As he entered the tobacconist's shop, a spark of elation jumped within him at the prospect of winning, even though he knew the impossible, absurd odds and loathed the irrationality of hope. They could not afford to waste money, and yet here he was gambling it away. He ran a hand through the back of his shaggy blonde hair and waited for a pair of ancient women to shift from the counter. Queuing for the lottery had taken the place of queuing in the post office for sheer annoyance-value. He snatched up a pair of forms, grimly aware of the syndicates up and down the country that were each filling in dozens of such forms, thought for a moment and began marking off numbers. The age of his dog, Boots (12), the size of his shoes (9), the age of Ann's mother (56), and so on, until he was done.
He posted the slips in the white plastic box and started to leave the shop when he felt a loose pound coin in his jacket pocket. At the same moment his eye caught a separate scratchcard dispenser beside the main lottery ticket display. Dropping the pound coin in the slot released one of the scratchcards, which he slipped into his jeans intending to scratch off when he reached the car. But the rain had begun falling in slate-grey sheets, the traffic was bad, the DJ on the radio annoyed him and he forgot all about it.
Ann insisted on seeing the lottery draw live on television, so that he was forced to miss the end of the programme he was watching in order to stare at some capering ninny and his simpering sidekick while they made a big deal about reading the numbers from coloured ping-gong balls – ping-pong balls!
'Doesn't it amaze you that we have all this modern technology, and the best random-number selection device they can come up with is running a hairdryer under a box of ping-pong balls?' he asked, but was shushed. Ann excitedly checked each number, and even managed not to reveal her disappointment when she failed to match a single digit to the winning line. Her innocent enthusiasm never ceased to surprise him; it was one of her most charming qualities.
It was then that he remembered the scratchcard in his back pocket. And it was only when he looked at it properly that he realised what an odd item it was. One word was emblazoned across the top of the card in crimson: WIN! Win what it didn't say, almost as if the promotions company could not be bothered to put details on the card. Underneath this were six grey panels, and beneath these were instructions: Scratch off each of the boxes in turn. Each one will reveal a word, WIN or LOSE. The more you WIN, the bigger your prize. To be the Prizewinner Of The Week you must uncover
Then a third.
'Ann?' He looked down at the card on his knee, and she followed his gaze. 'How many do you need?' she asked.
'Not sure. All, for the grand prize.'
'Keep going, then.'
He placed the edge of the coin against the corner of the fourth square and scratched. WIN.
And the fifth. WIN.
He swallowed and looked across at Ann. She gave him a puzzled look, a suspicious this couldn't happen to us look. 'Well, do it.'
He scratched at the sixth square, but could not bring himself to look. Slowly, he opened his eyes.
WIN.
'It's a trick, it's not a real card,' he said, 'it must be selling something.'
'No, you paid for it, didn't you?'
'Yes, but – '
'Then you've won, Gary. My god, you've won. Does it say how much?'
'No, it just tells you how to do it, and there's no company name, it's weird. I've never seen cards like these before.'
'Maybe they're new, maybe the money goes to some special charity. Fill in your name and address, send it off.'
'I'll put your name down, if you like.'
'That's sweet of you,' said Ann. 'But you picked that particular card, you were chosen fair and square.' So he filled out his own name and address, and on Monday morning drove back into town to send it off by registered post.
The next few days crawled by in agonising torpor. They had agreed not to mention the win, not to even think of it, but to behave in such a way would have been a defiance of human nature. They'd pay their bills, thought Gary, be prudent, clear all their debts, start anew and not make the same mistakes. Find somewhere decent for Ann's mother to live instead of her damp run-down flat. Find himself a job that paid a proper salary. Maybe they could even think about starting a family… The locks seemed to be falling away from the sealed gates of their fate, and some kind of decent future beckoned beyond. But Gary could not allow himself to think of such a thing; the more he dreamt, the greater would be his disappointment if it turned out to be a con, if the company was, say, a double-glazing firm attempting to hook customers.
He did not even believe in the lottery. Surely somebody less contemptuous should have won, a true believer who slavishly worked out the odds of various numerical formulations in order to maximise winning potential, someone who paid visits to the ticket dispenser with the regularity of a devout churchgoer? When it came to the divine power of chance, Gary was an agnostic. The idea of fate was unnerving; it contradicted natural laws. Someone had to win, Ann told him, but that meant someone had to lose.
One odd thing happened four days after he bought the ticket. He had stopped in town to pick up some shopping, and entered the tobacconist's to buy a newspaper.
'Where do you get your scratchcards from?' he asked the young Asian man stacking shelves.
'We don't sell 'em, mate.'
'Yes you do, you've a machine -' he indicated a space just past the regular lottery ticket dispenser, ' – just over – there.' His words dwindled away as he found himself pointing at nothing. 'It was there on Saturday,' he ended lamely.
'No, mate,' replied the boy, 'we've just got the regular one.'
'But I saw it, a red box near the door. I bought a ticket from it.'
'If there was anything like that there, someone must have brought it in from outside and then taken it away again.' He chuckled, shook his head and returned to aligning boxes of tampons.
Maybe it had been a scam. He had heard of bogus cashpoints being set up in empty shops, then removed at the end of a busy Saturday, filled with credit card details. As the days passed he grew convinced that he had been abstractly victimised – but then the postcard arrived.
It had been mailed inside a plain white envelope, presumably to preserve his anonymity. The frank-mark indicated that it had come from London. The address was computertyped, and the back took the form of a generic tick-box reply, the kind you found attached to the guarantee when you bought a toaster. The top of the card bore the legend GRAND PRIZEWINNER. It asked a variety of simple questions, his age, marital status, if he was a houseowner. At the bottom it read Our representatives will call you to arrange a time when they can visit. There was no other information on the card, or in the envelope.
'Don't you think they're being rather mysterious?' he asked Ann over breakfast on the morning the card arrived. 'No company name, no details, no picture of cars, or cash, or sundrenched beaches…'
Ann shrugged and gathered up the plates. 'They obviously have their own system,' she said, 'you'll just have to be patient.'