Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  She let you touch her breast.

  Now she’s gone.

  ‘Keith.’

  You jump, heart knotting.

  Looking around, you make her out. She stands by the wonky signpost.

  ‘Mary?’

  She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  A flame flares, brighter than a sunspot. You blink. Mary has a pocket lighter. Odd. You didn’t think she smoked. There is so much you don’t know about her. Your hand remembers the warmth of her breast. Your face remembers the flick of her tongue.

  You were doing well. Until the ditch.

  In the flamelight, Mary’s face is overexposed, like a bad snapshot. Her eyes are dark holes. Her lips have lost their red.

  The signpost reads SUTTON MALLET ½ MILE. Beyond Mary is a turn-off, leading to a tiny hamlet. Sutton Mallet is the Somerset equivalent of a ghost town, mostly uninhabited since the ’50s, a few broken-down cottages and old barns. But the sign is fresh-painted, proud.

  ‘Come here,’ she says.

  She’s alive. You want to hug her. Perhaps you can rub warmth into each other, tend each other’s wounds. Mary doesn’t seem hurt, not even scratched. But she might be a jumble of broken bones and ruptured organs.

  You step towards her, freeze, and totter at the edge of the ditch. You almost stepped off the bank. You would have fallen into the water.

  Mary giggles.

  You stagger back, away from the edge.

  ‘Fooled youm,’ she says, flicking off the flame.

  This is dizzying. As the lighter goes out, shadows spring up and surround Mary. Lightsquiggles writhe on the surfaces of your eyeballs. You still see burn-through where the flame was, a dancing phantom after-light.

  For an instant, you thought Mary was not alone. Shadow-spiders stood behind her, closing round her when the light went away. In her darkness, Mary has company. On your side of the ditch, you are alone.

  Still, you should go to her.

  The ditch is too wide to jump. You could wade it, but that would mean dipping your legs in freezing water, sinking your feet into undisturbed mud and filth. Maybe you could climb across the car, but that doesn’t seem a good idea. There are jagged metal edges. In films, crashed cars explode.

  Mary might toss her lighter into the car as you are perched on top of it. She could warm herself by the fireball, suck in the smell of you cooking.

  ‘There’m a gate up the way,’ Mary says.

  Wherever there is a gate, there is a bridge over the ditch, for the cattle to cross.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  You don’t trust her any more.

  ‘Why’d I lie, Keith?’

  Why would she?

  She flicks the light, merely for a moment, holding it up. At the blurred edge of your vision there is indeed a gate. On the moor, fields are separated by ditches rather than hedges. Even by day, some of the bridges are hard to see from quite close up, marked only by tufts of long grass growing where planks have been set in concrete lumps.

  ‘Come on.’

  Mary is already walking towards the gate. Her boot-heels click on the gritty road.

  A car speeds by. You wave your arms but Mary stands aside to let it pass. The driver honks his horn. You shout out for it to stop but are ignored. You think it was Desmond’s car, full of kids on their way to the party.

  Why didn’t Mary flag it down?

  The sweep of the headlamps briefly scattered light across the field. Besides the gate, which is nearby, you see a row of tall, thin trees at the far side. The field is empty, but the shadows of the trees waver with the passing carlight, as if beckoning. A small voice of panic shrieks inside.

  You walk, keeping parallel with Mary. Just now, you are grateful for the ditch between you.

  She sings to herself, cheerfully. ‘Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said good-bye to the cir-cussss.’

  Her voice is as clear and high as a six-year-old’s. You hadn’t known that about Mary. That she could sing. Almost as well as Victoria.

  What are the spidery shadows that accompany Mary? Why are you alone?

  The gate is only feet away. When you get there, you can swing round it and be on the road. You’ll be with Mary and the shadow-spiders, but the next car will stop. You can make sure of that.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Mary interrupts her song.

  You are already reaching out. Suddenly, there is nothing under your leading foot. This time you tumble, throwing yourself back, and crunch on to the cold earth. A shifting pain stabs you in the side.

