Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  Mary is an obvious, if scary, choice, but you don’t want to go out with someone who might get ahead of you. Equally, you can’t go with a thicko who would hold you back, like poor Jacqui. Roger and Rowena have been going out for over a year, but argue all the time. Roger isn’t measuring up to Rowena: he smokes drugs with Graham, Gully and Victoria, and Rowena violently disapproves of hippies. That might be an opportunity. Rowena already knows how to be a girlfriend, which would be a clear advantage.

  Mary is tall and blonde, with a pretty face and long, slim legs. Her huge eyes are still scary. As far as you know, she has never had a boyfriend. Shane admitted once that he always fancied her but was afraid of what she might do. You find her uncomfortable but attractive. Intelligence is hidden inside her, coiled like a snake, always tensely ready to strike. Rowena is still tiny but shapely. You have thought about her breasts too many times in the dark of night. She has a goofy humour you can’t quite follow but which suggests she’d never be boring. Also, you’ve overheard her tell a friend that if you weren’t in such a hurry she might fancy you.

  At the end of term, in the run-up to Christmas, the college has a Rag Day. Everyone dresses up in costumes and runs riot, raising money for charity. Michael, still stuttering crazily, is president of the Rag Committee, which consists of his girlfriend, Penny Gaye, and his long-time associates Mickey, Neil and Mark. On the evening of Rag Day, the last day of term, the committee is to put on a show at the college, a mix of comedy sketches and musical acts. Graham’s band, this week called Flaming Torture, will top the bill.

  You decide, after much internal debate, to ask Mary to go with you to the show and the wild party Michael will hold afterwards at his grandmother’s house miles out of town in Achelzoy. Then, you learn Rowena has found out Roger has slept with Victoria and acrimoniously broken up with him. You reconsider your plans. After all, you aren’t certain either girl will accept if you ask her to go out with you, and the shame and embarrassment of rejection would be insupportable for someone in your position. You are so used to victory that you cannot bear defeat. You’d rather not play than lose. You sit in your parents’ hallway, looking at the telephone. You have numbers for Mary and Rowena written down. You are sweating. You think of Mary’s eyes and Rowena’s breasts.

  Who do you ask to go with you to the show? If Rowena, go to 22. If Mary, go to 26. If you duck out of asking anyone and go alone, go to 30.

  20

  Your parents look relieved when they see Mr Brunt’s face. At the interview, it is agreed that a mistake has been made and that your exam paper should be set aside. For a moment, you wonder whether this is fair: why didn’t Paul and Vanda get interviews, with their parents waiting outside the office, to set aside their results?

  Mrs Vreeland holds the picture you drew for her, of a bank manager on Mars with a briefcase attached to his space-suit by an air hose. She asks you to go outside and play while she talks with your parents. You do, though there’s no one else in school to play with. You walk across the grass towards the copse, bounding slowly under reduced gravity. A Martian monster lives in the copse, so you stay away from it. You’ve left your raygun at home.

  On the way home, Dad says you’ll be going to Dr Marling’s after all. Your mum is so happy she is almost crying. You don’t suppose it makes much difference whether you’re in a school with Shane or with Paul.

  Go on to 21

  20

  Your parents look relieved when they see Mr Brunt’s face. At the interview, it is agreed that a mistake has been made and that your exam paper should be set aside. For a moment, you wonder whether this is fair: why didn’t Paul and Vanda get interviews, with their parents waiting outside the office, to set aside their results?

  Mrs Vreeland holds the picture you drew for her, of a bank manager on Mars with a briefcase attached to his space-suit by an air hose. She asks you to go outside and play while she talks with your parents. You do, though there’s no one else in school to play with. You walk across the grass towards the copse, bounding slowly under reduced gravity. A Martian monster lives in the copse, so you stay away from it. You’ve left your raygun at home.

  On the way home, Dad says you’ll be going to Dr Marling’s after all. Your mum is so happy she is almost crying. You don’t suppose it makes much difference whether you’re in a school with Shane or with Paul.

  Go on to 66

  21

  In the third year at Marling’s, the last year it will exist, a group of you are walking through town on a Thursday afternoon. You’ve just suffered through a geologic age of double geography.

