Life's Lottery (15 page)

Y
ou kiss Marie-Laure. She doesn’t seem that interested. But you get together anyway.

You get a flat over a chip shop. The DHSS reckons you are cohabiting, which you suppose you are, and cut your benefit. It’s Vanda’s job to write and tell you about it. Signing the letter, she still puts a tiny heart over the ‘i’ in ‘Pritchard’. Marie-Laure’s mum gives her odd wedges of cash. You take your washing home to use your mum’s machine.

You occasionally do bits of work without declaring income. Stock-taking at the jam factory. Picking up rubbish after the Glastonbury Festival.

Years pass. Margaret Thatcher is elected prime minister. Victoria goes to university, gets a degree in history, and comes back again. Laraine gets married to a bloke called Fred, then divorces. James joins the army. Dad dies. Britain counter-invades the Falklands.

The system changes and you get separate giros for housing benefit and supplementary benefit. You have to have an annual interview with a bored bureaucrat – Rowena Cunningham, whom you remember from school – who knows as well as you that you have no chance of employment.

When you first signed on, you were a school-leaver. Now, you’re long-term unemployed. You don’t get hassled so much because lots of other people are out of work. In waiting-rooms, you see older men, unemployed since the lay-offs at the Synth, nervous and at sea, unsure how to cope with the boredom and despair. You feel sorry for them.

Your mum remarries, to a younger guy, Phil Parslowe.

Marie-Laure gets pregnant. You work out that the child benefit will come in handy. You have two kids, Josh and Jonquil.

It takes you a few moments to remember what year it is when filling in the date on benefit forms. With each year, the problem gets worse.

* * *

You’ve lived through 1984. Still, you can’t believe it’s the 1980s.

Vince comes round a lot. You still talk with him about comics but are out of date: he’s high on Alan Moore and Frank Miller Jr, while you stick with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. There’s a new Robin, which strikes you as sacrilege. And Doctor Who is a curly-haired pillock in a parti-coloured coat.

You and Vince spend quite a bit of time remembering out loud the names of all the Tracy Brothers or the catch-phrases from
Hector’s House
and
Play School
. Marie-Laure always finds something else to do when you’re going ‘through the round window’.

You never did quite grow a beard, just as Marie-Laure never quite filled out a bra. You eat too many chips and get a bit of a gut. Marie-Laure takes the kids and leaves but comes back after a week. She works part-time in the jam factory. They’ve laid off full-time, long-standing staff to take on less-qualified people they don’t have to pay as much. It’s all very well, but when Marie-Laure earns anything, the DSS – reorganised and rechristened – cuts your giro back to almost nothing. With the kids, you can’t deny that you’re cohabiting.

You smoke dope less, though Graham and Victoria – who live in a squat in Sutton Mallet – still deal in a small way. You’ve had a headache for years, throbbing slightly, not bad enough to be serious, never clearing up entirely.

It’s
ten years
since you left school.

Whenever anyone tells you the ’80s are a boom time for the country and that you should be a part of it, you snap, ‘Not in this life.’

When you talk with Vince, you discuss either what’s happening right now this week – usually hassles with benefit – or minutiae of the years before 1976. You take to running through your old school register and wondering what has happened to everybody you knew.

A lot of them are in the same boat as you. It’s just that you climbed on the scrapheap while they tried to get along in the world of work and were thrown there.

The early ’70s – which were, of course, the years of the oil crisis, the three-day week, power cuts, strikes, the Ulster troubles, Watergate, flared trousers and the mullet haircut – become an Edenic refuge. Recounting in detail the differences between a Mivvi and a Sky Ray lolly or wondering when blue bags of salt were phased out of crisp packets, you almost transport yourself back in time.

It becomes a project, a game, a pastime.

