And the pair of them went down one street after another just to get away, Bully putting no thought to it until he saw the lights, patches of brightness he recognized; he was back on his side of the river, further downstream.
A car sped past. He waved his arms but it didn’t slow down, just weaved round him. He couldn’t chance waiting any longer for help, and he pushed on down towards the river.
When he saw the couple arm in arm, he started running towards them, windmilling his arms like he was messing about. “Heeelp usss … heeelp usss,” he said, his voice coming out sloppy like he was drunk, because he’d bitten his tongue. They looked at him, and they saw the dog, and they made what they thought was the right decision at this time between day and night and scurried away. He tried to run after them but every step was taking a longer breath and soon he knew there would be nothing left in him, and he went down on his knees and began to cry. He didn’t want his millions. All he wanted was his mum back, and to be a little boy again, when it was just him and his mum in their old flat with two bedrooms and no Phil and no cat. If he could go back now to that time, the only thing he’d take with him would be Jack. And he looked at his dog, at what he still had. And he saw that it wouldn’t be for much longer because it wasn’t just her leg that was broke and torn…
… Jack was bleeding out, blood from deep inside her organs running from red to black. He had to stop it. He was on the pavement but in the field. Jack was a casualty of Bully’s own little war and he had to put pressure on that wound. He squeezed his hands around the top of her leg. It felt like a sodden dishcloth, and she yelped and snapped.
He needed a tourniquet. He started trying to tear at his coat but it was too thick and then he saw something better – the red elastic bands still on his wrists. He pulled them off and doubled them up to stretch them over Jack’s leg but nearly all of them snapped and pinged because they were either too thin or the elastic was too old and rotten. He saw then the palms of his hands were grey not white…
When he started to wrap the duct tape around the top of Jack’s thigh bone she turned on him. He flinched and screamed as her teeth broke the skin of his arm and cut into the muscle. The pain was excruciating and he wanted to hit her but he didn’t let go until the tape covered the hole in her leg.
He wiped the blood off his forearm where Jack had bitten him. It felt worse than it looked. At least Jack wasn’t whining any more; she was up on her three good paws and growling. But not at him. It was the sort of noise she made when a Fed or a fight was coming round the corner, telling him she knew more than Bully about the future, about what was going to happen next. It was time to go. Bully pulled himself up, and the pair of them hopped and stumbled a few steps closer to the river.
Then he saw the skinny bridge. And across the skinny bridge, he saw the big, big blurry ice-cream cone, just wasted and thrown away. Sanctuary.
He made it up the ramp, like running the wrong way up the escalators, and then: Pap! Pap! He turned round and there was Janks taking pot shots from the riverbank – a bullet ricocheting off the steel safety rail, one last zombie fleeing from the bridge. Bully looked across at the big, big church, his body greedily soaking up the last few sups of adrenaline. He started to run and was nearly halfway across, and the church was just beginning to sharpen up in his sights when he heard a yelp.
He looked back and Janks’s pit bull had Jack on the bridge, its jaws clamped on her throat. Bully stopped but hesitated to go back, hopping from one foot to the other like a little boy who needed a wee while he watched the pit bull crush Jack’s windpipe, taking her air away. His dog would be dead in a quick minute because there was nothing in this field he could do for Jack now. Not with just his bare hands. He looked at them and they were black with blood and useless to him.
Crack!
Janks was there on the bridge, limping badly, dragging his leg along.
Bully looked down at the dark water, thick with ripples. It was too late for him, too late for his dog perhaps, because there was one last thing he could try. So he went back, back to her, and he got down on his knees, got his arms under both animals, still locked together, straightened up and, borrowing something from himself, he heaved this strange melded creature into the oily water.
Crack!
His shoulder took what felt like a hammer blow and he was rolling, spinning over the parapet, falling through the steel cables of the bridge.
It was like one of those freefall rides – leaving his stomach behind, then the rest of him catching up, then bam! He hit a shopping trolley, a bike, a scaffolding pole, something, he thought, but it was just the water.
Under he went, sinking down, down into the darkness, his feet piercing the soft, cold muck and filth of the river bottom. He waved his arms about and kicked himself free but his lungs were boiling and he couldn’t hold the little half breath he had any longer and he stayed where he was, weight and air balancing him deep under the water.
He breathed in … and he began to sink again … a freezing pain spread quickly through his chest, that feeling of swallowing a slush puppy in a rush. Then a slow warmth came into his body, like that feeling he had when he was half awake but still tired. He wanted so much to close his eyes, to go back to sleep, didn’t mind how dark it was down here, under the water.
But something was tugging at him, biting into his bad shoulder, waking up the last little bit of pain in him, not taking no for an answer; like his mum used to get on at him for school, shaking him, dragging him out of bed, telling him to get, to get up… And slowly, slowly … up, up, up he went.
He broke back through the surface and he tried to breathe but the water had to come out first, back into the river. Coughing and choking, he clung to Jack’s collar as they swept slowly downstream towards the dark towers of the bridge that opened in the middle and existed at the very edge of his imagined world. He thought perhaps he should let go before they got to the emptiness of the sea. But he hung on, drifting in and out of his surroundings.
