Lottery Boy (2 page)

He was twelve but getting closer to thirteen now so that he could count out the months in between just using one hand. When he was at little school, he’d been the tallest boy in the year, taller even than the tallest
girl
. And already he was 167 centimetres and a bit. He had a tape measure in one of his pockets that he’d nicked out the back of a builder’s van and in old-fashioned height that was nearly exactly five foot six. And that was bigger than some grown-up men, and as big as some
Feds
. His mum had been tall but, thinking about it, that was because a lot of the time he’d been small. And she’d worn heels. Platform one and platform two she used to call them. Maybe his dad was tall. Maybe his dad could reach up and touch the concrete ceiling at the skateboard park. Anyway, whatever his dad was, he was definitely going to get taller. That was his breed. He’d decided this, because as soon as he was tall enough, he was going to rob a bank or get a job or something and save up and get a proper place with a toilet and a bed and a TV.

He tuned back in. She was still sizing him up.

“Sixteen … are you
really
?”

“Yeah, I had cancer when I was little and that shrunk me up a lot,” he said all matter of fact, because cancer did that to you. His mum, after all the hospitals, had never worn heels again.

“Oh, love. You poor love. You go and get home… Look, get yourself a good meal with this and don’t go spending it on anything else, will you?” she said, looking at him now with bigger eyes. Bully didn’t like being talked to like that. He could spend it on what he liked if she gave it to him, but his face lit up when he heard the crackle of a note coming out of her purse.

When he saw the colour he couldn’t believe it. A bluey! Jack could have tins for a couple of weeks off this, the kind she liked with her name on and only
3%
ash
. And he fancied an ice cream and chips for himself and a proper
cold
can of Coke from a shop. He hadn’t had a proper can in weeks. Bare expensive in London, a can of Coke was. A total rip-off. That was the first thing that had really shocked him when he got here on the train: the price of a can of Coke.

“There,” she said. “You get home soon.” She smiled to herself as if she was the one getting the money and walked off towards one of the eating places on the river.

“Cheers, yeah. God bless ya,” he said after her. He thought that sounded good. It was what the Daveys said: the old shufflers on the streets with spiders up their noses and kicked-about carpet faces. He’d called them that after one of them had told him his name was Dave. He’d asked for a lend of Bully’s mobile and Bully had run away and steered clear of all of them after that.

Jack growled, her quiet warning one, under the radar, just for Bully. He looked up, the queen still smiling at him from off the twenty-pound note. But he lost his smile when he saw who it was, and the dog he had with him. Bully told himself he mustn’t run – worse for him later if he did because there was Janks with his eyes shaded out and his lizard grin that said: I know
you
.

Janks robbed beggars all over London town.
Taxing
he called it. He didn’t even need the money, just got a kick out of it, that’s what they said. They said he’d come down from
up north
and made his money dogfighting and breeding all sorts of illegals, and
the rest
they said. You never usually caught him out and about in the daytime with one of his illegals. Too many Feds. But once in a while, doing his rounds, he liked to chance it, showing off one of his pure-bred pit bulls.

Nasty animals. There were a few breeds Bully wasn’t keen on but the only dogs he despised were pit bulls. He didn’t like anything about them: the way they strutted about, looking for trouble with their long, shiny, burnt-smooth faces and tiny, beady black eyes. And they had this thing, so they said – everybody said – this click in their jaws like a key in a lock that meant once they bit down and got a hold of you, they never let go. Once on the estate he’d seen an American pit bull turn on the boy walking it and even when his mates had battered it, Old Mac from the newsagent’s still had to come out with a crow bar and pry it off.

Janks’s pit bull was straining on a long lead, choking itself to get at them. And Jack’s growl went up a notch and she started taking little snappy chunks out of the air.

“Stay, mate, stay, stay, stay… Mate!”

Bully’s top half swayed and twitched like he was a rat with its paws stuck in a glue trap, the rest of him still trying to get away. He’d seen them do that – real rats gnaw their own legs off near the bins round the back of the eating places.

