The car turned off the roundabout away from the palace and was heading along the Mall when the Snapback spotted the boy, saw him jumping on the bus with a whole dog under his arm.
“That’s him! There, there! There! On the bus. Quick, quick, he’s going to Piccadilly! Don’t lose him! Do a U-ey!”
“All right, Snapback. I heard you first time.” Terry flicked his fag onto the road, did a U-turn.
“Punch it then! Punch it!” said the Snapback. And Terry stepped on the loud pedal … lurched forward and stalled. A policeman began walking over to have words just as he got the car going again and pulled away.
“He didn’t get the number, did he?” whined the Snapback.
Terry shrugged. He didn’t care. It was the Snapback’s car. He’d teamed up with this guy for the job because he had a car. A friend of a friend of Janks. He didn’t like his stupid name, so he called him Snapback because his stupid baseball cap said Man U. And Terry didn’t like his football team, either. He’d already told him this a good few times today. Terry could do that because he was the muscle. He could say whatever he liked.
“You sure it was ’im?”
“Yeah, yeah. It was definitely him. He was carrying a dog. I saw it under his arm!”
“Under his arm? You sure?”
“Yeah!” And he got out his phone and showed him the picture that had come with the reward message as if that proved something.
“You’d better be right. Make me happy,” said Terry.
Last night he had been happy with a few drinks in him, thinking about this big reward money, but now the drink was draining out of him it was beginning to feel like a long shot. And that was making him unhappy. And when he felt like that he liked to threaten people so that they weren’t happy either. Why did Janks want the boy, though? He wasn’t saying, but Terry had an idea. He’d heard a few whispers on the grapevine about a prize ticket. Now if this was the boy with that ticket, then it was a long shot worth risking anyone’s happiness for.
He put his foot down, accelerated until he was almost touching the bumper of the car in front. The bus was three cars away, so Terry overtook them in one go, making the oncoming traffic brake. The car behind him beeped and Terry leaned out the window, swivelled his head and stared at a spot on the windscreen where the driver’s head would normally be, until the car stopped beeping and slowed right down.
“OK, Snapback, you listening?” said Terry. “At the next traffic lights, you jump out and get on the bus and get him off. And I’ll pull over and grab him and stick him in the boot. Right?”
“Won’t someone see us?”
“Yeah, but so what? He’s a nobody.”
The Snapback twitched a little while he thought about all this jumping out of cars and onto buses. And then he said, “Why don’t I take over driving and you get on the bus?”
Terry took off his sunglasses. He leaned over and gave him the same look he’d given the car behind, but without sunglasses blanking out his eyes it was much meaner and nastier and closer.
“On your left you can see Buckingham Palace Gardens where the queen hosts her many garden parties during the summer months…”
Upstairs the conductor was giving a guided tour to the zombies. It sounded packed up there, feet clomping about, everyone wanting to see out on a nice day. Bully was sat at the back, out of sight of the bus driver’s rear-view mirror. No one had noticed him jumping on. The seats at the back were empty and there were just seven or eight wig heads sat at the front, not able to get up the stairs.
He settled down. According to his compass the bus was going north and that worked for him, for a while.
When he heard the beeping he looked round and saw the silver car up the bus’s backside. He couldn’t see the driver until the big man in the brown shirt poked his head out. And then he didn’t want to see him because his eyes were popped white full of dollar signs.
“On your right is Green Park … once common ground and a swampy burial ground used for lepers. It was enclosed in the seventeenth century and bought by Charles II…”
He willed the bus to go faster but whenever he looked out the back by the stairs, the car was still there.
The bus slowed… A skinny guy in a red snapback jumped out of the silver car and ran for the bus, his legs going faster than the rest of him. Bully got ready to kick at his fingers if he made a grab for the pole. He could see the snapback working out the distance he had to jump … but the bus sped up and the snapback slowed down and banged on the side of the car to get back in.
They were going to rush him, grab him at the next set of lights – that’s what they had planned, he thought. And without thinking too much about what he was going to do, Bully grabbed a pushchair from among the luggage tucked under the steps that wound up to the top floor. And then he threw it off the bus.
It bounced once on the tarmac, opened up and the air got into it and it flew over the roof of the car. The car swerved but didn’t slow down. Bully pulled out a big grey suitcase half his size and trundled it to the edge of the step … and pushed it off. It ricocheted off the kerb and under one of the wheels, making the car jump but it carried on driving.
He needed to aim better. The big suitcase had been too heavy to throw at the right angle, so he grabbed a couple of smaller pieces of luggage and threw them, one after the other, with a straight arm like he was lobbing grenades. The first missed but the second one exploded onto the windscreen. He thought that might do it. The glass cracked up and pushed in but the wipers started going and the snapback was leaning out the window, like an extra windscreen wiper, pulling off clothes, shouting to the driver…
“Stop it! You naughty boy!” The wig heads at the front of the bus were looking at him, one of them standing, shouting at him. He ignored them all and yanked out a big green rucksack like the one Phil had in the army. But he held on to it, didn’t throw it. He looked back under the stairs. He was down to light ammunition – a couple of umbrellas, a coat – but then he saw collapsed up against the side one last thing…
The bus driver braked hard when he saw the wheelchair bouncing off the back of his bus. And when he did, he felt a thud as the car behind went straight into the back of him.
