A Twist of the Knife

  And, as Gail had only too accurately pointed out, in eight years of spending twenty pounds a week on tickets for his system, to date he had had just one small win of fifty pounds to show for his efforts.

  She’d calculated that if he had banked twenty pounds a week over this same period of time, they’d have over eight thousand pounds saved – and more, with interest.

  ‘Just how far would that amount get you today?’ he would retort.

  ‘It would get us a new dishwasher, which we can’t afford,’ Gail reminded him. ‘It would enable us to pay for a holiday – which we haven’t had for two years because you say we can’t afford one. It could replace my car, which is a basket case.’

  Most importantly of all, in her mind, it would pay for IVF treatments, since all their attempts to conceive so far had failed.

  ‘Ah, but just wait!’ he would reply.

  ‘I’ve been waiting – when do I stop waiting?’

  ‘Soon, very soon. I know – I just know – that we are on the verge; it’s going to happen. All the numbers are meshing closer and closer. It could be any week now!’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘dream on.’

  ‘Oh, I will!’

  Ricky had always had a lot of dreams. But he needed the money to make the most important one of all come true.

  *

  They decided they could not afford to throw a party for Ricky’s fortieth birthday, so instead they invited a dozen friends to join them for a dinner celebration at their favourite Italian restaurant in Hove, Topolino’s. On the strict understanding everyone would pay for themselves. Ricky, who was by nature a generous man, hadn’t been happy about that idea, but his latest bank statement was the gloomiest to date, and had forced him to accept the plan, albeit still reluctantly.

  That damned win was just around the corner, he told Gail. He could feel it in his bones!

  But after an hour of gulping down Prosecco at Topolino’s, listening to jokes about ageing and questions about whether he was looking forward to his free bus pass, he was enjoying the company of good friends, and all he could feel was a deep sense of bonhomie growing inside him, the more alcohol he drank. They were a rowdy table, sensibly placed in a far corner of the restaurant so they could stand up and make their toasts and their speeches without ruining the evening for the rest of the diners there.

  Suddenly, part way through eating his starter of ravioli florentine, he glanced at his watch. It was just past 9 p.m. Shit! He waved over a waiter, a tall, thin, cadaverous-looking Italian with a voice that was far more cheerful than his face.

  ‘Si, signor?’

  Ricky tried to speak to him without attracting the attention of the rest of his guests. ‘Could shew do me a favour,’ he slurred. ‘I shleft my phone at home. Could shew let me know this week’s lottery numbers?’

  The waiter frowned. ‘I go ask.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ Ricky shoved a twenty-pound note into his hand.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ Gail admonished quietly into his ear. ‘Can’t you leave it alone for just one evening, darling, and enjoy yourself?’

  ‘What if tonight’s the night?’ he hissed back.

  She shook her head, and drank a large gulp of her red wine.

  ‘Hey, Ricky,’ his oldest friend, Bob Templeton, the overweight owner of a heating engineering business, said. ‘Did you hear the one about the forty-year-old IT man who goes into a pub with a frog on his head? The barman asks, “What’s that you’ve got there?” And the frog replies, “I don’t know. It started off as a wart on my arse.”’

  The whole table erupted into peals of laughter. Ricky stifled a wry smile. Then the owner of the restaurant – a wiry, cheery man in his late fifties – bounded over. In a broad Italian accent he said, ‘OK, who wanta know tonight’s lottery numbers?’

  Ricky raised a hand.

  The owner read them out. ‘1, 23, 34, 40, 41, 48.’

  Ricky frowned. ‘Could you repeat those?’

  ‘Si, signor. 1, 23, 34, 40, 41, 48.’

  ‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘I sure. I go check, if you like? Make absolutely sure?’

  ‘Please.’

  Gail stared at him, and Ricky avoided looking at her. Inside, he was trembling. He downed the remainder of his glass of wine, reached for the bottle with a shaking hand and refilled it.

  ‘It’s a rip-off, the lottery,’ Hilary Wickens, the wife of his best man, said. ‘I think it’s a mug’s game.’

