Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  You are awake, cold and terrified.

  Control your family

  James.

  or lose members of it.

  The twins.

  ‘What is it, love?’ your wife asks.

  ‘Trouble,’ you say.

  You can go to it or wait for it to come to you.

  Reg Jessup dies.

  If you go to Somerset to protect your family, go to 118. If you stay in London to protect your family, go to 127.

  109

  In 1982, the week after your father’s funeral, you’re in Sedgwater, hurrying to the Lime Kiln. You’ve arranged to meet friends you haven’t seen in a while. The country is about to go to war over the Falklands. From the Corn Exchange steps, a shaggy, outsize young man harangues passers-by. You slow down and recognise Timmy Gossett, but don’t know whether he’s drunk or, in the playground expression, ‘mental’. He wears a green army-surplus coat two sizes too small for him and thick-lensed NHS specs fixed at one corner with masking-tape. The knees of his jeans hang at least six inches lower than his actual knees. He is shouting, ‘Fuck the Argies’. You know he won’t remember you, but a tiny worm of guilt has burrowed in your heart ever since Paul made you play ‘Timmy’s Germs’. Sometimes it’s quiet for five or six years; sometimes it’s active enough to lose you a night’s sleep to a fretful, gnawing pain. When you were nine, you picked up a sense of Sin. Now, as Timmy lurches towards you, you want to try to set things right. But saying sorry will never be enough. You also know it truly wasn’t your fault. Timmy never realised you had a choice, may not even have noticed you passing on the germs to Vanda. You were never a ringleader in ‘Timmy’s Germs’, just one of the followers. You only went along with it, like all the good Germans in the war. Now Timmy grabs your shoulders and you smell his breath. What has he been drinking, shoe polish? ‘Fuck the Argies,’ he shouts. ‘Fuck the Argies!’ Timmy falls over, tripping on something invisible. You have backed against the bank your father used to manage. Timmy, screaming his mantra so that you can’t make out the words any more, crawls away, leaving a foamy spittle trail on the pavement. Timmy’s germs.

  Read 7, and go to 8.

  110

  A wonderful night ends.

  Vic’s face is wet with happy tears.

  You are pleased with yourself.

  You think you have persuaded her to stay.

  But she goes.

  For a week, you don’t think of other women. You pass up certain scores. You think only of Vic.

  But she leaves town.

  For ever.

  After a month, it really starts constricting.

  To prove to yourself that it doesn’t matter, you start pulling again. Even more frenzied than before, you are bolder, harsher, wilder.

  Mostly, you fuck girls.

  Teenagers. Clever girls, a bit neurotic, impatient with boys their own age, hot ice in bed.

  You like people to see you with the girls.

  You hope it will get back to her.

  Out of bed, your girls seem to talk a foreign language. They listen to music you don’t know, they have a different culture. Sometimes, they indulge your oldie ways, as if you were a grandfather.

  But in bed, you are the savage master.

  Years pass. Not a man who knows you doesn’t, on some level, envy you. Every time, a new temp or student observer succumbs to you, colleagues groan with admiration and jealousy.

  You see Vic on television, sometimes, or read pieces about her in The Independent. For a poet, she has become quite famous. She writes a novel, Neon Spiral. You read it, certain it’s about you, but can’t connect with the world of her fictional characters. It makes you angry that you should impinge so little on her that you don’t even figure as a trace element in the world of her imagination.

  But there are still girls. And you are still on course.

  You slow down and settle for lengthy, overlapping liaisons. For the first time, the girls — young enough to be your daughters, but still in their thirties — seem like mistresses. You enter into a sort of domesticity with several, but eventually they move on.

  There are always other prospects.

  You read that Vic has married a television producer. You see pictures of their ideal home and messy kids in Hello! magazine. You think her husband looks a bit like you. You feel superior to him. You had her first. The next bloke just had her last.

  She keeps her promise and never gets in touch with you.

  You actually get married. Three times. You even remember their names: Emma, Marietta, Aisla. Three-quarters of the women you have slept with have had names ending in ‘a’.

  You don’t suffer for your lifestyle. You don’t get herpes or AIDS or any other venereal disease. No jealous husband or boyfriend or angry father comes after you with a pitchfork or a shotgun.

  None of them gets pregnant. That probably means you’re infertile. You don’t like the thought of that. But there it is.

  You wonder if Vic’s son is yours. No, the dates don’t work. Not by years.

  Of course, your physical capabilities diminish. But you never fail. You take a less fiery approach, but can compensate for the occasional limpness of your penis with dextrous fingers and an expert tongue.

  You can always satisfy your girls. And yourself.

  So what’s wrong? Why do you feel you’ve made a mistake you would give anything to unpick?

  I’m sorry, Keith. There’s nowhere to go from here. Except, eventually …

  Go to 0.

  111

  The heat tells you at once that this is the summer of 1976. In your life, the first major lull. You were just out of school, on the dole, not yet seeing Marie-Laure, doing odd jobs for your parents, hanging around, drifting.

  If you’d had any gumption, you’d have founded punk. But you didn’t.

