Life's Lottery (71 page)

You come to despise the old Keith. What a fucking loser!

But you
are
the old Keith.

* * *

No matter how much you jog, that jiggling pouch of gut won’t go away. And your head never quite clears. The old Keith has polluted it permanently. You find chunks of him surfacing.

Every night, you try to think for a while in Japanese. It becomes harder and harder. But you know how to roll a joint. And Vince’s prattle about comics begins to make sense.

* * *

This is your hell. You’re being punished for daring to question what you had with Ro and J and J.

Your new kids are dullards. All they do is watch telly and whine. You miss Jeremy and Jessica with an ache you never thought possible, even more than you miss Ro; than you miss your whole life.

You can’t go back. You try, but it doesn’t work.

You have a feeling that the switch only works if two Keiths are trying for it at the same time, and why would the other one – who is presumably living your old life – ever want to come back here?

Bastard.

No, you’re the bastard. He’s a lucky bastard.

* * *

Years pass, crushing you, breaking you.

Eventually, bored, you tell Vince the whole thing. He is fascinated. Alternate realities crop up every week in comics, so he knows all about them. He is surprised by the detail of your story but doesn’t take it as real. It’s exactly the sad fantasy (‘I’m really a princess in exile’) a complete lump of a loser like Keith Marion would come up with.

After that, you yourself mostly forget that you weren’t always here. Life grinds on.

And so on.

‘
N
o,’ you say. ‘Where did you get that from?’

You should just have said ‘No’. Asking the question was like admitting that you lied. The policeman takes a note.

‘That’ll be all, sir,’ he says.

He knows you’ve just lied. He’s writing off your whole statement as a lie. And your statement is the only alibi Mary has for Warwick’s death. It turns out he was strangled before being thrown into the culvert.

You are let go.

* * *

Only at the trial does it come out that it was Reg Jessup who said Mary was hired by Hackwill to murder McKinnell.

Hackwill slips the country, and goes on the run like Lord Lucan. But the smaller fish left behind all go down for various offences. Jessup turns queen’s evidence, and trades his inside story – which he also sells to the
Comet on Sunday
for a five-figure sum – for a vastly reduced sentence for some minor crimes.

The complex intricacies of the Discount Development, which turns out to have siphoned millions of pounds of council-tax-payers’ money out of Sedgwater, wouldn’t be such a sexy story if it weren’t for the murders.

Mary is always referred to as a WPC in the press. They run pictures of her in uniform, airbrushing the famous Scary Mary stare – they ask ex-schoolfellows about her and discover the nickname – into something of Countess Dracula proportions.

You visit her in prison, holding her fingers through mesh. Loving her is agony. She tells you to cut her loose but you can’t. Marie-Laure will have you back but you can’t face that.

You are lucky to escape prosecution as an accomplice. In the end, the lawyers do a deal you aren’t a party to, whereby you aren’t called. You would have given your testimony, affording Mary an alibi for Warwick, and probably have wound up charged with perjury for telling the truth.

And you couldn’t alibi her for McKinnell.

Even you wonder whether she slipped upstairs that morning and stabbed McKinnell. The knife – McKinnell’s – was found in the grass near the cottage, thrown into the storm from the bathroom window. If Mary killed Ben McKinnell, it wouldn’t stop you loving her.

She is found guilty and gets life. She accepts it and co-operates only dutifully with the appeals.

Hackwill shows up dead in a hotel room in Belize, killed by a teenage girl, a prostitute. You think he’s escaped justice and has doomed Mary by dying without saying who he had kill Warwick and McKinnell.

Bastard.

* * *

Years pass. The dead, useless weight of absentee love turns your heart to stone. You drive Marie-Laure away without even having to beat her. You stop writing to Mary in prison, visit her only rarely. Any contact at all makes the love flare up like an old wound.

You get back to work. In the aftermath of the scandal, you and James lose control of your business. Sean Rye, of all people, steps in and organises a financial package. You still run the courses, but the bank is your master.

There is no joy in doing what you do. There never is.

