Life's Lottery (55 page)

You feel a sting on your wrist, striking up your arm.

Red splashes around your feet. A used razor-blade drops. Water flows over your opened arm, blood-trails mixing in, flowing down into the plughole.

Mary gets out of the shower. She’s brought her own towel, which she uses to sponge the blood from her belly. You watch her as, fastidious as a cat, she cleans herself. You’ve flopped weakly at the bottom of the shower stall, one arm wrenched up above you, the other draining down by your side. You’re still conscious but can’t do anything.

Mary unlocks the handcuffs, examines your left wrist for chafing, is satisfied, and puts them away. She turns the water to cold and gets dressed. It’s like watching a striptease in reverse.

You’re too tired and empty to do anything. The long, straight cut, from your wrist almost to your elbow, isn’t bleeding so much now. The edges are wrinkled and blueing.

You’ve been in the shower too long.

Mary sits on the closed toilet and watches you. She won’t go before you do.

Go to 0.

Y
ou push yourself up off the ground and run for Hackwill. He is giving a few words to a TV interviewer, stressing the victory of law and order.

You slam into him, wrenching him away from Mary’s shoulder, and hammer him against a car. Your knee connects with his groin, your forehead crunches his nose. You get your hands round his throat and squeeze. People feebly thump your back. You see Hackwill’s red eyes bulge. He snarls, teeth glistening like metal.

‘Your brother’s a little shit,’ Hackwill says. ‘He’s no good at all.’

Your head swims in blood. You and Hackwill are at the end of a funnel that spirals out to take in the universe.

How have you come to this?

A wrong path has been taken. Disputes like this are settled in small claims courts, not in pitched gun battles. Some cowboy movie has superimposed over the real world.

You still try to throttle the bastard, Hackwill.

‘Come and see your brother,’ Mary shouts, close to your ear. No, not Mary. Reg Jessup.

Reg is supposed to be dead. James killed him.

You are pulled away from Hackwill. He chokes and stands up. He has never looked less human. He’s a grown-up, in shorts and a stretched-tight boy’s-size cardigan. His face is pure evil.

As you are held by the police, Hackwill hauls your dead brother off a stretcher and shakes him. James’s wounds bleed like stigmata.

There are trees in the car park. Reg slips out of them, battered face healing.

Everything is unravelling.

You’re going back.

* * *

You see Robert and Reg, holding James by his shoulders. James’s shorts are dark at the crotch. Wee trickles down his legs. He starts sniffling.

‘Everyone heard two shots ring out,’ Gene Pitney sings, ‘one shot made Liberty fall…’

The bell goes for the end of break. Shane, Mary – even Scary Mary! – and the rest run off, back to the classroom. You don’t move.

‘C’mon, Mental,’ Robert says. ‘We’re not going to hurt you.’

‘Much,’ adds Reg, laughing.

If you go to the classroom and get on with your sums, go to 6. If you go to a teacher and tell what’s happening, go to 10. If you go into the copse to help James, go to 14.

Y
our fortieth birthday is in 1999. At ten o’clock in the morning, Mum comes into your bedroom, the same room with the same pirate map on the wall, with a tray of tea and biscuits, waking you up. She gives you your present, a new dressing-gown (not wrapped, but in a nice paper bag from British Home Stores). She kisses you and gives you your cards.

One is from her, one is from the char.

Laraine and Jimmy are out of the country. They usually remember to send cards but don’t often calculate delivery time correctly, so you have to wait a day or two. Your friend Vince will deliver his card by hand, later.

‘The big four o,’ Mum says. ‘Well, I never.’ She clucks and leaves you alone.

You are living at home. In fact, you’ve never lived anywhere else. Mum cooks and a char comes two days a week to clean the house and do your laundry.

After Dad’s death in 1982, Mum thought about remarrying. There was this bloke Phil hanging around, asking her out to antiques fairs and car-boot sales. You thought he was a bit of a pillock and he went away in the end. Dad’s insurance, topped up by Mum’s own investments and the occasional contribution from your brother and sister, keeps both of you comfortable, though the house occasionally suffers because repairs and maintenance are supposed to be your department and you rarely get it together. Though your benefits were stopped nearly twenty years ago, you still do odd jobs around the house and garden to earn your keep. Mum, at sixty-eight, is spry, but her hip gives her gyp. She can’t cope with things as well as she used to. You have to be the man of the family.

