Lottery Boy Read Free

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