Vince prompts you, because your memory is more detailed. If you close your eyes and clear your mind, you can banish the writhing black spiders of the present by furnishing a three-dimensional dayglo picture of the world as it was. Pop music you hated at the time – Mud, the Bay City Rollers, the Osmonds – becomes evocative, and Vince haunts jumble sales for scratched albums. He has a complete set of the
Top of the Pops
compilations of chart hit cover versions, with some smiling bird in a dolly mixture dress on the sleeves. You retrieve boxes of stuff from Mum’s attic. They turn out to be treasure chests of
Biggies
books, Aurora glow-in-the-dark monster models, Dinky toys (
Goldfinger
Aston-Martin with ejector-seat figure missing), sweet cigarette cards (when did they stop making sweet cigarettes?), board games (Campaign, with Napoleon-hatted General pieces) and comics (Vince’s eyes water). For a moment, you feel like a pirate, unearthing long-lost booty.

* * *

You’re on your knees, scratching at the hard earth of a flower-bed, searching for a tin of marbles. You’re wearing a cardboard eyepatch and a pirate hat with a silvery skull-headed pin and a plastic plume.

* * *

Then you’re back in the flat over the chip shop, listening as Vince tells you how much your April 1969
Streak
ZC comic is worth, since it marks the first appearance of now-popular arch-enemy Dead Thing.

It was real. You were back there, you were
home.

* * *

The next weekend, when Marie-Laure has taken the kids to see her mum in the hope of gouging a hand-out from the old woman, you repeat the experiment under controlled circumstances.

When you shut your eyes, it is 1990.

In the dark of your head, red-eyed spiders crawl.

You open your eyes, heart pounding. You’re lying on your bed, looking at the cracked ceiling. Half your life has come and gone since you left school. You are thirty years old. You have done nothing.

You shut your eyes again, determined. You furnish the dark, imagining your room in Mum and Dad’s house. Your room as it was when you were thirteen.

* * *

Maths homework. You hate it. You want to get it over with so you can watch
Top of the Pops.
A spider crawls on your hand.

* * *

You open your eyes.

It was real. You were there.

Next time, you stay longer, ignoring the spiders. You finish the homework and go downstairs. James and Laraine are in the television room, young again.

Mum washes up in the kitchen. A
Telegraph
is folded up, and you see your Dad.

Alive.

A rush of something makes your eyes water.

Is it love? Or regret?

‘What’s up, Keith?’

* * *

Dad talked to you. You were there.

You made it back. You can go home again. You can, you can, you can.

But how do you want it to be? When did things change? From where do you want to start? And where do you want to end up?

* * *

Excited, you make Nescafé and try to think. You’re cramped in the flat’s tiny kitchen. Josh’s scrawled ‘drawings’ are stuck to the fridge. The place smells of fried food. There’s washing-up in the sink. Marie-Laure will nag you about that when she gets back.

Where you were was before Marie-Laure, before the kids. If you go back again, they might not be part of your life. The kids might not be born.

This is what you have. You might complain about the government and the DSS, but you are here by choice. Even in a socialist utopia, you’d be an unemployable layabout who can’t support his kids.

It’s been eating you bit by bit for years.

But do you really want to leave?

Really?

If you just want things to be better now, go to 87. If you want things back the way they were, go to 89.

Y
ou’re trying to have a conversation with Gully Eastment and his girlfriend, Bronagh Carey. Surprisingly, in the all-bets-off chaos of Rag Day, they seem the most sensible folk around. You and Gully are the only people in your year at college who have been asked by the principal to sit Oxford entrance exams. You’ve gone along with it, with your parents’ support, but Gully is trying to talk you out of it.

‘Remember Marling’s, Keith? It’ll be worse. A single-sex college is like a jail.’

Outside, in an alley, Rowena is being sick. For twenty minutes, she’s been puking. Mary keeps coming back with reports. She displays sisterhood with the sick girl, though Rowena was never a special friend. Penny Gaye, Michael’s girlfriend, is also helping.

You drink steadily, radiating a nothing-to-do-with-me-mate vibe.

Rowena’s heaves are amazingly loud.

‘Always know your limit,’ you say, sipping another half of cider.

‘Too fuckin’ true,’ says Gully.

You are sophisticates, far removed from the struggling fools all around. You need Gully and he needs you: neither of you has anyone else to pace himself against. If either were to slacken off, the other might also stumble.

Maybe you’ll end up at the same university?

