Life's Lottery (32 page)

Then he comes round to business: the defaulted payments, the overdraft, the interest, the mushrooming debt.

For a long time, you still play the promise game.

You both know the Discount Development is kaput. All the money is gone, the Lord knows where. Maybe it’s been sucked into a black hole. Or maybe Hackwill has planned an out-of-town shopping centre at Sutton Mallet.

It’ll never come right.

* * *

You come out of your house. It’s mid-afternoon and other husbands in the street are at work, in offices, on InterCity trains, using mobile phones, making money. Their wives are picking up the kids from school, or on shopping trips to Bristol or London.

People who live in your street would never have shopped at the Discount Development.

There is no one around. Still, you hold your pink-gloved hand under your coat, like Napoleon. Or the mutated scientist in the old version of
The Fly.

With the package – which rattles slightly – in your right hand, you stride down to the pillar-box on the corner. It stands red and righteous on a triangular patch of green where there’s a swing for the kids and a bench for the old folks. Neither is used much.

Your hand still hurts. But you’ve learned to live with the hurt. Just as you’ve learned to live with the shade.

The miracle is that you put this off for so long.

All through the 1980s and into the ’90s, you accumulated things to protect you. The degree, the start capital, the inside information, the contacts. Rowena, the kids, the first house, the business, the second house, the position, the plans, the cars. The fridge–freezer, the rowing-machine, the wrought-iron pan-stand, the home computer, the coffee table, the holidays in Mustique. This was all a wall, thrown up between you and the shade, between you and Sutton Mallet.

There are vast, malign, spidery forces in the world.

And you are their focus. Their weight has been gathering, ever since you first trespassed on their territory, gradually accumulating, forcing you into your protected corner, pressing you into the hole.

You stand at the pillar-box.

This is your supplication. You have sacrificed. You are all you have left to give up. Rowena and the kids are gone. The business is gone. You don’t, in any real sense, own the house or anything else.

If this doesn’t work, if the shadow-spiders – and their representative Sean – are not appeased, you will have to give up more of yourself.

How much more can you slice away with your kindling-chopper before you are no longer capable of chopping?

There are deep weals in your kitchen table where the blade bit.

You raise the parcel to the slit. It won’t fit. The box is a good inch too wide to jam through. You try it sideways, but that’s worse.

The world stops.

* * *

Then rescue comes. Postman Pat, whistling merrily like a hold-over from those never-were days of before-the-deluge, coming to empty the box.

‘I’ll take that for you, sir,’ she says.

The uniformed saviour is a Postperson Patricia, blond hair pinned up under her cap.

She opens her sack and you drop the package in, relieved of its burden.

At last, the offering is made.

‘You’re Keith Marion, aren’t you?’ the postwoman says. ‘We were at school together.’

You focus on the woman’s face. She smiles, eyes twinkling like frost at sunrise.

It’s Mary Yatman.

‘You’ve changed,’ she says.

Should the joke become apparent now? Should you understand how you’ve got here? Were there points at which you could have changed things? Could this have been put off indefinitely? Could you have kept all the balls in the air, beating off the shadows with your successes?

‘Didn’t you marry Rowena Thingy?’

You shrug.

Mary seems delighted. You wonder if she is pretending. She has always been part of this. You’ve never seen her on this route before.

‘You know, Keith,’ she says, ‘at college, I really used to fancy you.’

She kisses you on the cheek, and walks away.

You sit by the pillar-box and watch her go.

It is after dark now. The green is turquoised by the bright streetlamp. Residents petitioned for it, after a child in another part of town was attacked on another, more meagre green. Something is wrong with the lamp, which always flickers as if it were a flame rather than a filament.

Mary is gone, into the shade. Her whistling – ‘Nellie the Elephant’, still – fades into the night sound. The sacrifice is made. For you, it is over.

There is a great fizzing noise and the light goes away.

And so on.

W
hat made the people who lived here leave?

They left behind more than just furniture. 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 house? The arrangement on the stairs is almost ritualistic.

