Lottery

The first short story I ever wrote

Kath pushed through the squeaky living room door, an old plastic tray shaking in her bony grip. She set it into the lap of her husband’s paint-stiffened work trousers and scurried to retrieve her own from the kitchen. Jack cracked open his can of lager and prodded the reddish-brown mush suspiciously, mixing it around its flimsy plastic dish in an attempt to find some variation in colour or texture.

“What’s this muck?” He demanded, as his wife returned.

“Chicken curry. Aldi’s specially selected, I’ll have you know,” she said, “I told you we had to cut back on something, I gave you the choice before I did the shop on Sunday, I says to you “We have to cut back on something Jack, for the next few weeks it’s either microwave meals, or fizzy pop instead of beer,” no prizes for guessing which you picked.”

“You drink enough beer and any meal is bearable, doesn’t work the other way round.” Jack chuckled, his jowls quivering. “I’m sure this’ll be great. It’ll do us good to have some variety, rather than just cycling round the three things you can cook.”

Kath picked at her food. Over the years, she’d gotten even better at ignoring Jack than he had at accidentally offending her. A hairy hand bridged the gap between the two armchairs, and thick stubby fingers intertwined with his wife’s only slightly less stubby ones.

“We’re gonna be okay, you know, I’ll probably get another decorating job any day, and once Carol from down the road goes back to work and you’re baby-sitting her young’un that’ll be a bit of pocket money. Don’t fret sweetie.” Kath looked him long in the eyes, her gaze softening as the moments passed. They’d had a tough few months, between her losing her job cleaning the pub and her bastard idiot brother needing to borrow all that money to pay off debts that the less she knew about the better. But Jack was right, they’d be fine. Something had always turned up for them before, and she had no reason to doubt it would this time.

“This is actually alright you know,” in the time she’d been thinking Jack had devoured half his plastic tray of dinner, “if being in a bit of financial trouble means I don’t have to sit through your attempts at soufflé, maybe I won’t look for another job.” He winked at her over the can pressed to his lips. With a smile, Kath turned her attention to the old TV in the corner of the room. It was lottery time, and if ever they’d needed a stroke of luck, it was now.

“Welcome to tonight’s Euromillions draw,” came the all too familiar precursor to disappointment. “Tonight’s jackpot is an estimated fifty-eight million pounds.”

“Oh, the things we could do with 58 million pounds,” said Kath, moon-eyed.

“Don’t get your hopes up love, I buy tickets to keep you happy, but no one ever wins these things. Whole business is a scam.”

“Not true. I told you about Jane, who goes to my hairdressers. Well, her brother-in-law’s best friend used to play football with a bloke who won 2 grand on the lottery. That bought the whole family a holiday to Mallorca, and a bit left over!”

“If we win 2 grand, we’re not wasting it on a bloody holiday to bloody Mallorca, I’ll tell you that for free.” She flapped a hand to quiet him.

“And the first ball is out.” The number 4 ball dropped onto the runway, followed closely by the 27.

“You see, that’s something already!”

“Yeah, tuppence probably.” The number 18 was next to fall.

“My birthday Jack! That’s 3 balls! And number 8, that’s your birthday, we’re 4 numbers in.” Jack shuffled up in his seat as it dawned on him that, in fact, somebody maybe did occasionally win these things. The couple held their breath, letting it go with a whelp of excitement as the number 1 rolled towards them.

“5 balls! That’s a few thousand already, and still with the star numbers to go.” Both were in disbelief, it seemed too good to be true.

“Are you sure these are our numbers? And you’ve definitely got the ticket? What are the last two?”

“Definitely,” Kath squeaked, brandishing the ticket towards him. “All we need now is 17 and 29, and we’ve done it.” She was on her feet, moving closer to the screen, as if by concentrating hard enough she could will the right balls out. Jack’s fork and can were lying on his tray, a sight unheard of while there remained food to eat and beer to drink. After a dramatic pause, an orange ball displaying a 29 dropped from the mechanism of the second machine and the Davies’ living room filled with a shocked quiet, so quiet it drowned out the annoying suspenseful music still blaring. The moments stretched out, Kath’s nose inches from the monitor and Jack sitting bolt upright, staring hard at what he could see of the screen past his wife’s bun.

