Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  You get a flat in town. You have to go on the dole.

  Vanda’s old assistant is your case-worker. Paul Mysliwiec, whom you haven’t seen since school, is your probation officer. You’re found part-time work in a betting-shop but not allowed to handle money.

  People tend not to remember you: which may be a good thing.

  One week, as you are waiting to see Mr Mysliwiec, a demented woman comes into the room and harangues your probation officer’s receptionist. It’s Marie-Laure Quilter. God knows what she’s on probation for. Or if she’s found the right office.

  She pauses in her rant, and looks at you. She’s dressed like a bag lady.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she asks.

  You shake your head.

  ‘Yes, I do. You’re an Arachnoid spy.’

  Mr Mysliwiec comes out to see what the fuss is, and hurries you into his inner office. ‘Mad bitch,’ he says.

  You agree.

  Years pass. You don’t get anywhere.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  166

  ‘Kill them,’ you say.

  ‘Then you kill me, right?’ Mary prompts.

  She shoots you in the face. As you die, you hear the other thwicks.

  Go to 0.

  167

  ‘There’s a bomb,’ you shout.

  ‘Sit down, you bastard.’

  ‘Bloody loony.’

  ‘But there’s a bomb!’

  Soldiers rappel down from the ceiling. You try to escape. The Marines are after the Mad Bomber. You.

  ‘Run,’ you tell everyone.

  Security men wade into the audience. A Girl Guide sobs at her ruined moment in the spotlight.

  You run down the aisle towards the stage, towards the machines, towards the bomb. Marines point guns at you but don’t fire. You keep shouting about the bomb. You make it up on to the stage. Your face is huge on the monitors.

  People shout. Some have taken notice.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ you say, ‘if you would proceed to the exits.’

  Bob Monkhouse looks annoyed to have a punch-line pre-empted.

  Someone somewhere has made a decision. You’re a loony but you’ve been listened to. People are ferried out. There are crushes at the exits. A Marine uses his rifle-butt on someone’s grandmother’s head. You’re not surprised.

  Your ears ring and you are blinded by arc-lights.

  The monitors show a ‘technical problems’ logo. It’s roll-over week. Millions of dupes must be in agony at the delay, afraid they’ll miss the announcement of the winning numbers.

  How many more minutes to go? Or is it seconds?

  This week, maybe, they’ll realise there are no winners in the lottery of life. Not real ones.

  VC Conyer, the celeb, is escorted past by minders. Her unfocused eyed meet yours.

  ‘I know you,’ she says.

  ‘We were at Sedgwater College at the same time. You never spoke to me.’

  ‘Kenneth, right?’

  The stage lifts off and fragments. Din ruptures your ears. Flame flays your skin.

  It’s over in a flash.

  Go to 0.

  168

  You do everything you’ve imagined.

  You tell Tristram you’re leaving the branch. You add that you’re putting the money in a rival high street bank.

  You buy a new house. You buy a new car. You have holidays. You buy everyone everything.

  Money pours down from the skies.

  Minders keep the piranha people away, the crawl-out-of-the-woodwork creeps, the con-job merchants, the charity solicitors, the fruitcakes.

  You screw around a bit, but get back with Vanda. Money makes you thinner, more ardent. Money lubricates everything. You are convinced that everything has come right.

  Or are you?

  If you’re entirely happy, go to 187. If you still have questions, go to 200.

  169

  But are you living your life or is it living you? Have you vanished inside your own PR? Are you just the sum of what other people think of you? What do you have that’s yours?

  Memory.

  You’re on your knees, scratching at the hard earth of a flower-bed, searching for a tin of marbles. You’re wearing a cardboard eyepatch and a pirate hat with a skull-and-crossbones badge and a plastic plume.

  Then you’re back in the house in Sutton Mallet, listening as Ro tells you VC is going to be on the cover of Q.

  It was real. You were back there, you were home.

  The next weekend, when Ro has taken the kids to see her recently widowed mother in the hope of cheering her up, you repeat the experiment under controlled circumstances.

