Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  ‘I have a lot of responsibility where I am.’

  ‘Overdraft Officer,’ she says, looking down at her notebook. ‘Must make you popular.’

  ‘Sometimes, I give people overdrafts. I don’t just call in debts.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What about the, uh, fingers?’

  ‘The objects themselves have been sent off to Bristol for tests. Of course, we took prints?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Sadly, not on record.’

  She hands over a photocopied sheet with five black smudges. You look at them, but — of course — they don’t mean anything.

  ‘I suppose none of your debtors have come in wearing one mitten and looking pale?’

  You wonder if Mary’s attitude is entirely appropriate.

  ‘They are clean cuts. Your man seems to have done the digits one at a time, with a cleaver or a hatchet.’

  She lays her left hand on the desk to demonstrate, putting out her fingers one by one, making a chopping motion with her right hand.

  ‘It’s can’t have been easy to ignore the pain long enough to finish the job. You’d think that by the time he got to the thumb, he’d have hurt so much he’d have botched the chop. But the last is as clean as the first. Actually, we don’t know the order he did them. Where would you start, this little piggy?’ She sticks out her little finger, like a duchess drinking tea. ‘Or with Tommy Thumb?’

  You don’t like the way this is going. You’ve prepared a list of all overdraft-holders and dug out the files of those who have been especially recalcitrant. You expected the police to follow up that angle.

  Obviously, the finger-lopper is one of your overdrafts.

  ‘Of course, he could have got his wife to do the job.’

  Wife? Of course, the wedding ring. He is married.

  ‘We thought someone else might have chopped his fingers against his will, but unless they used anaesthetic and straps it’s not likely. He didn’t move about to avoid the blade. You’d expect that if there were a struggle.’

  ‘Was there anything about the ring?’

  ‘Not expensive, but not cheap. Gold. Probably about fifteen years old. Initials inside, but it’s hard to make them out. Some letter to some other letter. Both could be K, B, R or P.’

  Since the package came, your own fingers have itched. You remember your bout with repetitive stress injury, which set phantom pains shooting through your knuckles a few years ago. Your sister, in her early forties, already has the beginnings of arthritis.

  ‘You keep making and unmaking fists,’ Mary says.

  You take a grip of your left hand and fold the fingers to the palm.

  ‘I’ve been doing it too,’ she admits. ‘This is creepy. Have you any ideas?’

  ‘It has to be a debtor.’

  ‘We thought so too, but no one obvious has showed up. No one has mysteriously disappeared, or waltzed into St Margaret’s claiming to have had a firewood-chopping accident.’

  ‘It’s sick.’

  ‘Did anyone puke?’

  You nod. Kate was nauseated by the package. Even Tristram looked greenish about the gills.

  Mary puts her notebook in her shoulder-bag and gets up to leave. You show her out of your office. In the doorway, you get close and smell the conditioner in her fine hair.

  Awkwardly, you shake hands. She has a bone-crushing grip.

  ‘You know, Keith,’ she says as she’s leaving the bank, ‘at college, I really used to fancy you. I expect you didn’t even notice I existed.’

  As you drive home, your left hand feels as if it’s been dipped into a nest of red ants. Your knuckles are being nipped to the bone. Your own wedding ring is a white-hot bolt burning through the skin.

  You avoid using the hand, and try not to think about it.

  K, B, R or P? Inside your own ring, is scratched ‘R to K’. In Ro’s, it is ‘K to R’.

  Ro is in the lounge with a gin and tonic, reading Country Homes and Gardens while Jake and Jeanette, your children, watch Independence Day on video. The first thing you check is whether Ro has all her fingers, then whether she still has her wedding ring.

  You’re being silly. The fingers came from a man.

  When you were first married, you’d come home from the bank and Ro would ask, ‘Have a nice day at the office, dear?’ in an ironic spirit of sit-com parody. Now, she just says it automatically.

  ‘Have a nice day at the office, dear?’

  You don’t really want to answer that, but know you have to talk about it.

