Life's Lottery (38 page)

And so on.

T
hese are not dreams. These things really happen.

But one misstep, and you lose everything.

* * *

You and Ro become explorers, of your own love. You stay in the house in Sutton Mallet, on the mattress surrounded by candles, and you make love. With infinite variety, you explore the possibilities of expressing feelings through flesh. You become parts of each other, always striving to make the whole function better as a manifestation of your shared pleasure. You grow together.

You don’t need food, clothes, jobs, educations.

The moment extends, for ever.

You don’t age or tire or have children or change your minds.

Your bodies are impressed with the rhythms of your movements. You tick over, sometimes exploding into frenzied writhings, sometimes lapping gently.

Eternally, you hear the song of the flesh.

* * *

You and Ro become pirates, really you do. You convert a luxury yacht into an assault craft and prey on those evil-doers who use international waters to avoid justice. You rescue slaves, defy drug-smugglers, persecute polluting industrialists, intercept fleeing deposed dictators. You fly the Jolly Roger. Rowena is, literally, your First Mate.

You accumulate, spend and bury treasure. You make love on tropical beaches at sundown. You duel with villains and always win. You evade the authorities with style.

Eternally, you hear the song of the sea.

* * *

You and Ro become explorers, of your love. You stay in the house in Sutton Mallet, and find your communion has become general, has opened up a channel to the divine. You worship through each other. You begin to understand, to map the hidden workings of the universe. You each become part of the whole, never surrendering your selves but opening up to the myriad others. You evolve together.

You don’t need.

The moment extends, for ever.

You age, tire, have children, change your minds.

Others join you, venerate you both for your insights, revere you for your humility. You refuse to be set upon pedestals and find joy in working the fields as much as in roaming the universe.

Eternally, you hear the song of the soul.

* * *

You and Ro go to university, get jobs, get married, have children, grow old and die.

At each stage, your life is perfect.

You are as content as parents as you are as lovers, as colleagues, as grandparents.

You are unobtrusive, so people don’t envy you. And yet you are loved beyond the circle of your immediate family.

Eternally, you hear the song of the world.

Go to 99.

Y
ou’re amazed Sean has got away with it. He has founded a financial empire, diversifying into paper companies notionally owned by Ro, almost entirely on monies ‘borrowed’ from the bank. He has approved loans – which is supposed to be your job – to Ro at extremely favourable terms. He’s paying the loans back and you work out he’ll leave the bank just as he gets square. He’ll have a clear profit, acquired through – in effect – gambling with the bank’s customers’ money. He’s not an idiot, though. If left alone, he’ll be out of it and nobody any the wiser. No one will care about a loan paid back promptly. He’s broken the law, but hasn’t actually stolen anything.

Then, on some flimsies, you find your signature. It’s not even a forgery. It’s just your name, written by someone else.

Not Sean. You know his handwriting. Ro? Maybe. Are you culpable? No, you’re a victim.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ Candy asks.

And you’re a chump. Sean has been laughing at you.

‘Could you get me some tea, dear?’

‘Yes, Keith.’

* * *

You look over
HOUSEKEEPING
again. There’s no doubt. Sean has been a party to fraud, and instituted a policy of embezzlement. Dad would have been heartbroken.

If you report Sean to the police, go to 114. If you put the file away and try to forget all about it, go to 125. If you go to Sean to talk about it, go to 135.

I
f you think about this, you won’t do it. You’re just playing with the idea. You don’t mean it.

You’re blowing it up.

You open the cabinet, expecting to see a gaping dark void beyond the mirror. Instead, there are shelves. The medicine half of the cabinet: sticking plasters, bandages, insect-bite ointment, aspirin,
Mum’s sleeping pills
, indigestion tablets, milk of magnesia, haemorrhoid ointment. The toiletries half: scented soap, shampoo,
Dad’s razor-blades
, fresh flannel, toothpaste, bubble bath.

How to do it?

You’re here. You will do it. No going back now.

