0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (23 page)

Gregor waited for the bodies of his two guests to stop twitching, then stripped and dragged them to the open basement door, kicking them down into darkness. His cousin was due to have the area pumped full of cement in a week, to stop the foundation piles from shifting. It would be an easy matter to bring the delivery date forward. He wondered how long it would take him to forge Mr Colson's signature from the visitors' book.

A man like that always came abroad with plenty of travellers' cheques.

After locking the door, he walked down to the jetty and plunked the empty brandy bottle into the sea. A terrible waste of a fine cognac, he knew.

Tonight, though, a glass of homemade wine would taste just as well.

SCRATCH

It was too wet and too cold to go all the way into town for such a trivial purpose, but as Ann pointed out, he might regret it if he didn't. Somebody had to win, after all, and there was a double rollover this week.

He had tried to point out the folly of buying the tickets at all, had explained that the odds were so astronomical she was more likely to be struck by lightning ten times in a row than win the national lottery, but she would not be told. Somebody has to win, she would say, I've seen them on the telly, grinning brickies, office workers in syndicates, housewives, don't tell me that they've all been struck by lightning ten times.

She was missing his point. To say that they were short of money was an understatement. They were living in a limbo somewhere beyond bankruptcy, about to have their electricity cut off, about to lose their house and all its contents, and hoping against hope that everything would be neatly sorted out by winning an unimaginable amount of money seemed, well, unrealistic to say the least.

But he went, because she wanted him to and he loved her. That was what you did, wasn't it, if you loved someone? Things you didn't want to do yourself. The engine of the little Fiat sounded as if it was suffering from tuberculosis. He crested the hill and looked down on the wet rooftops of the town, the ashen carparks, the hideous plasticky shopping centre and the inhospitable moorland that butted against the new estate beyond.

How he hated what he saw, how he longed to get out, even though he knew he was imprisoned here as surely as if he was locked inside a cell.

Money could do that, just lift him up and set him down somewhere better. A simple row of numbers marked down in biro, the work of a moment. But the odds! The astronomical odds! He'd read that each week 30,000 people picked the numbers 1 to 6 in consecutive order!

Ann had read an article on the subject which advocated ringing the number 1 - infrequently chosen for its proximity to the top of the sheet -

and multiples of ten, which did not look random enough for the public to select. But how could anyone really know? Second-guessing the laws of chance would require understanding how life itself was shaped.

As he entered the tobacconist's shop, a spark of elation jumped within him at the prospect of winning, even though he knew the impossible, absurd odds and loathed the irrationality of hope. They could not afford to waste money, and yet here he was gambling it away. He ran a hand through the back of his shaggy blonde hair and waited for a pair of ancient women to shift from the counter. Queuing for the lottery had taken the place of queuing in the post office for sheer annoyance-value.

He snatched up a pair of forms, grimly aware of the syndicates up and down the country that were each filling in dozens of such forms, thought for a moment and began marking off numbers. The age of his dog, Boots (12), the size of his shoes (9), the age of Ann's mother (56), and so on, until he was done.

He posted the slips in the white plastic box and started to leave the shop when he felt a loose pound coin in his jacket pocket. At the same moment his eye caught a separate scratchcard dispenser beside the main lottery ticket display. Dropping the pound coin in the slot released one of the scratchcards, which he slipped into his jeans intending to scratch off when he reached the car. But the rain had begun falling in slate-grey sheets, the traffic was bad, the DJ on the radio annoyed him and he forgot all about it.

Ann insisted on seeing the lottery draw live on television, so that he was forced to miss the end of the programme he was watching in order to stare at some capering ninny and his simpering sidekick while they made a big deal about reading the numbers from coloured ping-gong balls -

ping-pong balls
!

'Doesn't it amaze you that we have all this modern technology, and the best random-number selection device they can come up with is running a hairdryer under a box of ping-pong balls?' he asked, but was shushed.

Ann excitedly checked each number, and even managed not to reveal her disappointment when she failed to match a single digit to the winning line.

Her innocent enthusiasm never ceased to surprise him; it was one of her most charming qualities.

