YD6~09 Janine Bets The Casino Gamblers Paid out Jacqueline

 I’m pulling up alongside a parked car, spin the steering wheel backing, stall the car with a counter spin pull forward, tweak the key, taking keys jingling in my fingers, unlatching the door. I’m stepping into the street, asking myself. ‘_What brings you here_?’ After bearing Janine’s attitude last week, returning from Sun City driving as daylight rousing behind us, ahead wiping the night away. We had entered a Saturday’s awaking mid-morning main street, contour Hillbrow’s street block, pull up in the back street alongside the spacious and bright lobby to her apartment tower. I watched her from the corner of my eye stepping out, to the front crossing by the Mercedes’ Star, a hand out pressing the plate-glass onto disappearing into shadowy depths for a sleep. 

The following week, I walked into the gleaming marble, turning toward the letterbox bank, incorporating the directory panel to press the button. Janine’s sweet voice croaked over the intercom when offside, the door buzzes. I step over to the elevator’s door, press the interim plate-glass door swing back. I stand in the cabin, wondering about Janine’s changed ritual. The doors clearing a courtyard’s void to rooftops amidst dreary rear brick towering facades, slew eyesight left in my stride but heading right. Prolong the corridor’s glass curtain. A few bathroom windows farther, to incremental door head plaques numbers. Under “24,” I sought the brick reveal for a button, instead discovered a door jamb crack. I pose fingertips on the door leaf, to a phantom hinging opens, to pursue Janine’s reaching out distant voice. I troll the narrow entrance hall, latching the door behind, paced toward a room clearing across partial beige lounge suits to a distant net-curtain shining streetlight. 

I’m doubling back as in the corner of my eyes, I’m encountering an inviting door ajar. I’m cowering from the intimacy, but my hefty ego permitting. I creep, encountering what I expected, a duvet draping off a bed’s corner. My guts arouse meshing into an entanglement. Around the door a double bed expands a muddled eiderdown, meeting deep under cover Janine’s stalking eyes, gazing, to say. “I’m sick.” I daren’t spiral away.

Led into chatting, I’m standing beside Janine, in an admirable sad little voice, saying. “My grandfather was a chemist...” as though her parents grew in the family business, from finding time for a child, growing up without having parents. Arouse the Hydra of my mind, into her adolescence soul behind the facades, growing up with her grandparents. She adds. “In Gresswold.” Flash to a bird’s-eye view of a foremost suburb alongside Louis Botha Avenue, the route Igor and I rode on our bicycle from home, in Kyalami to the heart of Johannesburg. The little girl capering amid a dwarf face brick house to rambling green flocculent branches looming a street leafy canopy swell shade multiple valleys and ridges of terracotta tiled roofs. 

The grandfather knew Janine’s mood swings for a month’s allotment to his grandchild, and in and out of money, Janine once again, seated abreast in the darkness of the passenger seat. She’s talkative, facing the car’s headlights to the roadway rolling out of darkness. While Janine says. “My grandfather owned the land in Meyerton.” I can seem to place the gentle bushy grassland’s waves, scattered boulders rolled out of the Ice age. I’m imagining the countryside from outer space, view a trail of glowing fireflies, until a bottleneck at the gateway to the casino. Road signs sprung in rapid succession. The starry horizon arouses Magaliesburg, then Rustenburg, to the glowing dome, the gateway through a glittery crown and park the car around the corner.

Janine forges her way out of darkness, to pass a pool of glitters and clatters, behind obsessive men and women at One Arm Bandits, and in mind I ruminated. ‘_Get ready. The night is going to be long! _’ After the channeling mirrors, The ease at imagining her phantom, as she passes the aisle to bare gambling tables, after mentioning. “I was a croupier.” Her slender nimble fingers dealing and flipping cards through the night, collecting bets, and paying out. She’s home entering the Privé Saloon, distancing and disappearing from the central aisle, swallowed by the shadowy clustered heads. I roamed around men’s round shoulders and stern faces, to pause at the blackjack table. With a woman amid gamblers, after rounds and again the croupier deals cards, racks in and pays, dubious I’m entering the game. 

The hydra in me, with eyes on every player, feeling invisible. I crawl toward the vacant chair, to sit while the home goes on, sifting two-fifty Rand banknotes toward the croupier. Reminding myself. ‘_Try consuming far into the awaking day._’ The man’s fingers, from a penguin suit sleeve, swipe my banknote off the green mat. In a ritual fans the notes on his play apron, with a spatula slotted away, wipes his hands, spider crawl fingers the tray of chips out, re-count in front of me, removing his hand, I pick one, placing my bet.

After an enjoyable run, lassitude rose in me, sweep an eyesight away from the croupier’s hand racking in my last betted chip, rising from my chair, in quest. ‘_What will you do with time_?’ Spiraled to pace away, spot across the central aisle the towering figure zip, In front of the Baccarat crowded table, I anchor on the animation, lifts to hand a filled glass off the plateau waitering. Permeate hunched back languid men around the roulette table. I anchored onto the spirited waiter’s retrieve, a long stretch toward the hall’s nook, edging the far bright serving hatch. 

