Lottery Boy (7 page)

“What numbers? What?”

“Camelot… You know.” Bully saw the knights in his head, charging around the castle on their dirt bikes, revving up, annoying the neighbours, making bets as to what day in the next five days he was going to turn up.

“What,
this
week? No. I not see you on TV.”

“No, it was in February. But, look, there’s only five days left on it and you gotta be sixteen before they give it to you, to get the money. So can you do me a favour, yeah? I’ll split it with you,” he said, without thinking exactly what splitting meant.

Stan rubbed his face and head thoroughly like he was washing it.

“How much? How much you winning?”

“A lot … the lot, you know?
All
of it. But you’ve got to have something to show them who you are, to prove it, yeah? You got that?”

It didn’t say this on the back of the ticket but Bully was now sure of it. Of course they would if it was millions they were handing over. You wouldn’t just give millions away without proof, would you? You’d keep it. He didn’t believe any of it would be going to charity if he didn’t get his claim in. That was just a story. The guy in charge of Camelot would keep it for himself.

“Be fine, be fine…” Stan started walking again. Bully followed him, a little less sure with each step that he’d done the right thing.

“Stan. You got to prove it. Yeah? They
check
, you know. You got a passport?”

That word stopped him, knocked him back on his heels. “Look. I got no papers,” he said quickly, to the ground. “OK? I got no
proof
. You need proof, yeah? I got no proof of me. Nothing. Everything in my country at home.”

Bully didn’t ask where that was because Stan was an illegal. Bully couldn’t remember where he came from, even though he’d told him a couple of times. It was one of those long names. Somewhere
Stan
.

“So how much you won?”

“I dunno. The lot.”

“About, about how much?”

“Millions.”
It was always millions.

“Wow.” Stan wiped his forehead then got close, put his hand on his shoulder to show he was being serious. “Yeah, you no kidding me?”

Bully shook his head. “No, straight up. No joking,” he said.

“So … no one know
you
got the ticket? Yeah?”

“Well, yeah. No … no one knows.” There was a long pause. He looked at Stan, saw him working things out, doing his own sums, his hand getting heavier. Then he took it away and smiled.

“So no problem! We get Mick to collect money!”

“Yeah … yeah.” Bully didn’t like this idea, not one
bite
of it.

“Good, OK. Let’s go getting him up!”

“You go.”

“No, no, no. We all go!” Stan patted his shoulder, nodded the way. “Come on. You want your money? Yeah? We not far!” Stan sped off and Bully followed along behind, starting to sweat after a few minutes, with Jack’s weight in the bag. He hung back as Stan crossed Shaftesbury Avenue. Stan looked round and waved him across, then when Bully didn’t move, came back for him.

“What you doing? Why you so slow?” Bully didn’t tell him that he didn’t like going out of his territory, because he knew it was stupid. So he looked down, just put one foot in front of the other and followed himself across the road. Still, though, he hung back, didn’t like being rushed into new places. And every so often Stan would stop and hurry him along. It felt weird, shops and buildings all a little bit different to the ones he’d got to know since he’d left the flat.

They were nearly there by the time he started thinking about what he would have to give Mick. Was he going to have to give him half of his half or half of Stan’s half? Or half for everyone? What were three halves? He had never liked fractions, the way the top numbers were always sitting on the bottom ones, all up themselves, and he was stuck on this sum – resenting the maths he was having to do – when he saw the blue lights reflected in the shop window. There were no sirens and the lights were moving slowly. Bully tapped Stan and they both looked away, Bully putting his hat on, pulling it down round his ears.

“Police men,” Stan said, splitting the word up so they sounded like what they were. He never said
Feds
. They waited for the car to go further down the road but it turned the corner into an alleyway, similar to the one Bully bedded down in but much larger, with six or seven eating places backing onto it. In the road was an ambulance and in front of it a big bin truck. One of the grey metal bins was on the back of the truck, two metal arms holding it up in the air. The truck was still making a groaning noise but nothing was moving except the shadow underneath, spreading out into the alleyway.

Stan was in the bin on the back of the truck before the policemen were even out of their car. Black bags came flying out, popping on the warm tarmac. Stan was screaming and shouting all sorts but the only word Bully could make out was
Mick
. All the rest of it was from somewhere else.

He didn’t wait around.

“We got to go back,” he said to Jack, because there was no one else left anywhere near the top of his list and now he would have to go searching much, much further down…

Win big! Win tonight!
it said in yellow letters as big as Bully on the giant screen above the zombies at Waterloo.

He waited until one of the guards opened up the disabled gates for a woman with a pram and followed her onto the platform.

“Mum … Mum,” he said, making her look round, making the guard think they were on the same family ticket, him carrying the bags.

He got on the train and hid in the toilets until the guard went past. He didn’t have to stay there long. It was only five stops between the flat and his doorway off Old Paradise Street.

When the train arrived at the station Bully went over the railing and into the car park, Jack on his back in the holdall. He landed on his feet, on the bonnet of a Fiesta. For the fun of it he ran across three cars to get to the exit. Someone shouted “Oi!” but no one did anything.

