Lottery Boy

by Michael Byrne

  It took him a good five minutes or so to get the words right because he had to cross quite a few wrong ones out. Finally he found an old used envelope and crossed out the flat’s address on the front and put Jo’s on the back. All he needed was a new stamp.

  As he was finishing up, the letter box started flapping. He froze and put his finger to his lips to shh Jack. And she went like stone, just like the hound at the cemetery. He was thinking it was maybe a moneylender and he didn’t want to have to go explaining Phil’s debt was nothing to do with him and his half of the money. Not with the darkness outside, getting ready…

  There was more flap, flapping… And then his old name slipping in through the letter box, following along after him, tracking him down.

  “Bully…”

  He woke to the day, as always, surrounded by rubbish. Black bin liners leaking from their ripped corners right next to where he was sleeping. Old stuff and clothes everywhere. And books, piled up and flapping open. He kind of liked it that way though, being surrounded by all this mess.

  “Brad… Brad… Bradley…”

  “What?”

  “You know what… Come on… Breakfast…” Rosie shouting up the stairs and then going back down to the kitchen.

  He didn’t want to get up. He’d been to school every day this week. And it was Wednesday and he deserved a lie-in, didn’t he?

  Jack did a hop round at the end of the bed. She gave his toes a lick and settled back down. She was getting heavier and Bully was pretty sure it wasn’t just the extra food. She did a dog sigh that was almost exactly the same as a human one except it was just a little bit sadder because there were no words to go with it.

  “All right for you,” he said. “I never get a day off in this place.” He sighed himself and then his head started rolling about, the insides of it thinking of getting back to sleep but already, despite himself, caught up in the new day.

  He looked over at the empty window, full of blue sky. He put his glasses on and his skateboard underneath it sharpened up. He was supposed to wear them all day but he usually just put them on when he wanted to look at something specific, like a face in the distance or a number plate.

  Rosie and John had bought him the skateboard a couple of weeks ago. Rosie had said Alex could teach him some tricks when he came home from uni. He’d said no, because he didn’t want to scratch it. He liked waking up and seeing it there, propped up in the corner of his room, the newness still shining through the plastic. And he looked at it now. It wasn’t the one he’d have bought but he loved it because someone had bought it for him.

  “I suppose you want feedin’ and cleanin’…” He sighed again and this time he got up. He reached out for his striped green tie, still in a leftover noose from yesterday, and put it on. And now except for his shoes he was wearing his whole school uniform. It saved time in the mornings.

  He walked slowly down the stairs so his socks didn’t slip on the smooth wood. He didn’t see why Rosie wouldn’t get carpet. He would buy them some, proper thick stuff like you got in pubs, when his money turned up. He would be eighteen, Alex’s age, by then. It was a time so far in the future that he could only think of it as a science-fiction film.

  He went through into the kitchen. Rosie was skating around a little yellow lake of dog wee, trying to make toast.

  Bully pretended he hadn’t seen the dog wee, though he knew Rosie was waiting for him to clean it up because it was his dog. She stopped what she was doing when he came in to look at him. But it wasn’t about the dog wee.

  “You woke up in that uniform, didn’t you?” He didn’t know how she could tell, he was even tucked in and everything.

  “No…” he lied reflexively, but then added: “Not all of it.” And he pointed to the tie.

  “Bradley,” she said. “What are we going to do with you? Eh?” But she didn’t say it like a real question because they’d taken him on.

  It wasn’t legal yet exactly. Phil didn’t want him, didn’t need him now. He’d been happy to see the back of him when he got back from Emma’s mum’s place to find Jo and her dad patiently waiting there, watching Mighty Ships on the TV with Bully.

  But though he’d moved in that night, they still had to go through the process. And that would take a while longer. Everything took a while in this new world of his.

  He’d thought it was going to be like a holiday, that first night when him and Jacky had come back in the van to this big, posh house with next to nothing. But it hadn’t felt like that at all. The next day had felt a bit like being in prison. Every day the same thing: get up at the same time, go to school, eat your food at the table and don’t wear your clothes to bed. The list was long. And knowing he had to be here for years and years, waiting to get what was his.