After I stepped onto the platform, to sink into the box couch’s soft cushions, with a foot swing to rest cross-legged. Pompous with a toe in the air over the coffee table, but to sight no one was around. In my comfort, glitched to mind, doodling a waitress’ expression near the saloon’s entrance doors. She’s lip talking across a breezeway’s brightness behind the servicing counter, to a young waiter, who shoulders the opposing serving hatch’s reveal — At imagining Igor’s first job waitering in Johannesburg’s exclusive President Hotel — Telling myself. ‘_For the glittery milieu?_’ The waitress spinning away, and left behind a lady draping in the corner of a lounging chair — out of another age, the 1930s posing for a photo, as she reposes an elbow on the armrest. Her evening skirt draping off her prominent knee, to a slipper’s pointing toe, in the air over a Japanese low coffee table.

I allowed the woman her privacy, but from my eyes corner, I glimpse, to glance, thoughtless my mind huffs and puff I distanced my mind not so innocent, from the, seven-year’s accreting rigmarole of body changes, past a girl’s fourteenth, puzzled twenty-first peering for her zodiacal soul, I burst, saying. “I’ve come with a compulsive gambler.”

The woman’s snake tong, spitting at me. “Are you chaffing me?”

‘_Sorry,_’ I shrug, raising my palms, saying. “No! I’m sorry to trouble you.” I shift to gaze into the breezing light to the catering wings, shadow a hand leaving a drink on a tray, to waiters circling by, while holding my breath from speaking.

The woman’s leisure in the corner of her chair, dawdling, then breaks to her silence, saying. “Me too.” Raising eyesight’s sweep offside across the couch vacant seats, shaking a blanket across the floor, telling. ‘_Somewhere there!_’ I’m skeptic to let my mind interface my brain scattering. In my silence, her stern expression melts into a seductive smile, repeating. “He’s somewhere there!” 

I flounder, a haphazard warning to myself. ‘_Don’t start with her now_!’ but succumb to our lingering silence across the coffee table. I’m saying. “Sorry, but what’s your birth sign?” Without a qualm, girlish she says. “I’m an Aries.” The Fire in this character spring to mind, but the animal’s grueling lock horns fight, the ram’s hooves sticking to craggy cliffs. I dare ask, “And, ‘_Do you know_,’ your Chinese sign — or, your birthdate?”

The woman, without qualm, says. “I’m born in Germany.” She gives further details, but my mind climbs the sun’s spiraling staircase. I tread past the zodiacal moons, to the branches of annual Chinese animals. Landing a twelve-year cycle, to 1977. Counted the years to Gavin’s birthday year, saying. “You’re a Snake.” She raises eyebrows. ‘_What does that say about me_?’ I’m imagining a neighbor’s son, the fire in the boy’s pants, the Ram bound to repeat hurting himself. At imagining while talking, the extreme symbiotic characters two headed Hydra, her Aries launching a shield upfront, constant conjugating with her genies’ cold-blooded Snake — reminding me of Grand-mother and father-Somers in Goma, freaked out, finding a lazying snake coiled under the terrace bench. 

The Ram in the woman waken, rises to her feet as the lights dimming to surges, transient and percussive brownout the gaming saloon. She stood in front of her chair, hesitant to pace away. She lingers in the persistent transient brownouts, from turning away toward the exit. Until I rose to my feet, glancing back into the saloon’s dark depth. ‘_ Nothing moved — Strange?_’  

The call-out for cleaners to storm in, with brownouts awakening ceiling spotlights, flute peripheral light beams colonnade. But nothing happened as the saloon nods brownouts, but the woman reluctant to converge with the darkness’ herding keeps her stance, before a reluctant turn away pacing toward the platform’s handrail hatchway. Her eyesight meets a stampede crossing by the hatchway, storming the double door out. She fussed lingering at the step from the platform, eyesight offside corner by the handrail. Innocence in her perplexed eye fixation, paused. 

I paced out from the left of the coffee table’s passage, attempting to locate Janine in the straggling crowd, pacing toward the hatchway facing the woman as she lingers at the hatchway. Words roll over my lips, saying. “May I have your phone number?” in our midst my wallet’s flap flip over the back of my hand. To the woman’s my Seven-Star Diary exposes an outdated day’s blank page. She seized my wallet and ballpoint pen. Her fingers return my wallet, as she descends a step, squeezing into the shadows carried away by the streaming crowd. I returned my eyesight to the page, let to read, in capital print. ‘_I am. . ._’ Calligrapher a cherry, in her fantasy a circle dotting the ‘i,’ double line spell “Jacqueline.” Her phone number underscored.

My trailing eyesight reached out into the straggling people, tucking my wallet in my back pocket, when Janine arouse from the darkness, storming up to the railing, waving me down, ‘_I’m here. What you’re waiting for — Let’s go_?’ As I descend the platform alongside Janine, to a trickle of people. I catch the adjacent door leaf swinging in my face, emerging to zombies against a sky’s awakening distant light. From the evanescent distancing figures in shadows of dotted soft waning lanterns lights. 

Janine’s eye picks among a few far scattered sleek glittery undulations in the expanding bare parking lot’s asphalt, heading straight for, faithful in the crispy and silent twilight, the lone Mercedes. We approach, contented to be the passenger, splits early from the tail contours for the car’s flank. As over the rooftop, Janine stands by, the doors sigh and pop the sill button, to meet again inside with closing doors. I tweak the ignition key, to an engine purr. Creep feeble headlights en route, to drop Janine off, to a midmorning arrival at her apartment building’s lobby.