Lottery Boy (5 page)

He heard a bell tinkling inside the theatre place and one or two zombies started doing a little twisty dance on their cigarettes whilst the rest headed back to their seats. Bully spread out on the empty steps and listened to the rest of what the two Sammies had to say. Then he told them about Janks.

“He loves his taxin’, always, always … taxin’ us,” said Man Sammy.

“Yeah, but it’s never you’s has to pay,” said the other Sammy, pulling a face, and Man Sammy told her to
shut it
and to keep it like that. And then they agreed that the river would be better off without Janks – who didn’t even live on the streets but in a house, partying all night, and who didn’t need the money – giving the pavement a bad name, taxing for the fun of it, for the
laughs
.

The other Sammy draped both her arms around Bully so that they were now like a little noose of bones and flesh around his neck.

“Little boy I never had,” she said.

“Get off him!” said Man Sammy but her arms stayed where they were.

The last of the zombies left to go back inside, and no one said anything for a while. Bully could feel his news working its way out.

“I won it,” he said.

“Won what?” said the other Sammy dreamily. “What you won, love?”

“The lottery. I won it!”

“What?” Man Sammy’s voice sharpened up. “How much?”

“All of it,” he whispered, almost to himself, so that he was surprised when he heard Man Sammy making fun of him.

“You
ain’t
won it! You
ain’t
won nothin’! You’d be on the telly!”

“In’t ’e
sweet
,” said the other Sammy.

“I haven’t told ’em yet, have I? And I’m not having no publicity anyway!” This was something he’d just decided. He didn’t like having his picture taken since his mum had stopped taking it.

“Course you did, love,” said the other Sammy, giving him another kiss. He tried to pull away without upsetting her because it was sore from where Janks had throttled him. “Where you going?” she said, giggling as if it was a game. And he ducked his head out from under her arms.

“I got all the numbers!”
Man Sammy’s voice squeaked and crackled as he tried to make it go all high, making fun of Bully’s voice that was changing all the time.

Bully stood up. “I have, I got all six! They scanned it and everything. And I’m going to Camelot to get it! In Watford!” he added, to show how true it was, because Watford was a real place.

Man Sammy stopped laughing and his face closed down and his eyes searched Bully’s for a few seconds before he spoke. “Let’s have a little look-see then, at this little ticket of yours,” he said quietly. And Bully realized he’d said way too much.

“I ain’t got it with me, have I? Got it stashed…” He tapped his little finger against his coat pocket to signal Jack he was ready to go. Jack was on her back though, still having her belly rubbed.

“Where you put it then?”

“Left it in the lockers…” Bully whistled softly with a bit of breath he was blowing out anyway and Jack rolled onto her feet, back on duty.

“What lockers? There’s no lockers at Waterloo.”

“What? Yeah, yeah, no. Not
there
.”

“Where? Where’s the
key
then?”

He made a show of patting his coat down like he was looking for it. “Dunno… Look, we gotta go. Got stuff to do. Yeah, laters.” And he was padding across the Strand, Jack at his heels, before either of the Sammies got to their feet.

“Bully, love, don’t go!” shouted the other Sammy but he didn’t look back – ran straight in front of a bus, just making it across, Jack a little ahead of him, knowing the way. And they kept the pace up between them, across the footbridge, back past the guys still playing their trumpets and drums for money, back towards Waterloo where the sun was just beginning to think about bedding down for the night.

He didn’t like being out and about when the sun played hide-and-seek. He wasn’t one for roaming after dark. He liked to get organized, get settled for the night. A lot of the older boys liked the empty hours, owning the streets for a while before the day brought the zombies back to town. But Bully didn’t. It wasn’t the dark itself. There was plenty of light around at night in London. No, what he didn’t like about the night-time was the people who came out of it. The way they went nasty and did things they wouldn’t do in the day. So he always laid out his cardboard bedding and his blankets and sleeping bag on his doorway before the sun went down.

The step that he slept on was at the back of an alleyway, a nice little dead-end off Old Paradise Street, not far from the station, past a little row of shops with a dancing lady painted on the end of the brick wall. She had a bowl of bananas and oranges and pineapples balanced on her head and Bully gauged how hungry he was by if he ever walked past and even
thought
about eating fruit.

There were no cars parked in his alleyway. The only thing it was good for was rubbish. Two metal bins as big as cars took up most of the space. Even so, when the rubbish truck came reversing in from the main road on Tuesday nights, he made sure his wheelie bin (that he’d nicked) with all his bedding in was tucked out the way. He didn’t want to have to go looking for new blankets at night.

He’d been lucky to get it. The first night in town he’d spent wandering around the station. On his second night he was so tired he’d fallen asleep on the steps where the names of the dead train drivers were written into the walls.
COMPANY EMPLOYEES WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR
it said in the stone.

Alfred Appleby

John Ardle

James Bootle…

He tried to remember which war was the great one, that was so
big
, that everybody got so excited about. It said
1914–1918
on the wall but he wasn’t sure if that was the one with Hitler in or not.

Phil had told him that in the army the fighting bit, the war bit, was OK, as long as you were pulling the trigger and doing something. And that gave you a bit of a rush, getting away with it for another day, but he’d never said any of it was
great
. And Bully had drifted off that second night thinking about all those dead train drivers driving
ghost
trains after their war and was nearly caught by the Feds.

