Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m wearing them. But these are them too. Look.’

  His name is written inside the leather lip in neat biro. That must be a habit from school.

  ‘This is what I do with my socks at night,’ Shearer says, pulling out a ball. You compare the tartan pattern with the socks he’s wearing: an exact match.

  Putting the boots beside his feet shows that they are identical to the ones he is wearing. Every dent, scratch and crease is the same.

  ‘Twilight Zone,’ you comment.

  ‘Come here,’ says Shane. He is at the edge of the culvert, looking down.

  Tristram Warwick lies at the bottom, in an inch or two of water, a rain-swollen trickle. He is face up, mouth and eyes open, dead as a fish. Scattered around him are more boots; eight pairs. You recognise your own among them. And Mary’s distinctive Docs.

  Read 13, then come back here.

  Shearer lets out one cry, a bark of grief.

  You slide down to Warwick and check. He is indeed dead. You’re more spooked by your own boots, simultaneously on your feet and lying by Warwick.

  There are nine pairs of boots too many in the universe. Why not ten?

  If you leave Shearer with Warwick and go back to the compound to confer with James, go to 198. If you stay yourself and send Shearer and Shane back, go to 215.

  189

  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 202. If you let go, go to 277.

  190

  ‘I know the terrain,’ you say. ‘I’ll take the boots and go.’

  You can’t read James’s expression.

  ‘Why you?’ blurts Hackwill.

  ‘Because I know I didn’t do it.’

  ‘You could be a split personality and not know you did it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  Though you’re resolved, it’s still distasteful. It’s up to you to unlace McKinnell’s boots. Your cold fingers fumble with the ice-stiff laces. Your breath frosts against McKinnell’s open throat.

  Everyone stands round in a circle, watching. You tug and get the boots off. Dead man’s shoes. Peeling off the socks is worse, more intimate, creepier. You’d wear just the boots but know that, after a couple of hours, your feet would blister. You’d walk on pain.

  Sean ughs in distaste as you pull on McKinnell’s socks.

  ‘Do you have to?’ he asks.

  You ignore him.

  You stock up on chocolate bars and sausage rolls and take a thermos of coffee. Before you go, you want to talk to James. But Hackwill always pushes in, not letting you alone.

  ‘What if you’ve cooked this up between you?’ he says, voice carrying across the valley. ‘You could be plotting to kill us all.’

  You try to look sadly at Hackwill, but the main reason you want to talk to James is to reassure yourself that this isn’t his plan.

  ‘We’ve never had dealings with McKinnell,’ says James. ‘Why would we want to kill him?’

  That hits home. Hackwill shuts up. Interesting.

  ‘Why should we want to kill any of you?’ you say.

  Hackwill doesn’t bring up the copse. Or the Lime Kiln. Or your house. You almost enjoy his discomfort. But McKinnell’s corpse, a tarp thrown over it, brings you down. This is serious.

  ‘What about the phone?’ you ask James, when you’re alone. You’ve walked about a hundred yards from Castle Drac.

  ‘There’s an opportunity here,’ your brother says.

  You don’t understand.

  ‘One of this crew is a murderer. There’s no passing trade up here.’

  ‘I’d thought of that,’ you say.

  ‘If anybody else dies, the murderer will take the blame.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Keith, this is it. We’re going to do Hackwill.’

  ‘James, you can’t mean it.’

  But you see he does. You’d forgotten that James has killed before. Has had to. To him, it’s a natural solution to a problem.

  ‘You didn’t kill McKinnell?’ you ask.

  James looks shocked. ‘Of course not.’

  You are torn.

  ‘Look,’ James says, ‘it was probably Hackwill himself. A dodgy deal gone wrong. In that case, Robbo’s got a cache of warm shoes and socks somewhere. As soon as you’re gone, he can continue his game.’

  Back at the Compound, Hackwill and the others stand together, watching you from a distance. What if they’re all in it? You’ll be leaving James to them.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ he says. ‘Get over the hill and go to ground. I’ll work on Hackwill, hint that we have another car stashed near the old shepherd’s hut. He’ll bolt for it. Then we’ll have him.’

  You think about it.

  If you agree with James, go to 206. If you argue with James, go to 216.

  191

  All you take from the flat over the chip shop is an ancient child-sized eyepatch you find pinned to the wall. You lost it years ago, but this Keith hung on to it. The eyepatch predates the point, whenever it was, when your lives split.

  This Keith has obviously walked out on his wife and kids — as you have, you think — and so there’s no obligation on you to stay. They’ll probably be better off without him.

  You walk through Sedgwater in the afternoon, finding things the same. Robert Hackwill is up for re-election. Brink’s Café is open for business.

  Your mother probably still lives here. No, his mother, not yours. You aren’t him. You have to get that straight.

  You walk out of town and hitch a lift. You end up in London. On the streets.

  It’s November, brutally cold. You don’t panhandle — that takes more guts than you think you’ve got — but take casual, cash-in-hand, sweeping-up and washing-out jobs. A publican, impressed with your attitude, gives you a line on a bedsit. You land a place in a housing co-op and a temporary job as a barman. In the mornings, you re-educate yourself in libraries, catching up on skills you were letting slip. You jog to get in shape, losing gut, building muscle. You spend your first surplus cash on a decent haircut. You keep but trim the beard.

