Life's Lottery (17 page)

Despite the savage attack of her songs, which all seem to be about violent sex, she’s almost sweet now in her enthusiastic acceptance of approval. As a little girl she took ballet classes, and she was probably like this when her parents applauded her turn in the school show.

You are kissing again and her hands are inside your trenchcoat, stroking your sides. You cup her breast, feeling warmth through your thick glove.

Occasionally, Victoria pulls back, looks into your goggles, shakes her head as if she can’t believe what she’s doing, then returns to you with more passion.

You’ve had an erection for half an hour. You feel as if you’ll explode.

Victoria starts gnawing your neck like a vampire, gripping your jugular with gentle teeth, moistening your mask.

Your forehead presses against the cold car window.

A signpost passes by. Desmond has driven past the Sutton Mallet turn-off.

‘That’s a short cut, isn’t it?’ says Mickey Yeo, in the front passenger seat.

You know it’s not. Sutton Mallet is a dead end.

Victoria’s hand, in a fingerless lace glove, slides over your belly and clamps on your cock.

‘Let’s give it a try,’ says Desmond, pulling the wheel over.

If you let Desmond continue down the Sutton Mallet turn-off, go to 42. If you’re too preoccupied with Victoria’s hand to make a fuss, go to 44.

A
s the car lands in the ditch, your weight is thrown forward awkwardly. The seatbelt, adjusted badly, snaps you back into your seat, suddenly tight across your throat, breaking your neck. You don’t have time for a last thought.

Go to 0.

T
he brief pain is so intense it cancels itself out, spot-burning away all memory of the agony. You’re left with a slight all-over buzz and a white-out. The pain you’ve had and lost can’t have been worse, more panic-making, than the Tipp-Ex blotch on your recent past. It’s like discovering a chunk of your body has been gouged away and lost for ever.

This can’t be helping. No matter what they say.

The pain comes again. You try to hold it this time, to keep it in your mind, but it wipes itself out again. The buzz is more extended and you are physically exhausted, incapable of movement. This white patch is longer, larger, spreading cobweb-strands beyond the area where the pain was, obliterating connected lumps of your memory, your mind. A moment ago, you knew what was happening, had the answers to important questions; now you are in a shade, a fuzzy fug, a nothing zone.

Thick ropes of sticky cord bind your wrists and ankles. Your head is held in a helmet of fast-setting stuff. Recovering from the buzz, you find you can arch your body, raising the small of your back from whatever you are bound to. But your head is fixed. Opaque shields are clamped over your eyes, wiry threads of the helmet weaving around them.

You are Keith Marion.

You can cling to that.

Haven’t you just died?

Or are you trying to misinterpret? To avoid facing the real? You’ve been told that before.

The pain comes again.

Briefly, you’re not sure: who is Keith Marion?

Y
our knuckles hurt. And you’re drunker than you thought. Standing up has made your head fuzzy.

Victoria is still standing but her head is turned round on her neck, almost like Linda Blair’s in
The Exorcist.

The only sounds in the Lime Kiln come from a juke-box burbling ‘Nights in White Satin’ and Rowena dry-heaving in the alley outside.

You rub your sleeve over your face, wiping your eyes.

You see Victoria’s hands hooking into claws. She has sharp, black-painted nails. Her cobweb gloves lack fingertips. She’s going to scratch your eyes out.

Her hands come for your face. You reach for her wrists.

The table between you is pulled out of the way.

You and Victoria almost dance.

You see the amazed faces of other people in the pub. Roger, you think, is envious. Gully, of all people, is appalled. Mary’s face is shut, concealing excitement. Most of the others haven’t been following the plot.

Victoria breaks your hold on her hands and backs off. She isn’t going to fight like a girl.

She punches you in the face and pummels your ribs. Your shoes slip on the spilled beer and you lose your balance.

A few folk cheer.

You get a hold on Victoria’s neck and force her to her knees. Her stiff, sprayed hair sticks into your face. Now she tries to scratch your hands, to make you let go.

She can’t hurt you in this position. But you can’t let her go. You are locked in this violent embrace.

