Lia's Guide to Winning the Lottery (6 page)

‘Jesus Christ! Bloody hell!' Jack ran through his long vocabulary of swear words at increasing volume, and launched himself across the duvet to give me a bear hug, just as Donna stormed through the door.

‘Jack! Mind your language! And what's going on here?'

‘Nothing, Ma, although technically you have no right to ask that question given that I am sixteen and
this is the privacy of my bedroom. If I choose to entertain a girl here, you'll just have to lump it.'

‘But it won't be me,' I said, shrugging him off. ‘Jack, I'm going to call Shaz, see if she can meet up down the Broadway Café. Half an hour?'

Shaz was busy, so it was just Jack and me having breakfast at Tithe Green's main eating place, which used to be a greasy spoon before it got a manager with ideas and wipeable Cath Kidston tablecloths.

‘Right,' he said, spooning sugar into his tea. ‘Tell me.'

‘I told you. I won eight million pounds. And a bit more.'

‘On that ticket? The one we bought the other day?'

‘Yup.'

Jack had this big goofy grin that you mostly saw when he scored a goal or when it was time for Food Tech, his favourite subject. Or when he was thinking about sex. So he was quite a smiley boy, really, because his life revolved around food, football and fantasy. His dual ambitions were to play for Tottenham and to win
MasterChef
.

‘Of course, ideally I'll do both and then it'd have to be
Celebrity MasterChef,
' he told me once. ‘But that's OK.'

‘Bloody hell, eight million, that's so cool,' he said, as his plate of bacon, eggs and sausage arrived.

‘Breakfast's on me,' I said, generously, spreading strawberry jam onto a croissant that had been crafted by my dad's fair hands just a few hours earlier – the café was one of Dad's best customers.

‘Too right it is. Breakfast's on you forever.'

‘Who says?'

‘I say. I bought the ticket, after all. I'm your manager.'

‘Err . . . who said I need a manager?'

‘I did. Buyer of the ticket.'

‘Jack. You couldn't manage a bus queue.'

‘I'm the captain of the A team, Lia. Proof of my leadership potential.'

‘The A team that lost to the B team two weeks ago,' I pointed out. He stuck his tongue out at me.

‘Told you it was a good present,' he said.

‘You didn't know it was going to be worth eight million! You were buying me the world's meanest birthday present.'

‘God. Typical. I buy you a present worth eight sodding million pounds and you're still not satisfied.
And
I said I was going to get you a DVD. Won't bother now. Huh.
Women
.'

‘Jack! What are you
like
?'

He bit into his fried egg, and yolk exploded over his chin. We were still laughing when I spotted a skinny, dark-haired guy standing by the counter, studying the takeaway menu. Argh! Raf!

I rushed up to the counter, supposedly to find serviettes for Jack, but actually – ‘Oh! Wow! Hi Raf. Fancy seeing you in here. I thought you had a café of your own.'

Raf looked terrible. Huge dark shadows under his eyes. His hand, as he picked up his latte to go, shook slightly.

‘Hey Lia,' he said. ‘Ummm. I . . . errr. . .'

‘Come and sit with us,' I said.

‘Oh.' Awkward silence.

‘That'll be fifty pence extra if you're having it in,' said Janice, the café manager.

Raf looked as thrown as if she'd asked him for fifty thousand pounds. He dug deep into his pockets.

‘Here you go,' I said, tossing a coin to Janice. I knew she'd catch it because she plays netball with my mum. Bit sad, really, middle-aged women playing a game they should have grown out of when they were my age, but my mum didn't really get why I thought she should do aqua aerobics, or badminton,
or something else a bit more age-appropriate.

Raf followed me to our table. ‘Look who's here,' I said.

‘Who?' Jack was busily buttering toast.

‘Raf, you know Raf. From my Science group.'

The air seemed to congeal, like the egg on Jack's chin.

‘Oh yes,' said Jack, narrowing his eyes. ‘We've met.' He put on a posh accent. ‘Hello
Rafe
.'

I chucked him a wodge of serviettes. ‘It's not Rafe. It's Raf. Grow up.'

‘It was a goal,' said Raf. ‘You know it was.'

‘Should've been a red card.'

‘The referee's decision is final.'

‘Cheat.'

‘Bad loser.'

‘Thug. I saw Olly's leg after you crashed into him. Call that a tackle? Maybe you thought we were playing
rugger
.'

I flapped my hands at them.

‘Shut up! I've won the lottery! That's more important than football.'

‘That depends,' said Jack, ‘whether you're talking about a decision that was downright daylight robbery.'

Raf shrugged. ‘We still won.'

I gave up, finished my croissant, drained my mug.

‘I am going to go and spend large amounts of money,' I said, although I wasn't quite sure where this money was going to materialise from.

‘Wanker,' said Jack. ‘Posh twit.'

Raf just sneered.

‘And then I am going to investigate holidays for after GCSEs. Ibiza, I thought. Or Crete. I thought a group of us could go. I would like to invite both of you. But I can't do that if you're going to fight all the time.'

That shut them up. Raf had a strange look in his eyes. As though he was trying to focus on something small, a long way away.

‘Crete is nice,' he said, softly. ‘I've been there. . . I think you'd like it.'

‘You're forgetting one thing, Lia,' said Jack.

‘What?'

‘What about Shazia? Her dad's never going to let her go on holiday with all of us, is he? How're you going to buy him off, Lia?'

