“Yes, that sounds awful, Bradley,” said Carol.
“Absolutely awful,” said Alan.
“How’s she doing? Your dog,” asked Diana.
He shrugged. “They chopped one of her legs off. The vet did,” he added when he saw their faces freezing up, thinking it was the gangstas.
“So… OK,” said Alan after they had all said how sad they were about that. “Getting back to the ticket: how did you come to have it, the winning ticket, in your possession? Because we have to ask you this, Bradley,” Alan said with a very serious teacher look on his face to make sure Bully understood this was about money and so it was really serious. “Did you buy this lottery ticket yourself?”
“No,” he said. He heard Phil puffing out a breath next to him, the old air saying that was it, they would pay out now.
“So who did buy the ticket?” asked Carol, leaning right forward so that her teeth were closer to him than any other bit of her.
“My mum did.”
Bradley heard Phil’s neck clicking, his head turning that quick.
“She went down the shops. He wasn’t even there. He was wiv ’er. Not my mum.” He didn’t know where this was coming from; he didn’t know what was making him say this now.
“Sorry?” Alan asked. “Are you telling us that Phil didn’t buy this ticket?”
“My mum bought it,” he said very slowly, like he had learning difficulties.
Phil blew up. He stood up, catching his knees on the edge of the glass table. “She couldn’t have got down there! She’d been in bed since New Year! She was dead before they even called the numbers!”
“Please, Mr Greg … Phil,” said Alan, trying to put the lid back on it.
“All I’m saying is, you ask her doctor!” Phil interrupted, coming back at him. “The last few days she couldn’t have got out of bed to go for a – she couldn’t’a got down the shops, that’s all I’m saying. She was so dosed up she didn’t even know if you were there half the time!”
“You weren’t there,” said Bully. “None of the time.”
All during that last week Phil had been “popping out”. And Bully knew where. Declan’s mum had been popping in, taking Cortnie off their hands. No one knew for sure when his mum died except him.
Phil sat back down and stared at him. His fists were solid under the table now, the bony tops of the knuckles showing just under the skin.
“Well, well… Maybe, maybe she did buy it and I got confused with the midweek draw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking about it now, I think I must have done. I think she did buy it after all,” said Phil, surprising Bully, going along with his version now.
“Well, this changes things, unfortunately,” said Alan, looking to his left and right at Carol and Diana. “And I think we are going to have to conclude this meeting for now and look at gathering more evidence.”
No one said anything.
“Do you understand, Bradley?” said Diana, leaning forward like Carol but looking concerned, like it really wasn’t anything to do with the money. “Bradley… Bradley…”
His mum had been telling him for days they were going to win.
He’d found it hard listening to her, especially that day, the day of the draw. She kept calling him in from the lounge, shouting against the TV, talking and breathing at the same time, jumping from one thing to another, shouting Happy Birthday! Even though that day was nearly two weeks away.
And she’d kept trying to give him his birthday card early, telling him she’d put just a little something in it for now. And him refusing to open it and pretending he had to go out to buy milk and bread. And wanting to escape, to get out of the flat, but thinking he should stay. And then coming home dragging his feet but wanting to run all the way. And finding her like that, knowing she wasn’t alive but still waiting for someone else to come along and tell him she was dead. And then opening the card and hearing her very last words; what she’d said to him.
“Bradley? Do you understand, Bradley? Are you OK?” Diana was saying to him but he just kept looking straight ahead, squinting through the windows at the frosted sunlight.
On the train back to the flat they sat at a small table. Bully sat opposite his sister and Phil. Whenever he looked up, Phil was looking straight back at him, not saying anything.
It was five stops on the train and Cortnie fell asleep and when she did, Phil kicked him under the table.
“What?” Bully said. Though he knew what.
“You left me hanging, you did. You left me right out there in no man’s land, you did. We could have done this nice and easy but, no, you had to go it alone, didn’t you? I know what your game is…”
Bully’s head went down and Phil kicked his foot to bring it up again.
“You listening to me? You think because your mum and me weren’t married, you think you’re going to get the lot? Well, you’re not. I had a word with him before we left. Even if they pay out – and now you’ve got them looking into it more, it’s not a done deal, and it’s not going to be for bloody years now – but if they do, in the end, then all the winnings don’t just go straight to you when you’re eighteen… You hadn’t thought of that, had you?” He nodded sideways. “Alan says she gets half. She’s your mum’s daughter. It goes through the bloodline. She inherits it just like you. And I’m her dad whether I married your mum or not. So just so you know: all this still works out for me, one way or another.”
And he kicked one foot and then the other, to remind Bully of that.
Bully left the flat in the afternoon as soon as he woke. He was already dressed. He left on his own. He hadn’t planned on taking Jack because of the no-dogs-allowed situation and Phil had been OK about it.
“Nah, leave her ’ere. We’re all off out later,” he’d said because it was Emma’s birthday and they were celebrating round her mum’s place. Bully thought maybe Phil wanted Jack there for something else, for back-up maybe during the day: all the flapping of the letter box they were getting from the Gombeen men, as his mum used to call them, the moneylenders that Phil was throwing scraps to now he wasn’t getting his money straight away.