  ‘I saw someone we were at college with,’ you say. ‘Mary Yatman. She’s a police person now.’

  ‘Scary Mary?’ Ro says, not lifting her eyes from the magazine.

  ‘You do remember her, then?’

  ‘Do I ever? I’m surprised she’s a pig. I’d have thought she’d be much more likely to grow up to be a terrorist.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call the police “pigs”,’ Jeanette tells her mother.

  ‘My daughter is a Tory,’ Ro laments.

  Your wife is wedged into an armchair. In recent years, she has grown outwards at the waist and hips. She dyes her hair reddish and wears too much make-up at home.

  ‘Someone sent me a nasty present.’

  You wake up in the middle of the night with a jolt of pain, as if a nail had been hammered through your left hand. You swallow a yelp of pain.

  Ro rolls over, disturbed but not awakened. Her breathing-through-her-nose turns into outright snoring. You imagine the downstroke of a saw, shearing off fingers.

  You get up and go downstairs. The house is cold.

  Like many of your victims, you’re stuck with negative equity and mortgage payments hiked up almost to late-1980s levels. You’ve had to economise on holidays and new cars. Ro is working mornings as a librarian at the college, but that only covers expenses. Sometimes you feel weighed down by the house, by the family, by the regular payments. From time to time, Ro jokes that you should extend yourself the largest overdraft in the bank’s history and relocate the whole family to the Club Whoopee, Rio de Janiero. When he wants new computer games, Jake always says you should dip your hand in the till and that Tristram would never notice you snaffling a pile of to-be-recycled dirty bills. Even Jeanette suggests using the bank’s money to underwrite sure-thing investments. Your whole family want you to become a criminal.

  You go into the kitchen and run the cold tap over your aching hand. In the merciless striplighting of your showplace kitchen, white goods gleaming, your fingers look perfectly healthy. You don’t have black nails or ragged rotten-meat gashes.

  Sitting at your stripped-pine breakfast table, you catch sight of a twisted face reflected in the curved chrome of the orange-juicer. Your mouth and brows are set. You are trying not to scream.

  Your hand throbs now, rings of monofilament tightening round fingers and thumb. Where your unknown correspondent mutilated himself, you are in agony.

  You slip off your wedding ring for the first time in a decade. You’re sure the last time you tried to get it off it wouldn’t shift.

  R to K.

  The letters have been blurred by time and sweat. R and K could both be K, B, R or P.

  Your hand convulses into a fist. You squeeze tight, crushing your thumb, trying to wring out the pain. It’s possible to knot your hand to half its normal size. That concentrates the agony.

  You thump the table. For a moment, one pain cancels out the others.

  You get up and punch the fridge-freezer. Your left hook is feeble and you don’t even dent the white wall. You punch again, smearing blood on your knuckles.

  If you were to rig up the food-processor by stabbing the end of a lolly stick where the lid-tab fits, you could get the blades to spin without having to fix on the safety-lid. Then, you could dip your hand into the circling steel and whisk off the pain, slicing your fingers down to stumps.

  ‘Daddy?’

  Jake has come down. He stands in his bare feet on the terracotta
tiles, leaning on the wrought-iron pan-stand, rubbing sleep from his eyes. His pyjamas are covered in dinosaurs.

  ‘Did you have a bad dream?’ he asks.

  ‘Keith, your friend’s here,’ Ro calls up.

  It’s Saturday and you’re trying to juggle the household accounts again. The Ford Montego is on its last legs and you feel a desperate need for a new car this year. With a new car, the bank might value you enough to offer you Tristram’s lousy job.

  You come out of your den and stand on the landing.

  Mary is downstairs in the hall, discreetly checking her hair in the mirror by the telephone stand. Ro, in her greenfingers smock and stretch-across-blubberbum trousers, is waddling back to the flower-beds in the back garden.

  Mary watches Ro’s rear manoeuvre through the conservatory. Her eyebrow is raised slightly. You know what she thinks of your wife. Sometimes, you think so too. Fad diets have never worked. It’s in the glands.

