Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  Now, in the bed Laraine usually shares with Sean, as afternoon wears on and your sister dozes, you feel calm — oh God, satisfied? — and wait for the shame bomb to explode.

  It doesn’t.

  You felt bad (if also a little smug) about making love with Clare one lunchtime and Anne in the evening. You don’t like to think about the time at university when you, nineteen, had screaming sex with Chrissie, only fourteen.

  This isn’t like that.

  Of course, you’re afraid. If anyone finds out, you’ll both enter a world of trouble. You’re not sure about the legal situation, but incest (bad word) is definitely against the law. You have some idea you can be jailed for it. At the least, you’ll suffer personal and professional ruin and have to go through mandatory counselling with all the — other? — sex offenders. Then again, fucking Chrissie was illegal.

  Laraine is a reasonable, adult, thinking person. Unlike Chrissie, who was a kid on amphetamines. Are you an adult? Are you responsible? Are you proud of yourself? Would it be so terrible to answer ‘yes’?

  Laraine wakes and slips her arms round you. She must be having the same agonies you are.

  Mustn’t she?

  ‘Sean will be home soon,’ she says.

  Being found like this by Sean would be a catastrophe.

  You sit up in bed. Your clothes are neatly folded on a chair.

  ‘How do you feel?’ you ask.

  Stupid question.

  Laraine is serene. With this intimacy, her earlier jitteriness is gone. ‘At least now I’ve done something worth being hit for.’

  You get up and dress, self-conscious that your sister is seeing you naked.

  Laraine stretches out under the duvet. ‘You go downstairs, Keith. I’ll have a shower. Stay for supper, why don’t you?’

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘We left the Good Idea Country a while back.’

  You potter about the kitchen as your sister showers. It’s surreally familiar, being left alone in the home of someone you’ve just slept with. As usual, you want to make tea and don’t know in which cupboards the cups and tea things are kept or how the kettle works.

  You note how differently other people arrange their kitchens. Laraine and Sean keep their cutlery drawer segmented into knives, forks and spoons, in that order, heads pointing into the drawer, with teaspoons horizontally below them. You just dump your cutlery in anyhow. Cups hang from hooks in size order, like a crocodile of schoolchildren.

  This is a distraction.

  You look out of the window. Darkness begins to fall on the moor.

  Sutton Mallet was almost abandoned when you were growing up. It had a reputation as a haunted place. Sometimes, braver kids — James among them — would play in the derelict houses, but you never did. Now it’s a neat little community with central heating.

  The only thing haunting it is guilt.

  Yours. And, you assume, Laraine’s. But are you guilty mostly because you don’t feel so guilty about something the world has always told you that you ought to? What’s so wrong about non-coercive incest? It’s not as if you’re going to have mutant babies.

  Laraine comes down, dressed up a little, as if to go out, and made up carefully. She looks like you in drag. Feminised, but with your basic face. Was your attraction a function of narcissism?

  You don’t know whether to touch or hug or what. Again, this isn’t that different from your experience with women you aren’t related to.

  You’ve been together. Now what?

  ‘Here’s Sean now,’ Laraine says.

  You see his car easing powerfully into the garage. You gulp hot tea.

  Sean comes out of the garage, smiling like a good bloke.

  Laraine is tense. But, from what she said earlier, she would have been anyway. Coming-home time, after a rough day at the bank, is when Sean is most likely to use his fists.

  You are here to protect her.

  Sean comes into the house.

  ‘Hello Keith,’ he says, dumping his car and door keys in the bowl on the phone table in the hall. ‘I didn’t know you’d be here.’

  You’d thought Sean might instantly sniff out what has happened between you and Laraine and fly into a Mr Hyde rage, laying into you both with the poker. But, of course, one of the positive things about unthinkable acts is that few people think of them until they have to.

  ‘Stay for dinner?’ Sean asks.

  If you stay, go to 106. If you make an excuse and leave, go to 117.

  102

  James is delighted to see you. It’s years since you visited the Marion Group Building.

  Your younger brother still looks trim. Compensating for his missing leg means he has taken care of the rest of himself. Your hair is white but his is only just grey.

  ‘I don’t have so much to do here these days,’ James says. ‘You should come by more often.’

  James’s office staff are pleased to meet you.

  ‘Place runs itself, you know,’ James says.

  He isn’t going to like being told what happens when he lets the place run itself.

  ‘Can we talk in private?’ you say.

  James is instantly alert. He knows you well enough not to protest or make a fuss. Between you, you know what’s serious.

  You sit in a hoverchair, while James gloves through the system, powering up search bugs. This is Jasper’s world, but James knows enough tech to penetrate the system. What gives Jasper away is that he has ice-protected data areas which should be open if they were legit.

  James takes it worse than you. A single tear leaks from his eye. He is heart-sick at the betrayal.

  You feel ashamed for Jasper.

  When Jasper was a child, it was always Uncle James who gave him the systems he wanted as presents. Always Uncle James who processed.

  When James is sure Jessamyn was right — you didn’t ask how she found out, but your guess is she was an early collaborator with her brother but had a falling-out with him — he overrides all systems with his own vocode and shuts down, locking Jasper out.

