Lotto: A Novel

By John Webb

If money is the root of all evil, why can’t we live without it?

Money might have corroded social constructs, corrupted institutions and commercialized human relationships, but still, we go along with it just in case there’s chance – even a small one – that we might be able to get our hands on some of it.

Beryl Manier, a wife and mother of two daughters, wins the biggest Lotto pay-out in history. Compelled into a giddying spending spree, Beryl is soon the subject of scandal and the object of jealousy. Her regard for humanity becomes distinctively grim despite her new-found fortune.

Set in a vaguely dystopian, disturbingly familiar world of ceaseless urgency, fake news, moral vacuity, superstitious obsessions, scientific remedies and a deadening reliance on a ‘rules-based’ order presided over by well-paid lawyers, Beryl and her daughters confront the innate deception that underpins the vaunted modern age.

Finally seduced by long-forgotten philosophical ideas, Beryl is reminded of the essential value of suffering and what it means to share in the suffering of others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grey Rocks Publishing
• Release date: Aug 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925786064

Book preview

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1

The Chocolates

Beryl had just been paid.

She stood in an aisle, surrounded by chocolates – her favourite part of the superstore.

She regarded the chocolates in all their varied and splendid wrappings, their promise of unremitting pleasure, with both titillation and resentment. Choc Crunch. Choc Nut. Choc Marshmallow. Choc Nougat. Choc Mint. Choc Honeycomb. Choc Wafer. She frowned at the Choc Liqueurs. She had her reservations about those. And she frowned at the Choc Raisins. Raisins made her gag. It confounded her that they should mix something as smooth and sweet as milk chocolate with something as disgusting and unsightly as a raisin. What a waste!

She considered scooping up all the chocolates (except the ones with liqueurs and raisins) and dumping them into her trolley. She imagined lying on her bed at home, reading magazines and eating chocolates for hours, days, weeks on end.

It was a silly old thought. One that had crossed her mind too often.

No. She couldn’t afford it. Never would. Defeated by the numbers, she sighed, leaned against the trolley and trundled towards the meat section.

Beryl’s husband liked meat: mutton kebabs, burger patties, beef steaks, sausages and bacon. This was a fact that Beryl regarded with growing disquiet, growing unease. It was never going to change. Curtis and his meat would always take priority over Beryl and her chocolates.

She selected a cut-price package of frozen burger patties and a cut-price package of shrink-wrapped processed sausages that were apparently ‘protein packed’. She paused and surveyed the display of fresh meat, plump and blood-red, sealed in a thin plastic membrane, each with a flattened snippet of parsley, in an imperishable white foam container. Nothing was dead around here. But she couldn’t afford the fresh meat, either. She made a mental note to return early the following week, when it was less fresh – and cheaper, about to be thrown out.

In the aisle with the breakfast cereals, Beryl chose a 'Family Pack’ of chocolate-coated muesli bars, sans raisins, (and sans muesli, actually). Her daughters, Alex and Monica, liked the muesli bars as much as she did. They were indeed ‘power packed with EXTRA crunch’. Her husband didn’t care for them, but then again, he had his burger patties.

At a slightly quicker pace, Beryl moved through the fruit and vegetable section. She hated fruit. She could tolerate banana-flavoured milkshakes, but only if they hadn’t been made out of actual bananas. And nor did she mind eating apples if they were thinly sliced, glazed in syrup, baked on top of a cake and served with something called Sweet Crème™ that came out of a spray can.

Apart from that, fruit was not her thing. This annoyed her because many of the best diets as postulated in magazines insisted that you should eat more fruit. But Beryl had resolved that she wouldn’t stick to any diets where she didn’t like the food, so that ruled out diets involving fruit.

She also loathed tomatoes and onions, always going to great lengths to remind the people serving at burger restaurants not to put any tomato or onion on her burger. It was one of those times in her life when she got to do two things: distinguish herself from the rest of humanity, and order someone around. She was always assertive, bordering on aggressive, when telling the paper-hat-wearing teenagers behind burger counters that she, Beryl Manier, was the kind of woman who did not like tomato and onion on her burger. Absolutely not.