  Ricky remained silent. Totally silent. Only Gail, staring at him intently, noticed all the colour had drained from his face. But she said nothing.

  Suddenly the owner was standing over Ricky’s shoulder, leaning down, handing him a tiny sheet of paper, torn from a pad, with the six numbers written on it. ‘Si, Signor Walters, I have checked. Called the phone line to make-a-sure for you!’

  Ricky said nothing. He nodded silent thanks, read the numbers carefully, folded the sheet and tucked it into his jacket pocket. He was aware of Gail’s intense gaze and avoided her eyes. He downed his newly filled glass in one gulp. He was shaking, almost uncontrollably, and did not want to be at the restaurant any more. But he had to go through with the rest of the evening.

  He picked at his main course, a thick, broiled veal chop on the bone, normally one of his favourite foods, but right now he had no appetite at all. And why the hell did Gail keep looking at him so strangely? Annoyed that he wasn’t in the party spirit? Well, hey, big surprise, it didn’t take much to annoy her these days.

  A massive cake arrived, with forty candles and a big firework thing in the middle. Everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’, with most of the rest of the people in the restaurant joining in. Then he had to blow out the candles. Of course, they were those stupid jokey ones that kept relighting themselves.

  Then he was called on to make a speech. He bumbled through the words he had prepared on a scrap of paper he produced from his pocket – although he was much more interested in the scrap of paper in a different pocket.

  He finished his short speech by quoting George Carlin. ‘Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting, “Holy shit, what a ride!”’

  Everyone laughed and applauded, except for Gail, who sat staring at him in stony silence.

  She leaned over to him when he sat back down, as Bob Templeton was rising to his feet to begin his speech. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Never better!’ Ricky said.

  And he meant it.

  And at the end of the evening, he insisted, absolutely insisted, on paying for everyone on his credit card. Despite almost coming to blows with Gail, who kept telling everyone he was drunk and to ignore him.

  *

  The cab dropped them home just after midnight. Ricky, well lit up with three Sambucas inside him on top of everything else he had drunk, slumbered for the entire short journey. He went straight into the bathroom, closed the door behind him, then pulled out the crumpled piece of paper the owner of Topolino’s had given him, on which were written the winning National Lottery numbers.

  His numbers!

  Oh shit.

  Oh shit.

  He focused hard on them, to make absolutely sure he was not mistaken. He knew them by heart. They were one of the group of numbers his computer algorithm had calculated was bound to come up from the combination of six balls dropping. And now they had.

  He was not mistaken.

  As he stepped back out of the bathroom, Gail gave him a quizzical smile. ‘So, what’s going on?’

  ‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’

  ‘You’ve been very quiet most of the evening. Didn’t you enjoy your party?’

  ‘I’d have enjoyed it more if you hadn’t tried to make me look so small over the bill.’

  ‘You were drunk, darling. Everyone had already agreed to contribute – you didn’t need to do that.’

  ‘No? Well, let me tell you som
ething. I’ve won the lottery! My numbers have come up – and you never believed me when I said I would win. Well, I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time – a long, long time. You see, I don’t want to be with you any more. I’m in love with someone else and have been for a long time. Now, finally, I can afford to divorce you. You don’t have to worry, I’m not going to dump you in the shit. I’ve thought about it very carefully and done the maths. I’ll make sure you’re well provided for.’

  ‘Very thoughtful of you,’ she said, acidly.

  He gave her a drunken leer. ‘Yeah, well, I’m all heart. Too bad you never recognized that.’

  ‘Silly old me.’

  ‘I’ll be gone in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’m going to start packing now. I can’t stand the sight of you for another day.’

  ‘You know how to make someone feel good,’ she said, ‘that’s for sure.’ She stepped past him, up to the washbasin, and began to remove her make-up.

  ‘You’ve always ridiculed my system. You told me I would never win. So, just how wrong are you?’

  ‘Not wrong at all,’ she said, dabbing away her mascara. ‘I thought it might make a fun evening if you thought you’d won the lottery. So I asked the waiter to give you those numbers, which I wrote down for him. Oh, and just in case you are wondering, I have tonight’s actual winning numbers. I suggest you tweak your system – you didn’t get a single one of them.’

