Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  James pauses and looks back. ‘You do fat boy, Keith.’

  He kicks the whining Hackwill in the side and starts a boot ballet, as if trying to cram the sodden bully into the plug-holes of the urinal.

  You look at Jessup, who backs into a stall. You remember the fat face snickering as James wet himself, calling to you.

  ‘It’s all right,’ you tell him. ‘I won’t hurt you …’

  Relief sweats out of the fat face.

  ‘Much.’

  From inside, violent rage erupts. You didn’t know that you were still so angry, that you carried the hurt.

  You leave Hackwill and Jessup bloodied on the stinking floor of the Gents. Max has lined up fresh, on-the-house pints on the bar. Everybody remembers their school bully. No one ever forgives.

  People gather round. You buy them all drinks. You buy a roomful of witnesses. Hackwill and Jessup slink out by a side door.

  Drinking your pint, you catch James’s eye. As one, you make fists in the air and roar. The Marion brothers are back in business!

  In the Falklands, James is severely wounded. He loses his left leg below the knee and is mustered out on a disability allowance. The medal citation commends his ‘initiative and conspicuous bravery’ in holding a position while someone else went to summon reinforcements. You wonder whether you taught him (by example) that he had to bear the brunt of the attack while others took the problem to a higher authority. James comes home changed but not obviously embittered. He is still self-reliant, even if he has to hobble around on a prosthesis. After a few months, he refuses to use a crutch.

  The family regroups around James. With Dad gone and you in London, he becomes the fulcrum. You talk with him every week on the phone, and he updates you on what’s happening with Mum — who has a boyfriend, Phil Parslowe — and Laraine.

  Wounds heal. Disabilities are coped with.

  It’s all been taken out of your hands.

  You work as a technical journalist in the daytime but struggle in the evenings with Freebooter, a historical novel. You live with Christina Temple, your girlfriend since university. You sell Freebooter and are contracted to write two sequels, Buccaneer and Privateer. You follow your hero, Kenneth Merriam, through a career of piracy from stowaway cabin boy to governor of Jamaica. Once you’ve used that up, you write about Merriam’s ancestors, in Gallant, Galleon and Galliass. You and Christina marry, and have two children, Jasper and Jessamyn. You write about Merriam’s descendants in Crossbones, Cutlass and Cutthroat. Freebooter is turned into a very unsuccessful film, which nevertheless makes you more money than all your publishing deals combined. You are published in sixteen languages. There is a Merriam Quarterly, a fan publication devoted to your books. You take a cruise in an authentic pirate ship for a TV documentary, and try to be good-humoured about seasickness. You write a book about the experience, Landlubber.

  In February 1998, James wins £6.3 three million on the National Lottery. He buys you a yacht as a birthday present.

  The Merriam saga completed, you don’t need to write any more novels. Effectively, you retire.

  James invests, speculates, develops. Determined not to squander his winnings, he incorporates.

  The Marion Group grows. Jasper works for James and becomes a vice-president at twenty-two. James, perhaps because of his leg, never married, though he has been seeing his personal assistant, Kate, for fifteen years. Outsiders sometimes think Jasper is James’s son.

  You have a seat on the board but can’t keep track of James’s dealings. You give advice when it is sought but feel cut out of the loop.

  This is James’s game.

  Jasper has come up fast. He’s a twenty-first century man, clued-in to technologies that baffle you, temples shaved to accommodate the decorative plugjacks he wears even though the tech to interface on a brain-level with information nets hasn’t been developed and isn’t likely to come along in the next few years. James relies on Jasper in communications; he is very obviously Heir Apparent.

  You love your son, but — as he nears thirty — you find it hard to like him. At school and university, he was erratically brilliant, often depending on you or James to cough up cash to get him out of trouble. He got married young, to Robert Hackwill’s daughter Sam of all persons, and made you a grandfather, to little Zazza. Sam has smoothed him somewhat — he had a bit of a stimulants habit at university — but he still likes electronic short-cuts and corner-shaving. James is more tolerant of his foibles than you are.

  And you are wealthily irrelevant anyway.