As she hastened through the fruit and vegetable section, she caught a glimpse of the audio-visual section at the far end of the superstore.

This reminded her of her husband. He loved the audio-visual section and almost broke into a run to collect the glossy brochures and test out the TVs and sounds systems on display. He’d question the sales people with an almost cruel complacency, as if he were on the cusp of buying one of their products even though he could never afford any of them.

She veered into another aisle. The audio-visual section sickened her. Her husband sickened her.

In the clothing section she spotted cheap nylon underwear with an aggressive sheen, slumped in a supersaver discount bin. Beryl liked sexy lingerie. And she liked to pose in front of her bedroom mirror – secretly, with the door locked. There, she fixated on the bits of her body that she still liked, confirming that youth had not yet (completely) abandoned her. She noted the smoothness of her forehead, rather than the thickness of her neck; the cute shape of her button nose, rather than how her fattened cheeks pressed against it and made her mouth small. She noted the familiar curvature of her hips rather than their ballooning size, and the fullness of her breasts, how the nipples still poked through the shiny fabric – suggesting that they did not sag as much as she sometimes suspected. Beryl liked to be reminded of her youth because she would also remember how funny she used to be; how she had entertained and amused the people around her. She remembered her mother and father and sister all howling with laughter, tears pouring down their faces at her quips and antics.

But no.

She couldn’t afford the lingerie. She’d have to wait. Save a little more. And it was almost six pm. Time to get to Dandy’s Bread & Pies where she worked a second job, cleaning baking trays.

She took her place in the checkout queue and found herself surrounded by racks of magazines. She loved magazines. They revealed a world of intrigue, of what life could be like. Their loud covers, their achingly beautiful models and their bright lettering – WIN! ROMANCE! SPLASH! STUNNER! FUN! – seized her imagination more than anything else in the superstore. Their stories were all about love. Love at first sight, love affairs, love triangles, love fests, and love lost.

But this week, she was short on money. Yes, she’d just been paid, but she’d already bought new school shoes for Monica and hairclips for Alex, and had renewed the JanSat Bronze cable TV subscription for Curtis. Hard times were upon her. She’d resisted the chocolates. She’d resisted the bargain-basement lingerie. She bit her lower lip, knowing that she must now resist her favourite magazines.

I’ll be okay, she thought as she inched towards the check-out.

It was Friday and that made her feel a little better. It meant she would leave Dandy’s Bread & Pies at nine, promptly and with great purpose. She’d done this every week for fifteen years. It was her greatest secret.

2

The Ticket

Many years ago when she was still quite slim, Beryl had returned home with great excitement to announce that she had bought a Lotto ticket and had a good feeling she was going to win. Curtis became so angry with her immoral ways that he snatched the ticket from her and tore it up. Beryl ran to her room, squealing, and slammed the door behind her.

Despite his wife’s moral frailty, Curtis kept the torn pieces of the Lotto ticket and watched the Lotto Show as she sulked and sniffed in the bedroom (and ate chocolates). It wasn’t a winning ticket, so Curtis threw it out. He returned to the bedroom, and with his usual bombastic indignation, insisted that Beryl should never be so misguided as to play the Lotto again.

Now a strong wind blew through the car park outside the superstore. Beryl ploughed through the swirling grit towards the bus stop, the shopping bags digging into her fingers. She made it to the shelter and sat down heavily on a modern aluminium bench, watching the cars whizz by as the rain began to pour down in a steady, steel-grey deluge. People drove their cars – their aerodynamic, temperature-controlled capsules, listening to their radios – impervious to the solitary figure with wet shoes who sat under the bus shelter.

That could be me, Beryl mused as she watched the cars rush by. I could have that kind of life.

On the bus, heading towards Dandy’s Bread & Pies, Beryl examined the reverse side of the till slip. The coupons offered her 10% off a monster pack of twelve toilet rolls and a 5% discount for every third can of tuna. But Curtis hated tuna. It might as well have been a vegetable as far as he was concerned, and he, like Beryl, hated vegetables. Beryl alighted from the bus, carrying her shopping bags, and entered Dandy’s Bread & Pies where an electronic doorbell played its familiar jolly notes announcing her arrival.

