Life's Lottery (48 page)

You want to die. You want everybody to die.

Oh, and happy birthday. You’re thirty.

* * *

Sometimes, late at night, you phone the flat – you agreed you should be the one to move out – and listen to Chris’s answerphone message, saying cheerfully that she’s on holiday and thoughtfully giving a number where you can be reached now you’re not living here any more. You don’t know if these calls help, but you’re certainly ashamed enough of them to be extremely furtive about the whole deal.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

You’re an idiot. Of Timmy Gossett proportions. That’s what you and James used to say at school. Timmy was the school’s poor, touched boy. You’d change places with him.

You voted to split.

What’s so wrong with marriage? Laraine’s been in and out of one. Besides, you only had to get engaged, which is like going to DefCon 3. Happens all the time without leading to World War Three.

Aaaaaarrrgghh!

* * *

James, between jobs, has a hobby. He’s preparing a dossier on Robert Hackwill. He has ordered documents about matters that are on public record and collected statements from various people in town. Being dispossessed from the family home is an affront he’s not going to forget.

It turns out he’s the one who gave Graham the keys, so the hippies could squat. If the road-widening is legit, the council will have to shift them first.

James is not going to let this drop.

* * *

One night, you and he go drinking in town and end up staggering back to your old house. It’s not quite automatic, because you know who lives there now. You’re still feeling at sea and think maybe you need to visit an old home port.

From the outside, you can’t tell much has changed. The front garden is neatly kept. The power was cut off but someone has hooked up a connection to get it back on.

The front door could do with a lick of paint. Since Dad died, jobs like that have tended to slip. It’s not that he ever did them, but it was his job to order you or James to do it, or get a workman in.

You tell yourself you won’t cry.

* * *

Vic, Graham’s girlfriend, lets you in. She’s more Goth than hippie. A pleasant marijuana-and-dye perfume hangs around her long, lank black hair. She wears a lot of ragged black lace and carries a paraffin lamp: there’s no electricity in the hallway.

She escorts you through your old home, like a housekeeper bringing ghosts back into the family circle.

The power is on only in the living-room, where about a dozen people between the ages of fourteen and fifty huddle, some in sleeping-bags, in the uncertain light of two flickering standard lamps. Extension cords snake off into the garden through the conservatory, which is full of the sort of pot plants your dad wouldn’t have grown. A cloud of dope-smoke hangs at chest height. You cough as you walk into it.

The furniture you knew is gone, and only a few tip-rescuee chairs and an unsprung sofa have been hauled in. The wallpaper is a Marion family legacy. You’re distressed to see untreated damp patches and a few deep gouges. Someone is working on a mural that begins at the bottom of one wall and hasn’t climbed far. Naked children in a forest, stalked by red-eyed spider-wolves. Not very comforting.

You’re offered a joint and take a toke. That’s a first. You’ve never smoked dope in this house, in this room. James huddles with Graham, negotiating. You sit down, cross-legged. About half the squatters are people you know, from school, college or just around town. Gully Eastment, Vince Tunney, Neil Martin, Jacqui Edwardes. Other faces, older or younger, are new.

These aren’t hippies in the sense you knew, the ’60s hang-overs who chose to drop out; plenty of these people have been thrown out, washed out or squeezed out. They’re smoking dope not to get high but to get level.

Gully, once genius-level clever, introduces you around, appending a thumbnail hard-luck story to each name. Lost jobs, broken homes, withdrawn benefits.

You are sitting next to Marie-Laure, a jittery woman with dirty blond rat-tails and panda-circles under her eyes. She remembers you from her two years at comprehensive, but you have no idea who she might have been; just another of the Hemphill kids. She has a severe facial bruise, which she claims was inflicted at a poll tax demo. She’s interested in you. Not a good idea. You see needle-tracks, admittedly old, around her inner elbow. And you’re not ready: the post-Chris era hasn’t dawned.

Sitting up all night in your old front room, you listen to recitals of grievance. These people hate Margaret Thatcher as much as Robert Hackwill – who is, after all, a Labour councillor. Maggie and Robbo are two faces of the changing, cusp-of-the-’90s world that has taken away everything they had a right to expect, and pushed them into this dark place, then cobwebbed them over so they can never come back.