  And that had really worked him up at first.

  “Errgh,” said Jo, coming into the kitchen with lipstick on and eating a KitKat. “You do know there’s dog wee all over the floor?” They both looked at her because, yes, they did know.

  “No shit,” said Bully.

  Rosie didn’t tell him off because she knew he was trying to cut down on his swearing, like people did with smoking.

  “I was only saying,” Jo said. “I’m off now anyway.”

  “What about your breakfast?” said Rosie. And Jo just waved the KitKat. She was at college now and Bully wished she was still at his new school, on the other side of the hill.

  He followed her to the front door, lolloping along after her like a greyhound because he was getting taller now. She turned back to look at him. “Brads? Are my lips smudged?” He shook his head. He had his suspicions that she had a boyfriend now in this college place.

  “How does it feel to be rich and famous?” She said it like a joke sometimes when she left the house because he wasn’t rich, not yet anyway.

  “Yeah, great,” he said.

  “See you later, alligator,” she said. She picked up her bag. It was leather and all worn out. And though he knew she liked it like that, he was still going to buy her a new one. When he got his money or maybe even before then if he wandered into a shop with a bunch of receipts and helped himself to one, or got a paper round and saved up. He was in two minds about it.

  He went back to the kitchen and mopped up the dog wee with kitchen roll.

  He washed his hands before he poured his cereal out because Rosie was still there.

  “You off in a minute?” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah…”

  “You’re going to go, aren’t you, today?”

  “Yeah?” he said, doing his surprised voice, like why would he not go to school on a Wednesday? As if that was the weirdest thing in the world not to do.

  “Bradley. You will go, won’t you? Mrs Avery can walk Jacky later because you don’t have time now… What?” she said because he was smiling out the corner of his mouth.

  He had a feeling Jacky was getting heavier because she was pregnant. Because she’d been hanging out with Mrs Avery’s poodle a lot. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that because both Mrs Avery and her dog were proper posh and spoke like it too. He reminded himself, though, that poodles had originally been bred as hunting dogs.

  Ten minutes later, Rosie left to go to work. When he heard the door go, he said, “Go get your lead! Go on, girl.” He just about had time to walk Jacky himself if he went into tutor group late.

  He ran up Swain’s Lane to the little circle of shops at the top of the village. He let Jacky chase a pigeon on the green, watched the pigeon just walk off, like it wasn’t bothered by this three-legged dog.

  A woman in black was waving at him. He squinted and nodded back. A lot of them were getting to know him up here now; he was the boy with the three-legged dog. And reminded of that, he stood and waited for her do a wee.

  While he waited for Jacky he put on his glasses to scope out the village and immediately clocked the black Peugeot circling the green very slowly. You can never be too careful… But it was all right, it was Mr Douglas the new
sagent, delivering the late papers by hand. He knew the plates, knew all the plates around the village. And the last three letters of Mr Douglas’s were OES, which were the initials of the Old English Sheepdog Society. (Mr Douglas had not realized his plates were personalized until Bully had pointed it out to him.) He would, he decided, get a paper round and earn the money for Jo’s bag, just in case he got caught nicking it and they took it off him in the cells. And also because he knew that nicking it would make her sad.

  “Oh, Jacky, Jesus… No! You’re pissing all wrong!” he said because she was trying to cock her leg like she used to, in fact like she was a boy dog, because bitches were never supposed to do that. And it was the leg that wasn’t there… He looked round but nobody had seen her go down.

  “Come on. We got to get back. You’re making me late.”

  When he got back the post was on the mat and he kicked it over with his foot, trying to see who the letters were from without picking them up or even touching them. So far he’d had nothing addressed to him here and he liked it that way.

  Eventually word would get round where the half-a-millionaire boy was living now. Words were free and the price of a second-class stamp was less than 59 pence, and those letters would start arriving soon just three houses in from the corner of Swain’s Lane.

