Lottery Boy

by Michael Byrne

  “What you doing! Cut it out! I saw him in the first place, didn’t I? I’m the only one seeing things!”

  “Yeah…” sniffed Terry. He let it hang there, his contempt for whatever the Snapback was seeing. He got out of the car, sat on the bonnet and then clambered up onto the roof and put a Terry-sized dent in it.

  “Hey! What you doin’! It’s me mum’s car!” said the Snapback as if that might make a difference.

  “There’s something been going on over there,” said Terry, sinking further down into the metal roof so that it looked from above as if a giant fist had punched the car. Across the highway he could see a dark patch on the pavement. Maybe blood or something. “What you waiting for then?” he shouted.

  The Snapback stayed put and started fidgeting with his mobile. “I want the money for the windscreen and the repairs,” he said.

  “You’ll have to want then, won’t ya? Now go take a look.”

  He was sure it was the same silver car on the other side of the Mary le Bone road. Bully couldn’t see how they were tracking him now Jack was out of sight. These men, these friends of Janks’s, didn’t have dogs and Bully was well out of his territory.

  The iron gates to the park were wide open for cars and zombies, and unconsciously he veered away from them, off the road. The sun, with nothing in the way, was heating him up, getting under his skin, making him sweat even in the late afternoon. He made his way to the line of trees running alongside the footpath where it was cooler, a light wind blowing against the back of his head. He tried to keep the weight off his right side where the car had pushed his ribs in. But every time he turned round to check whether anyone was on his tail, it rubbed a little more of the skin off his hips.

  A trickle of something wet ran down his neck, and walking along, he couldn’t decide if it was sweat or blood.

  “You OK, mate? You all right in there, mate?” He could hear Jack panting, trying to cool herself down the way dogs did, like they were about to pass out any minute and have a heart attack. He wanted to get her out, give her some proper air and check she really was OK, and that there wasn’t a hole in her head.

  He stopped to take the rucksack off and Jack immediately started to wind up her growl – and this time when he looked round, he saw the two men from the silver car weaving in and out between the trees. The big guy in the brown shirt, huffing and puffing, his big arms propped out like he was itching to do something with them; the skinny snapback doing his best to keep behind him. And Bully could scream and shout – but that was what kids did in a park, even big ones – so who was going to care?

  He stopped thinking about that for a second when he heard the sound. The noise was incredible – like a plane going overhead, it came from above and shook the air. And though he heard it, he couldn’t help but listen because it was the sound of a lion.

  He veered towards the fence and caught sight of a penguin popping into a pool. A made-up jungle in the middle of London! He’d heard there was one but assumed it was miles away and not right bang in the middle. And there weren’t just crappy cows here either, bused in from the countryside, but proper animals by the sounds of it. Stuff that could kill you; stuff that you wanted to see.

  He started running, a sort of a hop and skip to jiggle Jack into the right place on his back. And then he swivelled, saw he had ten, maybe fifteen seconds to come up with something before the snapback caught up with him, grabbed him, slowed him right down for the big one to push around. He heard the brown shirt say, “Just shove him over! Get him on the ground.”

  ZOO EXIT flashed up on Bully’s radar. He read the sign, understood it back to front – not as a word but as a way in, as a ZOO ENTRANCE. And he turned left sharp, wincing with the pain, ran past a staff girl in a green T-shirt with a camera at her face, snapping a family in a fake jungle. He cut in through the gift shop, pulled down a rack of cuddly giraffes and camels and then heard bigger crashes behind him. Then he was out, running past the penguins barking at Jack (Jack in the rucksack, giving it back). And people looking round as if to say: Did that rucksack just bark?

  He ran on. Glimpses of animals inside their cages was all he was getting. Past the parrots and hippos, he ducked into the Bugs Arena, ran through a dark glass corridor full of big, bright little things painted green and yellow.

  Out the other side, he took a narrow turn and was suddenly caught up in the queue funnelling into the monkey house.