James lists Hackwill’s profit schemes and has figures about lost jobs, withdrawn facilities and quality-of-life downshifts. A tiny faction are getting rich and happy, while everyone else is on a slope to the mud.

You’ve never heard it laid out so clearly. You didn’t notice it happening. As part of the Keith-and-Chris experience, you were blinkered. Because you were happy, you didn’t understand. Now you do.

You don’t know if you can stand it.

* * *

At five in the morning, the room full of grey light and cold haze, James’s lecture is illustrated.

There is a knock at the door.

You’re jolted from foggy half-sleep. A few people mumble and groan. You find your head is in Marie-Laure’s lap.

There is repeated knocking.

Graham stands, sleeping-bag falling away from his thin body like a dropped sack. He wears only a Snoopy T-shirt; from the waist down, he is hairily naked.

The front door is smashed in. There is efficient noise as people swarm into the hall.

Marie-Laure, frightened, clings to you, which means you can’t get up. James is alert, Marine-ready to kill.

Uniformed men come into the room. And women. A blonde constable reads aloud from some document. A notice to quit. Policemen root through everything. Searching for drugs?

‘What’s this shit, Yatman?’ Graham asks.

The policewoman is Mary Yatman. You remember her as a monster at school.

‘You knew this was coming, Graham. Now get some trousers on.’

‘Where will we go?’ asks a waif.

‘Where you came from, dear. Now hurry up. You’ve got five minutes to get your shit together – at least, the legal shit – then most of you will be free to go.’

James sizes up WPC Yatman. Another rogue for his gallery.

‘There should be a road through here,’ Yatman says. ‘So honest folk can go to work and get home. It’s selfish of you to be in the way.’

‘Work and home aren’t concepts we’ve had much opportunity to get our heads round,’ says Gully.

You are lumped in with the rest and jostled a bit as everyone is herded out of the front door. The door itself is broken in half and thrown into the garden.

Graham carries his standard lamp, extension cord wound round it. Vic has a heavy suitcase, full of paperbacks. Others tote plastic bags of clothes. The squatters are like disaster victims, clinging to pathetic debris from former lives.

‘To make sure you don’t crawl back,’ Yatman explains.

You wonder what she’s talking about.

Then the upstairs windows are broken. A couple of marijuana plants in earthenware pots thump down on to the pavement. The pots break and the plants are trampled. The police rampage inside, trashing the house, making it uninhabitable.

Lights go on in the neighbours’ houses.

Mrs Dunphy, who has lived next door since you moved in, peers through a crack in the curtains and clucks approval. She catches sight of you among the squatters, looks a bit ashamed, and retreats.

The police have brought axes and sledgehammers, which you didn’t think were the standard accoutrements of the Dixon of Dock Green-style bobby on the beat. It’s community policing with just a touch of Attila the Hun. With the frenzied attack of born vandals, uniformed men destroy your home.

Mary Yatman watches. Like Hackwill with his playground gang, she doesn’t have to do anything, just tell people what to do. She’s an unusual sort of WPC. With a certain smug satisfaction, to show that she appreciates the irony, she whistles ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’.

A policeman comes out, a little girl under his arm. She is howling. The pig, grinning like a goon, says he found her hiding in a cupboard. He holds her arm, dangling her above the pavement.

Gully steps forward to take the child. Another constable smashes his knee with a truncheon. He goes down, biting on pain.

Good God, you realise, this is the future. British police acting like storm-troopers. All resistance crushed. Refugees on the streets.

…
the morning will come when the world is mine
…

1990. Year of the Bastard.

* * *

You march against the poll tax. You sign petitions. You become active, on behalf of travellers, of prosecuted poll tax refuseniks, of the dispossessed. It’s a despairing rearguard action, bitterly fought. You never think you’ll win. Even when Thatcher resigns, the euphoria lasts only until you realise this means the Tories are electable again and will continue in power for more years.

You don’t exactly have much faith in the Loyal Opposition. Rob Hackwill becomes a rose-wearing New Labour Enterprise hero.