  When you shut your eyes, it is 1990. In the dark of your head, spiders crawl, red-eyed. You open your eyes, heart pounding.

  You’re lying on your sofa, looking at the distant ceiling. Half your life has come and gone since you last stumbled. You are thirty years old. You have done everything.

  You shut your eyes again, determined. You furnish the dark, imagining your room in Mum and Dad’s house. Your room as it was when you were thirteen.

  Maths homework. You hate it. You want to get it over with so you can watch Top of the Pops. A spider crawls on your hand.

  You open your eyes.

  It was real. You were there.

  Next time, you stay longer, ignoring the spiders. You finish the homework and go downstairs. James and Laraine are in the television room, young again.

  Mum washes up in the kitchen. A Daily Telegraph is folded up, and you see your Dad. Alive. A rush of something makes your eyes water.

  It’s love. Or is it regret?

  ‘What’s up, Keith?’

  Dad talked to you. You were there.

  You made it back. You can go home again. You can, you can, you can.

  But do you want to? When did things begin? From where do you want to start? And where do you want to end up?

  Excited, you make yourself espresso and try to think. You’re alone in the house’s huge kitchen. Jeremy’s precocious ‘paintings’ are stuck to the fridge. The place smells of coffee beans. The dishwasher hums through a cycle. Ro will tease you about the lack of piled-up dirty dishes when she gets back.

  Where you were was before Ro, before the kids. If you go back again, they might not be part of your life. The kids might not be born.

  This is what you have. You might try modestly to put it all down to luck and being in the right place with the right idea, but you are here by choice. Even in a fascist dystopia, you’d still be a smart cookie with a loving family.

  But there are things you’d do differently, aren’t there? Some things might make more sense?

  If you want things to be different now, go to 183. If you want things back the way they were, go to 189.

  170

  It’s a Doctor Who day.

  You turn the sound down and put in your tape of ‘Carnival of Monsters’. You fast-forward and freeze-frame, making several wrong freezes before you are satisfied.

  Finally, you catch Katy Manning centre-screen, wearing jeans rolled up and leather boots.

  You lie back on your bed, fix your eyes on the screen, think back to 1973, and

  … blit blurt …

  are transported at once to a parallel universe.

  A warm mouth is wrapped round your erection. You look down. Your stomach is flat. A long sword-scar runs from your thigh to your right nipple, cutting through your chest-pelt.

  A head of tousled hair bobs. You slip your hands into it, guiding Jo as she sucks you off. It’s her birthday present to you.

  Later, when there’s time, you’ll make lingering love. Just now, as midnight nears, you’re on the run.

  You climax pleasantly, and Jo swallows.

  She stands and hugs you, her head resting on your shoulder.

  You look up, through the shattered roof of the bombed-out barn. One of the shadow-saucers floats in front of the moon, spider-limbs dangling.

>   You draw a bead with your blaster. The invaders are blown from the sky with a single beam.

  You and Jo make your way through town, towards the safe house the rebel cadre you command has established in the old Discount Development.

  Jo clings to you, gasping at shadows.

  On the Corn Exchange, you’re shocked to see Timmy Gossett dangling from a noose of piano wire. You cut him down and promise to make the invaders pay. For this one innocent life, a hundred Arachnoids will fizzle in the beam of your blaster.

  Travelling, even by night, is risky.

  A trap has been set, at the Outlet. Your sixth sense tingles as you scent spider-stink. You tug Jo’s arm, pulling her behind a wall.

  Just in time. A blinding zap arcs to the spot where you were standing.

  You dart out and beam away. Three Arachnoids curl up and crinkle, limbs a-flame.

  ‘Eat death, spider-scum from outer space,’ you shout.

  Grey cobweb tendrils creep from the Outlet and spread across the road, coating cars and corpses, reaching for you.

  Jo passes you the bug bomb. You bite off the celluloid tag, and toss it with remarkable accuracy. Jo comments on your amazing arm. Modestly, you admit you were Somerset’s best bowler since Hallam Moseley. Before the invasion.

