Life's Lottery (46 page)

You watch television and you want things. Cars. Clothes. Gadgets. Homes. Laughs. Women.

It’s more than want. It’s
need.

Gradually, the dull throb of need grows to become an all-consuming agony. The defining emotion of your middle age is covetousness.

* * *

When you dream out loud, you always preface your aspirations with ‘When I win the lottery’.

Since the National Lottery started, you’ve been playing.

Every week, you’re sure you’ll win.

Every week, your hopes are dashed.

Jesse, who has a mind for numbers and odds, keeps a running tally of expenses and income on the Lottery. You do win £10 from time to time, even £100 once, but that’s not winning.

A million pounds. That’s winning.

Eight million pounds roll-over jackpot. That’s winning properly.

* * *

When you win the Lottery, you will be able to have everything. This you know with fierce, zealous certainty.

You believe in the Lottery because you have to.

Anthea Turner is your high priestess. Mystic Meg is a conduit to heaven. They speak to you from the screen. Dale Winton, Bob Monkhouse, Carol Smillie. They are your friends. You will win.

It is a matter of time. When you are without sin, you will win. You will receive your reward here on Earth.

* * *

People say you’re more likely to inherit a vast sum of money from a hitherto-unknown millionaire relative or even to find a suitcase full of unmarked notes thrown into the garden than you are to win the National Lottery. It is more probable that a jumbo jet will crash into your house or a spider of ice will close its legs round your heart than it is that the animated Hand of God will sprinkle stardust on your head.

You are a mug. Like all the other mugs.

But you have a sinking house and a swelling gut and a wavering job and a drifting family, and you
need.

The
need
is everything.

* * *

It’s Jesse’s job to divine the numbers. You don’t play the same combinations every week.

You are the spiritual side. Jesse handles the logic. Jason even develops a program to help you.

The odds are long.

But you have faith.

* * *

For the first thousand years in the bottle, the genie vowed the man who let him out would be richly rewarded for his charity. For the next thousand, he swore the man who let him out would be tortured beyond endurance for waiting so long. That’s roughly how you feel. Love, reverence and veneration of the presenters of the Lottery and the celebrities who pick the balls turn into resentment, hatred and distrust.

Each week, they rob you of your right.

Their sparkly smiles and cobweb-spun hair and spangly dresses and indecent trousers and nervous shuffles and plugged books-films-albums-shows are all a decaying dazzle, increasingly failing to disguise the Evil.

They are against you. You will never win. They conspire in their tinsel lairs. They are so far above you.

But these are dark thoughts you must banish. Your win must be earned. You try again to love the Lottery.

Each week, you play. Each week.

* * *

In all likelihood, this is the rest of your life. There should be an And so on here.

Jason and Jesse grow up and leave. You get early retirement. You get a coronary. You die.

Go to 0.

And each week, you have played the Lottery.

You are a dead mug.

* * *

However…

* * *

Take a pack of cards, remove the Jokers,
shuffle well
, and deal four hands of thirteen cards each.

If you have dealt perfect individual suits of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds…

…and if the one-eyed jacks jump out of their suits and squirt cider in your ears…

…go to 168.

A
part from the other thing (the i-word), you’ve never had an affair with a married woman before. One of the advantages of the freelance life is that it leaves daytimes open for sexual pursuit. Laraine can’t do mornings because a char comes in to clean the house, but her housewife afternoons are usually unspoken-for. How do people with regular jobs handle adultery? Lies about weekend conferences and evening meetings?

By concentrating on scheduling mechanics when you’re not actually in bed, you and Laraine manage to avoid dealing with the i-word issue. It never quite fades from your mind but the fact that your lover – mistress? – is also your sister starts to seem less important. For the first time, you’re in sync with Laraine, caught up in her world.

She will have to leave Sean.

You knew it as soon as she said he hit her. She’s slowly catching up with you.

In bed, she tells you about her marriage from the inside. Your body is rigid with anger as she calmly recounts the details of her husband’s rages, pinches and slaps that became punches and knocks.

He has progressed from fists to that old public-school special, the bar of soap wrapped in a towel like a rupee in a thuggee scarf. You wonder if Sean picked it up from his good-bloke mate Councillor Hackwill. He calls the soap-and-towel flail his ‘bitch-buster’.

Somewhere, you opened a door. Now you’re frightened, excited and angered by what you see. There’s another door ahead; an even more extreme one. You’re on the path to that other door.

Laraine tells you that when Sean is in a real state – the financing of the Discount Development is coming apart at the seams – he comes home, goes to the bathroom to get the soap and towel, then stalks the house singing nonsense lyrics to the
Ghostbusters
theme, with the chorus ‘Who you gonna call? Bitch-
buster
!’ Then, he beats Laraine bloody and rapes her.

You open the door.

‘Larry, we’re going to have to kill him.’

‘Yes.’

You hug, naked but chaste. You’re joined in this purpose.

* * *

This is not your field. James would just have brought a gun home from work and shot Sean in the head. No fuss, no frills. End of story. Then, admittedly, it’d have been up to you to sort out the mess.

You sit in the kitchen with your sister, over Nescafé and bourbon biscuits, and talk about murdering her husband.

Actually, it’s not so much the murder itself that’s the problem. It’s what to do with the body. If you dispose of it so that it’s never found, the story is that Sean has upped and run away. If you make a play of finding it, the story has to be that someone else killed him.

Which of these stories works for you?

If you opt for the hide-the-body plan, go to 126. If you favour the someone-else-as-murderer scheme, go to 134.

I
t’s very unpleasant. You have to go through the story over and over. For Tristram Warwick, the acting manager. For Inspector Draper and WPC Yatman. For many lawyers. For the press. In court.

There are always sticky patches. You have to admit Sean proposed you be his partner, and told you he was going to part-finance his investments with ‘petty cash’. The business about Candy’s paper-clip locksmith skills always sounds suspicious.

Warwick thinks you should have whistle-blown on Sean as soon as he made his proposal. You can’t explain why you didn’t.

It’s worst for Vanda. She and Ro are best friends. Ro, Sean’s co-defendant, has a sort of breakdown. She takes to phoning your house, alternately apologising to and abusing whoever answers the phone. Sometimes, it’s the kids.

You have to have the number changed. But you can’t move house. Sean and Ro are arrested but not remanded to prison. As non-violent criminals, they get bail easily and walk around free.

Sean avoids you but Ro tries to come over. She pleads with Vanda.

You don’t know if your wife thinks you’ve done the right thing. If you’d gone in with Sean, you’d all be rich and nobody would be charged with anything.

Sean keeps maintaining he would have paid back every penny.

It’s the forged signatures that convict him. He never says who forged them.

Sean gets three years and will be eligible for parole in nine months. Ro gets a suspended sentence.

There’s an enormous fuss but the crimes aren’t thought to be very serious. Who was hurt?

Sean liquidates his empire and pays back the bank. When he gets out of jail, he’ll still be wealthy. Some of the bank’s customers try to sue him privately, alleging his profits should be theirs since he effectively roped them in on investments.

You come out of it with the beginnings of an ulcer.

At the bank, under Warwick’s managership, everything you do is checked three times. The things that are remembered are a) you were told what Sean was going to do before he did it and didn’t make a noise, and b) you broke into the manager’s office for some suspect reason and rooted through the files.

The office is restructured. You are no longer in charge of loans but act in an advisory capacity, which means you don’t get to approve or write out cheques. Three days a week, you have to serve behind the counter.

Warwick sometimes asks you to make tea. The Shearer loan is extended, though Kay Shearer has cost the bank more than Sean Rye. Tristram Warwick turns out to be a close friend of Mr Shearer.

Vanda complains about the car.

