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Small Stakes: Two Pencils

Kezia's dad came for Sunday lunch at the beginning of March, which was the first time he had been to the flat since he had carried her boxes up the stairs in September.

He arrived twenty minutes early, as he always did, and stood on the pavement outside the launderette for a while so as not to be twenty minutes early. Kezia saw him from the kitchen window. He was wearing the good coat, and he had brought a bunch of daffodils and a box of eggs from the farm shop near home, and he looked smaller than she remembered, though she knew that was silly.

He had retired at Christmas. Thirty-four years at the depot, and then a cake, a card signed by people he had not met, and a clock. Her mum said he was finding it hard. He did not say anything about it himself. He had never said very much about anything, but on the phone lately his sentences had got shorter, and his silences longer.

"It's lovely," he said, standing in the kitchen doorway. "Very handy for the shops."

"Sim's doing the roast," said Kezia. "He's very proud of it. Don't say anything about the potatoes."

"What's wrong with the potatoes?"

"Nothing yet," said Sim, from the oven.

The drawer

The potatoes needed another forty minutes. The chicken needed a rest. Kezia's dad sat down at the kitchen table, looked at the daffodils in their jam jar, said again that the flat was very handy for the shops, and then ran out of things to say.

Sim opened the kitchen drawer.

It was the drawer that every kitchen has, full of things that had come with the flat or arrived and never left. A tape measure that did not go back in. Four keys to nobody knew what. Birthday candles. A pack of cards with the seven of clubs missing. And pencils, a great many pencils, mostly short. Sim took out two: a red one with a chewed end and a blue one from a garden centre that Kezia had picked up off the pavement and kept, because she kept everything, in case.

He found an envelope, a gas bill, and turned it over. On the back he drew dots. Four in a row, then another four below, then another, then another, until there was a square of sixteen dots.

"Dots and boxes," said Sim. "You know it? You take turns drawing a line between two dots next to each other. If your line finishes a box, you put your initial in it and you go again."

"I know it," said Kezia's dad. Something moved in his face. "Go on, then."

Sim's secret

Kezia had played it with Sim perhaps a dozen times, and had won it never.

Sim had solved it, the way he solved everything, by counting twice. A grid of four dots by four had twenty-four lines, twelve across and twelve down, and nine boxes. For most of the game nobody wanted to draw the third side of a box, because then the other person would draw the fourth and take it. So you drew safe lines, and the board filled up with long thin corridors of boxes, each one waiting for somebody to open it.

The trick was at the end. When somebody was forced to open a corridor, a chain of boxes, Sim did not take the whole chain. He took all but the last two, and then drew a line that left those two for the other person. They took them, with a little cheer, and then, because they had finished a box and had to go again, they had to open the next chain. Which was always the long one. And Sim took all of it.

"Giving away two to get five," he had explained to Kezia once. "It works every time, unless they know it too."

Her dad did not know it.

Sim won the first game seven to two. He won the second six to three. In the third, when a chain of three boxes opened, Sim took one, and left two, and Kezia's dad took them, and then had to draw a line that opened the long corridor down the middle, and Sim took all five.

"Well done," said Kezia's dad.

He had said it after each game, in exactly the same voice. Now he took out his phone and looked at it, though nobody ever rang him on Sundays.

Kezia's turn

Kezia had been watching the pencils.

In the first game her dad had thought about every line. He had held the red pencil the way he held a pen to do the crossword, very upright, and taken his time, and once he had laughed out loud when Sim drew a third side by mistake. In the second game he had been quicker. In the third he had drawn his lines almost anywhere, quickly, the way you sign for a parcel.

He was not playing any more. He was getting it over with.

And Kezia remembered something she had not thought about for years. She had learned this game from him, at the kitchen table at home, on the back of the electricity bill, when she was six. He had drawn the dots very neatly with a ruler. He had always let her win, though he pretended not to, and she had always known, though she pretended not to know.

They had played it for hours, that winter. They had talked the whole time. It was the most she could remember him talking.

Now there was a game on the table that he could only lose, and he had stopped talking, and he was looking at his phone.

"Sim," said Kezia. "Can you change it?"

Sim's rule

Sim looked at the envelope, and then at Kezia's dad, and then at Kezia, and he understood more quickly than she had expected.

"Right," said Sim. "New rule. When you finish a box, you don't go again."

"That's the whole game," said Kezia's dad, mildly. "The going again."

"It's my whole trick," said Sim. "Without the extra turn, giving away two boxes gets me nothing. So that's gone." He turned the envelope over and drew a fresh square of sixteen dots on a corner of the gas bill itself, beside the meter reading. "And instead of your initial, whoever finishes a box writes one word in it. Something from Kezia's house. The one she grew up in."

"Why my house?" said Kezia.

"Because I've never seen it," said Sim. "And nobody keeps score."

Kezia's dad looked at the dots for a while. Then he picked up the red pencil and held it upright, the crossword way.

Nine boxes

He finished the first box himself, five lines in. He looked at it for a moment, and then he wrote, in small square capitals: SHED.

"The shed," said Kezia.

"The roof," said her dad. "Do you remember the roof?" And he told Sim about the shed roof, which he had put on himself one August with felt and tacks, and which had blown off in the first storm of October and landed in the Pattersons' pond, with the Pattersons' ducks on it. He told it slowly, the way he used to.

Kezia finished the next box and wrote STAIR, for the third stair from the top, which creaked, and which she had stepped over every night for twelve years so as not to wake anyone, and which, her dad said, he had heard her step over every single time.

Sim, who had never been to the house, finished a box and wrote DOG, on the grounds that every house had a dog. Kezia's dad said they had never had a dog, they had had a goldfish called Ken. Sim crossed out DOG and wrote KEN. Kezia's dad laughed so hard that he had to take his glasses off.

By the ninth box there were SHED and STAIR and KEN, and SNOW, for the winter the school was shut for a week and he had pulled her to the shops on a tea tray. There was HATCH, for the serving hatch between the kitchen and the dining room that her mum had always wanted bricked up. There was BUS, and TOAST, and a word Kezia did not explain to Sim, and in the last box, in her dad's small square capitals, there was BILL.

"For the electricity bill," he said. "That's where I taught you this."

"I know," said Kezia.

"I always let you win."

"I know," said Kezia.

The potatoes were burnt. Nobody said anything about the potatoes.

Afterwards

When her dad had gone, carefully, with the eggs box folded flat in his pocket because he wanted it back, Sim pinned the gas bill to the fridge with the lemon magnet, word side out.

"The first game was better maths," he said.

"It was," said Kezia.

"It was a game he could only lose. And the second one he couldn't lose, because nobody was winning." He looked at the boxes. "With the extra turn, every move is about the next move. Without it, every move is just a line, and a word."

"Small stakes," said Kezia.

"Nine boxes," said Sim. "Not that small."

The question for your own table

Is there a game in your house that one person always wins? What would happen if you took away the one rule their winning depends on?

Something to do

Find two pencils in the drawer and draw four rows of four dots. Play dots and boxes the usual way first, taking another turn when you finish a box. Then play Sim's way: no extra turn, and whoever finishes a box writes one word in it, something from a house one of you grew up in. Nobody keeps score. See whose house fills the board.

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