Lottery Boy (3 page)

He examined his plastic spoons and threw away some with splits in, flicking them all into the road and a couple of the biros too. One of the zombies gave him a backwards glance, twisted her mouth a bit and then looked away. He got out his Oyster card from the little pocket near the collar of his coat. He’d found it by one of the machines when the cold had driven him down into the tunnels to ride the Circle line. It was a while since he’d used up the credit and he looked at it as if it was no longer his. He put it back and got his red penknife out. It was his prize possession and he held it in his palm to admire it. Inside were two blades: one big, one small. On the outside was a compass that told you where you were going. And it didn’t matter how fast you turned round trying to trick it, it always went back to pointing north and never let you down. He’d robbed it from a climbing shop. The small blade he used for little odd jobs like cutting up plastic containers for Jack to drink from. The big blade he saved to keep it sharp. He’d never done anything with it except to wave it at an older boy as he was running away.

He put his penknife back in his jeans and carried on looking, hoping to find a coin, a note, anything with a face on it, and he was almost finished now, pulling things out and putting them away. Finally then, to wrap things up, he got out his card. All the corners were bashed in so that it didn’t look like a card any more but he could still see what it said on the front. There was a picture of a face – a lady’s face, he’d decided, though it had just a squiggle of hair – whispering to someone inside the card. It made you want to open it. But he didn’t, not yet. He read the words on the front first, like you were supposed to. He always read the words.

I’ve got something to tell you…

He moved away from the railings, further back from the road, and opened it up. The face on the front was the same face inside but much bigger with a real-looking mouth cut into the card and a red paper tongue. And he concentrated on the words that were going to come out of this mouth.

And then the best bit, the bit he always waited for at the end: the kisses.

Her voice was beginning to sound a bit Dalek-y, like the batteries were starting to go, and he wondered if he should stop doing this every time he went through his pockets.

Bully looked around and one of the zombies waiting at the lights was smiling at him with pity eyes. He gave her a murderous look and clapped the card shut. As he did he heard a little
plinky
noise above the traffic. He opened the card back up and it said nothing. He frantically flapped it open and closed a couple of times before he could accept it was broken. Something had fallen
out
. He swore a lot and bent down, scanning the pavement, waving a fresh pile of zombies away like it was a crime scene.

He saw the little roundness of the battery sitting on the pavement and he picked it up very carefully with the tips of his fingers. The slot where it went must be somewhere inside the card. He put his fingers in the mouth and felt something crinkly behind the paper tongue. It wasn’t money: too papery, too thin. It
looked
like a receipt when he pulled it out, but when he unfolded it he saw it was just a lottery ticket.

It must have got stuck there somehow. He didn’t remember finding it. Still, worth checking it out, and it would take his mind off thinking about the money he’d lost to the river.

The girl at the till inside the station scanned his ticket without interest.

She was new. He knew all the staff by sight. She stopped what she was doing and pulled a face like the ticket had broken something in the machine.

“Gra-ham…” she said and Bully palmed a packet of chewing-gum for the fraction of a second she turned her head. An older man came to the till. Bully got ready to run.

“Graham, what does this mean?
Contact Camelot, Watford?
” She pointed to the screen.

“Oh, right,” he said and gave her a little nod to say he was taking over. Bully craned his neck to see and when he caught the girl’s eyes again she was looking at him differently, as if he was someone she thought she should recognize.

“What? Does it say I won a tenner?”

“No… It’s not that…” said the manager man and Bully swore and began to walk away.

“Heh, no! Hold on a sec—”

Bully turned round and the man surprised him, holding the ticket out, and looking concerned.

“You’ve won a lot more than
that
.”

“How much is more than
that
then?” The girl smirked and Bully gave her a look.

“I don’t know, I can’t say, but it’s not an instant cash prize. It’s not something we can pay out of the till. It’s too much,” the manager added when he saw the boy’s face. “That’s all I can tell you really. We just have to go by what’s on the screen.”

Bully thought about that. How much was too much for the till? He’d seen wads of tens and twenties when they opened it up to give change … must be at least three or four hundred quid in there … maybe a thousand or
more
.

“This is your ticket, is it, then?” The man had pulled a look over his face, tried to make it sound like he was just asking, like he didn’t really care.

“Yeah … someone else bought it though,” Bully said, in case he didn’t believe a boy like him could afford to be buying tickets. And then he remembered. It must be
that
ticket. And the memory of it, suddenly sharp in his head after all these months, started to hurt again and work him up. He looked round the busy shop to make sure of his exit.

“Well, someone needs to phone the number on the ticket…” The man slowly handed it back to him. “Or we can phone from here, if you like? If you’ve got I.D.?”

“Nah, it’s OK,” Bully said. He didn’t want anyone turning up and asking questions, all sorts of questions.

“You’d better get moving—”

Bully cut him off. “I’m going, all right!” he said, misunderstanding the man’s tone.

“No, the ticket, I mean. There’s a claim limit on it.”

