Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  ‘Sean?’

  You turn. Candy stands in the doorway. She is carrying a stuffed suitcase, packed in a hurry. She’s surprised to see you. You feel betrayed. You were always the one she fancied.

  ‘Not you too,’ you say.

  She bursts into tears.

  Sean, evidently, is in Morocco. And the bank owns your house. Vanda won’t talk to you, but blames herself as much as you. Ro had told her some things she didn’t pass on. She had a sense of the extent of Sean’s dealings.

  Tristram brings a woman to see you in your office.

  ‘Keith,’ he says, ‘this is DS Yatman.’

  ‘We were at primary school together,’ the policewoman says, smiling, extending a hand. ‘Scary Mary, remember?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Wasn’t it just?’

  ‘She wants to talk about Sean,’ Tristram says.

  ‘Actually, we’d like to talk to Sean,’ she purrs. ‘But that seems out of the question now.’

  Tristram hovers. For the first time, you pick up the vibe that he’s unnerved too. Scary Mary has got to him.

  ‘If I could talk with Mr Marion in private,’ she says.

  ‘Of course.’ Tristram beats a retreat.

  ‘Is he queer?’ Mary asks. You nod. ‘Thought so.’

  Mary takes a seat and opens her hands. She still has the clear skin of a child and her blonde hair is neatly pinned. The monster has gone from her eyes.

  ‘Well, isn’t this a mess?’ she says.

  You have to agree.

  Sean is caught and brought back. To your relief, his dealings turn out to be bigger than you thought. You don’t even get a mention in the local paper for three weeks. First, Councillor Robert Hackwill, who unbeknown to you was a major part of your Syndicate, is indicted on several counts of serious fraud, and it turns out that Sean’s little empire wound through Sedgwater like ivy roots, crumbling everything.

  You aren’t turfed out of your home, though your personal debt escalates as mortgage interest rates get out of control, mostly because Tristram is too busy with the bankruptcy of Shearer’s Shelves, on whose board of two directors he happens to sit. Somehow, Sean got to Kay behind Tristram’s back and sucked him into the Syndicate, presumably as insurance.

  You wonder if Sean was very clever, or if he just let things grow out of hand.

  Either way, the town is badly hit.

  You move to a flat in town and put the kids in the state school system.

  DS Yatman calls personally to tell you that you won’t be prosecuted.

  You are relieved.

  She stands in your tiny kitchen like a slim blonde ghost, looking around at all the new fittings. It’s cheap, but fresh.

  Vanda comes in.

  The two women remember each other.

  ‘This is …’ you say.

  ‘I know,’ they both cut in, and laugh.

  Vanda is still afraid of Scary Mary.

  ‘Some good has come of all this,’ the policewoman says. ‘I’m back in your lives now.’ That hangs in the air. ‘Vanda, make me some Cup-a-Soup would you?’

  You are astonished. Vanda, amazingly, looks into the cupboards.

  ‘We only have tinned.’

  ‘Needs must,’ Mary says.

  Vanda turns on a hot-plate. The ring glows.

  ‘I put in a good word,’ Mary says. ‘Probably saved you a lot of trouble.’

  Vanda opens the can of Heinz tomato soup and pours it into a pan.

  ‘Not everybody is so lucky, Keith.’

  The soup begins to simmer.

  ‘To have such a good friend.’

  Mary smiles.

  Vanda is still shaking when you go to bed. She won’t let you hold her. The new bed is narrower than the one you had at the house in Sutton Mallet, and the walls close in on you like a torture device.

  ‘You know what might have worked?’ Vanda says.

  You don’t.

  ‘Murder.’

  You think about it.

  Go to 94.

  73

  You’re not even forty. This can’t be happening.

  ‘What if I stopped smoking? Just quit cold? I can do it.’

  The doctor shakes his head.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s too far advanced for that, Mr Marion. I think you should see the counsellor.’

