Goldsmiths - University of London

I was only going to stay for a week, just long enough to get my bankroll sorted. After all, what's the point of picking cherries when you know how to play a genius system of online Blackjack? I'd been doing just that for the first month of the holidays, and I was raking it in, from the comfort of my own room too. Another month and I'd have had enough to get away for a while, just pack a bag and go. But then the bank fucked me over and my hard-earned bankroll went down to nothing overnight. Apparently, they'd reviewed my account activity and decided that fifteen hundred pounds was an unmanageable overdraft limit for a first-year student. The whole thing reeked of bullshit. Basically, they'd seen the online casino transactions and marked me down as a reckless gambler. Even though I was almost a grand up, they thought I'd lose it all again so they'd better claw back their money while they had the chance. Fine. Take your money. There's plenty more where that came from, I said. Well, I would've said it if they'd even had the guts to tell me face-to-face, but as it was I just thought it in my head, standing on the scratchy hallway mat in my bare feet. No post, I called to my dear old ma, and screwed the letter into a tight ball. The bastards.

They obviously didn't understand that bonus hunting isn't gambling: it's a system. Okay, so it does involve an element of what some people – idiots – would call luck. I'd call it variance. The numbers go up and down, and sometimes they go one way more than you'd expect. But all you have to do is stick to the system and the money rolls in. One time, I lost a hundred quid in two hours. The next day I made two fifty in the same amount of time. But that's why you need a bankroll, to account for the variance. And that's why I found myself on a train with my cousin Florence, going to pick cherries in Kent, of all godforsaken places.

She tried to find us some photos of the summer when she'd worked in the orchard, before Florence was born, but there weren't any. Instead, we ended up going through all her other photos, which I kind of enjoyed, even though we'd done it a hundred times before. It's weird, because my mum used to be a hippy too. There's photos of her and Viv when they lived a squat, both of them all long hair and swooning eyelids. My mum was the prettiest, back then. Viv loves to tease my mum about what she used to be like, all far-out-man, flowers in her hair and acid on her cornflakes, that sort of thing. But now my mum doesn't like looking at those pictures. She always wanders off and comes back when we've finished, saying she's cleaned aunty Viv's bin or something. I don't understand what happens to people between being young and being old. When you see those pictures, you have to wonder why my aunty Viv carried on being a hippy, while my mum ended up shopping at Next and working in the Lewisham tax office. Not that either one of those options is exactly appealing, to say the fucking least.

Anyway, I agreed to the job, even without photographic evidence of what I was letting myself in for. Florence was happy, by which I mean she hugged me and then jumped up and down on the spot, clapping like a performing seal. My mum was ecstatic. By that I mean she smiled and when we got home she ironed some towels for me to pack. I went to my room and looked up the casinos I'd play once I got some money together. I wrote out the list in my notebook, the kind of small red notebook that we used to use for French vocabulary at school. In it, I'd kept a record of which casinos I'd played so far, how much I'd deposited, how much I'd won or lost. Actually, I should say 'earned'. There's a forum for bonus hunters and some of them do it as their full-time job. One of them even lives in the Caribbean or somewhere, just off his Blackjack earnings. They're pretty friendly, those guys. I don't think they get many girls on the forum. Not that I would have put up with any pervy stuff – it was purely professional.

I'd wanted to take my laptop with me, but my aunty Viv had said there was no electricity supply in the orchard. I found that pretty hard to believe. Maybe there wasn't in her day, but surely nowadays even hippies watch TV. They were hardly going to have wi-fi though, so in the end I decided there wasn't much point in taking it. I could manage without it anyway, it's not like I was addicted or anything. My iPod, however, was a different matter. I'd only had it for a few weeks, my one big purchase from the Blackjack money before the bank had robbed me blind. It was white, 120GB, and I loved it. Even though I only had about 20GB of music, it made me weirdly happy, knowing that there was all that space to fill. I'd had to make sure my mum didn't find out about it, though. She'd been hassling me to get a job ever since I came back, and obviously I hadn't told her about the bonus hunting. But I had a lock on my bedroom door, so it wasn't really a problem. I'd sit in front of my laptop, earphones in, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the cards flip across the screen, the chips shuffling back and forth, the numbers going up and down. I'd stretch out inside the music and the empty gigabytes, where the only thing I had to think about was whether to hit or double, split or stand, and even that was all worked out by the system, so it was just a case of clicking the right button. Sure, you can't help getting a bit excited when the numbers are going up, or pissed off when they're going down, but mostly your feelings just bob along on a gentle wave and you keep clicking and smoking and the hours pass like cars outside the window.

