Life's Lottery

by Kim Newman

  You kiss her and slip away into the darkness, towards the moor.

  Hackwill’s car is in the drive.

  Lights are going on in the few other houses in Sutton Mallet. The shot has been heard.

  You bend low and scoot along by the hedgerow, towards the Achelzoy road. You can’t afford to be too far off. Your story — feeble as it sounds — is that you went for a walk on your own after dark. The strength of it is that you have no obvious motive.

  You find a deep bit of ditch and drop the shotgun through the duckweed. It sinks. The rippling weed re-forms over the hole.

  You walk, upright, back toward Sutton Mallet. Hackwill’s big car cruises by at speed. You’re almost run down. You see Hackwill, alone in the car, intent on driving, eyes black holes.

  Good, the idiot is running. He must have wanted to be a culprit when he grew up.

  You’re light-headed now. Everything is paid back. Not only is Laraine free of Mr Bitch-buster but James has been avenged for the copse. It’s amazing how murder makes sense.

  Back at the house, a nosy neighbour — Roddy Smedley, who used to play commandos with James — has found Laraine, who is rambling and hysterical, and Sean, who is head-deprived and dead. The police have been called.

  ‘It were that Hackwill,’ Smedley says. ‘He were a bully at school. Bastards don’t change.’

  You take over with Laraine, hugging her as you wait for the police.

  Hackwill isn’t quite stupid enough to make a dash for the Channel ports. The next morning, he calls the cops to report his innocent-bystander-on-the-scene version. By then, he’s facing charges anyway as collateral damage. The investigators found all sorts of incriminating documents in Sean’s study, detailing dodgy deals going back a few years. He might as well have filed it all under HACKWILL’S MURDER MOTIVE.

  What you can’t believe is that the police don’t find the gun. It’s not as if you hid it in the Amazon jungle. They get a court order and inventory Hackwill’s collection. A weapon of the requisite bore turns up missing. Hackwill does a stone-me-guv-I’m-innocent act.

  Mary Yatman does some of the gruntwork, taking statements from you and Laraine, but this is a big-shot CID investigation. It spirals out from murder into civic corruption. There are bankruptcies and reversals as Hackwill’s empire falls. The Labour Party forces him to resign or face deselection at the next council elections.

  Helen leaves him. He hangs himself in jail. Congrats. You’ve got away with it. You’ve got the girl, the gold watch and everything.

  You move in with Laraine, to see her through this. Sean turns out to have been almost broke, thanks to his Hackwill involvements. But he was massively insured. Laraine is set for life.

  Is this a happy ending?

  There’s a downside. You live together but have to be careful. Your actual relationship has to be kept a secret between you. No one else must know you sleep together. And you get a lot of attention. The corruption-and-murder story is juicy. Newspapers, television and radio are all over it. The Comet on Sunday offers Laraine a big fee for her story. You decide to take the money and she has you write up her version — including the bitch-busting, to blacken Sean’s name further — which sets in stone the Hackwill-blasts-Sean story.

  Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Sean Rye. The BBC makes a drama-documentary, with Lindsay Duncan as Laraine, Bob Peck as Hackwill and James Wilby as Sean. You’re in two scenes, played by an actor whose name you can never remember, who is always the best friend in sit-coms.

  Reg Jessup goes to jail and sells his own I-was-Hackwill’s-minion story to the papers.

  The Discount Development is abandoned. Jobs are lost. The economy of Sedgwater takes a killing blow just as the country is coming out of recession into boom.

  You wait for a wave of guilt that never comes.

  Two years later, kids fishing find the shotgun.

  Mary says that dots the last i.

  You and Laraine are seeing quite a bit of Mary. She was the one who told you what police press statements actually meant. You never forget how clever she is. You never quite relax around her. Then again, all the way back to primary school, you always found her slightly uncomfortable so she’s not going to notice any difference in you.