It was then that he remembered the scratchcard in his back pocket.

And it was only when he looked at it properly that he realised what an odd item it was. One word was emblazoned across the top of the card in crimson:
WIN!
Win what it didn't say, almost as if the promotions company could not be bothered to put details on the card. Underneath this were six grey panels, and beneath these were instructions:
Scratch
off each of the boxes in turn. Each one will reveal a word, WIN or
LOSE. The more you WIN, the bigger your prize. To be the
Prizewinner Of The Week you must uncover three WIN boxes. To
be the Prizewinner Of The Month you must uncover four WIN

boxes. To be the Grand Prizewinner Of The Year you must
uncover all six WIN boxes.
On the back was an address where you had to send the card to by registered post if you were a winner. He rested the cardboard oblong on his knee and began scratching across two of the boxes with a five pence piece while he was still talking to Ann.

He stopped talking as soon as he saw the words revealed beneath the plastic coating,
WIN
, both.

Then a third.

'Ann?' He looked down at the card on his knee, and she followed his gaze. 'How many do you need?' she asked.

'Not sure. All, for the grand prize.'

'Keep going, then.'

He placed the edge of the coin against the corner of the fourth square and scratched.
WIN
.

And the fifth.
WIN
.

He swallowed and looked across at Ann. She gave him a puzzled look, a suspicious
this couldn't happen to us
look. 'Well, do it.'

He scratched at the sixth square, but could not bring himself to look.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

WIN
.

'It's a trick, it's not a real card,' he said, 'it must be selling something.'

'No, you paid for it, didn't you?'

'Yes, but - '

'Then you've won, Gary. My god, you've won. Does it say how much?'

'No, it just tells you how to do it, and there's no company name, it's weird. I've never seen cards like these before.'

'Maybe they're new, maybe the money goes to some special charity.

Fill in your name and address, send it off.'

'I'll put your name down, if you like.'

'That's sweet of you,' said Ann. 'But you picked that particular card, you were chosen fair and square.' So he filled out his own name and address, and on Monday morning drove back into town to send it off by registered post.

The next few days crawled by in agonising torpor. They had agreed not to mention the win, not to even think of it, but to behave in such a way would have been a defiance of human nature. They'd pay their bills, thought Gary, be prudent, clear all their debts, start anew and not make the same mistakes. Find somewhere decent for Ann's mother to live instead of her damp run-down flat. Find himself a job that paid a proper salary. Maybe they could even think about starting a family... The locks seemed to be falling away from the sealed gates of their fate, and some kind of decent future beckoned beyond. But Gary could not allow himself to think of such a thing; the more he dreamt, the greater would be his disappointment if it turned out to be a con, if the company was, say, a double-glazing firm attempting to hook customers.

He did not even believe in the lottery. Surely somebody less contemptuous should have won, a true believer who slavishly worked out the odds of various numerical formulations in order to maximise winning potential, someone who paid visits to the ticket dispenser with the regularity of a devout churchgoer? When it came to the divine power of chance, Gary was an agnostic. The idea of fate was unnerving; it contradicted natural laws. Someone had to win, Ann told him, but that meant someone had to lose.

One odd thing happened four days after he bought the ticket. He had stopped in town to pick up some shopping, and entered the tobacconist's to buy a newspaper.

'Where do you get your scratchcards from?' he asked the young Asian man stacking shelves.

'We don't sell 'em, mate.'

'Yes you do, you've a machine -' he indicated a space just past the regular lottery ticket dispenser, ' - just over - there.' His words dwindled away as he found himself pointing at nothing. 'It was there on Saturday,'

he ended lamely.

'No, mate,' replied the boy, 'we've just got the regular one.'

'But I saw it, a red box near the door. I bought a ticket from it.'

'If there was anything like that there, someone must have brought it in from outside and then taken it away again.' He chuckled, shook his head and returned to aligning boxes of tampons.

Maybe it had been a scam. He had heard of bogus cashpoints being set up in empty shops, then removed at the end of a busy Saturday, filled with credit card details. As the days passed he grew convinced that he had been abstractly victimised - but then the postcard arrived.

