Life's Lottery (78 page)

You are too bewildered to argue. In a precedent-setting verdict, you get a suspended sentence. Marie-Laure leaves you, certain you betrayed her with Mary. How she managed to miss realising you’d fucked every other woman you took on a course (but not Mary) is beyond you.

For the rest of your life, whenever you pick up the phone and the other party hangs up, you’re certain it was James. Or Hackwill.

Or Mary. You don’t think she’s dead. She can’t die. She’s Death Herself.

In the Arthur C. Clarkeian year of 2001, you receive an e-bomb from a militant anti-euthanasia group. Your computer terminal blows apart, riddling you with glass, plastic and wire shrapnel.

You don’t linger.

Go to 0.

Y
ou aren’t your brother. Your arms won’t work. The pillow hovers.

Hackwill’s eyes flutter open. ‘Mental,’ he sneers.

A point prods up through the duvet. Hackwill has been sleeping knife in hand. The blade catches you in the soft of your belly, under your ribs. Hackwill twists the knife.

The pain is like nothing you’ve ever felt. You scream and try to raise yourself off the knife.

People crowd into the room. Mary, Shane, James, the rest.

You’re dying in mind-blotting pain.

‘He tried to kill me,’ Hackwill says.

‘I believe you,’ says Mary, taking his neck and twisting.

Hackwill dies before you do, but that’s no consolation. James and Mary hold you, getting your blood all over their dressing-gowns and hands.

You make it through a century of pain until sunrise.

Go to 0.

‘
I
should thank you, Mental,’ Hackwill says. ‘You and your brother will be remembered as the murderers. Warwick and McKinnell can’t wreck the development deal. The others are out of the way, collateral damage. Rye was wavering. He’d probably have wimped out with Warwick.’

‘What about him?’ you say, nodding at Jessup, who is a quivering wreck.

‘I don’t think he’ll make it till help comes. I’ll be with him when he dies, though. Friends for life, that’s us.’

Hackwill is enjoying this. You can’t believe it but he’s doing that stupid Bond-villain thing of explaining it all before killing the hero.

That makes you a hero. Then again, as he pointed out, he’s a murderer and you’re not. Mary, though. She killed Shane. She’ll do it.

Does this change how you feel about her?

‘And you really were trying to kill me,’ Hackwill says.

You’re too tired to argue about it.

‘Very clever. Get me up here. Have an accident. I almost admire that. But your brother got impatient.’

You suppose you realised hours ago that James really did push Hackwill into a culvert in the minibus. You’re sad that your brother should be dragged down to Hackwill’s level. You wonder if going to Mary made James do it.

‘And all because of that stupid house of yours, and that stupid pint. If your brother had just had a drink on me, we wouldn’t be here knee-deep in dead people.’

‘It wasn’t the pint, you stupid fucker,’ Mary says. ‘It was the copse.’

Mary’s hand closes on his balls. You have hold of his wrist and wrench it back. Mary twists. She gets his knife. She doesn’t go into frenzy, like Jessup. She is calm, detached, meticulous. She takes five minutes to kill Hackwill.

Watching that kills something else. Your love.

* * *

Hackwill gets the blame for everything. Jessup gives a lengthy confession. Hackwill becomes a bogeyman to rival Nilsen or Fred West. Iain Scobie’s book
Hackwill: The Will to Hack
, filmed with Alan Rickman as Hackwill, makes him a Manson or Rasputin figure, influencing Shane and Jessup to crimes. His ordinary financial motivations are played down so he can be seen as some kind of monster superman.

You have nightmares for ever. Hackwill doesn’t haunt you and you rarely dwell on James’s ghastly death. What you remember is Mary killing Hackwill. She knows what she has done. You become formal strangers, meeting only when it’s a legal obligation.

You marry Marie-Laure, but it doesn’t last. Only the nightmares last.

And so on.