  James keeps making speeches about luck and merit. The Marion Group is the first Lottery fortune to last. Most big winners are dead inside six months, used up by hedonism or torn apart by vultures. Their money drains away into the sand. James’s win is the seed money of an empire. He always credits you with demonstrating the difference between burying treasure, frittering it away and using it. He has turned his treasure into a treasury.

  As the new millennium whooshes on, you face sixty.

  Christina, five years younger, asks if you’re content. You wish you’d done some things differently and had tried harder in other areas but can’t deny that you have been a success.

  Then, one spring morning in 2020, your daughter visits you on the latest yacht.

  Jessamyn wears living tattoos on her breasts and magenta knee-length shorts. She’s had her cheekbones done, ridges of coral implanted around her eyes. It’s a look.

  ‘Daddy,’ she says, air-kissing you.

  Jessamyn has never been as focused as Jasper. Born to wealth, she has pleased herself, not quite making a go of careers as a sound sculptor or an estate agent. Currently unmarried, she is engaged to a woman. Though she’s had two husbands, Mandii will be her first wife.

  ‘Jess.’

  You’re pleased to see her. She was at your Big 60 party, but so was everyone else and you didn’t get to talk to her much.

  Her smile is serious. You know this is not good news.

  ‘I’ve had my family area scanned,’ she says, tapping her skull. A current fad is specific cat-scans of brain regions. Apparently the walnut-folds can be read like palms. ‘I know you always loved Jas more.’

  ‘That’s not true, Jess.’

  It isn’t. Everyone thinks their parents loved their siblings more. You certainly felt yours did.

  ‘No, it’s all right. I was a drip as a little girl. What was the word Uncle James used, “sneak”?’

  Whenever Jasper committed some naughtiness — which was often — Jess used to run and tell you, the model of public spirit. As you strode off to admonish or punish, Jess’s rectitude was replaced by unlovely glee.

  ‘Are you glad I told you?’ she would ask.

  An impossible question. You needed to know about Jasper but no one likes an informer.

  ‘I’m obliged to sneak again, Daddy.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘It’s Jas, as usual. I’ve known for weeks but not known what to do, who to tell. I thought I’d warn him I knew and he’d make things right and seal the record. But he wouldn’t. If you want to know, I’m afraid of what he’d do. You know what he can be like.’

  Her tattoos swirl around her nipples like twin dragons, reacting to her minutest skin secretions. They’re supposed to match her emotional state.

  ‘He’s been transacting in his favour. From the Group, from Uncle Jimmy.’

  The dragons’ eyes are blood-black.

  ‘I think it’s long-term. I know it’s major.’

  She leans forward and hugs you, miming crying.

  ‘Are you glad I told you, Daddy?’

  If you take this to your brother, go to 102. If you take this to your son, go to 116.

  11

  When your Eleven Plus results come through, your parents think there has been a mistake. But everyone is used to being disappointed in you. Remembering the tantrums you used to have, they always had a nagging feeling that any tests which suggested you were intelligent must
be wrong. Everyone could see you were mental. Actually, you haven’t pitched a fit since Class Four. After Robert Hackwill dragged you into the copse for the worst Chinese burn in human memory and no one came to help despite custard-level screams, you gave it up.

  You are the cleverest pupil in your class at Hemphill, but the lesson you learned in botching your Eleven Plus stays with you. The way to get through is not to scream and shout or show off, but to pretend consistently to be less able than you are. You can’t get away with a complete thicko act, like Timmy Gossett (in a special class, even at Hemphill), but keep answers to yourself, let others speak up in class.

  Every report you get is a variation on the theme of ‘Could do better if he tried’. Academically, you hover just under the top five of your class, conscientiously doing enough to get by, never letting yourself stand out in any way. Your mission is to come through the war without getting your head shot off. That means not shoving your helmet above the parapet.

  Your parents — you can see it — give up on you and put their hopes in James. Your brother easily passes his Eleven Plus, but spends only a year at Marling’s before comprehensive education comes in. Most teachers realise there’s something not quite right about your mediocrity but are too busy with real problem cases like the uncontrollable Tony Bennett or the suicidal Marie-Laure Quilter to give you much thought.

