Life's Lottery (45 page)

Every time Hackwill gets his picture in the paper – about every week – you see James in the background, often cropped just to an ear or an arm.

You’re working too hard to worry about James and Hackwill. Obviously, it’s got personal.

It’s not just the work, the rearrangements, the sacrifices. It’s the twins. All that guff about parenthood. It’s true. J and J are a constant delight, even when screaming and shitting. You’re besotted with them. You never make an equation in your mind between having the twins and not having adventures. Parenthood is a huge, draining, rewarding adventure.

Katie Reed – who campaigned for birth control and called motherhood tyranny – is less of a presence in your home. Chris has decreed your lives should not end with the coming of J and J, but they absorb so much attention, so much enthusiasm. You look at your children and think, ‘We made them.’ You have never been happier. You finally think of yourself as a grown-up. You discover maturity by crawling around gurgling wordless love at these wonderful arrivals.

Mum phones to say James is in hospital. He was set on in the street by two men in balaclavas with cricket bats. All very professional.

You want to go down to Somerset at once.

But…

You look at the babies and know they need you here, now.

You try to phone James in hospital but can’t get through. It’s Hackwill. You know it is. And you are out of it.

* * *

James gets out of hospital. Mum reports that he’ll be all right once he’s got used to the crutches. Your brother talks with you only briefly.

‘It’s all down to me, Keith,’ he says. ‘I’ll make sure your family is out of it.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ you say, knowing how stupid that sounds.

‘I won’t,’ he says. ‘I’ll do something effective.’

The next cutting you receive reports a fire at Hackwill’s home. In a picture, Hackwill surveys the damage, with his wife, Helen. James is in the crowd. An upper room has exploded, making a black hole in the mock-Tudor eaves. The fire took hold in Hackwill’s gunroom and detonated a cache of shotgun shells. Samantha, the councillor’s small daughter, is in hospital, eardrums damaged by the explosion. Her room was next to the fire.

You tell Chris you’re worried about James.

Juanita has an infection. You lose a couple of nights to real worry, listening to her breathe through a fistful of phlegm. You contemplate losing everything. Juanita’s chest clears up.

* * *

A petrol bomb is thrown into Phil Parslowe’s shop, destroying his entire stock, shutting down his business. There’s some insurance but not enough. The bank won’t help and insists Phil and Mum keep up mortgage payments on the house in Sutton Mallet. You can’t believe Sean is treating his old boss’s wife, his almost-mother-in-law, like this. But Sean, as James says, is Hackwill’s fuckbuddy.

Interest rates hike again. You have to take extra classes to meet your own mortgage. Chris has to do proofreading and indexing jobs for her academic publishers, who have long since given up expecting the promised delivery of
Katie Reed
, and the twins wring every extra ounce of energy out of you. Life is divided between drudgery and bliss; the latter earned only by an excess of the former.

Reg Jessup is beaten ‘within an inch of his life’ and dumped on the Corn Exchange steps. Hackwill vows the culprit will be caught and claims rampant lawlessness in Sedgwater will be wiped out. ‘There’s a new sheriff in town,’ he claims, ‘and outlaws are drinking in the Last Chance Saloon.’

Joseph gets an ear infection and you think you’ll die. It clears up. You know joy.

* * *

One night, late, your telephone rings.

‘Keith Marion?’ The voice is male, flat, neutral.

‘Yes.’

‘Control your family. Or lose members of it.’

Click. Hang-up.

The ringing has woken one of the twins, who wakes the other. Chris, bleary and scraggle-haired, clamps one to each breast – a lovely sight – and gives herself to them.

You are awake, cold and terrified.

Control your family

James.

or lose members of it.

The twins.

‘What is it, love?’ your wife asks.

‘Trouble,’ you say.

You can go to it or wait for it to come to you.

* * *

Reg Jessup dies.

If you go to Somerset to protect your family, go to 118. If you stay in London to protect your family, go to 127.

