The Wager

"Here's the thing," said Tam, who had said "here's the thing" every Thursday in the Lismore since about 1987. "You believe, and you're right, you win everything. You believe and you're wrong, you've lost nothing. You don't believe and you're wrong, you're done for. You don't believe and you're right, you get, what. A wee bit of Sunday morning." "That's not new," said Archie. "I know it's not new. Some French fella. Doesn't make it wrong." "It's wrong." "Tell me how." Archie had been telling him how for thirty-eight years. He was a retired maths teacher and Tam was a retired postman and they'd been at school together, and the argument predated both of their marriages and had outlasted one of them. "You can't decide to believe something," Archie said. "That's how. It's no a bet. Can you decide, right now, to believe that pint's a dog?" "No." "There you are, then." "That's different. Nobody's telling you to believe the pint's a dog. There's no upside." "Belief's no about upside." "Everything's about upside. You just don't like admitting it." The barman, Kenny, who had heard this before, put the football on with the sound down. "Right," said Archie. "Say I do it. Say I go along to St. Simon's on Sunday and kneel and say the words, because you've told me the odds. What's He going to make of that? An all-seeing God, and here's Archie Munro in the third pew, hedging?" "Maybe He appreciates the effort." "Maybe He thinks I'm a chancer." "Everybody's a chancer. That's the whole of Glasgow." Archie drank. Tam drank. The football did something and neither of them looked. "I'll tell you what it is," Archie said, after a while, and he said it lower, which Tam noticed. "I'd rather be wrong and honest than right and pretending. If there's something there, it knows I didn't lie to it. That's the only thing I've got to offer it. That I never once said I believed when I didn't." Tam was quiet for a bit. This was not the usual shape of it. The usual shape was Tam saying "aye, but" and Archie saying "no, but" until the second pint.

"Jean believed," Tam said. "She did." "Right up to the end." "She did." "Did it help her?" Archie looked at the table. His wife had been gone four years. Tam had carried the coffin. "Aye," he said. "It helped her. She wasn't scared. I was scared and she wasn't. I'd have given anything to be her, those last weeks. I'd have taken your bet in a heartbeat." He turned the glass. "I just couldn't. It's no a lever you can pull. I tried. I sat in the chapel at the hospital and I tried." Tam didn't say anything. Then he put his hand on Archie's arm, once, which he had not done in thirty-eight years, and took it off again. "Same time Thursday," he said. "Same time." Kenny turned the football up, because the silence had gone on long enough and that's a barman's job.