“Okay, the second lucky star to appear tonight is…” They never got to hear the end of that sentence. It was drowned by the roar that left Kath’s mouth. She leapt to her feet, meeting the remnants of chicken curry flung through the air as Jack mirrored the movement. The couple embraced, suffocatingly tight, oblivious to the brown slime sandwiched between them. They wrenched themselves apart far enough to fall into an attempted kiss, but only managed to press their grins together.

“58 million pounds.” Kath muttered, trying to wrap her head around what had just happened. “58 million pounds. Fifty-eight million Great British pounds. Think of it, Jack. We can pay off the mortgage, replace your shit-heap excuse for a van, get my brother out of debt for good. No more crappy microwave meals, that’s for sure, we’ll be dining exclusively on lobster and caviar, thank you very much. No pressure for you to find more work, you never have to work again if you don’t want. And Carol can find some other daft sod to look after her ugly baby while she’s out sleeping with half of Merseyside. This is it. We can start living again. No more worries.”

The rest of the night evaporated into a blur of drinking, dancing around their stuffy living room, and uproarious laughter. Jack phoned the number on the ticket and arranged for an advisor to visit the house to confirm everything was legitimate and tell them what to do next. He’d been assured it would only take a day or two for the money to clear into their account, and with the formalities dealt with, they began to celebrate. Due to these celebrations, the loud knock that woke them the following morning was met with disdain. Jack plodded downstairs in his tartan pyjamas, rubbing his eyes and clutching his throbbing head. Upon opening the door, he faced two tall, broad-shouldered men in black suits.

“Jack Davies?” inquired the shorter man in a smooth, neutral southern accent. He had dark, shiny hair and cool blue eyes fixed on Jack’s bleary, unshaven face. The other man was wearing thin, expensive-looking sunglasses, but the twitches around them betrayed that he was rapidly looking Jack up and down and surveying the hallway behind him.

“That depends, who wants to know?” Replied Jack, annoyed that these strange men in their fancy suits thought they could come to his house at this ungodly hour and wake him up.

“Am I correct in thinking that you put in a call last night claiming to have won the Euromillions lottery?”

“I did, but I was told that the advisors wouldn’t be coming round until Monday. Me and the wife haven’t had time to discuss things properly yet.”

“May we come in, Mr Davies?”

“I’d prefer if you didn’t. On the phone, I arranged for you to come at 3pm Monday, and 3pm Monday is the earliest I’ll let you into my home.” And he slammed the door in their faces. Or, he tried to. Its swing was blocked by the mirror-shined shoe of the thus far silent man. He pushed the door open and entered the house, despite Jack’s complaints and attempts to physically restrain him. Blue Eyes sauntered behind his colleague, surveying his surroundings with a nauseous expression, before lounging in Jack’s armchair, and gesturing for Jack to sit in his wife’s.

“Who the bloody hell do you think you are, barging into my house like this? We arranged for you to come on Monday and you have the nerve to walk in like you own the place? I’ve a good mind to call the police!” Kath’s slippers came cautiously into view as she descended the stairs to see what all the fuss was about.

“Who the bloody hell I think I am, Mr Davies,” he said, looking dispassionately around the room, “is Agent Temple, MI6.” He paused to let that sink in, “and I would appreciate you taking a seat so we could have a little chat. Oh, and here comes your wife, she’d better join us too.” Temple watched Jack try to process what he had said through the smog of his hangover.

“But… what are you doing in my… do you have a warrant for… or any kind of… I don’t believe you,” he settled on. “Show me your badge.” Temple pulled a dark purple lanyard carrying a laminated card featuring his mug shot from his inside jacket pocket and threw it into Jack’s lap, who had sat down in disbelief mid-stutter. He gazed down at the blue eyes staring back at him from the card. “It’s a fake!” Jack yelped. “Anyone could get one of these printed, it proves nothing.” By now, the taller, broader gentleman had ushered a panic-stricken Kath into the sitting room, and slotted himself into the doorway, which fitted him like a jacket.