  Your book about James, abandoned for over a year, mutates when you get back to it. You contrast James with Sean. You write up Hackwill as a villain. It becomes a book not just about your family but about the town, the country, the ’80s. Hackwill represents much that is dangerous to everyone. It’s easy to write and sells surprisingly well. But, of course, it’s structured around two big lies and a lot of evasions. It’s as if you keep pouring concrete on aspects of your life that can never be examined.

  The real story, you worry, would make a better book.

  And so it goes on.

  You live with Laraine, almost in a marriage. Unmarried siblings, no longer young, kept together by family tragedy. You have sex about as much as Sean and Laraine did when their marriage was rocky, but you remain attracted to and interested in each other.

  You actually stay in love.

  You write more books, analysing the state of the nation as Thatcherism gives way to Majorism, observing the rise of Tony Blair, the influence of Europe, the end of the Cold War. Your books, which come out every few years, feel like personal reports on the state of the nation as seen from Sutton Mallet.

  Twenty years after the murder, in a new century, the seconds it took to kill Sean are still central to your life. You still have to think of it every day, and hesitate often, to avoid exposing yourself. You’d thought that after a while you’d come to believe Hackwill shot Sean but you don’t.

  Sometimes, your hands still shake and your ears still ring.

  At a reception in town, to mark the launch of your collected works on CD-ROM, a pretty face catches your eye. You’ve never been unfaithful to Laraine — you know too much about each other to risk the relationship for trivial distractions — but take an aesthetic interest in girls. You’re like a decadent old uncle, hiding sweets in his pockets so that little nieces will perform intimate searches.

  The face is not only pretty but vaguely familiar. She must be about twenty, with nose and eyebrow piercings, and a blonde buzz-cut. In this future — you think of anything past 1984 as the future — she has quite a conservative look. She’s one of the girls your publisher has hired to pour wine and carry canapés.

  She looks at you the way you look at her, with interest, and puzzlement. At last, she comes over and talks to you.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s silly, but we shouldn’t have to avoid each other.’

  Behind her face, you see another: smaller, rounder.

  ‘I’m Sam Kellett,’ she says. ‘Kellett’s my step-dad’s name. I was Samantha Hackwill.’

  Good Lord! You remember her chewing a shotgun shell.

  She thinks she needs to nudge you further. ‘My father killed your brother-in-law.’

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ you say, conventionally.

  ‘All my life. It’s been with me.’

  ‘Feels that way to me too.’

  Sam almost gushes. ‘I knew you’d understand. Mum doesn’t. No one else does. Your book. It was banned in our house but I read it when I was twelve. I’d like you to know it really helped. It made them real to me. Dad, Sean, your sister. Knowing you started out as kids, like everyone else. That no matter how it went wrong, you were all just people, not those actors in that TV film. Just kids who grew up, with all your quarrels and private jokes and messy lives.’

  You find your eyes are watering.

  Sam Kellett, Samantha Hackwill, the cartridge-biting baby, the damaged-but-struggling-woman, kisses your cheek.

  You want to cuddle her, as you did once before. But you don’t.

  And so on.

  Begin again?

  148

  Fuck subtlety. Mary won’t buy another disappearance. She knows Laraine wouldn’t be capable of coolly going th
rough the abandoned wife bit before sneaking off to join her embezzling bastard of a husband in the Club Whoopee, Rio de Janiero.

  Suicide she’ll swallow.

  Before you lose your nerve, you go through with it. You go to the master bedroom and scoop the sleepy Laraine up in your arms.

  She resists a little. ‘No, Keith,’ she says, misinterpreting.

  You go out into the hallway, carrying her. You have opened the window first. You throw her out, awkwardly. She nosedives on to crazy-paving.

  Of course, she isn’t immediately dead. You use a big stone to flatten a section of her skull. Then you call Mary.

  As you wait for the police and the ambulance, you think over things to say. ‘I should have known. It’s hit her hard. Dad, James, Sean. Everybody was leaving.’ In the end, you keep it simple, don’t venture analysis or opinion. You were woken up by the window being opened and didn’t investigate until you heard the impact. No cry. No note.

  Mary questions you tactfully.