The blond teenagers, hired for their conventional prettiness – their customer-facing qualities – paid her no attention. They were, instead, absorbed by their Devices: their immediate yet distant connection with other Device-using humans. Why would they be concerned by the arrival of an actual person, especially one so obviously ‘unfriendable’?

The manager sprang into the room. ‘Phew!’ he said brightly (and a bit scornfully). ‘Thought you weren’t coming! Come on! The trays are building up. The hotcakes have been selling like… you know.’

Beryl looked at him absently. Her shoulders sagged. She gave a weary grunt as she brushed past him, through the swing doors to the cleaning sinks.

Placing her shopping bags in the staff refrigerator, she donned her blue hairnet and yellow washing-up gloves and then stared at herself in the small mirror next to the sinks.

She let out a heavy sigh. No, she didn’t have customer-facing qualities. Of that much she was sure. She’d be stuck here in the back room forever, while the young girls in the front of the store gossiped with acerbic malice about the fat old bag who washed the baking trays. She turned away from the mirror. It displeased her.

Alongside the mirror was a poster that read: Dandy’s Rule # 1! The Customer is Always Right! Given that she did not have a customer-facing job Beryl was certain that Rule # 1 never applied to her.

She filled one of the sinks with scalding water and dumped the hot trays into it to loosen the sticky burnt crusts on the edges. She was forty-one, and she had the distinct feeling that nothing was ever going to change. This was her inexorable lot. She wasn’t sure that she liked people and she was sure none of them really liked her. Even her daughters, Alex (sixteen) and Monica (fourteen) had grown weary of her.

Alex was at that stage of extricating herself from parental control – something she probably wouldn’t have minded had she not thought of her parents as narrow, slightly deranged, almost demonic creatures with no known social skills. Alex believed that it was just her rotten luck – the kind of luck with which she was woefully familiar – that she should have such disagreeable parents.

Monica might still have liked her mother, but she knew that it was not as much as she used to. She remembered times when she’d seen her mother as the embodiment of everything good in the world: a sanctuary of wisdom and safety. But now Monica had endured enough of her mother’s despair to feel that, far from being a sanctuary, Beryl was cursed to be distinctively unhappy for the rest of her life.

Beryl wished she could whistle while she worked. Or hum a little tune. Or do something – anything – that might lift her spirits. But she couldn’t. In a sluggish silence she drew a baking tray from the sink and began scrubbing it with exhausting monotony, absorbed by nothing but her many travails. Recently there had been the ‘hairclip’ debacle and the ‘pumpkin’ debacle.

The hairclip debacle: Alex had asked Beryl for money so she could buy new hairclips – shiny ones, encrusted in glitter. Alex had seen Xan Pahad wearing something similar in the social pages of a magazine. Alex idolised Xan Pahad. She’s got everything! She’s slim and loved and rich! Beryl said no, that the hairclips were too expensive and she couldn’t possibly afford them.

Alex railed at her. ‘You’re so… you’re so effing useless! That’s why you can’t afford six francs for a pair of plastic hairclips – because you’re so effing useless!’

All Beryl could do was say, ‘Don’t you use that kind of language with me, my girl.’

Beryl finally relented. She’d bought two new sparkling hairclips and planned to place them on Alex’s pillow. She expected that Alex would thank her, the matter would be resolved and old intimacies would be restored – or perhaps not. Beryl felt as if something had snapped, and that things – from now on – would keep on snapping.

The pumpkin debacle: during the Festive Season, Beryl’s sister had come to visit. The two of them did little else but sit in the kitchen and gossip about old times. Sometimes they laughed so much that Beryl’s small house shuddered on its stilts, as if stricken by a minor seismic event (Beryl and her sister were both very large women). For three days they were undisturbed in the kitchen; children were shooed away.