I
n 1982, the week after your father’s funeral, you’re in Sedgwater, hurrying to the Lime Kiln. You’ve arranged to meet friends you haven’t seen in a while. The country is about to go to war over the Falklands. From the Corn Exchange steps, a shaggy, outsize young man harangues passers-by. You slow down and recognise Timmy Gossett, but don’t know whether he’s drunk or, in the playground expression, ‘mental’. He wears a green army-surplus coat two sizes too small for him and thick-lensed NHS specs fixed at one corner with masking-tape. The knees of his jeans hang at least six inches lower than his actual knees. He is shouting, ‘Fuck the Argies.’ You know he won’t remember you, but a tiny worm of guilt has burrowed in your heart ever since Paul made you play ‘Timmy’s Germs’. Sometimes it’s quiet for five or six years; sometimes it’s active enough to lose you a night’s sleep to a fretful, gnawing pain. When you were nine, you picked up a sense of Sin. Now, as Timmy lurches towards you, you want to try to set things right. But saying sorry will never be enough. You also know it truly wasn’t your fault. Timmy never realised you had a choice, may not even have noticed you passing on the germs to Vanda. You were never a ringleader in ‘Timmy’s Germs’, just one of the followers. You only went along with it, like all the good Germans in the war. Now Timmy grabs your shoulders and you smell his breath. What has he been drinking, shoe polish? ‘Fuck the Argies,’ he shouts. ‘Fuck the Argies!’ Timmy falls over, tripping on something invisible. You have backed against the bank your father used to manage. Timmy, screaming his mantra so that you can’t make out the words any more, crawls away, leaving a foamy spittle trail on the pavement. Timmy’s germs.

Read 7, and go to 8.

A
wonderful night ends.

Vic’s face is wet with happy tears.

You are pleased with yourself. You think you have persuaded her to stay.

But she goes.

For a week, you don’t think of other women. You pass up certain scores. You think only of Vic.

But she leaves town.

For ever.

* * *

After a month, it really starts constricting.

To prove to yourself that it doesn’t matter, you start pulling again. Even more frenzied than before, you are bolder, harsher, wilder.

Mostly, you fuck girls. Teenagers. Clever girls, a bit neurotic, impatient with boys their own age, hot ice in bed.

You like people to see you with the girls. You hope it will get back to her.

Out of bed, your girls seem to talk a foreign language. They listen to music you don’t know, they have a different culture. Sometimes, they indulge your oldie ways, as if you were a grandfather.

But in bed, you are the savage master.

* * *

Years pass. Not a man who knows you doesn’t, on some level, envy you. Every time, a new temp or student observer succumbs to you, colleagues groan with admiration and jealousy.

You see Vic on television, sometimes, or read pieces about her in
The Independent.
For a poet, she has become quite famous. She writes a novel,
Neon Spiral.
You read it, certain it’s about you, but can’t connect with the world of her fictional characters. It makes you angry that you should impinge so little on her that you don’t even figure as a trace element in the world of her imagination.

But there are still girls. And you are still on course.

* * *

You slow down and settle for lengthy, overlapping liaisons. For the first time, the girls – young enough to be your daughters, but still in their thirties – seem like mistresses. You enter into a sort of domesticity with several, but eventually they move on.

There are always other prospects.

* * *

You read that Vic has married a television producer. You see pictures of their ideal home and messy kids in
Hello!
magazine. You think her husband looks a bit like you. You feel superior to him. You had her first. The next bloke just had her last.

She keeps her promise and never gets in touch with you.

You actually get married. Three times. You even remember their names: Emma, Marietta, Aisla. Three-quarters of the women you have slept with have had names ending in ‘a’.

You don’t suffer for your lifestyle. You don’t get herpes or AIDS or any other venereal disease. No jealous husband or boyfriend or angry father comes after you with a pitchfork or a shotgun.

None of them gets pregnant. That probably means you’re infertile. You don’t like the thought of that. But there it is.

You wonder if Vic’s son is yours. No, the dates don’t work. Not by years.

Of course, your physical capabilities diminish. But you never fail. You take a less fiery approach, but can compensate for the occasional limpness of your penis with dexterous fingers and an expert tongue.

You can always satisfy your girls. And yourself.

