Lottery Boy (17 page)

The sky was running out of sun but it was still bright to his left, to the west, as he headed a rough north, following the little arrow clenched in his hand. He kept away from the long main roads now, with the evening traffic building up even on a Sunday, and walked down the side streets.

When the road began to go uphill he thought that was good because it felt like he was going
up
north. He was pretty sure now that when he got out of London, things would get better and he would find someone to cash in his ticket for him.

Hampstead
it said when he finally got to the top of a very long hill. And he squinted hard and looked down to where he had been but he could not see the zoo, or the Eye, blinking out the end of the day, not even a thin strip of brown river.

It was a posh kind of place full of one-off shops with names he hadn’t seen before. He planned to push on but when he saw the newsagent’s outside the tube station he couldn’t resist it – he got his fiver out and went in and bought two cans of Coke – one for him, one for Jack.

“Uh-oh, what’s that?” said the till lady when he’d bought the drinks and turned round to leave. And Bully didn’t bother telling her what she was
uh-ohing
at.

Outside, he drank his can down in one. As he glugged, he clocked four boys, older than him, ganged up across the road. They kept looking at their phones, and then looking up as if waiting for someone specific to arrive, waiting – he realized – for
him
. He felt sick and panic sent his skin buzzing.

Slowly he began to walk away, keeping his eyes to the ground (if you looked at them, they looked at you). Then his head went back without his say-so and all he could see was the dark blue sky.

“You busted my car! You little—”

Bully half swivelled round, saw the red snapback right in his face; grey, gappy teeth in ones and twos, spitting out swear words at him.

Bully twisted away, tried to punch his way out of trouble, but the snapback was hanging on to his hair and the smooth soles of the flip-flops weren’t giving him any grip. He kicked them off but he couldn’t get away and the skinny guy in the snapback was starting to yell out. All the zombies did was stand and watch like it was on TV. And as he spun round Bully caught a look at the boys across the road, wising up to what was going down.

Snap!

The snapback had been snapped at! He was yelling and screaming his head off, with Jack’s teeth poking out of the flap, giving him a proper munch. See how that felt!

“Drop it!” Bully commanded, because though the guy wasn’t much heavier than him, he was
towing
him. And then Jack stopped mincing his arm up, let go and Bully was gaining speed and running into the underground.

There were no staff about and he forced his way through the barriers. He looked for the escalators but there was just a big square lift the size of his old blue bedroom.

He ran into it, looking for the buttons to press, but there were no buttons and the doors weren’t shutting either. The faces were looking at him, then seeing Jack, blood on her fangs, and they were shrinking back against the metal walls … didn’t want to share a lift with
that
.

He could see back through the barriers that the boys were across the road now and there was no way the lift doors were going to close before they got to him.

He wanted to stay where he was. That same feeling he got every day but ten times worse in the lift. And he had to fight it. He had to fight it
now
; didn’t have all day, just a few seconds more to make his mind up. Was he going or staying?

“That dog really should be on a lead…” a woman’s voice inside the lift was saying, her voice floating about outside his head. And he got out the lift, got ready to run back through the barriers and sprint as hard as he could and maybe, maybe ram through the boys.

And then he saw the stairs.

Well, this
was
one.

The steps didn’t just go straight down, they went round and round in a spiral like water going down a plughole. He took them two, three at time, grasping at the metal banister. Round and round, down and down he went. The yellow metal edges of the stairs blurred into one long golden path. The rucksack was cutting into his waist, really hurting him now, jolting and making him scream in his mouth, but he didn’t have time to get Jack out and he tunnelled on through the pain, down and down and down…

He could hear feet behind him, catching him up – but just one or two sets – where were the other feet? They were taking the lift, that’s what they were doing – outflanking him – and his heart got ahead of him for a second because he had no way out if they got to the platform first. Still, though, he carried on running, trying to gauge how fast a lift could travel. He could hear the feet behind him, thumping on the metal strips …
bang, bang, bang
… didn’t look round, just kept going on down… How many steps was it now? A hundred? Less? More? How quick was a lift? What would he do when he got to the bottom? It was the sort of maths they didn’t teach you at school.

