a reply to:
SprocketUK
“That the box is it?” He asked poking at the cardboard box on the bar. Without waiting he grabbed it and opened it up. “Ooh, haha, oh yeah”
He muttered while pawing through the contents.
“This is like the essence of your old man.” he murmured, pulling out a little leather necklace with a flattened Effes bottle cap hanging from
it” Taksim square” he said quietly “That was a night, best of me life” There were a few other bits an pieces, he gave a chuckle as he
lifted out the g string “Damn, you know who this belonged to, don't you kiddo?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Umm one of his girlfriends?” I answered sarcastically.
He laughed then and shook his head “In his dreams. No, he won this in a game of cards, was doing security for some concert and the sound guy was all
in, then he added this and told your dad he got it while working on a film as the sound man, Jenna bloody Jameson! Yeah, honest to god. He took a
breath or maybe it was a sniff, before continuing “Your dad always said they was lucky. He left them in the hotel off Taksim and when we were 2 nil
down, he got up and said “I gorra get me lucky kecks” and so me and him missed the whole of the rest of the game, but, soon as he had them back
in his hands, Stevie G scored and..”He smiled, “You know the rest.”
I blinked in surprise. “He never said” I answered shaking my head in disbelief.
“Oh it's true as I am standing here, God's honest laa.” He pulled the g string fully out the box and gave it an experimental twang. That made him
laugh in a Sid James kind of way. “Oh, whats that?” He mumbled, his thumb and finger rolling around over one tiny lacy triangle.
I leaned over and couldn't help myself, reaching for it I felt the hard plastic rectangular shape myself and took the thong off him. What we must have
looked like, sitting at the bar playing with women's underwear is anyone's guess, but after a moment, I had managed to extract a tiny little memory
card, one of those micro sd things.
Two hours later, we are back at Terry's place, leaning over his laptop trying to get the stupid thing to open up what was on the card.
“I don't think there is anything on it Terry.” I grumbled “That or whatever it is is corrupted.
“Eh, no way laa, yer ol' man wouldn't have hid it if it was useless.” He tapped a few keys and copied the folder name of the card and put it into
Google, then his eyes widened “Eh, eh, I think you gorra bitcoin laa.” he said excitedly.
“What?” I asked, stupidly, I knew what a bitcoin was, but how did my alcoholic, womanising gambler of a dad who had been dead since 2013 know what
one was? “You sure? How can we get it open?”
“Need wallet software and the password” He replied. All business now. His brow furrowed even more, as if that was possible, and he spent the next
half an hour downloading and installing the software before getting up and saying “Gonna make a brew, you get thinking about his password laa.”
The next four hours were some of the most frustrating in my life as I tried everything I could think of, horses names, women's names, sexual
positions, nothing seemed to work. I slumped back in the chair, puffing out my cheeks in frustration as Terry reached for the box and emptied the
contents on the coffee table “Maybe he left a clue, eh?” he mumbled, still sounding hopeful. I wasn't.
It was the little glint off the bottle cap that did it. I leaned forward again and typed in “We won it 5 times we won it 5 times in Istanbul we won
it 5 times”
The screen changed and it showed the bitcoin balance. “We're in!” I shouted, even though he was next to me. That brown, monkey face was a still
mask of shock, the ever present roll up dangling uselessly from Terry's mouth as he sat there stunned.
“Ey laa, there's a thousand of them” he whispered. I quickly opened a tab in the browser and brought up the bitcoin rate. “Oh my god.” I said,
my eyes staring fixedly at the ticker showing the current value at over six thousand dollars for each one.
I didnt notice the small piece of paper that had fluttered to the floor from the box until I got up to go put the kettle on. I bent and picked it up
and all it said was “For you son, make good use of them and never ever gamble away the lucky pants.
Three months later I was sipping coffee on the terrace of the little Spanish villa I had bought in the Costa Del Sol. Reading the paper on my tablet
when the e mail icon popped up. I opened it and saw it was from Scouse Terry. “Eh laa, just a quick note to say I'll be over later, I think I got
the dishwasher fixed in my flat, coulda just paid some one but old habits die hard haha. Oh, you ever heard of rimming?”
I choked on the coffee then, but laughed, Terry was the closest thing I had to family now and with his share of the cash he decided to buy a place
just up the road from me so he could have someone to bug.
The End
edit on 03pTue, 11 Sep 2018 07:46:03 -050020182018-09-11T07:46:03-05:00kAmerica/Chicago30000000k by SprocketUK because: This is the
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