Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  Can’t anyone else see the spiders scuttling in the shadows of the studio? Every week, the celebrities who join in the draw add themselves to a list of saddo sell-outs. Some betrayals are worse than others.

  You tell your counsellor you think you see a way through your obsession. You’re willing to call it that. She is pleased for you.

  You’re still a trained investigative journalist. You know how to circumvent security arrangements and get into a studio. You can plan ahead.

  You assemble your device on a Saturday evening. The television is on in the room. Ignoring Simon Mayo’s Confessions, you flatten a lump of gelignite into a doughy sheet with a kitchen roller. After sprinkling on a layer of ball-bearing shards and one-inch nails, you make a jumbo-size Swiss roll which will fit into two paint-cans taped mouth to mouth. This is sweaty work. You concentrate furiously. If you don’t, there will be problems.

  As the Lottery itself comes on, you fix the timer. You want the bomb to detonate just as the numbers are drawn, when the most people are tuned in. Now, you embed terminals in one end of the roll and fix the battery-powered arming device. With pliers, you attach the wires.

  Mystic Meg witters generally about this week’s winners, making non-specific predictions that still manage to be wrong in every essential. Something flickers across the harridan fraud’s face. Has she seen something? Something real? You hope so. The moment passes. After a hesitation, Mystic Meg is back on the waffle.

  You look down at the bomb. Where were you? The red wire or the blue wire? Which should you attach next?

  Why are you sweating?

  Which?

  If the red wire, go to 119. If the blue wire, go to 132.

  86

  She looks around for the cameras, disbelieving you, thinking this is another cruel joke. You feel stabbed.

  She throws her arms round your neck, and kisses you, warmly, passionately. Your stone heart dissolves.

  She pulls her arm back, makes a fist, and slams it into your chin. It doesn’t hurt much, physically.

  She finds her voice and screams ‘fuck off, you bastard! You are staggered by the volume.

  She says ‘I guess I’ve been a bitch as much as you’ve been a bastard. Let’s start again from scratch. My name is Rowena.’ You think it over and say, ‘And I’m Keith.’

  She takes your hand, looks you in the eye, and says ‘No, Keith, I’m sorry. What happened was my fault. I’m back with Roger.’ You want to die.

  She hugs you desperately and whispers in your ear, ‘Oh, Keith, I’ve been so worried. I think I’m pregnant.’ You don’t know what to feel.

  She looks through you with eyes like lasers and says, ‘You’re a monster, Marion.’ You are left frozen.

  She whispers close to your cheek, ‘I can’t stop thinking about you, Keith. Please hold me.’ You have an erection.

  She says, ‘Let’s be grown-up, Keith. We were both drunk. It won’t happen again.’ Your hopes die.

  She starts crying, sobbing on your shoulder, clutching you ravenously. You can’t bring yourself to put your arms round her. You wonder what it was you saw in her.

  She tells you she is entering a convent. She has vowed to atone for her sins. She advises you to pray for forgiveness.

  She says ‘do you like my new hairstyle?’ You tell the truth and she says, ‘Oh well, it’ll grow out.’ You laugh. You both laugh.

  She drops to her knees in the college corridor, students passing all the time, and unzips your fly, fishing out your penis, and wrapping her mouth round it. You look up at the ceiling.

  She takes a small-calibre pistol out of her satchel and presses its barrel against your forehead. Smiling like the Mona Lisa, she pulls the trigger.

  She smiles and dissolves. You realise you’re talking to Mary Yatman. How could you have made such a mistake? ‘Rowena?’ she says. ‘You haven’t heard? She killed herself. On New Year’s Eve.’

  But you were staring at her all through French class.

  She looks incredulous and says, ‘Do you really like me, Keith? After everything. You’re a tragic case.’ You shrug.

  She tears the skin under her chin and peels off her face. Through the glistening red mucus, you recognise that all along Rowena Douglass has been …

  She puts a hand on your chest. You can’t tell if she’s warding you off or pulling her to you. You can’t read her expression. You don’t know how she feels.

  You only know how you feel.

  You take it from there.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  87

  It happens in an instant. It doesn’t so much hurt as wear you out, as if you’d fast-forwarded through three hours of running after a bus. There’s a lurch, and an instant hangover, which instantly vanishes, leaving your brain fogged with the memory of throbbing fuzziness only fractionally different from the sensation itself.

  The house is huge. You feel like hugging the walls, afraid of stepping out into the middle of the floor. You don’t see how such vast ceilings can be supported.

  You aren’t quite you. You’re smoothly shaved, with well-cut hair. You’re heavier, but less flabby. Bending your arms, you feel unfamiliar sheaths of sleek muscle. You aren’t Arnie, but you’ve certainly kept in shape.

  One ear is pierced.

  Your clothes — jeans and a sweatshirt — were clean-washed when you put them on. Your trainers must have cost £100 each.

  Your mouth tastes different. You can’t find any cigarettes anywhere, which perhaps explains that.

  What have you done?

