We were tired. So tired. It’s hard to tell you how tired we were. Things weren’t that bad until our second was born. A little boy with a cleft lip. We put on a brave face in the birthing suite. Acted like it didn’t worry us, like we were simply grateful for the gift of life. But we waited until the repair surgery, three months later, before sharing a picture of him on social media.

I’d assumed we were blessed. I always had. I assumed that I could get away with anything. Booze, drugs, mediocre recklessness. Chronic pain and hangovers aside, bad things were afflictions set upon others—strangers and acquaintances—but not us, not loved ones. Julius Caesar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caesar is mortal.

My boy’s surgery went as well as possible. He looked much better after; everyone we knew said so. Everyone on social media said he was gorgeous. But our problems ran deeper than aesthetics. We weren’t happy. Probably hadn’t been in a longtime, but it was easier to pretend when there was only one kid. Two was too many.

Sleep was a big part of it. Like most things, you don’t appreciate sleep until you aren’t getting it. My boy was a terrible sleeper. Slept an hour or two at a time, never more. Someone had to get back up to sooth him. Usually, that was Susanna, my wife, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t awake too. It was a special kind of torture.

Susanna’s moods kept getting worse. It was like she hated me; worse still, like she hated being a mother. I know there’s now a diagnostic term for this—postpartum depression—but how is that supposed to help? Day after day, I’d come home from work, then it would start. It would start with something as simple as me asking how her day was. From what seemed like nowhere, her pride and spite would gather an unstoppable momentum. She wanted to kill me; I could see it in her eyes before the words even started. On and on those words would then detail all the ways in which I didn’t understand what she was going through. About how I got to go to work with other adults, how I got to have boozy lunches, how I got to speak more than just babytalk. Did she think I enjoyed my work? I hated work, for the record, but any place was better than home.

 

“You winning?” my boss said to me one morning. He’d approached my workstation from his, crossing the plane of our open-plan office. The ceiling tiles above us were grey, the carpet tiles below us grey too, and the plasterboard walls flanking us were a white that was greying.

“Doing OK, gaffer,” I said. We both liked Premier League football, and British slang was the only way we could communicate in any friendly capacity. “Just not sleeping well at the moment. You know what it’s like. I’ll have the tax-depreciation schedule for Blackstone done by close of business though. I’m nearly finished.”

“No worries, they chased me up again just now. If you need another day, I’ll let them know. But they expected it a week ago.”

“I know. I don’t need another day.”

I got the work done and sent it out. It could’ve used another proofread, but alas, it was sent. Then I started walking through Hyde Park—Sydney’s, not London’s—and boarded a train from St James to Strathfield via Paramatta, getting off at Newtown Station. The Newtown streets were filled with misguided hipsters, young bums who made me feel old. I don’t know why my wife and I still lived there, but we owned our home, and our generation is notoriously terrible at sacrificing our lifestyles for the future. Waist deep in mortgage debt, we persevered with our silly little lives. The Vietnamese restaurants, the barely old and recently refurbished pubs and theatres, the Aboriginal and Palestinian flags painted shabbily together on dilapidated brick walls. None of this meant anything to me anymore. It all felt like utter nonsense.

I walked into our three-bed one-bath terrace, and Susanna didn’t even greet me with a hello. Simply handed me our girl. Said, “Her food is in the fridge, then can you bath her.”

I took our girl, two years old, and sat her in the highchair. She was screaming for her mother. I tried to put the mashed sweet potatoes into her mouth, but every time the spoon reached her lips, she shook her head violently and flung it all over the floor. Tried letting her feed herself, but she just threw more food onto the floor.

“You’re meant to put it in her mouth,” Susanna said after she had breastfed my boy to sleep, strutting out from the nursery to the living room.

“You just do it,” I said frustratedly. “She doesn’t like me.”

“I can’t do everything.”

“I’m the one who has been at fucking work all day.”

“You wouldn’t last a day doing what I do,” she said, hoisting our girl from the highchair. Then she added, unnecessarily, “Prick.”

“Don’t fucking call me a prick, Susanna. I’m doing my best. Someone has got to go to work and make money.”

I walked into the bathroom and started running water into the plastic bath. The taps were rusted, and momentarily, I worried about what the modern world was doing to the health of my children. I quickly realised I had bigger fish to fry than microplastics, metals, or fluoride. The industrial revolution wasn’t going anywhere, neither was the technological. Soon enough, my daughter would be glued to an iPad. There was no way around it that wasn’t even more anti-social. Besides, the idea of us being capable of running a homestead was laughable.

“Can you dry her and put her to bed tonight?” Susanna said.

“That’s usually your job.”

“Just do it,” she said.

I did it. Then all three of them, the two kids and my wife, were somehow asleep. It was 10PM. I needed to take this opportunity to get back out of the house. I ordered an Uber to the Crown Casino at Barangaroo.

I’d always been a casual gambler, always enjoyed a dumb dopamine hit that made no statistical sense, always ducked off to a self-serving betting terminal or a pokies room for a quick punt. But I was never interested in betting big, in throwing away my hard-earned at a casino. I’m not sure what came over me that night, but I felt the sudden urge to do something. Something radical.

