Lottery Boy (29 page)

And she’d kept trying to give him his birthday card early, telling him she’d put just a
little something
in it for now. And him refusing to open it and pretending he had to go out to buy milk and bread. And wanting to escape, to get out of the flat, but thinking he should stay. And then coming home dragging his feet but wanting to run all the way. And finding her like
that
, knowing she wasn’t alive but still waiting for someone else to come along and tell him she was dead. And then opening the card and hearing her very last words; what she’d said to him.

“Bradley? Do you understand, Bradley? Are you OK?” Diana was saying to him but he just kept looking straight ahead, squinting through the windows at the frosted sunlight.

On the train back to the flat they sat at a small table. Bully sat opposite his sister and Phil. Whenever he looked up, Phil was looking straight back at him, not saying anything.

It was five stops on the train and Cortnie fell asleep and when she did, Phil kicked him under the table.

“What?”
Bully said. Though he knew what.

“You left me hanging, you did. You left me right out there in no man’s land, you did. We could have done this
nice
and easy but, no, you had to go it alone, didn’t you? I know what your game is…”

Bully’s head went down and Phil kicked his foot to bring it up again.

“You listening to me? You
think
because your mum and me weren’t married, you
think
you’re going to get the lot? Well, you’re
not
. I had a word with
him
before we left. Even
if
they pay out – and now you’ve got them looking into it more, it’s not a done deal, and it’s not going to be for bloody
years
now – but if they
do
, in the end, then all the winnings don’t just go straight to you when you’re eighteen… You hadn’t thought of that, had you?” He nodded sideways. “Alan says s
he
gets half. She’s your mum’s daughter. It goes through the bloodline. She inherits it just like you. And I’m
her
dad whether I married your mum or not. So just so you know: all this still works out for me, one way or another.”

And he kicked one foot and then the other, to remind Bully of that.

Bully left the flat in the afternoon as soon as he woke. He was already dressed. He left on his own. He hadn’t planned on taking Jack because of the no-dogs-allowed situation and Phil had been OK about it.

“Nah, leave her ’ere. We’re all off out later,” he’d said because it was Emma’s birthday and they were celebrating round her mum’s place. Bully thought maybe Phil wanted Jack there for something else, for back-up maybe during the day: all the flapping of the letter box they were getting from the
Gombeen
men, as his mum used to call them, the moneylenders that Phil was throwing scraps to now he wasn’t getting his money straight away.

Jo met him at the railway station and they travelled back into London, back along the Northern line, carrying the sweetie jar and the broken piece of paving-stone in the Bag for Life he’d bought from one of the supermarkets in town.

“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Jo asked him, just like they did in the films. And just like in the films, he nodded and said he was going to do it, with or without her, though that wasn’t true because he didn’t think he could do it on his own, not in the day anyway. And the daytime was the proper, right time to do it. No more creeping around.

Jo paid to get in. And just like she’d said, they had to go with a tour guide, though it wasn’t like any holiday Bully had ever seen. None of the zombies seemed bothered. They all acted like it was a normal day out to walk round a place full of dead people, right under their feet, taking pictures of gravestones and eating sandwiches.

The lady in charge of their tour with a sweet-sucking face was suspicious of Bully, he could tell. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t taking pictures. He didn’t look that different in his jeans and Reeboks. And he wasn’t the youngest on the tour. It was just something about him, his breed that marked him out. Or perhaps it was the sense of purpose carved into his face; that he wasn’t just here for a day out.

The lady started up straight away with her sweet-sucking about keeping to the path and no littering and explaining that she was a
friend
of the cemetery who did all this for free. Then she started talking about the dead people and the graves and Bully and Jo slipped to the back of the group.

As they followed along, Bully didn’t recognize very much of the cemetery in the daytime. It looked more like a theme park without any rides or concession stands, just fake-looking statues and little paths going everywhere, park benches all over the place.

“What about over there? That looks like a nice spot?” said Jo.

Bully shook his head. It was just a spare patch of grass behind some other gravestones. And he didn’t want his mum stuck in there like she was in a tin of sardines. He was looking for somewhere special and exclusive with a private view of the trees and the grass.

He’d planned to scatter his mum next to Lady Di and he’d been
very
disappointed when Jo had told him she wasn’t buried here because Lady Di was still famous, even though she was dead. Not like all these old-fashioned celebrities Jo kept going on about who’d never been on TV. His mind was made up though. If it was good enough for this
Karl
Marx
guy, some famous old Davey who’d spent all his days in the library a hundred years ago, Jo said, then it was good enough for his mum.

