Lottery Boy (27 page)

“Jack—”

“Yeah,
what
?” Phil said, getting irritated now, trying to go through his plan.

Bully made the OK sign with his fingers and blinked his eyes wide to say: Is. She. OK?

“Well, she’s not here, is she? Look, all I know is that she was in a right state. The vets said she was as good as dead when they brought her in and they’re not making any promises. I’m telling you that now, so you’d better be prepared for the worst.” He paused to inspect something on Bully’s cheek. He looked puzzled and then annoyed. “No, come on, come on, come on. Let’s have none of that,” he said and showed him the newspaper headlines from the past few days.

The police came in three times to speak to Bully. They praised him, and told him what a brave boy he was, like he was a little kid with cancer or something. He didn’t do a lot of talking because his lungs hurt. As well as all that dirty water getting in them, he’d busted his ribs in the fight. Three of them. And you couldn’t do anything about that. No knives, no injections, no tubes. They didn’t even put you in a plaster cast. You just had to let them heal. And that would take time, the doctors said.

He asked the Feds about how Jack was doing but they didn’t seem to know, promised they’d look into it for him. Then they told him about his own story. Half of London – the wrong half – had got to know about his numbers coming up. And they wanted to know about the dead man in the park because they said they knew Bully had been there. They’d rounded up Tiggs and Chris and some of the men at the dogfight but they were still looking for Janks. His real name was Peter Jefferson. And could he tell them anything about him or the dead man? And Bully said no, he didn’t remember no dead man, didn’t remember
nothing
, especially nothing about Janks.

When they’d taken most of the tubes out and he could eat without anyone helping him, a woman came on to the ward and sat down next to his bed. He clocked straight off who she was. The way she kept smiling when there was nothing to smile about, the way she looked like she’d stopped off on her way to somewhere else. She was from the social. He asked her about Jack but she didn’t know anything about dogs. So he asked her when he was getting out of here. Her smile shrunk a bit and she said they were looking closely at what would be best for him now that his situation had come to light. Because his mother was dead and the whereabouts of his real father unknown, he was
at risk
. He could tell the woman thought it might make him sad to know this. He listened while she took him through his care options.

Care option 1: How did he feel about going back to the flat? (He said “dunno” to that.)

Care option 2: What did he think about living with a direct relative? If they could find one of those. (He just shrugged at that one.)

Care option 3: How about going to stay with a foster family? (He said “no” to that: he didn’t want a fake mum or dad.)

Care option 4: What were his thoughts about going to live in a
care
home
? (He considered it until she told him they didn’t take dogs, only kids.)

The woman went away and came back a couple of days later with her best smile. She was very pleased to tell him they had looked into all his options and that his preferred option was
definitely
now an option. He was going back to the flat.

He opened his eyes and heard the tail end of a scream coming out of his head.

He’d been dreaming.
In
the dream, he was asleep and the smell woke him up. On the couch, the TV turned up, dozing and then starting to cough, this chemical smell coating his throat, getting worse and worse the more he coughed, creeping further down and
fizzing
. And then above the back of the sofa, seeing that stickleback bit of hair spiking up, his old street name seeking him out…
Bully… I’ve come for you…
That was when he woke up from the dream to real life, back on the couch, screaming for his mum.

Cortnie was watching some kiddy crap with
it
on her lap and screaming too. And the baby was starting to cry. And Jack was barking, trying to get up on the couch. It was the dog Cortnie was screaming at because it looked weirder than ever now to her.

He yawned and rolled over and rubbed his shoulder. It itched where the bullet had gone in, and there was a small but deep hole in the skin like a tiny meteorite had torn through the atmosphere and into him a few weeks ago.

“Get
it
off,” Bully said to her because this was where he slept. But what with everyone in and out, and
it
waking up all the time, and Emma nagging him off the sofa when she forgot she was supposed to be nice to him, he didn’t get that much sleep here.

Emma came in from the bathroom. “What
is
going on, Bradley? You can’t keep screaming like that with the baby!” She picked it up and coo cooed it and took it to the kitchen. Then she shouted back: “And don’t let that dog keep jumping up! I don’t want her round the baby!”

He watched Jack’s face appear over the arm of the couch, her eyes frantic and wide before she fell back down and tried again. She was playing a game, trying to get his attention, but he didn’t want to play. “Come ’ere,” he said, waving her round to the front of the couch now that the baby was gone.

When he got out of hospital he couldn’t just go and get Jack from the vet’s. He was too young to be
legally responsible
. You could have a cat, a guinea pig, mice, a
rat
or any of that other four-legged crap, but in the eyes of the law you had to be sixteen to own a dog.

When he finally pestered Phil enough to get him down the pound and sign the forms, he was expecting to see Jack, not this other dog. It looked something like her but was shaved almost all over down to prickly skin and bones. It was thinner, missing five or six kilos in weight and
one
leg. At the back on the left there was just a flap of skin sewn over her stump.