On the day of her departure, Beryl’s sister gave Alex and Monica ten francs each. The girls hurried to the shop. Alex rushed to the cake section and bought a factory-fresh chocolate fudge cake for seven francs fifty, and at the till she spent two francs fifty on a plastic pink and yellow beaded bracelet.

Monica spent two francs on a large pumpkin. She liked the look of pumpkins. Their knobbly grey-yellow skins spoke of struggle and ardour, while concealing a sweet and vibrant orange flesh. It was a contrast that, for whatever reason, pleased her. She still had eight francs left. She couldn’t think of anything else to buy.

Alex was in a mood of fiery good cheer. She laughed and jeered at Monica as they walked home. ‘A fucking pumpkin? How fucking gross is that?’ She stormed ahead, propelled by the sweet aromas of her new cake and the prospect of devouring the whole thing while sitting on her bedroom floor with her headphones on. As she hurried around the corner into their street, she tripped and fell, dropping the cake, bruising her knee and snapping her new elastic bracelet, sending a small squadron of pink and yellow beads scurrying into the drain.

She bawled and hissed as she returned unsteadily to her feet and brushed herself off. Despite the fall, the chocolate fudge cake had remained largely intact, if slightly misshapen. But Alex’s ire was hardly assuaged. She had suffered an awful indignity. She picked up the cake and flung it with all her might so that it splattered all over the road.

No. As Beryl scrubbed the baking trays with a plastic brush, her throat ached. It hadn’t been an easy time lately. The worst Festive Season of all. Beryl felt more alone than ever.

At the end of her shift she received forty-six francs in cash from the till.

‘Cheerio,’ she said to her colleagues as she waddled towards the front door. None of them replied, but it didn’t matter. The doorbell offered her its electronic jingle; it was by far the friendliest thing in the shop.

At the bus stop, near the concrete underpass, Beryl crossed the street at the controlled intersection. She didn’t notice that the WALK signal was timed perfectly so that she walked smoothly ahead, as freely as if she were in a meadow.

Flushed and unusually ebullient, Beryl stumbled up to the Lotto booth. She smiled at the man behind the glass barrier. He slipped a Lotto ticket across the counter, giving her a smile in return. Accompanied only by small tropical insects which fluttered around the neon light, Beryl slowly completed the six blocks with her chosen numbers and returned to the booth. The man took her ticket and her fifteen francs. ‘Good luck!’ he said and then… he winked!

Beryl was sure the man was making an advance: a not entirely improper advance, as far as she was concerned. She smiled back at him. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and she laughed out loud for the first time in months without faking it. She felt so cheerful that the last place in the world she wanted to go to was home. Instead, in homage to her sudden and inexplicable jubilance, she walked briskly down the main highway to Todd D’s Burger House.

The teenage boy to whom she spoke was stricken by such a severe attack of acne that it surprised Beryl he’d been given a customer-facing position. She ordered a double cheeseburger with extra fries and a large raspberry-flavoured fizzy drink. And with deliberate bumptiousness she added, ‘And don’t put any onion or tomato on the burger. Okay? Are you with me? No tomato! No onion! Okay?’

She glared at the boy with grim severity, and it suddenly seemed to her that he might be on the edge of tears.

‘Okay!’ he gasped.

Beryl took a bench covered in red shiny plastic and for the first time she felt ashamed of herself for humiliating the boy. She declared that she would never behave like that again.

3

The Win

On Wednesday (Lotto Day!) Curtis was about to finish things off at work (get out of his overalls, change into his home clothes, wash his hands at the sink, splash his face and smooth his hair) when the supervisor walked into the locker room. ‘Hey, Curtis! Come over and take a look at this!’ The supervisor’s eyes were fixed on Curtis in a way that made him look at the floor; scrutinised, judged, condemned. ‘Come on!’ the supervisor said finally. ‘No need to be so… morbid!’

Curtis followed the supervisor out of the locker room, and joined a number of his co-workers who were gathered around the supervisor’s computer. Indeed, the supervisor had downloaded a new batch of pornographic pictures. They were of a variety and quality that stunned Curtis so much that at one point he gasped, and spent the rest of the time petrified that his colleagues should find him to be so tense.