Ro will be sorry. She’ll understand.

It’s the only way you can show how you really feel.

You aren’t a heartless bastard. You feel things deeply. Too deeply.

The bathroom, as well-lit as a lunatic’s high-security cell, is full of shadows. They press in around you.

They aren’t unfriendly. They are here to make it easy.

You reach into the cabinet.

If you take the pills, go to 90. If you take the razor-blade, go to 95.

T
he Scam
collapses in 1991, owing a lot of people – including you – a lot of money. There’s a great deal of acrimony in the collective. You find yourself in a tiny splinter faction, supporting Anne. She travels into nervous-breakdown country. No amount of restructuring or refinancing helps. Debt sinks the dream.

You work as a researcher for independent television, doing a stint as a fact-finder for
Survival Kit
, a street-level consumer programme. You still freelance for
The Guardian
and the
Statesman.
You self-publish pamphlets.

You write exposés of the privatisation programme, showing just how fat cats benefit from the selling-off of public utilities. Your thesis is that the Tory government enthusiastically embraces the Marxist notion of redistribution of wealth, but chooses to redistribute upwards from the broad base of the poor. The few become enormously rich at the expense of the many. You win an award for your investigative work and a token MP has to resign. Nevertheless, privatisation continues like a juggernaut.

You’re one of the first to refer in print to the Community Charge as a ‘poll tax’. It is still brought in. You refuse to pay yours. You go on marches. You take photographs at a big demo that turns into a riot as police and anarchist groups spoil for a fight in Trafalgar Square. You write about what it’s like being on the receiving end of a cavalry charge.

Margaret Thatcher falls from power but John Major wins the next election. All things considered, you hate him more. She was Medusa-cum-Hitler, he’s a bureaucrat with an independent nuclear deterrent.

After the death of John Smith and the rise of Tony Blair, you fume at the Labour Party’s abandonment of socialism. You hate Blair more than Major. After all, Major wasn’t supposed to be on your side. In a whirl of PR and glitz and spin-doctoring and focus groups and public-school hangers-on, New Labour conceals its acceptance of the baton of authoritarianism. The people are cut out of the system.

Democracy has obviously failed. You consider non-electoral activities.

Clare and her girlfriend Maisie get their indie record label together, trading on a resurgence of interest in the bubblegum pop they stayed faithful to all these years. Indirectly, they are responsible for the Spice Girls. You feel the need to join a travellers’ convoy.

Your group is harassed by the police, lackeys of the entrenched interests who want to deny you access to the common land of England. Rumours go round that the army will be sent after you. Remembering James, you do your best to organise a militia in the convoy. You work out an early-warning system alerting you to hostile approaches and try to get the more able men and women together as a defence force.

Your fellow travellers find this a bit heavy and don’t respond well to the imposition of discipline. A woman called Syreeta condemns you for reverting to patriarchalism and you are expelled.

You are a collective of one.

* * *

Why don’t others notice they are being ruled by Evil? Why don’t your fellow victims respond to your wake-up calls, your attempts to get a resistance together?

You can’t work in television any longer. There are too many controlling interests. In the end, the media is wholly owned by monsters like Rupert Murdoch or – your new
bête noire –
Derek Leech. Demon demagogues atop their monolithic corporations are systematically destroying oppositional access to air-time.

But new media develop. A lightweight camcorder allows you to take moving snapshots of the underside of the glorious new society. The Internet lets you get round octopus tentacles of oppression to tell some of the truth. You no longer care about your own voice, you just want to get through to people.

You still follow the links between top politicians – New Labour as much as Old Tory – and big business, observing the way the law of the land is restructured or ignored to the benefit of the powerful. You become increasingly concerned with cultural issues, with the way a thinking, feeling society is being polluted by an invasion of heartless, bread-and-circuses trash.

