Life's Lottery (25 page)

At your gym, you take up kick-boxing and repeatedly thrash junior executives and financial consultants. Once or twice, you put friendly opponents in hospital. You go through the formalities of apologising, but they’ll always remember you in the frenzy of the clinch. Strangely, this is good for you in your job, giving you an underground rep that helps you close deals and see off rivals. You still mug people, not for the money but for the night thrill. You are extremely cautious, always operating well off your home ground and selecting victims who are too drunk and disoriented to remember much.

You become a partner in your firm, but stockpile clients and connections against the day, in the late ’80s, when you found your own business. You launch very successfully, in the wake of the Big Bang of 1986, which deregulates the market, and buy a house in Esher and a flat in the newly developed London Docklands. It has its own gym, and you sometimes invite people back for ‘a bit of a punch-up’. The stock-market crash rocks the City, and you lose a considerable number of clients – many flee back to your old firm – haemorrhaging money as if from a cut throat. Despite your manoeuvres, your business goes under. No one tries to prop you up, underwrite you, take you over or buy you out. Everyone knows about your tendencies and too many remember specific instances. No one is inclined to give you any help.

With money tight, as you move from one temporary consultancy to the next, you take to serious mugging. You specialise in foreigners – Arabs or Japanese – and work around the West End hotels. You learn how to convert jewellery, traveller’s cheques, top-of-the-line watches and calculators into cash. But these efficient, brutal encounters don’t take up all the slack. You need to receive as well as give, so you hire women and men to provide the service. Often, you pay them off with merchandise lifted from your victims. Not many of these professionals will deal with you more than once, because you like to break the rules and fight back.

In the ’90s, without the house in Esher, but with the flat in Docklands, you get your business back together. It is absorbed into the Derek Leech Group of Companies, mostly because your flat – from which you operate – is in a block Leech, a multimedia tycoon, has bought and converted. You have learned some harsh lessons during your reversal – you have a police record for aggravated assault – but feel you are fitter than ever to survive the next century.

* * *

As an experiment, because you’re bored, you throttle a dominatrix to within a breath of dying. But she’s more cunning than you gave her credit for and shivs you with a sharpened nail-file, scraping your ribs. She’s a person. She counts. Strangely, this retroactively improves your memory of the encounter.

It’s 1994.

This is the first partner you’ve had who understands you, since… What was her name?

Victoria. 1976.

And did that happen?

* * *

There’s a girl in the office called Vickie. She must have been born in the year Victoria came through your bedroom window, and her colouring is different.

You find yourself thinking about her a lot.

You pull her file and find where she lives. She has a flat not far from yours.

One evening, you wait opposite her building. She gets back at about eleven, from the cinema perhaps, with a boyfriend. He stays over. You go home.

The next evening, she gets back at half-past six, straight from the office, alone. You ring her bell, and explain that it’s important. She buzzes you up.

You kill her.

* * *

Your assault conviction tells against you. Otherwise, the judge might have thought this was an office feud gone wrong.

You enter the new century – on 1 January 2000 or 2001, depending on how you read it – in prison.

By the time you are eligible for parole, tough new laws on violent offenders require that you be medicated to suppress your ‘urges’ and be tagged by the police. Your name, photo and Vickie’s mum’s shadow-faced account of your crime are broadcast nightly on Cloud 9 cable TV’s Crime Channel – owned by Derek Leech, of course – and you are frequently recognised and abused in the streets.

Several times, you are arrested and grilled simply because it has been assumed that you are on the point of exploding into violence against a woman or child.

You are found low-grade employment. In prison, you have learned computing skills. You do the Century 21 equivalent of addressing envelopes, organising electronic mail-outs for special offers.

Cloud 9’s Home Fantasy Channel offers all manner of legal experiential services. No-contact, debit-card exchanges. The fighters are computer-generated, morphing to suit your needs as you input specs on a touch-pad.

Because of your medication, your bouts with these virtual opponents are unsatisfactory. You go into debt, racking up minute after minute of line-time as you fail, in the terminology, to damage or be damaged.

