Lottery Boy Read Online Free PDF

ticket out and read the date of the draw and the man put it into the Camelot website and then twisted the laptop round to show him the results. Bully leaned closer, his lips working, mumbling to himself but not saying anything just like the beggar man on the bridge. And for close to a minute he read the numbers right to left, left to right, comparing them with the random ones on his ticket he had out underneath the table.
    The man was beginning to get uneasy again.
    “Any good?”
    “No … no. No good. Gotta go,” he said and stood up, unplugged his mobile and picked up Jack.
    “Look, do you want this? I’m not that hungry. I just got it for the drink really.” The man was handing him his burger, still in the wrapper, as good as throwing it away. Bully took it, tore off half and swallowed it before he got to the bottom of the stairs. And though he was starving he’d had a job to force it down because he’d been calculating (the best bit of maths he’d ever done) how many millions of meals he could buy just like it and still have spare change.

    Because he had all the numbers. All six. He had won it, the big one. The one people went mad about. The jackpot. He couldn’t remember exactly how much but it was more than a million. It was always
millions
.
    Why hadn’t the manager man in Smiths just told him so? Didn’t want to go shouting out his numbers, everyone crowding round, maybe. But then he remembered nothing had come up on the screen because he’d been looking at it.
Contact Camelot, Watford …
that was all it said. The manager man
knew
he’d won big. He just didn’t know how big.
    There must have been something about it on the news back in the winter, but then he hadn’t heard any news since they’d left the flat. And though he sometimes watched TV through the shop windows on the Strand and on the big giant screen above the platforms at Waterloo, it was all silent news. And he didn’t
read
news. The only thing he read was magazines.
    “We won it, mate … we won it,” he said to Jack but it still didn’t make it real enough. He buzzed around for a while with the notion that he was rich, proper rich like off the TV with enough cash to buy things, not just a few things but
every
thing he wanted. And he had the rest of the night, and another five days if he felt like it, to feel like
this
, that feeling of looking forward to something.
    He wanted to tell someone. He
needed
to. The urge was strong, like a nice hunger. The manager man in Smiths had told him not to but he was talking about someone he didn’t know, wasn’t he? So Bully weaselled his way back out of the station, through the arch, down past the dead train drivers’ steps, back towards the river, looking for a face he knew. There was no one around on his side, just the eaters in the eating places and the skateboarders pushing out onto the pavements, getting braver now the sun was going, doing tricks on the benches and rails.
    So he crossed the footbridge, put his hands to his ears as he hurried past the guys playing trumpets, thumping their big plastic cans for money. They were there most nights in the summer but he never hung around to listen, didn’t like that noise. Lots of noises he didn’t like, but over to his left he didn’t mind the big clock, Big Ben, by the politicians’ place that was going
bang, bang, bang
… for nine o’clock, because he knew what that meant. It was the time.
    Even so, he looked away to his right along the river, at the other buildings stacked up against the water, some of them stone, some of them glass, one of them like a huge sharp lump of ice. And further down the river, the skyscraper like a giant bullet, and the skinny bridge and the big church looking like a blurry ice-cream cone that somebody had just wasted and thrown away.
    He walked on up to the square, let Jack size up the dirty brown lions lounging around Nelson’s Column. He wondered what the little man with the pointy hat could see up