Lottery Boy Read online

  “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.

  He sighed, got the gut shakes he was so hungry now and put the card away. Getting ready to leave he looked in the mirror and saw this scraggy, spindle-shanked boy giving him a “what d’you want?” face.

  He leaned in towards the glass. He could see where his hat had been these last few warm weeks because the top of his forehead was paler than the rest of his skin. Where the sun had got to him he was very brown but his cheeks underneath were still showing red. His mum said it was because people pinched them when he was a baby because he was so cute but he didn’t believe that. And he had large eyes that were still no better for seeing with and lips that looked kind of blubbery, like someone had caught him a sucker punch a few days ago. He wished he had spots. They made you look older because they left little scars.

  He caught himself rubbing his top lip to see if it was just dirt stuck there. And though it was just dirt, he definitely still looked sixteen. Maybe seventeen, he thought, and he spiked his hair to make up for the lost centimetres but it was too greasy and fell flat.

  Jack whimpered and started scrabbling up his knees with her huggy legs because she was hungry too but you couldn’t let a dog do that to you.

  “Get down … down. Now, OK, all right, cut it out, mate. I already told you we’re getting something to eat. Don’t be so impatient,” he said, making a big deal of it because he felt guilty. Jack was getting bigger too and needed more food than Bully was giving her.

  He opened the toilet door and had a scout about the eating place. One of the Whopper girls was cleaning the tables. Bully waited for her to go back downstairs. As soon as he heard her shoes clacking he came out and sat down at his favoured table and plugged his mobile into the mains that the cleaners used. The battery in the phone wasn’t much good now. Even if he turned it off, it still died on him after a few days. After he phoned up Camelot, he’d buy a new one with his five hundred quid or however much it was that was too much for the till. One you could play proper games on.

  He looked round to see what there was to eat. Upstairs was getting to be quieter in the summer evening times and there was just an old man eating every bit on his tray and a mum and dad with two kids messing about with their chips, their free toys still wrapped up new. The mum and dad looked at him suspiciously but the kids didn’t notice he was there. When they left he sidled over to their table, keeping an eye out for the manager, for the Feds, for anyone who didn’t like the look of him. He took the tray, stashed the ketchup sachets to eat later, ate the chips, and with a huge effort of self-control, he lifted up the towel and slipped Jack the bits of burger.

  “I spoil you,” he said, like his mum used to say to him.

  His phone beeped back on. A shot of Jack when she was little with a long white snout lit up the screen. When his mum was still alive, his wallpaper used to be a selfie his mum had taken of them with her arms round his neck. She was wearing a funny hat in the photo to cover her empty head, funny because she never wore hats. But he’d deleted that one a while ago because he didn’t want to think of her like that, wearing a hat.

  His credit came up as zero. He needed credit to ring Camelot. He pictured the castle, this time with water all the way round and knights on motorbikes instead of horses, riding round with machine guns, guarding his winnings.

  He heard feet on the stairs, got ready to dip into the toilets but it was just a geeky zombie with a laptop. He looked too happy to be anyone official, too relaxed, and Bully decided he could risk it. He put on his best voice, the one he used for questions and favours.

  “Where’s Watford, mate?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Watford, mate. How far is it, mate?”

  “Umm, well, I don’t really know. It’s sort of North London, north of London. It must be near Hemel Hempstead… Rickmansworth way…”

  He didn’t need teaching about it, just telling. Maybe this guy, maybe he was a teacher.

  “How far is it?”

  “I don’t know – about twenty-odd miles.”

  “So you could walk there then?”

  “I suppose you could. You’d have to really want to, though.” He puffed out a laugh but Bully just nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said, because he might have to walk it if he couldn’t beg any money or jump a train and risk losing one of his five days stuck answering questions if he was caught.

  Bully got ready to go but then he had another think. Maybe if he went online it might tell him exactly how much he’d won. How much was too much for the till.

  “You look up my numbers on your laptop?”

  The man hesitated to say yes but didn’t say no or shake his head.

  “Sorry, what numbers?”

  “The lottery. The numbers. Not this week’s. I don’t want them.”

  “No, OK, but I don’t know if I can get a connection in here…” the man said, putting his hand on the screen and looking down at the floor to make sure his satchel was still there and then seeing Jack’s head poking out. He flinched, sat up straight.

  “Is he all right in there?”

  “Dudn’t live in there, mate.”

  The man relaxed a little. “Oh, OK. Your dog, is it?”

  Who else’s dog was she going to be, sitting there next to him being fed bits of burger? Why did people keep asking him that? Like he’d nicked her from a blind man or something. Jack was as good as any dopey Labrador. She could lead you anywhere whether you had any eyes or not.

  “Yeah. It’s my dog,” he said, just about controlling himself enough to be patient with another zombie asking stupid questions about his dog.

  “Oh, OK. Cool, nice dog.” He opened the laptop up and tapped the keys. The guy didn’t know anything about dogs, Bully could tell.

  “OK… So when was it, the draw then? Which week are we after?”

  What did he mean, we? Bully didn’t like the sound of that, like he was looking to get something out of this for himself just for tapping the keys. Bully got his ticket out and read the date of the draw and the man put it into the Camelot website and then twisted the laptop round to show him the results. Bully leaned closer, his lips working, mumbling to himself but not saying anything just like the beggar man on the bridge. And for close to a minute he read the numbers right to left, left to right, comparing them with the random ones on his ticket he had out underneath the table.

  The man was beginning to get uneasy again.

  “Any good?”

  “No … no. No good. Gotta go,” he said and stood up, unplugged his mobile and picked up Jack.