It had been mailed inside a plain white envelope, presumably to preserve his anonymity. The frank-mark indicated that it had come from London. The address was computertyped, and the back took the form of a generic tick-box reply, the kind you found attached to the guarantee when you bought a toaster. The top of the card bore the legend
GRAND PRIZEWINNER
. It asked a variety of simple questions, his age, marital status, if he was a houseowner. At the bottom it read
Our
representatives will call you to arrange a time when they can visit
.

There was no other information on the card, or in the envelope.

'Don't you think they're being rather mysterious?' he asked Ann over breakfast on the morning the card arrived. 'No company name, no details, no picture of cars, or cash, or sundrenched beaches...'

Ann shrugged and gathered up the plates. 'They obviously have their own system,' she said, 'you'll just have to be patient.'

'When I was a kid there was a special offer on the back of a packet of cereal,' he recalled. 'Something called a 37-In-One-Scope, a kind of -

instrument - that had 37 separate uses, magnifying glasses and knives, all sorts of stuff. You had to send three and six - '

'My god, old money,' laughed Ann.

' - to get this wonderful thing. I'll always remember how excited I was when the postman called to deliver it, but when I opened the box I found this tiny, badly made piece of plastic. The illustration on the cereal box had been greatly exaggerated, and the magnifier was blurry and the knives were plastic. It was junk.'

'Poor Gary.' She reached down and gave him a kiss on the head. He seemed melancholy today. She decided not to show him the final demand from the gas board that had arrived with the card. 'Well, you never know.

Maybe your luck has changed.'

'Not me,' he replied, 'I never get chosen for anything.'

'But you have been,' she said, waving the card at him. 'You're a good man. Why shouldn't you get what's coming to you?'

A man rang that evening, to arrange the visit. He and his colleague would come to the house on Saturday night, one week after Gary had scratched the card. He thought it odd that they operated outside of normal office hours, but said nothing to Ann; she had quite enough on her mind. On Saturday evening, shortly after a watery sun had set behind the trees, there was a knock at the front door. Two gaunt, unhealthy-looking young men stood side by side in matching black ties and raincoats. They looked like eastern European government inspectors, he thought, or Bible salesmen.

'You are Mr Gary Chapman?' asked one.

'Yes, I am,' replied Gary. 'Do you want to come in and have a cup of tea?'

'The same Gary Chapman who filled in this form?' He held the card up between thumb and forefinger.

'That's right.' Gary held the door wide, but neither of them showed signs of accepting his invitation. 'What have I won?'

'Will you be available to receive your reward here, say, tomorrow afternoon?' one asked, ignoring his question.

'I suppose so, yes.' He felt vaguely put out by their dour, unsmiling behaviour. Wasn't this supposed to be something to celebrate? Shouldn't he be congratulated on his luck?

'Shall we say four o'clock?' The man took a small black notebook from his colleague and jotted down the time.

'Yeah, fine.' He nodded at them defiantly, looking from one to the other.

'You'll be ready tomorrow, then.' They turned to go. 'Good day to you.'

'Wait, will it be you coming back tomorrow?,

'No, not us, sir - someone else. Well, good day to you.' They walked to the corner of the street in perfect step - as though they had rehearsed the movement together - and were gone.

'Why didn't you ask them anything useful?' Ann was watching from the kitchen, waiting for him to shut the front door.

'How could I? You saw what they were like.' Something they had said bothered him. The word
reward
. Surely they'd meant
award
?

The forecast for the day ahead was stormy. By noon on Sunday the sky had blackened and the wind was flattening the grass in the fields behind the house, making the moors resemble billowing green sails. There was an uncomfortable, heavy atmosphere in the kitchen. They barely spoke to each other as they sat studying the newspapers, watching TV, eating lunch. At five minutes to four they began surreptitiously watching the kitchen clock. By a quarter past four rain was falling in a light fine drizzle, and Gary had begun to feel as nervous as a condemned man in his last hour. He tried to read an article in the paper, something about the Church of England revising their definition of hell, but found it impossible to concentrate for more than a sentence or two.