Muggins

by John Suckling, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The board at the Whitton Bowls and Social Club was walnut, two streets of holes up and two down for each player and the game hole at the top, and it had been made in 1961 by a man called Arthur Pask, who was dead, and who had drilled one hole in Ray Tull's street a sixteenth of an inch out of true, so that the peg leaned there like a drunk against a lamp-post. Ray had passed that hole perhaps four thousand times. He knew it the way a man knows the step on his own stairs that creaks.

Above the board, on the wall by the darts, a card in Arthur Pask's capitals said MUGGINS PLAYED HERE. Nobody had taken it down because nobody had ever thought it wanted taking down.

On Tuesdays at two Maureen Pocock brought Len in through the side door, took his coat off him, hung it on the third peg, which was his, and said, "Five o'clock, Raymond." Then she went up the High Street. At five she came back. That was the arrangement, and it had been the arrangement since Easter, and before Easter Len had come in by himself on the bus, as he had since 1987.

"Your crib or mine?" said Len.

"Cut for it."

Len cut a seven, Ray a jack, and the low card deals; Len shuffled with the old riffle, the cards running together like a zip, and dealt six apiece. That was at two. At a quarter to four, on the sixth deal, which was Ray's, with Ray standing at forty-eight and Len at fifty-two, the trouble showed itself again, as it had been showing itself, a little at a time, since about the beginning of May.

Len had cut, Ray had turned the starter, the six of hearts, and they had played their cards out. Len, the pone, counted first, as the pone does. He laid down the seven of clubs, the eight of hearts, the eight of diamonds, the nine of spades, and he set the six beside them and looked at them for a while with his lips moving.

"Fifteen two," he said, touching the seven and one eight, "fifteen four," the seven and the other, "and a double run of four is twelve, and a pair is fourteen."

He took his back peg and began to move it.

There is a six and a nine on that table, and they make fifteen, and fifteen is two. Sixteen. Ray saw it the way you see a man's flies undone, all at once and with a feeling of responsibility. Under the rule on the wall the two points were his for the saying of one word. He did not say it. He watched Len count fourteen holes with his forefinger, one, two, three, the old nail ridged and yellow, and set the back peg forward past the front, correctly, at sixty-six. Then Ray counted his own hand, which was a modest six, and pegged it, and turned his crib, which was nothing at all.

Kieran, who ran the bar on weekdays and was twenty-three and played nothing but a game on his telephone about farms, had been leaning on the hatch watching. He looked at the six of hearts and the nine of spades. He looked at Ray. Ray looked at the board.

A miscounted hand is a small lie told to a piece of wood that cannot answer back. Ray had been letting it be told every Tuesday since May. Two points: and what were two points between men who had been playing each other for thirty-nine years, the running tally of games in the back of Len's red notebook, in Len's hand, standing at two thousand and something to two thousand and something else, the difference being, as Len said, about one bad winter.

Len gathered the cards and shuffled them and pushed the pack across for Ray to cut, and dealt.

Ray picked up the four of hearts, the four of clubs, the nine of diamonds, the queen of spades, the king of clubs and the ace of hearts. It was Len's crib. A man discarding to his opponent's crib wants to give him strangers, two cards that do not know each other and will not be introduced: no five, never a five, no pair, nothing close enough in rank to run. Ray put out the king and the ace. A king and an ace have nothing to say to each other. Len threw two cards on top without looking at them very hard, which was not like him, or had not been.

Ray cut. Len turned the starter, and it was the five of spades, and he put it face up on the pack and squared it there with two fingers, and something went over his face which Ray could not read.

Ray led a four. You lead a four because no single card makes fifteen with it. Len put a jack on it and said "Fourteen," and Ray played the nine, "Twenty-three," and Len put down a five and said "Twenty-eight," and Ray, holding a four and a queen and nothing that would go under thirty-one, said "Go," and Len looked at his hand and could not play either, and took one for the last card. Then Ray led the other four, and Len put a five on it, nine, and Ray played the queen, nineteen, and Len his last five, twenty-four, and one for the last card again. Two to Len. The play is arithmetic done standing up, with somebody trying to trip you; there was no tripping in that one. Ray had held nothing to trip with.

Ray, the pone, counted first. He laid out four, four, nine, queen, with the five beside them. The nine wanted a six and there was none; the fours wanted a seven between them and there was none. "Fifteen two," he said, the queen and the five, "and a pair is four." He pegged it, past Arthur Pask's crooked hole, to fifty-eight.

Len laid his hand down on the green baize one card at a time. The jack of spades. The five of hearts. The five of diamonds. The five of clubs. Beside them sat the five of spades, the starter, the fourth of its kind, the suit of the jack.