  He tried to slot in between the families but couldn’t help pushing. He could smell the food on them, what they’d been eating. Cheese-and-onion crisps, ice creams, hot dogs … tiny bits of them going up his nose. It was no good though. Too slow this way. Tut, tut, tut, he heard, like some kind of bird, as he made his way through, but the queue had thickened up into a crowd. And there was nowhere left to push.

  He turned round to go back but there was the brown shirt, his gut trying to get out of his jeans, the face above it all twisted up and out of breath. He met Bully’s look from ten metres off, locked on like a fighter pilot with a red button to press, and Bully made up his mind to scream anyway.

  He drew in the breath but held it, saw something the big guy wasn’t seeing… A lot of green T-shirts.

  “Excuse me, sir? Excuse me? Can I see your ticket?”

  “What? Oh, I lost it, didn’t I?”

  The zookeeper wasn’t taking that, her mouth set in a hard-to-please smile, another four T-shirts backing her up.

  “Well, I need you to accompany me back then, please, sir, to the entrance. Please, sir.”

  “Look… Look, love… I’m… I’m looking for my kid.”

  He turned back to point Bully out. “He’s over there somewhere!” he said because Bully had ducked down, was hiding out among the shoelaces and the pram wheels and the little kids. He shuffled along with the queue like that, like a creature looking for something to eat, and the next time he chanced a look, the big guy was swarming with green T-shirts, throwing wild, roundhouse punches, trying to wade on through them… He knocked one of them out and just as it looked as if he might break free, they got hold of his arms and legs and pulled him down.

  Bully was in the monkey house, winding his way through. And despite the situation he was enjoying himself because the monkeys – he couldn’t get over it – the monkeys were allowed out. They were in the trees and on the benches, and the little kids around him were squealing and not believing it either.

  One monkey landed on his rucksack, jumping straight off again when it felt jaws snapping underneath.

  “Daddy! Look, Daddy! A doggy,” said a girl.

  “What, darling? Where?” asked the daddy, not seeing any doggy even when his daughter pointed to the long-haired girl – or was it a boy – with a rucksack, wearing cut-offs and flip-flops.

  In a quiet spot outside, Bully went to one of the bins and hooked out an ice cream, good as new after a bite and quicker and cheaper than buying one from the shop. He saw a map in there too, of the zoo, and fished it out. It showed you where all the animals lived.

  That set him thinking about buying his own zoo. He’d buy the lot and probably get a discount and move them into his place. He’d have his monkeys not in the house but in his garden. And he would have the lions and tigers caged up during the day but they could wander about at night, helping out with security. And he would get a digger and dig a pond for the hippos and penguins and the big goldfish from Japan. And he would get giraffes and they could earn their keep too. He would train them to fetch. If he was upstairs and the postman delivered his dog magazines then they could just pick them up and poke their heads through his bedroom window.

  Maybe he’d get rid of the hyenas, he thought, looking at the pictures. He remembered from a nature programme how they laughed just the way Man Sammy had done, making fun of him when he’d said about his numbers coming up. And no snakes. And he didn’t fancy having vultures on the roof either, thinking he was dead if he overslept and pecking his eyes out.

  He only wanted good anim
als, not the sneaky, creepy ones. And then he thought about who was going to have to feed them and look after them and all the mess they would make in his new house and garden. And finishing off his ice cream, he thought perhaps it might be easier to just save his money (like he had with his ice cream) and come back and see everything here at this zoo another day.

  Because it was time to go and the zoo was getting on for closing up. The crowds had thinned out, and it was just him and the camel over there, looking ready to spit. And right next to him, on the other side of a fence, something that looked like an Afghan hound crossed with a feather duster. It just had claws instead of paws and its nose was half as long as the rest of it put together. He could see a baby one shuffling about in a burrow under a special see-through hill. And this baby one was looking at him, up on its hind legs. It was no dog, that was for sure, but it reminded him of Jack when he’d found her under that 4x4.

