A big week. A big big week for Eva Wiseman, as for the first time, she bought a lottery ticket. It wasn’t that I was feeling lucky, no, luck has no place in this lumpen body I’m forced to heave around from seat to seat, the baby playing my innards like a harp. And it wasn’t that I was financially sinking into new depths of desperation, nor am I dying with nothing to lose. I bought a lottery ticket because everyone else did. It started in a typically muted way, the person who sits opposite me at work noting that this week’s jackpot was £34m. Not a showy £100m; just a modest, accessible, dignified sum – the kind of money that, split across the desk say, could change all of our lives just the right amount. Everybody in earshot put in £2.50, and the job was done.
Except, it had only just begun. In quiet moments between genius and deadlines, a colleague would ask a question. What happens when we win, and all of us get £3m except the person who’s off sick? Do we need to agree on an appropriate sum each, a handful of £1,000s say, to donate to her? Opinion was split. A familiar ugliness emerged. Should the person who held the tickets perhaps share her phone’s location with another colleague, just in case she felt compelled to fly to Mexico when the numbers come in? I proposed a buddy system, the details of which I’m happy to share via email, but be prepared – they are elaborate and cynical. Who would play each of us in the feel-good movie, out next summer? Is it cleaner, perhaps, to dump our current partners now, to avoid messiness on Monday?
Normally, I wouldn’t even have registered a lottery, but once the conversation had begun, with all its delicious meanderings through estate agent websites and charitable ventures with our names loudly inserted in the title, I would not be left out. Imagine if I was the lone rational voice, whispering monotone statistics about the impossibilities of winning while my longtime colleagues loudly dreamed? I can be a knob, sure, but I always try not to be a dick. Also, I would like lots of money.
No, I would like exactly the right amount of money. I would like the opportunity to do a Michael Carroll, the problematic legend of our time, the man who burned through his £9.7m lottery win with “Roman-style orgies”, bail bonds for his mates, Big Macs that he purchased as missiles to throw at strangers from a Mercedes van painted with the phrase “King of Chavs”, and lots of cocaine. My version would be gentler, of course. “Friends-style orgies”, perhaps, nail bars for my mates, etc. Instead of a Mercedes van, a party bus, the kind that can transform into a boat, and lots of cocaine. No, I jest! I jest. A small amount of cocaine.
It became immediately clear, as we discussed our intentions, that money meant different things to each of my colleagues. For some the inevitable win offered a weary respite from worrying about rent, or the cracks in the roof, for others an opportunity to buy something extremely shiny that would display their new successful lives. For me, it is a combination of guilt and padding, guilt because it feels vaguely sickening to fantasise about millions three minutes after reading that rough sleepers are sheltering in bins, “with surging homelessness in the UK blamed for a rising number of deaths by crushing”, and padding, because awareness of how close each of us could be to losing everything means I treat money with a grand, respectful reverence, knowing each new £1 offers another fraction of security.
It also became clear that the reasons we were each playing the lottery were different, too. Some colleagues led with superstition – that twinkling drunkenness that offers new answers to old sums. Some enjoyed the rough maths involving calculations of probability that their gentle brains were not evolved enough to process. The optimistic ones were my favourites – the ones that heard we had a one in a million chance as, “We have a chance!” Some weighed up the investment of £2.50, and decided to forego their morning’s coffees in favour of joining in.
As evening fell on Friday, the questions had become more meditative, darker. Would our friends feel patronised by our generous gifts? Would our win be a curse, neither enough to change the world, nor too little for it not to change our lives? If we all gave up our jobs, what would life be like with nothing to strive for? Leaving the office in the rain, we nodded to each other with great seriousness, aware now of the golden chains in which we were bound. I made an effort to look carefully at my surroundings, in order to ground myself later – the valiant hand sanitisers, the intricate map made by spilled coffee on the carpet, last week’s newspapers, not even good enough for chips.
That night I refreshed my screen alone as the lottery was drawn, my sombre excitement having required silence and a hat. Sixteen tickets we bought, not a single one came in. For the best, I think. For the best.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
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