How exactly do you place a bet?
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Ding, ding, ding… Day two. Well technically day one again but here he was. Money at the ready, a good hour before the start of the fight, looking for someone to take his bet. He actually liked the smell of the smoke although he could do without the unsightly clientele.
He hated self-service tills in supermarkets but he would have killed for a self-service betting machine at that point. An app on his phone he could just point at the fighters like Pokémon Go and tap the screen to say which one he wanted his money on.
Instead, he had to talk to people. Ask questions like, “how do I place a bet”? Maybe tonight he could just sit and watch. See who was taking bets, how it worked just look, there was nothing weird about that.
A drink would be handy though, it was a pub after all. He turned to go to the bar and a man brushed past him. Brushed putting it politely. Arwyn had to brace himself against a pillar to stop being knocked to the floor. He was about to grab the man when he heard him speak.
“Doo bind off…” A very strong accent. What was he saying? The man pointed behind the bar. The bar man looked at him and drew his hand along the row of barrels while looking at the man. Once again, the man spoke.
Nodding his head enthusiastically and pointing he repeated the words. “Doo bind off”. The barman held up two fingers questioningly. The man nodded and reached in his pocket. Ahhhh… The penny dropped. He was saying “Two pints of”… This was brilliant. Arwyn could pretend he was foreign. Just do a dodgy accent, they wouldn’t know. Generic shady Eastern European from the films would be fine.
Words of one syllable or ideally less. He didn’t understand most of what people were saying to him anyway so he might as well be from abroad. “I place bet. I place bet”. He practiced saying it in what he thought was a convincing Dracula type accent.
For some reason his voice went deeper. “I place bet”… A sesame Street Count laugh burst out of him unsummoned. He looked around to see if anyone noticed. Luckilly the noise level was so high, and the drunkenness at such professional levels, nobody noticed him at all.
He tried it in a higher pitched voice. “I place bet”… This time the laugh made him sound like a distant sea bird. He definitely hoped nobody heard that one. Luckily, he was wrong. A woman holding a tray piled with glasses casually nudged him in the ribs.
He turned to see her grabbing a glass from a table and fitting it inside another on the tray. She leaned into him and pointed. “You place bet there”.. Sitting behind a table to the left of the bar was a man and a dog. A very nasty looking dog.
The table had piles of coins on it and a small queue in front of it. Also sitting at the table was another man, making notes in a book. Arwyn joined the queue. He thought back to when he first went into a Subway to buy a sandwich. Because the queue was so big he had plenty of time to figure out the system of ordering and what he wanted to eat so when it was his turn to be served he just blurted it out and sounded like an expert.
Surely this would be the same. Also he had the foreign accent thing to fall back on. It could go one of two ways. They could think “he doesn’t speak English very well so we’ll cut him a bit of slack and explain everything carefully to him” or, as he had seen in real life where illegal betting is going on, they could resent the fact that he hasn’t learnt the ropes and dismiss him out of hand.
He didn’t want the be the man who sits down at a table of people playing five card stud for big money who says “right, how do we play this then”? People were handing over money, and he tried to hear what they were saying. As he got closer he could make out two names. Jackson and Chard, but which was his man?