You and James go into business together. You charge executives very high fees for week-long assault and survival courses. Your literature claims the wilderness experience creates bonding within teams and inculcates skills as useful in the boardroom as on the battlefield.

Actually, you just enjoy shouting at suits. You get a little thrill in your gut every time a manicured vice-president of marketing plunges thirty feet into ice-cold shit. You especially enjoy the pit-fights – ‘Two men enter, one man leaves,’ you chant, copping from
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
– in which a couple of sales reps are tossed naked into a ten-foot-deep hole and the one who gets out on his own has the loser’s rations for the next three days.

Between you, you and James fuck every woman who takes one of your courses. You work especially hard at it if she’s in a relationship with someone else on the course. There’s nothing like demonstrating your superiority in the wilderness to pull the fanny. It makes you feel like Tarzan.

When you’re not on a course, you live in Achelzoy with Marie-Laure. It turns out that she’s rich. You even grow to quite like her.

When Chris invites you to her wedding – to Danny, her just-divorced PhD supervisor – you get very drunk and wake up to find Marie-Laure crying because she says you hit her. You hug her and love her and make it up.

But you wonder what happened to you. Was it the country or your ex-girlfriend? How did you become what you are?

* * *

‘At last,’ James cackles, reverentially putting the letter on his desk. ‘Hackwill.’ It’s September 1997. For three years, you’ve been sending fliers to the council, offering cut-price deals for Survival Weeks, carefully not including your names. ‘He’s signed up his whole crew.’

‘All the council?’ you ask.

‘No, just his gang. Reg Jessup, Ben McKinnell, Sean Rye, Tristram Warwick, Shane Bush, Kay Shearer. And, to keep it sweet, Mary Yatman.’

Reg, Hackwill’s old sidekick, is another councillor, depended on to second motions; McKinnell is a building contractor who lands a suspicious number of council jobs; Sean, Laraine’s ex-boyfriend, has your dad’s old job at the bank; Warwick is Hackwill Properties’ chief accountant; Shane is Hackwill’s driver (and bodyguard?); Shearer is a small businessman, a pilot fish to Hackwill’s shark; and Mary Yatman, retired from the police, has been rewarded for services rendered with a job as security manager.

‘I’d like to see that lot in a steel cage.’

James laughs. ‘You will, boyo.’

You visualise Hackwill taking a slow-motion fall into the shit-dunk. And smile.

‘Life would really be complete,’ you say, ‘if we could get Mrs Fudge, our primary-school dinner lady, along for the ride too. That would just about clean the board.’

James thinks about it.

‘But wait,’ he says, sincerely. ‘Isn’t petty personal revenge degrading and ultimately futile? Shouldn’t we forgive, forget, get on with our lives unencumbered by resentments that have eaten us up, poisoned our every waking moment? Should we turn Hackwill’s application down and prove we’ve outgrown childish grudges and sadistic vindictiveness?’

If you agree with James, go to 124. If not, go to 133.

T
he next day, while Sean is at work, you phone your sister. You don’t trust yourself – or her – to have this conversation face to face. You’re worried you’ll lose control, find yourself utterly entangled.

‘Rye residence,’ she answers, as Sean must force her to.

What do you call her? Darling?

‘Larry, it’s Keith.’

Quiet. You hear the radio in the background at her end. Something by Duran Duran.

‘Yesterday was one-off madness,’ you say.

‘Yes.’ Dull, flat, accepting. An answer.

‘Larry, I love you.’ You’ve never said that to anyone in your family. They have had to take it on trust.

‘Thank you.’

‘But I can’t
love
you.’ Why does this feel wrong?

‘I’ll see you soon, Keith.’

‘Yes. You will. Of course. Always.’

She hangs up first.

* * *

Now what?

You sit at your desk and look at the clippings and photos on the wall. Laraine is speckled everywhere: with you and James in an awkward posed portrait that shows her trying to seem grown-up next to you children; on her own as a teenager with too much eye make-up and an Alice band; at her wedding (with that bastard); with Mum, at funerals.

Your hand falls on the neat stack of typed pages.

Your book is dead in your heart. The point was to tell the truth. About James, and what led him to a lonely, cold death on the other side of the world. And about the rest of you. Now there’s a secret that can never be told. It changes everything.