It was not unknown that on such days, he would leave the plant and instead of driving home he’d take a heart-thumping detour to another part of town. And so it was on this Lotto Day. He parked his car in a quiet suburban alley and walked to the corner of the nearby intersection. Once on the other side of the main road he walked exactly twenty-eight steps whilst studiously looking at the pavement. On the twenty-eighth step he turned left, brushed aside a purple and yellow plastic curtain and entered the Sex-O-Rama Adult Emporium. He headed straight for the Live Show – which entailed sitting in a small, darkened cubicle on the edge of a rotating stage. He carefully placed coins into a slot and the blind in front of him opened to reveal a tall, slender, dark-skinned woman in a turquoise bikini, dancing seductively for the caged viewers all around her. Curtis tugged at his stiffened cock with urgency, terrified that he would soon run out of coins.

On the same day Alex decided to skip her afternoon classes and accompany some boys (and a few girls) into the forest behind the old church where they could smoke marijuana. Although Alex worked to earn money to buy marijuana, she never seemed to have enough and it nearly drove her crazy. The Fountain of Joy Theme Park only paid her twelve francs fifty for a six-hour shift. She liked to have a stash of her own because, a) it added to her coolness factor; and b) boys didn’t get too pushy with her (she’d seen boys get pushy with other girls when they were always on the take).

Meanwhile Monica walked into a music arcade and put her hand-woven hemp bag down on the floor. She sat on a cushion and selected a pair of headphones off a nearby hook. The touch screen lit up her face as she scrolled down to Katie T (her favourite singer). She selected, ‘Play All’ and as the first song began to play, Move Me Baby, a boy walked in.

At the same time Beryl was taking off her hot rubber gloves for her coffee break at Dandy’s Bread & Pies. She was feeling better than normal because it was Wednesday: Lotto Night!

Alex, on the other hand, short on weed and short on excuses, found herself cajoled into a conversation with a boy called Darryl who lay on top of her and tried to kiss not only her lips but her entire face. Darryl might have been a boy she liked, but now that they were separated from the others, he seemed to be slightly overheated, subsumed by the most primitive ambitions. Instead of enduring his flailing advances, Alex decided to push him off her. He rolled onto the mossy ground, slightly startled, and Alex giggled in a mood of near-electrifying mischief. ‘I want to do something you’ll like.’ She proceeded to unzip Darryl’s jeans.

Curtis knew he was running low on coins while the girl in the bikini swivelled her hips and jiggled her boobs at him through the one-way glass. But she hadn’t yet offered him a glimpse of the darkest, shaven, most mysterious part of her body. Curtis was frantic.

Alone in the staff room, with her Lotto ticket in hand, Beryl waited for the draw to commence.

Stunned into a state of disbelief by the first number, she consulted her ticket to be sure. When the second number was a match, she took in a large apprehensive gulp of air. On the third she exhaled. ‘Oh my!’ On the fourth she whispered, ‘Oh my God!’ When the fifth number rolled up she stayed very quiet, but her body began to tremble as if gripped by a mild seizure. When the sixth and final number matched, she let out a shrill wail. I’ve made a mistake. It can’t be. I haven’t. It isn’t. Damn it all. Damn me! She looked at her ticket again and then at the screen. She jumped from her chair and placed her hands over her mouth. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. The room whirled around her. She felt her knees caving. Yes! It’s true! I’ve won! I’ve won! Oh my beautiful, holy, lovely God, I’ve won! She wanted to rush out to the front of the shop and tell everyone, but she remembered that she hated them. So she ran to the mirror and gasped at herself and laughed.

At that precise moment Monica caught the magnetic gaze of the boy who had walked into the music arcade. Seized by a strange and sudden thrill, she felt the tips of her ears redden and her mouth go dry.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town in the forest behind the old church, Alex tasted the ejaculate of a boy for the first time.