The next thing he felt was his feet catching the bottom of the river. He turned his head and saw the black bank curving out towards him, the current at low tide kicking him across the stones like a tin can. He let go of Jack to grip at the shore. He dug his good elbow into the mud, clawing his way up like a wonky crab until he was almost out of the water. But when he looked back for his dog, Jack was gone. And in his hand was just a dirty golden dog tag.
* * *
Bam! Bam!
The delivery driver threw the bundles of newspapers at the back door of the shop. The lights were still out, the door was still locked but another couple of bundles would wake Norman up.
Bam! Bam! All the papers, all the news: crashes, deaths, births, murders, wars. All of it already out of date … except for this one little item on the front page about an unclaimed lottery ticket, running out at the end of this day, around the same time as someone’s luck by the looks of it. After all, it had been nearly six months since the draw. And what was another day? He would have spent it by now, thought the driver. If it had been his ticket, he would have cashed it in the same day and bought a place in the countryside, somewhere nice and not too grand, near a river with swans and ducks and fish … to fish… He had not been fishing in a long while. He shut the back of the van and threw the last bundle… Bam! A light went on upstairs in the newsagent’s. Hhmmf, he sniffed. Norman was up. Now he wasn’t the only one awake at half past three in the morning.
The driver picked the bundle of yesterday’s unsold papers off the step and when he came back to the van there was a dog in the headlights. He’d left the engine running and hadn’t heard it creeping up on him. He didn’t know much about dogs nowadays but it looked like one of those new sort of devil dogs, the sort that went for you if you weren’t too careful. He threw the scrappy bundle of papers onto the front seat and jumped back in the van. He revved the engine to frighten it off but it stayed where it was, right in front of the vehicle. Up high, cushioned in the driver’s
seat, he could see in the headlights that this dog was in a bad way, jittering about on three legs, twisting round like it was making a bad job of chasing its tail.
A wire-haired Labrador flashed up in his memory: the last dog he’d had as a kid. There was no room in the city now. Too much mess to clean up. Too much of a tie at his age. Even so, sometimes, some days, he missed having a dog – something to come home to at the end of his morning round, something that missed him.
Slowly, he slid the door back, got out of the van and went over to see what was wrong with it. It didn’t bark or show its teeth, and he got very close and bent down and then it came to him, hopping over on three legs, the back one hanging off like a chicken wing.
It was bleeding bad. It would be a right mess to clean up and it would probably be dead before he’d finished his round and had a chance to take it to the vet’s. Still, he found himself just scooping the dog up – getting blood all over his fleece – and putting it in the front seat, where it settled down on the pile of old news.
He caught sight of the blood-streaked grey tape wrapped around the dog’s back leg. He was angry then. Kids! It was always kids! He moved to pull it off but thought better of it. Let the vet do it, if it came to that…
He drove on to the next shop, towards the river. When he looked at the road, he thought it was starting to rain; every few yards there were little dark spots on the tarmac, but nothing on his windscreen, and then he realized this was the way the dog had come, from the river. And when he got down to the embankment, he saw blue lights downstream, blinking away. That was his direction, towards the trouble and the blue lights. He began to turn left but then put the vehicle into a wide arc, changing his mind when he saw the spots of blood weaving off to the right, because he just had to know where this mixed-up-looking dog had come from.
The trail stopped here. He parked up with his lights shining onto the foreshore. He turned the engine off this time and got out and peered at the dim water’s edge. And in the light of the new day, he thought what he saw dragging itself out of the mud was some leftover creature from out of the river’s past. Some thing that had done this to the dog. But then he saw that it was just a boy wrapped up in a grown man’s coat, lying twisted on one elbow, head down, sucking air an inch from the water.
The driver waded into the mud, shouting and telling the boy he was safe, that he was OK now, like you did when someone wasn’t either one of those things. When he got to the boy, like the dog, he picked him up and took him back to the van, but this time he laid him out on the pavement and covered him with clean, fresh papers.
“Jacky’s got the ticket,” croaked the boy. The driver heard the dog in the van moving around, pawing at the door.
“Jacky? Who’s Jacky? Don’t you worry,” he said because he was very worried. He got his phone out, never bothered turning it on this first part of the day.
“Who’s Jacky?” the driver asked the boy again, but the boy just looked up at the lightening sky.
“Come on, boy … stay awake.” He had a feeling you were supposed to do that, to stay awake to stop that bigger sleep grabbing hold of you in the silence.
“Who’s Jacky? What ticket?” he said in desperation, asking him any old question, trying to keep him with it.
“Come on, wake up. Where’s this ticket? What you got there? Is this it? He saw something trying to shine in the grip of the boy’s hand. “Is this the ticket? Is it Jacky’s ticket? Come on, boy… Try and stay awake…”
He took it out of the boy’s hand. It looked like a doubloon, a gold coin the boy had scraped off the bottom of the river, but when he wiped it clean it was just a cheap brass dog tag. The sort you could buy for just a few pounds. Jacky it said in the metal. But it took him the length of the phone call to the emergency services to comprehend that this was the boy’s dog sitting on top of the papers in his delivery van. That this was Jacky.
