Life's Lottery (16 page)

‘Good God,’ she says. ‘Arachnoid body-snatchers have struck.’

Over the last year, you’ve received sporadic silent phone calls. You always assumed it was Marie-Laure. You don’t know what to say to her. Her mother sent her away for a time last year. Vanda said her claim was suspended while she was being treated in a private ‘hospital’.

‘I never really liked you,’ she says, spitefully. ‘You were always too common.’

‘You owe me a pound,’ you say.

She kisses you, wriggling her tongue into your mouth.

‘There,’ she says. ‘Even?’

She zig-zags away, ragged blue shawl clutched round her skinny shoulders.

You never forget her eyes.

* * *

For the first time, with the job, you have money. You can treat Vanda, buy her things for a change. You enjoy that. You have lunch together every day, in pubs and cafés. You insist on paying, to make up for the last couple of years. Every Friday, you come home with a scarf or a household implement.

She suggests you find a bigger flat, or a cottage. You work out that soon you could afford it.

Vanda has learned to drive and bought a second-hand car, a Ford Cortina. You promise to take lessons as soon as your college course is completed. Again, you’re on an exam treadmill. But this time, the results mean something.

You wonder why you ever resisted.

You have two weeks’ holiday in the summer. You go camping in Wales. You make love in a tent. You go to quiet pubs, and cuddle in dark corners. You wander round Snowdonia. Nature doesn’t care whether you wear a suit. It’s just there, magnificent even without you to see it. Alone in the wild with Vanda, you feel calm.

Later, you work out that this is where your first baby was conceived. In a tent pitched by a culvert, water flowing into the mountain as you flow into Vanda.

You get married well before the bump shows. You arrange a mortgage at a preferential rate through the bank and think about buying a cottage in one of the outlying villages. In the end, you get a newly built house in town, anonymous but solid.

Vanda enjoys decorating. Dad gives you DIY tips. Vanda doesn’t go back to work after Jason is born. Less than a year later, your son has a sister, Jesse.

Laraine gets married to a bloke called Fred. James joins the army. Sean becomes loans officer. Marie-Laure is institutionalised.

Vanda suggests you have a vasectomy, and you do.

Money begins to get tight.

* * *

In 1982, your Dad dies, of a sudden coronary. It’s unexpected. Sean Rye is made acting manager. You’re worried he’ll purge you. You’ve always thought, deep down, your position was something Dad fixed up.

A week after the funeral, Sean calls you in for an interview. First, he tells you what a great man and a good friend your father was. You’ve only just begun to see this yourself, and resent the intrusion.

Sean is still wearing a 1975 suit, with wide lapels. He is still a prat. Acting prat.

‘Keith,’ says Sean, ‘I don’t mind telling you your dad
was
this branch. I can’t replace him, but London have confirmed me in this job.’

Here it comes. You’re out.

If Laraine hadn’t chucked him for that hippie…

‘A lot of customers need a sense of continuity. I know it’s absurd, but the name – Mr Marion – means a lot. I’d like you to take over loans.’

A pause.

You’re not being fired. You’re being promoted.

‘I’ve cleared it with head office,’ Sean says. ‘They’re very enthusiastic.’

‘Thank you, Sean,’ you say.

‘Thank you,
Keith
.’

You worry it will all go away.

* * *

The promotion means Vanda doesn’t have to go back to work. You approve an extension of your own mortgage and move to a cottage in Sutton Mallet. You lay out on the first new car of your life, a Ford Mondeo.

James comes back from the Falklands. He has been wounded slightly, and leaves the army. Your mum remarries, to a younger man, Phil Parslowe. Jason and Jesse go to playgroup. Laraine gets divorced from that bloke called Fred.

Sean gets married to a woman you were at school with, Rowena Douglass. You and Vanda and Sean and Rowena play badminton together on Thursdays, have barbecues at the weekends in summer.

Though you and Vanda vote Social Democrat, Mrs Thatcher wins a second term. They say it’s the Falklands factor.

Your duties at the bank expand. You’re required to give investment advice. You and Sean are a bit puzzled by this head office decree. You’re mates now. You see that he isn’t the prat you thought. Laraine could have done a lot worse; indeed, her marriage to Frightful Fred suggests that she did.