  As she smiles up at you, Mary’s face silently says ‘Phew, what a porker.’

  ‘Sergeant Yatman?’

  ‘Please, it’s Mary. I’ve got follow-up stuff to do on your package.’

  You feel like the Special Guest Murderer on Columbo.

  ‘Come through into the kitchen. The lounge is occupied by kids exploring computer-generated tombs. Excuse my shabby clothes. You should have called ahead.’

  ‘That’s quite a nice cardigan. It suits you better than the monkey outfit you have to wear at the bank. Did you inherit that from your dad?’

  You make Mary coffee in the cafetière. She has never seen one before and plays with the plunger as it brews. The dents in the fridge seem like clues in neon but she doesn’t mention them.

  ‘This is a nice kitchen,’ she says, clocking all the gadgets. ‘That oven has more dials than the space shuttle.’

  ‘And works about as often, I’m afraid. Ro has fantasies of being Lieutenant Uhura, but we’ve not been able to hack into the control system yet.’

  ‘Expensive?’

  ‘Obscenely.’

  ‘You haven’t been taking things home from the office, have you? Ball-point pens, envelopes, a hundred thousand pounds?’

  A spasm racks your left hand, screaming pain up to the elbow. ‘Has there been a shortage at the bank?’

  ‘Joke, Keith, joke. It’s the weekend. You should be off duty.’

  ‘You aren’t.’

  ‘Actually, I’m on my own time. I wanted to see where you lived, see what you made of yourself. What’s that thing with the handles and the bicycle seat?’

  ‘It’s the Rowena Machine. A rowing-machine, you sit there and get exercise by rowing.’

  ‘Amazing. Does Ro use it every day?’

  It was a Christmas present from her parents. She tried to sit in it once and couldn’t get up. Out of guilt, you did an hour or so just after the New Year. It’s waiting to be relegated to the attic with other white elephants.

  ‘Have there been any developments?’

  ‘In the case of the phantom fingers? No. Bristol have been useless. White man in his thirties or forties. Right-handed. Boring blood type O. Probably not a smoker. Chews his nails.’

  Your nails are pressed close to your palm. You’ve tried to stop nibbling in odd moments and mostly kicked the habit, but when you’re alone your fingers sometimes stray to your teeth without you thinking.

  Mary stops playing with the cafetière and rummages in her shoulder-bag. She brings out a copy of the fingerprints and smooths it on the table. The black blobs, with their lines and whorls, are meaningless. You wonder if there’s a code.

  ‘Of course, we’ll never get a match. We’ve got the fingers and the man we’re looking for hasn’t.’

  ‘What’ll happen to them?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Keith. Maybe they’ll end up in the Black Museum.’

  You really are in intense pain. It must be psychosomatic.

  Mary takes out a Magic Marker and pops off the top. She scribbles black on her thumb and looks at her own print, then stabs it on the paper just below the thumb-print. Her smudge is less defined.

  ‘You see, my lines swirl the other way.’

  She hands you the felt-tip pen.

  ‘Give it a try.’

  You worry that you’re being set up. This is how Columbo gets Patrick McGoohan into the gas chamber. Is your thumb-print on a murder weapon sealed in a plastic bag at the police station?

  It’s hard for you even to hold the Magic Marker against your left thumb. Your face must be screwed up with the pain. You manage to stab ink across the ball and stick it on the paper between Mary’s print and the anonymous thumb’s.

  Mary examines the print.

  ‘That’s odd,’ she says. ‘That’s not supposed to happen.’

  She gives you the paper. Of the three thumb-prints, two are identical. The odd one out is hers.

  Read 13, and then come back here.

  The pain has faded. Now you just have strange circles of ache, like invisible rings, at the roots of your fingers and thumb. The skin of your fingers looks distinctly unhealthy, grey and dry, with a greenish undertinge. You have only the echo of feeling in your fingertips. Your left hand feels entirely useless.

  Mary has left the impossible piece of paper with you.

  You’ve been thinking. The fingers were not an offering, but an attack. Something has been done to you.

