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Small Stakes: The String Story

Sim's sister came to stay for the weekend in the second month, and she was nine.

Her name was Aisha, and she had been promised by her mother that her big brother's flat would be exciting, and it was not. It was a small kitchen above a launderette, with two mugs, a kettle, a frying pan and the drawer. By Saturday evening she had read both her books, watched everything on Sim's phone that was allowed, and was lying on the sofa with her feet up the wall, sighing in a way that Kezia recognised from eleven years of wet playtimes.

"Games," said Sim firmly. "We'll play a game."

"What game?" said Aisha, to the ceiling.

Sim went to the drawer. There were still fifteen buttons in the paprika jar. He did not suggest the buttons. He had learned his lesson, and besides, he knew the trick now, and so did Kezia, and a game everyone has solved is not a game. Behind the buttons was the ball of garden string.

"String," he said, holding it up doubtfully.

"I know a string game," said Kezia.

Sim brightened. "Right. Whoever drops it loses a point. First to five points does the washing-up. Aisha's exempt, she's a guest."

"It doesn't have points," said Kezia.

"Every game has points."

"Not this one," said Kezia. "If you put points in it, it turns into a different game, and a worse one." She was already cutting a length of string and tying the ends together with a neat knot, the way she had done for children for years. "Nobody wins. Nobody loses. Watch."

She looped the string round her hands, behind the thumbs and little fingers, and then with her middle fingers she picked up the string across each palm, one hand and then the other, and pulled her hands apart. Between them, suddenly, there was a shape: a long cradle of crossing strings, neat and symmetrical, like a tiny hammock.

Aisha sat up.

"That's the cradle," said Kezia. "Now you take it off me. Pinch these two crosses, here and here, pull them out to the sides, then go under and up through the middle."

Aisha tried. Her fingers got tangled. Kezia guided them, very gently, without taking over. Aisha pinched, pulled, went under, came up, and the string slid off Kezia's hands onto hers, and between Aisha's hands was a completely different shape: four crossing lines, flat, like a cot.

"That's the soldier's bed, some people call it," said Kezia. "Or diamonds. Now Sim takes it off you."

Sim was not good at it. He had big hands and he was trying too hard, and on his first go he pulled the wrong strings and the whole thing collapsed into a loop round Aisha's fingers.

"You lose," said Aisha, delighted.

"Nobody loses," said Kezia. "Start again."

So they started again. Cradle, diamonds, and this time Sim got it, and the string came onto his hands as a shape like a row of candles standing up. Then Kezia took it from him, and it was a manger, an upside-down cradle. Then Aisha took it, and it was diamonds again, and then Sim dropped it.

"Four," said Sim, who could not help counting things. "We got four in. Out of how many?"

"The way I learned it," said Kezia, "seven. Cradle, diamonds, candles, manger, diamonds again, the cat's eye, and the fish in a dish. Then people argue about what comes after that."

"So three to go," said Sim. He looked at the collapsed string in his hands. Then he looked again, frowning in a way Kezia had learned meant he was noticing something.

"It's strange," he said. "I dropped it. I should feel like I lost. But I don't. We just start again from the cradle, and nobody's any worse off, and I just want to get further."

"That's the whole point of it," said Kezia. "It isn't you against us. It's all of us against the string. The only way to get to the fish is to hand it over properly so the next person can go on."

"Where did you learn it?" asked Aisha.

Kezia thought about it. "From a girl called Precious, in Year Three," she said. "She learned it from her nan. Her nan learned it from somebody on a boat, she said, but Precious said that about everything." She smiled. "And I've taught it to about two hundred children since. Every wet playtime for eleven years. It's the only game I know that the shy ones and the loud ones are exactly as good at."

"Why?" said Sim.

"Because it isn't fast," said Kezia. "You can't rush it. The loud ones always grab, and it collapses. The shy ones wait, and watch, and get it right. After a term, the loud ones start waiting too." She held up her hands, wide, to show the shape of waiting. "That's what it teaches, really. Wait until the other person's hands are still."

They played for an hour. Aisha took her feet off the wall and sat cross-legged on the floor with her tongue between her teeth. Sim's big hands got gentler. They learned that the cat's eye was the hard one, because you had to pick up four strings at once with your little fingers, and that the person taking it had to wait until the person holding it had their hands still and wide. Nobody shouted. Mostly they said "careful" and "wait" and "go on, go on," and when it collapsed they all groaned together and started again.

At about half past nine, with the launderette downstairs finally quiet, they did it. Cradle, diamonds, candles, manger, diamonds, cat's eye, and, from Sim's hands to Aisha's, the fish in a dish: a tiny diamond of string with two loops like fins, sitting in Aisha's palms.

Aisha did not move. She looked at it as if it might swim away.

"We did it," she whispered. "All of us."

"All of us," said Kezia.

Afterwards, when Aisha had gone to sleep on the sofa under Sim's coat, Sim sat at the kitchen table winding the rest of the garden string back into a ball.

"I didn't think it would work," he said quietly. "No points. I thought she'd be bored in five minutes."

"She would have been, with points," said Kezia. "She's nine and you're twenty-two. She'd have lost every round, and known it, and lain back on the sofa with her feet up the wall. This way she was as good as you by the end. Better, on the cat's eye."

Sim laughed, because it was true. Aisha had done the cat's eye on the first go every time after her third try. He had dropped it twice.

"Small stakes," he said.

"No stakes," said Kezia. "That's even smaller."

On Sunday afternoon, when Sim's mother came to collect her, Aisha would not take the string off. Kezia had tied the loop loosely round her wrist like a bracelet.

"Teach it to someone at school," said Kezia. "You can't play it on your own. That's the one rule."

The question for your own table

What is the last game you played where nobody could win? Did it feel like less of a game, or more?

Something to do

Cut about a metre and a half of string, tie the ends, and learn the cradle and the first figure from someone who knows it, or from a library book. Pass it back and forth until it drops. Count how far you got, not who dropped it.

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