  Hemphill is understaffed and overworked. If Dr Marling’s is intended to turn out Sedgwater’s estate agents and local government inspectors and the Girls’ Grammar to furnish them with wives, Hemphill Secondary Modern’s job is to grind out leave-school-at-sixteen drones. Hemphill boys who live in town will work at the British Synthetics plant. If they’re from outlying villages, they’ll work on a farm. The girls work in shops or the jam factory and get married as soon as they can. Many of your schoolmates will have kids of their own before they are twenty.

  You still hang around with Barry Mitcham, Paul Mysliwiec and Vanda Pritchard, preserving the remains of your infants’ school circle into your teens. With Shane and Mary at grammar schools, you’re nudged into the leadership of your gang, though you find it boring always having to think up things to keep your friends amused. The laziness you affect becomes all too real. Vanda becomes something of a nag and Barry makes the odd joke about ‘old married couples’; which disturbs you. Though you’ve played kissing games, you aren’t Vanda’s boyfriend. She develops a serious plague of spots.

  One lunch break, Marie-Laure Quilter, who hasn’t really tried to kill herself, whatever they say, is hanging around with you for no real reason. Paul, athletic enough to make the junior football side, has brought a couple of his soccer mates, Vince Tunney and Dickie Kell. There’s an irritating barking in the air, the constant yapping of a dog that belongs to a pensioner whose garden backs on to the school grounds. Marie-Laure claims it’s trying to chew through the fence to get her. You pelt the dog with small stones and are hauled up en masse before Mr Taylor, the Head. Marie-Laure and Vanda get the slipper, and the rest of you the belt.

  The ‘slipper’, the ‘belt’. None of you — and, more significantly, none of your parents — questions the propriety of corporal punishment in school, administered with instruments as fetishist and symbolic as the top hat or old boot in Monopoly. The Bash Street Kids in the Beano usually wind up with throbbing cartoon bums and the frequently televised Bottoms Up! features a gowned Jimmy Edwards shouting ‘whacko!’ as he humorously thrashes recalcitrants. You’ve learned from James that it’s not true that pupils at Dr Marling’s can be beaten by sadistic prefects, but the cane is still used there as an instrument of chastisement. If and when any of you has a twelve-year-old, the idea of ritual child abuse as disciplinary tool will seem as obsolete as public executions or ducking witches. You’ll wonder if ‘the belt’ — three mild lashes administered by the tweedy and unenthusiastic Mr Taylor — could possibly have hurt as much as you remember. Even a hardnut like Dickie Kell is reduced to helpless tears almost before the first lash.

  The shared punishment makes you a proper gang. Before, you all drifted around the playground as free agents. Marie-Laure, who has an alcoholic mother, introduces you to smoking. Tension develops between Marie-Laure and Vanda, much like that between Mary and Vanda. Mary got her way through violence, terror and cunning, but Marie-Laure prevails by being dependent, clinging and desperate. Vince’s great obsession is American comics and he encourages your own budding interest. You hunt around newsagents’ together for stray issues of Batman, Doctor Strange and The Streak, and build collections through swapping and delving.

  By 1973, Hemphill is falling apart. After next year, it won’t even exist. Rumours go round about which of the staff will get the boot. Vanda frightens you all by claiming that at the new school you’ll have to do the difficult work her brother Norman does at Marling’s. Again, it’s repeated that grammar-school kids have five hours’ homework every night. You remember the panic spasm that made you botch your Eleven Plus. James does under an hour of homework an evening, but the prospect of giving up television and loitering-and-smoking-in-Denbeigh-Gardens is frighteningly real.

  Increasingly, you feel you have no control over your life. You used to have choices. Now, you have a trap. It is slowly closing.

  Read 18, go to 23.

  12

  In the first form at Dr Marling’s, you put on a spurt of growth, shooting up six inches. Your parents spend a fortune on new school clothes. Then have to do it again, twice, as your trouser-cuffs rise above your socks. They threaten to put you back in shorts. You say you’ll go on hunger strike if they send you to school dressed like an infant. The uniform is okay, except for the blood-red cap, which makes Marling’s boys look from a distance as if they’ve been freshly scalped.

