Life's Lottery (64 page)

You wonder why James has made you three the party.

* * *

Shearer asks questions about the landscape. Shane is sullen, only along on the expedition because Hackwill gave him the nod. Mary as good as told you Hackwill had ordered her to kill someone last night. If she didn’t do it, would Shane be second choice hit-person? And does (did) the councillor have anything against Tristram Warwick?

At the lip of a culvert, you find a pair of boots, knotted together by the laces, balled socks shoved into the toes.

‘Are these Tristram’s?’ you ask Shearer.

He looks at the boots and you see something odd – bewilderment? fear? – in his eyes.

‘No,’ he says, ‘they’re mine.’

You look down at his feet.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m wearing them. But these are them too. Look.’

His name is written inside the leather lip in neat biro. That must be a habit from school.

‘This is what I do with my socks at night,’ Shearer says, pulling out a ball. You compare the tartan pattern with the socks he’s wearing: an exact match.

Putting the boots beside his feet shows that they are identical to the ones he is wearing. Every dent, scratch and crease is the same.

‘Twilight Zone,’ you comment.

‘Come here,’ says Shane. He is at the edge of the culvert, looking down.

Tristram Warwick lies at the bottom, in an inch or two of water, a rain-swollen trickle. He is face up, mouth and eyes open, dead as a fish. Scattered around him are more boots; eight pairs. You recognise your own among them. And Mary’s distinctive Docs.

Read 13, then come back here.

* * *

Shearer lets out one cry, a bark of grief.

You slide down to Warwick and check. He is indeed dead. You’re more spooked by your own boots, simultaneously on your feet and lying by Warwick.

There are nine pairs of boots too many in the universe. Why not ten?

If you leave Shearer with Warwick and go back to the Compound to confer with James, go to 198. If you stay yourself and send Shearer and Shane back, go to 215.

Y
ou find yourself humming the theme for
Top Cat
and fixating on a world of giants, where the ceilings are further away. As you shrink back into your past, your present-day self recedes. You are tempted to let it go, but wonder whether the point isn’t to take some of what you are now back to what you were then.

If you hang on, go to 202. If you let go, go to 277.

‘
I
Know the terrain,’ you say. ‘I’ll take the boots and go.’

You can’t read James’s expression.

‘Why you?’ blurts Hackwill.

‘Because I know I didn’t do it.’

‘You could be a split personality and not know you did it.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Though you’re resolved, it’s still distasteful. It’s up to you to unlace McKinnell’s boots. Your cold fingers fumble with the ice-stiff laces. Your breath frosts against McKinnell’s open throat.

Everyone stands round in a circle, watching. You tug and get the boots off. Dead man’s shoes. Peeling off the socks is worse, more intimate, creepier. You’d wear just the boots but know that, after a couple of hours, your feet would blister. You’d walk on pain.

Sean
ughs
in distaste as you pull on McKinnell’s socks.

‘Do you have to?’ he asks.

You ignore him.

You stock up on chocolate bars and sausage rolls and take a thermos of coffee. Before you go, you want to talk to James. But Hackwill always pushes in, not letting you alone.

‘What if you’ve cooked this up between you?’ he says, voice carrying across the valley. ‘You could be plotting to kill us all.’

You try to look sadly at Hackwill, but the main reason you want to talk to James is to reassure yourself that this isn’t his plan.

‘We’ve never had dealings with McKinnell,’ says James. ‘Why should we want to kill him?’

That hits home. Hackwill shuts up. Interesting.

‘Why should we want to kill any of you?’ you say.

Hackwill doesn’t bring up the copse. Or the Lime Kiln. Or your house. You almost enjoy his discomfort. But McKinnell’s corpse, a tarp thrown over it, brings you down. This is serious.

* * *

‘What about the phone?’ you ask James, when you’re alone. You’ve walked about a hundred yards from Castle Drac.

‘There’s an opportunity here,’ your brother says.

You don’t understand.

‘One of this crew is a murderer. There’s no passing trade up here.’

‘I’d thought of that,’ you say.