  ‘… off she went with a trumpety-trump. Trump, trump, trump!’

  Just before the gate, the ditch takes a right-angle turn and runs off towards the trees. The gate and the bridge to the road are actually in the next field. Cut off from you.

  Again, the ditch is too broad to jump.

  Your whole body shivers. The ice has risen from your legs, glaciating your torso and arms. These were your best clothes, too. Your suede jacket is ruined.

  ‘Things have come to a pretty pass,’ Mary says, almost singing. She dances in the dark and swings up to sit on the gate, tucking her long legs under her to get balance. She can’t be very badly hurt.

  ‘The head of the herd was calling, far far awayyyy.’

  There must be a bridge into the next field, the field with the gate. But where is it?

  ‘By they trees,’ Mary says, answering your unvoiced question. ‘I be sure.’

  ‘Shine some light.’

  Mary flicks the lighter too slowly. Flame does not catch. Sparks show you her smile, putting nasty lines round her mouth and eyes.

  ‘I can see,’ she says. ‘By they trees. There’m a stile. If’n youm walk back there, youm can cross over. Then youm can walk back here, and get out.’

  She sounds so reasonable.

  Should she sound reasonable? Shouldn’t she be hysterical? Shouldn’t she worry what her parents will say about the car? Shouldn’t she be cold and in pain?

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she says, calmly.

  ‘What did happen to your monster?’ you ask. This seems the right time.

  ‘There were no monster. There were just me.’

  You know you’ll have to do as she suggests: walk to the trees and come back. There’s no guarantee that there aren’t other ditches. You may have to make your way through right-angles, sometimes walking almost an entire square before you find a bridge.

  You would like her to flick on the lighter and hold the flame steady, to give you a point to fix on.

  She strikes futile sparks again.

  ‘I’ll sing,’ she says. ‘That way, you’ll know I’m still here. You can fix on my voice.’

  She begins to sing ‘Nellie the Elephant’ again, ending the discussion. You get up and stumble away from her, concentrating on the ground. You don’t want to get too close to the ditch. Sometimes marshy spots spread, setting traps for the unwary foot. These are marked by bursts of longer grass, where the earth is sodden.

  The ground crunches under you. Mary is still singing ‘Nellie the Elephant’ over and over.

  Whatever your generation gets into, ‘Nellie the Elephant’ is buried deep in musical memory. The kids now singing ‘I Am an Antichrist’ started out with Uncle Mac and Junior Choice. ‘Nellie’ and ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’ and ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window?’ are imprinted in your chromosomes, as much as ‘She Loves You, Yeh Yeh Yeh’ and ‘Satisfaction’ will always mean your childhood, and ‘I’m Not in Love’ by 10fuckingcc will be the snog record following ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ at college discos, as much as ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ and ‘Ode to Joy’ will always mean 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Underneath everything lies ‘Nellie the Elephant’.

  You are in the dark, well away from the road, stumbling beside a ditch. You can’t make out the trees you’re heading for, or the gate you want to go back to. Mary’s singing is still there, the odd word yelled louder than
the rest after she has drawn a breath. Your eyes have not got used to the dark. If anything, you’re seeing less. You have only the faintest impression of the ground you are walking on.

  You stop for breath. Are you hearing something? Not just ‘Nellie the Elephant’: something else.

  You walk again. Your feet tramp, tramp, tramp. There’s a disjunction between the feeling in your feet as you lift them up and put them down and the sound they make. The grass is crackly with frost. The earth is hard as iron.

  You walk more slowly. The noise is slightly out of sync. You stop, but hear one more footstep than you make.

  Not your footstep.

  The chill is more than physical cold.

  You look up. Even the stars are shrouded by boiling black cloud. You are cut off.

  Experimentally, you step backwards. The echo of your step comes before you have completed it.

  You are being shadowed.

