Happy Birthday_(0)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

My name is Josh. My father runs this town. Well, he controls everything that happens here, but he aint exactly an elected official, if you get what I mean. Nothing happens here that he doesn’t have a say in, so I have grown up almost as royalty here. It may be a small town, but it is MY town.

One of the clubs my father owns holds a regular poker night and it is pretty popular. The stakes are big, and since I’ve been playing all my life, I normally do pretty well. As well as I do, however, there are a couple of guys who do badly. They lose every week. The only difference is that one of them knows when to stop, where the other keeps throwing money away. Obviously, in the kind of world in which we live, there is always someone willing to loan him money, with outrageous rates of interest. In this case the perpetual loser, Darren, is borrowing off a real bad dude. He probably owes him about £20k by now, and the shark is starting to want some payment.

After poker last Friday, things kicked off. When Darren went outside (having lost another grand on the tables). I won’t go into details, but Darren got hurt. Not too badly, this was just a warning. He had drunk a bit too much to drive, but I was surprised when his girlfriend came to pick him up. I was even more surprised when I realised his girlfriend was one of those girls that had been stunning since she was about 10. God knows why she was with this loser! And when her face caught the street lights as she drove away, I had another surprise. She was the girl I had chased all the way through school. When I remembered her name was Katy, and that Darren had been banging on about getting her a nice engagement ring for her birthday next month if he had won tonight, a plan began to form in my mind.

Over the next week, I thrashed out the plan in my mind, weighing exactly how to pitch it to Darren. On Thursday evening, the night before poker, I went to visit the loan shark, and arranged to pay Darren’s loan. The fact that the guy wanted to carry on working in the town meant that he had to stay on my father’s good side, and therefore my good side! Needless to say, I got the deal for £10k, which was the actual debt before the interest was added. Once this deal was negotiated, I headed home for an early night to get my head together for the big day.

At 9.30pm, I rocked up to poker. Sure enough, Darren was already there, trying to scrounge some more cash off the loan shark.

“Darren.” I called him over, “I think I can help you. Stay away from that guy, he’s trouble. How much do you need for tonight?”

After a bit of negotiation, and grovelling on his part, we settled on a loan of £2,000.

“Oh, by the way,” I said, as we were called to the table, “I bought your debt. So that £22,000 you owe me now.”

He was a bit stunned by this, but couldn’t say anything as we sat down at the table and the game started. Tonight he was playing quite well, which made me think I had made a bit of a cock up, but he soon started to lose heavily. During the interval, I lent him another £2,000, which he managed to lose by the end of the game at midnight. I didn’t win much, but finished up by about £500.

“I think I should drive you home tonight Darren, we need a talk.” I said, as one of the guys who worked for my father grabbed his arm and ‘helped’ him towards the car.