  As usual, you put off the moment of getting back for tea. The group aren’t your particular friends, just boys who happen to live along the route you take home, through the town centre and out towards the Achelzoy road.

  Mickey Yeo has (against regulations) stuffed cap, tie and blazer in his satchel, trying to look as if he goes to a harder school. Stephen Adlard seems about ten in his perfect uniform. Norman Pritchard scurries ahead and darts back all the time, unable to keep to a steady pace.

  You hang about Denbeigh Gardens, a rec ground. Younger kids are playing football and Mickey wants to scare them off, sending Norman in as a shock troop. Norman is keen, but you and Stephen aren’t so sure.

  Stephen asks you a question about homework but you aren’t interested. Officially, you are a good pupil, like Stephen. But he’s boring. His idea of a good time is drawing a Venn diagram, using all the inks in his multicolour pen. Mickey, clever (too clever) but temperamental, and Norman, a Trouble-Causer, make you a bit uncomfortable. But uncomfortable is better than boring.

  You always stop at Denbeigh Gardens, at Mickey’s insistence, because a steady file of Girls’ Grammar girls pass through at about the time you are there. None of you has ever actually tried to speak to any of these girls, but Mickey and Norman throw each other around in slow motion like stuntmen, trying to attract their attention. Sometimes, the girls giggle.

  ‘Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ Mickey says.

  Everyone else stopped playing cowboys in primary school, but with Mickey the re-enactment of fights from films he’s seen is less a game than a ritual. When he arranges you into characters from Shane or The Magnificent Seven and talks you through shoot-outs, insisting you die in order, he’s invoking something. He occasionally varies the model, straying from Westerns to war films (Tobruk, with you all trundling like tanks, or The Great Escape, in which you are Donald Pleasence) and even, once, the assassination attempt on Governor George Wallace. Recently, with 10cc’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ in the charts, Mickey has re-enacted that, with you as Sergeant Baker.

  Mickey is Liberty, Lee Marvin. He taunts you, as James Stewart. Norman, as John Wayne, gets to back-shoot him from the shadows. And Stephen is the bald coon who tosses Wayne the rifle he fires at Liberty.

  You scrabble in the dirt for the gun you have dropped — a piece of wood — and Norman fires his branch from behind the gardener’s shed.

  The timing is perfect. Three girls, in straw boaters and bottle-green blazers, come through the latch-gate just as Mickey takes the shot in the back. More elaborately than Lee Marvin, he wheels around, dropping his gun, clutching his wounds. He staggers this way and that, then spread-eagles on the grass, gurgling his last. The girls hurry on, looking down to avoid noticing the mad boy. There’s injustice there. Mickey’s artistry should be rewarded somehow.

  The girls have gone and Mickey is spread out on the grass.

  Stephen comes up behind you as you stand over Mickey and nudges you in the back.

  ‘Nothing’s too good for the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’ he says.

  You think Stephen has pulled a six-shooter from his satchel and is going to rewrite the script by plugging you in the back, leaving Norman to get off with Vera Miles and live in that half-built desert house with the cactus rose.

  Actually, he has a thin pack of cigarettes. Not sweet cigarettes. Players No 6.

  Mickey springs back to
life and Norman is interested too.

  ‘Give us one, Adlard,’ Norman says, barging in.

  ‘Dying for a gasper, I am,’ Mickey says.

  A dynamic is changing in this group. It should be one of the bad boys offering the cigarettes round. Stephen is the best-behaved boy at Marling’s. His homework is always perfect, as if laboured over by a medieval monk; his geography maps are illuminated texts.

  Mickey and Norman have fags in their mouths and suck the taste through the filters. Of course, neither have matches.

  Stephen is quietly pleased to be prime mover rather than the coon (a word your mum doesn’t like you using) throwing John Wayne the rifle. He has a flip-top lighter, metal and shiny. Norman takes it but doesn’t know how to use it, so Stephen takes it back. Promoted from coloured help to suave decadent, Stephen plucks a cigarette from the pack, taps it on his hand (like Sean Connery as James Bond), and sticks it jauntily in his mouth. Cupping his hand to shield the flame from the breeze, he flicks the lighter and lights up. He inhales deeply and sends plumes of smoke out of his nostrils.