And as the flashing lights from downstream drew closer, he began to wonder, in that strange shock that panic brings, if the dog in his van did have the ticket, where it might be and what sort of ticket was worth dying for.
Bully was floating in some sort of boat, not moving though, anchored where he was to the seabed. He could hear birds, beep, beep, beeping. A man in a proper shirt and trousers was wading towards him, trying to catch his eye with a rubber smile.
“How are you feeling, Bradley?” the man said.
Bully looked around – saw a couple of other boats like his with bodies in them, but he couldn’t see the birds that were beep, beep, beeping at all.
He tried to sit up then but he was too heavy, his whole body weighed down by invisible anchor chains. Even his voice couldn’t escape. He tried to talk but it came out a whisper and then he couldn’t hear any more, and the shapes and sounds around him fizzed and melted away.
The next time he woke, Phil was there, next to his bed. He looked weird. He was smiling with his mouth open, showing his teeth, as if for a proper picture in a newspaper or a magazine.
“How you feeling, pal? What you been getting into? You’re lucky it didn’t nick an artery. Just grazed your shoulder blade, they said…”
Bully looked about for something that was missing, couldn’t think what it was.
“It’s all right, don’t worry. It’s safe. I got it covered. Why didn’t you tell me we’d won it? If it hadn’t been for that driver, you’d’a lost us the bloody lot! What?” he said because Bully was trying to talk.
It really hurt, like the worst sore throat, the pain shooting all the way down to his lungs. Finally he said it: “Ja…” and made a listening face, putting his head to one side.
“Who? Your mum?”
Bully shook his head.
“Ja…”
“What? The dog?”
Bully nodded, his shoulder throbbing now he knew that the bullet had just grazed him.
“She’s not here, is she? They don’t let dirty old dogs in here, do they?”
Phil paused to look round the ward in case someone might be listening. “Right, listen. You hearing me?” He leaned in, as close as he’d ever got to Bully in the last six years. “They won’t want to pay out, I can tell you that now. Not unless we say it was me what bought the ticket, OK? So that’s our story. OK?”
“Jack—”
“Yeah, what?” Phil said, getting irritated now, trying to go through his plan.
Bully made the OK sign with his fingers and blinked his eyes wide to say: Is. She. OK?
“Well, she’s not here, is she? Look, all I know is that she was in a right state. The vets said she was as good as dead when they brought her in and they’re not making any promises. I’m telling you that now, so you’d better be prepared for the worst.” He paused to inspect something on Bully’s cheek. He looked puzzled and then annoyed. “No, come on, come on, come on. Let’s have none of that,” he said and showed him the newspaper headlines from the past few days.
HOMELESS BOY ESCAPES BOUNTY GANG IN DRAMATIC THAMES FALL
DEVIL DOG SAVES STREET BOY IN RIVER PLUNGE!
LOTTO-GANG STREET KID WINS BIG THANKS TO MUTT!
SUSPECTED KILLER STILL ON THE RUN…
The police came in three times to speak to Bully. They praised him, and told him what a brave boy he was, like he was a little kid with cancer or something. He didn’t do a lot of talking because his lungs hurt. As well as all that dirty water getting in them, he’d busted his ribs in the fight. Three of them. And you couldn’t do anything about that. No knives, no injections, no tubes. They didn’t even put you in a plaster cast. You just had to let them heal. And that would take time, the doctors said.
He asked the Feds about how Jack was doing but they didn’t seem to know, promised they’d look into it for him. Then they told him about his own story. Half of London – the wrong half – had got to know about his numbers coming up. And they wanted to know about the dead man in the park because they said they knew Bully had been there. They’d rounded up Tiggs and Chris and some of t
he men at the dogfight but they were still looking for Janks. His real name was Peter Jefferson. And could he tell them anything about him or the dead man? And Bully said no, he didn’t remember no dead man, didn’t remember nothing, especially nothing about Janks.
When they’d taken most of the tubes out and he could eat without anyone helping him, a woman came on to the ward and sat down next to his bed. He clocked straight off who she was. The way she kept smiling when there was nothing to smile about, the way she looked like she’d stopped off on her way to somewhere else. She was from the social. He asked her about Jack but she didn’t know anything about dogs. So he asked her when he was getting out of here. Her smile shrunk a bit and she said they were looking closely at what would be best for him now that his situation had come to light. Because his mother was dead and the whereabouts of his real father unknown, he was at risk. He could tell the woman thought it might make him sad to know this. He listened while she took him through his care options.
Care option 1: How did he feel about going back to the flat? (He said “dunno” to that.)
Care option 2: What did he think about living with a direct relative? If they could find one of those. (He just shrugged at that one.)
Care option 3: How about going to stay with a foster family? (He said “no” to that: he didn’t want a fake mum or dad.)
Care option 4: What were his thoughts about going to live in a care home? (He considered it until she told him they didn’t take dogs, only kids.)
The woman went away and came back a couple of days later with her best smile. She was very pleased to tell him they had looked into all his options and that his preferred option was definitely now an option. He was going back to the flat.
Lottery Boy Page 17