  Who are you?

  You are in a kitchen the size of the Titanic’s ballroom. A copy of The Independent lies on an acre of polished table. It’s dated 19 November 1990. Today. John Major is prime minister. Tonight’s TV listings are familiar. The world hasn’t changed radically, just you.

  And your life.

  From the evidence available in the house, you try to find things out. An envelope confirms that you’re Keith Marion, and reveals that you live in Sutton Mallet.

  That tips you off.

  This is the house Victoria and Graham are squatting …

  … were squatting, in the other world …

  It’s your house. You explore. Upstairs, there’s a bedroom which you share with your wife. Marie-Laure? You’re not sure. There are two rooms that obviously belong to children, a girl and a boy. Jonquil and Josh? The toys don’t seem to jibe with the characters you know.

  You find a photograph album, a leather-bound volume with perfectly mounted, professionally shot images. You could mistake it for an issue of Vogue or a travel brochure, because there are any number of moody black and white shots of beautiful people (including, you are shocked to note, you) or parrot-coloured pictures of exotic foreign locales.

  You see yourself transformed, comfortable and casual in an unimaginable colour-supplement world that is now yours. And you see, over and over again, your wife and children.

  At first, you think the kids are Josh and Jonquil, with more expensive clothes and better haircuts. But this brother and sister are twins, and mixed in with the familiar features of your own kids are other shapes and expressions.

  You wonder if you’ve given these semi-strangers the names you know. You rather hope you haven’t.

  Your wife is another person. Strangely, she’s familiar. Paging backwards, from the elegant and full-figured woman of recent shots, you feel you are peeling away veils and will find an answer. When you get back about seven years, the face is recognisable.

  Rowena Cunningham. No, that was a married name. At school she was Rowena Douglass.

  Great Shades of Elvis!

  You married Rowena Douglass. Of the enormous breasts and tiny voice. Here, she’s Rowena Marion.

  What do you call her? Honey? Darling? Ro? Wena? Row-Boat?

  You can’t find Marie-Laure in any photographs.

  But who is this Keith Marion? What does he do? How did he get to be so rich? And can you — an impost
or — keep doing it?

  There’s an obvious office, with a computer and many locked filing cabinets. The piles of print-outs and other documents don’t tell you much, except that your business is international. Your passport, which you find in a desk drawer, is blotched throughout with stamps from dozens of countries.

  There are even documents in Japanese. Or Chinese.

  If your fortune depends on language skills you don’t have in your current incarnation, you are stuffed.

  Maybe you can bluff it. Or maybe there’s a way out.

  If you try to be the new Keith, go to 105. If you fake amnesia, go to 173.

  88

  Later, when you get home, you put The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance into the video. It was a present from Jon, your son, two birthdays back, but you’ve never watched it. You mentioned once that it was your favourite film when you were his age, and you bought him his favourite film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, for the Christmas before.

  When the theme music comes on, you’re faintly surprised. For years, you’ve remembered the Gene Pitney song as being from the film. Now you realise it came out afterwards, inspired by the story.

  In the beginning, John Wayne is already dead. In a plain wooden box, forgotten by the town. You know what really killed the Duke.

  The Big C.

  You aren’t sure whether you’re coughing or crying.

  What is it about this film?

  You picked it off the shelf on automatic pilot. You don’t really want to watch anything. With what you know, can you afford to spend time on anything trivial?

  John Wayne and James Stewart must have been in their fifties when they made the film. Older than you are now. Wayne’s gut and Stewart’s neck are middle-aged. Even Vera Miles looks almost matronly. But the characters they play are supposed to be young, like Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance.

  Why didn’t you ever notice that when you were a kid?

  Wayne shoots Liberty Valance but Stewart gets the credit and goes on to become a famous politician. Wayne burns his house down and drinks himself to death, getting only a cactus rose on his coffin.

  It’s a bitter, sad story. Being a hero is a waste of time, the film says. The world belongs to lawyers in aprons who will become stuffy senators.

  For the first time since you had the News, you wonder what will happen afterwards. To Ro, to Jon and Jenny, to the bank? Without you, what will become of them?

  Without you, do they count, do they exist?

  Perhaps with your death — yes, you will die, you can think the word, you have to — the whole world will pack up? Like when a film has finished shooting, they’ll come in and take the scenery down, pay off the actors, promise to get together sometime, have a wrap party?

  Around your coffin. With a cactus rose plumped on it.

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

  And nothing’s what he gets.

  Three months. That’s it. All you get. There’s a lot of pain and indignity and awkwardness and legal stuff, but you don’t need to hear that from me. You can imagine. You have to imagine. Is it fair? Is anything?

  Rowena suggests joining one of the mass lawsuits being brought against tobacco companies, but you can’t say it’s not your own fault. Every one of those cigarettes you put in your mouth yourself. It was your mouth that sucked. It’s your lungs that are dying on you.

  Still, you make the best of it. You are strangely calm. There were problems at work, problems at home. Not any more. You don’t even have the worry of not knowing.

