‘OK.’

‘Promise me.’

I got a job at the town hall, or rather in the parks and gardens department, where I worked with Richard Regnier. We drove all around town in a clapped-­out van, pruning trees, clearing weeds from flowerbeds or pulling them out of the gaps between paving stones. I didn’t know Regnier well; we’d crossed paths here and there, and I’d seen him a couple of times in the Golden Moon. I remember him setting aside his rake in the town park one day, pulling down his trousers and squatting under a golden willow. ‘Out of the earth, the man,’ he said, giving me a serious look. ‘Out of the man, the earth.’ I think he was a bit mad.

To begin with it was hard. My whole body ached. The pain started in my back; it radiated out over my hips, down to my knees, and up over my shoulders and arms, right to the tips of my fingers. There were open blisters on my hands, and the dirt seemed to eat its way into every pore. It grew easier with time; I got used to the hard labour, and there were even days in spring and late summer when I liked it.

One evening, Regnier insisted on inviting me for a beer. I hadn’t been to the Moon for ages, and when we walked in, in our filthy overalls, I was curious to see whether the same men were still sitting there, or whether some of them, at least, had put it behind them. They were all still there; that is, they looked like the same men, sitting in their seats and staring into their glasses.

But something was different. It was the light. The whole room was lit up. It moved, pulsed, darted across a hunched back, a soot-­blackened forehead, trembled red and green and yellow in a half-­empty beer glass. The light was coming from a slot machine that stood in the corner between the bar and the wall. It was as tall as a man and about a metre wide, and the front was studded with little flickering, blinking lights. I didn’t know it back then, but it was just an old-­fashioned Lucky Deal, one of the first models, a screen, no handle, four rows and a rainbow sun in the middle.

We sat at the counter and ordered beers. We were tired and didn’t have much to say to each other. The colours from the little lights twinkled in my beer. The dots and blobs spun and danced in the glass like a shoal of tiny colourful fish.

I walked over to the corner. The Lucky Deal chuckled. I put my hand on its side. The wood was warm; it vibrated beneath my fingers. For a moment I saw my face reflected in the screen, pale and shadowy, as if underwater. I put a couple of coins in the slot and pressed the button. Instantly the reels were set in motion; the symbols raced off. Then, one after another, with a soft sound, they stopped: the melon, the seven, the bell, the coin.