He managed to stagger forward just a few steps and kick Jack round behind him because Jack wasn’t good at backing down. It was one bit of her training she struggled with. She was fine round people – most people anyway – just some dogs rubbed her up the wrong way.

“You’s done well…” Janks said, getting in close so that Bully felt the words on his face. He spoke in a funny way, the words seesawing up and down, the way they did up north. His dog snapped at Jack’s face and Jack snapped back and Bully gave her another punt with his toe.

“I taxed you before, didn’t I?” said Janks. He pulled Bully’s hat off and let it fall. The pit bull instantly went for it – like a nasty game of fetch – and started tearing it apart.

“Grown, ’aven’t ya?” he said, ignoring what was going on at his feet.

Bully was close to Janks’s height now. When he’d first got to the river in the winter time, a long time ago, this man with the same stickleback bit of hair, the same “nice to know you” smile, had asked for a loan. And when Bully had said no, he’d taken his money anyway and given him a kicking, as if that was paying him back.

Bully had managed to keep out of Janks’s way since then.

“You want to mind
that
,” he said, nodding down at Jack. “My dog’ll rip that thing of yours apart. You don’t want to start facing up to me with a dog, boy.”

Bully just stood there, too frightened to work out whether to shake his head or nod.

“Calling me out, are you, big man? You giving me the
eyes
?” And Janks jerked Bully’s head down in the crook of his arm, pushing his face into his jacket so that Bully could
smell
him – a sort of sharp, sniffy smell like that stuff his mum used to spray round with – and he did his best to breathe through his mouth.

“Stay! Stay, Jack!” Bully’s muffled voice just about made it out of the headlock.

“Yeah, that’s right. Good
boy
,” said Janks, squeezing his neck harder still.

Bully twisted his head to breathe, looked down and saw daylight at Janks’s feet. Everyone knew he had a cut-down skewer inside his boot. He’d used it once on a guy, a big fat flubber who wasn’t showing him any respect, that’s what Chris and Tiggs had told him. And he imagined it happening the way his mum used to do their spuds in the microwave, stabbing them with a fork, quick, before putting them in:
stab, stab, stab
.

“What she give you?”

“Twenty…” Bully said to the feet. He heard a dog yelp.

“Well, lucky for you that’s what you owe me.”

“Mate…”
he pleaded.

“Who you talkin’ to? I’m not your
mate
.”

Bully felt the crook of Janks’s arm cut into his windpipe and he started making alphabet sounds like he was a little kid.
K … k … k … a … a … r … r
. His head was thumping because the blood was getting stuck in it but he couldn’t say anything, not even sorry, and he felt faint and his legs began to go, making it worse for him.

And then suddenly he could breathe.

“Re-lax …
re-lax
, man…” Janks was patting Bully hard on his back, like he was helping him to cough something up. Bully pulled away, dazed like he’d been trapped underground for a week. He wobbled a bit and saw what Janks was seeing: a couple of fake Feds in high-vis: Community Support Officers standing away by the footbridge with their backs to them, talking to the beggar man.

Bully looked back at Janks who was staring right through him. Then he looked down, saw Jack at his feet, blood dripping off her ear, and his anger roared up quick like a paper fire. And while he waited for it to burn out he thought about what he’d do to Janks one day when he was robbing banks or had a job and was a whole lot bigger than him.

Bully handed the note over and Janks took it without a word. Then he heard a terrible sound: Janks screwing up his twenty quid into a ball, because there was only one thing you did with a ball… And Bully watched Janks walk over to the railings and flick his money into the river.

“Don’t keep me waiting next time.
Mate
,” he said, smoothing his bit of hair down, a gust of wind blowing it straight back up again. Bully nodded down at the ground, paid his respects and looked away.

When Jack stopped growling, Bully picked his hat up, ripped apart and slick with dog spit, and shoved it in one of his pockets. He checked Jack’s ear. It looked worse than it was. Janks’s dog had only managed to take a nick out of it. He used the rest of his water to wash the blood off, then gave Jack a squirt of it.

“You got to learn when to back down, mate,” he said. Jack didn’t seem to be listening, too busy licking Bully’s face. “Get off,” he said but didn’t push her away. He rounded up some of the spit off his cheek and swabbed the wound on her ear because dog spit was good for cuts, as good as medicine (though he had never seen this printed in the magazines).