  Quietly, inevitably, surrounded by your family, letting your grip relax, you go to 0.

  89

  You find yourself humming the theme for Top Cat and fixating on a world of giants, where the ceilings are further away. As you shrink back into your past, your present-day self recedes. You are tempted to let it go, but wonder whether the point isn’t to take some of what you are now back to what you were then.

  If you hang on, go to 100. If you let go, go to 277.

  90

  The bottle of sleeping pills is almost full. Mum got a new prescription filled before Christmas. The recommended dose is one tablet per day. A warning says ‘Keep Out of the Hands of Children’.

  You might still be a child. Despite everything, you’ve never been an adult.

  You twist the top off.

  It’s early yet. Mum and Dad won’t be home for hours. You have time.

  You are serious. You have no doubts.

  You take the toothbrushes out of the toothmug. You put four toothbrushes (Mum’s, Dad’s, Laraine’s, James’s) in the cabinet, and throw the last one (yours) into the waste-bin under the sink.

  You fill the mug with water.

  You cram all the pills into your mouth. They taste like chalk, with a bitter undertang.

  You take a swig of the water and swallow.

  It takes several mouthfuls. But you get them all down. You aren’t sick.

  You try to think of Ro and can’t remember her face.

  ‘Keith, you’re pathetic.’

  It was Victoria. It was what she said that hurt most. You set about it wrongly. You should have tried to explain yourself to her.

  She was the difficult one. But she might, in the end, have understood.

  Your stomach aches, as if you’ve eaten a dozen unripe apples. You slowly drink another mug of water.

  The shadows blot your whole vision now. Your body is very heavy. You sit on the toilet, weighed down by your limbs. Your head lolls.

  Black bands close in around your head.

  Go to 0.

  91

  You leave Mary’s house quietly, locking up behind you with her keys — which you later throw away — and wiping your feet on the doormat.

  A pattern is complete. You are unassailable, now. The last person who could have stood up to you is neutralised.

  You wonder if you are disappointed. When it came down to it, Scary Mary was no opponent. Her monster was long gone. The life she had made for herself weakened her, reduced her from the fearsome creature she might have been.

  Now, Mary has been fucked and dumped.

  Rowena, oddly, is the person to tell you. She telephones, as she does from time to time on the pretext of getting you involved in one of her charities, and asks if you remember Mary Yatman from school.

  ‘Scary Mary?’

  The line goes quiet. Then she tells you.

  It is hard not to laugh but you manage it.

  You offer a reward and make solemn pronouncements.

  Geoff Starkey takes the blame, as you knew he would. He has a history of drinking, and you’ve arranged a social worker’s report to mark him down as a hazard to his son. Will is taken into care and anything he might say about the Man Who Was Interested in Dinosaurs is disregarded. That was the breakthrough. Realising what Will might say didn’t count.

  Sedgwater expands, as you have planned, spreading along the main roads, absorbing several former villages. Sutton Mallet becomes a residential district. You buy property there. You even consider living there.

  You marry, have children. You diversify, from property into information, from the concrete into the abstract. The new millennium comes and seems to belong to you, to people like you. You win awards, honours. You almost become famous.

  In the years that pass after Mary, you realise you are not unique. Others have been to Sutton Mallet and learned what you learned. Some recognise your strength and offer themselves as disciples. You despise most of them, but are pleased.

  You have everything anyone could want. And you keep it for a long time.

  But in the end, you are fucked.

  And dumped.

  What he said didn’t count but what he knew stayed with him.

  A quarter of the way into the new century, in a Sutton Mallet you could never have predicted, you are found; and found out.

  Will Yatman still has his mother’s eyes.

  And it’s hard not to feel he
has inherited his mother’s monster.

  At the end, as you look up from your bloodied bed at Mary Yatman’s beautiful eyes staring out of a hard man’s face, you wonder if you won after all. Maybe the shadow-spiders were just using you, as you used so many others, fucking you.

  And dumping you.

  He has to tell you who he is, but you knew right away.

  ‘I didn’t always like your mother,’ you say.

  He ends you before you can complete the sentence.

  Go to 0.

  92

  Blit blurt …

  All the lives fall away, like scales from your eyes.

  This is the here and now.

  You’re running across wasteland, on a cold day. Your lungs hurt, and you have to be careful of your footing. You can’t afford a twisted ankle.

  Because of the shadow-spiders.

  You have no past, no future.

  The only thing in your mind is the shadow-spiders.

  If pressed, you wouldn’t know your name; if you were married, whether you had a living family.

  You don’t know where you are.

  But the shadow-spiders are after you.

  Ranging from about the bodyweight of a large cat to biology-defying monsters the size of the Albert Hall, the shadow-spiders are after you.

  They scuttle with alarming speed.

  You are in the open. You have been sighted.

  This is your place. They are the intruders.

  You pick up and put down your feet. You draw in and let out your breath.

  That’s all.

  … blit blurt.