“Look. You were there, right? Leicester Square. So get your ironing arse back one spot to my railway and fork out twenty-five.”
Rory was incredulous.
“It was ten, I rolled ten!”
“If you don’t go back, I’m taking the iron and ejecting you from the game.”
“Ejecting me?”
We sweated like merchants and swindlers, and Rory struck out at himself for a change—a palm through the wire of his hair. His hands were already so hard by then. Those eyes gone even harder.
He smiled, like danger, toward me now. “You’re joking,” he said, “you’re kidding.”
But I had to see it through.
“Do I look like I’m Goddamn joking, Rory?”
“This is bullshit.”
“Right, that’s it.”
I reached for the iron, but not before Rory had his greasy, sweaty fingers on it, too, and we fought it out—no, we pinched it out, till coughing was heard from the lounge room.
We stopped.
Rory let go.
Henry went to see, and when he came back in with a nod of okay, he said, “Right, where were we, anyway?”
Tommy: “The iron.”
Henry: “Oh yeah—perfect, where is it?”
I was deadpan. “Gone.”
Rory searched the board in a frenzy. “Where?”
Now, even deader-pan. “I ate it.”
“No way.” Disbelief. He shouted. “You gotta be kidding me!” He started to stand, but Clay, in the corner, silenced him.
“He did,” he said. “I saw him.”
Henry was thrilled. “What? Really?”
Clay nodded. “Like a painkiller.”
“What? Down the hatch?” He burst forth with loudmouthed laughter—blond in the white-blond kitchen—as Rory turned fast, to face him.
“I’d shut up if I were you, Henry!” and he paused for a moment, then went out back, and returned with a rusty nail. He slammed it down on the proper square, paid his money, and glared at me. “There, you dirty bastard. Go try swallowing that.”
But, of course, I didn’t have to—for when the game started up again, and Tommy rolled the dice, we heard the voice from the adjoining room. It was Penny, part gone, part alive.
“Hey, Rory?”
Silence.
We all stopped.