On a really lucky streak, winning eight, nine, ten hands in a row, it can be hard to tear yourself away. Sometimes, my mum would be knocking on my door for dinner, and even though I could hear her, distantly through the music, I'd have to wait until the streak ended before I could take my earphones out and answer.

"What are you doing in there?" she'd ask.

"I'm trying to relax," I'd say, which was kind of true.

I showered and dressed. It looked hot outside so I chose my thinnest jeans. When I'd finished packing, I started up my laptop and checked through all the casino junk in my inbox, then went on to the Blackjack forum. I kept thinking that maybe I could use that twenty quid to play one of the smaller bonuses, turn it into forty quid, turn that forty into eighty. Build my bankroll up steadily. It would only take a week. But I could just picture my mum's face when she got home from work to find me still in my room. At five to eleven, I was still trawling through the forum when I heard aunty Viv's horn outside. I shut down the laptop and picked up my rucksack. It weighed a ton, but I still felt like I'd left something behind.

She said something I couldn't hear, shrugging her shoulders the way she did, as though in spasm of delight. I took one earphone out and let it dangle on my T-shirt.

"What?"

"I said, it's nice to get out of London."

"Hmmm. Lovely. Pylon central." She rolled her eyes but it was true, there were fucking hundreds of them.

"Come on, Norah, think about it, it's going to be so cool. We're going to live in our own place–"

"It's a caravan." Actually, I was kind of looking forward to staying in a caravan, just because I hadn't done it since the holidays we went on when we were little kids. But I couldn't help myself. She's always been too eager about everything, and it can only lead to disappointment. Being the older cousin, I try to look out for her like that. I put my earphone back in and turned up the volume, but she was still talking, so I hit pause.

"Where'd you get that, anyway?"

"Student loan."

"But I thought you were skint."

"I am."

"Oh. Well, not for much longer. My mum says we could earn quite a bit. And we'll be getting paid to get a tan." She stretched out her arms, fingers spread. I could see the white bits in between.

"No, we'll be getting paid to work our arses off for a bunch of so-called hippies who are making loads more money than us." I did notice, though, that my arms were looking a bit pasty. It had been pretty hot, but I suppose I hadn't been out that much.

"I'm going to buy a whole new wardrobe for uni," she said.

"University."

"Yeah, uni. I can't believe I'm actually going this year. I swear, it feels like I was only doing my GCSE's yesterday or something."

"Tell me about it."

I could see her face going red, which meant she was getting pissed off with me. It's a problem she's always had – any hint of anger or embarrassment and she goes beetroot. She just can't hide a thing with those cheeks of hers. She took a deep breath, got out her lipgloss and applied another layer. I put my music back on and looked out of the window. I knew I was being shitty but I couldn't really be bothered to talk to her about university. The train went through a tunnel and for a second she caught my eye in the black glass. Then we were out again, hurtling on past square fields of nothing. At the end of the carriage there was a Network Rail poster with a picture of an apple tree and the words: Visit Kent: the Garden of England. I did a big, empty yawn and sunk into my seat. Soon I was drifting, having half-dreams of cards flipping through dark city streets like collapsing buildings.

The album finished and I opened my eyes. Florence was texting on her phone.

"Who you texting?"

She looked at me. "Josie."

"Josie Miller? God, are you still friends with her? I just remember her walking around for months in that ridiculous neck brace and both her arms in plaster after she smacked into a tree sledging."

"That was years ago."