You think Victoria meant what she told Graham. Sutton Mallet is strange.

That sound is more unearthly the nearer you get to the top of the stairs. And there’s a glow, like luminous fungus or Halloween paint.

You stand on the landing.

‘Kei-ei-eith,’ a voice trills.

A door hangs ajar. Flickering light outlines it. The call came from beyond it.

You have an impulse to turn and run, to dash downstairs, to get out of the house.

In which case, go to 62.

* * *

But you don’t. You couldn’t. You have to know what’s beyond the door. What comes next.

‘Kei-ei-ei-ei-eith.’

Your name is repeated.

It’s a girl’s voice. But it’s not Victoria’s.

You stand outside the door, your fingertips out, touching the wood. The tiniest push, and you will see. You will be able to go into the room.

You look to either side.

At the end of the landing, Victoria stands, face white. Is she sad or eager?

You don’t ask her what’s happening. It’s too late for that.

She nods.

You push the door.

* * *

The room is dotted with candles. Hundreds of them, all burning like flammable stalagmites, dribbling wax on to floorboards or dusty furniture. They are arranged in a vast mandala-like circle around a mattress.

A naked girl lies on the mattress. It is her voice you have heard. Her body glows with candlelight, curves burnished and almost reflective. She radiates heat.

She half sits, and beckons with her arms and fingers.

It is Rowena.

She is sober now, wantonness a choice not an impulse. She smiles, aware of the silliness of this set-up but also of its beauty, its innocence.

The room is warm. There’s a fireplace. Some of the candles float in saucers, firelight reflected in ripples.

You join Rowena on the mattress. She helps you out of your clothes. They seem to fall away without struggle.

You kiss.

And it’s magical.

* * *

After a very long time, after extensive and varied love-making, the candles begin to wink out, one by one. The fire shrinks to embers, filling the room with a dull red glow.

You and Ro nestle.

This was worth waiting for.

‘It took for ever to light all the candles,’ Ro says.

You don’t want to know. The set-up is irrelevant. You want the effect. The magic.

‘But you’re worth the effort,’ she says, hugging you.

The dawn comes up, filtering gloom-light into the room. The cold creeps back, making you huddle beneath the quilt.

The real world returns.

If you wish hard, work at it unceasingly, make untold sacrifices and ignore the serpents, you can have Sutton Mallet for ever; if you have the strength and the love for that – and you must be certain you have, for failing here leads to unparalleled misery – go to 82. If you accept that imperfection is the lot of all, but feel you can make a life for yourself in which the memory of Sutton Mallet is always a power source for a vein of magic, go to 93. But if you feel the lesson you have learned tonight is about sex rather than love, and wonder if it can be applied with other women, go to 104.

Y
ou are a bastard. You admit it.

You lie on the gravel path, arms and legs outstretched, eyes open wide. You need this.

Mary kicks you in the side. It hurts, but not as much. You don’t cry out. You’re almost calm.

She kicks you again.

‘No.’ A tiny voice. ‘Stop.’

Mary kicks you again. You cough up more vomit. You taste blood in your mouth.

‘Roger,’ says Rowena, ‘stop her.’

Mary stands back.

You try to sit up, but can’t.

Roger comes over, hands fists. He kneels down and punches you in the chest.

Mary stops him, grabbing his upper arms and wrestling him away from you.

You hurt too much to follow this.

Mary pulls Roger out of the light. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve. You work yourself up on your elbows. The torch, put on the ground, is still shining in your face. It makes a wedge of the grass seem very green.

Gentle hands help you.

You look up at Ro’s face. She has tear-tracks, and needs to blow her nose. You have lost the place completely. Ro cradles you, and you go limp.

In the darkness, Roger spits disgust. He frees himself from Mary and looks back at you, eyes bright with unfathomable hatred. Mary, turned away from you, holds a hand out, warding Roger off.

This was all Roger’s fault. He turns and stalks off, Zorro cloak swishing.

Again, Ro kisses you. This time, you think, she means it. Your jaw hurts too much for you to kiss back. Aches have set in up and down your ribs.