  You work on a believable story. You’ve been in the Far East, were in fact brought up there, and have recently returned. All your documentation is lost. You get a photocopy of your birth certificate from the Reading records office, and use it to get a new passport.

  Newspapers keep you up to date on your clients. Without you, some are floundering — which ought to please you but doesn’t — and between the lines you see where connections are missing. Deals you have brokered have gone unmade.

  All you’ve brought with you is in your head. But that turns out to be quite a lot.

  You sketch out a few financial articles, using inside but unaccountable knowledge, and sell the pieces to The Financial Times. You call yourself Marion Griffin, perhaps to bury yourself deeper.

  After six months, you’ve gone from bum to barman and from journo to expert. Working out of a tiny flat, you take consultancies. When your knowledge of Japan, specifically your near-fluent Japanese, gets out, you become sought-after.

  You can never be as flamboyant as you were, but you can be a behind-the-scenes player, putting things together. You have started over.

  When you first start seeing women, you have twinges of guilt. But you feel worse about the thin blonde woman, whose name you don’t even know, than about Ro. You’ve discreetly checked up on Ro, and she’s married to Roger Cunningham, whom you vaguely remember from school. The Sedgwater Herald didn’t even run a news item about this Keith’s ‘disappearance’, which is obscurely depressing.

  You start seeing Christina Temple, a lecturer at London University. You move in together but don’t marry. You assume the other Keith, who you are legally, was prob
ably married. The issue doesn’t arise, anyway.

  You begin to command high fees. Nobody ever asks about your qualifications. Your work is mostly talk and you can demonstrate your ability to do it.

  It occurs to you that you’ve recreated a life you performed a miracle to leave. Maybe this has taught you what you really want. Or maybe you’ll find yourself, eventually, making another switch.

  Maybe.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  192

  Next time Josh and Jonquil are bored, you draw them a treasure map. It’s a desert island which topographically mimics Sedgwater. You tell Josh it’s in another dimension, where the town is an abandoned settlement in a Sargasso Sea overrun by giant spiders.

  ‘Once, long ago, I buried a treasure,’ you tell them. ‘When I was your age, I searched but never found it. The lost treasure — it doesn’t matter what it was — is still there, but it’s not the finding that’s important. It’s the searching.’

  You aren’t sure, but you think Josh and Jonquil see you differently for a moment. Not as layabout Dad, part of the furniture, a disappointment to everyone, but as the magical visitor to the Admiral Benbow Inn, opening up a world of wonder and adventure and tragedy and triumph.

  You give them the map and send them out to search.

  Marie-Laure, who has been watching this, is surprised and pleased. She’d thought she knew everything about you. She was willing to settle for you, you realise.

  But you’ve found something else, which you can share with the children and even with her.

  ‘Let’s get married,’ you say.

  This isn’t what she was expecting. ‘Pardon?’ she says.

  ‘I love you,’ you say.

  Marie-Laure, under the mannerisms, is beautiful. She has trembled between neurosis and practicality on her own, with no support from you, having to mother you as well as the kids.

  Going back has helped you understand that.

  ‘I may not be able to get a job,’ you say, ‘but I can still make a home, be a father, be your husband.’

  Marie-Laure is crying. You embrace her.

  After you’re married, Marie-Laure tells you her mother will settle £50,000 on you both. She’s repeatedly made this offer, pressuring Marie-Laure to marry, but Marie-Laure — your wife — has always held back from telling you. She didn’t want to get married simply for financial security, feeling the situation would fall apart. You half feel her mother made the offer in the hope of prodding Marie-Laure into a marriage as disastrous as her own, just so she could say, ‘I told you so.’

  It’s like finding buried treasure.

  Your trips into the past have reminded you of the spirit you once had and made you wonder how you lost it. As a child, you had no long-term hopes, because being grown-up was as remote as taking a trip to the moon. But you had a home, a family, a sense of the eternal present.

  The money enables Marie-Laure to quit her job and study for a degree. You two buy into Vince’s comic book and nostalgia shop just as the ’60s and ’70s retro-industry takes off as big business. It’s almost magic.

  As the ’90s wear on, things get better. Sometimes, considering the state of the country, you feel guilty about it. But while financial comets like Laraine’s old boyfriend Sean Rye were streaking upwards in the ’80s, you were ploughing along in a rut. Now, Sean and his whole Thatcherite yuppie class are burned out, and your ruts are foundations.

  You give up travelling into the past, and travel instead into the future.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  193

  Blit blurt…

  This was your home. Now, it’s a ruin, wisped over by layers and layers of cobweb. You rend the web apart with your hands, only to find another grey veil underneath.

  It frightens you that you have so many memories. Irreconcilable memories.

  When you think of your wife, too many names and faces come to mind. And the same for your son and daughter. A pixilated, drunken-haze conglomeration of lives seems to be clogging your mind.

  What are you looking for? Food? Survivors? A tin of marbles?

