The Rules of Play Read Online Free Page A

prefer to be getting wet. If you turn on the TV, the game you are seeing is not the game you at first think you are seeing but the recorded highlights of another, previous, historic game. You can probably tell, if you know about these things, how long ago this game was by tiny differences in fashion: the boots, the bagginess of the clothes, the peaks of their caps.
    So: how the loss-adjuster and I met.
    I was at a translators’ conference in Edinburgh. (I have two jobs, both of them small, one of which is translating from the Spanish. My father was Spanish. But that can keep till another rainy day.) He too was at a conference, for loss-adjusters, at the same hotel, and because his conference was even more tedious than mine he decided to pay mine a visit. He arrived in the middle of a session and sat in the row behind me; and though I didn’t turn round the notes I was taking became illegible, and then stopped altogether. On the transparently ridiculous grounds that he wanted to learn more about translation as a form of neo-colonialism, he suggested we have dinner. Which, given how little we ate, went on for a very long time. Loss-adjusters earn more than translators, and he had a room at the hotel. I phoned the people I was staying with, friends of Alan who lived in Edinburgh, and told them not to wait up.
    We walked and talked and lay down. Except for the weather and the traffic and the tall grey buildings, it was bucolic: we were shepherds somewhere remote, or shepherd and shepherdess. I had a dictionary, he a calculator. Poems are what get lost in translation, he translated losses into finite figures. One bright and blustery afternoon we were sitting out at a café by the docks in Leith and I wanted to show him a story I was translating. As I took the folder from my bag the pages fell out and were blown up among the gulls and out over the edge of the quay. The loss-adjuster jumped up and began to chase after them, stumbling and grabbing at what the wind tore away. He looked as though he was being attacked by a swarm of bees or his house was burning down and he was trying to save the one thing important to him, except that the thing was mine and it wasn’t important at all, and besides I had saved the file.
    On the Friday evening Alan came up from London to spend the weekend with me. We went out for a meal: Alan, me, Alan’s friends, and the loss-adjuster came too and kept ordering more wine. He got into a fight with two men at the next table who he said were laughing at me, or staring, or anyway something that he decided was offensive. Almost certainly something very small, like the color of their ties. He stood up and told them to apologize. He was gripping a chair, hard, in order to stand up, and I remember praying he wouldn’t let go. When one of the men told him to sit down and stop making an idiot of himself, the loss-adjuster hit him. The woman at our table, the wife of Alan’s friend, had a giggling fit.
    A month later he wrote to me. His handwriting— oddly old-fashioned and impersonal—was that of someone who’d been taught at school how to hold a pen properly. He wrote that he was surprised by how easy it had been to hit someone, to throw a punch; his hand didn’t hurt at all, though doubtless it would have been different if he’d been sober. He wrote that he was going on a business trip to Spain, and as he didn’t know any Spanish and the phrase books he had looked at weren’t helpful, perhaps I could provide him with translations for some essential sentences. I am lost. Do I have to change trains? Please give me directions to your bedroom.
    HE DOES HAVE a name—it might even have been pinned to his jacket at the conference hotel—but I don’t want to use it in case it breaks.
    I MUST HAVE dozed. The dream that’s with me in mid-flow when I wake up has something to do with the story whose pages blew away on Leith docks, except that the loss-adjuster is in it and the sentence I’m knitting my