"I know. But still. She was heading right for it, but she didn't even try to turn. She just closed her eyes. That's pretty stupid, by anyone's standards." I laughed.

"She just didn't know how to. And anyway, she's the only person from my year going to Cambridge, so she's obviously not that stupid."

"Yeah, well, that's if she gets the grades," I said, and immediately saw Florence's cheeks flush again. I wasn't sure if this was because I'd insulted her friend, or because she was worried about her own results. She put her phone down on the table but she didn't say anything.

"Cambridge is full of idiots anyway. They're just clever idiots," I said, which didn't exactly make either thing sound any better.

"She's my best friend."

I felt like saying: well, she won't be for much longer, not once she goes away and makes herself into a new person, just so she can be friends with other people who are all trying to be new and exciting. But I couldn't really be bothered to talk anymore, and besides, there's no point telling people stuff they can only find out for themselves. It's like when she had that nineteen year-old boyfriend when she was fifteen. Anyone could see he was an absolute prick, but Florence thought he was some kind of god, just because he was a DJ. My mum told me I should talk to Florence and find out what was going on because my aunty Viv said she was crying all the time in her room. My mum and her mum are always interfering like that, telling us to do this and that, but what they don't understand is that we're not best friends, or even friends. We're just cousins. I mean, I told Florence her boyfriend was an absolute prick, but it didn't make any difference. She still carried on letting him fuck her around, until he went off with some other girl.

"Tickets, please."

We both looked up. The ticket inspector was standing over us. The collar of his uniform was too tight and it made me feel uncomfortable just looking at him. I pushed my ticket across the table and looked away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Florence handing over her railcard. She sat up straight in her seat and flicked her hair off her shoulders, suddenly all sweetness and light. When he gave the card back she smiled and I could see her sticky mouth saying thank you, her tongue flashing between her teeth more than was actually necessary. The ticket guy was about forty and had bad hair and chipped front teeth. He lapped it up, of course. I really don't know how she turned into the kind of girl who acts like that around anything male. I can't stand all that stuff. It smacks of desperation.

Florence was always the pretty little blonde one but there was a time when she didn't know it, or else she didn't care. We actually used to have a laugh when we were kids. Every time she stayed over at mine, we had this thing where we'd wait at the bedroom window to see my downstairs neighbour Mr Pasher bring his milk in from the doorstep below, just because it gave us a kick to look at his bald spot. One time, Florence decided she was going to spit on it so he'd think a bird had shat on his head. It was all her idea. She had the droplet hanging off her lip and she let it go with perfect timing. We only just saw it hit, but then we ran away from the window so we never knew what he did. We used to imagine he shook his fist at the sky, and every time we passed him in the corridor or on the street, one of us would shake our fist and then we'd be laughing our arses off. But there you go. People change, and usually for the worse.

Florence kicked my foot. The ticket inspector was tapping his finger on the table.

"...must show a valid Young Person's railcard with your ticket or you will be required to pay the full price standard single fare for your journey."

"Right."

The woman sitting across from us glanced up over the top of her trashy magazine, so I gave her my best withering smile and reached into the pocket of my jeans. The inspector was pursing his lips, all irritated at having to wait for two seconds.

He checked the railcard thoroughly. "Here you go, miss." I took the card and put it back in my pocket.

"Wanker," I said, when he'd moved away.

Florence did her pretend shocked face, which she did a lot. Any excuse to open her mouth suggestively. "He was only doing his job, Norah."

"There's a difference between doing your job and being a jobsworth."

"You're such a hater."

"Get over it."

She leant across the table. "Why are you being like this?"

"I guess I just can't contain my excitement."

She sighed. "Some people actually would be excited about going to a cherry orchard, you know."

"Oh really. Well, for all we know there is no cherry orchard. I reckon your mum's sold us to a prostitution ring. And they're going to love you." She tutted, but she couldn't help glancing down at her neat little cleavage, probably thinking about whether a prostitution ring really would love her. I shook my head, hit play, and looked out at all the wide-legged pylons, lording it over the Kent countryside.