You lose interest.

In the end, whatever you do, you do alone.

And so on.

B
etween Christmas and New Year, you cycle out to the Sutton Mallet turn-off. Mary’s car has been hauled away. You know if Laraine wrote off Dad’s Austin, he’d take a cat o’ nine tails to her. But Mary’s parents, according to her, are so grateful she (and you) isn’t permanently hurt that they’ve walked on eggshells about the subject. Her policeman father is apparently cooking evidence to put in his insurance claim.

The only person to ask whether either of you’d been drinking before getting in the Honda is James. He looks at you with a new respect since your supposed brush with death. He means the crash, of course. You haven’t talked to anyone about what happened afterwards.

Come to that, you don’t really know yourself.

At night, though, you often think, despite yourself, about the shadow-spiders. You don’t know it yet, but you’re thinking of me. Coming towards me. You’ve disturbed the extremities of a web, and feel the tiny vibrations.

Soon, you’ll be used to the idea of me. Of someone like me.

The road is empty, traffic fallen off to nothing in the lull between the holidays. You can see tyre marks grinding through the verge where the car went into the ditch. The Sutton Mallet signpost has been replaced by a temporary one. You doubt anyone has had cause to take the turn-off since the sign was knocked over.

The field on the other side of the ditch is unexceptional. Wetland stretches dully to the horizon. You can’t even see Glastonbury Tor – which is in the other direction – and this is a landscape bereft of magic.

The sky is blue-grey cloud. It might drizzle.

Nothing in the air suggests the shadow-spiders. No sense of the beyond, just a familiar Sunday afternoon-in-winter gloom. Turkey leftovers for dinner, family slumped in front of a Bond film on telly. Christmas isn’t what it used to be: you’re jaded, occasionally stirred to nostalgia for pirate ships and pre-dawn raids on Santa’s stockings.

You lean your bike against the sign and look around.

Though you’re cold, even after the exertion of cycling four miles, you’re not chilled. The shade has passed. This is not a frightening place.

And yet…

Mary arrives. She has walked.

‘Hello, you,’ she says.

You shrug.

Since the accident, you haven’t said much. There just isn’t much worth saying.

Mary slips close to you, hugs you, thin arms around your chest, frosted breath against your mouth. Non-committally, you hold her.

She breaks the embrace and kneels by the verge, looking at the tracks, like a detective searching for clues. She whistles.

‘We might be ghosts, Keith.’

She is wrapped up in a violent yellow-green cagoule. Sensible, not stylish.

‘For the rest of our lives, we’ll always know.’

‘Know what?’ you ask.

‘That we’ve been touched. That we’re special.’

You know what she means. Since Sutton Mallet, everything has seemed clear. You know what value to set upon everything you’ve done. You are changed and you will change.

You won’t stop running – probably, you can’t – but you will run with a purpose now.

Mary straightens up and crosses the road. She stands by the temporary sign, then starts walking down the turn-off. It’s paved but, by comparison with the smooth tarmac of the Achelzoy road, might as well be beaten earth. Muddy snail-tracks like wheel-ruts show where tractors pass. She stops and beckons. You follow her, wheeling your bike down the path. You catch up.

‘Not many left in Sutton Mallet,’ she comments. ‘There are houses empty, waiting to be claimed. Graham wanted to squat one back in the summer, but Victoria talked him out of it. She said it was a strange place.’

The hamlet is around you. It’s like any of a dozen others in Somerset. On the outside.

‘I know a house,’ Mary says, taking your arm. ‘With furniture and all. With a bed.’

You know what you are going to do. Have sex. You and Mary. You have thought of it, on and off, mostly on, for six years. This is not what you have ever imagined.

You remember the plan you have worked out. You still intend to get married at twenty-five, in seven years’ time, and have two children, Jonathan and Jennifer. Until now, you’ve always had a nebulous image of your wife, a cut-out woman with a ghostly smudge of a face.