  “Look, do you want this? I’m not that hungry. I just got it for the drink really.” The man was handing him his burger, still in the wrapper, as good as throwing it away. Bully took it, tore off half and swallowed it before he got to the bottom of the stairs. And though he was starving he’d had a job to force it down because he’d been calculating (the best bit of maths he’d ever done) how many millions of meals he could buy just like it and still have spare change.

  Because he had all the numbers. All six. He had won it, the big one. The one people went mad about. The jackpot. He couldn’t remember exactly how much but it was more than a million. It was always millions.

  Why hadn’t the manager man in Smiths just told him so? Didn’t want to go shouting out his numbers, everyone crowding round, maybe. But then he remembered nothing had come up on the screen b
ecause he’d been looking at it. Contact Camelot, Watford … that was all it said. The manager man knew he’d won big. He just didn’t know how big.

  There must have been something about it on the news back in the winter, but then he hadn’t heard any news since they’d left the flat. And though he sometimes watched TV through the shop windows on the Strand and on the big giant screen above the platforms at Waterloo, it was all silent news. And he didn’t read news. The only thing he read was magazines.

  “We won it, mate … we won it,” he said to Jack but it still didn’t make it real enough. He buzzed around for a while with the notion that he was rich, proper rich like off the TV with enough cash to buy things, not just a few things but every thing he wanted. And he had the rest of the night, and another five days if he felt like it, to feel like this, that feeling of looking forward to something.

  He wanted to tell someone. He needed to. The urge was strong, like a nice hunger. The manager man in Smiths had told him not to but he was talking about someone he didn’t know, wasn’t he? So Bully weaselled his way back out of the station, through the arch, down past the dead train drivers’ steps, back towards the river, looking for a face he knew. There was no one around on his side, just the eaters in the eating places and the skateboarders pushing out onto the pavements, getting braver now the sun was going, doing tricks on the benches and rails.

  So he crossed the footbridge, put his hands to his ears as he hurried past the guys playing trumpets, thumping their big plastic cans for money. They were there most nights in the summer but he never hung around to listen, didn’t like that noise. Lots of noises he didn’t like, but over to his left he didn’t mind the big clock, Big Ben, by the politicians’ place that was going bang, bang, bang … for nine o’clock, because he knew what that meant. It was the time.

  Even so, he looked away to his right along the river, at the other buildings stacked up against the water, some of them stone, some of them glass, one of them like a huge sharp lump of ice. And further down the river, the skyscraper like a giant bullet, and the skinny bridge and the big church looking like a blurry ice-cream cone that somebody had just wasted and thrown away.

  He walked on up to the square, let Jack size up the dirty brown lions lounging around Nelson’s Column. He wondered what the little man with the pointy hat could see up there. Maybe the bridge at the end of the river that opened up for the boats to go under. He didn’t have the nerve yet to travel that far away. He liked to stick to the patch he’d got to know. Along the Strand, up Kingsway, down Charing Cross and the Haymarket and then back across the river to the Eye was as far as Bully went. A lopsided square of roads, shops and offices that he had somehow in the last five and a half months decided was his territory, his own bit of turf.

  He was going to the Strand now. The punters would be about, fagging outside the theatre places, and he might pick up a couple of quid to top up his mobile. There were a lot of these theatre places along the Strand and he sometimes looked at the posters they put up and watched the lights flashing for the shows. Back at the flat, Phil, when he was wasted, used to talk about the theatre of war, but it wasn’t like one of these theatre places where they acted things out and did a song and dance for money. Phil said they shot each other instead.

  He wandered along with Jack, in a world of his own, thinking about what he would buy from the shops on his way back from Camelot in Watford. He wanted a games console – an Xbox, the new one, and a PlayStation, but not the Wii – that was for kids… He looked in a shop window at the dumb show on all the TVs. Yeah, and a big, big plasma 52 inch, maybe 62, maybe a hundred! No, better than that, he’d have a screen built into one of the walls… He would need walls for that though. So maybe he would have to get a place first for all this stuff he was going to buy.

  He heard a sharp whistle – the sort he had never learned to make, with two fingers in your back teeth.

  “Bully!”

  A couple of zombies outside the theatre place looked round, thinking something was up, but it was just his name. Bully for bulldog, like his dog – like some of his dog, anyway.

  “Bully, Bully! You all righ’!” The two Sammies came over, hanging off each other, laughing and falling about like they were in a three-legged race and close to coming last.

  Man Sammy bent down to make a fuss of Jack, the other Sammy, a big old lady one, kissing Bully on the lips.

  “You all righ’, love,” she said, draping one arm round him like she was fed up with holding it herself. Close up she looked older than last time he’d seen her, like she was her own sister. Bully smelled the drink, and her eyes were slow to look at him. He didn’t like drink. He’d tried it – course he had – but it tasted like medicine and why would he want to take medicine when there was nothing wrong with him?

  “We been Sunderlan’, haven’t we, Sam?” said the other Sammy.

  Man Sammy ignored her, playing with Jack, tickling her belly. “Bite me? You gunna bite me, eh? Who’s a nasty dog, eh? Who’s a nasty dog?”

  “D’you hitch?” Bully asked. He didn’t like it when Man Sammy said things like that to his dog like she was a bad dog.

  “On the coach, love.”

  He wondered how they got their money. Neither one of them did much begging as far as he could tell.

  “You seen Tiggs and Chris?” he asked. It was where they came from, up north, and he took it for granted that everyone that way sort of knew what everyone else was up to.

  “Nah. Dunno where they are. Up to their eyeballs in it, I expect…” Man Sammy put a finger to his eyelid and dragged it down so that Bully could see his whole eye shining in its socket.

  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.