  You’re sitting outside Brink’s Café, alone, reading an Amazon Queen comic. A Mediterranean sun shines down and Somerset folk walk by in short-sleeved shirts and floppy hats, transformed by a quirk of the weather.

  You’d forgotten the physical weight of the heat.

  Also, you’d not noticed the gradual softening of your body. Here you are without a gut bulge. You feel almost strong. You’re young, sixteen. You absorb strength with the heat.

  Despite what the Sex Pistols will say, you know there’s going to be a future, even if it will belong to Margaret Thatcher, Sean Rye, Ayatollah Khomeini, Rob Hackwill.

  Maybe you can change that.

  You don’t think you could get it together to assassinate Thatcher. Besides, you’re not sure taking her out of history wouldn’t leave space for someone worse.

  Don’t think about the world. Think about Keith Marion.

  You’re going nowhere in this town. But maybe that can be changed.

  If you stay in Sedgwater, go to 178. If you leave, go to 180.

  112

  By 1997, you’ve forgotten the filing cabinet. Of course, you remember Sean’s spectacular rise in the world of investment; and even more spectacular crash. Tristram Warwick, Sean’s successor as bank manager, still makes jokes about going ballistic.

  The bank is a different animal now. The staff has been down-sized by replacing almost all the cashiers with machines. Tris and Candy run practically everything, abetted by a computer whizz called Kate who isn’t yet twenty. The sort of advice your father used to give is downloaded from head office. Rather than talk to clients to get a sense of what they really mean when they apply for a small business loan or a mortgage, you have them fill in a detailed form which is analysed to a strict grid. People don’t really come into it.

  Your duties now include stuffing the cash machines. You even make the tea two times out of three. You aren’t that old but feel like an anachronism.

  At home, you’ve been through several struggles. Vanda admitted during a row four years ago that she had an affair with Sean. The knowledge always hangs between you. Actually, you get along as well as most old married couples.


  Jason and Jesse are sullen teenagers with bursts of brightness. Your son spends all his time building universes on his computer — when not complaining you don’t give him enough pocket money to upgrade tech to keep pace with his friends — and your daughter is a fashion-plate who wants to have her nipples pierced before she even needs a bra. They’re both at Ash Grove, which seems a much better school these days than it was when you were there.

  The house has subsidence problems that drain any money put aside against a new car or a holiday or clothes for Jesse or software for Jason. It’s been three years since you decorated.

  You’ve been at the bank too long to be fired. Staff has been cut back well beyond the bone. But you’re not going anywhere. Tris has a job for life. If he were struck by divine lightning, the obvious choice to replace him would be Candy. And Kate probably comes after her, even if she wears a nose-stud.

  You and Vanda have put on a stone every three years since your marriage. All your shirts are tight across the gut, with missing buttons. And Vanda stretches side-seams whenever she puts on jeans. You feel like a set of those wobble-bottom toys that bounce back when knocked over. But you don’t know if you could bounce back and you aren’t sure you’d want to.

  You find yourself watching a lot of television. Baywatch, Noel’s House Party, Gladiators, EastEnders, The X-Files, One Foot in the Grave, Star Trek: The Next Generation

  .

  Vanda would like a satellite dish, but money is tight. Jason would like a whole new computer. He claims he’s working on the heuristic equivalent of a bone-shaker bicycle in the jet age. Jesse wants a pink leather catsuit. She’s decided at twelve that her role models in life are the Avengers girls.

  There’s severe damp in the kitchen. The car is choking.

  Tris goes to Venice and Morocco for his holidays, Candy and her partner have a villa in Tuscany, and Kate is always zooming off to Florida and Macao. Two years ago, you took the ferry and did a weekend in French supermarkets.

  You watch television and you want things. Cars. Clothes. Gadgets. Homes. Laughs. Women.

  It’s more than want. It’s need.

  Gradually, the dull throb of need grows to become an all-consuming agony. The defining emotion of your middle age is covetousness.

  When you dream out loud, you always preface your aspirations with ‘When I win the lottery’.

  Since the National Lottery started, you’ve been playing.

  Every week, you’re sure you’ll win.

  Every week, your hopes are dashed.

  Jesse, who has a mind for numbers and odds, keeps a running tally of expenses and income on the Lottery. You do win £10 from time to time, even £100 once, but that’s not winning.

  A million pounds. That’s winning.

  Eight million pounds roll-over jackpot. That’s winning properly.

  When you win the Lottery, you will be able to have everything. This you know with fierce, zealous certainty.

  You believe in the Lottery because you have to.

  Anthea Turner is your high priestess. Mystic Meg is a conduit to heaven. They speak to you from the screen. Dale Winton, Bob Monkhouse, Carol Smillie. They are your friends. You will win.

  It is a matter of time. When you are without sin, you will win. You will receive your reward here on Earth.

  People say you’re more likely to inherit a vast sum of money from a hitherto-unknown millionaire relative or even to find a suitcase full of unmarked notes thrown into the garden than you are to win the National Lottery. It is more probable that a jumbo jet will crash into your house or a spider of ice will close its legs round your heart than it is that the animated Hand of God will sprinkle stardust on your head.

  You are a mug. Like all the other mugs.