  He looked to see what it was on his map. It was called an Anteater. And from his map he could see that they were at the far end of the zoo. At the other end, next to the birdcage, was a little n for north and another exit. And he saw when he got out of the zoo that his next steps would be off the map, back into the white paper of London.

  He folded up his map and set off towards the north exit, through the tunnel and past the giraffes and the hyenas and hunting dogs, and when he heard Jack growl, he didn’t bother looking round because of the dogs. But if he had, he’d have seen a red snapback shadowing him, texting on his mobile phone.

  The sky was running out of sun but it was still bright to his left, to the west, as he headed a rough north, following the little arrow clenched in his hand. He kept away from the long main roads now, with the evening traffic building up even on a Sunday, and walked down the side streets.

  When the road began to go uphill he thought that was good because it felt like he was going up north. He was pretty sure now that when he got out of London, things would get better and he would find someone to cash in his ticket for him.

  Hampstead it said when he finally got to the top of a very long hill. And he squinted hard and looked down to where he had been but he could not see the zoo, or the Eye, blinking out the end of the day, not even a thin strip of brown river.

  It was a posh kind of place full of one-off shops with names he hadn’t seen before. He planned to push on but when he saw the newsagent’s outside the tube station he couldn’t resist it – he got his fiver out and went in and bought two cans of Coke – one for him, one for Jack.

  “Uh-oh, what’s that?” said the till lady when he’d bought the drinks and turned round to leave. And Bully didn’t bother telling her what she was uh-ohing at.

  Outside, he drank his can down in one. As he glugged, he clocked four boys, older than him, ganged up across the road. They kept looking at their phones, and then looking up as if waiting for someone specific to arrive, waiting – he realized – for him. He felt sick and panic sent his skin buzzing.

  Slowly he began to walk away, keeping his eyes to the ground (if you looked at them, they looked at you). Then his head went back without his say-so and all he could see was the dark blue sky.

  “You busted my car! You little—”

  Bully half swivelled round, saw the red snapback right in his face; grey, gappy teeth in ones and twos, spitting out swear words at him.

  Bully twisted away, tried to punch his way out of trouble, but the snapback was hanging on to his hair and the smooth soles of the flip-flops weren’t giving him any grip. He kicked them off but he couldn’t get away and the skinny guy in the snapback was starting to yell out. All the zombies did was stand and watch like it was on TV. And as he spun round Bully caught a look at the boys across the road, wising up to what was going down.

  Snap!

  The snapback had been snapped at! He was yelling and screaming his head off, with Jack’s teeth poking out of the flap, giving him a proper munch. See how that felt!

  “Drop it!” Bully commanded, because though the guy wasn’t much heavier than him, he was towing him. And then Jack stopped mincing his arm up, let go and Bully was gaining speed and running into the underground.

  There were no staff about and he forced his way through the barriers. He looked for the escalators but there was just a big square lift the size of his old blue bedroom.

  He ran into it, looking for the buttons to press, but there were no buttons and the doors weren’t shutting either. The faces were looking at him, then seeing Jack, blood on her fangs, and they were shrinking back against the metal walls … didn’t want to share a lift with that.

  He could see back through the barriers that the boys were across the road now and there was no way the lift doors were going to close before they got to him.

  He wanted to stay where he was. That same feeling he got every day but ten times worse in the lift. And he had to fight it. He had to fight it now; didn’t have all day, just a few seconds more to make his mind up. Was he going or staying?

  “That dog really should be on a lead…” a woman’s voice inside the lift was saying, her voice floating about outside his head. And he got out the lift, got ready to run back through the barriers and sprint as hard as he could and maybe, maybe ram through the boys.

  And then he saw the stairs.

  EMERGENCY STAIRS This stairway has over 320 steps. Do not use except in case of an emergency…

  Well, this was one.