Then he nearly had a heart attack – feet were coming
up
the stairs – and he put on his own brakes but it was just a man – a weekend zombie, head down, a coffee in one hand, tired of waiting for the next lift. And as Bully went past him he took advantage of the situation and deployed
defensive counter-measures
and flicked the cup of coffee all over the man so that he took up the whole stairs, complaining and shouting about it. That should slow them down.

A breeze pushed past him. He matched that up to what he knew: a train coming in, the sound rushing after it, brakes squealing.

As he sped up again he ignored the voice in his head telling him his legs were giving out, because he could see the brighter lights of the platform now – and he came pelting down onto it, voices echoing fifty or sixty steps behind.

Mind the gap, mind the gap
, said the platform announcer.
Get in the train, get in the train
, said the voice inside Bully’s head. And further down the platform he heard the lift doors opening…
Beep, beep, beep
.

“There! There! Get ’im! Get ’im!” Jackals and vultures came screeching and swooping down the platform towards him, and with the train doors beginning to narrow and not caring about the gap, he turned sideways and flung himself through.

Seconds later, double faces at the glass, spitting, mouthing terrible things, just millimetres between the words and Bully as the tube train pulled away.

Bully looked at the tube map above his head. He was on a straight
black
line, the
Northern
line. This was good. If he stayed on the tube the whole way to the end of the line then Watford couldn’t be far. And there was Brent Cross! He could stop off there and go looking for Tiggs and Chris. They would help him out.

The train was pulling into the next stop but instead of Golders Green it said Belsize Park and Bully saw the train was travelling back into town, going south. It was the
wrong
stop, and the
wrong
way.

And now he was waiting on an empty platform on the opposite track, waiting for the next train, back
north
. Only the platform wasn’t empty now. And he was trying to pretend to himself that he hadn’t heard the feet squeaking out of the train ten carriages back, and trying to convince himself that none of the boys had jumped onto one of the other carriages nearer the lift. He wasn’t looking. He was
refusing
to look. For this minute his head had had enough of looking out for fear, and his lungs were full to the brim with it. He had lost his edge.

He looked down the tunnel instead, begging for the train to come in. And he shuffled his toes onto the yellow line of the platform, squinted into the darkness for the smallest speck of light. But there was no train coming in, just humans
moving in
on him, to his left, at the edges of his vision, where he was choosing not to stare.

“Give us the ticket!” the boy said in an almost cheerful whisper, couldn’t believe his luck. And then Bully
had
to look. There were two boys, bigger than him. One black, one white.

Bully held his penknife up. It wasn’t much of a weapon, especially with the blades still inside. They cackled at it, like Man Sammy had. The fun was over now and they were shouting, threatening, trying to work themselves up to rush him, to get it out of him before the next train came in. They were taking their time, though, because neither one was a leader – the alpha dog (he’d read about them in his magazines). Every pack has an alpha and these boys were the tag alongs, the beta dogs. But that didn’t mean they
weren’t
going to go for him.

And then a shiver went through him, but a good one that made him feel full of himself, pushing the fear out of him, out of his chest and into the tunnel. And he smiled, he really did smile, when he remembered that he had
another
weapon, better than any penknife.

It threw them when he knelt down, kept them back just long enough for Bully to say, “Here! Jack! Here, girl! OUT!” And she couldn’t
wait
to get out! And when they saw that dog with a head full of shark’s teeth, blood bubbling between her ears, they were breathing in Bully’s fear. He could almost see it, like it was a mist.

“Back off!” said Bully. “Back off. You’re not getting nothing!” And they did, they backed away, swearing and threatening, but they did back away up the steps.

The train whistled in. Bully jumped on with Jack. The boys heard the doors beeping and ran for the exit, back up to the street for a signal for their phones to tell the rest of the gang he was travelling back the way he’d come.

That was their mistake, because Bully did a brave thing, his head telling him this was the best thing to do but his heart having nothing to do with it. He went and jumped
off
the train as soon as their ankles were starting to disappear up the steps.

Never get predictable
.

So, he was being unpredictable now. Not doing what he wanted to do, which was get on this train. He looked up at the information board and saw it change and lose a minute of his life, of his ticket’s life, as he thought about what to do next.