Life's Lottery (41 page)

You raise the hammer. Vanda flicks a switch.

Go to 103.

T
his is going to make a mess.

You don’t take the blade out of the razor Dad is using. You take a fresh pack, one of those little plastic dispensers.

It’s best if you’re in the bath. The warm water will sweep you away without pain.

You put the plug in and let the taps run. Steam covers the windows and the mirror. You are no longer looking at yourself.

You take off your clothes, letting them fall where they may, and sit in the bath. It’s too hot, but you let it pass. Your body goes lobster red.

You are supposed to punish yourself, after all.

You slide a blade out of the dispenser and cut your fingers getting the paper off the shiny sliver of sharpness. Drops of blood splash into the bathwater and disperse in red threads.

Where to cut?

If you had an old-fashioned Sweeney Todd straight razor, you suppose you’d have a chance of opening your throat. That would be the best thing: sure and certain and swift.

But the Wilkinson’s Sword blade is barely two inches long and thinner than a wafer-thin mint. You couldn’t even find your femoral artery – it’s in your thigh somewhere – to puncture it. So, it’s the wrists then.

Both of them?

You’ll have to do one and see if you’re in any state to finish the job.

You look at your left wrist. You see the blue line of the vein. Easy. Just slice across it.

You hope Ro won’t be too upset. This isn’t really about her. It’s about you.

Keith, this is
your
suicide.

The thin sliver is pressed between your right thumb and forefinger. It is sticky with blood from your minor cuts.

You look at your vein. Do you draw a line across you wrist? Or do you cut in at the wrist and carve down, following the vein?

Across? Or down?

If across, go to 97. If down, go to 98.

T
he hardest part is remembering the name. You lie awake beside Rowena after she has silently cried herself to sleep, remembering his face, his voice, his habits. He was the neat boy. Not inspired, but neat. Full marks for anything that involved copying out presentably. Which was most things. Probably still is.

Mickey Yeo, who wrote and drew comic books for a while, and Norman Pritchard, who went to jail when they caught him in the front seat of a car with a hundred car keys on a chain, still bob about vividly in your recollection. You remember Norman firing the branch at Mickey, and Mickey hamming up his

death

Liberty Valance act.

Who was the boy who gave you your first cigarette? The one you sucked on, trying to understand the appeal. You must have smoked a dozen fags over two or three years before you learned how to take the smoke into your lungs

that’s the killer

but it was that first one that started it.

Without Neat Boy, you’d be alive.

Finally, you decide to do it by elimination. You can still remember the class register. You heard it every day for years. Like the Lord’s Prayer, it’s written into your memory for ever.

Adlard, Allen, Banner…

Adlard, Stephen. He was the first in the register. That’s what marked him out. First alphabetically, he had to be first in presentation.

You don’t know what happened to him. Neat boys don’t do memorable things, not like Mickey or Norman. Neat boys don’t go to Beverly Hills or Strangeways.

Your chest is like concrete, anchoring you to the bed. You are tired of the pain, the constant tiny tearing of Velcro fishhooks inside you.

Stephen Adlard.

He’s in the local telephone book. He lives about three miles away, at a nondescript address, 96 Raleigh Road.

You have his number. Should you call? What would you say? What are you going to say?

You remember his sardonic posture, offering

death

the Players packet, daring you to take your first drag, to begin your protracted assisted suicide. You remember Adlard’s head cocked to one side, not egging you on, knowing you had no choice. If you hesitated you’d be the prig, the softie, the good boy. And he’d be hard like Mickey and Norman. He’d be with them, attracting the girls’ attention. Bobby Moore said smoking was a mug’s game, but you had no choice, you had to be a mug or an outcast. You’d be the bald coon – yes, you called black people coons when you were thirteen, you did, you did – in the shadows, whose name nobody could remember. Adlard knew what he was doing when he

began murdering you

made cigarettes available to you.