  ‘He’ll get round that,’ he says.

  You wait in the office, with your brother. James seems older now than you. Screens iris but James accepts no calls.

  ‘He’ll come here,’ he says.

  Jasper does.

  James runs through the severance package and gives generous terms. Waivers are drawn up ready for Jasper’s blood-spot on the DNA type box.

  James doesn’t ask why.

  You feel you have to accompany Jasper out of the building.

  ‘It was a clever play, Dad,’ he says. ‘But it crashed. There’ll be others.’

  Your son doesn’t understand.

  You stay in the lobby and watch Jasper, thin and defiant, even a little smug, as he stalks toward his car. He’s young. He’ll be back. Even with an Embezzler Jacket, he can get a position high on the totem pole in any corp. What’s in his head is worth more than he can possibly skim and skam.

  You stay behind.

  And think about what has been lost. And what is left.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  103

  You are shocked out of your reverie.

  Vanda says, ‘We wouldn’t be here, if only…’

  You’re shaking. ‘It wouldn’t work,’ you say. ‘Murder.’

  Damn.

  Then you have to deal with the mess. You can’t stay on top of it. You are pulled under.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  104

  ‘You once told me there were rules,’ Vic says.

  ‘There are,’ you reply. ‘Well, there’s one.’

  She laughs. Despite everything, she still likes you.

  Women like you. You can make them like you. You’re good at that. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be who you are.

  It’s past midnight. The 4th of October, 1999. You’ve just turned forty. You and Vic are back in your flat, drinking coffee with Jack Daniel’s in it.


  You work for money. Literally, your employer is a nebulous investment business. Money gives you orders and money is your reward.

  You suppose you are good at your job, just as you are good at women. But it doesn’t interest you.

  Vic is a poet.

  You have never slept together.

  You wonder why. At forty, she’s more attractive than she was as a teenager. A bit old for you at your current rate. But still. Her few, almost imperceptible, lines suit her. Even the white streak in her hair is striking.

  You get close to her on the sofa, wondering, for the thousandth time.

  She laughs and holds up her hands, forefingers like Van Helsing’s crucifix.

  ‘Back,’ she says.

  You snarl playfully, as if showing fangs.

  ‘It’s been over twenty years. Don’t you ever give up?’

  ‘Never,’ you declare, proudly.

  Back in 1977, Victoria had seemed your obvious next target. After Rowena, she was there, waiting. If she’d melted then, perhaps your subsequent life would have been different. What you have with Vic is vastly different from all the things you have had with all the others.

  Disappointed with Victoria, you went back to Rowena.

  But she got tiresome. She was more interested in the world beyond the bed, and wanted to cart you about on her arm like a trophy.

  For you, the world has always been the bed.

  Vic puts a cigarette in her holder.

  ‘Got a match?’ she asks.

  ‘Not since Errol Flynn died,’ you say.

  She laughs, shaking her head. ‘You really are a fucking monster.’

  ‘Good choice of adjective.’

  If you put your hand on her breast, she’d pop. You know she would. After all these years.

  But you hesitate.

  Once you dispensed with Ro, you found there were many opportunities available. Of course, like every other just-broken-up Sedgwater teenager in 1978, the first thing you did was shag Jacqui Edwardes. It was practically mandatory, a tradition like the Queen’s telegram on your hundredth birthday. Then, widening the field a little, you fucked Mary Yatman — whose eager, desperate, dangerous coils were surprisingly hard to escape — and fell into bed with Shane Bush’s ex-fiancée, Vanda Pritchard.

  After that, just to prove you could and to test your mettle, you specialised in taking women away from other people. You borrowed Bronagh Carey from Gully, if only for a weekend, and made a successful assault on Penny Gaye, Michael Dixon’s girlfriend. You got together one afternoon with Michael’s sister, Candy, who was supposed to be going out with your brother, James, but turned out — painfully and messily — to be virgo intacta. Michael asked you if you planned on screwing his mother next, and you seriously thought about it.

  Your first older woman turned out to be Mademoiselle Quelou, your college French teacher. Then Phyllis, your father’s assistant at the bank.

  Then Michael’s mum.

  You worked through the register of your college class.

  There was Marie-Laure Quilter, the neurotic with the rich mother and the stringy hair. Marion Halsted, the week after her wedding to Gerry Trickett.

  That wasn’t even finished when you went away to university, to experience that Golden Age of Shagging, 1978-81. You were never obsessive about remembering names. There was Tina Temple, though, the wild little girl. Clare, with her bloody Abba records.

  It isn’t the chase for you, it’s the act.

  Fucking. Screwing. Shagging. Making love. Sex.

  It’s what you’re best at and it’s what you need to do most.

  ‘Do you still see any of them?’

  ‘Who?’ you ask.

  Vic prods you. ‘You know. The shag hags.’

  You think about it. ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  You missed out on Vic, but you had her sister Lesley. After university, when you came back to town.

  And all the girls in your office. Kate. They’ve all been called Kate. Even if they were named Bella or Marcia, you called them ‘Kate’. Most of them found that charming.