  You walk forwards again, listening carefully. Your noise blots out the other noises. But you can feel the shadow. It could be six yards behind you or sixty. It is as if you were undersea, sensing water moving out of the way of the shark-snout pointed at your back. You wade through the air, slowed by settling fear. You cannot afford to panic, scream, throw a fit.

  You’re walking briskly now. Each breath creates a cloud of wet exhalation which you part as you step forwards. You’re jogging, as if limbering up for a race, not running seriously, not even running at all. Jogging to keep warm, to get where you’re going sooner.

  A tangle of white-coated grass alerts you, and you hurdle a swampy patch. You’re running faster now. Mary sings at 78 rpm, gabbling through the song to render it meaningless. You know your shadow is matching your pace.

  When you run, you never look behind you. But you know when a competitor is gaining, when he falls back, when he drops by the track. It’s as if you have side-mirrors. The clear track ahead shows you signs.

  Now there is someone behind you. More than one person, one shadow. A pack of shadows. Shadow-spiders. Running in perfect sync, matching your speed, racing on many thin legs. Maybe bettering your speed, for they are gaining on you.

  The field couldn’t be more than two hundred yards across, but seems to have spread. Now you are running full out, fighting the draggy weight of your soaked clothes, arms pumping along with your legs.

  You run away from darkness. You run into darkness. The ditch beside you is always there. Mary never gets further away. The trees never get closer.

  But the shadow-spiders behind you do.

  This is how you have always felt. The screaming six-year-old in you is gaining on the concentrated seventeen-year-old. Nellie the Elephant has lapped ‘Satisfaction’, drawn past ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ and is neck and neck with ‘Anarchy in the UK’. You can’t afford to lose it now.

  To lose anything.

  You clear your mind and run.

  The pack are close to you. You realise there are ditches either side of you, that you are running on a narrow strip of field. Beyond the ditches, in the dark, are the other runners, kept to their unlit lanes.

  Your heart is close to bursting.

  How far must you run? Where will this race end?

  Shadow-spiders nip your heels. They are tireless and you are human. They can run until the end of time.

  ‘The head of the herd was calling …’

  Where is the finish line?

  ‘Far, far awayyy …’

  What if there is no finish? What if there is just running? What if you can never definitely win, just run on and on until you must sleep or grow old or die?

  The ground beneath is rough, littered with rusty traps. Your ankles are whipped.

  ‘… they met one night in the jungle light …’

  Shadow-spiders are at your elbows.

  ‘… on the Road to Mandalay, hey! Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and …’

  The song doesn’t end. It just comes round again after ‘hey’. Mary still sings. You still run.

  You can’t think of the miles you must have run. You know this field can’t be the size and shape it seems to be. Like the ditch, you took a left turn. You aren’t just running on the spot or struggling up a down escalator.

  You are getting closer to something. To Someone. As you’ve guessed, that Someone is Me.

  Read 13, and come back here.

  You run on and on. You’re running beside a ditch. You are ahead of the pack.

  Mary singing.

  Her voice gets louder.

  Up ahead, there is a burst of light.

  Mary’s flame flickers, reddening her pale face. She is sitting on the gate. Her mouth shapes the words but only an ululation of the tune emerges from her.

  You have run there and back again. You are nearly where you started.

  Somehow, without turning corners or passing landmarks, you have run round the whole field.

  You are still on the other side of the ditch from the gate.

  As you slacken, the pack slackens behind you. You fall to your knees at the spot where you started.

  The shadow-spiders don’t have to come for you. The point has been made.

  Without explaining and without pausing in her banshee wail, Mary hops off the bar and unlatches the gate. She drags it open, pulling it out across the road, then pulls it further round, wrenching it through a 180 degree arc, twisting it on its post. The gate is not hinged wood, but rusted tube metal, fixed with frayed rope. It can be pulled in a circle on the fulcrum of its post. She pushes the gate back over the verge, flattening a wedge of grass. It wobbles out over the ditch and hangs in mid-air.

