Life's Lottery (31 page)

‘You see, my lines swirl the other way.’

She hands you the felt-tip pen.

‘Give it a try.’

You worry that you’re being set up. This is how Columbo gets Patrick McGoohan into the gas chamber. Is your thumb-print on a murder weapon sealed in a plastic bag at the police station?

It’s hard for you even to hold the Magic Marker against your left thumb. Your face must be screwed up with the pain. You manage to stab ink across the ball and stick it on the paper between Mary’s print and the anonymous thumb’s.

Mary examines the print.

‘That’s odd,’ she says. ‘That’s not supposed to happen.’

She gives you the paper. Of the three thumb-prints, two are identical. The odd one out is hers.

Read 13, and then come back here.

* * *

The pain has faded. Now you just have strange circles of ache, like invisible rings, at the roots of your fingers and thumb. The skin of your fingers looks distinctly unhealthy, grey and dry, with a greenish undertinge. You have only the echo of feeling in your fingertips. Your left hand feels entirely useless.

Mary has left the impossible piece of paper with you.

You’ve been thinking. The fingers were not an offering, but an attack. Something has been done to you.

It’s like a curse.

You go into the bank on Sunday and go through all the files, considering each of your overdrafts. The bank has called in a few mortgages, especially on small farms in the area. None of the debtors seems the sort to have
supernatural
resources.

No other word will do.

This is not the world you were used to, though it still looks the same, with
Independence Day
on video and a rowing-machine in the kitchen. This is a world where curses work.

As you go through the files, you try not to use your left hand. Before this, you never considered how much you rely on having two hands. Even as a confirmed rightie, you need the less capable hand to hold things open, to give support, to provide balance.

If your left hand drops off, how will you wash your right?

You extend the range of your checking and look through all your correspondence over the last year. Maybe the cause of all this is in an overdraft you
approved.
For someone, a sudden cash injection could lead to disaster.

Nothing.

Ro phones and asks if you’ll be coming home for dinner. Her parents are expected.

‘I have to sort this out.’

‘You should have married that bank.’

‘This is not about the bank. It’s about me.’

‘If you say so, dear.’

Your family are worried about you, but pretending everything is all right. They live in a world where curses don’t work and everything has a rational explanation.

Psychosomatic pain.

The dead phone buzzes as you put it down.

The bank is completely empty. You don’t have the keys and computer codes to get into the vault, but you could open up the back of the cash machine. It’s Kate’s job to keep the automated dispenser stocked up with thick wedges of notes. Thousands of pounds.

If you wanted money, you could get it.

Kate would be blamed. You could force the locks, and claim to have found them that way when you came in this morning.

Kate’s boyfriend has pierced eyebrows and rides a motorbike. He’s probably in with a hippie convoy. Just the sort to pull a silly job and vanish.

You’ve often fantasised about ways of robbing the bank. Towards the end of his life, Dad admitted he had too. You suspect everyone who works in a bank thinks about robbery, thinks about an inside job. It’s just that very few get desperate enough to do anything.

Would you be able to escape Mary? Detective Sergeant Scary Mary? Avon and Somerset’s own Mrs Columbo?

You look at your left hand. The palm is pinkly healthy, a little flushed, but the fingers and thumb could have been dipped in grey grease. You move each digit in turn, and find that the last two fingers don’t respond. You can make a fist, but can’t move your ring and little fingers by themselves. You concentrate, straining to shift the fingers, then snap and bend them down with your other hand. They feel cold and unhealthy, like sausages left too long in the fridge.

Stolen money won’t help. Doctors won’t help. The police won’t help. Psychiatry won’t help.

You’re under a curse.

You sweep the telephone off your desk and it crashes on to the floor, spilling the receiver, buzzing like an insect. You stamp on it until it is silent and in pieces.

Violence makes you feel a little better.

‘There now,’ you say. ‘I’ve sacrificed the telephone. Does that satisfy you?’

I HOPE THIS SATISFIES YOU. IT
’
S NOT A POUND OF FLESH, BUT IT
’
S A START
.