  The bug bomb explodes inside the Outlet. The last Arachnoids pour out, burning like fireworks. You beam-blast them out of their misery.

  Finally, a Queen Arachnoid scuttles enormously out of the burning ruin, expanding the doors to get all her limbs through. Her egg sac is distended with a hundred baby shadow-spiders, all clacking their claws and gnashing their venom-injectors, hungry to be born, to pour forth in a black tide of evil.

  ‘Keith,’ she coos. ‘Remember me?’

  It’s Marie-Laure, transformed, her pale face peeping out through a balaclava helmet of chitinous carapace. Her skinny white arms stick out ineffectually from a bulbous thorax.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be this way,’ Marie-Laure says. ‘We can rule together.’

  ‘Not in this universe, baby-cakes.’

  You blast the Queen to atoms. The screams of her unborn horde rip the air.

  Diving behind the wall for cover, as spider-foetuses explode like hand-grenades, spattering the street with burning wet muck, you find Jo has slipped off her soft leather thigh-boots and is wriggling out of her cut-off jeans.

  ‘Take me now, Fearless Leader.’

  You know what she means. This time tomorrow, you could both be dead, so why wait?

  You unfasten your Apache-head belt buckle.

  She takes off her rainbow-pattern wool tank-top and frilly-fronted, round-collared watered silk blouse. Her breasts are enormous.

  As she smiles, her cheeks dimple.

  On a bed of fur coats, retrieved from a smashed shop window display, you make love. As you come for the third time, Jo’s cries rise above the Arachnoids’ dying screams.

  She is weeping.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you so much.’

  At the safe house, Vince is manufacturing the bug bombs. Mum mixes explosives in the tiny kitchen. James, from his wheelchair, pores over maps of the area, looking for weaknesses in the invaders’ cobweb castles. Shane, your lieutenant, drills the latest rebel recruits.

  As you and Jo come in, everyone turns and applauds.

  ‘We were getting worried, chief,’ says Shane.

  Mary Yatman, wearing a khaki bikini and camouflage stripes all over her skin, kisses you passionately.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ she says. ‘The broadcast said the Spider Queen had you wrapped and sucked dry.’

  You chuck her on the chin, and say, ‘That’ll be the day.’

  You and Jo have an open relationship. Sometimes Mary joins you in bed. It’s important for the rebellion.

  Mum brings you a mug of tea. ‘Well done, Son.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the house, Mum.’

  You had to blow up your own home, trapping Spider Colonel Hackwill and his Killer Aphids. It was a significant victory.

  ‘That’s all right dear. One day, we’ll have another.’

  You drink your tea.

  Vince explains that the Arachnoids have regrouped, and are operating out of the old DSS building. The files they have there will be of inestimable use to them in tracking down rebels.

  ‘Well, old chum,’ you say, ‘we’ll have to blow those files up. And if a few shadow-spiders get in the way of the blast, that’s just too bad.’

  Everyone cheers.

  A plan is forming in your mind.

  ‘Some day, the Arachnoids will be beaten off,’ you say, ‘and we’ll be free to live and love and laugh again. We’ll have homes and jobs and cars and families. A sun will rise over the Somerset levels, and we’ll rejoice in the warmth and light. I know things seem black and dark and hairy at times, but we must never give up hope. They’ll never understand, those spider brains, that we always hope, we always struggle, we never give up. That’s what makes us us.’

  Everyone cheers.

  ‘Long live Keith,’ shouts Shane.

  Everyone joins in.

  ‘No,’ you say, arms round Jo and Mary. ‘Long live the Rebellion!’

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  171

  At about midday, you and Mary’s team are at the foot of a seventy-foot loose shale incline. Mary has the suitcase, and has discovered that it’s locked.

  Sean reports that he can see Hackwill’s team in the next valley, crawling through thick brush.

  ‘What’s up there?’ Mary asks, nodding at the slope.

