Lottery Boy (26 page)

It was like one of those freefall rides – leaving his stomach behind, then the rest of him catching up, then
bam
! He hit a shopping trolley, a bike, a scaffolding pole,
something
, he thought, but it was just the water.

Under he went, sinking down, down into the darkness, his feet piercing the soft, cold muck and filth of the river bottom. He waved his arms about and kicked himself free but his lungs were boiling and he couldn’t hold the little half breath he had any longer and he stayed where he was, weight and air balancing him deep under the water.

He breathed in … and he began to sink again … a freezing pain spread quickly through his chest, that feeling of swallowing a slush puppy in a rush. Then a
slow
warmth came into his body, like that feeling he had when he was half awake but still tired. He wanted so much to close his eyes, to go back to sleep, didn’t mind how dark it was down here, under the water.

But something was tugging at him, biting into his bad shoulder, waking up the last little bit of pain in him, not taking no for an answer; like his mum used to get on at him for school, shaking him, dragging him out of bed, telling him to get, to get up… And slowly, slowly … up, up, up he went.

He broke back through the surface and he tried to breathe but the water had to come out first, back into the river. Coughing and choking, he clung to Jack’s collar as they swept slowly downstream towards the dark towers of the bridge that opened in the middle and existed at the very edge of his imagined world. He thought perhaps he should let go before they got to the emptiness of the sea. But he hung on, drifting in and out of his surroundings.

The next thing he felt was his feet catching the bottom of the river. He turned his head and saw the black bank curving out towards him, the current at low tide kicking him across the stones like a tin can. He let go of Jack to grip at the shore. He dug his good elbow into the mud, clawing his way up like a wonky crab until he was almost out of the water. But when he looked back for his dog, Jack was gone. And in his hand was just a dirty golden dog tag.

* * *

Bam! Bam!

The delivery driver threw the bundles of newspapers at the back door of the shop. The lights were still out, the door was still locked but another couple of bundles would wake Norman up.

Bam! Bam!
All the papers, all the news: crashes, deaths, births, murders, wars. All of it already out of date … except for this one little item on the front page about an unclaimed lottery ticket, running out at the end of
this
day, around the same time as someone’s luck by the looks of it. After all, it had been nearly six months since the draw. And what was another day?
He
would have spent it by now, thought the driver. If it had been his ticket, he would have cashed it in the
same day
and bought a place in the countryside, somewhere nice and not too grand, near a river with swans and ducks and fish … to fish… He had not been fishing in a long while. He shut the back of the van and threw the last bundle…
Bam!
A light went on upstairs in the newsagent’s.
Hhmmf
, he sniffed. Norman was up. Now he wasn’t the only one awake at half past three in the morning.

The driver picked the bundle of yesterday’s unsold papers off the step and when he came back to the van there was a dog in the headlights. He’d left the engine running and hadn’t heard it creeping up on him. He didn’t know much about dogs nowadays but it looked like one of those new sort of
devil
dogs, the sort that
went for
you
if you weren’t too careful. He threw the scrappy bundle of papers onto the front seat and jumped back in the van. He revved the engine to frighten it off but it stayed where it was, right in front of the vehicle. Up high, cushioned in the driver’s seat, he could see in the headlights that this dog was in a bad way, jittering about on three legs, twisting round like it was making a bad job of chasing its tail.

A wire-haired Labrador flashed up in his memory: the last dog he’d had as a kid. There was no room in the city now. Too much mess to clean up. Too much of a tie at his age. Even so, sometimes, some days, he missed having a dog – something to come home to at the end of his morning round, something that missed him.

Slowly, he slid the door back, got out of the van and went over to see what was wrong with it. It didn’t bark or show its teeth, and he got very close and bent down and then it came to him, hopping over on three legs, the back one hanging off like a chicken wing.

It was bleeding bad. It would be a right mess to clean up and it would probably be dead before he’d finished his round and had a chance to take it to the vet’s. Still, he found himself just scooping the dog up – getting blood all over his fleece – and putting it in the front seat, where it settled down on the pile of old news.