Eventually he stood up, went and took a long look in the river. He thought maybe he could still see it, a spec of blue, his twenty quid, sailing away under the bridge and out into the sea. The tide was going that way. He caught himself thinking about jumping in after it, though he couldn’t swim, not even doggy-paddle. He’d bunked off the school swimming lessons at the leisure centre because he didn’t like the noise there in the pool, all the screaming and shouting. He bunked off school too, for the same reason: having to sit still at a desk, questions and answers from thirty other kids all day, right next to his ears. He could just about put up with it when he had his mum to come home to at the end of it all, but after she’d died it was all just empty noise.

He looked back towards the footbridge and one of the fake Feds was looking at him. Bully started walking off, whistled Jack to follow him, getting in step with the zombies until he could cut through between the eating places and make for the station. He thought about taking one of the tunnels to be on the safe side but he didn’t like tunnels, even in summer. He didn’t like going under the ground if he could help it. Besides, he’d got used to his route: past the fountain that wet the pavement on windy days, across the traffic lights, through the arch, up the steps where the dead train drivers’ names were scratched into the walls, and into Waterloo.

Waiting at the traffic lights, he leaned against the railings. He watched a few zombies get ahead of the game, beat the lights, hop and skip between the cars like kids out for the day. He fiddled with one of the red rubber bands he wore on his wrists. He collected them, picked them up off the pavement and at busy times, fired them at the zombies as they raced away. It was a game he played. He’d invented different ways to do it, too – and so far, he’d come up with seven. His favourite, though, was to just ping it off his thumb. And that was what he did …
ping
. A zombie just stepping off the kerb slapped the back of his neck and looked round. Bully gave him the innocent face.

“Big Issue… Help the homeless… Big Issue…” A woman with soft brown eyes was standing a few feet away. She was here most days in the summer now. And he had got used to her.

The green man came and went but Bully wasn’t in a rush. He had all day, what was left of it anyway. He did a quick check for Feds, then started patting himself down. He did this ten, twenty times a day depending on the weather. It had become a routine, going through his pockets, making sure he had all his stuff, that he was all there. And it passed the time when he was bored because his coat had a lot of pockets. He’d robbed it from a bag outside a charity shop, leaving his old one there in its place. It was the best coat he’d ever had.
Barbour
it said on the label. It was warm and padded like a blanket inside but with a green and greasy skin to it that stopped the wind and rain like a brick wall. It had been way too big for him in the winter but he was growing into it now and the edge of it left a greasy mark on his jeans just above his knees. The best bit about it was the pockets. He’d never seen a coat like it. It had eleven altogether. The biggest one was like a rubber ring with holes cut in it that ran all the way round the bottom inside. And he’d cut holes in the two for his hands so that he could stash stuff in his jeans without anybody in the shops seeing.

“Big Issue… Help the
hopeless
… homeless, I mean,” the woman said, correcting herself, but no one heard her except Bully. He laughed – not nasty like he had done at the skateboard park because the lady had her long brown hair in a ponytail, like his mum used to wear it when she was working.

He started pulling out the usual bits and pieces he had on him all the time: sugar packets, salt packets, paper serviettes, tape measure, Jack’s metal spoon, plastic spoons, two cigarette lighters, penknife, extra elastic bands, sauce packets, towel scrap, Jack’s holdall (bigger and tougher than a plastic bag), plastic bags, biros, crisp packets (empty), Jack’s lead (a
proper
one too, not a tatty bit of string), chewing-gum (chewed and unchewed), a pack of dog Top Trumps (best of breed) and his receipts. They weren’t
his
receipts. He just collected them, went looking for them on the ground, sometimes fished them out of bins. He read them out of curiosity to see what it was that people bought in shops, but the reason he kept them was in case he was ever caught
outside
a shop with something he hadn’t paid for. And then if the guard marched him back inside he could say, “But I’ve got a receipt, mate.” And see how long they spent looking through that lot before they let him off. That was the idea, anyway.