  You see what she has done.

  You push yourself up from the ground and reach out. The gate hangs just beyond your hands.

  ‘You’ll have to jump, jump, jump,’ she sings.

  You jump. Your hands close around cold, dirty metal. The gate wrenches on its post, sagging. Your feet trail in water that is cold beyond cold.

  There is an alarming creak as the gatepost rises six inches out of its concrete setting. The gate buckles in several places. Hand over hand, you make your way toward Mary.

  She flicks her lighter on and off, assuming different poses between illumination bursts, hanging her head this way and that, putting her free hand in her hair, pouting and smiling.

  You are across the ditch. You sink gratefully to your knees.

  Mary stops singing.

  This is Sutton Mallet. You are alone on the moor, between villages, no cars for miles. Really alone. No shadows, no spiders, no Mary.

  You are too tired to scream.

  This, you know in an instant, is what will happen. You’ll lie by the roadside all night, body temperature falling by the hour, too tired to sleep. In the morning, you’ll be found and try to explain. Then they’ll find Mary. In the car, her neck broken.

  ‘She must have been killed instantly,’ they’ll say. ‘At least she didn’t suffer, poor thing.’

  You will never be able to tell what happened after the car went into the ditch. Eventually, you’ll convince yourself you hallucinated it all as you crawled away from the accident. But now, in the cold silence, you know your race was no dream. You know you ran off the path, and from now on you’ll be wary in the knowledge that a step can bring you to my home, my shade, my domain.

  You think of Mary and can see her in your mind, lolling in the driver’s seat, pinned by the steering-wheel embedded in her chest, head hung at an impossible angle, eyes red and empty.

  Then, close to your ear, she shouts, ‘Hey …’

  The flame bursts, and Mary’s face hangs near.

  ‘Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk and said good-bye to the cir-cusss …’

  If you avoid Mary for the rest of the college year and try never to think of her or this night again, go to 53. If you cling closer to Mary, certain that what you have shared is too important to suppress, go to 57.

  41

  The experiment is a remarkable success. Within
three months, £10,000 has grown to a notional £30,000. You and Sean liquidate a third of your portfolio, pay back the bank’s petty cash — a relief, since you’ve always known just how not legal it was to borrow that — and take out your own initial investments. You leave the rest on the table and cluck over its steady growth. At first, you didn’t tell anyone, not even your wives, but now you explain. Ro has money of her own and insists on buying in, which prompts Vanda to scrape together some spare cash and join. You start calling yourself a Syndicate and favour a monthly expensive restaurant meal over your old barbecues.

  The ordinary work of the bank seems a bit dull.

  You and Sean go on more courses, spend more time on your investments. In London for a course, you buy new suits, very ’80s, with sharp angles, thin collars. You get red braces.

  You talk about leaving the bank and founding a West Country investment service. Ro is keen but Vanda advises caution. You realise your wife is a little out of her depth.

  Sean spends quite a lot of time in London. You have to cover for him at the bank. But the branch almost runs itself. You assume Sean is having a serious affair with one of the women from the courses. He’s also getting a lot of information which turns out to be golden. She must be someone well placed in one of the coming firms.

  You rely more on Candy Dixon, a school-leaver who is your assistant. She handles the chores you have to neglect to keep up with the investments. You buy her the odd gift (perfume, a bracelet) to keep her sweet, and trust her competence. She has a little crush on you, but you wouldn’t do anything about it. You aren’t that stupid.

  Ro has a small inheritance, which she puts into the Syndicate. Suddenly, the portfolio you share is worth £100,000 and growing.

  Sean talks seriously about leaving the bank. You wonder if he’s thinking about leaving Ro. If he does, the Syndicate would split. You could all lose out. You think a lot about the money. It can do quite a bit for you. Your DHSS days are dead and gone. You already have BUPA, and are thinking of private eduction for the kids.