Laraine is married for the second time, to Kay Shearer, the discount shelving tycoon, and living in Canada. She has six children, whom you can never keep straight, though Mum can pick them out of a group photograph and rattle off their names and statistics like a football fan listing the goal averages of his team’s players. Jimmy is Major James Marion, stationed with the UN peace-keeping forces in some foreign trouble-spot. He has married a Czech girl, Pavla, and they have two sons. Mum worries that he will be shot by insurgents, but he says he mainly does admin work.

Last Christmas, Mum went to Canada to see Laraine and Kay and the children. Laraine paid for a first-class air ticket. She offered to bring you over too but you didn’t like the idea of flying. Mum made sure the char popped in to see you were all right, and telephoned on Christmas Day, only she got the time difference muddled and called up after midnight, on Boxing Day.

It occurs to you that Mum gave you a dressing-gown for Christmas too.

You worry about her.

* * *

You have never had a job. You haven’t had a girlfriend since Marie-Laure Quilter.

You weigh sixteen stone. Your usual outfit is corduroy trousers, slightly split at the crotch, and a baggy pullover that has its frayed areas. You shave every third or fourth day. Your hair gets long until Mum gets fed up enough with it to cut it for you. You have a bald patch, and don’t comb your hair over it; probably because you rarely comb your hair.

You find ways of passing the day.

You sleep in the mornings. You follow Australian soaps. Vince comes by some afternoons with videos. He has a shop in the old Discount Development, selling second-hand comics, records and videos. He only opens in the morning.

You have a lot of little things to do; to prevent you dwelling on the big things.

* * *

‘It looks lovely,’ comments Mum.

You are wearing your Christmas dressing-gown, not your birthday one.

‘Just your size.’

She still sometimes calls you a growing boy.

* * *

Mum makes you cups of tea every two hours and teases – well, nags – you about getting out more with your friends. Her official version is that you stay at home to look after her, and that she doesn’t want you to sacrifice yourself for her.

‘You’re only young once.’

You were only young once.

You go into town once a week, to help Mum with the supermarket shopping. She gets a taxi back and you loiter, putting off going home. You sit in the Outlet, the fast-food place where Brink’s Café used to be, watching the kids hanging out, chattering and moaning. You can’t remember ever being like that.

Sometimes, in the street or the Outlet, you see withered faces that remind you who their wearers used to be. Timmy Gossett, the loony who sits on the Corn Exchange steps mumbling, was at primary school with you. Locked in his own mind, he fills you with dread. You always felt sorry for him, and now you fear he feels sorry for you.

Not a day goes by that you don’t think about Marie-Laure. She doesn’t live in Achelzoy any more. Her mother sold up, and they both moved on. You wonder what she’s doing.

Less often, you think of that woman from the DHSS. Her name usually escapes you, but it was Vanda.

Vince brings you a
Doctor Who
video as a birthday present. ‘Inferno’, with Jon Pertwee. You spend the afternoon watching it together.

Mum asks if Vince will be staying for your birthday dinner. Vince says he has to be off. He’s taking evening classes. Tonight, it’s sociology. His hobby is evening classes. He has more O Levels than Einstein. Each time he gets one, he picks another course and works on that for a few years.

In the video, Doctor Who slips sideways in time to a parallel world where all his friends – the Brigadier, Liz Shaw of UNIT, Sergeant Benton – are evil.

You and Vince have one of your long conversations, about parallel worlds. They usually turn into arguments, but Vince thinks of a row as a species of performance art.

His contention is that ‘Inferno’ is a radical departure from the usual parallel-world science fiction story. Most are about societies rather than people, and posit worlds in which Germany won the Second World War or President Kennedy wasn’t assassinated or England lost the Cup Final in 1966. The stories demonstrate the effects of these events. When real people, like Winston Churchill or JFK, figure in parallel-world stories, they appear as themselves, and authors suggest how, given their established real-world characters, they’d react in changed circumstances. ‘Inferno’, in which England is a fascist state, goes further and suggests personality itself is defined by social and political circumstance, that a person’s degree of niceness or nastiness is conditioned by the regime under which they live.