So what’s wrong? Why do you feel you’ve made a mistake you would give anything to unpick?

* * *

I’m sorry, Keith. There’s nowhere to go from here. Except, eventually…

Go to 0.

T
he heat tells you at once that this is the summer of 1976. In your life, the first major lull. You were just out of school, on the dole, not yet seeing Marie-Laure, doing odd jobs for your parents, hanging around, drifting.

If you’d had any gumption, you’d have founded punk. But you didn’t.

* * *

You’re sitting outside Brink’s Café, alone, reading an
Amazon Queen
comic. A Mediterranean sun shines down and Somerset folk walk by in short-sleeved shirts and floppy hats, transformed by a quirk of the weather.

You’d forgotten the physical weight of the heat.

Also, you’d not noticed the gradual softening of your body. Here you are without a gut bulge. You feel almost strong. You’re young, sixteen. You absorb strength with the heat.

Despite what the Sex Pistols will say, you know there’s going to be a future, even if it will belong to Margaret Thatcher, Sean Rye, Ayatollah Khomeini, Rob Hackwill.

Maybe you can change that.

You don’t think you could get it together to assassinate Thatcher. Besides, you’re not sure taking her out of history wouldn’t leave space for someone worse.

Don’t think about the world. Think about Keith Marion.

You’re going nowhere in this town. But maybe that can be changed.

If you stay in Sedgwater, go to 178. If you leave, go to 180.

B
y 1997, you’ve forgotten the filing cabinet. Of course, you remember Sean’s spectacular rise in the world of investment; and even more spectacular crash. Tristram Warwick, Sean’s successor as bank manager, still makes jokes about going ballistic.

The bank is a different animal now. The staff has been down-sized by replacing almost all the cashiers with machines. Tris and Candy run practically everything, abetted by a computer whizz called Kate who isn’t yet twenty. The sort of advice your father used to give is downloaded from head office. Rather than talk to clients to get a sense of what they really mean when they apply for a small business loan or a mortgage, you have them fill in a detailed form which is analysed to a strict grid. People don’t really come into it.

Your duties now include stuffing the cash machines. You even make the tea two times out of three. You aren’t that old but feel like an anachronism.

* * *

At home, you’ve been through several struggles. Vanda admitted during a row four years ago that she had an affair with Sean. The knowledge always hangs between you. Actually, you get along as well as most old married couples.

Jason and Jesse are sullen teenagers with bursts of brightness. Your son spends all his time building universes on his computer – when not complaining you don’t give him enough pocket money to upgrade tech to keep pace with his friends – and your daughter is a fashion-plate who wants to have her nipples pierced before she even needs a bra. They’re both at Ash Grove, which seems a much better school these days than it was when you were there.

The house has subsidence problems that drain any money put aside against a new car or a holiday or clothes for Jesse or software for Jason. It’s been three years since you decorated.

You’ve been at the bank too long to be fired. Staff has been cut back well beyond the bone. But you’re not going anywhere. Tris has a job for life. If he were struck by divine lightning, the obvious choice to replace him would be Candy. And Kate probably comes after her, even if she wears a nose-stud.

You and Vanda have put on a stone every three years since your marriage. All your shirts are tight across the gut, with missing buttons. And Vanda stretches side-seams whenever she puts on jeans. You feel like a set of those wobble-bottom toys that bounce back when knocked over. But you don’t know if you could bounce back and you aren’t sure you’d want to.

You find yourself watching a lot of television.
Baywatch, Noel’s House Party, Gladiators, EastEnders, The X-Files, One Foot in the Grave, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Vanda would like a satellite dish, but money is tight. Jason would like a whole new computer. He claims he’s working on the heuristic equivalent of a bone-shaker bicycle in the jet age. Jesse wants a pink leather catsuit. She’s decided at twelve that her role models in life are the
Avengers
girls.

There’s severe damp in the kitchen. The car is choking.

Tris goes to Venice and Morocco for his holidays, Candy and her partner have a villa in Tuscany, and Kate is always zooming off to Florida and Macao. Two years ago, you took the ferry and did a weekend in French supermarkets.