Bang!
Bully saw it coming, was holding on to the pole, but Jack wasn’t and she skidded down between the seats. The silver car started whining away in reverse and Bully grabbed the rucksack.
“Was that you?” said the conductor on the stairs. He was just standing there as if waiting for Bully to say Yeah! and own up to it. Instead he jumped off the bus, dragging the rucksack with him.
In mid-air he shouted, “Here girl!” and the conductor stood well back as a gnashy-looking dog scuttled past and followed her master off the back of the bus.
The bus conductor tried chasing Bully to Piccadilly but he was fat and slow and Bully easily got away, even with the weight of the rucksack on his back.
Now in a side street, he was taking a look. He started pulling out clothes. It was women’s stuff – dresses and tops and other things that were no good to him. Because all he was looking for were shoes. He needed shoes if he was going to walk to Watford. Even if he managed to get the train, he still needed to look half decent to convince a nice lady or someone old enough to cash his ticket in for him. Because no one nice was going to believe a word he said unless he had shoes on his feet.
Halfway through the rucksack he found something, although it wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind: flip-flops. He was pretty sure they were girls’ too, purple and yellow with a swirly flowery design on them, but they would have to do. He shoved his toes in them and finished emptying out the rest of the clothes. Right at the bottom he found money. It wasn’t real money though; it had a drawing of a skinny guy with Harry Potter glasses on the front. Bank of India it said. No good to him and he threw it all away.
When he’d emptied out the rucksack, he put it on the ground and told Jack to get in.
Jack looked at him like:
What, you mean in there? But this was the other reason he’d nicked it – to hide Jack, so that he wasn’t a boy with a dog, he was a boy with a rucksack. Bully got her rear end and pushed her in and then got her settled and pulled the top flap down, leaving a gap for her to breathe through. He could still just about see her snout and eyes like this rucksack had a … well, a dog in it.
He put it on. He adjusted the straps. It wasn’t too bad. And he set off north to Camelot thinking about his money just waiting to be spent, begging and pleading with him to go to the shops and spend, spend, spend…
Flip, flop… Flip, flop, flip, flop. He kept looking back every few steps for the men in the silver car. He wasn’t used to the sound of his own feet under him, and he turned round to check it was him flip-flopping along.
He got to Oxford Street. Not the back of it but right on it, his first time there. And he thought of poor old Mick squashed up pulpy in the back of the bin truck. The last bin he was ever going to kip in.
Bully walked along. It was one long street full of shops. He shielded his eyes from the sun. He imagined Brent Cross was like this but better, with a roof on. That was the place to go said Chris and Tiggs. Everything you needed under one roof.
He stopped the first woman who looked like she could be a mum – softer-looking than the younger women carrying big-name bags with next to nothing in them. And she was carrying food not clothes in plastic bags like mums did.
“Have you got 59—” he asked but she was already walking away. He carried on along the street and after asking directions and begging for a while he’d managed to get three quid off foreigners. But no one knew anything, where anywhere was. No one lived here, on Oxford Street, in London. He thought maybe he should get a map, rack one up from a bookshop, just to check what that guy had said about Watford was right.
He carried on walking through alleyways and along little roads until he got to a big nasty one, four lanes thick, sunshine blowtorching the windows and windscreens. Mary le Bone it said on the side of one of the buildings. He could see the gates of another park through the gaps in the buildings and he walked along, getting ready to cross this tarmac river, thinking about buying a helicopter – no, better than that – a jetpack. He’d seen them on TV – not just in films, either, but in real-life programmes. And the pack wasn’t much bigger than the rucksack he had on now. He could light it up, stick Jack on the back and go.
He imagined flying just above the pavements, not too high so everyone else walking along could look up and see him and think: I wish I had one of those… And deciding what he’d buy with his money reminded him of the foreign money he’d thrown away. It hit him that even on Sunday he could have changed it for proper money at a bank or some place… And then bought a map and food and a cold can of Coke…
In the middle of telling himself off and reminding himself again of just what else he had lost today, he stepped off the pavement and something picked him up, shook him hard and threw him down the road.
He was paralyzed. He couldn’t breathe. He lay on his side, his eyes stuck staring at the creases and wrinkles in the tarmac, willing the air back into his lungs. He’d felt like this once before, lying in a bundle, buried above ground, three or four older boys jumping him in the changing rooms. He’d never liked PE, running round for the sake of it, getting tired out for nothing, playing games where you didn’t win anything worth keeping. At least when you played the arcades, whatever you won or lost was yours. And it was real, it was something…
And then he felt his breath slowly coming back, like he was having to suck it out of someone else’s body.
“Arrgh…” he said, the hurt catching up with him. He got into a crouch and then sat up, hugging his knees. A rusted white van was moving away, reversing, now pulling round him and going through the gears. Another car began driving towards him and then pulled up. Horns started beeping but the man got out.