When Mary is killed in a prison riot, it freezes you solid. You don’t love her any less because she’s dead. You still walk and talk but you’re dead too. You just wait. You don’t believe you’ll be reunited with your other half in death. You think you’re both gone for ever, into the void.

Occasionally, some Fortean publication brings up the boots. There is magic in the world. Terrible magic, perhaps. So maybe there is something.

Maybe Mary – another Mary who goes with the other Doc Martens? – goes on somewhere. Maybe there are an infinite number of Marys, and infinite Keiths. Maybe this horrible love of yours is satisfied somewhere.

It’s no comfort: if you ever believe it, you hate those other Keiths and Marys who are themselves and not you, and even feel contempt at the thought that there might be other Keiths and Marys who don’t realise the love that consumes you.

Life grinds on.

And so on.

Y
ou don’t bury the tin. This time, you keep your marbles. You find that funny both as a grown-up and as a kid, but in different ways.

At school, you see faces superimposed over grubby kids’, the faces of the adults they will become. You know enough now to stay away from Mary Yatman, and are horrified when Shane Bush’s gang pick on poor, dim-witted Timmy Gossett.

After a while, Shane starts picking on you. ‘You’re mental, you are.’

‘And you’re going to be a failure as a van-driver.’

‘What?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Yahh, Mental.’

You remember this kind of treatment as crippling but it seems silly. Shane may be bigger than you but you can’t take him seriously as a threat, even when he tries to beat you up.

Two days before the event, you tell Shane’s gang who will score the goals in the World Cup final. After Bobby Moore’s lads have won the cup, you’re a hero too.

Shane’s gang becomes your gang. Even Mary is impressed.

You’re very sparing with the kid-mystic act, partly because your memory of specific events is shaky. You should have memorised a book of general knowledge. You do remember one other snippet of World Cup trivia: the trophy will be stolen, and found by a dog called Pickles.

Your biggest coup is in November, when you foretell William Hartnell’s regeneration as Patrick Troughton. You can remember all the actors who play
Doctor Who
. But you find it strange actually to watch, with grown-up critical faculties, the show as it goes out, realising how ropey the sets are and how repetitive the storylines. Surely it got better in colour?

You write a letter to the BBC telling them not to wipe their master tapes of
Doctor Who
because they will reap a fortune in the unimaginable but impending future when retail videos will become a significant ancillary market. You get a patronising letter back, saying your amusing suggestion about the next century has been passed on to the
Doctor Who
production team, even if it is a bit far-fetched for the scientifically credible standards of the programme.

You write to John Lennon and tell him not to move to New York, and, if he does, not to move into that block of flats in
Rosemary’s Baby
. After you’ve posted the letter, you realise
Rosemary’s Baby
hasn’t been made into a film yet, though you think the book has been published.

Well, you tried.

* * *

A lot of things come back to you just too late to be of any use and you dread the process of relearning all the subjects you will take at school when you pass the Eleven Plus – you’ll have to be careful not to score too well there since that’s a test of skills not knowledge – and go on to Marling’s. Christ, you’ve got three years in uniform at a single-sex prison camp before comprehensive education comes in.

And you’re a virgin.

* * *

You start saving your pocket money. Eventually, Microsoft is going to be founded and you plan to be a very early investor.

If you don’t watch out, you’re going to rule the world.

And so on.

B
lit blurt.

* * *

‘Mr Marion? Keith?’

You look at the man.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asks.

You don’t. Do you?

‘I’m Dr Cross. This is Susan Rodway.’

A nice-looking woman smiles.

‘You’ve been away,’ he says.

‘Away?’ you ask.

‘Voyaging, I suppose. Inside yourself.’

‘Am I mad?’ you ask.

‘The term no longer means anything.’

Dr Cross is rather stuffy, pompous. But Susan, who seems also to be a doctor, is warmer.

‘You’re not alone, Keith,’ she says.

‘The Spiders?’ you ask.

Dr Cross and Susan look at each other.

‘You remember the Spiders,’ Dr Cross says. ‘I suppose that’s a good sign. Most Marion syndromers edit them out of their memories.’

‘I have a syndrome?’

‘Not if you remember the Spiders.’

‘No, I have a syndrome named after me.’