“The leg was a real
mess
. I mean, even if we could have saved it, it really wasn’t worth saving,” said the vet, trying to be nice about it.

Phil, not trying to be nice about it, had suggested getting rid of this dog and getting another one later on, a better one, with a proper
pedigree
and all four legs, when they moved house and got the payout. But Bully shook his head and said no. He said things inside that were a lot worse. Because Jack was still his dog. The difference was that now, he wasn’t so proud of her any more, didn’t want to be showing her off, out and about on the estate. He only took Jack out late at night, after the good TV had gone bad, when there was no one much about.

He hadn’t wanted to go out
at all
because of all the press and the TV wanting pictures of him and Jack. Bully didn’t want any publicity. So they’d had to make do with Phil and the driver who’d found the ticket and told the police about it right at the last minute, at the end of his round. There were loads of pictures of
him
. He’d already got his reward from Camelot for handing it in.

Now they’d all moved on to another story and were leaving him alone, but people still whispered and pointed him out like he was a celebrity. And he didn’t like it. Perhaps when they got the money and they went to live with all the other celebrities, then he wouldn’t mind being pointed at, sitting next to David Beckham maybe. But it had been nearly a month since he’d crawled out of the Thames and they were still waiting for the payout, even though the woman from Camelot had been to see them. She’d come to the flat with just a card, no money in it. She told Phil some questions
still had to be asked
. And they were going to be asked at Camelot, with him and Phil in the firing line.

Phil was already spending. And he was running up a
tab
everywhere and not just on credit cards but with people you had to pay whether you had the money or not. It wasn’t like the bank; they didn’t just write you nasty red reminder letters. They came round in person to see you, as a nasty reminder.

Flap, flap, flap
at the letter box. That was the only interesting part of his day. Bully could tell it was the postie from the way he did it, and he gingerly got up off the couch. His shoulder and his ribs ached first thing in the afternoon when he’d been lying down for a while, and sometimes instead of opening the door, he would spend five minutes listening to the letters coming through the letter box…
Flap, flap, flap
.

He came back to the couch with a pile up to his chin and sorted through the different-sized envelopes, looking for something good. Some of them were cards from people wishing him well (and then making more wishes, asking for things for themselves). Most of them were letters written on little coloured squares of lined paper, one or two even typed on bigger sheets. Whatever sort they were, they were all called
begging letters
. And Phil threw them straight down the rubbish chute if he was in, even the ones that were addressed to Bradley.

The complaining ones just annoyed him when they started saying how hard their lives were and asking him to buy things
he
didn’t even have yet. He preferred reading the ones that asked for stuff straight out, that just tried it on for a bit of a laugh.

He never replied to any of them. Even the funny ones.

He had a visitor at the door.

“Someone to
see
you… A little friend of yours, hon,” Emma said, kissing her lips up, showing him she wasn’t so little.

“What? Who?” he said but she was already back in the kitchen.

Phil’s bedroom door was closed. He was still in bed, dosed up to the eyeballs with painkillers – his back still bad – getting ready for the meeting tomorrow with Camelot.

“Hello, Bully,” said Jo when he got to the door. She looked different, older in just a few weeks, grown up without being taller.

“No one calls me that round here,” he said.

“Sorry, Bradley.”

“Your stuff – I ain’t got it. I lost it. The shoes and the money and all that.”

“Oh, no, that’s nothing. Mum doesn’t mind. She gave it to
you
anyway. I just wondered…”

“What?” he said.

“If you got the card we sent you? I sent it to Camelot. I didn’t know your address.”

“Didn’t get it.” He shook his head. He was starting to breathe hard. He had trouble breathing when anything
out of the ordinary
happened. He started sucking in the air for no other reason than it was panicking him seeing her here, a whole different world flapping at his door.

He slipped his trainers on, kicked Jack back inside the flat with the side of his foot and motioned Jo out onto the landing. Declan next door trundled past on his plastic motorbike and looked up at them. His mum was watching him play. She smiled extra nicely at Jo because she was a visitor. “You find him all right then, love?” She stopped smiling when she looked round. “Declan! No!” she yelled because Declan had climbed off his bike and was trying to force it down the rubbish chute.

Bully took Jo to the end of the landing and down the stairs. “How did you get here, if you didn’t know where I lived, then?”

“I saw your stepdad, Phil, in the pictures.”

“He’s not my stepdad,” said Bully.

“Sorry.” She blushed like she had done in that little room at the top of her house. “Anyway, I worked out that it was somewhere round this area from the road signs in the photos. And then I
asked
.” She sounded pleased with herself. “Your next-door neighbour told me in the end. I just thought I’d come and see how you were getting on, whether you needed any … thing.”

They went down to the ground floor, went walking. One or two people stared and one laughed and shouted, “Brads! Lend us a tenner!”