Tony Wu throws the stub of a Galoise Blonde onto the pavement, crushes it with the toe of a fake alligator skin boot and steps into a gaming arcade that hides between the phone shop and an optician. The only customer, Wu does not acknowledge the Ethiopian cashier who is absorbed in a game of Tetris on her mobile phone and doesn’t look up. Tony Wu, forty, slim with a black leather jacket and jeans and a drooping Mandarin moustache. Import, export; mainly phones, chargers, and GPS; plugging himself in to a flashing one armed bandit called Lucky Seven; twenty pounds in and forty more in his back pocket if the luck fails. Wu’s head throbbing from the stress of it all. Tiny Cheo and that fag brother of his calling twenty times a day and the ship still somewhere south of Suez. Diazepam washed down with a Red Stripe helped a little. ‘Do not operate machinery’. He sneers as the twenty rattles up to twenty seven and he rubs the back of his neck where it hurts. Bonus symbols. Free spins. He smacks the button, licking his lips. Up she goes. Digits flicker quickly as they race towards the magical fifty and for a moment, Wu is weightless, fearless. Tomorrow his shoulder will ache again and another bitch from the HMRC will call and so will his son, asking why he didn’t wire the money; Soon Yi’s birthday and who else is looking after her while Marco is in jail?

At the cashier’s desk, the Ethiopian rearranges coloured oblongs and squares as they drop from the top of her screen and passes three hundred points for the first time. An ad interrupts the game and she takes a bite of an orange Club biscuit, while on Tony Wu’s machine, the number settles at ninety six pounds. Wu is free from all of it. No grownup children back in Macau, the idiot Rudi and the delinquent Marco, no Rita demanding Western Union money transfers, no unpaid taxes nor problems with the Home Office, just adrenaline and his body suspended in space; only the machine anchoring him to the bedrock of the earth. He hits the button and the lines spin again.