  It’s like a curse.

  You go into the bank on Sunday and go through all the files, considering each of your overdrafts. The bank has called in a few mortgages, especially on small farms in the area. None of the debtors seems the sort to have supernatural resources.

  No other word will do.

  This is not the world you were used to, though it still looks the same, with Independence Day on video and a rowing-machine in the kitchen. This is a world where curses work.

  As you go through the files, you try not to use your left hand. Before this, you never considered how much you rely on having two hands. Even as a confirmed rightie, you need the less capable hand to hold things open, to give support, to provide balance.

  If your left hand drops off, how will you wash your right?

  You extend the range of your checking and look through all your correspondence over the last year. Maybe the cause of all this is in an overdraft you approved. For someone, a sudden cash injection could lead to disaster.

  Nothing.

  Ro phones and asks if you’ll be coming home for dinner. Her parents are expected.

  ‘I have to sort this out.’

  ‘You should have married that bank.’

  ‘This is not about the bank. It’s about me.’

  ‘If you say so, dear.’

  Your family are worried about you, but pretending everything is all right. They live in a world where curses don’t work and everything has a rational explanation.

  Psychosomatic pain.

  The dead phone buzzes as you put it down.

  The bank is completely empty. You don’t have the keys and computer codes to get into the vault, but you could open up the back of the cash machine. It’s Kate’s job to keep the automated dispenser stocked up with thick wedges of notes. Thousands of pounds.

  If you wanted money, you could get it.

  Kate would be blamed. You could force the locks, and claim to have found them that way when you came in this morning.

  Kate’s boyfriend has pierced eyebrows and rides a motorbike. He’s probably in with a hippie convoy. Just the sort to pull a silly job and vanish.

  You’ve often fantasised about ways of robbing the bank. Towards the end of his life, Dad admitted he had too. You suspect everyone who works in a bank thinks about robbery, thinks about an inside job. It’s just that very few get desperate enough to do anything.

  Would you be able to escape Mary? Detective Sergeant Scary Mary? Avon and Somerset’s own Mrs Columbo?

  You look at your left hand. The palm is pinkly healthy, a little flushed, but the fingers and t
humb could have been dipped in grey grease. You move each digit in turn, and find that the last two fingers don’t respond. You can make a fist, but can’t move your ring and little fingers by themselves. You concentrate, straining to shift the fingers, then snap and bend them down with your other hand. They feel cold and unhealthy, like sausages left too long in the fridge.

  Stolen money won’t help. Doctors won’t help. The police won’t help. Psychiatry won’t help.

  You’re under a curse.

  You sweep the telephone off your desk and it crashes on to the floor, spilling the receiver, buzzing like an insect. You stamp on it until it is silent and in pieces.

  Violence makes you feel a little better.

  ‘There now,’ you say. ‘I’ve sacrificed the telephone. Does that satisfy you?’

  I HOPE THIS SATISFIES YOU. IT’S NOT A POUND OF FLESH, BUT IT’S A START.

  There’s a framed picture of Ro and the kids on your desk. The frame is heavy, a present two Christmases ago. Rowena is thinner in the picture, but a bulge is beginning to show all round her face.

  You drop the picture on the floor and smash your heel down on to it.

  Another sacrifice.

  You make no pretence that this is not an inside job. You use your keys to get into the back of the machine. The Saturday shopping rush has depleted the stacks of notes, but there are still fistfuls of cash in the press, clamped like staples inside a stapler.

  Without thinking, you use your left hand to shut the machine as you use your right hand to put your keys back into your pocket.

  You leave a finger on the handle.

  The break doesn’t look like a chop-wound; it’s as if your hand were a tree grown brittle and your forefinger a snapped-off twig.

  A little fluid leaks from the stump.

  You make a fist around the emptiness where the finger should be. When you straighten out your hand, the little finger falls off.

  There is no pain.

  But you feel yourself falling into a chasm. You whirl around the cashiers’ area, screaming. Not since primary school have you thrown a fit like this. You’re possessed by panic. You have lost it entirely.