And also at that precise moment Curtis thought he was about to ejaculate, too, when he was struck by a violent pain deep in his chest. He immediately knew what it was. It was those ruthless machines down at the steelworks! He’d worked them to boiling point all his life and now he felt their cold revenge – his whole life story – softly crushing him from the inside. He let go of his penis (which remained as hard as a rock). Wincing and clutching his chest, he fiddled with the latch to open the cubicle door. He collapsed into the passage, still with an erection, his pants around his ankles and a fist full of coins. As he fell, he cried, ‘Oh God have mercy upon my soul!’

4

The West

Beryl lived in the West.

There were no more nations. There was simply the West and the Countryside. Some decades before Beryl was born the nations of the world had gathered at their last international conference, which became known for the sake of history text books as The Big Conference.

The idea of nationhood, much like the Old Religions, had long been falling into disfavour and decline. Nations eventually emerged as rigid inflexible constructs in a global society that was increasingly fluid. If there weren’t atrocious squabbles within nations, there were atrocious squabbles between them. Their clamour over resources, riches and the constantly expanding and contracting zones of mismatched territorial ambitions provoked the most appalling spats and counter-spats across thousands of miles of national borders all over the world.

Perhaps the most overwhelming threat to the future of the nation was money. As money moved so did power. And money did move. Fast.

Trampling all over national borders, people swarmed towards vast agglomerations where money was made and spent. Migration was as old as the human story itself and no one who believed in something as petty as national sovereignty was going to stop it.

Not everyone moved to the cities. Some preferred to live in the Countryside no matter what, even if it meant they would have less money. At least they could appreciate other things in life, like the stars at night and the smell of clothing that had been dried in the sun.

Eventually, once all the turbulence within and amongst nations had come to an end, with the conclusion of the last election, the last military coup and the last revolution, and once the last breakaway province had finally broken away, people looked around them and saw that the world had moved on. Nations had no logical place in the new order of things.

Instead it was found that the people of the cities had estranged themselves from their traditional origins and formed a new, modern culture all on their own. They had bonded with each other through chains of identical coffee shops and burger restaurants where they congregated in queues and selected soft, treated food (in an endless range of flavours) from touch screens all the while listening to an endless range of music on their headphones. They called it freedom. They were connected across the globe through invisible cables and satellite signals. Travel from one city to another was through a network of identical airports, each one claiming to be a ‘hub’ to some other ‘hub’. There was the whole infernal business of believing in ‘trusted brands’ – the only belief system that seemed to deliver results. There were the TV franchises – the same shows, the same contests, the same kinds of contestants. Old national stadia were named after insurance giants and national sporting heroes were bought, sold, branded and sent out to play with logos emblazoned across their chests. There were citizenship-by-investment schemes and express lanes for members of the Chamber of Commerce. There was shopping – malls with rock-climbing walls and valet parking. There was the constant possibility of entertainment – in the street, in cars, on monorails, in your hand and plugged into your ears. The nights were lit up in neon. The days were cooled by machines. There was work: the salaries, the bonuses, the overtime, the deadlines and timelines, all of which marked milestones in the pursuit of endless growth. There was annual leave – that privilege of balancing work with a little bit of life. There was that predictable routine: corralled onto escalators, into mass urban transit systems, travelling on machines, along clogged arterials and choking capillaries to and from work, and occasionally, emerging from subways, tossing a coin into a paper cup held out by a beggar.

There was a lot of talk – endless talk – about solving problems.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, there was that unifying dream: the chance to gravitate from a box-like flat in a concrete tower to a box-like house in a distant suburb, and from there to a house with a tree in the backyard (and maybe a pool). And for a lucky few, some even made it to a walled-off mansion on The Hill. There was fine dining. There were yacht clubs. There were jewels crafted to your personal taste. The dream was not as implausible as some critics claimed. Not everyone got to realise it, but enough people did: enough for the dream itself to prosper.

At The Big Conference it was agreed that the people of the cities would be given citizenry of what (for old time’s sake) was to be called the West. People of the West were to be given their own passport and would trade in their own currency known as the franc (the French had pleaded for this, saying they were tired of not being taken seriously as a major world