  You want her to think Laraine did it out of guilt but not be able to tell anyone else. She’ll feel she alone knows the real truth of Laraine’s suicide and be content with that secret knowledge, without needing to probe for any realer real truth.

  God, this is complicated.

  You stay on in the house in Sutton Mallet. Legally, it passed to Laraine when Sean died and to Mum when Laraine did. But since Sean won’t be officially dead for seven years, it’s his; and, when seven years are up and Laraine isn’t around to inherit, it’ll go to his next of kin, whoever the fuck they are.

  You seem to have de facto inherited the place. You doubt if you’ll ever be able to sell it. After all, if it wasn’t haunted before it certainly is now.

  And could you trust the new owners not to dig up the compost heap?

  Of course, you could kill them. By then, the superstitious locals would believe in a curse.

  There are other people you could kill; To make sure. Mary, for a start. Hackwill, maybe; he knows too much about Sean, and must be wondering about the Reggie Perrin theory.

  Yourself. That would solve it all.

  You are dozing in front of Sean’s television, on which greenish people have sex in clinical close-up — you found a stash of Swedish-language porn videos in his den — when the doorbell wakes you. As you make your way to the hall, you scratch your chin, realising you haven’t shaved for two or three days.

  You let Mary in. She’s out of uniform, in a summery orange dress with a light fawn raincoat. Her hair is down. She looks like a normal young woman. But you remember Scary Mary from school.

  In the living-room, you hastily turn off the video. Mary doesn’t even raise an eyebrow at your viewing material. She’ll have seen worse.

  ‘You must feel mucky,’ she says, looking at the blank screen. ‘Let’s take a shower.’

  You don’t follow this.

  ‘Together,’ she clarifies.

  Mary is, you realise, a pretty girl. Since Laraine, you’ve been missing the sex. If the cop on the case wants to get wet and naked with you, you’re probably off the suspects list.

  ‘I always fancied you at school,’ she says, smiling.

  You are naked, under the warm rain of the shower. Mary is down to her half-slip. She folds her clothes carefully. You reach out for her. She has turned flirty and teasing, pushing you back under the water jet. You find it slippery underfoot and grasp the chrome handle set into the wall.

  Mary takes something from her bag and hides it behind her back. She steps into the shower, underclothes instantly transparent. As you look at her nipples, she takes her handcuffs out from behind her back. Kinky, you think.

  She clips one cuff round your left wrist, then — swiftly, purposefully — clamps the other round the chrome handle. You are tethered to the wall.

  Mary steps out of the shower and wraps herself in a towel-robe. The water is too hot now. You cringe against the tile wall, your chest and thighs boiled lobster-red. Mary looks at you as if you are an idiot.

  ‘There weren’t any clues,’ she says. ‘I just knew. Like I knew Hackwill deserved what James gave him. And Sean, come to that. But Laraine was wrong.’

  You don’t protest that you don’t know what she’s talking about.

  Mary looks through the bathroom cabinet. She tuts disgust at Sean’s electric razor and puts it back. But she finds the blades for your safety razor and clucks approval.

  ‘I brought my own, just in case. But this is better.’

  You try to wrench the bar off the wall, but it’s designed to withstand the weight of a falling pensioner.

  ‘Is the water too hot? Can’t have that.’

  Mary reaches in and turns the heat down. You relax into the warm stream.

  ‘That wasn’t a lie about fancying you,’ she says, slipping out of her robe. ‘But doing Laraine was wrong. It meant we had to come to this. Why do you think I became a ladypig? I’m not interested in the law. I believe in justice.’

  She takes off her half-slip and her panties. She is naked. You try to grab her hair with your right hand but she gets a strong grip on your wrist. You wrestle a little, water falling all around you.

  You feel a sting on your wrist, striking up your arm.

  Red splashes around your feet. A used razor-blade drops. Water flows over your opened arm, blood-trails mixing in, flowing down into the plughole.

  Mary gets out of the shower. She’s brought her own towel, which she uses to sponge the blood from her belly. You watch her as, fastidious as a cat, she cleans herself. You’ve flopped weakly at the bottom of the shower stall, one arm wrenched up above you, the other draining down by your side. You’re still conscious but can’t do anything.

