Lottery Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

One you could play proper games on.
    He looked round to see what there was to eat. Upstairs was getting to be quieter in the summer evening times and there was just an old man eating every bit on his tray and a mum and dad with two kids messing about with their chips, their free toys still wrapped up new. The mum and dad looked at him suspiciously but the kids didn’t notice he was there. When they left he sidled over to their table, keeping an eye out for the manager, for the Feds, for anyone who didn’t like the look of him. He took the tray, stashed the ketchup sachets to eat later, ate the chips, and with a huge effort of self-control, he lifted up the towel and slipped Jack the bits of burger.
    “I spoil you,” he said, like his mum used to say to him.
    His phone beeped back on. A shot of Jack when she was little with a long white snout lit up the screen. When his mum was still alive, his wallpaper used to be a selfie his mum had taken of them with her arms round his neck. She was wearing a funny hat in the photo to cover her empty head, funny because she never wore hats. But he’d deleted that one a while ago because he didn’t want to think of her like that, wearing a hat.
    His credit came up as zero. He needed credit to ring Camelot. He pictured the castle, this time with water all the way round and knights on motorbikes instead of horses, riding round with machine guns, guarding his winnings.
    He heard feet on the stairs, got ready to dip into the toilets but it was just a geeky zombie with a laptop. He looked too happy to be anyone official, too relaxed, and Bully decided he could risk it. He put on his best voice, the one he used for questions and favours.
    “Where’s Watford, mate?”
    “Sorry?”
    “Watford, mate. How far is it, mate?”
    “Umm, well, I don’t really know. It’s sort of North London, north
of
London. It must be near Hemel Hempstead… Rickmansworth way…”
    He didn’t need teaching about it, just telling. Maybe this guy, maybe he was a teacher.
    “How far is it?”
    “I don’t know – about twenty-odd miles.”
    “So you could walk there then?”
    “I suppose you could. You’d have to really want to, though.” He puffed out a laugh but Bully just nodded.
    “Yeah,” he said, because he might have to walk it if he couldn’t beg any money or jump a train and risk losing one of his five days stuck answering questions if he was caught.
    Bully got ready to go but then he had another think. Maybe if he went online it might tell him exactly how much he’d won. How much was too much for the till.
    “You look up my numbers on your laptop?”
    The man hesitated to say yes but didn’t say no or shake his head.
    “Sorry, what numbers?”
    “The lottery. The numbers. Not this week’s. I don’t want them.”
    “No, OK, but I don’t know if I can get a connection in here…” the man said, putting his hand on the screen and looking down at the floor to make sure his satchel was still there and then seeing Jack’s head poking out. He flinched, sat up straight.
    “Is he all right in there?”
    “Dudn’t
live
in there, mate.”
    The man relaxed a little. “Oh, OK. Your dog, is it?”
    Who else’s dog was she going to be, sitting there next to him being fed bits of burger? Why did people keep asking him that? Like he’d nicked her from a blind man or something. Jack was as good as any dopey Labrador. She could lead you anywhere whether you had any eyes or not.
    “Yeah. It’s
my
dog,” he said, just about controlling himself enough to be patient with another zombie asking stupid questions about his dog.
    “Oh, OK. Cool, nice dog.” He opened the laptop up and tapped the keys. The guy didn’t know anything about dogs, Bully could tell.
    “OK… So when was it, the draw then? Which week are we after?”
    What did he mean,
we
? Bully didn’t like the sound of that, like he was looking to get something out of this for himself just for tapping the keys. Bully got his