You try imagining Mary’s face in the smudge. It doesn’t fit. Not with those scary eyes.

Mary’s cold hand is under your shirt at the back, fingers pressed to your spine.

You stop and kiss, hungry.

You are both ghosts. You need a house to haunt.

The Sutton Mallet lane narrows. The hedgerows are taller. Shade closes in, insinuating itself around you. Overhead, the sky is bone-white now.

You are cold but try to find warmth, pressing yourself against Mary. She must feel your penis, hot and hard. Should you slip your hands into her clothes?

‘Come on,’ she says, leading you towards a house.

* * *

Afterwards, you lie in bed with Mary, thinking that you don’t feel much different. Springs rake your back through a rotted mattress. You are huddled together under a makeshift quilt of clothes.

You see the red marks on Mary’s legs. The weals she got clambering out of the car.

You had thought this moment might be when you were finally able to ease off, to slow down. Maybe this was when you could stop running?

Your heart beats faster now than when you were having sex. Neither of you disgraced yourself, as far as you know, and the mechanics of the condom were dealt with, but the act itself was less important than what it meant.

Keith and Mary, Mary and Keith.

You were in this together.

In what?

This.

A bed in Sutton Mallet.

The bedroom, at first look, might be in a living house. The wallpaper peels only a little and the dusty windows aren’t broken. An empty light-socket dangles overhead, centrepiece of a canopy of cobweb.

What made the people who lived here leave?

They left behind more than just furniture. Plates and cutlery are strewn on the kitchen floor. On each of the stairs is placed a small household object – a plastic comb, a picture frame, a toothbrush. What makes a person leave behind their toothbrush when they move out? The arrangement on the stairs is almost ritualistic.

You think you know what Victoria meant about strange.

Mary isn’t asleep, though you expected her to nod off. Mary is thinking unreadable thoughts, her skull two skin-layers away from your sternum.

You had believed, without ever articulating the belief, that sex triggered a latent telepathic ability. That it took you completely out of yourself and into someone else, and opened you to them.

But Mary is as much a stranger now as when you first saw her back in Ash Grove Primary.

While you were making love, you were reminded of Mary’s monster. You thought you glimpsed it behind her eyes as she bit her lips, hissing impatience.

You hold her breast – because you can, without her hitting you – and try not to notice the shadows growing in the room. These are ordinary shadows.

You are not on the starting-blocks of another race in the dark.

There is blood on the mattress, sticky under your thighs. You were right about Mary. This was her first time. How had she known what to do?

How had you known what to do?

Did you both do it properly?

You think so.

* * *

‘Do you feel alive now?’ you ask.

Mary says nothing.

‘We’re not ghosts.’

It is dark and you’re both dressed. You know you should get home. Since the night of the accident, your parents have fussed about what you do, wanting to have a minute-by-minute run-down of your schedule.

The house, you notice now your sweat has cooled on your skin, is like a fridge, holding in the winter cold. Your breath clouds in the gloom.

‘That night,’ you say. ‘There was something.’

‘Yes. In the dark. Of course.’

‘You
save
it?’

It’s too dark now to see her face. You can’t judge her expression.

She shakes her head. ‘It weren’t something you see.’

‘Then how do you know it was there?’ you ask.

‘How you know,’ she replies.

You could not have been mistaken but you half hoped she would dispel your certainty, argue that it had all been the drink, the panic, the accident, the hormones, the dark, the hurt.

‘Sutton Mallet is special,’ she says. ‘Victoria was right.’

It’s special now, you think.

But what you say is ‘It’s where the shadows start.’

She understands what you mean.

You take her hand – you’ve just fucked, but you’ve never really held hands – and hold tight.

‘We’ll keep running,’ you say, not having to explain. ‘Always, we have to run. Now, we run together. But do we run into the shadows, or out of?’

If out of, go to 70. If into, go to 80.

‘
I
doubt it,’ you say. ‘It’d be a pretty bloody stupid thing to do.’

Vanda leans against the door-jamb. She wraps her dressing-gown tight.