Y
ou can’t let it lie. Hackwill’s a multiple murderer. Besides, he was your school bully. Calmly, you and James set out the whole story. The big surprise is that James admits to trying to kill Hackwill in the minibus. His honesty makes the police take you seriously. Then Hackwill accuses you both of attempted murder. The police think again, wondering whether Kay Shearer acted alone. They can understand why he killed Tristram Warwick, but not the others.

James gets five years.

You are grilled off and on for weeks. Nothing sticks, except reckless endangerment. Your business is shut down and investigated.

Everyone who ever twisted their ankle on a course sues you. One day, you wake up and Mary’s gone. You hope she’s hunting Hackwill. But Robert Hackwill gets richer; serves as mayor of Sedgwater; wins Businessman of the Year awards; exults in the grand opening of the Discount Development, grinning in photographs with Tony Blair and the Spice Girls.

You are sidelined. The worst thing is that you know the whole truth but no one will believe you.

James is killed in a prison riot.

You bitterly marry Marie-Laure.

You make things worse for yourself.

And so on.

M
ary’s body lives on but her mind has flown. You feel you’ve a lot in common with her. You feel yourself sinking. Sometimes, you don’t talk for days.

Then Marie-Laure tells you she’s pregnant. It’s like a rope lowered into a well. You take hold of the fact and haul yourself up. You rebuild a life. You have a son, Jan, then a daughter, Josie. You get on with it.

In dreams, though, you are back in the copse. Only, it’s not at Ash Grove Primary but up a mountain in Wales.

Hackwill, Mary, James. They keep beckoning, outstretched hands gloved with boots which bob like comical hand-puppets. There are others with them, in the cobwebbed shadows.

You always wake up before you go into the copse. If you can, you wake your wife and make love with a desperate urgency, an embracing of life.

You spend the rest of your life running from the dream-copse.

And so on.

F
or the rest of your life, you wish you’d gripped the rope tightly. It burns your hands as it passes through them, even through gloves.

You can’t hear screams in the rain.

Everyone will say you couldn’t have held them up. You’d just have been pulled down to death with them.

It’s no comfort.

And so on.

Y
ou stay in the hut with Thierry. Apart from Tibet, England, family, friends. You don’t love them any the less but you do not trouble them.

Your world shrinks to Thierry, the hut, the garden. The money is gone. It means nothing. You wish it well and hope it does some good.

You work and eat and sleep. Every mouthful of food, every moment of comfort, every second of warmth, has to be earned.

At last, you live honestly, with love, with bravery, with joy. Always, you are grateful to your brother for making the path, for understanding first. You are amazed at his generosity in welcoming you.

Alone among the legions of men and women, you understand.

You are truly fortunate.

Only now do you understand this.

Only here do you feel, of all the possible paths you could have taken, that you have really won the Lottery.

Life’s Lottery.

I
n the early 2000s, I prepared these annotations for an abortive US ebook publication of the novel – they were intended mostly to help Americans with specific British references, so British readers can now chortle at being told things every fule kno. I also include a few notes about the links between
Life’s Lottery
and my other books.

KIM NEWMAN

2014

In 1959, BBC Radio broadcast three main channels within the United Kingdom: the Home Service, the Light Programme and the Third Programme. The Light Programme eventually became the channels that are now Radio One and Radio Two, the BBC’s pop music stations. The Third Programme became Radio Three, which puts out serious music.

Church of England. While the American Constitution insists on a separation between church and state, the United Kingdom has no written constitution and the ritual and legal apparatus of the state is inextricably bound up with the Anglican Church. The reason this hasn’t led to anything like the Inquisition or witch-burning in the last few hundred years is that Anglicanism has become the mildest, most decaffeinated church on the block. The C of E certainly asserts far less influence on the country – for instance, in terms of pushing through laws or criticising government sponsorship of the arts – than the religious right does in the United States. When I was asked at school to state my religion and I claimed ‘agnostic’, I was aptly told ‘that’s C of E then’.

