Lottery Boy (15 page)

In mid-air he shouted, “Here girl!” and the conductor stood well back as a gnashy-looking dog scuttled past and followed her master off the back of the bus.

The bus conductor tried chasing Bully to Piccadilly but he was fat and slow and Bully easily got away, even with the weight of the rucksack on his back.

Now in a side street, he was taking a look. He started pulling out clothes. It was women’s stuff – dresses and tops and other things that were no good to him. Because all he was looking for were shoes. He needed shoes if he was going to walk to Watford. Even if he managed to get the train, he still needed to look
half
decent to convince a nice lady or someone old enough to cash his ticket in for him. Because no one
nice
was going to believe a word he said unless he had shoes on his feet.

Halfway through the rucksack he found something, although it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind: flip-flops. He was pretty sure they were girls’ too, purple and yellow with a swirly flowery design on them, but they would have to do. He shoved his toes in them and finished emptying out the rest of the clothes. Right at the bottom he found money. It wasn’t
real
money though; it had a drawing of a skinny guy with Harry Potter glasses on the front.
Bank of India
it said. No good to him and he threw it all away.

When he’d emptied out the rucksack, he put it on the ground and told Jack to get in.

Jack looked at him like:
What, you mean in
there
?
But this was the other reason he’d nicked it – to hide Jack, so that he wasn’t a boy with a dog, he was a boy with a rucksack. Bully got her rear end and pushed her in and then got her settled and pulled the top flap down, leaving a gap for her to breathe through. He could still just about see her snout and eyes like this rucksack had a … well, a dog in it.

He put it on. He adjusted the straps. It wasn’t too bad. And he set off north to Camelot thinking about his money just waiting to be spent, begging and pleading with him to go to the shops and spend, spend, spend…

Flip
, flop…
Flip
, flop,
flip
, flop. He kept looking back every few steps for the men in the silver car. He wasn’t used to the sound of his own feet under him, and he turned round to check it was
him
flip-flopping along.

He got to Oxford Street. Not the back of it but right on it, his first time there. And he thought of poor old Mick squashed up pulpy in the back of the bin truck. The last bin he was ever going to kip in.

Bully walked along. It was one long street full of shops. He shielded his eyes from the sun. He imagined Brent Cross was like this but better, with a roof on. That was the place to go said Chris and Tiggs. Everything you needed under one roof.

He stopped the first woman who looked like she could be a mum – softer-looking than the younger women carrying big-name bags with next to nothing in them. And she was carrying food not clothes in plastic bags like mums did.

“Have you got 59—” he asked but she was already walking away. He carried on along the street and after asking directions and begging for a while he’d managed to get three quid off foreigners. But no one knew anything, where anywhere was. No one lived here, on Oxford Street, in London. He thought maybe he should get a map, rack one up from a bookshop, just to check what that guy had said about Watford was right.

He carried on walking through alleyways and along little roads until he got to a big nasty one, four lanes thick, sunshine
blowtorching
the windows and windscreens.
Mary le Bone
it said on the side of one of the buildings. He could see the gates of another park through the gaps in the buildings and he walked along, getting ready to cross this tarmac river, thinking about buying a helicopter – no, better than that – a jetpack. He’d seen them on TV – not just in films, either, but in real-life programmes. And the pack wasn’t much bigger than the rucksack he had on now. He could light it up, stick Jack on the back and
go
.

He imagined flying just above the pavements, not too high so everyone else walking along could look up and see him and think:
I wish I had one of those…
And deciding what he’d buy with his money reminded him of the foreign money he’d thrown away. It hit him that even on Sunday he could have changed it for
proper
money at a bank or some place… And then bought a map and food and a cold can of Coke…

In the middle of telling himself off and reminding himself again of just what else he had lost today, he stepped off the pavement and something picked him up, shook him hard and threw him down the road.

He was paralyzed. He couldn’t breathe. He lay on his side, his eyes stuck staring at the creases and wrinkles in the tarmac, willing the air back into his lungs. He’d felt like this once before, lying in a bundle, buried above ground, three or four older boys jumping him in the changing rooms. He’d never liked PE, running round for the sake of it, getting tired out for nothing, playing games where you didn’t win anything worth keeping. At least when you played the arcades, whatever you won or lost was yours. And it was real, it was something…

And then he felt his breath slowly coming back, like he was having to suck it out of someone else’s body.

“Arrgh…” he said, the hurt catching up with him. He got into a crouch and then sat up, hugging his knees. A rusted white van was moving away, reversing, now pulling round him and going through the gears. Another car began driving towards him and then pulled up. Horns started beeping but the man got out.