  LIKE YOU

  She liked him on Facebook. He liked her back. Actually, he liked her a lot.

  He liked her smile. He liked her photograph. She was the right age for him – late twenties, he guessed. An age when people started to mature and know what they wanted. She had a serene air about her, and a friendly smile that suggested she could be fun, a bit of a sport, maybe very sexy. But at the same time he could sense a slight hunger in her eyes. As if she was looking for something she had not yet found. He liked her name too. Teresa Saunders.

  He wanted to be her friend. Very badly. Oh yes. You are one stunning girl. We could definitely hit it off. Me, I could be that guy you are looking for. Really I could!

  He clicked to see more photographs, but all he got was the message: No photos to show.

  Damn, he thought, she had her privacy settings high. He sent a request to be Teresa Saunders’ friend. Then he waited. Twenty minutes later, it was past midnight and there was no response. He had to be up early for an important client presentation: the launch of a new food brand, a vitamin-packed, cholesterol-busting super-porridge that would be all the breakfast you ever needed. So he logged off and went to bed.

  Teresa came to him during the night in a dream. Her long, wavy hair, the colour of winter wheat, floated in slow motion around her face. Her blue eyes smiled at him. She kissed him lightly on his forehead, on his cheeks, then on his lips. He woke with a start, convinced, for a fleeting instant, that she was in the room with him. And feeling horny as hell.

  Of course, it was just a dream. But what a dream! He could feel some kind of strange, magical and deeply erotic connection with her across the ether. It was so powerful he had to switch on the light just to make sure she was not really in the room with him. But he was alone, of course. Alone in his big, loft-style bedroom, with its bare wooden floors strewn with rugs, and the curtainless picture window overlooking the inky waters of the Thames, half a mile upstream from Tower Bridge.

  Lights glided by, accompanied by the throb of an engine: a Port of London Police boat. He slipped out of bed and padded through to his den, sat at his desk, which looked out over the river; then he flipped open the lid of his laptop and logged back on to Facebook. There was a notification: Your friend request has been accepted. Teresa Saunders is now your friend. And there was a message: Thanks for the friend request!

  Yayyyyyy!

  But he held off replying. Did not want to seem too keen. She might think him a bit of a saddo messaging her at 3.20 a.m.

  He went back to bed and closed his eyes and wondered if she would come to him again. But all that came were images of MaximusBrek, the porridge of gladiators!

  His slogan and he was proud of it.

  *

  He awoke at 6.15 a.m., a few minutes before his alarm was due to go off. Dawn had long broken and it was almost full light. He liked this time of year, early April. Spring was in the air. The nights were getting shorter. Maybe this spring he would fall in love. Perhaps with Teresa Saunders?

  He sat in his black silk dressing gown in front of Daybreak on television, and ate his microwaved MaximusBrek. It tasted like molten plaster of Paris but, hey, he wasn’t going to tell the clients that. He would stride into the meeting bursting with energy, like an unleashed gladiator, and tell them how terrific this new food was. Especially for the below-the-line profits of the ad agency that paid his wages.

  As he ate, angry Palestinians were shouting on the screen and holding up placards. He should have been thinking about his pitch at the meeting, but he couldn’t focus on that. All he could think about was the message he was going to send Teresa Saunders. Something original that would make her smile, that would make her think he was a really interesting guy to communicate with. Hell, he was one of the highest-paid advertising copywriters in London right now. He wrote hot slogans for hot products. So surely he could write one for the hottest product of all – himself.

  He was thirty-two. Single. He had this cool pad. His charcoal Aston DBS. He kept himself and his bank balance in shape. But for the past eight months, since his last short-lived relationship, he slept every night in an empty bed.

  He sent Teresa Saunders a message: Thanks for accepting my friend request . . . J

  Then he got dressed and headed out to work, checking his iPhone at every red light he stopped at. Fresh emails popped up every few seconds. But to his disappointment, nothing from Teresa Saunders.