In the Uber to Crown, I called the Commonwealth Bank’s 24-hour hotline. Gave them all the information they needed: my name, my card number, my date of birth, my mother’s maiden name. Then I asked them to release the $5,000 maximum withdrawal limit that had been the default on my Visa Debit card. Upon arrival, in four separate withdrawals from an ATM, I withdrew the $19,000 of savings I had in my account.

I started with the easy game of roulette. Easy because once you’ve placed your bets, there are no decisions to make; it’s just you and some Chinese tourists against a silver ball and the kid who placed it onto a spinning wheel. I spread my $25 chips across the board, and after a few spins, I managed to hit on the number 2: my daughter’s day of birth. It returned 35 to 1, and after half an hour or so, I walked away with a balance of $19,350.

I was up, I thought, but roulette was just foreplay. I was here to play blackjack, but before then, I figured I would join my Chinese comrades in their favourite game: baccarat. Though it was a game of French origin, I was the only man of European descent at the baccarat tables. It was another game of sheer chance, the only options being to bet on the player or the banker. I think the reason why the Chinese loved it so much lay in their deep culture of superstition. At the $100 table, gamblers were allowed to squeeze the cards, and my comrades delighted in the opportunity to destroy every card they could with a Taoist force.

One Chinese man of middling age said to me, “We play banker together. You good luck.”

I said back to him, in his same stupid, albeit friendly English, “You good luck too, my friend.”

We lost that hand. Lost a few more. After another half hour or so, I was down to a balance of $17,250.

“You bad luck,” my comrade said.

“You bad luck too,” I said, still jovial, leaving the table.

It was blackjack time. I knew the rules. Even knew basic strategy from watching YouTube in my early twenties, without ever actually playing. Got obsessed with card counting but knew I didn’t have the attention span to pull it off. Blackjack was ingrained in my memory like a former lover who appears in your consciousness from time to time; strangers present themselves to you as her, though they really look nothing like her at all.

I sat down at a $100 table. Put down fifty $100 notes onto the felt table and the dealer returned me a stack of fifty black $100 chips. My fellow gamblers looked at me with a mix of respect and concern.

I started playing $500 hands. Went up and down, up and down. I was making all the right moves, knowing that perfect basic strategy limited the house’s edge to a matter of basis points. But after only another half hour, I was down bad. The five grand in cash I’d laid onto the felt had been sucked up into the casino’s inevitable, windfall profits.

Balance at $12,250, I put down another five grand onto the felt. This time, though, I was chasing my losses. My fellow gamblers, now mostly white men, looked at me with less respect and more concern than the first time. They were not my comrades. I started playing $1,000 hands, lost five out of the next six. I stayed when I should have: a fourteen against a four, a seventeen against a ten, a sixteen against a five. I hit when I should have too: a fifteen against a king, a thirteen against a nine, a fourteen against an eight. But I was not lucky, the dealer even felt sorry for me, and I was down to my last $7,250.

Fuck this, I thought, with a desperate strategy in mind to win most of it back. One spin of roulette, all $7,250, the remainder of my life’s savings. If I win, I thought, I’ll leave with $14,500, and I can hide from Susanna that this ridiculous night even happened at all. I approached a $10 roulette table and laid out all the cash onto the felt. The dealer obligingly handed me back that value in $100 chips. A crew of rubberneckers quickly gathered around the table, moths to a flame. I put it all on red.

“Good luck, friend,” said the Chinese man I was playing baccarat with a couple hours earlier. He seemed to appear from nowhere. “Red is good luck. You good luck.”

The kid dealer nodded to me in the same show of good faith, as he spun the wheel and dropped the silver ball.

2, the ball settled upon. Black.

“You bad luck,” my Chinese comrade laughed cruelly.

It was gone. It was all gone. All the savings I had for myself and my family were gone. I tried to minimise the severity of my actions, telling myself it was only a few months’ salary. I told myself that I owned a home, and in the long run, I would inherit my parents’ home too. I was still ahead of most of the population. But there was no escaping the shame of defeat. It washed over me like a tidal wave. I was a complete fuckup; there was no way I could hide this from my wife. Susanna was going to find out. I thought of my son, his cleft lip. I nearly cried. I wanted to kill myself, but I didn’t, I could never. I was too narcissistic to do something that drastic.

Miraculously, everyone was asleep when I got home. My boy must have stayed asleep. Those three hours in which I’d destroyed several years of fiscal prudence had so far gone unnoticed. I slunk back into bed, my heart racing.

“You winning?” my boss said to me the next morning.

“All good, gaffer. I got out Blackstone’s tax-depreciation schedule yesterday.”

“I saw. Good work. How are you going with the rest of your workload? Do you need any help?”

“It’s all under control,” I smiled through gritted, desperate teeth.

“If you say so.”

I’d always thought I was lucky. I’d assumed I was blessed. I thought some higher power had my back, as defiantly rational as I pretended to be. But no one did. It was all chance. I could lose twenty grand one day, get cancer the next. My kid was no less likely to be born defective than any other man’s, just as my wife was no less likely to turn into an absolute disaster. It was all random.

I would financially recover. After all, my situation was salvageable, but I was a disgrace. And Susanna was going to find out. There was no way around that. It was only a matter of time. When I got home from work that night, I was so tired. Too tired to sleep.