No publisher is willing to take
Keeping Tabs
, the book you write about the pernicious influence of Murdoch’s
Sun
and Leech’s
Comet.
The takeover is complete. The rebels have been rounded up, bought off, disappeared, seduced to the Dark Side of the Force or ridiculed out of the game. It is as if giant spiders from outer space have taken over the world, and now expect to be worshipped for sucking the life out of billions of souls.

You follow the way the media are spreading thin. More and more TV channels fill with less and less content. Soaps and quizzes and porn fill the frequencies, flooding out towards Alpha Centauri, an expanding sphere of mindwashing drivel filling the universe, a poisonous gift for other civilisations. TV and cable and satellite bosses talk about increased choice and the information revolution, but all they deliver is sex and violence and shopping.

Worst of all is the frenzy of greed, hopelessness and tack that surrounds the National Lottery. From the first you hear of it, you are the implacable enemy of this tax on hope, on stupidity, on futility. It’s an aesthetic and a moral atrocity, dangling the promise of unimaginable wealth before demoralised and desensitised masses. Tony Blair calls it ‘the People’s Lottery’, which makes you furious. It’s not something for the people, it’s something done to them. With deliberate malice and deep-seated evil intent.

You make a documentary about impoverished persistent Lottery players,
Losers.
No television station will take it. They claim problems with securing clips rights to
National Lottery Live
from the BBC, and cite the low technical standard of your interview footage. You know you’ve been silenced. You transcribe
Losers
and post it on your web page. You get a lot of hits but are mail-bombed with criticism. You recognise an orchestrated campaign.

The Lottery has become the engine of oppression. It sucks in huge amounts, which remain unaccounted-for, and distracts the slaves. It keeps the Tories in power far beyond their sell-by date, and makes sure the New Labour government is business as usual for the vampire filth who really run the country.

It poisons all it touches.

You make a follow-up documentary,
Winners.
Case histories of Lottery millionaires are, if anything, sadder than those of the losers. Ordinary people, sold a dream, learn how worthless money really is. You despair at the lack of imagination the winners show. Quite apart from broken families, death threats, descents into addiction or madness and the high suicide rate, the winners are blighted by a poverty of mind that has been deliberately inculcated in them and which no amount of money will ever relieve.

If you had a million pounds, you’d make it
work.
You’d go on the attack.

* * *

You’re arrested for harassment of big winners and the new law on stalking – rushed through parliament in Blair’s first month in office – means you get six months’ jail time. The zombie press refers to you as a ‘dangerous obsessive’ with an ‘unhealthy fixation’ on Lottery winners. You are tagged as ‘the Lottery Stalker’. You state your case clearly whenever you’re caught by the media, but are always edited to seem like Lee Harvey Oswald. Of course, he was innocent too.

Released from jail, you’re required to have counselling. You’re not disturbed. You calmly state your position. In group therapy, you’re abused by genuine neurotics. Mad people all play the Lottery, it turns out. Why aren’t you surprised?

You open files on the presenters, past and present. Anthea Turner, Dale Winton, Bob Monkhouse, Carol Smillie. Teeth agleam in studio lights, they are obviously part of the problem. They are the spangled attendants of the people-grinding machines, high priests and priestesses of the sacrifice. Each week, twice, the wheels spin, the numbers come up, and countless bloody, beating hearts are ripped out of chests, displayed with a smile for the cameras. And Mystic Meg. If she’s really clairvoyant, why can’t she see you coming?

One day, the black ball will come up.

* * *

On the Internet, you learn about home-made explosives. You compare and contrast the Oklahoma City bomb with the World Trade Center bomb. You go back over all your IRA coverage and dig as far back as the French Resistance. You’re amazed at how easy it is if you just work hard. A combination of DIY and cookery, and a little expensive quarry pilferage, should do the trick.

* * *

You always watch the Lottery on Saturday and the new mid-week draw on Wednesday. You have to keep tabs on the enemy.

Can’t anyone else see the spiders scuttling in the shadows of the studio? Every week, the celebrities who join in the draw add themselves to a list of saddo sell-outs. Some betrayals are worse than others.