  But not today. Just bills by the look of the brown envelopes and he would pay those for John and Rosie when he got his money or maybe before then. All their bills for everything, for ever.

  He decided he was going to go to school. For the morning at least, to sign in. He didn’t want other letters turning up here saying he was bunking off. So he made sure Jacky had plenty of food and water and reminded himself that Mrs Avery was coming round in a couple of hours and she knew about dogs. He grabbed his blazer and shoved it in his bag, ready to put it on as he went into tutor late. He shut the door and walked away from the house and then turned round as if to check it was still there.

  He looked up to his room, right at the top in the roof of the house, the little square of glass divided into four. It looked a little bit like a prison cell from where he was but it didn’t feel like a prison any more. Not now. It just felt like somewhere he was living, this place with his new … friends. A big old question mark in his heart, he couldn’t quite bring himself to use the f word yet.

  He thought he heard Jacky barking from the kitchen then, and he took a step back, and another, and then thought about going back.

  But he stopped in his tracks because he knew Jacky didn’t act like a baby when he was gone. She knew he was going to come back. She was trained. It was what you did with dogs; you trained them to trust you.

  And making up for lost time, Bully got a move on, cold without his blazer, jogging up the hill, because school was on the other side.

  Enjoyed this book? Tweet us your thoughts:

  #LotteryBoy @WalkerBooksUK @MichaelByrneEtc

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There was once a primary school teacher (so the story goes) who every year somehow managed to get the children in her class to paint and draw the most beautiful pictures in the school. When she was asked what her secret was, she said that she took the pictures away from the children before they finished them. Well, I have to say my experience of writing this book for children has been the exact opposite of that.

  So, thank you to Zoe King, my agent, for going out on a limb and doing a whole lot more with the book than I could have ever done without her. And thank you to my editors: Gill Evans, who kept telling me to go away and do it again (but better); Lucy Earley, who really made the book sing; and Emily Damesick, who gave it a such a lovely rough polish at the end.

  My thanks also to my mother and father, who worked so hard to give me a life they never had. And finally to Andrew Williams, the happiest Welshman I know and my bestest friend in the whole wide world

  Michael Byrne worked as an English teacher in a secondary school just a mile from Heathrow. He then moved to Winchester to work as an airport taxi driver. The irony is not lost on him.

  Michael lives with his daughter, Eve, and their cat, Chloe. He is now a full-time writer; this is his first novel.

  WINNER OF THE GUARDIAN CHILDREN’S FICTION PRIZE

  Carnegie Medallist Frank Cottrell Boyce transports readers from the steppe of Mongolia to the streets of Liverpool in a story that is compelling, miraculous and laugh-out-loud funny.

  “Funny, original and moving … a joy to read.” Independent

  “Illustrated with captivating photographs, this is a treasure in itself.” Daily Mail

  WINNER OF THE BRANFORD BOASE AWARD

  In a newspaper office, Paul Faustino, South America’s top sports journalist, sits opposite the man they call El Gato – the Cat – the world’s greatest goalkeeper. On the table between them stands the World Cup…

  In the hours that follow, El Gato tells his incredible life story – how he, a poor logger’s son, learns to become a World Cup-winning goalkeeper. And the most remarkable part of this story is the man who teaches him – the mysterious Keeper, who haunts a football pitch at the heart of the claustrophobic forest.

  “Mal Peet [takes] the football novel into a new league.”

  The Guardian

  “A remarkable and absorbing story with football at its heart, but superb storytelling in its soul.”

  Branford Boase Award panel

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. All statements, activities, stunts, descriptions, information and material of any other kind contained herein are included for entertainment purposes only and should not be relied on for accuracy or replicated as they may result in injury.

  First published 2015 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  Text © 2015 Michael Byrne

  Cover images: Boy running © Red Edge / Anna Baria;

  Chasing men © Sean Murphy / Getty Images, Inc

  The right of Michael Byrne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4063-6387-6 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk