The Lotto Ticket

Arthur sat with a €4 cup of coffee before him and approximately a quarter billion euros in his pocket. The lotto total the previous night amounted to €260,936,087.86, but rounding down to the nearest fraction proved less threatening. Arthur amused himself with quick calculations in his head; he would be able to buy fifty-million cups of the same just okay dark-oak coloured coffee that now looked up at him, reflecting his own pallid face back at him on its shiny roasted surface. Even blacked, the thinning short hair of strawberry-blond, making Arthur look his thirty-eight years, and then some, his bright cyan eyes which fought against his drooping, black bags, and the lines carving deep ridges across his high forehead were all unmistakable. It wasn’t a great cup of coffee, Arthur thought.

Perhaps he’ll invest in a barista machine. It always seemed like a daunting undertaking, both in commitment and price, but now that he had a Euro Millions winning lottery ticket in his phone case, nestled behind a bank card, his mind was flittering with haphazard thoughts and intrusive daydreams. What even is a good brand of barista machine anyway? Arthur struggled not to pull his phone out just to Google. This was serious. He needed to focus. He needed to decide what to do next.

Arthur was sitting in a franchise café, the one with the terrible coffee, the one you immediately thought of, for the same reason he had the winning lotto ticket on him and not in his bank; he had time to kill. The draw was on Friday, last night, and the National Lotto Office isn’t open for calls on the weekend. He knew the offices were on Abbey Street in Dublin, but even they wouldn’t be back open until Monday morning.

Arthur never made it a point of playing the lotto. In fact, it was an act of desperation for him. Arthur was, and is, an overthinking cynic. He considered gambling, even as unassuming as bingo, to be the dumbest thing a person could do. When Maggie, his partner and the mother of their child, Alexandra, celebrated winning €100 at bingo, Arthur felt compelled to point out that over the course of the previous ten €10 games, she had spent €100. Maggie would try to make Arthur see logic.

“Yeah, but I WON €100, so it’s more.”

She’d ignore Arthur’s feeble attempts to explain that’s not how money works.

This ego-inflating sense of empiricism, however, submitted quickly to the ego crushing fact that Arthur had lost his job. Lost his job and had yet to tell Maggie.

Arthur slurped more of his coffee from the heavy, thick ceramic mug, which would have seemed like a nice addition to the home if it wasn’t for the fact nearly every inch of the cup was covered with garish stamps of the café’s logo, as though they were afraid someone could somehow forget their unforgettably unmemorable coffee. Arthur would have helped design a logo like this. Design is perhaps a strong word; he wasn’t NOT a designer, per se, but rather a design quality assurance manager. This vague title neatly obscured what he did for a living; his job was to ensure logos were printed correctly onto pens, posters, mouse pads, calendars, and, yes, cups. Fourteen years of loyalty and competence were simply wiped away due to automation. AI can do what he’s spent his adult life doing. Arthur silently agreed it was an untaxing job, but, still, for the money that was saved by his former print-on-demand employer, it had cost him his livelihood. Even with a job, life was already a struggle. Arthur, Maggie, and little Alexandra lived with Maggie’s mother, Beth, who was as friendly and as patient as she was young. At eighty-nine years old, her ailing health, bad knees, worsening ears, manic mood swings, blackened teeth, and crotchety personality made her difficult to endure. This living arrangement was only tenable because the alternative was homelessness. Part of Arthur’s reason in keeping his unemployment a secret was because he didn’t want to listen to Beth.

“And I tell you this, you needn’t be looking for a handout neither! Men used to work in this country! Now they just fap about! And what am I to do without me cigarettes? Starve? Oh, I tell you; it’s a sad day when me only daughter took a liking to you, wasn’t it, boy!”

Desperation (and a mother-in-law) makes men do foolish things, like playing the lotto. Arthur estimated he must have played ten games over the course of two months before he finally won big. He had spent that time searching for a new job, but to no success. You’re considered lucky these days if you even get a rejection email back. Arthur wasn’t that lucky. Though he knew the odds of winning the lotto were about one in one-hundred-and-thirty-nine million, the cynical side of him quipped that those odds were on par with finding a job. He was already eating into his savings; what harm could €7 a week do? As it turns out, quite a lot to his nerves. He’s felt sick for the last nine sleepless hours.

He had just opened his book in bed the previous night, finally finding the time to begin reading, when Maggie asked if they could go to sleep. Arthur struggled to contain his annoyance, but he managed to smother it. The stress of what he was to do now for money, along with keeping up the charade by spending his week like he was now, sitting in a café and ruminating, was beginning to make him irritable, but he needed to push a little further, at least until a miracle happened. For all his pompous intellectualism, Arthur was a reserved believer in hope. They had turned out the lights. Arthur would have lain awake for another hour or two, as he was accustomed to even before unemployment, except, as his eyes grew heavy, the stress finally sending him to sleep at a respectable hour for once, a voice whispered.