It was 1973. You were kids; nothing counted yet. Was Ro one of the girls who’d just walked past? No, that would have been too neat. But she was at the Girls’ Grammar then. You might even have seen her. Within a year, at Ash Grove, you’d be sitting behind her in French, wondering about her as you wondered about all the girls, not knowing, as you wouldn’t know for years, that she’d become your wife, the mother of your children.

Back then, Jon and Jenny weren’t.

as you won’t be

That first cigarette couldn’t be the most important decision of your life. No, that was whether to ask Rowena or Victoria to the Rag Day party. Or whether to go to university after college or take the job your dad arranged at the bank. Or what to call the kids.

But you can remember it. Like you can remember your first kiss. God, Vanda Pritchard, Norman’s twin sister. Or the first time you had sex. With Rowena who, apart from Jacqui Edwardes that one time at college when you’d had an argument with Ro, is the only woman you’ve ever slept with

or ever will

and now you wonder if you should have tried harder, when desire was still important to you, to make love with more girls, women.

Denbeigh Gardens, long gone under the Discount Development.
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Mickey Yeo, Norman Pritchard

and Stephen mr fucking death’s neat blue-eyed boy adlard

It’s a weekend. Adlard will probably be home.

* * *

You stand at the end of Raleigh Road, thinking you should be able to identify Adlard’s house by its neatness. But you can’t. None of the semi-detacheds – large, spacious, 1930s homes: the Death Cunt must be doing well for himself – is more precisely perfect than the next.

You come to Number 96. It should be Number 13, or Number 666. There’s a girl’s bicycle on the lawn, its yellow bum-shaped seat scuffed. The grass could do with cutting. Neat Boy is slipping.

If you had a shotgun, this would be easier. The most lethal implement in your possession is a small hatchet, for kindling. No, you’re wrong. The most lethal substance in your possession

apart from fucking fags

is in the petrol tank of your car.

You could walk through town with a full plastic jerry-can, you suppose. People would assume you’d run out somewhere and were going back to your car. But people don’t run out of petrol in towns. Too many garages.

So you’ve rescued empty plastic screw-top bottles – milk, lemonade, Coke, the bigger the better – from the rubbish and filled them. These you have put in a suitcase and dragged through the streets.

You would have driven, but you’re low on fuel since you siphoned it out. Your hands still stink from the messy business of pouring and the sleeves of your sports jacket are soaked. Your wrists feel as if ten-ton weights are fixed to them. The case got heavier and heavier as you hauled it along your own personal
via dolorosa.

You’ve had to stop every few yards to have a cough

because you’re a fucking walking dead man

and a rest.

* * *

You’re in so much pain you know you won’t enjoy this. But it has to be done. There has to be an answer.

Should you ring the doorbell?

Adlard might be out. Then you’d have to wait.

No. If he’d gone out, he’d have seen that untidy bicycle besmirching his lawn. Neat Boy would have tidied it up, put it in some bicycle-shaped spot, battened it down as tight as a cat’s arsehole. Neat Boy probably numbered, weighed and sorted into alphabetical order his bowel movements.

You hump the sloshing suitcase across the lawn. The bottom leaks. One of the bottles must have been cracked.

Too late to worry about that.

It’s nearly over.

You don’t think of your wife and children. You think of Neat Boy. And the killing concrete in your chest, clogging all the passages, spider-leg tendrils of pain winding throughout your whole body.

You get the case up on the doorstep and have a coughing fit. It must be louder than ringing any bell could possibly be. You thump the wall and hawk. Black stuff, with bloody chunks in it, comes up. That’s lung tissue, that is. That’s disease in a basket, death on a stick.

The world is going to end. For you. No. For everyone. Without you, nothing counts. Before then, though, scales can be adjusted.

You stand on a porch, looking at a panel door. There’s an ornamental knocker and a functional bell. Frosted glass side-panels, with etched naked fat babies playing musical instruments. A sunrise-pattern semi-circular fanlight, segmented like an orange, each segment a different-coloured glass. Slumped over your suitcase, you must look like a demented door-to-door salesman.

death of same

You brought the hatchet just in case. After the spasms have subsided, you chop at the door, by the chest-height lock. The hatchet embeds itself. As you pull it out, the door opens inwards.

