Lottery Boy (16 page)

“Where is he then?” said Terry. He was sweating from the car chase and bits of him he never got to see were getting very
hot
because there was no air conditioning in the car.

“He was
there
,” said the Snapback. “I saw him. He must have gone…”

“You
saw
him? That’s no good, is it? Where is he
now
?” And to emphasize the difference between the past and the present, Terry knocked the Snapback’s cap off so that he didn’t have it on
now
. It made him feel happier and cooled him down, too.

“What you doing! Cut it out! I saw him in the first place, didn’t I? I’m the only one seeing things!”

“Yeah…” sniffed Terry. He let it hang there, his contempt for whatever the Snapback was seeing. He got out of the car, sat on the bonnet and then clambered up onto the roof and put a Terry-sized dent in it.

“Hey! What you doin’! It’s me mum’s car!” said the Snapback as if that might make a difference.

“There’s something been going on over there,” said Terry, sinking further down into the metal roof so that it looked from above as if a giant fist had punched the car. Across the highway he could see a dark patch on the pavement. Maybe blood or something. “What you waiting for then?” he shouted.

The Snapback stayed put and started fidgeting with his mobile. “I want the money for the windscreen and the repairs,” he said.

“You’ll have to want then, won’t ya? Now go take a
look
.”

He was sure it was the same silver car on the other side of the
Mary le Bone
road. Bully couldn’t see how they were tracking him now Jack was out of sight. These men, these friends of Janks’s, didn’t have dogs and Bully was well out of his territory.

The iron gates to the park were wide open for cars and zombies, and unconsciously he veered away from them, off the road. The sun, with nothing in the way, was heating him up, getting
under
his skin, making him sweat even in the late afternoon. He made his way to the line of trees running alongside the footpath where it was cooler, a light wind blowing against the back of his head. He tried to keep the weight off his right side where the car had pushed his ribs in. But every time he turned round to check whether anyone was on his tail, it rubbed a little more of the skin off his hips.

A trickle of something wet ran down his neck, and walking along, he couldn’t decide if it was sweat or blood.

“You OK, mate? You all right in there, mate?” He could hear Jack panting, trying to cool herself down the way dogs did, like they were about to pass out any minute and have a heart attack. He wanted to get her out, give her some proper air and check she really was OK, and that there wasn’t a hole in her head.

He stopped to take the rucksack off and Jack immediately started to wind up her growl – and this time when he looked round, he saw the two men from the silver car weaving in and out between the trees. The big guy in the brown shirt, huffing and puffing, his big arms propped out like he was itching to do something with them; the skinny snapback doing his best to keep behind him. And Bully could scream and shout – but that was what kids did in a park, even big ones – so who was going to care?

He stopped thinking about that for a second when he heard the sound. The noise was incredible – like a plane going overhead, it came from above and shook the air. And though he heard it, he couldn’t help but
listen
because it was the sound of a lion.

He veered towards the fence and caught sight of a penguin popping into a pool. A made-up jungle in the middle of London! He’d heard there was one but assumed it was miles away and not right bang
in
the middle. And there weren’t just crappy cows here either, bused in from the countryside, but proper animals by the sounds of it. Stuff that could kill you; stuff that you wanted to
see
.

He started running, a sort of a hop and skip to jiggle Jack into the right place on his back. And then he swivelled, saw he had ten, maybe fifteen seconds to come up with something before the snapback caught up with him, grabbed him, slowed him right down for the big one to push around. He heard the brown shirt say, “Just
shove
him over! Get him on the ground.”

ZOO EXIT
flashed up on Bully’s radar. He read the sign, understood it back to front – not as a
word
but as a way
in
, as a
ZOO ENTRANCE
. And he turned left sharp, wincing with the pain, ran past a staff girl in a green T-shirt with a camera at her face, snapping a family in a fake jungle. He cut in through the gift shop, pulled down a rack of cuddly giraffes and camels and then heard bigger crashes behind him. Then he was out, running past the penguins barking at Jack (Jack in the rucksack, giving it back). And people looking round as if to say:
Did that rucksack just
bark
?

He ran on. Glimpses of animals inside their cages was all he was getting. Past the parrots and hippos, he ducked into the
Bugs Arena
, ran through a dark glass corridor full of big, bright little things painted green and yellow.

Out the other side, he took a narrow turn and was suddenly caught up in the queue funnelling into the monkey house.