Oh. This was a problem. Shaz's dad used to be quite normal about religion – i.e. not very interested – but
then a few years ago he started going to the mosque a lot more and ratcheting up the Islamic rules they kept at home. He was always threatening to move Shaz to an all-girls school, and about a year ago she started wearing a headscarf. We never really talked about it. Shaz was mega-sensitive about Islamophobia – she was constantly lecturing Jack because his dad read the
Daily Express
– but I'd always assumed that she found it a real pain. You can't imagine someone as stroppy as Shaz wanting to hide under a scarf. I had no doubts that when she was eighteen she'd just do her own thing.

‘I'll have to sort it out somehow,' I said. ‘Maybe we can pretend it's a girls-only trip. Or go to a Muslim country – Morocco, maybe, or Turkey.'

‘Dubai,' said Raf, dreamily. ‘The world's only six star hotel is in Dubai.'

‘You're going to be spending Lia's money for her, are you?' asked Jack. ‘Because, as her manager, I can tell you that if she's going to fork out for a six star hotel, the guest list will be strictly limited. Just Lia and me – and Shaz, if we can persuade her.'

Raf finished his latte and stood up. ‘I'd better be going. Bye, Lia.'

I watched him walk away. ‘Thanks a
lot
, Jack. I've
been trying to get to know him all year, and you have to be completely obnoxious.'

‘You have?' Jack speared his last rasher of bacon, and plunged it into his mouth. He'd have to learn some table manners if we were going to hang out at six star hotels. Although I'm not sure if they'd even serve a Full English in Dubai.

‘Don't waste your time with him, Lia. He's clearly gay.'

‘No he's
not
.'

‘He
so
is.'

‘You're just a homophobe. And he's
not
.'

‘So you fancy him?'

‘That's my business.'

‘Yeah, right, Lia. Don't bring him on our holiday. Anyway I'm going. Thanks for breakfast.'

Jack gave me an eggy kiss on the cheek and left. I went to the counter, asked for the bill, which came to £15.75 – the prices went up with the polka-dot tablecloths – and pulled out my purse.

Nothing there.

I might be a multi-millionaire, but I was just as skint as I had been the night before.

Chapter 6

How good are you at making decisions? Because you'll need to improve
. . .

‘The most important question for you to think about,' said Gilda, ‘is whether you go public or not.'

Gilda was my Winner's Adviser. She was about Mum's age but a bit curvier, and she had a nice friendly smile. Plus she had eight million pounds for me. I liked her right away.

Anyway, when she started going on about publicity I was kind of surprised. Surely the most important question was how I was going to break it to my family that my money was mine. Only mine. And then there was the question of how to move things on with Raf, after our promising start. If only Jack hadn't put him off. Maybe I could pop round later and find out. . .

Also, how quickly could I move out of this shabby maisonette, and into my own plush apartment?
Could I leave school right away? Was that leather jacket still on the stall? And should I pick chestnut highlights or go the whole hog and opt for the Japanese straightening treatment, to eliminate my messy curls forever? Obviously that wasn't the
most
important question, but it was what Natasha and I had spent forty minutes discussing that morning, with Shaz texting in her thoughts from her granny's house in Wembley.

We'd done the boring bit where I handed over the ticket and my birth certificate and my passport and Gilda scanned them and checked them and sent them all off on her laptop to head office.

My Personal Banker, ‘Call me Kevin', arrived (tall, younger than my dad, looked a little bit like Daniel Craig. Mum and I gave him extra-big smiles). Kevin handed over my cheque book and bank details, and a debit card.

And then Gilda pressed a few buttons and
kerching!
– a slow
kerching
, admittedly, Gilda said the money could take up to forty-eight hours to arrive. (How? Why?) But eight million pounds was coming my way.

I felt exactly the same, and yet completely different. I was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, I was a multi-millionairess. I could buy anything I wanted,
go anywhere in the world – but I still had History coursework which was due in at the end of the week. If I'd suddenly discovered that I could fly it wouldn't have surprised me. Anything was possible. Now this had happened, so could anything else.

‘There you go, Lia,' said my dad, who still wasn't looking all that well. He was pale, and beads of sweat stood out on his top lip. ‘You'll never have to come running up the hill to bum money off me to pay your café bill again.'

‘Ha, ha,' I said.

‘We'll be looking in your purse for a spare tenner,' said Mum.

‘Hands off!' I said.

‘Have you thought at all about anonymity, Lia?' asked Gilda. ‘If you decide to go public, then we need to organise a press conference quite soon. We wouldn't want the news to get out and you wake up to find the world's press on your doorstep.'

‘Lia definitely wants to stay anonymous,' said Mum, stirring her tea. ‘She's much too young to cope with all the attention. We'll keep things very quiet. Just tell a few friends and family.'

‘Yeah, right, Paula,' I said. She'd been on the phone all morning.

Gilda said, ‘Paula? I thought your name was Sarah,' and Mum said, ‘Oh, a family joke! Lia's always kidding around,' with a totally false, merry, little laugh.

Gilda was back on to anonymity. ‘How possible do you think it will be to keep Lia anonymous?' she asked. ‘We tend to find that if one or two people know, then sooner or later – but usually sooner – the winner gets a call from a journalist.'

‘We'll just tell them to go away,' said Dad. ‘Lia's only sixteen.'