Jo met him at the railway station and they travelled back into London, back along the Northern line, carrying the sweetie jar and the broken piece of paving-stone in the Bag for Life he’d bought from one of the supermarkets in town.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do?” Jo asked him, just like they did in the films. And just like in the films, he nodded and said he was going to do it, with or without her, though that wasn’t true because he didn’t think he could do it on his own, not in the day anyway. And the daytime was the proper, right time to do it. No more creeping around.
Jo paid to get in. And just like she’d said, they had to go with a tour guide, though it wasn’t like any holiday Bully had ever seen. None of the zombies seemed bothered. They all acted like it was a normal day out to walk round a place full of dead people, right under their feet, taking pictures of gravestones and eating sandwiches.
The lady in charge of their tour with a sweet-sucking face was suspicious of Bully, he could tell. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t taking pictures. He didn’t look that different in his jeans and Reeboks. And he wasn’t the youngest on the tour. It was just something about him, his breed that marked him out. Or perhaps it was the sense of purpose carved into his face; that he wasn’t just here for a day out.
The lady started up straight away with her sweet-sucking about keeping to the path and no littering and explaining that she was a friend of the cemetery who did all this for free. Then she started talking about the dead people and the graves and Bully and Jo slipped to the back of the group.
As they followed along, Bully didn’t recognize very much of the cemetery in the daytime. It looked more like a theme park without any rides or concession stands, just fake-looking statues and little paths going everywhere, park benches all over the place.
“What about over there? That looks like a nice spot?” said Jo.
He’d planned to scatter his mum next to Lady Di and he’d been very disappointed when Jo had told him she wasn’t buried here because Lady Di was still famous, even though she was dead. Not like all these old-fashioned celebrities Jo kept going on about who’d never been on TV. His mind was made up though. If it was good enough for this Karl Marx guy, some famous old Davey who’d spent all his days in the library a hundred years ago, Jo said, then it was good enough for his mum.
As they drifted further and further back like tired-out toddlers, and the feet and chatter of the rest of the tour got further and further away, Bully started to hear the nicer noises of the cemetery that he hadn’t heard at night: birds talking to each other, the leaves making a fuss of hanging on to their branches in the little bit of wind between the trees. And then he saw the spot, the best spot for his mum, with a tree for the birds and even an angel from next door’s grave looking over like Declan’s mum did next door, keeping an eye out.
“There, over there!” he said.
“Right, quick then! Let’s go. Let’s do it!” said Jo. She was smiling and giggling but that seemed right. And they ran through the graves and off the path to the little patch of trees on a bit of a hill. Bully quickly scraped a space in the roots of the dark green ivy and the dead leaves and unscrewed the red lid right off the sweetie jar.
“Are you going to say anything?” said Jo.
“What?”
“You know … something nice. I think you’re sort of supposed to.”
He looked into the dust and grit and still couldn’t help wondering if there was any bit of her left that he might recognize – a tooth, a bone, but there was nothing. It was just ashes, the 3% that was left of her.
“I don’t know…” But Jo was still smiling and it was still right. “R.I.P., Mum,” he said because that was what people said. And he went to tip the couple of kilos of her ashes out of the jar but they seemed suddenly very heavy to him. And then another hand was underneath nudging his, and the ground began to puff up with thick grey-and-white dust like a little bonfire that had finally burned out. He tapped the bottom of the plastic jar, made sure there was nothing left inside and passed it to Jo. Then he put the piece of broken paving-stone that he’d brought with him somewhere in the middle, got down on his hands and knees and pushed it deep into the earth.
“So that’s your mum’s name,” said Jo, reading the scratches in the stone that Bully had made last night. And he nodded down, and noticed when he stood up that the bottoms of his jeans were a lighter blue than the rest of his legs. He didn’t mind when he realized what it was. He brushed the ash off. It was just dust now.
“Oh, crap,” said Jo, but he was still looking at the bit of paving-stone and folding up his Bag for Life and wondering what kind of birds they were that his mum would be putting up with for the rest of her life, because he couldn’t remember if she really liked birds all that much or not. There weren’t many birds on their estate.
“What are you doing with that?” said a sucked-up voice behind him.
It was Jo who ran. She was almost back on the path when she looked round and he was still there standing next to the sweet-sucker. Because for Bully, now, this wasn’t a place for running away.
The friend of the cemetery walked them back to the reception, telling them it was thoughtless what they had done even after Jo explained.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said, looking at Jo not Bully. “But you can’t just do as you please! There are laws in here just like everywhere else! It’s not self-service! You have to have the proper written authority and go on the waiting list just like anyone else! What would happen if everyone did what you’ve just done?” she said finally. “We’d have bodies all over the place!”
“Well, there are,” said Jo in a sarcastic voice, looking around the place.
The women tutted, sucked on her invisible sweet and said “typical”. She told them to sit and wait while she got someone official to deal with them.