“Are you all right?” the man said, wondering what to do if the boy said no.
Bully nodded, didn’t waste his new breath saying yes.
“You sure? He just hit you – stay there and I’ll phone an ambulance. OK?”
Bully told himself to get up. “Get up,” he said. And he did – onto his hands and knees and then up onto two legs. He felt light-headed and then just light. And though he still had the rucksack on, something wasn’t right.
“Is that anything to do with you?” said the guy, pointing uncertainly behind Bully.
He turned round to face the sun and Jack was lying on the road behind him, twitching.
“You did that! You did it!”
“I didn’t… I just stopped. I… I… I didn’t even see it.” And he went pale, hesitated and then got back in his car and drove off slowly with his accident lights still blinking orange and red.
Bully picked Jack up and carried her right across all four lanes, the traffic snarled up, people slowing down, looking to see. By the time he was over, all the necks had twisted enough to see it was just a dog that wasn’t moving, and the traffic sped up again.
He laid her down on the empty pavement. “Come on, wake up!” He poured water over her head and tried to squirt some in her mouth but it just seeped out again, darkening the paving-stones.
“I’ll get your tea on, Jack… Come on … come on… I’ll get you a tin,” he said, though he had no tea, nothing on him, not even an empty can now.
“Get up. Come on, get up! Come on, mate… Come on! Get up, girl! Get up … get up, girl…” His voice was breaking, going up and down, sounding young and old within the same word.
Inside his head he was shouting too, at himself for not looking, for not seeing the van. The rucksack had messed up his sight lines and the sun had got in his eyes but that was no excuse. He hadn’t seen it coming because he’d been too busy thinking about his money. Still, though, he had blame to spare for the van driver, racing between the traffic lights. He wanted to chase after the man in the van and smash him up, and he threw the empty water bottle out into the road.
A car beeped at him, a disgusted face passed him by.
Then underneath the groan and roar of the traffic he heard a living sound. And still on his knees, he almost fainted, his body numb like in the gun, but full of pins and needles he was happy to bear, that he didn’t want to go away. And he watched Jack get up onto her front legs and then drag the back ones up after her. She shook and wretched and coughed like she’d eaten too much too quick and was going to sick it up, but she stayed on her feet.
“Are you all right? Is that your dog?” Someone there now. A guy in his twenties with the sort of thin, dirty moustache Bully thought he might be getting any day now was looking at him. And a woman kneeling down with blonde hair so clean, he could see the sun through it.
“Yeah, yeah…” he said.
“Have you lost one of your flip-flops? I think I can see it!” said the man as if it was fish in the water, excited and pleased to have seen such a thing. He waited until the lights changed to retrieve it.
“I don’t think you are all right,” said the woman. “You should both get checked out,” she said, because Bully was pushing Jack back into the rucksack and dragging it onto his back. It felt twisted up on one side, and he realized it had a metal frame that had taken most of the bash and that was the reason they were both alive.
“Do you want some water?” She was holding out a bottle. He swallowed all of it and then held it up to his face.
“Can I ’ave it?” he asked because his water bottle had been swept down the road.
“Yes, of course. Yes, have it,” she said. “Are you sure you’re both all right? I think you should go to A and E. You really should, shouldn’t he, James?” James just nodded. Bully ignored them and tried to move the rucksack about on his back. It hurt and stung in the middle and he jiggled the weight around on his shoulders from one side to the other like it was too hot.
“I got to get going.”
“Where? Do you want us to come with you or anythin
g?”
He looked at them. He was tempted to ask for help, proper help with his ticket and the money. But there were two of them and he didn’t have the head to start thinking about splitting it and what was fair to give them. And besides, they maybe looked too nice – because whoever helped him would have to pretend it was their ticket. And he didn’t think either of them were the type to tell lies. This was his problem: to find someone in the next three days who was nice enough to help him do something that wasn’t all right.
The man was handing him something in a cup. “Do you want a coffee?”
Bully shook his head. He was sick of coffee and being asked if his dog was his.
“D’you need anything?” James asked awkwardly.
“You got 59 p?” he said out of habit and the man looked relieved and pleased that he could give him something. And he checked his change and then gave him a fiver.
“Cheers,” Bully said. He shoved it in his back pocket. Then he jiggled the rucksack because it was now rubbing on his hip where the frame was twisted.
“Is there anything else we can do for you?” asked the woman, still wanting to help.
“No,” he said, looking back across the road. “I got to go.”
Terry bumped the steaming car right up onto the pavement. The Snapback had pulled the wheelchair out of the front grill but the radiator was losing water and overheating. Pedestrians looked … and then looked away.
“Where is he then?” said Terry. He was sweating from the car chase and bits of him he never got to see were getting very hot because there was no air conditioning in the car.
“He was there,” said the Snapback. “I saw him. He must have gone…”
“You saw him? That’s no good, is it? Where is he now?” And to emphasize the difference between the past and the present, Terry knocked the Snapback’s cap off so that he didn’t have it on now. It made him feel happier and cooled him down, too.
Lottery Boy Page 10