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was visiting and Rainbow had insisted they watch the programme. Her mother leaned so close to the orange flickering face of Noel Edmonds on screen that Erykah thought she might trip and fall through the television. Neon-coloured balls tumbled in a spinner like socks in a dryer and an announcer shouted the results as they appeared.
    Even before the National Lottery started her mother had been a sucker for any promise of money with no strings attached. Horse races. The Irish Sweeps. Raffles in the pub, charity draws. Erykah collected up any losing tickets and flattened them out between the pages of her textbooks. She punched a hole in one corner and threaded the tickets onto a piece of string. She did this until Rainbow found the collection and went apoplectic. Erykah couldn’t understand why she was so upset. Hadn’t she realised how many there were? Why spend the money at all if you didn’t want to know you were spending it?
    But it wasn’t the wasted money that bothered Erykah. Saving wasn’t for people like them anyway. A few pounds each week spent on food instead of lottery tickets wasn’t going to get them off the estate in Streatham. It wasn’t going to make her blend in with the white kids at school or make their parents stop talking about her in hushed tones the few times she had been invited over to do homework in one of the detached houses that bordered the estate. It wasn’t going to stop final notices for bills coming through the door. It wasn’t going to stop the few valuables they had ending up in the pawn shop, and it certainly wasn’t going to stop the times when Rainbow was looking ragged and sweaty and was pushing down a kind of hunger that food alone couldn’t fix.
    No, what bothered Erykah was what the lottery represented. It stood for the loss of hope for any future apart from blind luck.
    What was excruciating was not that her mother kept playing these games, no matter how many times Erykah explained the statistical improbability of winning. That wasn’t it. It was the look on Rainbow’s face that night when each neon ball dropped, and they were all the wrong ones. The look as whatever dreams she had were snatched away, piece by piece. Then, when Rainbow had checked her numbers over once, and once again to be sure, she disappeared. Out the front door, going to do whatever it was she did out there. Erykah didn’t want to think about the details of that bit very much. She promised herself that, no matter what, she would never have nothing left but blind hope. Betting on luck was a fool’s game.
    ‘So,’ Rab said. He looked down at her bag, at the bits and pieces of clothing on the bed. ‘Are you going somewhere?’
    Erykah bit her lip. Was she going somewhere? Half of twenty million was a hell of a lot more than she had been planning to carry out of the house today. ‘There’s a training camp tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It’s in Peterborough. Instead of driving up early I thought I might stay over.’
    The weight of Nicole’s key had felt so good in her hand, so natural. Leaving was the right thing to do. For herself. For them. But this . . .
    This was money. To a girl who had grown up with her mum reeling between double shifts on a miserable wage or sick with drugs and unable to work, money was nothing to sniff at.
    ‘Nice of you to tell me.’ Rab sat on the corner of the bed and looked up at her. ‘About going away.’
    ‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I’m not the only one who’s been keeping secrets lately, am I?’ She held his gaze, hard. Go on, say it! Say it. I dare you. I dare you.
    Rab broke the stare first. He turned the lottery ticket over and over in his soft white hands. ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said. ‘We . . . I mean I . . . have some, ah, unexpected debts to cover.’
    ‘So I guess this money comes at the perfect time for you, doesn’t it,’ Erykah said.
    ‘Yes, I guess it does,’ Rab said. There was a pause, longer than was comfortable, shorter than it