There’s a framed picture of Ro and the kids on your desk. The frame is heavy, a present two Christmases ago. Rowena is thinner in the picture, but a bulge is beginning to show all round her face.

You drop the picture on the floor and smash your heel down on to it.

Another sacrifice.

* * *

You make no pretence that this is not an inside job. You use your keys to get into the back of the machine. The Saturday shopping rush has depleted the stacks of notes, but there are still fistfuls of cash in the press, clamped like staples inside a stapler.

Without thinking, you use your left hand to shut the machine as you use your right hand to put your keys back into your pocket.

You leave a finger on the handle.

The break doesn’t look like a chop-wound; it’s as if your hand were a tree grown brittle and your forefinger a snapped-off twig.

A little fluid leaks from the stump.

You make a fist around the emptiness where the finger should be. When you straighten out your hand, the little finger falls off.

There is no pain.

But you feel yourself falling into a chasm. You whirl around the cashiers’ area, screaming. Not since primary school have you thrown a fit like this. You’re possessed by panic. You have lost it entirely.

Nothing helps. You don’t expect screaming to help. It doesn’t even make you feel better. You exhaust yourself, flailing about.

No one comes. Sedgwater High Street is empty on Sunday.

You throw scales and stools at the wall. You smash the clocks. You toss bundles of notes in the air and let them flutter around you.

You lose your ring finger.

Drained and sobbing, you curl up on the floor. Eventually, the fit peters out.

You have only your middle finger and your thumb left. You snap them off yourself, to get it over with.

It takes a while to gather all the fingers, which have dropped all over the floor. Your ring finger rolled under a desk. As you find your digits, you sweep up the notes, piling them in a heap in the middle of the floor. You drop the fingers into the nest of cash.

From your own office, you fetch a book of matches. The bank is a no-smoking branch, but you keep matches for the sealing wax you have to use on legal documents.

This is a proper sacrifice. You hope it will put an end to the business.

The money burns easily, but the fingers just shrivel and blacken. You squat cross-legged by the fire, a wilderness man warming himself. A stench wisps up. The cash wriggles into hot ash, metal strips curling like magnesium flares.

As the fire dies, you calm down.

You have no fingers on your left hand. It could have been worse, you think. You could have been sent a severed penis.

* * *

The next morning, you stay home from the bank. You will soon suffer the consequences of your sacrifice. The children bustle off to school, and Ro is still angry you missed dinner with her parents. Your family avoid looking at your bundled-up left hand. They’ve got used to your craze.

You’re alone in your house when the postman rings the bell, with another package. A whole sheet of Christmas stamps is pasted to it, crowding out your name and home address. The label still calls you ‘
OVERDRAFT OFFICER
’.

This is bigger than the last one. The box inside could hold a basketball.

It is difficult, with only one set of fingers, to open the parcel. Eventually, steadying the thing with your bandaged hand and sawing with a kitchen knife, you manage it. You lift out unread the covering letter and recognise the face nestled in scrunched-up newspaper. You think, for a moment, you have been sent a mirror.

And so on.

M
onday, 23 February 1998. If you’d thought it through, you’d have written the note, addressed the parcel and stuck on the stamps before you chopped off your fingers. Since you’re right-handed, you should be able to accomplish these minor tasks without using the fingers of your left hand – now unavailable to you – but you’d somehow not reckoned with the pain.

To write the note, for instance, you don’t just have to put biro to paper and print the letters. You have to hold the paper in place on the table as you write. You instinctively bring your left hand round and press down, getting blood all over the paper, prompting another yelp. You abandon this first attempt.

The fingers are in the box.

That’s done.

But the rest of it. You feel it has to be perfect. The overdraft officer will expect no less,
deserves
no less.

You sit back and try to make the pain go away. It feels as if all the nails of your left hand are being slowly pulled out with hot pincers. Five individual throbs of pain under the nails, lesser aches in all nine knuckles.