  She hasn’t put her knife away.

  Your hands are cuffed behind your back. Mary’s jacket is a right little utility belt, heavy with souvenirs from her law-enforcement career.

  You’re losing control. For the first time, it occurs to you that the Compound’s isolation is not altogether a good idea.

  ‘What’s up there?’ Mary repeats, knife tapping the air.

  ‘The key,’ you admit.

  ‘Mr Bank Manager,’ she tells Sean, ‘hop up and get the key.’

  Sean looks about to protest but doesn’t. He wades upwards about a dozen yards, then slips, tumbles and rolls back down again, ripping his cagoule up the back.

  McKinnell is behind some rocks, still crapping. It’s a wonder there’s anything left in his lower bowel. It’s possible he’s dumping innards as well as faecal matter. James suggested putting ground glass in with the laxative but you overruled him. Perhaps he went behind your back?

  Mary looks at Shearer, who doesn’t volunteer. She sighs and darts up the hill like a mountain nymph. The key is tied to a bright yellow plastic anchor. Mary snatches it and foot-skis back down, leaving tracks in the crumbly shale.

  ‘Game over,’ she says. ‘Now, I’d like a bath.’

  ‘If you uncuff me, I’ll blow the whistle,’ you say. That’s the signal that the treasure is found.

  Mary looks up at the sky. ‘It’s early yet. Be a pity to lose Councillor Hackwill an afternoon’s exercise.’

  You shrug. You can’t do much else with the cuffs on. Mary leads you back to the Compound. You can’t help feeling you’ve ceded command. If the course continues as planned, it will only be because Mary lets it. And she’s unknowable. Everyone else — even McKinnell, whom you’ve never met — you can fathom. They will act predictably. But Mary doesn’t follow rules, even those of her own character. Whatever that is.

  You feel the cold and your shoulders are cramped.

  While Mary bathes and McKinnell sits on the toilet, Sean tries to be mates with you. He asks after Laraine. You tell him she’s married again, to an alcoholic named Owen. He asks after Mum and Phil, but can’t remember their names. He reminisces about the way your dad took him under his wing at the bank.

  Shearer has been told to make the tea but resents getting a woman’s role because he’s gay. He uncuffs you and orders you to get busy in the kitchen. Mary’s defiance has brought
something out in Shearer.

  When James gets back, you have to reestablish control.

  Mary comes down, wearing your towelling bathrobe, hair in wet spikes. She looks like a little girl dressed up, not dangerous at all.

  ‘Kay,’ she tells Shearer, ‘you’re next for the tub.’

  Shearer goes upstairs.

  Sean sulks at being passed over. ‘I feel filthy,’ he says. ‘Those pens were vile.’

  Mary looks contemptuously at him. ‘I don’t bank with you,’ she says.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I can tell you to fuck right off.’

  Sean goes beyond sulky into upset.

  At nightfall, Hackwill’s team trudges back, cold, hungry and depressed. James asks what happened to the whistle and you signal discreetly towards Mary.

  Hackwill is furious that he’s lost. He blames Reg for leading them along a blind trail. Of course, he couldn’t have won, anyway.

  ‘You smell nice,’ Warwick says, moving on Shearer for a cuddle.

  ‘Ugh,’ Shearer says. ‘You don’t.’

  You’ve seen this happen before on courses, between straight couples. It’s always good policy to get them on opposing teams and watch relationships — usually based on economic rather than character compatability — come apart.

  Perhaps you should think about fucking Kay Shearer? If he were a woman, you’d definitely be working round to it by now. It’s part of the Marion Course strategy. You’ve been straight all these years but your heart is untouched, especially by Marie-Laure. Shearer looks a bit like Chris.

  ‘The map was inexact,’ Reg whines.

  You remember the fat boy giggling as James weed himself, as Hackwill gave you the Chinese burn. There’s another couple on the verge of crack-up: Hackwill and Reg. They were only friends in the first place because they were both children no one liked. The link between bully and sidekick must involve a lot of contempt.