“For the record, Mr Davies, the ‘pretending you can’t guess why we’re here’ bit gets old quite quickly, so I’d appreciate it if we could move on from that part of proceedings.” Temple replaced the ID badge in his pocket. “Now, are you going to come quietly for questioning, or make this more difficult than it needs to be?” On cue, the now backlit figure in the doorway slid one hand into his trouser pocket, revealing the nose of a pistol strapped to his chest. “You don’t look like much of a runner,” Temple said.

Silence blanketed the house for the first time since the lottery draw, and three pairs of eyes watched Jack’s chin wobble as his mouth opened and closed noiselessly. Finally, words came, quiet and shaky, but present, “no need for any trouble, sir. We’ll come. But please, please, tell me what we’re being accused of.”

Agent Temple sighed. “I’d respect the commitment to the role if it wasn’t the same part I’d seen played dozens of times. Mr and Mrs Davies - I’ll continue to call you that for want of your real names - I’m taking you for questioning in relation to unauthorised and illegal time travel.”

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Kath spent most of the four-hour drive to London cycling through panic attacks and vomiting through the window of the shiny black BMW. Agent Temple’s patience was wearing thin at what he assumed was sickeningly feigned ignorance from the passengers in the back. They discovered that the up-to-then-silent man driving owned a deep, Glaswegian accent halfway down the M40 when he launched a stream of expletives at a silver Lexus which cut them up.

The second, and arguably more ground-breaking revelation, was that in the not so distant future, time travel held much the same position in society as selling guns does now. The government can do it at will, but when civilians do, it’s a heinous crime. In fact, the problem of civilian time travel was becoming so difficult to police that an international initiative was set up, and several agents sent back in time to start various lotteries throughout history. The logic was that large quantities of money available as a prize for guessing random numbers would be too good to resist for street-level criminals with access to a time machine and the internet, so these honey traps were dispersed, and teams of operatives lay waiting for them to be sprung. The journey’s final revelation was that Jack and Kath Davies, despite what they’d thought the night before, were incredibly unlucky.

“Of course, your house is being ransacked as we speak,” Temple drawled from the passenger seat, “once we find your machines they’ll be taken as evidence then repurposed, probably made into a 3D TV or something. Honestly, the fact that you each need a separate machine to travel is the most inconvenient part of this job. They just keep piling up when we arrest the likes of you. We’ve got more machines in this time zone than people authorised to use them, so we have to find some way to dispose of them.” He laughed. “You ever hear about a big technological advancement that seemed to come out of nowhere? The first phone, space travel, the computer, teleportation, etcetera. Repurposed time machine tech.” Temple seemed almost triumphant. “We take the TMs from low-lives like you, dismantle them for parts and sell the fancy bits to the highest bidder. It drives progress forward in this time and keeps demand high in the future. All the while you’ll be rotting in a cell somewhere with the other time-criminals.” More satisfied laughter.

“Sir, I promise, we’re not…” Jack’s pleas were cut short.

“Mr Davies, for the last time, people don’t simply ‘win the lottery’, the whole thing is a scam.” Jack shot a furtive, triumphant glance at his wife. He was so rarely right about things that he liked to savour the moment, regardless of what else was happening around them.

“Search our house all you want.” Kath’s voice was an octave higher than usual. “You won’t find any of your bloody time machines there. Then will you let us go?” The cold blue eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror.

“Afraid not love. Anyone can destroy a time machine. We’ve got all the evidence we need in your phone call.” The vomit speckled BMW drove through a narrow entrance in the grey stone building that had gradually grown in size over the past 10 minutes, and the car was plunged into darkness. A faint smell of petrol and warm metal leaked into their nostrils as they glided to a halt. The light was just enough to see a faint smile cross the shorter man’s face as the broad-shouldered Glaswegian pulled open the car door and growled at them to get out. Agent Temple lit a cigarette and reclined his seat. “Be quick Finn, it’s the Grand National this weekend, so we’ve got a hell of a lot of paperwork to get through.”

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