  Your long legs make you a runner. The school tries to get you to play fly-half in rugby, but you don’t like the idea of twelve larger boys running after you, jumping on top of you. For you, games means track events: sprints, the half-mile, hurdles. Not very athletic at your last school, you discover that if all else fails you can run.

  Also, you take to the work. After a week struggling with base eight in mathematics and the lowest slopes of Latin and French, pennies drop. You find that schoolwork, like running, is something you can do, a resource. At the end of the first term, your year takes achievement tests in all subjects; you score in the top five in everything but religious instruction and music. You usually do your homework in under an hour and are in front of the television for Top of the Pops or Softly, Softly: Task Force. Your parents are delighted by your end-of-term report.

  You wonder if you were held back in primary school. Maybe having girls in the class hampered you. You don’t see any of the girls from Ash Grove, or any of your friends who failed the Eleven Plus and went to Hemphill. You have a new life.

  Suddenly, you are a leader. In the second term, Mr Waller, your form master, makes you form captain. Shane Bush, struggling to keep up in most subjects, is a hanger-on. You are wary of Michael Dixon and his friends, as clever as you but unpredictable, but become closer to Stephen Adlard, whom you barely knew at Ash Grove. Stephen is the neatest boy in the form, tie immaculately tied, homework meticulous. Without a ruler or compass, Stephen can draw perfect straight edges and geometric figures.

  In the first year, from 1971 to 1972, cliques and factions coalesce. Kids you knew at Ash Grove you think of by their first names; kids who came from other schools are known to you, as to the masters at Marling’s, by their surnames. You, Stephen and Roger Cunningham are the Brainboxes, with Shane as your attendant Thicko. Michael Dixon, Amphlett, Martin, Skelly and Yeo are the Forum, clever but useless at games. Trickett, Holmes and Ferguson are the rugby hulks. Beale, Pritchard (Vanda’s twin brother) and Fewsham are the Trouble-Causers.

  In the second year, from 1972 to 1973, you are in a form with Stephen, Cunningham and Michael — you all continue Latin, which two-thirds of your year drop — but Shane is relegated to a thicko stream. You still hang around
together at break. Shane brings along Gully Eastment, a new friend from his form. Eastment isn’t really a thicko, but mad moments hold him back: if dared, he’ll try anything from climbing the outside of the school to setting light to all the magnesium in the chemistry lab. He’s the only boy you know well who has been caned, bum striped scarlet by the head, ‘Chimp’ Quinlan.

  You feel yourself draw ahead of the pack, as you usually do towards the end of the half-mile, getting a third wind, finding new strength, new speed. Wally Berry, the games master, calls you ‘Streak’ and cautions you about pacing yourself. As you run, you always sense others at your heels, gaining fast. Even when you’ve sprinted well ahead of your closest rival, you sense the shadows of pursuers flickering at your heels.

  You run fast because you think you are being chased. You don’t like to think about who or what might be chasing you. You just know they are there, relentlessly pounding the gravel, matching your strides.

  At the beginning of the third year, in 1973, which you hear will be the last year Marling’s exists as a separate school, you draw up a life schedule, carefully writing it out on a sheet of exercise paper. In your future, you’ll have two years at Ash Grove Comprehensive, where you will take O Level courses, then two years at Sedgwater College, where you will take A Levels. Then you will read modern languages at Oxford or Cambridge, graduating with a First in 1981. After education, you will get a professional job. Something with a starting salary higher than that your father earns after twenty years with the bank. By 1987, when you are twenty-five, you will be ready to get married, buy a house, and father two children, a boy and a girl, Jonathan and Jennifer. Your wife will also be a professional. You will both have cars. You will continue to run, continue to draw ahead of the shadowmen at your heels. The track ahead of you stretches towards the twenty-first century. At the turn of the century, you’ll be forty. You write an essay in English about your fortieth birthday, spent on a daytrip to Mars.