  Mary unlocks the handcuffs, examines your left wrist for chafing, is satisfied, and puts them away. She turns the water to cold and gets dressed. It’s like watching a striptease in reverse.

  You’re too tired and empty to do anything. The long, straight cut, from your wrist almost to your elbow, isn’t bleeding so much now. The edges are wrinkled and blueing.

  You’ve been in the shower too long.

  Mary sits on the closed toilet and watches you. She won’t go before you do.

  Go to 0.

  149

  You push yourself up off the ground and run for Hackwill. He is giving a few words to a TV interviewer, stressing the victory of law and order.

  You slam into him, wrenching him away from Mary’s shoulder, and hammer him against a car. Your knee connects with his groin, your forehead crunches his nose. You get your hands round his throat and squeeze. People feebly thump your back. You see Hackwill’s red eyes bulge. He snarls, teeth glistening like metal.

  ‘Your brother’s a little shit,’ Hackwill says. ‘He’s no good at all.’

  Your head swims in blood. You and Hackwill are at the end of a funnel that spirals out to take in the universe.

  How have you come to this?

  A wrong path has been taken. Disputes like this are settled in small claims courts, not in pitched gun battles. Some cowboy movie has superimposed over the real world.

  You still try to throttle the bastard, Hackwill.

  ‘Come and see your brother,’ Mary shouts, close to your ear. No, not Mary. Reg Jessup.

  Reg is supposed to be dead. James killed him.

  You are pulled away from Hackwill. He chokes and stands up. He has never looked less human. He’s a grown-up, in shorts and a stretched-tight boy’s-size cardigan. His face is pure evil.

  As you are held by the police, Hackwill hauls your dead brother off a stretcher and shakes him. James’s wounds bleed like stigmata.

  There are trees in the car park. Reg slips out of them, battered face healing.

  Everything is unravelling.

  You’re going back.

  You see Robert and Reg, holding James by his shoulders. James’s shorts are dark at the crotch. Wee trickles down his legs. He starts sniffling.

  ‘Everyone heard two shots ring out
,’ Gene Pitney sings, ‘one shot made Liberty fall…’

  The bell goes for the end of break. Shane, Mary — even Scary Mary! — and the rest run off, back to the classroom. You don’t move.

  ‘C’mon, Mental,’ Robert says. ‘We’re not going to hurt you.’

  ‘Much,’ adds Reg, laughing.

  If you go to the classroom and get on with your sums, go to 6. If you go to a teacher and tell what’s happening, go to 10. If you go into the copse to help James, go to 14.

  150

  Your fortieth birthday is in 1999. At ten o’clock in the morning, Mum comes into your bedroom, the same room with the same pirate map on the wall, with a tray of tea and biscuits, waking you up. She gives you your present, a new dressing-gown (not wrapped, but in a nice paper bag from British Home Stores). She kisses you and gives you your cards.

  One is from her, one is from the char.

  Laraine and Jimmy are out of the country. They usually remember to send cards but don’t often calculate delivery time correctly, so you have to wait a day or two. Your friend Vince will deliver his card by hand, later.

  ‘The big four o,’ Mum says. ‘Well, I never.’ She clucks and leaves you alone.

  You are living at home. In fact, you’ve never lived anywhere else. Mum cooks and a char comes two days a week to clean the house and do your laundry.

  After Dad’s death in 1982, Mum thought about remarrying. There was this bloke Phil hanging around, asking her out to antiques fairs and car-boot sales. You thought he was a bit of a pillock and he went away in the end. Dad’s insurance, topped up by Mum’s own investments and the occasional contribution from your brother and sister, keeps both of you comfortable, though the house occasionally suffers because repairs and maintenance are supposed to be your department and you rarely get it together. Though your benefits were stopped nearly twenty years ago, you still do odd jobs around the house and garden to earn your keep. Mum, at sixty-eight, is spry, but her hip gives her gyp. She can’t cope with things as well as she used to. You have to be the man of the family.