Free Coasting by Jonathan Raban

high walls and electronic eyes guarding its wrought-iron gates; a giant slice of Mexican adobe, with twin Mercedeses left askew in the driveway; a bungalow, monstrously swollen to the size of a Texan ranch, its bilious green floodlights beating the sunset at its own game. These excessive Brobdignagians towered over the surrounding countryside, making the mountainsshrink and the moorlands pucker into poorly kept suburban lawns.
    One by one, Stepmar ticked the giants off his list. “Tax exile … tax exile … tax exile … tax exile … I bet the buggers are bored out of their skulls.”
    “I thought you liked the Island.”
    “Oh, it’s all right. For the odd overnight, you know. But you wouldn’t catch me living here, hell’s bells. You been to L.A.?”
    “Yes.”
    “Great place. Fantastic. Beverly Wilshire. Sunset Boulevard. Hollywood Bowl. Rodeo Drive. I played a hole in L.A. back in June. It was a steal.”
    It was nearly dark when we reached Douglas, twenty minutes away from Port St. Mary, but a twenty minutes in which we appeared to have covered several hundred miles. The casino was not quite like the ones at Venice and Monte Carlo. Instead of champagne and anisette there were mugs of draft beer. Instead of a palm-court orchestra, there was a rather faded tape of Sandy MacPherson at the Blackpool Theatre Organ on the Muzak system. There were no contessas, no gigolos, no Saudi princelings, no fidgety Dostoevskian neurotics marking cards and working out their beat-the-bank combinations. There were some fat ladies in Bri-Nylon prints, with churning laughs like concrete mixers’; some bored traveling salesmen; a few holidaying dads, out on the lam for the night away from their boardinghouse-bound wives and kids. Much the most exciting thing about the roulette table was the way one’s money was changed into chips, in yet another vertiginous loop-back in time. For the Douglas casino was still using currency that had gone out of date twenty years ago: for twelve and a half pence you bought a chip marked 2/6d, for fifty pence you got one marked 10/—. These scratched and grubby wafers of old plastic had survived decimalization, inflation, deflation, revaluation, incomes policies, sterling crises, the one-dollar pound, Hayek, Keynes, Friedman and the Gnomes of Zurich. The Douglas casino was sticking to the Gold Standard.
    I bet on the numbers in my birthday and the hours and minutes of High Water, Liverpool, and lost £7/2/6d. Stepmar Securities Offshore (I.O.M.) Ltd. cannily staked out the table in blocks of four, and, judging by the height of his stack of chips, it looked as if he were well past the hundred-guinea mark. Scooping up his winnings, he went off to invest them at the blackjack table. I kept my place, drinking warm beer and listening to Sandy MacPherson playing something that should have been sung by Vera Lynn.
    We left at eleven, far into the small hours, Douglas-time. Stepmar’s face was shining like a ripe cheese. “It was straight down the fairway for me,” he said. “How did you do?”
    “I got into the rough,” I said.
    “Oh, well,” he said, “win some, lose some,” as if the phrase were his own mint coinage.
    On the outskirts of Douglas, a couple of hundred yards from its center, the car headlights picked out a flapping
Examiner
poster:
Fire Brigade in Peel Cat Rescue Drama
.
    With its miniature railways, its miniature roads, its miniature landscape and its miniature news, it was clear that the Isle of Man was not so much itself as a scale model of something bigger.
    Ten minutes later, after we’d passed a few mountains in the dark, Stepmar said hello to the fairies again, and I croaked “Hello, Fairies” too. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I thought, in Stepmar’s voice, as we scared hell out of the rabbits, racing through Toyland.
    The Nimrod aircraft was out of sight somewhere off the coast of Ireland when I heard the radio in the wheelhouse talking to