  This is the worst time to have a coughing jag. You think you feel the barb-tipped limbs of the tarantula in your chest as you’re racked over. Black matter surges in your throat, tearing tissue.

  You try to remember when there was no pain.

  How many cigarettes? Since the first? Laid end to end, would they reach to Saturn? Alpha Centauri?

  Your lungs are full of brick chips.

  The doctor is embarrassed. Anyone else would thump you on the back, trying to dislodge the blockage. But he knows. He’s seen the X-rays.

  You have a wife, children, a job.

  You were going to buy a boat kit and make it up in the space over the garage, get it on the water at Lyme Regis next spring.

  There won’t be a next spring.

  Forty a day. Forty fucking death injections a day.

  You are going to 0. If you accept the judgement, and apologise for misusing the gift you have been given, go to 88. If you refuse to recognise your responsibility, go to 96. Whatever, in the end, very soon, go to 0.

  74

  Tuesday, 24, February 1998. She is up at four o’clock, to do her rounds. You know a lot about her life, her routine. She must know very little about you. Your house is not on any route she works, so she doesn’t even know whatever can be deduced about you from your daily post.

  Mary Yatman. Scary Mary. She grew up to become a postman. Postwoman? She is not married, but lives with a man called Geoff Starkey, another postman. Postperson? They have a child, a little boy called Will.

  You can’t quite fit together the Scary Mary of Sutton Mallet and the mum in uniform. You’ve gone to lengths to keep up to date with her. Your local government contacts have been able to secure copies of files.

  It’s an unexceptional record. Mary has done nothing in her adult life that would seem to connect with the monster she used to harbour inside. Also, it seems strange she should be in such an ordinary job. She left college with three A Levels; she could have had a university place, could have followed her dad into the police force. And she had the shade. She should have made something of herself.

  As you have.

  Since you took control, you’ve become a Secret Master. You own three local councillors, a magistrate and entire planning departments. You have your MP’s private telephone numbers and have arranged his Caribbean holidays. You’ve shaped the growth of Sedgwater for the last fifteen years, deciding which districts would develop and which atrophy. You’ve rearranged everything, so that it revolves around you. And you’re loved for it. You’re always on the front page of the Herald. You’re thought of as a ‘good bloke’. Local businessman, local success. You’ve built a swimming-pool for the town. You’ve brought in new business.

  You’re still young. And you’ve taken care of almost everything. All the scores are settled. All the bodies are buried. All the debts are paid.

  Except Scary Mary.

  Today, you’re up at the same time as she is. This is not unusual. You like to get a head start on the day’s work. Two or three free hours to think, before everyone else gets to their desks, gives you an advantage.

  You walk through the empty town centre.

  It is as dark as midnight. You can walk unnoticed but driving might call attention to you. Even now, there are people about who might recognise you. A lone police car patrols. Timmy Gossett, who sleeps rough on the Corn Exchange steps, mumbles under a cocoon of newspapers.

  You like being out in the dark. The shade is your friend.

  It’ll still be dark when Mary finishes her morning deliveries. She’ll come home, see to Will’s breakfast and get him off to playgroup, then sleep the morn
ing away.

  You walk through the estate. All houses here look the same, but you know which one is Mary’s. You have done dry runs several times.

  You know where she lives.

  It occurs to you that you’ve arranged things to the point where you could walk into Mary’s home on Saturday morning with a shotgun and blast her to pieces without suffering any consequences. To this town, you are indispensable. Without you, Sedgwater’s prosperity — hard won in the 1980s, hard to maintain in the ’90s — would shatter. You have a licence to do anything you might want to.

  No, not want to. Need to.

  This is not petty, this is not revenge. This is a necessity. A last stitch in the pattern.

  Mary was at Sutton Mallet. She’s the only one who knows, who might understand. You can gull and charm the whole town, but Mary would never be carried along.