  Come on, he chided himself. Focus. Concentrate! They sat round the black glass table in the stark white boardroom of Bresson, Carter, Olaff – the agency he worked for. Croissants and brioches lay on plates, alongside jugs of coffee and expensive mineral water. The four-strong team from the client, as well as his three agency colleagues, including his boss, Martin Willis, watched the presentation on the big screen. Then they were shown mock-ups of the TV campaign, the magazine campaign, the online campaign and the in-store point-of-sale artwork. He should have been watching too, but instead he kept glancing at his iPhone, surreptitiously cupped in his hands beneath the table.

  ‘Don’t you think, Jobe?’

  Hearing his name brought him back to earth with a start. He looked up to see fourteen eyeballs fixed on him – several of them through stupidly trendy glasses. He went bright red. He stammered. ‘Um, well, yes,’ although he had, in truth, no idea what they were referring to. He felt their stares, and his face burned as if a corrosive acid had been poured over his skin.

  ‘Are you with us, Jobe?’ Willis said.

  ‘Totally.’ He began perspiring.

  ‘You have the floor,’ Willis said.

  ‘Yes, right. Um . . . ah . . . OK.’

  The female, whose name he had forgotten, said helpfully, ‘We’re referring to the Twitter aspect of the campaign.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, waiting for the light-bulb moment. But it didn’t happen. So he took a stab in the dark. ‘My thinking is that all these tweets start appearing, from people who have eaten MaximusBrek, saying how much energy they suddenly have. Also, when anyone tweets that they’re on a diet, MaximusBrek starts following them. We kind of anthropomorphize it, so MaximusBrek becomes like a person out there in cyberspace, right, rather than just a brand.’

  He was greeted with frowns and blank stares.

  ‘Diabetics,’ the female client said. ‘I thought we planned to target the two and a half million diabetics in the UK with the low glycaemic index of MaximusBrek.’

  ‘Absolutely!’ Jobe said, remembering suddenly. ‘Diabetics are a shoo-in. What we’re going to do is engage with the diabetic blog
sites, as well as Twitter and Facebook. MaximusBrek is going to be the diabetic’s new best friend – types one and two! We’re going to make it the biggest breakfast cereal ever – first for this nation, and then we’ll break it out globally!’

  Then he made the mistake of glancing down at his iPhone again. Hey Jobe, nice to ‘meet’ you! Just checked out your photos – you look a really cool guy! Tell me more about yourself.

  *

  After the meeting, Martin Willis asked him to come up to his office. Willis was in his early forties, with trim ginger hair, and was dressed in a traditional business suit and an expensive open-neck white shirt. He had a hard, blunt Yorkshire accent. ‘Who are you with, Jobe? The Woolwich?’

  ‘The Woolwich?’ Jobe frowned.

  ‘Yeah, the Woolwich? Are you with them? Because you sure as hell aren’t with us.’

  ‘I’m not quite with you.’

  ‘No, you’re sodding not. You’re not with anyone today; you’re on planet Zog. You on drugs or something? Not well?’

  ‘No – nothing . . . and I’m not unwell.’

  ‘You realize you almost lost us one of our biggest new clients this morning with your behaviour? Every time anyone asked you a question you were somewhere else.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t do sorry.’

  *

  Back home, Jobe typed: Hey Teresa, nice to ‘meet’ you too! Your reply got me a load of verbal from my boss a bit earlier! He seemed to think it was more important for me to concentrate on a meeting I was in than read your message. What a Philistine!

  Anyway, about me: I’m single and I work in advertising. I live on Wapping Wharf, near Tower Bridge. I’d love to meet you properly J.

  He posted the message then switched on the television, mixed himself a large vodka martini, took one sip, then checked his laptop before settling down to watch television. Whatever was on, he didn’t care. He needed a large drink tonight after the bollocking from Martin Willis – and what annoyed him most about it was that Willis was right. His mind had been all over the place in a crucially important meeting. God, Teresa Saunders was messing with his head and they hadn’t even met yet!