He tried to slot in between the families but couldn’t help pushing. He could smell the food on them, what they’d been eating. Cheese-and-onion crisps, ice creams, hot dogs … tiny bits of them going up his nose. It was no good though. Too slow this way.
Tut, tut, tut
, he heard, like some kind of bird, as he made his way through, but the queue had thickened up into a crowd. And there was nowhere left to push.

He turned round to go back but there was the brown shirt, his gut trying to get out of his jeans, the face above it all twisted up and out of breath. He met Bully’s look from ten metres off, locked on like a fighter pilot with a red button to press, and Bully made up his mind to scream anyway.

He drew in the breath but held it, saw something the big guy wasn’t seeing… A lot of green T-shirts.

“Excuse me, sir? Excuse me? Can I see your ticket?”

“What? Oh, I lost it, didn’t I?”

The zookeeper wasn’t taking that, her mouth set in a hard-to-please smile, another four T-shirts backing her up.

“Well, I need you to accompany me back then, please, sir, to the entrance. Please,
sir
.”

“Look… Look, love… I’m… I’m looking for my
kid
.”

He turned back to point Bully out. “He’s over there somewhere!” he said because Bully had ducked down, was hiding out among the shoelaces and the pram wheels and the little kids. He shuffled along with the queue like that, like a creature looking for something to eat, and the next time he chanced a look, the big guy was swarming with green T-shirts, throwing wild, roundhouse punches, trying to wade on through them… He knocked one of them out and just as it looked as if he
might
break free, they got hold of his arms and legs and pulled him down.

Bully was in the monkey house, winding his way through. And despite the situation he was enjoying himself because the monkeys – he couldn’t get over it – the monkeys were allowed
out
. They were in the trees and on the benches, and the little kids around him were squealing and not believing it either.

One monkey landed on his rucksack, jumping straight off again when it felt jaws snapping underneath.

“Daddy! Look, Daddy! A doggy,” said a girl.

“What, darling? Where?” asked the daddy, not seeing any doggy even when his daughter pointed to the long-haired girl – or was it a boy – with a rucksack, wearing cut-offs and flip-flops.

In a quiet spot outside, Bully went to one of the bins and hooked out an ice cream, good as new after a bite and quicker and cheaper than buying one from the shop. He saw a map in there too, of the zoo, and fished it out. It showed you where all the animals lived.

That set him thinking about buying his own zoo. He’d buy the lot and probably get a discount and move them into his place. He’d have his monkeys not in the house but in his garden. And he would have the lions and tigers caged up during the day but they could wander about at night, helping out with security. And he would get a digger and dig a pond for the hippos and penguins and the big goldfish from Japan. And he would get giraffes and they could earn their keep too. He would train them to
fetch
. If he was upstairs and the postman delivered his dog magazines then they could just pick them up and poke their heads through his bedroom window.

Maybe he’d get rid of the hyenas, he thought, looking at the pictures. He remembered from a nature programme how they laughed just the way Man Sammy had done, making fun of him when he’d said about his numbers coming up. And no snakes. And he didn’t fancy having vultures on the roof either, thinking he was dead if he overslept and pecking his eyes out.

He only wanted good animals, not the sneaky, creepy ones. And then he thought about who was going to have to feed them and look after them and all the mess they would make in his new house and garden. And finishing off his ice cream, he thought perhaps it might be easier to just save his money (like he had with his ice cream) and come back and see everything here at this zoo another day.

Because it was time to go and the zoo was getting on for closing up. The crowds had thinned out, and it was just him and the camel over there, looking ready to spit. And right next to him, on the other side of a fence, something that looked like an Afghan hound crossed with a feather duster. It just had claws instead of paws and its nose was half as long as the rest of it put together. He could see a baby one shuffling about in a burrow under a special see-through hill. And this baby one was looking at him, up on its hind legs. It was no dog, that was for sure, but it reminded him of Jack when he’d found her under that 4x4.

He looked to see what it was on his map. It was called an
Anteater
. And from his map he could see that they were at the far end of the zoo. At the other end, next to the birdcage, was a little
n
for north and another exit. And he saw when he got out of the zoo that his next steps would be
off
the map, back into the white paper of London.

He folded up his map and set off towards the north exit, through the tunnel and past the giraffes and the hyenas and hunting dogs, and when he heard Jack growl, he didn’t bother looking round because of the dogs. But if he had, he’d have seen a red snapback shadowing him, texting on his mobile phone.