That’s strange. The parts that hurt aren’t connected to you any more. The stumps, which leak quite a lot, aren’t painful. The blood is inconvenient. If you continue working on the parcel, you’ll get blood over everything and ruin the gesture.

You search the kitchen for something to staunch the flow.

It might have been better just to chop off your whole hand. Then you’d only have one big stump to cope with.

You wrap your left hand with a J Cloth, which soaks at once, then jam a rubber washing-up glove over the mess, rolling it over your wrist like a big pink condom. Air is trapped in the fingers of the glove, which fatten and extend.

It still hurts, but won’t bleed on anything else.

* * *

You can’t afford to think about how you got here.

There was a time, five years ago, when you were out of the shade. You’d almost got to the point when you could stop thinking of yourself as an estate agent and claim to be a property developer. Through a strategic alliance with Councillor Robert Hackwill and McKinnell the Builder, you were in on the ground floor of the Discount Development, an in-town shopping centre that remains half-built on the site of the old Denbeigh Gardens.

You re-mortgaged your own house to buy into the scheme.

For an estate agent, that’s the equivalent of violating the drug-dealer’s code of ‘Never get high on your own supply.’ But profit was certain. The deal was done. You were a comer, a master, a power.

Rowena never pushed you, but was happy to come along for the ride. She was still buying things for the house, even the week before she left. The kids, Jamie and Jillian, never wanted for anything. They must be resentful now, cooped up in Rowena’s parents’ spare room.

The Discount Development turned out to be an inflated promise. Crucial land purchases and planning permissions were not secured. The month after Tony Blair’s election victory, Labour Central Office sent a hit squad down to Sedgwater and suspended the local party apparatus. Hackwill was replaced on the council, and seems likely to face criminal charges.

You had not lied to the bank deliberately. But you passed on lies told to you. The prospectus, professionally printed and heavy with detailed figures, remained an impressive piece of work.

It had to be your dad’s old bank. And it had to be Sean, Laraine’s old boyfriend. You remember Sean, the overdraft officer, as a toadying teenager, telling you to slow down. Now he’s clamped to your neck, squeezing, sucking.

You’ve been told you’ve been treated generously because of your father’s memory. Anyone else would have been foreclosed many months ago.

Is Sean enjoying this? Of course he is.

He never forgave Laraine for chucking him and going off with that hippie. He has hated the whole Marion family ever since. Even at Dad’s funeral, he was snickering behind his mask of sham grief.

* * *

When Jeffrey Archer made a bad investment and found himself cataclysmically in debt, he whipped up a best-selling novel and with one bound was free. You don’t think that’s an option open to you. And it’s unlikely that you could get away with a John Stonehouse-Reggie Perrin disappearing act.

All you can hope for is to appease the Gods of Money with an offering of flesh. It’ll make a nice late valentine for Sean. With love from the Marion family.

* * *

I HOPE THIS SATISFIES YOU
, you print.
IT’S NOT A POUND OF FLESH, BUT IT’S A START.

The floppy-fingered paw you have made of your left hand is expert now at holding things down. You hold the tennis-ball box against the table, three-quarters projecting over the edge, and wind Sellotape round and round, burying the box in a transparent thickness.

Objectively, it’s quite a neat job.

How many stamps? Normally, with a small package, you’d go down to the post office and have it weighed, paying only the correct postage. Understandably, you can’t be doing with the bother now.

Four first-class stamps. That should do it. The package isn’t especially heavy. There are jolly Christmas stamps in the Useful Things drawer. You use six stamps, just to be on the safe side.

You don’t want to keep Sean, might-have-been brother-in-law, waiting too long. He’s told you he wants this matter settled.

* * *

Sean always rubs it in with a few preliminary questions, presuming on his long-ago relationship with your family to ask after Rowena and the kids, after your mother, even after James. The giveaway is that he never,
ever
, asks after Laraine. If the old wound were healed, he’d be able to ask about her. But he avoids the subject, revealing beyond a shadow of a doubt that his hatred is still bleeding and fresh.