Victoria arches her back, trying to throw you off. Her backbone presses into your groin. She is a warm body.

This
can’t
be a turn-on for you.

Someone is giving a referee’s count. Victoria twists and hisses, like an angry cat. You can’t hold her much longer. But if you let her go, she might well kill you.

The bell clangs for time. Even with the distraction, there is a moan of disappointment.

‘Break it up,’ shouts the barman.

He is coming to stop the fight. You are relieved and wonder if Victoria is.

Rough hands take your arms and pull them away from Victoria’s neck.

‘Should be ashamed of yourself,’ the barman says.

Victoria turns, her face close to you.

‘Tonight,’ she says, whispering so only you can hear.

‘She could have blinded me,’ you say. It sounds feeble.

Bronagh has found a towel and gives it to you. As you wipe beer and blood from your face, you see Victoria – with Mary and Neil at the bar – turn and mouth the word ‘tonight’ at you.

You sit down, uncomfortable with the erection you have sprouted.

What do you think? Is Victoria a promise or a threat? If a promise, read 50 and go to 55. If a threat, read 50 and go to 56.

A
s the car lands in the ditch, your weight is thrown forward awkwardly. You pitch out of your seat – damn fool, you should have taken the trouble with the seatbelt – and thump against the dashboard. Your forehead smacks against the frosted window, shattering it to fragments.

It’s not exactly a blackout. You don’t lose consciousness, really, but your mind fades. All sensations become fuzzy. You wonder if you haven’t broken something major, and this is your brain’s way of coping with it. You are uncomfortable but not in pain. Things seem to itch rather than hurt.

Close objects are in focus. Beyond arm’s reach, everything is a blur.

The cold seeping into the car makes you stir. The fuzziness goes away and you become sharply aware of your circumstances. Your body is crammed between your seat and the dashboard, but your head is stuck through the broken windshield, which seems to have vanished completely. Your feet and legs are wet and chilled. Water from the ditch is up around your thighs.

You are alone.

Where is Mary?

Tentatively, you push against the dashboard, afraid the buckled car has become a trap. The seat behind you moves back easily, sheared from its bolts. It is not heavy, but you have to brace your back and shrug forcibly to heave the thing off you.

With the seat gone, you can crawl through the windshield-frame. Your palm crunches on a line of jagged crystal still in the frame and you grunt in annoyance and pain.

‘Fuck.’

Your own voice sounds impossibly loud. Since the wrench of metal, silence has been marred only by the subtle, steady trickle of water.

You squeeze through the gap and take a careful hold of the car roof, bracing your feet on the sloping bonnet. You’re crouched a foot or so above the water, and your lower body is soaked through. Already, icy air is turning your wet trousers into a biting skin.

There is no sign of Mary.

She’s a maniac, you think. Her monster never went away, just hid in a deep cave. All these years, it’s been waiting for you, waiting to escape. She’s turned into Scary Mary again. This time, for good.

That’s silly. When Shane Bush racked up his moped, you didn’t think he was possessed by Pazuzu. Mary’s just a teenage girl who drinks too much and drives like a silly bugger. Being too bloody clever has made her forget how bloody stupid she can be.

Still, where is she?

You climb carefully out of the ditch. You can see almost nothing. The headlights still burn underwater, making ghostly pools of gleam in the ditch. But the moon is covered by cloud. You are between villages, miles from street-lighting or central-heated houses. In the ditch, the headlights hiss out.

You’ve climbed on to the far bank of the ditch, away from the road. You feel the effort in your knees and arms. You have been cut in a half-dozen places, on your hands and face. Blood flows slowly, either freezing or clotting. You realise your teeth are chattering and think distantly of exposure and hypothermia.

It would be easy to sit down and sleep, wait for dawn and rescue. Even before then, someone must pass by and see where Mary’s Honda went into the ditch. There should be many cars going back and forth to and from Michael’s party. You can’t see your non-luminous watch-face but it can’t even be midnight. Which means that it’s a long eight hours till light, and it’ll get colder before it gets warm. By morning, the car will be ice-locked.

You’re worried about Mary. You’re not sure, though, whether you fear for her safety or fear her.