Neither of you has ever invested in anything more venturesome than premium bonds, but everyone is into the stock market these days and your bank wants a slice of its customers’ action. Other banks in town have recently established securities desks and you have to compete. You both study the whole thing, and go on week-long courses to get up to speed.

You are surprised Sean is unfaithful to Rowena with women on the courses. Thin, sharp-suited, bright-eyed professionals. You talk it over with him. He says that he doesn’t love Ro any less, but that the ’80s are about taking opportunities.

‘What we learn here makes us better back home.’

You’re sort of convinced, but you don’t join Sean in his energetic chatting-up in hotel bars.

On the train on the way back from one course, Sean proposes a scheme to make more sense of the investment business. He suggests you each put £2500 into a fund, and have the bank match the £5000 with capital from petty cash. Then, experimentally, you should make investments and see what happens. If you make a go of it, you can pay the bank back and take a bonus out of the profits. If you don’t, you pay the bank back and take a loss of part or all of your own investment. After all, it’s only £2500.

Two thousand five hundred doesn’t sound that
only
to you. And speculating with petty cash goes well beyond the legal grey area into something that could coldly be called embezzlement.

‘It’ll just be a flutter,’ Sean says, ‘like the Grand National.’

If you go in with Sean, go to 41. If you back off, go to 47.

A
chelzoy is miles out of town, across the moor. The road is straight for a stretch, then winds like a snake. Originally, the Somerset levels were marshes. Villages used to be islands: the common ‘zoy’ in place names is a local contraction of ‘zoyland’ or ‘island’. Roads were navigable waterways. In December, the fields are bare and black. Ditches, called ‘rhynes’, are deep and water-filled. They separate fields and run either side of the road.

Between you is an atmosphere you can’t understand. What has happened this evening is still sketchy, unconfirmed. You don’t know if Mary wants to murder you or marry you. You are excited but hesitant. You really wish you hadn’t drunk so much; it’s only in the last year that you’ve looked old enough to get served in pubs, and you downed several pints of cider in the Lime Kiln before you went to the show. It occurs to you that, you don’t know how much Mary has drunk.

The road is empty at this time of night. Between villages, the only light comes from the headlamps.

As the road weaves from side to side, Mary drives in the centre, staying on the white line to avoid the curves. Catseyes stare back at you. You aren’t sure if this is a good idea.

Mary laughs when you mention it.

Then the Honda loses traction on a slick patch of ice. Up ahead is a right-angle bend.

The car hits the verge and your side lifts up as it slams into a signpost. The windscreen fractures to frost.

Wheels grinding grassy earth and air, the Honda crunches over a bank and its front end falls five feet, crashing through a thin layer of ice.

Mary has driven you into a ditch.

Go on.

I
n the Lime Kiln, Victoria pairs off with you at the bar, keeping up a canny chatter of questions which you punctuate with shrugs and gestures. You see her concentrating, despite the scrumpy she’s been drinking and the dope you can smell on her hair. You’d forgotten how clever she was before she made an effort to hide it. The problem of you has piqued her curiosity. She’s obviously going to worry at it until she has an answer.

Then, probably, she’ll be disappointed.

She’s unlikely to make up with Roger; still drips contempt when she talks about Graham; and, though he’s obviously smitten, has no interest in Neil.

For now, she’s keen on the Invisible Man.

But not – you are certain – on Keith Marion.

The straw-hole in your mask rips. Through it, you can drink from the glass.

‘Not a very distinctive tongue,’ Victoria comments.

You wiggle it at her. She nips it between her thumb and forefinger, not hard.

‘Any solution?’ Michael asks, from the other side of the pub.

‘Not as yet.’

‘Preliminary report?’

She lets your tongue go. ‘It’s a heterosexual male.’

Michael laughs. Your face goes hot but you smile. No one can see you blush. Behind cloth, you’re as cool and suave as you’d like to be. Your blank mask is a screen, and people project what they want on to it.

* * *

It really is like being invisible, or a ghost. You’ve always wondered what people were like when you weren’t around. Now you can find out. Are you imagining it, or are people really more relaxed with you invisible? Does your presence, your intense need for achievement, put people on their guard, make them watch themselves?