It was Chris who had saved him. He’d seen the Feds on their way, come over and given him a tap and got him and Jack moving. Bully’d wandered around for the rest of the night with Tiggs and Chris, in and out of takeaways to keep warm, and in the morning he’d gone round the back of McDonald’s with Jack and found this place.

He lay down on his step. The doorway was too small and the step too narrow for a big man or even an older boy of much more than five feet and a half to bed down on, and his cardboard crinkled out over the edge. He didn’t know where the door went. No one had opened it while he was there, not while he was awake, anyway. There was no name or number on it, just a keypad, and sometimes he’d punch in numbers to see if he could get it to open. So far, he’d had no luck.

“What’s this?” he said, picking fluff from his sleeping bag out of Jack’s coarse fur. “There’s a bit of poodle in you, mate.” He thought this was really hilarious and said it most nights even if he couldn’t find any fluff.

What he spent most of his time picking out of Jack’s coat though was
fleas
. His eyesight was good enough close up. The warm weather the past few days had been breeding them up and yesterday he’d squished thirteen between his nails so that his fingers looked like they were bleeding. The thought of it had Bully checking Jack’s ear. The tear was ragged like a torn ticket and he rubbed a bit of his own spit into it for good measure, though human spit did nothing for dogs.

Jack whined a little and then nuzzled up to him. Her dog tag touched his sore skin. And because it was metal it felt cold even though the night was warm. He scratched under her jaw with one hand and with the other rubbed the little brass disc between his fingers. His mum had paid out extra to have it engraved and he traced the letters of the name cut into the metal. It reminded Bully of his money.

Jack suddenly twitched away from him and started up, pointing towards the bins. Her growl ticked over.

Rats
.

A small one had got into his sleeping bag in the winter and bitten his ear. Bully had woken up screaming to see Jack shaking her head like she was saying
no, no, no
to the rat in her mouth.

He was about to put Jack on it when there was a
beep, beep, beep
from the emergency exit at the back of McDonald’s. One of the burger boys was dumping the trash. It was twenty-four hour opening and this went on through the night. The alarm used to wake him up when he first moved in but nowadays most of the time he slept through it. Sometimes early in the morning he went looking for food in the bins, but he didn’t like climbing in there with all those black bags bobbling about and maybe rats trapped in there in the darkness with him too.

When the door shut and the alarm stopped Jack settled down and the rat was gone. Bully got out his Top Trumps. He’d remembered to bring them with him when they left the flat. He went through them most nights, working out what Jack was from the pictures and descriptions of the different breeds. The categories were
height
,
weight
,
guard-dog skill
,
rarity
and
lovability
. Jack didn’t do so well on height or weight, losing out to the big hounds, but she made up for it in the other three categories. Though Jack’s breed wasn’t exactly in the pack, Bully was sure there were bits of her in among all those pedigrees and most nights he went searching for exactly what mixture of dogs she was. A bit of red setter, maybe, around her neck, and the way she sometimes pointed like a gundog with her long nose. Or … maybe Jack was crossed with something much, much bigger and she was just the runt of the litter. This was the first time he had thought this up. Maybe she was part English mastiff or Great Dane. They were big dogs, bigger than men and real breeds too, with proper
ancestors
and
lineage
. The dog magazines said so. It was something to think about.

A while later, he put the pack of dogs away and tried to get to sleep but he was too excited. Every time he drifted off, thoughts started frothing up about what he would buy with his cash. Somewhere to live first of all. A penthouse flat right at the top of a block where you could scout everything out, nice and quiet with a swimming pool all to himself and no screaming kids. But would a penthouse be big enough for all his stuff? Maybe he’d just get a house, then, not joined up to next door but one on its own with a garden. A big, big house with lots of windows so he could see what was coming from miles away. And the roof would be made of glass too so that when he looked up he could see the planes and the sky. And it would have security alarms and razor wire and an electric fence to electrocute the scumbags who deserved it. And it would be where all the footballers lived. And all the rooms would have fridges full of cold cans of Coke. And it would have beds. Just normal-sized beds though, like the one he had back at the flat. That would do him. And Jack could have her own room full of squeaky toys and sticks and cans of food without
any
ash in them at all. He’d pay someone to pick it out.

He got out his lottery ticket to look at it again, to make sure it was still real. He read the numbers. Then he turned the ticket over to read the back.

Game rules
…

The tiny red print was difficult to read in the shadows. He got out a cigarette lighter and scanned the print through the top of the yellow flame. Some of the words sounded foreign – what were
aspects
? Was
amended
something that had been mended? It didn’t matter. He had the numbers. And he still had five days. He would phone them up tomorrow. Camelot at Watford. Get some credit or use a payphone. And then he would go get his millions. The drawbridge would come down and they would let him into Camelot, this castle place, and the knights would show him the money. He knew it wouldn’t really be like that but he liked to think of it that way all the same.

He was down to the second-but-last one of the rules and the flint of the lighter was beginning to hot up his fingers.

It is illegal for any person under sixteen to buy tickets or claim prizes
.

He’d never thought about the rules. He’d looked at them on the backs of the tickets before but he’d never
thought
about them, what it meant when he bought a ticket for his mum, Old Mac at the till turning a blind eye as long as you were in his shop. And just in case he hadn’t understood, there at the bottom was a red circle with
15
inside, crossed out.

He dropped the lighter.

He was too young to play.