Mickey Yeo makes an announcement: ‘Dave Tamlyn’s chunder-up record has fallen.’

The pub cheers.

A shadow falls over the table. You look up. Victoria stands there, half-full pint glass huge in her delicate hand.

‘Hi, Vickie,’ you say.

Outside, Rowena pukes again. She vomits with an animal cry. An embarrassment to herself and everyone else. You’re well shot of her.

‘That doesn’t bother you at all, does it?’

You freeze half-way into a shrug and a smile.

Cold beer hits you in the face, dashed into your eyes, soaking your collar, seeping down your chest. You splutter through a noseful of liquid.

You can still hear Rowena.

You want to protest. It really has nothing to do with you. When you come down to it, it’s Roger’s fault.

Victoria smashes the glass against the side of your head.

The pain is sharp and wet. Gully and Bronagh get out of the way. You feel a warm gush as blood pours down the side of your face. You have splinters in your forehead and cheek.

Victoria has no right. You have stood up.

The bitch glassed you. She could have blinded or killed you. She has crossed a line. She must take the consequences.

Your hands are fists.

There are places you can go from which you can never come back. Hitting a girl,
any
girl, is one of them.

‘You’re pathetic, Keith,’ Victoria says.

If you hit Victoria, go to 39. If you try to laugh it off and sit down, go to 43.

Y
ou and Vanda get a flat together in town, above a launderette – which is handy – and, because she has to declare you’re cohabiting, your benefit is cut. She gives you pocket money and within a week of your moving in together starts gently to suggest you get a job. Her income supports your idleness and she feels entitled.

Since Vanda is a tease rather than a nag, you allow yourself to be reshaped a little. You admit you were in a rut. You start shaving and get a proper haircut. Vanda buys you shirts and ties. She says you look better when you’re smart.

The amazing thing about living together, for you, is the sex. Every evening and all the weekend you spend in the big bed in the flat. You’ve never made love in a double bed before. It’s a major improvement.

Vanda is everything Marie-Laure wasn’t. Curvy rather than skinny, open rather than shut, predictable rather than neurotic. She doesn’t have mood swings. She doesn’t contradict herself. She never hits you with ashtrays.

She says she loves you. In bed, she proves it. She says she enjoys giving fellatio. You suppose you love her. You certainly say so.

* * *

Though they weren’t sure at first, Mum and Dad come to like Vanda. She can be trusted to carry out their instructions when it comes to you.

Often you overhear your dad’s distinctive ‘Tell him that…’ when Vanda is talking with them on the phone. She then relays the orders of the day.

An opening comes up at the bank.

You still don’t want to be a clerk, but Vanda is one so you can’t go on about that. Despite the three years of nothing in your life, you’ll earn more than she does now the first week you turn up. And three years is a long time to do nothing, to be marking time.

It seems to make sense.

Vanda takes an afternoon off work and joins forces with your mum to help you buy two suits. For the bank. You revolt deep down at the thought of embracing prat-dom.

The bank’s policy is theoretically against close relatives working together in a branch but your father has such a straight reputation that he has a special dispensation. And he will not be your direct boss. Sean Rye is still at the bank, as assistant loans adviser. You’ll be ‘under’ him.

Vanda is proud of you in your suit.

It is 1979. Margaret Thatcher is prime minister. It’s a new era. You allow yourself to be gentled into the life, to be convinced.

It’s not as bad as you thought it would be. The work is easy. Dad arranges that you have two afternoons off a week to take catch-up courses at the college. If you pass exams at the end of the year, you could be promoted within the bank.

You buckle up and knuckle down.

* * *

Walking home through town one evening, after your first few weeks in the job, you are passing Brink’s Café. Inside, Marie-Laure is having a heated argument with the manager. She pauses in her tirade, sees you through the window, does a goggle-eyed double-take, opens the door and cadges a pound off you to pay for a broken cup.

‘Don’t go away,’ she says.

She has red and grey streaks in her tangle of hair. She’s even more jittery than you remember, looking everywhere at once like a paranoid owl, hands always on the move.

She comes back out and looks at you.