As they drifted further and further back like tired-out toddlers, and the feet and chatter of the rest of the tour got further and further away, Bully started to hear the nicer noises of the cemetery that he hadn’t heard at night: birds talking to each other, the leaves making a fuss of hanging on to their branches in the little bit of wind between the trees. And then he saw the spot, the best spot for his mum, with a tree for the birds and even an angel from next door’s grave looking over like Declan’s mum did next door, keeping an eye out.

“There, over there!” he said.

“Right, quick then! Let’s go. Let’s do it!” said Jo. She was smiling and giggling but that seemed right. And they ran through the graves and off the path to the little patch of trees on a bit of a hill. Bully quickly scraped a space in the roots of the dark green ivy and the dead leaves and unscrewed the red lid right off the sweetie jar.

“Are you going to say anything?” said Jo.

“What?”

“You know … something nice. I think you’re sort of supposed to.”

He looked into the dust and grit and still couldn’t help wondering if there was any bit of her left that he might recognize – a tooth, a bone, but there was nothing. It was just ashes, the 3% that was left of her.

“I don’t know…” But Jo was still smiling and it was still right. “R.I.P., Mum,” he said because that was what people said. And he went to tip the couple of kilos of her ashes out of the jar but they seemed suddenly very heavy to him. And then another hand was underneath nudging his, and the ground began to puff up with thick grey-and-white dust like a little bonfire that had finally burned out. He tapped the bottom of the plastic jar, made sure there was nothing left inside and passed it to Jo. Then he put the piece of broken paving-stone that he’d brought with him somewhere in the middle, got down on his hands and knees and pushed it deep into the earth.

“So that’s your mum’s name,” said Jo, reading the scratches in the stone that Bully had made last night. And he nodded down, and noticed when he stood up that the bottoms of his jeans were a lighter blue than the rest of his legs. He didn’t mind when he realized what it was. He brushed the ash off. It was just dust now.

“Oh, crap,” said Jo, but he was still looking at the bit of paving-stone and folding up his Bag for Life and wondering what kind of birds they were that his mum would be putting up with for the rest of her life, because he couldn’t remember if she really liked birds all that much or not. There weren’t many birds on their estate.

“What
are
you doing with
that
?” said a sucked-up voice behind him.

It was Jo who ran. She was almost back on the path when she looked round and he was still there standing next to the sweet-sucker. Because for Bully, now, this wasn’t a place for running away.

The
friend
of the cemetery walked them back to the reception, telling them it was thoughtless what they had done even after Jo explained.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said, looking at Jo not Bully. “But you can’t just do as you please! There are laws in here just like
everywhere
else! It’s not self-service! You have to have the proper written authority and go on the waiting list just like
anyone
else! What would happen if
everyone
did what you’ve just done?” she said finally. “We’d have bodies all over the place!”

“Well, there
are
,” said Jo in a sarcastic voice, looking around the place.

The women tutted, sucked on her invisible sweet and said “typical”. She told them to sit and wait while she got someone official to deal with them.

She came back with an old bloke, with a baggy, saggy throat. He was a cross between a Davey and a retired zombie, wearing a black suit and a tie that looked as if he’d got it second hand off a bigger, younger man.

He introduced himself and said that he was called Mr Faraday. And he asked Bully and Jo to write down their names and addresses and a responsible adult who could pick them up because he didn’t think this was really a matter for the police.

“Who have you lost?” asked the man, as if Bully just might find her again if he searched and searched hard enough. Bully knew what he meant though.

“My mum,” he said and pinched himself because his eyes were making things more squirmy than usual without his glasses on. “I wanted her to end up somewhere nice. And not in a bin.”

And then he told the story, a shorter story than the one he’d told the old man in the hospital in case this one didn’t remember any of it either.

Towards the end there was a knock on the door and the sweet-sucker came in, still not out of sweets yet.

“I’ve cleaned things up as best I can,” she said. She put a bag on the desk with a clunk, giving the old man an “it’s in there” face, and Bully swore at her on top of his breath, not under it.

The old man nodded and waved her out whilst he kept his eye fixed on what was on the desk. He would deal with this too.

“Now, I do have a great deal of sympathy for you and your loss,” said the man, pausing to look to the door as if the sweet-sucker might come back. “But I have to say to you that the rules are for everyone… So that everyone can enjoy this beautiful place. The ashes will be left as they are but the stone cannot legally remain where it was laid. Unfortunately there are no exceptions. I can’t put this back. I’m sorry,” he said, smiling, his throat wobbling about as he swallowed down his apology.

But Bully’s eyes flushed with hate. And that made them much smaller, letting less light in, so that the man suddenly stopped squirming in front of him and Bully saw as clear as he ever did with glasses what happened next. Because the man did a very strange thing with just one of
his
eyes, something that only old people still knew how to do nowadays: he winked at them.