Lottery Boy (19 page)

Bully was going to sleep in the hospital but a security guard found him on the stairs and started asking him why he was there. And by the time he got out of the hospital the sky was more black than blue.

He didn’t feel safe out in the open any more among the late-night dog walkers, dogs off the lead and sniffing round his rucksack. So when he came to a high wall, he went over it. The top had spikes curling above it like old, dead fingers but he just grabbed them and heaved himself over. Even with the rucksack on it wasn’t hard because he was mostly skin and bone.

The first thing he saw was a lump of stone stuck in the ground, and another, and another, with angels poking out all over the place. He was in a grave place, a cemetery. And this, he thought, was a good place to hide out – just like the hospital, anyone could go there but nobody really wanted to. He felt like running back and telling the Davey in the hospital that this was where he was going to end up; that this was going to be his view very soon. He wanted to get back at him for what he’d done, getting Bully’s hopes up, playing tricks, making promises he didn’t know how to keep.

He took Jack out of the rucksack, left it by a gravestone, and they went for a walk. Bully kept to the big wide paths and he stopped every so often to touch a name carved into a stone. As he wandered around in that last bit of extra light you got in summer time, he cheered himself up thinking that the people looking for him wouldn’t be happy either.

They went past a few stone coffins that were empty, with their lid half off or smashed, like someone inside had had enough of being stuck in there. As he walked he kept sniffing, night green smells and old water sneaking in past his cold. And then he felt his feet getting
colder
and he looked down and saw he was walking on gravestones: a whole path of them leading off into the black green of bushes and trees.

He shivered, jumped back onto the grass and started seriously thinking about where he was going to sleep. There must be a toilet, some place somewhere. But when he tried to go back to the main path he was lost.

He got his compass out but that was no good because he hadn’t checked which direction he’d been heading when he came over the wall. And as the bushes and the darkness thickened up around him, he thought he saw what looked like a little old-fashioned street full of little old pointy houses. But as he got closer he saw that these houses weren’t for living in. No one had ever lived in them. They were for being
dead
in. And their huge iron and stone doors had only ever opened and closed once or twice for those inside. And now he was in among them, he saw they weren’t so little. They loomed above him, carving off that last little bit of light from the summer sky.

He stopped walking, saw a tunnel of these tombs winding into the darkness. He wasn’t going any further down there…

And then that last speck of light in the sky was gone. And though the stars were out, they didn’t shine this far down. He flicked his lighter on, but the darkness was still there, pushing up against him inside his little bubble of light.

He tried very hard not to look right and left, not to swing the lighter about, but when he did he caught more of the angels, the bad ones between the trees, dragging little kids to heaven. Another one pointing him out with white fingers, as if to say:
He’s the one! He’s the one with the winning ticket!
And there were more of them at his feet. Kipping just off the path, trying to trip him up!

“Where’s the wall, mate? Where we going?” But Jack didn’t seem to know either, she just whined like she was scared. And Bully had to listen to the sound of his own feet hurrying after them as he went down one path then another, his head going right and left until he stopped looking where he was going, and that was when he ran and tripped right in front of the hound crouched ready and waiting to rip his throat out.

“Hurrgh,”
he said, scrabbling back to his feet. But when the dog didn’t go for him, didn’t pounce – didn’t even
breathe
– he reached out and touched it.

It was cold, stone cold, and part of a gravestone. And it wasn’t waiting to rip his throat out but resting with its head between its paws, forever looking out for the poor bloke six feet under the ground. And he couldn’t help being impressed. He didn’t know you could put a whole dog on your grave. He wouldn’t mind getting one of those for his gravestone when he’d spent his millions and he was dead, because he didn’t want to end up like his mum as just ashes in a sweetie jar, dumped in a bin.

Then he heard an extra big noise like something
extra
big
coming at him and he yelled and he was
off
, frantically clicking the flint on his lighter,
click, click, click
.

They came out over a different wall onto a lane on a hill. And he ran straight over to the nearest streetlamp to get his breath back. When he did, he found he was very thirsty because he hadn’t taken any water at the hospital.

He walked on up the lane past a blue van that he gave the once over, considering breaking into it.
Highgate Plumbing and Solar
it said on the side. At the next row of houses he went looking in the back gardens for a water tap and maybe a shed to spend what was left of his night. He went from garden to garden, catching sight of someone in front of the TV, a long, long way away.

