He opened his eyes and heard the tail end of a scream coming out of his head.
He’d been dreaming. In the dream, he was asleep and the smell woke him up. On the couch, the TV turned up, dozing and then starting to cough, this chemical smell coating his throat, getting worse and worse the more he coughed, creeping further down and fizzing. And then above the back of the sofa, seeing that stickleback bit of hair spiking up, his old street name seeking him out… Bully… I’ve come for you… That was when he woke up from the dream to real life, back on the couch, screaming for his mum.
Cortnie was watching some kiddy crap with it on her lap and screaming too. And the baby was starting to cry. And Jack was barking, trying to get up on the couch. It was the dog Cortnie was screaming at because it looked weirder than ever now to her.
He yawned and rolled over and rubbed his shoulder. It itched where the bullet had gone in, and there was a small but deep hole in the skin like a tiny meteorite had torn through the atmosphere and into him a few weeks ago.
“Get it off,” Bully said to her because this was where he slept. But what with everyone in and out, and it waking up all the time, and Emma nagging him off the sofa when she forgot she was supposed to be nice to him, he didn’t get that much sleep here.
Emma came in from the bathroom. “What is going on, Bradley? You can’t keep screaming like that with the baby!” She picked it up and coo cooed it and took it to the kitchen. Then she shouted back: “And don’t let that dog keep jumping up! I don’t want her round the baby!”
He watched Jack’s face appear over the arm of the couch, her eyes frantic and wide before she fell back down and tried again. She was playing a game, trying to get his attention, but he didn’t want to play. “Come ’ere,” he said, waving her round to the front of the couch now that the baby was gone.
When he got out of hospital he couldn’t just go and get Jack from the vet’s. He was too young to be legally responsible. You could have a cat, a guinea pig, mice, a rat or any of that other four-legged crap, but in the eyes of the law you had to be sixteen to own a dog.
When he finally pestered Phil enough to get him down the pound and sign the forms, he was expecting to see Jack, not this other dog. It looked something like her but was shaved almost all over down to prickly skin and bones. It was thinner, missing five or six kilos in weight and one leg. At the back on the left there was just a flap of skin sewn over her stump.
“The leg was a real mess. I mean, even if we could have saved it, it really wasn’t worth saving,” said the vet, trying to be nice about it.
Phil, not trying to be nice about it, had suggested getting rid of this dog and getting another one later on, a better one, with a proper pedigree and all four legs, when they moved house and got the payout. But Bully shook his head and said no. He said things inside that were a lot worse. Because Jack was still his dog. The difference was that now, he wasn’t so proud of her any more, didn’t want to be showing her off, out and about on the estate. He only took Jack out late at night, after the good TV had gone bad, when there was no one much about.
He hadn’t wanted to go out at all because of all the press and the TV wanting pictures of him and Jack. Bully didn’t want any publicity. So they’d had to make do with Phil and the driver who’d found the ticket and told the police about it right at the last minute, at the end of his round. There were loads of pictures of him. He’d already got his reward from Camelot for handing it in.
Now they’d all moved on to another story and were leaving him alone, but people still whispered and pointed him out like he was a celebrity. And he didn’t like it. Perhaps when they got the money and they went to live with all the other celebrities, then he wouldn’t mind being pointed at, sitting next to David Beckham maybe. But it had been nearly a month since he’d crawled out of the Thames and they were still waiting for the payout, even though the woman from Camelot had been to see them. She’d come to the flat with just a card, no money in it. She told Phil some questions still had to be asked. And they were going to be asked at Camelot, with him and Phil in the firing line.
Phil was already spending. And he was running up a tab everywhere and not just on credit cards but with people you had to pay whether you had the money or not. It wasn’t like the bank; they didn’t just write you nasty red reminder letters. They came round in person to see you, as a nasty reminder.
Flap, flap, flap at the letter box. That was the only interesting part of his day. Bully could tell it was the postie from the way he did it, and he gingerly got up off the couch. His shoulder and his ribs ached first thing in the afternoon when he’d been lying down for a while, and sometimes instead of opening the door, he would spend five minutes listening to the letters coming through the letter box… Flap, flap, flap.
He came back to the couch with a pile up to his chin and sorted through the different-sized envelopes, looking for something good. Some of them were cards from people wishing him well (and then making more wishes, asking for things for themselves). Most of them were letters written on little coloured squares of lined paper, one or two even typed on bigger sheets. Whatever sort they were, they were all called begging letters. And Phil threw them straight down the rubbish chute if he was in, even the ones that were addressed to Bradley.
The complaining ones just annoyed him when they started saying how hard their lives were and asking him to buy things he didn’t even have yet. He preferred reading the ones that asked for stuff straight out, that just tried it on for a bit of a laugh.
Dear Bradley, You won the big one! Mega congrats! I could do with an upgrade on my life too! Can you spare 500 quid? Or a grand? Cheers bro…
He never replied to any of them. Even the funny ones.
He had a visitor at the door.
“Someone to see you… A little friend of yours, hon,” Emma said, kissing her lips up, showing him she wasn’t so little.