In the UK, universal health-care is provided by the state, supported by a tax called National Insurance commonly deducted at source from a person’s wages. Britons can choose to take out private health-care insurance on the American system, but they still have to pay National Insurance. Just as all Americans have a Social Security number, all Britons have a National Insurance Number.

Trundling, squawking cyborg fascist alien villains from the long-running BBC-TV series
Doctor Who
, the Daleks first appeared in the second
Who
serial in 1963 and were an instant success, spawning a ton of various merchandising. They returned many times to the TV series and appeared in two spin-off theatrical films,
Dr Who and the Daleks
and
Daleks
–
Invasion Earth: 2150 AD.

‘A story for the very young’, written and illustrated by Phoebe and Selby Worthington (1948), common in the 1950s and ’60s and in print as recently as 1985. In the Newman household, wicked childish amusement was found in interpreting the hand gesture of the woman who wanted
two
bags of coal as the irreverent two-finger sign equivalent to the American single digit salute.

Gonks were a 1960s toy fad: big Humpty Dumpty-shaped heads with tiny vestigial arms and legs, often caricatures of famous persons or specific types (cowboy, spaceman, schoolgirl, etc). They feature in the film
Gonks Go Beat.
Roughly equivalent to Trolls or Cabbage Patch Dolls.
Upside-Down Gonk’s Circus
was the most intriguing-sounding of the slim children’s books published to go with the craze, or at least so I thought when I pestered my father to buy it. It has stuck in my memory probably because of the odd disappointment of finding that the cover had been mistakenly bound onto another, less-interesting gonk adventure. The Newman copy of
Teddy Bear Coalman
has survived (my sister recently read it to my nephew), but that doubtless-priceless collector’s item misprint gonk book disappeared long long ago.

By Enid Blyton, illustrated by Harmsen van der Beel (1949); the actual title is
Noddy Goes to Toyland
, but I copied an error from David Pringle’s
Imaginary People.
First of a series of books featuring a wooden gnome called Noddy, these were amazingly popular for decades but have suffered from a backlash thanks to Blyton’s use of racial caricature ‘gollywogs’ as supporting characters, not to mention elements common to children’s books in more innocent times like Noddy and his male best friend Big Ears sleeping together and the hero’s tendency to get in trouble with Mr Plod the policeman. The term ‘Plod’ or ‘Mr Plod’ is still in use as a demeaning term for police officer, equivalent to the American ‘pig’. The reference is here to prevent the book becoming autobiographical – I found Blyton twee and dull as a child and didn’t read her much.

By C.S. Lewis (1950); first of the ‘Narnia’ series.

By A.A. Milne, illustrated by E.H. Shepherd (1926). In the 1960s, Winnie hadn’t been bought outright by Disney and so retained an English accent.

There are several books with this title or something close like
The Mighty Big Book of Riddles.
The ‘big red rock-eater’ riddle is from the one we had in our house, but the ‘Letsbe Avenue’ riddle is here as a tribute to Paul J. McAuley, who still laughs when he tells it. ‘Why do firemen wear red braces?’ is another from the original.

The Buccaneers
was an ambitious British television series originally broadcast in 1956, starring Robert Shaw as Captain Dan Tempest. Because of the pirate theme that runs through
Life’s Lottery
, I invented the annual and its contents – though I later found out that the show spun off at least one such tie-in and saw a copy in the collection of the Museum of the Moving Image. Annuals were (and are) a British form of children’s publishing, large-format illustrated hardbacks combining text and comic-strip stories (with factual articles, puzzles and the like), associated with a popular character (Popeye), TV series (
Danger Man
) or weekly comic (the
Beano
).

A single comic strip adventure for Hergé’s intrepid reporter hero Tintin, published as two large-format albums.

Long-running UK television serial, premiered 23 November 1963.

The first
Doctor Who
(1963–66).