You point out that the same thing is done in the
Star Trek
episode in which Spock has a beard and Kirk succeeded to command of the
Enterprise
by assassinating the captain played by Jeffrey Hunter in the pilot.

Vince concedes that is true. ‘Think about it, Keith. If the world were different – if Britain had lost the Falklands or Neil Kinnock was elected prime minister – you would be different. Who knows what you’d be?’

You find the idea a bit threatening.

‘I’d still be me. Under any circumstances. If we passed through a time-slip tomorrow and woke up in a world where the Vikings had triumphed and Somerset was an outpost of an Icelandic empire, I’d still be Keith and you’d still be Vince.’

‘But maybe you’d be Evil Keith. Like the Brigadier with an eyepatch or Spock with a beard. You’d have a helmet with horns.’

‘That’s a common fallacy. Viking helms didn’t have horns.’

‘You’d ride out every day in your big Icelandic car, the Volvo Björk, and put Achelzoy to the sword, looting and raping, then come back home in time for tea.’

Sometimes, Vince loses you. You think he’s a bit sad.

At the end of ‘Inferno’, Doctor Who slips back to his proper time and his friends are nice again.

At the end of your birthday – Mum made you your favourite, sausage toad – you go up to your room and put Vince’s present with your other videos.

You have the old TV and video in your room. The new home-entertainment system Kay bought Mum is set up downstairs, filling the front room with speakers and screens and decks like the Borg taking over in
Star Trek: The Next Generation.

You undress and put on your birthday dressing-gown.

You are torn between Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura in
Classic Trek
, and Katy Manning, Jo Grant – who took over from Liz Shaw – in
Doctor Who.

So, you ask yourself, is it a
Doctor Who
day, or a
Star Trek
day?

If
Star Trek
, go to 160. If
Doctor Who
, go to 170.

W
hen it comes to it, you hesitate. You can’t take it that one step further. You can’t kill.

Sean, on the doorstep, stares at you. ‘Keith,’ he says, astonished.

‘Do it,’ screeches Laraine.

Now Sean is terrified.

‘I’m fucking him, Sean,’ Laraine says.

There’s anger in Sean’s terror. He makes fists.

Headlights in the drive. Hackwill is here.

The gun in your hands is a dead stick. You’re a statue. You can’t go forward and you can’t go back. You begin to unravel.

Laraine takes the gun away from you.

With a snarl, Sean comes for her. The gun goes off and Sean’s shoulder dissolves into red mist. She has fired both barrels.

Your eyes are hurt by the flash. Your ears ring like police sirens.

‘Fuck,’ shouts Hackwill.

‘Shells,’ Laraine demands.

You bring the packet out of your pocket. Laraine snatches it.

Sean is screaming now, rolling on the drive, one arm dead, lower face splattered with blood. Hackwill is fixed by his car, goggling.

Laraine breaks the gun, shucks the used shells, and jams in fresh ones. She is clumsy but manages it eventually and snaps the gun shut.

‘Sorry, Rob,’ she says, and shoots Hackwill in the face. Almost in pieces, he lies on his car bonnet, life blasted out of him.

If Laraine had seen Robert Hackwill drag James into the copse, things would have been different. Of course, Laraine seems to be mad.

She can’t reload. Her motor skills are deteriorating. She stands over Sean, fumbling with shells. The packet comes apart and shells patter over Sean’s kicking legs.

Lights go on next door.

Laraine picks up two shells and, concentrating, gets the gun loaded.

‘What do you think, Keith,’ she says. ‘Me, or him?’

If you say ‘You’, go to 161. If you say ‘Him’, go to 174.

‘
I
f a man did that to me,’ Mary says. ‘I’d kill him.’

‘Sean was one of those men,’ you say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘One of those men people want to kill.’

‘People?’

This is it. Play this right and you’re home free.

‘I probably shouldn’t say this, Mary. But there’ve been calls. Men, asking for Sean, late at night. Not bank-customer voices. Threatening, somehow. And before he left, Sean burned some papers in the grate. Things are chaos at the bank. They sent someone over to go through his files at home.’ This is true. ‘I think Sean was keeping a lot from us.’