ROLLOVER

Jake was feeling in a good mood so he bought two lucky dips from the nice girl behind the fag counter in Martin’s the newsagents. He told her his pet joke too.

“Man goes to a zoo but there was only one dog. It was a Shitzu.”

The nice girl behind the counter wobbled with laughter. She handed Jake his lottery ticket and wished him luck. She wished most of her customers luck. Those that spoke politely to her, made an effort at conversation, showed they were human, not just impatient shoppers in a hurry.

“If you win the jackpot will you share it with me?” she said. She said it to lots of punters and they always smiled back at her. Some said “Of course love” without meaning it but most just smiled back at her. The young men thought that if they won, they’d get shacked up with Abbie Titmuss or any bit of decent totty, rather than the nice girl behind the fag counter. The nice girl behind the fag counter wasn’t a looker. Some said, rather cruelly, that she needed to carry a government health warning. Jake, on the other hand, came from the school of you don’t look at the mantle piece when you’re poking the fire. There was something he quite liked about the nice girl and he didn’t care about health warnings.

“If I win you can have half but you’ll have to make a honest man of me.” He said and the nice girl giggled at the idea. She liked Jake. As her customer’s went, Jake was all right. She quite fancied him.

Jake didn’t win. Only one of his numbers came up and he screwed up the phoney bit of paper-thin dreams and chucked it in the bin, the pedal bin next to the kitchen sink. It lodged between a smeared tin of meatballs and a wet bottle of Beck’s. The discarded knot of paper, the one that had been bought with so much optimism, lay scrunched up next to a damp Typhoo tea bag and a three quarters eaten apple tart in its tin foil dish. The little piece of printed hope had turned into no hope when six numbered balls spewed from Sir Gallahad at the press of a button by the smiling, fat, Irish TV man who spoke those meaningless words, “Good luck everyone.”

Jake felt robbed. It had been a rollover too. Twenty three million pounds and he hadn’t won a penny. Someone had though and the next time he called at the newsagent the talk from one of the girls who worked with the nice girl was that the winning ticket had been purchased from them.

“Just imagine that,” the girl who worked with the nice girl said to Jake as she passed him a packet of Marlborough Lites. “Some lucky bugger’s won the lot and we sold them the ticket.”

“How d’you know?” asked Jake.

“Lottery HQ tell us,” replied the girl who worked with the nice girl.

The local rag was full of it. Who, asked the headlines, was the mystery winner? No one came forward and within a week the search was forgotten and the headlines roared about a local lad who’d been killed in Basra.

On the Saturday evening, two weeks after the big jackpot, Jake breezed into the newsagents and waited until the nice girl was free. He’d got a plan.

“It was me.” He said to her almost too quickly.

“What was?”

“It was me that won the rollover jackpot.”

“You can’t have done,” said the nice girl.

“I bloody can,” said Jake. “What time d’you finish work because we’ve got some planning to do.”

They met in the snug bar of the Rose and Crown. The nice girl had a Cinzano and lemonade and Jake had his usual pint of larger. They got on well and after nearly too much to drink they walked back to Jake’s flat with a large Domino’s Pizza to share.

After the feed, the nice girl let Jake take advantage of her. She undressed and the two of them embraced on Jake’s old sofa and one thing led to another.

“Roll over,” implored Jake as he wrestled with his shirt. “I want to take you from behind.”

The nice girl let him and Jake had his way selfishly and in a matter of moments. Less time than it took to pick the six lucky balls.

“Right.” He said after he’d got himself dressed. “You’d better be going.”

“What?” said the nice girl somewhat taken aback. “Not even a cup of coffee.”

“Have a cup of coffee by all means. But then you ought to go. By the way I never won the lottery. I lied. I just wanted to shag you that’s all.”

The nice girl looked at Jake with pity. Pity turned to disgust and then disgust turned to amusement. She started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” said Jake.

“Nothing really,” said the nice girl. “ It’s just that it was me that won the rollover.”