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The Caller · The Fifth Evening: One Away

The fifth night was quieter than the fourth, as her uncle had said it would be. It was colder, too. People came in with their hands in their sleeves and sat closer together than usual, and the paper lanterns swayed in a wind that got in under the flap.

Forty cards. Hạnh counted them, as always.

Ông Sáu was quieter too. His voice had gone a little rough on the fourth night, and he had brought a second flask, of ginger tea, which he said was for the throat and which smelled strongly enough to reach the second row. He let Hạnh call every game. He sat beside her with both flasks and turned the cage for her only when her wrist got tired, and once, when she lost her place in the rhyme for sixty-one, he hummed the tune under his breath until she found it. Nobody in the tent seemed to notice the change. They had stopped coming to hear the new caller sing badly. They came now, she supposed, just to play.

That was a compliment, her mother said. Hạnh was not sure it felt like one.

She had spent the afternoon on her phone, which she had not meant to do. Her little cousin had a bingo game on his, with cartoon balls that bounced and coins that rained down the screen, and he had shown it to her over lunch. Every time he was one square short of a line, the screen flashed gold and a voice cried SO CLOSE! and the whole phone trembled in his hand. He had played it for an hour. He had looked, she thought, very happy and slightly ill.

She had watched him, and she had thought: that is what the tent is missing.

So on the fifth night, in the second game, when the chess men in the front row had four numbers of a row and were waiting on a fifth, Hạnh leaned over the table and called out, in a bright voice, "So close! One away! Front row, one away!"

The chess men looked up, startled. A few people laughed. The tent woke up a little.

She did it again three numbers later, for Bà Diệu. "One away! One away, first row!" And again for the young father at the back. Each time, heads turned, and there was a small stir, a sound of people sitting up. It worked. The quiet night had a little fizz in it.

By the fourth game she was doing it every few numbers.

"Hạnh," said Ông Sáu, between calls.

She knew that voice. She put the ball down.

"How many cards in this tent," said her uncle, "are one away right now?"

She looked out at the rows. It was late in the game. She could not see the cards, but she could see the faces: bent close, pencils still, the particular stillness of someone waiting for one number.

"I don't know," she said. "A lot."

"Most of them," said Ông Sáu. "By the end of a game, nearly every card is one away from something. That is what the end of a game looks like. One away is not a near win. It is just a card."

Hạnh looked at the cage.

He was right, and she could see why without a sum. A row had five numbers. Near the end of the game, with forty-odd numbers called, almost every card had at least one row with four marked. The chess men had been one away. So had Bà Diệu. So, probably, had thirty other people who had not caught her eye. When she shouted one away, she was not telling anybody anything. She was making an ordinary thing feel like a near miss, so they would feel it in their stomachs and want another card. That was what the phone game did. That was why her cousin had looked slightly ill.

It did not change anyone's chance. It only changed how often they played.

She thought of the cousin's phone again: the gold flash, the trembling, the coins raining down a screen. None of it had been about the numbers. It had all been about the next go. And she had stood in the tent her uncle had kept honest for thirty years and done the same thing with her voice, because the night was quiet and she wanted it not to be.

She did not shout it again.

Instead, when the game ended, while the winner chose a scarf from the prize table, Hạnh went to the chalkboard. Her uncle had written the price and the prize there the night before, in two lines. She rubbed out the second line and wrote the night's numbers underneath, as large as the board would take, so the back row could read them:

Tonight: 40 cards × 10,000 = 400,000 to the lanterns. Prizes on the table, given by neighbours: about 240,000. Kept for the lanterns: 160,000.

She stepped back and looked at it. Then, because the board had room, she added one more line:

Of every 100 you give, about 60 comes back as prizes.

The tent read it. She watched them read it. It took a while; people read a chalkboard more slowly than a phone.

One of the chess men read it out loud to the other, whose glasses were in his other coat. The young father held the baby up as if to show it the board. In the third row, somebody did the sum again on a napkin, to check, and nodded. Hạnh had expected people to be cross, or embarrassed, or to look away the way people look away from a price tag. Nobody did. They looked at it the way you look at a map of somewhere you have been many times: oh, so that's where it is.

Then the noodle woman, who had come over from her stall for the last game, got up and bought a second card. "For the lanterns," she said, putting down the money. The young father bought one. Bà Diệu did not buy another card, because she only ever bought one, but she copied the numbers into her notebook, under the night's list of calls.

Nobody shouted one away for the rest of the evening. The last game was won by a girl Hạnh had never seen before, a student home for Tết like herself, who did not know the songs and laughed when she won, as if she had been caught doing something.

When the tent was empty, Ông Sáu stood in front of the chalkboard with his tea and read it twice.

"That," he said, "is the best call of the night."

"I didn't sing it," said Hạnh.

"No," said her uncle. "You wrote it down. A caller is paid in the trust of the room. The numbers on the wall are how you keep it." He tapped the last line. "Sixty in a hundred. Some halls keep less than we do and some keep more. The ones worth playing in tell you which."

"And we keep forty," said Hạnh, "and write it on the board."

"For the lanterns," said Ông Sáu, and switched off the light.

The question for your own table

What games or apps in your house tell you that you were "so close"? What does that message change: your chance of winning, or how often you play?

Something to do

Next time you play a game with prizes or points, write on paper what goes in and what comes out, where everybody can see it.

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