He caught sight of the blood-streaked grey tape wrapped around the dog’s back leg. He was angry then. Kids! It was always kids! He moved to pull it off but thought better of it. Let the vet do it, if it came to that…

He drove on to the next shop, towards the river. When he looked at the road, he thought it was starting to rain; every few yards there were little dark spots on the tarmac, but nothing on his windscreen, and then he realized this was the way the dog had come, from the river. And when he got down to the embankment, he saw blue lights downstream, blinking away. That was his direction, towards the trouble and the blue lights. He began to turn left but then put the vehicle into a wide arc, changing his mind when he saw the spots of blood weaving off to the right, because he just had to
know
where this mixed-up-looking dog had come from.

The trail stopped here. He parked up with his lights shining onto the foreshore. He turned the engine off this time and got out and peered at the dim water’s edge. And in the light of the new day, he thought what he saw dragging itself out of the mud was some leftover creature from out of the river’s past. Some
thing
that had done this to the dog. But then he saw that it was just a boy wrapped up in a grown man’s coat, lying twisted on one elbow, head down, sucking air an inch from the water.

The driver waded into the mud, shouting and telling the boy he was
safe
, that he was
OK
now, like you did when someone wasn’t either one of those things. When he got to the boy, like the dog, he picked him up and took him back to the van, but this time he laid him out on the pavement and covered him with clean, fresh papers.

“Jacky’s got the ticket,” croaked the boy. The driver heard the dog in the van moving around, pawing at the door.

“Jacky? Who’s Jacky? Don’t you worry,” he said because he was
very
worried. He got his phone out, never bothered turning it on this first part of the day.

“Who’s Jacky?” the driver asked the boy again, but the boy just looked up at the lightening sky.

“Come on, boy … stay awake.” He had a feeling you were supposed to do that, to stay awake to stop that bigger sleep grabbing hold of you in the silence.

“Who’s Jacky? What ticket?” he said in desperation, asking him any old question, trying to keep him
with it
.

“Come on, wake up. Where’s this ticket? What you got there? Is this
it
? He saw something trying to shine in the grip of the boy’s hand. “Is this the ticket? Is it Jacky’s ticket? Come on, boy… Try and stay awake…”

He took it out of the boy’s hand. It looked like a doubloon, a gold coin the boy had scraped off the bottom of the river, but when he wiped it clean it was just a cheap brass dog tag. The sort you could buy for just a few pounds.
Jacky
it said in the metal. But it took him the length of the phone call to the emergency services to comprehend that this was the boy’s dog sitting on top of the papers in his delivery van. That this
was
Jacky.

And as the flashing lights from downstream drew closer, he began to wonder, in that strange shock that panic brings, if the dog in his van
did
have the ticket, where it might be and what sort of ticket was worth dying for.

Bully was floating in some sort of boat, not moving though, anchored where he was to the seabed. He could hear birds,
beep, beep, beeping
. A man in a proper shirt and trousers was wading towards him, trying to catch his eye with a rubber smile.

“How are you feeling, Bradley?” the man said.

Bully looked around – saw a couple of other boats like his with bodies in them, but he couldn’t see the birds that were
beep, beep, beeping
at all.

He tried to sit up then but he was too heavy, his whole body weighed down by invisible anchor chains. Even his voice couldn’t escape. He tried to talk but it came out a whisper and then he couldn’t hear any more, and the shapes and sounds around him fizzed and melted away.

The next time he woke, Phil was there, next to his bed. He looked weird. He was smiling with his mouth open, showing his teeth, as if for a proper picture in a newspaper or a magazine.

“How you feeling, pal? What you been getting into? You’re lucky it didn’t nick an artery.
Just
grazed your shoulder blade, they said…”

Bully looked about for something that was missing, couldn’t think what it was.

“It’s all right, don’t worry. It’s
safe
. I got it covered. Why didn’t you tell me we’d won it? If it hadn’t been for that driver, you’d’a lost us the bloody lot! What?” he said because Bully was trying to talk.

It really hurt, like the worst sore throat, the pain shooting all the way down to his lungs. Finally he said it: “Ja…” and made a listening face, putting his head to one side.

“Who? Your mum?”

Bully shook his head.

“Ja…”

“What? The
dog
?”

Bully nodded, his shoulder throbbing now he knew that the bullet had just grazed him.

“She’s not here, is she? They don’t let dirty old dogs in here, do they?”

Phil paused to look round the ward in case someone might be listening. “Right, listen. You hearing me?” He leaned in, as close as he’d ever got to Bully in the last six years. “They won’t want to pay out, I can tell you that now. Not unless we say it was me what bought the ticket, OK? So that’s
our
story. OK?”