Kieran did not know what he was looking at, but he knew that Ray had stopped breathing, and came round from behind the hatch.

There is exactly one way to make twenty-nine in a cribbage hand: three fives and the jack in your hand, and the last five turned up, and that five the jack's own suit. Ray had played cribbage since he was nine, in his grandfather's kitchen in Feltham, and he had never seen it. Arthur Pask had seen it once, in 1974, and had the cards framed, and the frame was on the wall of the gents' and had been since the refurbishment.

"Well," said Len.

He put his hand flat on the table, just short of the cards, as a man rests his hand on a dog that might bite.

"Count it," said Ray. "Go on. Out loud."

Len looked at the cards. His lips moved. Ray sat on his hands, actually sat on them, the backs of his fingers against the plastic of the club chair.

"Fifteen two," said Len, and put his finger on the jack and the five of hearts. "Fifteen four. Fifteen six. Fifteen eight." The jack with each five in turn, four of them, his finger going along the row like a man counting railings. Then he stopped.

The stop went on. The fruit machine by the door went through its whole little tune and started again.

"Three fives," said Len, "are fifteen." He touched the hearts, the diamonds, the clubs. "Ten." Then the hearts, the diamonds, the spades. "Twelve." Hearts, clubs, spades. "Fourteen." Diamonds, clubs, spades. "Sixteen." He looked up at Ray, and there was nothing wrong with his eyes at all; they were the eyes that had taken two pounds a week off Ray at this table through the last of Mrs Thatcher and the whole of Mr Major. "And six pairs of fives," he said, "is twelve, twenty-eight. And his nob," and he laid his fingertip on the jack of spades, the knave of the turned-up suit, "is twenty-nine."

Kieran said, "Is that good?"

Neither of them answered him.

Len took his front peg out and held it. Sixty-six and the two he had pegged in the play. Sixty-eight. His back peg was at sixty-seven, his front at sixty-eight, and he had to take the back peg out of sixty-seven and carry it twenty-nine holes past the front, and it was here, Ray knew, it was always here in the last months, with the counting done and only the pegging left, that the thing slipped: the hand forgetting which peg it held, the front peg moved instead of the back, the board telling a story that was not true. He watched Len's fingers. Len was holding the front peg, the wrong one.

There is a kindness that muddles the board, and there is a kindness that does not.

Ray took his hands out from under himself. He did not take the peg. He put one finger on the back peg, at sixty-seven, and tapped it once.

Len looked at it. He put the front peg back in sixty-eight. He took the back peg out. And then they counted it together, Len's finger going hole to hole and Ray saying the numbers low, the way you read to a child who can already read: sixty-nine, seventy, up the street through the seventies and the eighties, round the turn at ninety, and Len set it in ninety-seven, which was sixty-eight and twenty-nine, and took his hand away.

"The crib's four," said Len, after a moment, and turned it over: a king and an ace and his own two and eight, and the five of spades doing all the work. "Ten and five. Two and eight and five. Four." He pegged that himself, correctly: a hundred and one.

He picked up the red notebook and turned to the back and, below the long two columns of games, wrote, in the old small hand that had not changed: 29 Sept. J♠ 5 5 5 + 5♠. 29. He underlined it twice.

Then he closed the book and put his palm on it and said, without looking up, "You've been letting me off."

Ray said nothing.

"Muggins," said Len. "Since about May. The six and the nine, today. I saw you see it." He pushed the cards across. "Your deal. Don't do it again."

So Ray dealt. He had the six of clubs, two sevens and the eight of spades among his six, and kept them, and threw the rest into his own crib. Len cut and Ray turned the five of diamonds. They pegged it out, and Len, the pone, counted first. He laid down the four of diamonds, the five of clubs, the six of hearts, the ten of spades, and looked at them against the starter on the pack.

"Fifteen two," said Len. "Fifteen four. Fifteen six. A double run of three is twelve, and the pair is fourteen." He reached for the back peg; the right one.

The four and the six with either five: that was four. The ten with the five of clubs: six. Ray had been watching for the other, and Len had not got it: the ten and the five of diamonds, lying there in plain sight on the pack. Sixteen, not fourteen; and Len a few holes past the hundred, with the game hole in sight.

Ray looked at the card on the wall. Then he leaned across.

"Muggins," he said. "Ten and the five of diamonds. Two."

Len took his hand off the peg. He sat back. Something happened at the corner of his mouth which, on a man who had kept a straight face through two thousand Tuesdays, was as good as a shout.

"Good," he said. "Peg it, then."

And Ray, under the rule, took the two points into his own street, back peg past front, honest, and the board said exactly what had happened.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Iohanne Sucklingō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Suckling, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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