“Are you all right?” the man said, wondering what to do if the boy said no.

Bully nodded, didn’t waste his new breath saying yes.

“You sure? He just
hit you
– stay there and I’ll phone an ambulance. OK?”

Bully told himself to get up. “Get up,” he said. And he did – onto his hands and knees and then up onto two legs. He felt light-headed and then just
light
. And though he still had the rucksack on, something wasn’t right.

“Is that anything to do with you?” said the guy, pointing uncertainly behind Bully.

He turned round to face the sun and Jack was lying on the road behind him, twitching.

“You did that! You did it!”

“I didn’t… I just stopped. I… I… I didn’t even see it.” And he went pale, hesitated and then got back in his car and drove off slowly with his accident lights still blinking orange and red.

Bully picked Jack up and carried her right across all four lanes, the traffic snarled up, people slowing down, looking to see. By the time he was over, all the necks had twisted enough to see it was just a dog that wasn’t moving, and the traffic sped up again.

He laid her down on the empty pavement. “Come on, wake up!” He poured water over her head and tried to squirt some in her mouth but it just seeped out again, darkening the paving-stones.

“I’ll get your tea on, Jack… Come on … come on… I’ll get you a tin,” he said, though he had no tea, nothing on him, not even an empty can now.

“Get up. Come on, get up! Come on, mate… Come on! Get up, girl! Get up … get up, girl…” His voice was breaking, going up and down, sounding young and old within the same word.

Inside his head he was shouting too, at himself for not looking, for not seeing the van. The rucksack had messed up his sight lines and the sun had got in his eyes but that was
no excuse
. He hadn’t seen it coming because he’d been too busy thinking about his
money
. Still, though, he had blame to spare for the van driver, racing between the traffic lights. He wanted to chase after the man in the van and smash him up, and he threw the empty water bottle out into the road.

A car beeped at him, a disgusted face passed him by.

Then underneath the groan and roar of the traffic he heard a living sound. And still on his knees, he almost fainted, his body numb like in the gun, but full of pins and needles he was happy to bear, that he didn’t want to go away. And he watched Jack get up onto her front legs and then drag the back ones up after her. She shook and wretched and coughed like she’d eaten too much too quick and was going to sick it up, but she stayed on her feet.

“Are you all right? Is that your dog?” Someone there now. A guy in his twenties with the sort of thin, dirty moustache Bully thought he might be getting any day now was looking at him. And a woman kneeling down with blonde hair so clean, he could see the sun through it.

“Yeah, yeah…” he said.

“Have you lost one of your flip-flops? I think I can see it!” said the man as if it was fish in the water, excited and pleased to have seen such a thing. He waited until the lights changed to retrieve it.

“I don’t think you
are
all right,” said the woman. “You should
both
get checked out,” she said, because Bully was pushing Jack back into the rucksack and dragging it onto his back. It felt twisted up on one side, and he realized it had a metal frame that had taken most of the bash and that was the reason they were both alive.

“Do you want some water?” She was holding out a bottle. He swallowed all of it and then held it up to his face.

“Can I ’ave it?” he asked because his water bottle had been swept down the road.

“Yes, of course. Yes, have it,” she said. “Are you sure you’re both all right? I think you should go to A and E. You really should, shouldn’t he, James?” James just nodded. Bully ignored them and tried to move the rucksack about on his back. It hurt and stung in the middle and he jiggled the weight around on his shoulders from one side to the other like it was too hot.

“I got to get going.”

“Where? Do you want us to come with you or anything?”

He looked at them. He was tempted to ask for help, proper help with his ticket and the money. But there were two of them and he didn’t have the head to start thinking about splitting it and what was fair to give them. And besides, they maybe looked
too
nice – because whoever helped him would have to pretend it was their ticket. And he didn’t think either of them were the type to tell lies. This was his problem: to find someone in the next three days who was
nice enough
to help him do something that wasn’t
all
right.

The man was handing him something in a cup. “Do you want a coffee?”

Bully shook his head. He was sick of coffee and being asked if his dog was his.

“D’you need
anything
?” James asked awkwardly.

“You got 59 p?” he said out of habit and the man looked relieved and pleased that he could give him something. And he checked his change and then gave him a fiver.

“Cheers,” Bully said. He shoved it in his back pocket. Then he jiggled the rucksack because it was now rubbing on his hip where the frame was twisted.

“Is there anything else we can do for you?” asked the woman, still wanting to help.

“No,” he said, looking back across the road. “I got to go.”

Terry bumped the steaming car right up onto the pavement. The Snapback had pulled the wheelchair out of the front grill but the radiator was losing water and overheating. Pedestrians looked … and then looked away.