  You’ve practised charm quite a bit.

  Once, to see what it was like, you fucked a guy, Kay Shearer, a young businessman. The build-up was surprisingly familiar, just like charming a woman.

  And the aftermath was the same. As soon as he got clingy, you cut him off.

  To prove to yourself that you could, you spent one Christmas working on Laraine, your own sister.

  You didn’t think you’d go through with it when you got her to the point where she was willing, but you did.

  It wasn’t any more complicated than most of your entanglements. And you got out of it unscathed, dumping her for Samantha, Councillor Hackwill’s teenage daughter.

  It’s a point of pride to you that you don’t wreck lives. You aren’t some sort of sexual serial killer. You just like to fuck.

  And you make it easy for the fuckees. You withdraw smoothly. You don’t leave a barb.

  ‘If I were to ask you to marry me,’ you ask Vic, ‘would you have sex with me?’

  ‘What is that? Your last resort?’

  You’re hurt. On some level, you mean it.

  After all, she is the only woman. She’s practically the only one left.

  That’s not what you mean, though. She’s the only one you can talk to. The only one who is still here.

  Even Laraine, who has moved to Canada with her second husband, hasn’t sent you a birthday card.

  At least, you haven’t fucked any sheep or corpses. Though, you admit, there’s still time.

  You’ve had sex with girls as young as twelve and women as old as sixty-three. You’ve had sex with beautiful women and ugly ones, and the whole range in between. You’ve shagged girlfriends, sisters, wives, mothers. Waitresses, secretaries, nuns, politicians, soldiers, dancers, executives, doctors, nurses. Every nationality, every racial group, every body type.

  You’ve let the rest of your life coast, doing only as much as is necessary to keep it going, to free your time and energy for the pursuit of sex.

  It’s not an obsession.

  No, it’s a vocation.

  You slug back the last of the coffee, feeling that Jack buzz in your forebrain.

  Vic is curled up on the sofa, knees tucked in, a delectably taut length of thigh exposed.

  You’ve been here before. Many times. It’s been a twenty-year flirtation.

  She wouldn’t still be here if she weren’t interested.

  ‘Why are you still my friend?’ you ask.

  ‘Because one day you’ll wake up, dear. You’ll remember about those rules.’

  ‘I was being a coward, an idiot.’

  She smiles, adorably, and a wave of hair falls over her face. ‘Maybe, and maybe not.’

  It’s like a stealth bomber locking on to a target. The whole world fades into black and white, and the woman glows in natural swirls of neon radiating from her vagina. You follow the spiral.

  You don’t lie, you don’t promise, you don’t exaggerate. Except for comic effect.

  While you are with a woman — or a group of two or three women — you are genuinely wrapped up with her, with her life and personality. Your own sense of self fades and you wrap around her concerns, her interests, her quirks.

  It’s not conscious. It’s not a trick. You’re not a chameleon. What you are is a lover.

  You lay a hand on her thigh, and stroke.

  ‘Vic …’

  She seems amused, a little drunk, exhausted.

  The neon is swirling.

  But she’s different.

  It’s possible your vocation is actually a search. For the one. And she’s been here all along. You won’t tell her you’d be faithful to her. She wouldn’t believe it. That’s not true. Deep down, she’d know you were telling the truth, but she wouldn’t believe you were capable of fidelity, of rededicating your enormous energies to her alone.

  But you would
.

  ‘Vic, marry me.’

  There’s a pause. A long pause.

  You have an erection. Vic is the loveliest of all women, an anenome of neon spider-legs wrapping round you, pulling you to her. You want to make love with her now. And for ever.

  She pushes you away.

  ‘Here’s the deal,’ Vic says, at last. ‘Think it over carefully. I’ll have sex with you. Here and now. All night, if you can manage it. But then I’ll never see you again, never speak to you, nothing.’

  She’ll have sex with you! Your erection is a compass point.

  She loosens the scarf round her neck.

  ‘Now,’ she says. ‘Do you want to have me?’

  If yes, go to 110. If no, go to 120.

  105

  You prowl the house, memorising objects and distances, trying to pick up clues. Eventually, you fall asleep on the living-room couch, in front of a giant television silently tuned to the news.

  You’re woken up by two children jumping on you.

  ‘Daddy, Daddy!’

  You hug kids you don’t know. Whose names you don’t know.

  They chatter at you, about ‘Grandma’ and ‘Mummy’. Their voices are posh, unaccented, angelic.

  As soon as you open your mouth, they’ll know you aren’t their dad. You cannot do this.

  A strange woman takes off an expensive coat, shaking out her hair. Not a stranger. Rowena, grown up. Poised in the doorway, she is heart-stoppingly beautiful. But you never liked her. She was patronising at school. Then she got a job hassling you about your dole.

  Do you have a good marriage? Or are you as fed up with her as you were with Marie-Laure?

  You cling to the kids, for protection.

  ‘J and J,’ Rowena says, ‘let Dad breathe, now.’

  J and J? Josh and Jonquil? Surely, the names were Marie-Laure’s ideas.

  The kids obediently clamber off. You stand up. Rowena presents her face to be kissed.