Neat Boy looks at you through an adult mask, an absurd wisp of blond moustache gummed to his lip. He is thinning on top. He wears only a towel. You can’t help noticing he has an erection.

‘Good God, no!’ he gasps.

Hatchet in one hand, dragging the case with the other, you lurch at him, pushing him aside, and stagger into his hallway. The weight of the case has an independent impetus, and dredges an occasional table from the wall, scattering a telephone and an answerphone, smashing a pot-plant.

‘We can be reasonable,’ Adlard says.

You have interrupted something, but don’t care. Neat Boy didn’t just interrupt you. He ended you.

will end you

‘It’s unconventional, Mr Pelham. But Aimée is over sixteen. She…’

A chubby girl stands at the top of the stairs, a sheet wrapped around her, held to her chest.

‘That’s not my father,’ she screams.

Adlard lays a hand on your shoulder.

Coughing, dribbling blood, you whirl round, hatchet outstretched. Adlard gets out of the way, losing his towel. Through pain, you focus on your case, which lies flat and leaking a few feet away, at the foot of the stairs.

You chop down, rupturing the case, and chop again, aiming for the clasps. You wrench the case open and chop at the bottles. They roll and rupture and squirt. You lose the hatchet.

‘Petrol,’ the girl shouts.

You empty the bottles on the floor, on the stairs, on yourself, on the walls. It gets in your eyes. You don’t think you’re breathing any more. You’re so clogged up you’re just going to stop.

Soon.

Then, the bottles emptied and strewn about Neat Boy’s hallway, messing it up beyond repair, you turn and look for Adlard. Naked, appalled, not understanding, he stares at you. You want him to recognise you, to remember. You try to explain.

But you can’t talk, you can only choke.

You take Stephen Adlard by his skinny shoulders and pull him to you. Hugging tight, you fall on to your case, empty and broken plastic bottles beneath you. Adlard struggles but your grip is fixed, iron.

He was the one who used to have the light. Now it’s you.

You get Neat Boy in a neck-lock and probe in your pocket for the disposable lighter. You took a fresh one from the kitchen drawer.

Adlard’s heels skid on his petrol-sodden carpet. He is not impressing his girlfriend now. His neatness means nothing

this close to death

his crimes are about to come home.

Your thumb scrabbles on the lighter.

The girl screams.

You toss the lighter, like John Wayne hurling the lamp to burn down his life after Jimmy Stewart has taken the credit for shooting Liberty Valance and stolen away Vera Miles.

You hear the fire before you feel the heat. It starts as warmth, then becomes biting pain, nipping through even the bled-out aches in your chest.

The whole world is screaming.

A rivulet of fire runs up the stairs, towards the yelling girl’s naked feet. You smell Neat Boy’s cooking meat. You can’t relax your hold on him.

Something caves in inside you.

Go to 0.

T
here’s a tiny sting as the edge of the blade slips in. You instinctively put your hand under water. The heat covers the sting. A flower of blood blooms in the bath. It’s very pretty.

Are you sure about this?

You cut. Another flower.

Sure you’re sure.

Further. A big, gulping, blossoming rose explodes from your wrist.

That’s it. The vein cut.

You drop the blade. You’re too weak to do the other wrist. You feel you’re draining.

The bathwater is mostly red. It laps at your body, leaving a red-wine-dreg bath-ring on your white skin.

It doesn’t hurt.

You pull the plug with your toes, but turn the taps back on with your left hand, keeping your bleeding right wrist under the water all the time.

Water flows. You lie back in the warm and let it flow.

You can’t remember why you’re doing this.

Blood slips slowly towards the plughole, swirls in the mini-maelstrom, and slides away.

You don’t pass out. You look at the ceiling light fixture.

The water has drained from under you.

Hot and cold water pours on to your ankles, scalding and chilling.

You’re bleeding less. The end must be near. You must be empty.

No time for regrets.

Should you have written a note? No. This will be a mystery. Everyone will blame themselves: Ro, Victoria, your parents, your lecturers, everyone. They should have seen it coming.