You’ve seen Rowena puke until there’s nothing more to come up and Victoria break a glass on Roger’s head. Surely they wouldn’t act like that if you were there?

Or maybe it’s just Rag Day.

* * *

After time is called, everyone drifts out of the pub and back to the college common room. Most other disguises have come apart and not a few kids are moaning in drunken agony. Roger has got proprietary about Rowena and is helping her stagger down the street. She is either crying uncontrollably or singing ‘See My Baby Jive’ under her breath. Roger won’t let her crawl home to her parents until she’s in a fit state.

You’ve drunk more than you usually do but aren’t even slightly giddy. The mask gives you power. Behind it, you can be calculating while everyone else flounders.

Victoria takes your arm and stays close. You are her project.

‘Give it up,’ Neil tells you. ‘It’s boring now.’

He is jealous.

‘No,’ says Victoria. ‘Not yet.’

In the common room, people are piled up on the battered chairs. Dreadful coffee brews in an urn. Graham, not a student but always hanging around the college, skins up and passes a joint round a circle of younger kids.

Ancient iron radiators clank, pouring out heat, misting the windows. Outside, it’s the Arctic; in the common room, it’s subtropical.

Victoria sits you down, takes off your hat and strokes your head through the cloth. She feels bumps like a phrenologist, trying to discern your character in your skull.

‘Rip it off him,’ someone suggests.

‘No,’ she announces. ‘Then he would have won.’

* * *

The afternoon passes in a fug of smoke and coffee. Everyone is trying to purge themselves before the evening, when they’ll go to the show at the college auditorium and Michael’s party in Achelzoy. This is down-time.

Victoria is sometimes distracted by other conversations but always comes back to you, the Mystery Man.

When it goes quiet, she kisses you again. A proper snog, what they call ‘sharing a stick of gum’. Tongues entwined, jaws working, swapped spit. She holds your neck and you hold hers. She’s warm even through your gloves.

You aren’t the only couple kissing in the room. Neil is disgusted but no one else even notices.

Victoria breaks the kiss and puts a finger on your lips. The cloth around your mouth is damp.

‘I don’t know you,’ she says.

You shrug.

‘But I will. Oh yes, Invisible, I will.’

* * *

At some point, you have to go to the toilet. When you get up, your brain fuzzes. It’s as if movement stirs the alcohol lying heavy in your blood.

You make it out of the common room.

Will Victoria lose interest while you’re gone?

Your bladder’s need is pressing.

On your way back from the Gents, in a stairwell whose chill contrasts pleasantly with the overheated common room, you pause, leaning on a banister.

What are you doing?

Above you, on a landing, someone stands.

Through the slits in your mask and the goggles over the slits, you only just make out legs in jeans.

It’s a girl.

‘Keith Marion,’ she says.

It’s Mary Yatman. Scary Mary.

The brain-fuzz is gone.

‘It’s nothing you did,’ she says, stepping down. ‘You haven’t given yourself away.’

You make out her huge eyes.

‘It’s just that you’re you, Keith. No getting away from it.’

Suddenly, she darts past you.

Because of your limited field of vision, you have to turn round entirely to see her. It’s like trying to train a pair of binoculars on a piece of driftwood far off in a storm-tossed sea. You hear the doors slam on the ground floor but don’t see Mary go.

* * *

Back in the common room, you assume everyone will now see through you. The disguise will fall apart and you’ll be laughed at for a while, then everyone – and Victoria – will move on to something or someone of more interest.

But Mary has gone without telling on you.

The space beside Victoria is still there. She crooks her finger and smiles. You go to her.

* * *

You would never have thought it could go this far.

It’s nearly midnight and the glass slipper hasn’t dropped yet. At the show, you stand near the stage and watched Flaming Torture. Victoria seems to sing every song at you, eyes always on the white of your mask.

Disco strobe light makes neons of white garments. Kids around gasp as your head shines.

Afterwards, you snuggle with Victoria in the back of Desmond’s car as he drives out to Achelzoy. She’s on a high from performing, a feverish sheen damping her white-face make-up.