  It’s possible she’s been harbouring her secret knowledge all these years, waiting for the moment to strike, to pick apart all you have made of yourself. That would explain why she didn’t go away to university, why she took a subsistence job, why she stays close.

  You’re excited by the thought. Having an opponent is a thrill. It’s comforting to think of Scary Mary, disguised as Postperson Patricia, waiting for her moment, thwarted by your cunning and resourcefulness. When she’s out of the way, will you miss her? Will you miss even the possibility of her?

  She might have been a partner.

  You have no partners. You have and have had lovers, employees, associates, allies. But no partners.

  Soon after Sutton Mallet, you realised you had a power. The ice in you could be cloaked. You could make people like you, want your approval, want to make things easy for you.

  Rowena Douglass was the first. Only the first.

  As a teenager, you fucked her and dumped her. That established a pattern. You’ve been fucking and dumping ever since. When Hackwill, the councillor who secured planning permissions for the Discount Development, got too greedy, started thinking of himself as your partner, you dumped him.

  And he was fucked.

  The miracle part was that the dumpees could never hurt you. Rowena, married to Roger Cunningham, still sends you a sincere Christmas card and is hopefully flirtatious at receptions. Hackwill had a strange turn, and accrued to himself the blame for several reversals, freeing you to pursue the Development unencumbered by his obvious crookedness.

  You never fucked Mary. And so you never dumped her.

  She is a might-have-been.

  You find shadows and watch. Pre-dawn blue spreads.

  Mary, on a bicycle, arrives home. Geoff, a solid man fifteen years older than her, is at the door, with little Will. He has waited for her to come back so he can go to work. You wonder if Mary will kiss him, but she doesn’t.

  Geoff walks off and Mary goes inside with Will.

  You count to one hundred.

  Then walk up to the house and knock smartly.

  The door opens and you see an empty hallway. It’s cramped, unlike yours. Clothes hang over bannisters. You look down. Will has opened up.

  ‘Mum says “what do you want, mister?”‘

  You had expected Mary to answer the door. But you are not thrown off balance.

  ‘To see your mummy, Will.’

  ‘She’s changing.’

  Of course. She wouldn’t want to take Will to playgroup while wearing her uniform.

  ‘Do you want to see my dinosaurs?’

  Will has the Scary Mary eyes you remember from infants’ school. Has he got her explosive temperament?

  You nod, and let Will lead you into the front room. It is tiny, filled with too-large furniture. You live alone but have four times the space these three people are crammed into.

  There’s no mess in your home.

  The table is covered in breakfast things. Plastic dinosaurs are arranged between the cereal packets and milk cartons. Will has them fight for you.

  If you had made Mary your partner, this might have been your son.

  A strange thought, one for which you had not planned. Does it change your mind? If you tell Will you can’t wait, and leave Mary alone, hurrying from the house before she gets down, go to 81. If you decide your strange thought is an irrelevance, and should not sway you from a course decided years earlier and successfully stuck to ever since, go to 91.

  75

  ‘It’s a very elaborate construct, Dr Cross.’

  ‘It would have to be, Susan. To be worth escaping into.’

  ‘All these variants. What is it, a fantasy life or multiple personality disorder?’

  ‘Strictly speaking, it can’t be MPD. To Marion, all these lives are real and valid and simultaneous. They all come with worlds. You can note recurrences and confusions. All these mad women and treacherous men.’

  ‘That’s a man’s multiverse.’

  ‘Of course. That’s the primal split, the juncture between Marion and the maze.’

  ‘What happened to her, Doctor?’

  ‘You can look at the file. Marion Keith seems to have been unexceptional. It was a lot of little things, building up. She was married, twice.’

  ‘That’ll do it.’

  ‘Not married, are you, Susan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think Marion felt she wasn’t appreciated. That the world wasn’t arranged for her benefit, that men had a much easier time of it.’

  ‘So she decided to be a man?’

  ‘Marion has constructed a male self, an equivalent man if you like, and tried to live through the life she might have had. The lives she might have had, rather.’

