excitement. "Now let me play and win everything back."

The man sitting across from him was enormous, broad and heavy, with the kind of presence that told you immediately he was in charge of this room.

"Mr. Michael," the man said, smiling slowly, "if you lose, we gain everything. Including that house of yours." He tapped the document with one thick finger and laughed. The people around the table laughed with him.

"Mum." I grabbed her arm. "Do something. Create a distraction. Please."

She shook her head, her eyes still fixed on the table.

"It is too late. The game has already started."

I held my breath. I clasped my hands together and prayed harder than I had ever prayed for anything, willing my father to win, willing the cards to fall in his favour, willing something to go right.

It was useless.

His last card was beaten and the table erupted. My father's face collapsed.

"No. That is not possible."

Then he looked up and saw us.

I could not bear it. I turned and walked out.

"Boma!" My mother was right behind me, and a moment later so was my father.

"Stella! Boma! I am sorry, I am so sorry—"

My mother said nothing to him. She took my hand firmly, guided me to the front seat of the car and fastened my seatbelt like I was a small child. Then she got in, handed me a handkerchief without a word and drove away.

I cried the whole way home.

The thoughts came in waves as the streetlights blurred past the window.

My father is a gambler. He has always been a gambler. The car he said was in the workshop, he gambled it away. And now the house document, the one thing standing between us and the street, is gone too. In the space of one evening, he has made us homeless.

Mum parked the car. I ran straight to my room.

"Boma! Boma, come back!"

I heard her calling but I could not stop. I was not just sad. I was furious. They had both lied to me, kept me in the dark, smiled at me and told me everything was fine while our lives quietly fell apart. I slammed my bedroom door and locked it.

She knocked. I didn't answer. After a while, I heard her footsteps retreat down the stairs.

I sat on my bed and cried until I had nothing left.

Then I heard it. The front door opening. My father's voice.

"Honey, please. I am sorry."

I crept out of my room and looked over the banister.

What I saw broke something in me.

My mother, my composed, unshakeable, impenetrable mother, was destroying the kitchen. She swept the plates off the dining table in one violent motion. She picked up a glass and hurled it at the wall. She screamed, raw and ragged, a sound I had never heard come out of her before.

"I hate you. I am fed up of all of it. I have spent years trying to hold this family together and all you do is tear it apart, piece by piece." She bent forward, her hair falling over her face, and when she straightened up her voice was dangerously quiet. "I want an annulment. I want a divorce. And you will give it to me."

She reached behind her and pulled out the gun.

"Because if you don't, I will end this myself. Pick up your things and get out of my house."

She turned and swept another plate off the counter, sending it exploding against the wall.

"Every time I look at you I think about what you have stolen from us. Get out before I do something I cannot take back."

My father turned and looked up at me.

I turned away and went back to my room.

He left that night.

Later, when the house had gone completely quiet, I came downstairs to check on my mother.

She was asleep on the couch, curled up small, still in her clothes. She looked nothing like herself. She looked exhausted in a way that sleep could not fix, wrung out and hollowed and fragile in a way I had never seen her before.

I stood there for a long moment, not knowing where to begin.

Then I switched on the heater, went upstairs to run her a bath, and came back down to guide her gently to the bathroom.

"Mum. Go and wash up."

She nodded without speaking.

While she bathed, I went back to the kitchen and began cleaning. Broken plates, shattered glass, the wreckage of everything she had thrown. I swept and picked and wiped until the room looked like itself again.

In fifteen years, I had never once seen my mother lose control like that. Not a raised voice, not a slammed door, not a single c***k in that calm, steady surface she always presented to the world. She had always been the kind of woman who smiled through difficulty, who made you believe everything was going to be fine simply by the way she carried herself.

My father had broken all of that in one night.

I knew she was in shock. I knew I probably was too. But I pushed my own feelings down as far as they would go, because right now, in this quiet and broken house, my mother needed me more than I needed to fall apart.

I was not going to let her face this alone.