‘You weren’t the first,’ Dr Cross says, ‘but you were the first to be studied. You’ve not responded as well to treatment as some, so you’re not the first to come out of it.’

‘What about the Spiders?’

‘Gone,’ Susan says. ‘Just as they came. We’re not sure what they were, really. A large-scale, inexplicable phenomenon.’

‘But I didn’t dream them?’

‘No, there were Spiders.’

‘Actually,’ Dr Cross says, ‘they can’t have been Spiders. Arachnid physiology is such that no true spider can attain great size. They have no respiratory or circulatory system which could keep a large body functional, and the increase of mass would render their limbs inoperative.’

‘So where did the webs come from?’ Susan asks.

You sit up. Your mind is clear; but you have phantom memories.

‘Don’t worry,’ Dr Cross says. ‘You’ll soon get over the after-effects.’

You can’t believe it.

‘It’s a happy ending,’ you say, wondering.

F
uck it.

That’s your motto. Literally.

* * *

You set up Vanda and the kids with trust funds and the house, and move out.

You live in hotels. All your meals are in restaurants. All your beds are temporary; and populated.

* * *

Everything you’ve heard of, you try. Cocaine, crack, call girls, caffeine, cherry trifle.

You bury yourself in them. You can’t spend fast enough.

* * *

Somewhere there are two graphs. One line is your life expectancy, the other your bank balance.

You want them to hit zero simultaneously.

Then, fuck it.

* * *

Money isn’t everything. But it can buy you everything.

You plough through the world. Fucking it.

You live rich. And die broke. Congratulations.

Go to 0.

‘
H
e was a bully at school,’ you say. ‘Not that that’s any reason to kill him.’

The sergeant catches that. He hasn’t said anything about Hackwill being killed.

‘I’m not,’ you begin, ‘sure Hackwill was, uh, the most ethical of businessmen.’

‘Um,’ the sergeant says. ‘I think that’ll be all for today. The doctor wants to take a look at you.’

You wonder if you’ve passed.

Read 250, go to 268.

‘
Y
our business partners are dying,’ you say to Hackwill, hoping to spook Jessup and Sean.

‘So are your customers,’ Hackwill replies.

‘When will this rain end?’ Sean asks.

You and Hackwill look at him. He’s working on a fright fit.

‘Not soon enough to save you,’ you say. ‘Not if he’s determined.’

‘Shane,’ Hackwill says, ‘hit Mr Marion.’

Shane steps forward. Mary trips him. He gets up and backs down. She always could outfight him.

Hackwill looks betrayed. ‘So that’s how it is? Strange bedfellows, if you ask me.’

‘You’re a murderer,’ James says, coherent.

Hackwill shrugs in disgust.

‘He tried to kill me,’ your brother says. ‘And he wrecked our quickest way out of here.’

On balance, you believe James. So does everyone else in the room, though you guess Jessup and Shane will stick by Hackwill. Sean is wavering and Shearer is tentatively with you. You have James and Mary.

‘When we get back, I’m going to make sure you pay, Hackwill,’ you say. ‘This is one charge you’re not avoiding.’

Hackwill can’t be bothered to look you in the eye. You know he’s scared. You’ve got him. You know it was him. No doubts. He killed them both. Maybe he had Shane do it, but he’ll be brought to book for it. You see wheels working in his head. His patience is thinning. He senses walls closing in. He’ll try something desperate.

‘Looks like the rain’s letting up,’ Sean says, with a pathetic attempt at cheer. ‘We can send someone for help.’

Hackwill shakes his head. He won’t sit tight at Castle Drac while you or James go for the police. And you’re the only ones who know the country.

‘Shane,’ he says, ‘get your coat on.’

‘Not a good idea,’ you say.

‘You’d skip away free and leave us here to freeze,’ Hackwill says. ‘I’ve already had to crawl out of a gorge thanks to one of you. We can trust Shane.’

‘
You
can trust Shane.’

The only person you could both trust to go to the police is Sean. He’d trip and sprain his ankle. Then, if he didn’t die of exposure, get lost and limp back to the Compound bedraggled and useless.