  You couldn’t be more impressed if he blew rings.

  Stephen holds out the flame and Norman and Mickey light up. Norman gulps down a lungload, coughs and goes greenish. Mickey merely takes a suck, pretends to like the taste and breathes out a cloud.

  ‘Keith?’

  Stephen is offering you a cigarette. Your hand goes out, but you hesitate. In adverts in comics, ‘Bobby Moore says “smoking is a mugs’ game”‘.

  Norman splutters badly now. Green slime trickles from his nose and tears dribble down his cheeks. Mickey is enjoying the show, smiling in a superior way. He takes another bogus puff.

  Stephen raises the pack as if it were a gun.

  If you turn down the cigarette, go to 16. If you think you can get away with the fake smoking demonstrated by Mickey, go to 73. If you think you can do better than Norman and smoke properly, like Stephen, go to 19.

  22

  Rowena says she is coming down with flu and doesn’t think she’ll be going to Michael’s party. She’ll be in town for Rag Day, but thinks she ought to get home in the evening.

  She coughs into the phone. That makes you think this is a turn-down not a legitimate excuse. Rowena is trying too hard to convince you she’s sick.

  Maybe she’s off men after Roger and needs to be convinced you’re not a swine like him. Or maybe you misunderstood her interest in you.

  When you put the phone down, she’ll call up all her friends and tell them you had the temerity to ask her out, emphasising the ridiculousness of your expectations. Everyone will know.

  Score one against the runner.

  To get through Rag Day like this, you’ll have to wear a mask. Or be invisible.

  Or maybe she just has flu. It happens.

  ‘Sorry,’ Rowena says.

  If you accept the excuse and hang up, go to 30. If you try to use your powers of persuasion to wheedle around Rowena’s excuse, go to 28.

  23

  In September 1974, you start going to Ash Grove. Though on a new site, combining the ivied quadrangle of Marling’s with prefab shacks, you still have the Hemphill teachers, the Hemphill classes. You study for Certificate of Secondary Education exams, the thicko versions of the O Levels ex-grammar school kids are taking. Laraine’s O Levels got her into Sedgwater College, from which she’ll go on to university. CSEs are a rubber-stamp for cannon fodder in the job market. If anything, the schoolwork is easier than it was at Hemphill, almost insultingly so.

  Dickie Kell and Paul Mysliewic work Saturday mornings at the jam factory, hefting boxes. They seem fabulously wealthy, with £10 a week cigarette money. Two more years, they chant, and they can work full time (‘go down the Synth’), have money coming in, buy mopeds, move out of their parents’ houses — their homes are much smaller than yours, and they have to share rooms — and get on with their lives. They make the last two years of school seem like the remainder of a prison sentence.

  Your parents won’t let you work at the jam factory, though they don’t mind Laraine doing Saturdays as a waitress at Brinks’ Café. You decide not to speak to them for a month. They don’t seem to notice, which shocks you. Somehow, you’ve become the invisible middle kid. James studies Latin at Ash Grove — on the site which used to be Hemphill — while you’re encouraged to take woodwork. Laraine is wondering which university to go to.

  You think seriously about British Synthetics. Do you want to work in a factory? Go down the Synth?

  At Ash Grove, Shane Bush rejoins your gang. He’s struggling with O Levels. He joins Dickie and Paul, counting off the days to release, and is the only one among you with an ambition, to learn to drive and gain command of a delivery van. Three years apart have changed your relationship. Shane is still loud and domineering, but Marling’s has convinced him he’s thicker than he is. He calls you ‘Mental’ in public, but asks for advice (even help with schoolwork) when you’re alone. You’ve grown past the age where Shane can get his way with a few cheerful cuffs around the head. You realise you can order him around, a position you sometimes (remembering infants’ school) can’t resist abusing.

  Shane tries to get off with Marie-Laure but she isn’t interested. You realise Shane defers to you and Marie-Laure because your parents are, by his standards, rich, which makes you uncomfortable. Vanda’s spots clear up and she keeps proposing kissing games, though you’ve long grown out of them. Marie-Laure kisses with her tongue, which means Vanda has to let boys feel her growing breasts. You all go along with this weird competition between the girls, but Marie-Laure calls a halt when Barry slips a hand into her knickers, and becomes for all practical purposes a nun.