“What? You only just looked at it!” Trying to rip him off.

“No, it starts from the date of the draw … 180 days … there, see?” The man leaned over the counter and pointed out the faint date on the ticket. “That’s February the 16th,” he said as if Bully was stupid. Bully knew what day that was, didn’t need to look at the numbers to know that day.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to phone Camelot for you?”

Bully shook his head like he was Jack with a rat in her mouth and then when he was sure he’d said no, out came a question.

“What happens to it then – to the winnings – if no one phones up in time?”

“Well…” the manager man said, considering it. “I’m not sure but I think it just goes back into the prize fund or to charity or something.”

To
charity
? Why would they want to go and do that? Waste all his money on little kids and wheelchairs.

The man carried on talking but Bully wasn’t listening now. He was looking at his ticket. What day was it, today? He looked at the green numbers on the till screen.
6.45 p.m
. it said one side,
09/08/13
on the other. What day was
that
though? All of a sudden he couldn’t understand what the numbers meant. He
was
stupid.

He turned round and looked at one of the papers to give him a proper day with a name to it. Today was Friday. And it was the 9th of August. He counted the months out on his fingers from February to August. It was nearly six months. So how many days was that? There were some months with more days than others in them and he tried to get a rusted-up rhyme going in his head. February had 28 days except in a leap year, he knew that.

He looked at today’s date again. It was too complicated to work out so he just did six thirties to average it out. But he couldn’t do that either. So he tried six threes instead which was eighteen and then added a zero. That was 180 already! He was frightened then that he’d run out of time.

But the man was smiling at him. “It’s five days you’ve got – well, six if you include what’s left of today – that’s how long you’ve got left on the ticket,” he said. He leaned over the till and the look on his face changed: like he wanted to tell him something that he didn’t have to, that wasn’t part of his job.

“And I’d keep it quiet if I was you … until someone puts your claim in at Camelot…”

Still in the station, Bully looked at his ticket again, at the numbers. He remembered buying it for his mum a couple of days before she died. She must have put it in his card and tucked it inside the paper mouth because she wasn’t thinking straight on all the drugs.

He put the ticket away inside his top pocket with his Oyster card and went back to thinking about his winnings piled up in pound coins in Camelot, in Watford. He looked back at the shop, at the sign for the lottery outside. It was a picture of fingers crossed for luck with a stupid smile creased underneath. He knew the sign for the lottery used to be a man on a horse. And he thought about this knight inside a castle looking after this money that didn’t fit in the till. He could do with some of it now, he was starving – that pain in his guts starting up again like roadworks. He might pick up something off the tables along the river or try the bins outside the station. There were eating places he went to inside the station but he preferred to be outside if the weather was good.

He walked towards the side exit, through a smaller arch where the taxis picked up passengers. He kept close to the walls, out the way of the CCTV. He didn’t like the idea of people looking at him, looking
for
him maybe, though he doubted it. Phil couldn’t wait for him to leave the flat after his mum died, had never liked having him around in the first place. And Phil didn’t like dogs, either. It was only down to his mum that he had been allowed to keep Jack when he brought her home from the shopping-centre car park, after grabbing her with one hand from underneath that 4x4.

He was deep, deep down in his thoughts when his eyes dragged him back to the surface to see what he was seeing: dead ahead of him were Feds, real Feds this time, wriggling around the punters at the taxi rank.

Bully turned on his heels. And then, walking away from the taxi rank, he ducked left into Burger King, his stomach taking over the thinking in this emergency. As he went in he pulled out a crinkled-up holdall from one of his big coat pockets. He let it skim the ground for a second, didn’t have to say a word and Jack jumped in.

“Shh,” he said and got his scrap of towel out and laid it over Jack’s head.

He went straight upstairs, avoiding the eyes of the Whopper boys on the tills. (If you looked at them, they looked at you.) The first thing he did before scouting for leftovers was go to the toilets. The first thing he did in the toilets was to go to the toilet. He only went for a sit-down every three or four days. Personally, that suited him. He didn’t like
having
to sit still for five, ten minutes. It was like being back at school, waiting for the end to come… And ten, fifteen minutes later the end did come … job done.

The second thing he did was refill his water bottle. You could live months without food but only days without water. Phil used to go on about it back at the flat: running out of rat packs away from base was no problem – you lost a few kilograms maybe – but you did not want to run out of water
in the field
. No way. Though all the time Phil had lived with them Bully had never seen him drink water in the flat, let alone in a field.

“He’s like a human camel,” Bully’s mum used to say before Phil came back to the flat with a big hole in his back like a mushroom growing the wrong way. And after that, no one talked about camels any more.

He washed his hands and dried them properly like he was doing an operation. He was fixing his card so it could talk again. It was a very fiddly thing to do without ruining the mechanism but he managed to fit the little battery back in the slot inside the face. He opened up the card; it didn’t speak. He swore a bit, then, remembering about pluses and minuses, he took the battery out and turned it round and tried it again and finally heard what he needed to hear.