* * *

Sean gets out of jail and moves to London, where he buys a huge house. He sells his story to the
Daily Comet
, and becomes a wide-boy icon of the late ’80s. Each time the market crashes, he is the pundit called to discuss the implications on television. He publishes a run of best-selling ‘how to’ guides to the market, explaining that the small-investing David can often best the corporate Goliath. In a
Hello!
magazine feature in the ’90s, you see Sean at home with his new wife, a nineteen-year-old model with lips the size of a doughnut, relaxing and grinning.

Interest rates really put the squeeze on you, and Warwick rigidly enforces a policy of non-favouritism. After the Sean affair, no employee is ever going to get the better of the bank. You keep the house only by struggling, with Vanda going back to work at the DSS.

Your ulcers grow, eating away at your gut.

* * *

Only once does Vanda say what she really thinks: ‘Why did you have to blow the whistle?’

If she doesn’t understand, you can’t explain.

‘Sean would have looked out for his friends,’ she says.

You grapple with what your wife is trying to tell you. Your stomach burns.

* * *

Candy is promoted over you. Assistant manager. She’s taken courses, and is up to speed in the new world of computer and telephone banking. A kindly woman, she does as much as she can to help you out, often making you look better.

Your salary barely keeps place with inflation. Each morning, you fill the cash machines. Millions of pounds run through your fingers every month. You remember Dad’s old fantasies of robbing the bank. And laugh, sadly.

You get middle-aged. Your kids leave home, get married, have kids. You’re offered early retirement. You are a martyr to your stomach. As a retirement present, Candy – the manager – pays off the last of your mortgage. Vanda can quit work too. You get old. Your stomach gets worse. You sell the house, buy a smaller cottage.

Tristram Warwick gets AIDS and dies. Sean is on his fourth marriage and third Channel 5 series. Candy has a baby with her partner, the old paper-clip rogue. Ro is in a rest-home abroad. The bank is mostly virtual, customers jacking in or slotting cards in walls. No one seems to work there.

Operations don’t help. You assume your ulcers will kill you. But they don’t. Angina does.

Go to 0.

Y
ou can’t believe you have such impulses. Even if you don’t act on them, their existence is disturbing. You were talking about rules, inflexible rules. Men who break them lose rights.

You try to act as if you were Laraine’s father, not her brother, not… not whatever else you might be, not a man. You stand up, give her your hankie, and stride about the room, making declamatory statements.

You say you’ll sort Sean out.

That terrifies Laraine. ‘No, you’ve got to go. If you say anything, it’ll be worse for me. Worse than you can imagine.’

It’s late in the afternoon.

If you stay and confront Sean, go to 143. If you go and leave Laraine, go to 156.

‘
D
ad, this is a surprise.’

Jasper is sat back in his hoverchair, gloved up and doing the invisible origami that replaced keystrokes and the mousepad a decade ago. He’s careful with his gestures. An involuntary turning away from the task at hand could compromise whatever info-manipulation he’s engineering.

There are wall-size clips of Sam and Zazza, huge-eyed and smiling on a three-second loop. It’s a typical veep office, full of toys.

Jasper ungloves, leaving them hanging in the air. ‘What can I do you for, man?’

You’re ramrod-straight, coolly furious. ‘Your sister’s been to see me.’

‘She’s still going to marry that girlchik?’

‘She told me what you’ve been doing.’

If Jasper tries to bluff it out, you’ll slap him.

‘What do you mean, Dad?’

You slap him. His hoverchair, set on minimal floor-grab, slides across the tiles. ‘You know what I mean.’

He slams the chairlock and stands. ‘Dipping into the till, I expect.’

You nod.

‘It’s tagged “black salary” in the trade. All the plug-heads do it. It’s expected. It’s our perk for processing so much more than our owners.’

‘You mean your uncle.’

Jasper shrugs. ‘I did it for you, man. Why should he run the family? You’re older. You were rich first. And you earned it. He picked the numbers. Random mutation. A freak. I’m merely shifting control of the family back to our branch of the tree.’

‘Call him. Tell him what you’ve done.’

Now Jasper looks afraid. ‘Dad, it’s a delicate time. It could ruin me. Us. Uncle Jimmy too. Take one bit out and the info-wall crumbles.’

‘Call James.’