All the Sixes

We went to bingo with Granny in the Dysart Community Centre.
Bought ourselves bingo books and borrowed pens because there
weren't any dabbers.
The women behind us had three books each and at least 5 dabbers in 3 different colours.
We weren't the youngest there, but our table radiated youth and the smell of chocolate and popcorn.
It wasn't the cinema. But our excitement was different from the others, all the old women and old
men for whom this was the highlight of their weeks. We were First Timers, and we
believed we would win.

The hall was large and full of tungsten light and chipped plywood tables and sad, sagging
basketball nets. And sad, sagging faces.
The bingo caller had a thick country accent. All the trees, terty tree. And the balls bubbled up out of an old machine with tatty paintwork from the seventies, in colours only seen on Refreshers packets. And the numbers were called both too fast to find them and too painfully slowly, and they were never in lines, and never in the same box, and never predictable, and never the ones you wanted.
But it was addictive. I could see the thrill the bingo-players got. And my brother won a line (CHECK! 20 Euro!) and so did my cousin, and the rest of us stared at our sheets even harder but nothing came up, it was never fourandtree-forty-tree or all-the-sixes-sixty-six or legs-eleven when you wanted it to be. It was unpredictable.

And by the end the way the numbers were called and the way we all had no control and how anything or anyone could be called at any time made me sick and sad, it made me think of life and dying and how we never know when it will be, how old we will be, 85, 63, 21. The way some people win and others don't, and you can't control it, you can never control it.

The way we ripped out the pages,
one
by
one,
until we reached the back,
and they were
gone.