  Though three school populations are amalgamated, there’s little mixing. You’re in lessons with Hemphill kids and hang around with them at breaks. Some kids (Michael Dixon, Mary Yatman) you were at infants’ school, even kindergarten, with are around. You don’t talk to them unless you have to.

  You had expected armed combat with the Marling’s boys, but it rarely comes to that. Hemphill lads think grammar schoolies are posh and soft and brainy. Some of them, like Michael, are. As Shane solicits homework help from you, you worry that deep down you’re posh and soft and brainy too. More and more, you think about your Eleven Plus. How might things have been if you hadn’t failed it? Is the worst thing in the world to be posh and soft and thick? You actually make an effort in some of your classes (English, French) but it’s a struggle. It’s not the work you have to overcome, it’s the sluggishness of your classmates and even the teachers.

  You get fed up with Shane, Dickie, Barry, Paul and Vanda. They’re so impatient to get out of school and ‘on with it’ that they keep getting into trouble. You get dragged in with them too often. Dickie has a maniac streak (he threw the first stone at that bloody dog, you remember) and commits an escalating series of acts of vandalism. The prefab classrooms are flimsy and Dickie discovers that he can head-butt cracks in the pasteboard walls, even punch right through them.

  It makes sense to distance yourself from your long-time friends, and you spend more time with Vince Tunney and, oddly, Marie-Laure. The three of you are all-round out-of-its, too clever for CSEs, not clever enough for O Levels. You admit to Vince that you find the prospect of life after school terrifying. You don’t want to go down the Synth, you’ve decided. But you don’t want to work in a bank or an estate agent’s either. You don’t want to drag things out by going to college or university. You think of joining the merchant marine and joke about running away to become a pirate.

  Vince would like to be a comic-book artist but isn’t very good. In the art room, he sees superhero panels drawn by Mickey Yeo, one of the O Level stream, and is forced to recognise how inadequate his own work is. He can never get hands right. Marie-Laure is torn between staying at home — her rich parents are screwed up enough to support her without a second thought — and travelling to India. She’s the first person you know who tries marijuana. You and Vince s
ometimes go to her house in Achelzoy, a village outside town, and loll around her bookless room, getting stoned. Her mum and dad are never home at the same time.

  You want time to stop, now. Then you wouldn’t have to think about the future, the imminent after-school. Without noticing it, you’ve become a grown-up. You’re sixteen. The fun is over. Vanda and Shane announce their engagement. Paul, Barry and Dickie bunk off school most of the time. Marie-Laure’s hands won’t stop shaking. Vince endlessly catalogues and rearranges his comics. Ahead of you, a shadowy void gapes. You are sure there are cobwebs stretched invisibly across the path, waiting for you.

  At the end of your first year at Ash Grove, your fourth year in secondary school, you have interviews with your class teacher and a careers officer. You worry that the only ambitions you’ve ever had, to be a pirate or an astronaut, won’t impress them.

  Mr Bird, your class teacher — you don’t have him for any lessons, just for a ten-minute get-together in the morning — looks over your report and asks if you want to shift from maths and French CSE to O Level courses. He thinks you’ve got a chance of passing.

  ‘You should seriously think about it,’ he says.

  You don’t know. Can you keep up with the more demanding work? And will two O Levels to go with six CSEs mean anything in a year’s time, when you pass out into the void?

  If you transfer to the O Level stream in two subjects, go to 25. If you stay on the CSE courses, go to 27.

  24

  In September 1974, you start going to Ash Grove. It’s less structured than Marling’s, more relaxing, easier to cope with. You study for O Levels now, which means thinking harder. But you enjoy that. You need goals to stretch for. It’s the same in cricket, where you constantly try to improve yourself. As an all-rounder, you’re distinguished as neither a bowler nor a batsman — though you have a knack for catches when you field — but become captain. Because you see the whole picture, you can best deploy the strengths of your team-mates, compensate for their weaknesses.