“What? Who?” he said but she was already back in the kitchen.
Phil’s bedroom door was closed. He was still in bed, dosed up to the eyeballs with painkillers – his back still bad – getting ready for the meeting tomorrow with Camelot.
“Hello, Bully,” said Jo when he got to the door. She looked different, older in just a few weeks, grown up without being taller.
“No one calls me that round here,” he said.
“Sorry, Bradley.”
“Your stuff – I ain’t got it. I lost it. The shoes and the money and all that.”
“Oh, no, that’s nothing. Mum doesn’t mind. She gave it to you anyway. I just wondered…”
“What?” he said.
“If you got the card we sent you? I sent it to Camelot. I didn’t know your address.”
“Didn’t get it.” He shook his head. He was starting to breathe hard. He had trouble breathing when anything out of the ordinary happened. He started sucking in the air for no other reason than it was panicking him seeing her here, a whole different world flapping at his door.
He slipped his trainers on, kicked Jack back inside the flat with the side of his foot and motioned Jo out onto the landing. Declan next door trundled past on his plastic motorbike and looked up at them. His mum was watching him play. She smiled extra nicely at Jo because she was a visitor. “You find him all right then, love?” She stopped smiling when she looked round. “Declan! No!” she yelled because Declan had climbed off his bike and was trying to force it down the rubbish chute.
Bully took Jo to the end of the landing and down the stairs. “How did you get here, if you didn’t know where I lived, then?”
“I saw your stepdad, Phil, in the pictures.”
“He’s not my stepdad,” said Bully.
“Sorry.” She blushed like she had done in that little room at the top of her house. “Anyway, I worked out that it was somewhere round this area from the road signs in the photos. And then I asked.” She sounded pleased with herself. “Your next-door neighbour told me in the end. I just thought I’d come and see how you
were getting on, whether you needed any … thing.”
They went down to the ground floor, went walking. One or two people stared and one laughed and shouted, “Brads! Lend us a tenner!”
“How’s your dog?” Jo said in the silence that followed.
“They chopped her back leg off. We didn’t have to pay though,” he said.
“I’m really sorry about that. But she’s all right though, is she?”
He nodded, a little ashamed of himself because though he was glad he still had her, he couldn’t help feeling embarrassed when people saw him out with a three-legged dog, whatever breed she was.
“So, is it all OK? Are things all right here for you living back with your – with Phil, is that his name?”
He shook his head to say things weren’t OK.
“When we get the money, I’m living somewhere different.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. He’d forgotten that she didn’t know about the deal he’d done with Phil that they were pretending it was his ticket. That they were splitting it 50/50 and Phil was giving him half and not the other way round.
“So when do you get it then?”
“What?”
“The prize money.”
“Dunno. Soon. It’s only 1.1 million though.” He was disappointed when the lady from Camelot had told them that. That the jackpot that week was one of the lowest they’d ever had and only 1.1 million pounds.
“That’s still loads.”
He turned on her then. “Well, you must have that.”
“No! You’re joking, right? My mum and dad work full time. You know they do,” she said, as if to remind him he had met her parents.
“Yeah, but your house. And all those books. That must be worth way more. You didn’t even have to win anything. You could sell that and be more of a millionaire.”
“Yeah, I suppose so, maybe, but…” She waved her hands about, struggling to explain away this comparison. “It’s where we live.”
They walked along Dowley Road, ended up walking past the Spar shop where he’d bought the ticket. He didn’t want to go in in case Old Mac was on the till and suddenly remembered, like old people did, that it was him who bought the ticket that day. So Jo went in and got them drinks. They talked about what Jo was doing next, going to college. And that Alex was off to some place called uni.
“I nicked his passport,” Bully said. He thought he should confess in case Alex might need it to go there.
She looked surprised and then disappointed. “Did you? Oh… OK. He’s got a new one now. We just assumed it was from the break-in.”
He nodded, annoyed with himself for shrinking down in her eyes. “What did they nick then?”
“Nothing much. Just some money and stuff. But they got the keys to Dad’s van with all his work gear and it wasn’t insured.”
“I’ll pay for it then. And I’ll get him a new one!”
“You can’t do that…”
“I can. I will.”
“No, I mean it’s very kind of you, Bully…” She looked embarrassed. “But I mean, it’s not your money, is it? It’s Phil’s…”
And he remembered again that she and everyone else thought it was Phil’s ticket and that Phil had bought it.
They walked along, past the little kiddie park with no little kiddies in it, on towards the station. “Are you walking me back?” she said. “The station’s this way, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…”
But he stopped walking because of where they were, and what was here. He looked across the road at the straggly bed of still-flowering weeds. He could just see one edge of the broken paving-stone, imprisoned in the pale green stems.
“You OK?” she said. He looked back at her like she was a photo from a long time ago. “I’ll give you my number if you want… If you need someone to talk to. And Dad says you should come over and visit again. You and Jack.”
“She dudn’t go out in the day,” he said automatically.