  But you have a sinking house and a swelling gut and a wavering job and a drifting family, and you need.

  The need is everything.

  It’s Jesse’s job to divine the numbers. You don’t play the same combinations every week.

  You are the spiritual side. Jesse handles the logic. Jason even develops a program to help you.

  The odds are long.

  But you have faith.

  For the first thousand years in the bottle, the genie vowed the man who let him out would be richly rewarded for his charity. For the next thousand, he swore the man who let him out would be tortured beyond endurance for waiting so long. That’s roughly how you feel. Love, reverence and veneration of the presenters of the Lottery and the celebrities who pick the balls turn into resentment, hatred and distrust.

  Each week, they rob you of your right.

  Their sparkly smiles and cobweb-spun hair and spangly dresses and indecent trousers and nervous shuffles and plugged books-films-albums-shows are all a decaying dazzle, increasingly failing to disguise the Evil.

  They are against you. You will never win. They conspire in their tinsel lairs. They are so far above you.

  But these are dark thoughts you must banish. Your win must be earned. You try again to love the Lottery.

  Each week, you play. Each week.

  In all likelihood, this is the rest of your life. There should be an And so on here.

  Jason and Jesse grow up and leave. You get early retirement. You get a coronary. You die.

  Go to 0.

  And each week, you have played the Lottery.

  You are a dead mug.

  However …

  Take a pack of cards, remove the Jokers, shuffle well, and deal four hands of thirteen cards each.

  If you have dealt perfect individual suits of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds …

  … and if the one-eyed jacks jump out of their suits and squirt cider in your ears …

  … go to 168.

  113

  Apart from the other thing (the i-word), you’ve never had an affair with a married woman before. One of the advantages of the freelance life is that it leaves daytimes open for sexual pursuit. Laraine can’t do mornings because a char comes in to clean the house, but her housewife afternoons are usually unspoken-for. How do people with regular jobs handle adultery? Lies about weekend conferences and evening meetings?

  By concentrating on scheduling mechanics when you’re not actually in bed, you and Laraine manage to avoid dealing with the i-word issue. It never quite fades from your mind but the fact that your lover — mistress? — is also your sister starts to seem less important. For the first time, you’re in sync with Laraine, caught up in her world.

  She will have to leave Sean.

  You knew it as soon as she said he hit her. She’s slowly catching up with you.

  In bed, she tells you about her marriage from the inside. Your body is rigid with anger as she calmly recounts the details of her husband’s rages, pinches and slaps that became punches and knocks.

  He has progressed from fists to that old public-school special, the bar of soap wrapped in a towel like a rupee in a thuggee scarf. You wonder if Sean picked it up from his good-bloke mate Councillor Hackwill. He calls the soap-and-towel flail his ‘bitch-buster’.

  Somewhere, you opened a door. Now you’re frightened, excited and angered by what you see. There’s another door ahead; an even more extreme one. You’re on the path to that other door.

  Laraine tells you that when Sean is in a real state — the financing of the Discount Development is coming apart at the seams — he comes home, goes to the bathroom to get the soap and towel, then stalks the house singing nonsense lyrics to the Ghostbusters theme, with the chorus ‘Who you gonna call? Bitch-buster!’ Then, he beats Laraine bloody and rapes her.

  You open the door.

  ‘Larry, we’re going to have to kill him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  You hug, naked but chaste. You’re joined in this purpose.

  This is not your field. James would just have brought a gun home from work and shot Sean in the head. No fuss, no frills. End of story. Then, admittedly, it’d have been up to you to sort out the mess.

  You sit in t
he kitchen with your sister, over Nescafé and bourbon biscuits, and talk about murdering her husband.

  Actually, it’s not so much the murder itself that’s the problem. It’s what to do with the body. If you dispose of it so that it’s never found, the story is that Sean has upped and run away. If you make a play of finding it, the story has to be that someone else killed him.

  Which of these stories works for you?

  If you opt with the hide-the-body plan, go to 126. If you favour the someone-else-as-murderer scheme, go to 134.

  114

  It’s very unpleasant. You have to go through the story over and over. For Tristram Warwick, the acting manager. For Inspector Draper and WPC Yatman. For many lawyers. For the press. In court.

  There are always sticky patches. You have to admit Sean proposed you be his partner, and told you he was going to part-finance his investments with ‘petty cash’. The business about Candy’s paper-clip locksmith skills always sounds suspicious.

  Warwick thinks you should have whistle-blown on Sean as soon as he made his proposal. You can’t explain why you didn’t.

  It’s worst for Vanda. She and Ro are best friends. Ro, Sean’s co-defendant, has a sort of breakdown. She takes to phoning your house, alternately apologising to and abusing whoever answers the phone. Sometimes, it’s the kids.

  You have to have the number changed. But you can’t move house. Sean and Ro are arrested but not remanded to prison. As non-violent criminals, they get bail easily and walk around free.

  Sean avoids you but Ro tries to come over. She pleads with Vanda.

  You don’t know if your wife thinks you’ve done the right thing. If you’d gone in with Sean, you’d all be rich and nobody would be charged with anything.