The flat was less than a Scooby-Doo away from the station. Twenty minutes max. Before he’d learned to read a clock he used to measure out the day in Scoobies because it was his favourite cartoon when he was little and watched cartoons. His old life slowed him down on the way back to the flat, though. It kept jumping out at him, and everything seemed too close, as if he’d put his glasses back on, and it took him a whole Scooby-Doo and a half just to get back to where he’d left the ashes in the bit of dirt.

It didn’t look the same. The broken stone he’d left to mark the spot was covered over with stringy, straggly orange and yellow weeds, just squatting there. He poked around with a stick to clear a patch and then paid his respects, made sure Jack didn’t wee anywhere and made his mind up to come back another day.

He nearly went to the wrong block. All the blocks were in a line and each block on the estate had a big huge arch in it, so that from far away it looked like a giant rat had gnawed its way through all of them. They’d only moved into the new flat overlooking the road tunnelling underneath just before his mum started getting ill. They’d done an exchange and got one with three bedrooms so he didn’t have to share with his half-sister Cortnie any more. Though now his mum was dead, he didn’t consider any fraction of Cortnie as relating much to him at all.

A few people on the estate stared like they thought they recognized this boy in the hot green coat on a summer’s day but no one said his name out loud.

He took the stairs instead of chancing the lift. His old flat was fifteen flats from the lift doors, eleven from the stairs, and just one down from the rubbish chute. He was pretty sure it was why the old man who used to live in it had wanted to swap. No one liked having a chute clanging and banging at all hours, even though the sign on it said to be considerate to your neighbours. He pulled it open to see if there was anything he could eat jammed in the top, like a pizza box, but it was empty. There was just the smell of all that old waste still hanging on to the dark.

He could hear the little kid Declan next door, crying up against the letter box, wanting to play out. He wasn’t allowed to unless his brother was with him because it was too dangerous with the stairs. The little kids played with the rubbish chute, sticking toys and stuff down it, and maybe falling down it, and Bully had looked after his own sister too when he used to live here.

“All right, Declan,” he said, and Declan stopped crying for a sec and then started up again.

Outside his flat Bully flapped the letter box, looking up and down the concrete landing, his heart going and him just standing there not going nowhere.

No one was in. He had a look-see through. In the hall was a
cat
. It was psycho, staring right back at him, just like cats did. He wondered what it was doing there. Phil didn’t like dogs or cats or anything else with more legs than him. It was another reason why Bully had left. He still had his mum’s set of keys and he let himself in. Jack barked at the cat and it ran into Phil’s bedroom and then Bully thought maybe it was
her
cat.

The smell of the empty fryer set his stomach going. He could taste the fat in the air. Another smell too, paint coming from somewhere. He went through to the kitchen. It looked different from when he left; his mum’s spider plant was missing from the top of the fridge and two of the kitchen walls had been done up purple. A dirty paintbrush was still on the side of the sink, its roots sky-blue.

First thing he did was feel the kettle. No heat there, not even smack warm, the plastic colder than he was. Phil always had a brew on the go and Bully was an expert at judging how long boiled water took to cool down to nothing. And Bully was pretty sure Phil had left the flat before the middle of the day. He would either be back soon or not for a while yet. If Phil was out for longer than a few hours, he was gone all day. It was the way he worked.

Bully put a bowl of water out for Jack and was going to defrost some mince when he saw tins of cat food stacked up against the fridge. He picked one up and, hiding it from Jack, he took out the empty tin he’d saved from yesterday and put some of it in that.

“It’s for dogs,” he said, serving it up but keeping the can. Then he went looking for his own meal. In the cupboards he found a packet of Rich Tea biscuits and a family bag of crisps and got some bread and margarine and made himself a crisp sandwich. There was half a bottle of Coke in the fridge and he had that. It was flat but that didn’t bother him. He could drink flat Coke like it was water.

He stayed in the kitchen, eating and listening out for the front door. There was a letter from his school, unopened, on the side. Bully picked it up, examined it. He knew what that was about – bet Phil had had a few of those in the last few months. He threw it in the bin and then went back into the hall to put his phone on charge because that was where his mum always used to do it. On top of the meter were two tens for the electric, his old square glasses weighing them down. He tried them on; the insides of the flat were suddenly too close, just like the outsides had been, walking from the station. And he took them off but put them in his coat pocket.

He left the money where it was and went into the lounge. The curtains were still drawn and it was the same as he remembered, just cleaner looking. The TV was new though. He felt tired, very tired, and lay down on the old couch. The new cushions on it were bright and scratchy. He flung them at the end and spent a few minutes working out the TV. He used to sleep here like this when his mum was dying. He used to like drifting off to the voices on the TV, still in the room with him whether he was awake or not.

He flicked through the channels without interest and then he fell asleep.

A scream went off somewhere just outside Bully’s head. His eyes popped and a little girl with long hair was staring at him. She looked a lot like his half-sister except this one had dolly-cut hair and a bigger, redder face.

“Dad! BRADLEY’S BACK! It’s Bradley!” she said. Then she screamed again when she saw Jack coming out from underneath the cushions, as if she’d never seen her before.