You raise a hand and put it on Ro’s back, feeling the nubs of her vertebrae through her jumper. She smiles at you and you do your best to smile back.

‘Sorry,’ she whispers.

And so on.

F
riday, 13 February 1998. You wait for Mary to come back. It’s her turn to go into town and get food for the weekend. Your DSS payment ran out earlier in the week, and she will have to score some money from her dad, the sergeant, to get into Sainsbury’s.

The house is cold, damp. It’s never been warm. You sit upstairs in the bedroom, the only habitable room in the place, swaddled in blankets, watching children’s television with the sound turned off. You don’t care about the fucking Teletubbies, but the telly is the only light-giving gadget in the room that works. You never got round to finding someone to do the wiring for the regular lights. The only power point you have is used by several major appliances but not the free-standing lamp Gully scrounged from a skip before Christmas. The one time you tried to plug it in, you blew the last fuse and lived without power for days.

You’ve had the beginnings of a cold since the autumn and sniffle constantly, hawking and swallowing phlegm. Scabby patches have grown around your nostrils and lips. Your feel the cold most of all in your eyes, as if two ice bullets were jammed into your skull. The chill radiates into your head, freezing your brain. You imagine it like a grey cauliflower, sparkling in its refrigerated state, electrical impulses dying inside.

You’re wearing every outer garment you possess and most of your underclothes. Though you’ve been camping out in Sutton Mallet for years, people who see you on your trips into Sedgwater assume you’re homeless.

They may be right. This house is not what anyone could think of as a home.

You hear the footsteps coming up.

In your mind, you mark off the stairs by remembering the long-gone objects – plastic comb, picture frame, toothbrush – once placed on each step. You and Mary still use that comb, whenever you remember.

In the dark beyond the coloured blobs of the screen, Mary stands. Two shopping-bags hang from her grip like white plastic scrotums.

‘It be nearly dark outside,’ she says. ‘Get up you lazy tosser. There’m work to be done.’

‘It’s dark inside,’ you say.

Mary drops one bag and throws the other at you. Potatoes thump against your chest and spill in your lap. You look at them and imagine grenades with the pins out.

You could do with the warmth of a good explosion.

‘Youm should have got thic fire going,’ she says.

‘Meant to.’

‘Meaning ain’t enough.’

‘Fuck right off will you, Mare.’

She sneers and lays a hand on your brow. ‘Poor lover, had a hard day?’

‘Too right.’

What did you do this morning? You can’t remember. You think you went outside, at least for a while. Come to that, what did you do earlier this afternoon? You’ve been wrapped up here for a while, but how long? Did you eat anything for lunch? Fucked if you can remember. You’d have to look in the kitchen, for evidence of food tampered with, more unwashed plates and cutlery. Hunger, like cold, has been with you so long that individual meals don’t matter.

‘What day is it?’ you ask.

Mary shrugs.

You focus on the screen. ‘It’s Friday,’ you say, realising. ‘It’s five o’clock. It’s time for –’

‘
Crackerjack
,’ Mary completes.

When did they take
Crackerjack
off? When did they bring in all these spastic juvenile presenters? Children’s telly used to be full of grown-ups.

‘It’ll be a long weekend,’ you say.

‘Did you get me a valentine?’ Mary asks.

‘What?’

‘A valentine. For Sunday.’

‘Did you get me one?’

‘No.’

‘Then why should I get you one?’

‘Didn’t say you should. Asked if you had.’

‘Cards cost money.’

‘Youm could have made one. We could still. Make cards. For each other.’ Mary is speaking in short sentences, with enthusiastic breaths between, hopping from side to side, hanging her head this way and that.

You know the symptoms.

‘Cardboard and paper. Scissors and Sellotape. Cellophane and silver paper. Magic Markers.’

Mary likes lists.

‘Alphabetical,’ you say. A keyword.

Mary stops jerking like a
Thunderbirds
puppet throwing a fit, and freezes in stone, thinking.