  ‘Poor dear.’

  ‘It doesn’t make her very happy. Or him. Keith. It doesn’t often work out.’

  ‘Most lives don’t.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, Susan.’

  ‘You wouldn’t, Dr Cross. You’re a man.’

  ‘I think that’s unfair.’

  ‘I think that’s the point.’

  ‘Touché.’

  Begin again?

  76

  You aren’t a bastard. This isn’t your fault.

  You lie on the gravel path, arms and legs curled up, eyes tight shut. You don’t need this.

  Mary kicks you in the side. It hurts, worse than before. You cry out. You are almost frenzied.

  She kicks you again.

  ‘Yes.’ A tiny voice. ‘Go on.’

  Mary kicks you again. You cough up more vomit. You taste blood in your mouth.

  ‘Roger,’ says Rowena, ‘help her.’

  Mary stands back.

  You try to shrink more, but can’t.

  Roger comes over, hands fists. He kneels down and punches you in the back.

  Mary helps him, grabbing your upper arms and wrestling you open, so he can get in his shots.

  You hurt too much to follow this.

  Mary and Roger stand in the dark. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve. You work yourself up on your elbows. The torch, put on the ground, is still shining in your face. It makes a wedge of the grass seem very green.

  Hard hands grasp you. You look up at Ro’s face. She has tear-tracks, and needs to blow her nose. You have lost the place completely. Ro throttles you, and you struggle.

  In the darkness, Roger spits disgust. He walks past Mary and looks back at you, eyes bright with unfathomable pity. Mary, turned away from you, holds a hand out, beckoning Roger back.

  This was all your fault. He turns and stalks off, Zorro cloak swishing.

  Again, Ro strangles you. This time, you think, she means it. Your jaw hurts too much for you to fight back. Aches have set in up and down your ribs.

  You raise a hand and flop it against Ro’s back, feeling the nubs of her vertebrae through her jumper. She grimaces at you and you do your best to grimace back.

  ‘Bastard,’ she whispers.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  77

  Tuesday, 24, February 1998. The evening starts with you trying to park you
r car in the space where hers already is. You’ve driven out to Sutton Mallet on autopilot and go through the pre-set moves, swerving to avoid the permanent pot-hole. Kay has to stop you totalling both vehicles by cramming them into the same space.

  You stall, your headlamps spotlighting Vic’s new car, and laugh. Kay is genuinely rattled.

  ‘It’s only to be expected, love,’ you tell him. ‘I parked here for over ten years.’

  He huffs a little.

  Stupid faggot, you think.

  He spent twenty minutes in the off-licence in town, picking out a chilled bottle of something you know Vic will think is cheesewater. It’s not worth the argument.

  This is only disguised as a dinner party anyway. You still have divorce business to do and it’s dragged on too long. Last time you were on the point of sorting everything out, some broker in Amsterdam shot himself and you had to cope with an evening’s worth of clients calling up on your mobiles in a stupid panic. Vic ended up making cups of coffee and rattling off stats for you to drop into repetitious calming conversations.

  That was the last time you stayed over at the house. You didn’t even get any sleep. You were on the phone or the fax until dawn.

  Tonight, you have remembered to forget the mobile.

  It doesn’t mean much. You and Vic are still partners in business; any clients who call you first — about half of the list — will naturally call her if there is no reply. Neither of you can bear to go along with Kay’s suggestion and mute the answerphone.

  You both need to be plugged in. All the time.

  You reverse a few yards and squeeze the car in beside Vic’s. Eerily, she has bought exactly the same model Nissan that you have.

  When you get out, it is as if you are seeing double. The only difference is the number-plates. And the fact that Kay is getting out of your car.

  The light above the front door is on.

  The door opens by the time you’re at the step. Vic, wearing a backless black dress you remember, kisses you — not too passionately, not too formally, just right — and you peel off your overcoat, hanging it on the usual hook.