She came back with an old bloke, with a baggy, saggy throat. He was a cross between a Davey and a retired zombie, wearing a black suit and a tie that looked as if he’d got it second hand off a bigger, younger man.
He introduced himself and said that he was called Mr Faraday. And he asked Bully and Jo to write down their names and addresses and a responsible adult who could pick them up because he didn’t think this was really a matter for the police.
“Who have you lost?” asked the man, as if Bully just might find her again if he searched and searched hard enough. Bully knew what he meant though.
“My mum,” he said and pinched himself because his eyes were making things more squirmy than usual without his glasses on. “I wanted her to end up somewhere nice. And not in a bin.”
And then he told the story, a shorter story than the one he’d told the old man in the hospital in case this one didn’t remember any of it either.
Towards the end there was a knock on the door and the sweet-sucker came in, still not out of sweets yet.
“I’ve cleaned things up as best I can,” she said. She put a bag on the desk with a clunk, giving the old man an “it’s in there” face, and Bully swore at her on top of his breath, not under it.
The old man nodded and waved her out whilst he kept his eye fixed on what was on the desk. He would deal with this too.
“Now, I do have a great deal of sympathy for you and your loss,” said the man, pausing to look to the door as if the sweet-sucker might come back. “But I have to say to you that the rules are for everyone… So that everyone can enjoy this beautiful place. The ashes will be left as they are but the stone cannot legally remain where it was laid. Unfortunately there are no exceptions. I can’t put this back. I’m sorry,” he said, smiling, his throat wobbling about as he swallowed down his apology.
But Bully’s eyes flushed with hate. And that made them much smaller, letting less light in, so that the man suddenly stopped squirming in front of him and Bully saw as clear as he ever did with glasses what happened next. Because the man did a very strange thing with just one of his eyes, something that only old people still knew how to do nowadays: he winked at them.
Jo’s dad picked them up from the cemetery and made promises to the man. He said it in that quick, funny voice of his. He didn’t make a big fuss about Jo getting into trouble and helping Bully out; all he made a fuss about was Bully coming back for something to eat. But Bully couldn’t go through that whole show again. So even though he was hungry, Jo’s dad drove him straight home in his new second-hand van.
“Are you really sure, Bully?” said Jo on the way there. “Are you sure you don’t want to come back and have something with us? You can stop the night if you like? Can’t he, Dad?”
But Bully shook his head, didn’t want them stopping anywhere near his flat either, and so they dropped him off right at the edge of the estate.
“Next time, eh, boy?” said Jo’s dad, in that voice of his that made it sound as if the words really did mean something and he wasn’t just being nice about it.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bully said, making his promises quick to get out of the van, saying that he would bring Jack with him next time too.
He walked off into the estate. He kept looking back, waiting for the van to drive off. As he passed one of the blocks, he caught sight of what looked like a blurry old Davey with his hood up, shuffling and limping about by the bins in the basement. You didn’t usually get them this far out of town, and he wondered if perhaps he was just living here, on the estate. He crossed the grass and a couple of loud boys playing a game of football went quiet while they eyed him up and Bully didn’t waste any more time getting back to his own flat.
He was ready for a mouthful when he opene
d the door but it was nice and quiet for a change because everyone was still out. Phil had left Jack shut in the kitchen and when Bully opened the door, she hopped round him, sniffing at his ankles for the old and new smells. He felt a strange shudder of relief go through him. It had felt weird today being on his own without her and he realized that he had missed her and he was glad she was there, waiting for him to return. He’d been thinking that he shouldn’t have left her. The ideas in his head had been ganging up on him on the way back, saying that Phil might have got rid of her or done something worse while he was out.
But, no, here she was. All in one piece. And he didn’t push her away like he’d been doing for the last few weeks but got down on his hands and knees. He looked at her. And she sat right down on her one back leg and looked up at him, her Monkey Dog tail swishing on the linoleum floor.
“I know,” he said. “I know…”
Bully ran the tap to get a cold drink of water. He listened to it splashing the sides of the stainless-steel sink before he drank it straight from the tap. Then he went to Cortnie’s bedroom and found some black pens. He went back to the lounge and took out some of the begging letters he’d hidden under the couch and flicked through them until he found one with almost a blank page.
He was going to do something that he had never done outside of school in his life. He was going to write a letter. Because Phil was right. Camelot had decided to pay up but they were holding on to the money for him and his sister, putting it in trust until they were eighteen. So he had his half of the money. He just didn’t have it for close to five years. It would be sitting somewhere in a big, big bank, waiting for him until then. The thing was, he knew he could not wait in the flat that long. He didn’t have it in him. Not all that time with Phil and her and it. Even if sometimes they did all go out.
But he didn’t want Jo thinking he wasn’t grateful about the risotto. And he knew she would be upset and even angry with him if he phoned her up and told her what he was going to do, so he was putting it in a letter. And it was better than telling her on the internet because if he posted the letter tomorrow it would take days to get there and he’d be gone by then, back to the streets. Sending a letter with bad news was like planting a bomb. You didn’t want to be around when it blew up.
Lottery Boy Page 19