“Check.”

He startled fully awake, snorting back a snore; he often woke himself with the ferocity of his snoring. He clumsily knocked over the book he’d never get to finish as he reached blindly in the dark for his phone, pulling it and himself under the blanket so the glare wouldn’t disturb Maggie. From his phone case, Arthur pulled out his ticket.

Twenty-four, forty-four, forty-five, forty-eight, forty-nine, and lucky star numbers one and four.

Arthur initially swore when he had received the ticket earlier that week. Yes, the odds were the same, Arthur understood, but statistically the winning numbers tended to be more diverse, not clumped together. Arthur had done some research. He wasn’t expecting much. He opened the lotto app on his phone and checked the results page.

Twenty-four.

Oh.

Forty-four.

A bemused laugh was muffled by the blanket overhead.

Forty-five.

Oh?

Forty-eight.

Arthur’s widening eyes were singed in the flooding phone light.

Forty-nine.

Arthur didn’t bother glancing down to confirm. His eyes raced to the end.

One.

…

Four.

…

Arthur’s nostrils gaped and loudly flushed with air so heavily that Maggie sleepily slapped him on the shoulder.

“Babe, you’re snoring again.”

Arthur cradled the cup of coffee, now cooled to the point of enjoying its radiating warmth in his hands without scalding himself. It felt nice, almost lulling him to close his eyes and finally catch on the sleep he missed shaking, vomiting, and suppressing giddy yelps in the bathroom all night. He was cold with exhaustion that morning, but still lied to Maggie, claiming he needed to run back into the office for something. He needed space, time, and silence to think. Two out of three was all he could manage; the café wasn’t overly busy, with the reserved chatter of the gossiping yummy-mummys with a sleeping baby each in their prams at a table in the corner, and man in a suit and a carry-on suitcase sitting by the window, glancing out every few seconds when he wasn’t scrolling emails on his phone, but the speakers did play obnoxiously loud pop music, occasionally breaking for an ad suggesting the café upgrade to Spotify Premium. Nonetheless, this would do. What was Arthur to do now?

He knew what to do, obviously. First thing Monday, morning, he would phone the lotto office, follow their instructions, and become a quarter of a billionaire. But then what? Yes, a house, obvious. And yes, finally propose to Maggie and stop living in sin, as Beth so often described it. And yes, hire someone to deal with Beth. But then what? At a quick estimation, that would all only be a little under six-hundred thousand; nowhere close to a million, never mind a quarter billion.

Arthur swirled the dregs of his coffee in the shallow pool at the bottom of the cup. The more he thought of the obscene, unimaginable numbers, the more he shook with a conflicting sense of joy and fear.

Arthur went up and got another underwhelming €4 cup of coffee. He decided to treat himself and got a day-old stale croissant. Sitting down again, this time at a different table since a group of teens had commandeered his table while he was at the till, Arthur chuckled under his breath to himself. He never thought he would actually win the full jackpot. He didn’t even think he’d win anything. It was an action of a sad, pensive, guilt-riddled man, sending a hapless wish out into the universe, hoping someone would answer. He had nothing. Now he had too much.

He supposed he could become a philanthropist, donating to the Arts and Sciences, helping fund schools, hospitals, and public parks. He could always get into politics; becoming a big party donor whispering in the ears of government. Maybe he could even enjoy himself for once. Take Maggie and Alexandra to Disneyland for a week. The real Disneyland, not that French knock-off. They could travel the world, savouring cultures. Why not buy a house in every country? With maids and cooks. Cellars full of the most prestigious champagne. And then, all to himself, away from judging eyes, in a five-star hotel, he can have a little fun of his own; a harem for his amusement.

“What!”

Arthur shook himself back to reality, his vision returning from his lewd fantasy, locking eyes with one of the teens, staring back at Arthur, who was absentmindedly staring off into space in their direction this whole time.

Arthur looked away, distracting himself with his lukewarm coffee and flaky croissant, failing to ignore the mocking laugh the teens shared. This is exactly what Arthur was scared of; the damning freedom winning now afforded him. He suddenly got an empathising glimpse into the world of the obscenely rich. What do you do when money is no object? Who are you without limitations?

Arthur studied his reflection in his coffee, wondering, with mournful self-loathing, if he was only who he was because he didn’t have a choice. Would he still be with Maggie if he could just pay her for child support and leave? Would he have any sympathy for others if he didn’t suffer as they did? Would he be the kind of man he’d want his daughter looking up to if he were the kind of man who couldn’t resist the temptations of wealth? Should he have this much freedom?

Arthur took out the lotto ticket, flattening it out on the table. He must have folded and unfolded it about a dozen times in the last nine hours, and every time the crease of the folds carving a cross the length and depth of the ticket whispered a tempting solution.

“Tear me.”

No one would know what he did. It would absolve him of the responsibility. Of the temptation. He sat there, staring at the ticket. Hoping, once again, for a sign.

#HI