‘If anybody else dies, the murderer will take the blame.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Keith, this is it. We’re going to do Hackwill.’

‘James, you can’t mean it.’

But you can see he does. You’d forgotten that James has killed before. Has had to. To him, it’s a natural solution to a problem.

‘You didn’t kill McKinnell?’ you ask.

James looks shocked. ‘Of course not.’

You are torn.

‘Look,’ James says, ‘it was probably Hackwill himself. A dodgy deal gone wrong. In that case, Robbo’s got a cache of warm shoes and socks somewhere. As soon as you’re gone, he can continue his game.’

Back at the Compound, Hackwill and the others stand together, watching you from a distance. What if they’re all in it? You’ll be leaving James to them.

‘Here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Get over the hill and go to ground. I’ll work on Hackwill, hint that we have another car stashed near the old shepherd’s hut. He’ll bolt for it. Then we’ll have him.’

You think about it.

If you agree with James, go to 206. If you argue with James, go to 216.

A
ll you take from the flat over the chip shop is an ancient child-sized eyepatch you find pinned to the wall. You lost it years ago, but this Keith hung on to it. The eyepatch predates the point, whenever it was, when your lives split.

This Keith has obviously walked out on his wife and kids – as you have, you think – and so there’s no obligation on you to stay. They’ll probably be better off without him.

You walk through Sedgwater in the afternoon, finding things the same. Robert Hackwill is up for re-election. Brink’s Café is open for business.

Your mother probably still lives here. No,
his
mother, not yours. You aren’t him. You have to get that straight.

You walk out of town and hitch a lift. You end up in London. On the streets.

It’s November, brutally cold. You don’t panhandle – that takes more guts than you think you’ve got – but take casual, cash-in-hand, sweeping-up and washing-out jobs. A publican, impressed with your attitude, gives you a line on a bedsit. You land a place in a housing co-op and a temporary job as a barman. In the mornings, you re-educate yourself in libraries, catching up on skills you were letting slip. You jog to get in shape, losing gut, building muscle. You spend your first surplus cash on a decent haircut. You keep but trim the beard.

You work on a believable story. You’ve been in the Far East, were in fact brought up there, and have recently returned. All your documentation is lost. You get a photocopy of your birth certificate from the Reading records office, and use it to get a new passport.

Newspapers keep you up to date on your clients. Without you, some are floundering – which ought to please you but doesn’t – and between the lines you see where connections are missing. Deals you have brokered have gone unmade.

All you’ve brought with you is in your head. But that turns out to be quite a lot.

You sketch out a few financial articles, using inside but unaccountable knowledge, and sell the pieces to
Financial Times
. You call yourself Marion Griffin, perhaps to bury yourself deeper.

After six months, you’ve gone from bum to barman and from journo to expert. Working out of a tiny flat, you take consultancies. When your knowledge of Japan, specifically your near-fluent Japanese, gets out, you become sought-after.

You can never be as flamboyant as you were, but you can be a behind-the-scenes player, putting things together. You have started over.

When you first start seeing women, you have twinges of guilt. But you feel worse about the thin blonde woman, whose name you don’t even know, than about Ro. You’ve discreetly checked up on Ro, and she’s married to Roger Cunningham, whom you vaguely remember from school. The
Sedgwater Herald
didn’t even run a news item about this Keith’s ‘disappearance’, which is obscurely depressing.

You start seeing Christina Temple, a lecturer at London University. You move in together but don’t marry. You assume the other Keith, who you are legally, was probably married. The issue doesn’t arise, anyway.

You begin to command high fees. Nobody ever asks about your qualifications. Your work is mostly talk and you can demonstrate your ability to do it.

It occurs to you that you’ve recreated a life you performed a miracle to leave. Maybe this has taught you what you really want. Or maybe you’ll find yourself, eventually, making another switch.

Maybe.

And so on.

N
ext time Josh and Jonquil are bored, you draw them a treasure map. It’s a desert island which topographically mimics Sedgwater. You tell Josh it’s in another dimension, where the town is an abandoned settlement in a Sargasso Sea overrun by giant spiders.

