Haunted since childhood by an unfinished trick, Don Lowe built his world around the five of diamonds – until the card itself reappeared.
Don Lowe – stately now, and grey – steps into a gutted community hall in the scruffy streets of The Rivet and stops short. He breathes in through his nose, his eyes closed. The smell, he hopes, might be familiar. For this is not the Franklyn Road Hall that he knows. In his memory, the place is like an echoing carnival, spilling with colour and life, alive with the cries of friends and the faint tang of orange and vanilla.
Today, the floorboards are bare, the wallpaper half-stripped, the ceiling ribs showing where tiles once sagged. In the wreckage of municipal renewal, he can still pick out the spot where, 50 years ago – half a century! – he had stood as a boy with a playing card in his hand.
He remembers that moment as if it were yesterday. His birthday. His treat. The magician, a veteran of the party scene, called Ebeneezer Colharbour, or the Great Cobra.
The cobra strikes
The Cobra took back his card and… it disappeared. The young Don gasped. The Cobra laughed and said, “Let’s find your card, Dom.” (Getting his name wrong.)
But they never found the card. The Great Cobra collapsed. Died right there on the stage. Screams and confusion – but no five of diamonds.
“It was unfinished business,” Lowe told me before he returned to the gutted hall. We were sitting in his club, the Five of Diamonds. The décor is plush in a defiant way – crimson banquettes, diamond-pattern mirrors, playing-card prints in the gents.
A sign over the bar reads, All hands are winning hands, though the regulars, newspapermen and retired boxers, would not always agree. Lowe wore a black suit despite the hour. He tapped the heavy ring on his finger, set with five small stones in a circle. “I built a life around a missing card.”
Marked for life
The tattoo came first, a teenage experiment in permanence: five red pips across his back. “People thought I’d been in prison,” he said. Later came the club, the ring, the stationery embossed with the suit. The wife (Lizzie Diamond although he swears it’s love, not habit.)
The card became both private joke and public calling card. “You carry something unfinished long enough, it turns into a brand,” he said.
Last week, Guardian City announced renovations to the hall. Workmen, stripping back wallpaper, uncovered a single card pressed flat against the plaster. Faded but legible: the five of diamonds. Lowe’s nephew, on the building crew, called into Don’s club on his way home. “He said, ‘Uncle Don, I’ve seen your card,’ and I told him, ‘Don’t move it. Leave it there.’”
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At the site, Lowe leans over it, hands behind his back, inspecting the card oblong as he might a miniature masterpiece. “That’s the one,” he said, as if there might be doubt.
“It’s a reunion. Not closure – just proof we met again.” He doesn’t touch it. He fears the world he built will fall apart, his one constant disrupted.
A new mystery
The missing card shaped a character: part showman, part gambler, living life fast because it might end at any moment, the job left undone.
He laughs, thinking how the Old Cobra would have relished the long pay-off.
Now, with the card in view, Lowe feels a peculiar unease. “I’ve been waiting 50 years for this,” he said. “And here it is. What do I do now?” He smiled thinly.
The workers continued scraping down the walls, planning to make the place new again. Across town, in the Five of Diamonds, mirrors reflect the familiar faces of men who had come in to forget.
Lowe, holding his ring to the light, seemed less certain. A trick had been finished, belatedly, and left him with no next act.
The Splintered City: A Guardian City novel – out now