  There’s a movement in the distance, and you look over across the plain of rubble. Black pipe-cleaner legs poke over the horizon as an Arachnoid crawls up from one of the holes.

  You don’t think you can stand to look at the spider-face.

  The legs strain and the body emerges like a cloud of infested soot. The face is coming.

  You feel an electric touch in your mind.

  … blit blurt.

  194

  Ignoring the pain in your knee, you launch yourself out of the chair at Mary. The other two are stooges. They don’t count.

  You come down hard on Mary’s arm. Her gun thwicks, kicking up a divot of carpet, lino and floorboard.

  You are being battered.

  You wrestle for Mary’s gun. You get it and fit it into your fist. You fire, dizzyingly certain you’ll hit Chris or one of the twins. An orange poke-hole appears in Grebo’s gut. He starts yelling — Your neighbours must hear.

  Mary has Grebo’s gun now, held to Chris’s ear. ‘Drop it,’ she says.

  You shoot her in the throat.

  She shoots Chris in the head.

  Shane shoots you in the back.

  Mary lies against one wall, gurgling blood, hand pressed to her throat wound. Chris is curled up on the sofa, obviously dead. The twins howl like dogs. Grebo shouts profanity.

  You’re still crawling, towards the sofa. Shane stands by the sofa, gun aimed at the twins, barrel drifting between Juanita and Joseph.

  ‘Don’t,’ you say. It’s all you can manage. You haven’t got a gun or a wrench.

  ‘Don’t,’ you say.

  Shane looks at your children. And can’t.

  People come. The police. You fade.

  Go to 0.

  195

  What I want of you is quite simple. I want you to keep doing what you have been doing. You can go back to the beginning, to 1, if you wish. Or re-enter wherever you choose. You’ll learn you’re not just one Keith, but a legion of Keiths, and that a legion of lives are affected by you, or even depend on you.

  You may think of me as an enemy of man.

  Not so.

  I am fascinated. I am pleased to encounter those truly rare individuals who see beyond the game, who do not constantly succumb to deals and catches.

  Believe me.

  And, if truth be told, I am disappointed each time I win.

  There’ve been complaints, I know. Altogether too many Go to 0 outcomes. Premature, sudden 0s. Statistically, that’s unlikely. There are an infinite number of outcomes, and I’m guiding you within only a comparatively narrow band. I haven’t let you go down the Synth, for instance. You can venture further on your own, ponder the outcomes between the lines we’re treading together.

  Most people, in my experience, live And so on lives. At some point, sometimes frighteningly early, they fix their futures and just live them out. And so on. Often, the And so on point comes as suddenly as a Go to 0. The difference is that you have to live with it.

  Are the And so on lines really inescapable? Once you have received that verdict or reward or punishment or revelation, do you really have to stick with it?

  Maybe not. Some people never surrender. I like them; though they can be infuriating. Perhaps they should look for satisfaction rather than adventure.

  You can crap out now. Go to 300, maybe. Or 37. Whatever.

  Or you can explore. Make conclusions. Make something of yourself and for yourself.

  Don’t be afraid.

  Just go on.

  196

  The woman’s name is Marie-Laure Quilter. You aren’t married but have two children, Josh and Jonquil. You can’t help but laugh at your daughter’s name, which is the highest possible scoring word in Scrabble. You don’t work. You don’t seem to do much of anything.

  Okay, so you live in a tip. But, hey, there are advantages.
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  You sit back and take a holiday, coasting through things. It’s easier than it ought to be, since you only have one or two friends — VC, here called Victoria, is one, and a loser called Vince — and they’re used to you nodding as they talk at you. The same goes for Marie-Laure, who nags a bit but does your washing and cooks for you.

  Admittedly, you put off seeing Mum. But that seems to be in character.

  Doing nothing but pig out on stodge, watch videos, smoke dope and drink beer, you perfect your ‘Keith Marion’ impersonation. Your kids jump on you a bit and Marie-Laure lets you shag her, but you keep everything low-key. God, this is an easy life.

  If you let go and become ‘Keith Marion’, go to 204. If you resist and remake yourself, go to 237.

  197

  As you walk away, I am proud of you. Few can resist a sure thing.

  Go back to 1.

  It will be different this time.

  198

  You find Mary in charge. James and Hackwill have driven off in the minibus. This disorients you.

  ‘Warwick is dead,’ you say.

  Shearer is in glum shock. The others don’t believe it.

  ‘Why did they go?’ you ask Mary.

  ‘You weren’t back. Hackwill demanded to be taken to the village to bring help. James argued but agreed to drive him.’

  It’s not like James to give in.

  ‘What’s this about boots?’

  You check Mary’s feet. She still has her Docs on. Bovver boots, they used to be called. Skinheads wore them in the early ’70s, for aggro, for putting the boot in.

  ‘I can’t get my head round that,’ you say.

  ‘But Warwick’s dead? How?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell.’

  ‘Warwick?’ Mary is as fazed by this as you. You want to hold her hand. Are you allies out of bed?

  ‘Do you have a phone?’ she asks.

  ‘James does. A mobile. It’s in the bus.’

  ‘No help, then?’