  The steps didn’t just go straight down, they went round and round in a spiral like water going down a plughole. He took them two, three at time, grasping at the metal banister. Round and round, down and down he went. The yellow metal edges of the stairs blurred into one long golden path. The rucksack was cutting into his waist, really hurting him now, jolting and making him scream in his mouth, but he didn’t have time to get Jack out and he tunnelled on through the pain, down and down and down…

  He could hear feet behind him, catching him up – but just one or two sets – where were the other feet? They were taking the lift, that’s what they were doing – outflanking him – and his heart got ahead of him for a second because he had no way out if they got to the platform first. Still, though, he carried on running, trying to gauge how fast a lift could travel. He could hear the feet behind him, thumping on the metal strips … bang, bang, bang … didn’t look round, just kept going on down… How many steps was it now? A hundred? Less? More? How quick was a lift? What would he do when he got to the bottom? It was the sort of maths they didn’t teach you at school.

  Then he nearly had a heart attack – feet were coming up the stairs – and he put on his own brakes but it was just a man – a weekend zombie, head down, a coffee in one hand, tired of waiting for the next lift. And as Bully went past him he took advantage of the situation and deployed defensive counter-measures and flicked the cup of coffee all over the man so that he took up the whole stairs, complaining and shouting about it. That should slow them down.

  A breeze pushed past him. He matched that up to what he knew: a train coming in, the sound rushing after it, brakes squealing.

  As he sped up again he ignored the voice in his head telling him his legs were giving out, because he could see the brighter lights of the platform now – and he came pelting down onto it, voices echoing fifty or sixty steps behind.

  Mind the gap, mind the gap, said the platform announcer. Get in the train, get in the train, said the voice inside Bully’s head. And further down the platform he heard the lift doors opening… Beep, beep, beep.

  “There! There! Get ’im! Get ’im!” Jackals and vultures came screeching and swooping down the platform towards him, and with the train doors beginning to narrow and not caring about the gap, he turned sideways and flung himself through.

  Seconds later, double faces at the glass, spitting, mouthing terrible things, just millimetres between the words and Bully as the tube train pulled away.

  Bully looked at the tube map above his head. He was on a straight black line, the Northern line
. This was good. If he stayed on the tube the whole way to the end of the line then Watford couldn’t be far. And there was Brent Cross! He could stop off there and go looking for Tiggs and Chris. They would help him out.

  The train was pulling into the next stop but instead of Golders Green it said Belsize Park and Bully saw the train was travelling back into town, going south. It was the wrong stop, and the wrong way.

  And now he was waiting on an empty platform on the opposite track, waiting for the next train, back north. Only the platform wasn’t empty now. And he was trying to pretend to himself that he hadn’t heard the feet squeaking out of the train ten carriages back, and trying to convince himself that none of the boys had jumped onto one of the other carriages nearer the lift. He wasn’t looking. He was refusing to look. For this minute his head had had enough of looking out for fear, and his lungs were full to the brim with it. He had lost his edge.

  He looked down the tunnel instead, begging for the train to come in. And he shuffled his toes onto the yellow line of the platform, squinted into the darkness for the smallest speck of light. But there was no train coming in, just humans moving in on him, to his left, at the edges of his vision, where he was choosing not to stare.

  “Give us the ticket!” the boy said in an almost cheerful whisper, couldn’t believe his luck. And then Bully had to look. There were two boys, bigger than him. One black, one white.

  Bully held his penknife up. It wasn’t much of a weapon, especially with the blades still inside. They cackled at it, like Man Sammy had. The fun was over now and they were shouting, threatening, trying to work themselves up to rush him, to get it out of him before the next train came in. They were taking their time, though, because neither one was a leader – the alpha dog (he’d read about them in his magazines). Every pack has an alpha and these boys were the tag alongs, the beta dogs. But that didn’t mean they weren’t going to go for him.