“If there’s anything I can do, Bully… Bradley, I mean. Sorry. Is there, though? Anything … I can help you out with?”
“Like what?” he said to test her, to see if she really meant anything because there was one thing he had in mind, that he would need help with, going behind enemy lines…
“I don’t know… Taking Jack out, maybe…”
“She dudn’t walk.”
“She can walk though, can’t she?”
“She dudn’t. She hops,” he said dismissively.
“OK, well with school then, maybe?”
He just sniggered. Wasn’t planning on doing too much school once Phil gave him his share of the payout.
“I don’t know, whatever, you know, to help. Anything you want…” She didn’t seem put out by the way he was behaving and it annoyed and impressed him at the same time.
“OK then. Yeah,” he said.
She nodded expectantly, waiting for him to tell her, but instead he turned away and headed over to the patch of scrubland that looked as if it might once have been a proper flower-bed.
She followed him across the road and watched him prise up what looked like a piece of paving-stone from among the late summer weeds. He started poking around with a stick but she didn’t say anything until he began to dig with his hands.
“What? Have you lost something?” she said. And he waved her over to take a closer look.
They got a taxi from the train station. Five minutes later the driver was pointing out a big brick office block on a roundabout; no castle, no moat, just tarmac around a bunch of bricks and glass.
“This is it,” he said.
As soon as they got out, Phil said, “Remember, right? We do this by the numbers, keep it simple. Right, right, right?”
Bully nodded. Phil was like this when he got nervous, repeating things like they did in the army so you didn’t forget. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bully said.
They went up in a lift, right to the top. The woman in reception let Cortnie press the button. A man and two women were waiting for them in the corridor outside a room with a frosted-up window so you couldn’t see through it. The man telling them his name was Alan had his hand out before they even went inside. Bully watched Phil shake it and the hand was still there for him. And then he had to do it again with the two women: Carol and Diana. He recognized the lady called Diana. She’d come to the flat a few weeks ago as a Camelot representative. She hadn’t looked like he’d imagined, mostly because she was a woman. He hadn’t expected a real knight but he had expected a real man to deliver the message.
This second time, he didn’t mind her. She was OK, he decided, making a fuss of Cortnie, saying how nice her new clothes were as if they were all designer. He didn’t like the look of the other one, Carol. Her teeth were too white and they looked at you like eyes did, wet and shiny. And he didn’t like the sound of her either, like she had chocolate stuck in her throat when she spoke.
They went inside the room and they all sat down at one end of a massive table, and that was made of see-through glass. Everything in the place was see-through except for the windows which were frosted up. He supposed it was to stop people thieving stuff. He could see the new jeans Phil had bought him through the glass, right down to his sports socks and new Reeboks.
“Would you like something to drink?” Alan asked Phil.
“A bit early for me,” he said as if it was a test.
Bully said no thanks but Cortnie got a Coke out of it.
Then they got started.
They wanted to know all about the day Phil bought his ticket. Bully started listening but lost interest and did his best to look through one of the frosted windows. It was sunny out and he suddenly wanted to be outside, back on the riverbank, shading his eyes and doing a bit of fishing… It was just a feeling he had, him and the old Jack out there (the one with four legs), hanging out, things back to normal. Because this wasn’t normal.
“So … we just need to ask one or two more questions.” Carol
was talking, had taken over, surprising Phil – Bully could tell because he was already nodding before she was anywhere near asking him anything.
“So, Phil, you’ve just said you purchased the ticket at the Spar shop in Dowley Road. And from the terminal read-out we can see this was at 5.26 p.m. on February the 16th.” Phil was nodding still, and faster, and Bully could hear him bunching his fingers, freshening up his fists every few seconds.
Carol was looking at Bully now, with those wet, white, shiny teeth. She kept showing them at him and then Phil, backwards and forwards between them like the bandog, unsure which one of them to attack first.
“We can see from one of our terminals that the ticket was checked against a till in Waterloo station on Friday, August the 9th at 6.45 p.m. … 174 days after the draw and 176 days after it was purchased. Is that right? Did you get it checked, Bradley?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what we would like to know is how it came into your possession?”
“What d’you mean, like? What? Like how he got hold of it?” asked Phil, butting in.
“Yes. How did you get hold of it … Bradley?” said Carol. She hadn’t even been looking at Phil while he’d been talking. She was getting ready for Bully’s reaction.
“He must have picked it up after I went out, by accident. He’s cack-handed like that,” said Phil, like it was a proper thing.
“We appreciate that but we would like to hear it from Bradley,” Alan said, coming back at him, one either side now, getting ready to outflank Phil.
Bully spoke hesitantly, slowly looking through the glass table down at his feet, as if the past was down there and might give him a nip on the ankles. “I went to Smiths but the man said it wasn’t a cash prize from the till and that I had to go to Camelot in Watford.”
They all nodded and smiled at that as if the man in Smiths had done the right thing.
“He said I had to phone them up. But I didn’t have any credit so I went instead. And that’s when they started chasing me.”
They all pulled very serious faces now. They had heard about that, the terrible things that had happened to him and his dog.
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