You try to call her name, but just croak. You try again, more successfully.

‘Mary…’

If it were light, you would probably be able to see the marks of her escape from the car. She’s probably staggered off into the field and curled up. She may be hurt more seriously than you. She might have slammed into the steering-wheel, crushing her chest. Was she wearing
her
seatbelt? You think so. When you kissed her, she was held in her seat. You remember the strap against her shoulder.

She let you touch her breast.

Now she’s gone.

‘Keith.’

You jump, heart knotting.

Looking around, you make her out. She stands by the wonky signpost.

‘Mary?’

She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.

‘Are you all right?’

A flame flares, brighter than a sunspot. You blink. Mary has a pocket lighter. Odd. You didn’t think she smoked. There is so much you don’t know about her. Your hand remembers the warmth of her breast. Your face remembers the flick of her tongue.

You were doing well. Until the ditch.

In the flamelight, Mary’s face is overexposed, like a bad snapshot. Her eyes are dark holes. Her lips have lost their red.

The signpost reads
SUTTON MALLET 1
/
2 MILE
. Beyond Mary is a turn-off, leading to a tiny hamlet. Sutton Mallet is the Somerset equivalent of a ghost town, mostly uninhabited since the ’50s, a few broken-down cottages and old barns. But the sign is fresh-painted, proud.

‘Come here,’ she says.

She’s alive. You want to hug her. Perhaps you can rub warmth into each other, tend each other’s wounds. Mary doesn’t seem hurt, not even scratched. But she might be a jumble of broken bones and ruptured organs.

You step towards her, freeze, and totter at the edge of the ditch. You almost stepped off the bank. You would have fallen into the water.

Mary giggles.

You stagger back, away from the edge.

‘Fooled youm,’ she says, flicking off the flame.

This is dizzying. As the lighter goes out, shadows spring up and surround Mary. Lightsquiggles writhe on the surfaces of your eyeballs. You still see burn-through where the flame was, a dancing phantom after-light.

For an instant, you thought Mary was not alone. Shadow-spiders stood behind her, closing round her when the light went away. In her darkness, Mary has company. On your side of the ditch, you are alone.

Still, you should go to her.

The ditch is too wide to jump. You could wade it, but that would mean dipping your legs in freezing water, sinking your feet into undisturbed mud and filth. Maybe you could climb across the car, but that doesn’t seem a good idea. There are jagged metal edges. In films, crashed cars explode.

Mary might toss her lighter into the car as you are perched on top of it. She could warm herself by the fireball, suck in the smell of you cooking.

‘There’m a gate up the way,’ Mary says.

Wherever there is a gate, there is a bridge over the ditch, for the cattle to cross.

‘Are you sure?’

You don’t trust her any more.

‘Why’d I lie, Keith?’

Why would she?

She flicks the light, merely for a moment, holding it up. At the blurred edge of your vision there is indeed a gate. On the moor, fields are separated by ditches rather than hedges. Even by day, some of the bridges are hard to see from quite close up, marked only by tufts of long grass growing where planks have been set in concrete lumps.

‘Come on.’

Mary is already walking towards the gate. Her boot-heels click on the gritty road.

A car speeds by. You wave your arms but Mary stands aside to let it pass. The driver honks his horn. You shout out for it to stop but are ignored. You think it was Desmond’s car, full of kids on their way to the party.

Why didn’t Mary flag it down?

The sweep of the headlamps briefly scattered light across the field. Besides the gate, which is nearby, you see a row of tall, thin trees at the far side. The field is empty, but the shadows of the trees waver with the passing carlight, as if beckoning. A small voice of panic shrieks inside.

You walk, keeping parallel with Mary. Just now, you are grateful for the ditch between you.

She sings to herself, cheerfully, ‘Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said good-bye to the cir-
cussss
’.

Her voice is as clear and high as a six-year-old’s. You hadn’t known that about Mary. That she could sing. Almost as well as Victoria.

What are the spidery shadows that accompany Mary? Why are you alone?

The gate is only feet away. When you get there, you can swing round it and be on the road. You’ll be with Mary and the shadow-spiders, but the next car will stop. You can make sure of that.