‘Once, long ago, I buried a treasure,’ you tell them. ‘When I was your age, I searched but never found it. The lost treasure – it doesn’t matter what it was – is still there, but it’s not the finding that’s important. It’s the searching.’

You aren’t sure, but you think Josh and Jonquil see you differently for a moment. Not as layabout Dad, part of the furniture, a disappointment to everyone, but as the magical visitor to the Admiral Benbow Inn, opening up a world of wonder and adventure and tragedy and triumph.

You give them the map and send them out to search.

Marie-Laure, who has been watching this, is surprised and pleased. She’d thought she knew everything about you. She was willing to settle for you, you realise.

But you’ve found something else, which you can share with the children and even with her.

‘Let’s get married,’ you say.

This isn’t what she was expecting. ‘Pardon?’ she says.

‘I love you,’ you say.

Marie-Laure, under the mannerisms, is beautiful. She has trembled between neurosis and practicality on her own, with no support from you, having to mother you as well as the kids.

Going back has helped you understand that.

‘I may not be able to get a job,’ you say, ‘but I can still make a home, be a father, be your husband.’

Marie-Laure is crying. You embrace her.

* * *

After you’re married, Marie-Laure tells you her mother will settle £50,000 on you both. She’s repeatedly made this offer, pressuring Marie-Laure to marry, but Marie-Laure – your wife – has always held back from telling you. She didn’t want to get married simply for financial security, feeling the situation would fall apart. You half feel her mother made the offer in the hope of prodding Marie-Laure into a marriage as disastrous as her own, just so she could say, ‘I told you so.’ It’s like finding buried treasure.

* * *

Your trips into the past have reminded you of the spirit you once had and made you wonder how you lost it. As a child, you had no long-term hopes, because being grown-up was as remote as taking a trip to the moon. But you had a home, a family, a sense of the eternal present.

The money enables Marie-Laure to quit her job and study for a degree. You two buy into Vince’s comic book and nostalgia shop just as the ’60s and ’70s retro-industry takes off as big business. It’s almost magic.

As the ’90s wear on, things get better. Sometimes, considering the state of the country, you feel guilty about it. But while financial comets like Laraine’s old boyfriend Sean Rye were streaking upwards in the ’80s, you were ploughing along in a rut. Now, Sean and his whole Thatcherite yuppie class are burned out, and your ruts are foundations.

You give up travelling into the past, and travel instead into the future.

And so on.

B
lit blurt…

* * *

This was your home. Now, it’s a ruin, wisped over by layers and layers of cobweb. You rend the web apart with your hands, only to find another grey veil underneath.

It frightens you that you have so many memories. Irreconcilable memories.

When you think of your wife, too many names and faces come to mind. And the same for your son and daughter. A pixilated, drunken-haze conglomeration of lives seems to be clogging your mind.

What are you looking for? Food? Survivors? A tin of marbles?

There’s a movement in the distance, and you look over across the plain of rubble. Black pipe-cleaner legs poke over the horizon as an Arachnoid crawls up from one of the holes.

You don’t think you can stand to look at the spider-face.

The legs strain and the body emerges like a cloud of infested soot. The face is coming.

You feel an electric touch in your mind.

* * *

…blit blurt.

I
gnoring the pain in your knee, you launch yourself out of the chair at Mary. The other two are stooges. They don’t count.

You come down hard on Mary’s arm. Her gun
thwicks
, kicking up a divot of carpet, lino and floorboard.

You are being battered.

You wrestle for Mary’s gun. You get it and fit it into your fist. You fire, dizzyingly certain you’ll hit Chris or one of the twins. An orange poke-hole appears in Grebo’s gut. He starts yelling – your neighbours must hear.

Mary has Grebo’s gun now, held to Chris’s ear. ‘Drop it,’ she says.

You shoot her in the throat.

She shoots Chris in the head.

Shane shoots you in the back.

Mary lies against one wall, gurgling blood, hand pressed to her throat wound. Chris is curled up on the sofa, obviously dead. The twins howl like dogs. Grebo shouts profanity.