Jack chased a cat. Bully told her off; they were on manoeuvres and you didn’t chase cats, you kept your head down.

Three gardens in from the lane he found a tap on the outside wall of a house. There weren’t any lights on inside, just a glow coming in from next door but he still ducked down as low as he could while he assessed the situation. And Jack was taking it more seriously, waiting, invisible in the long grass.

He turned the tap on as quietly as he could but it still squeaked when no water came out. He twisted it backwards and forwards and he felt like screaming and crying. And then he calmed down and thought about why there were no lights on and no water on in this house; why somebody might have turned the lights and the water
off
.

He peered through the kitchen blinds into the darkness. He wondered how long they’d been gone for, weeks by the look of the grass and all the flowers in the pots, growing mad. He thought about picking one of the pots up and chucking it through the window but that would make a lot of noise, and that sort of smashing always woke everyone up on his estate. Then he remembered that people who lived in houses sometimes left keys outside, in case they couldn’t get back in, and he went looking under the doormat and feeling round the window frame. He even lifted up all the pots to look underneath them with his lighter but there was no key.

It began to rain then, just wetting the air, nothing heavy, but he went and sat under the little porch, too tired to move off just yet. A dog next door started yapping. Something big and fluffy, he could tell. He warned Jack not to bark back and then he thought again about breaking in. He picked up the pot on the step under the porch. It didn’t have anything much in it, just a couple of twigs like the pigeon had in its beak on the poster in crustie town.

Why did these people have all these flowers and plants in pots when they already had a garden? It made him angry again and he liked the feeling of it, taking the edge off just how tired he was.

He weighed the pot in his hand. He would chance it, throw it through the kitchen window and hope the neighbours were bad neighbours and wouldn’t bother to come looking. He got ready, and then as an afterthought, he pulled the twigs off the pot and the whole lot came out, roots and everything. And just before he lobbed it, he heard a
clink
on the patio. He got down on his knees and saw what looked like little golden teeth shining in the dirt.

When he unlocked the back door with the key he thought it was a squat for a minute. That he’d got it wrong. There was washing-up crusting in the sink and the bin stank worse than his bins and the kitchen was just a
mess
. But the electric was on when he opened the fridge and he left it that way for a bit of light.

Nothing much in there that he recognized as food. There was hard butter and some jars of funny-looking jam. The cupboards weren’t much better. He found something in a yellow bottle called
cordial
and a loaf of dried-out bread. He thought the cordial might be wine but it just tasted sweet, and he drank it neat and then buttered the end of the stale loaf of bread under his arm, and ate it the way a rat might, gnawing at the end. Then he defrosted some meat for Jack. And while the microwave was whirring, he had a look round the rest of the house.

When he found the shutters were closed on the front windows he turned the lights on. He wasn’t impressed. It was a right mess in here too: clothes draped on sofas and hanging off doors. The state of the place was bad. And all the walls were white like they’d just been given the keys to the place by the council, and there were no proper carpets anywhere. There were some paintings on the walls that brightened it up a bit but they were rubbish. The best one was a naked lady with lovely wavy hair stuck inside a big seashell, but the rest of them weren’t of
anything
: worse than Cortnie used to do with her felt tips.

He fed Jack and then went upstairs. He flicked another light on. He had never climbed upstairs inside a house before. All the stairs between the floors in the tower block were on the outside. It was a strange feeling and he clung on to the banister that wound up the wooden hill like he was in a fairy tale, pictures of a mum, a dad and two kids on the wall. Lots of books upstairs, all different sizes and colours, one room just full of them, no bed or nothing, just books, a desk and a chair. Bully preferred magazines but he didn’t
mind
books as long as they were interesting ones with real stuff in and not full of
stories
. What he didn’t understand, though, was why people kept them for so long after they’d read them.

When Bully went into the first kid’s room he could tell from the clothes and the sort of school books that the boy was older than him. He had a look in the wardrobe, kicked a few things about and then he saw a skateboard propped up in the corner. He took that and a laptop into the next room, the girl’s room. The bed was messier than the boy’s, clothes all over it, and he felt comfortable sleeping somewhere that didn’t seem looked after. He lay down on the bed, Jack next to him, getting used to laying on beds now because she’d never been allowed to back at the flat.

Something else he couldn’t work out … spending all that money … on books … and not a single
telly
in the house. And as he began to drift off to sleep he tried to imagine a place where there was no TV in the bottom of a deep dark cave without electricity, because even in prison they gave you something to watch.