“So there I am, homeless, shaking with the cold, right, squatting in this shop doorway, a mound of blankets and all that.”
“Right.”
“I"m starving, but what I really need is a smoke. I"ve found a few fag-ends but I"ve no paper. Then I see this scrap blowing down the road towards me. Like, just skipping along. Beautiful. I grab it. And then, as I"m rolling it up, I see it"s a lottery ticket.”
He"s told the story a hundred times, of course. The young blonde woman sitting at the bar next to him sips her cocktail. Death in the Afternoon. Her long red fingernails are wrapped delicately around the bowl of her glass.
“Just like that.”
She smiles a beautiful smile, her earrings sparkling. Her legs are crossed and he finds it hard not to look at the silky stretch of her thigh. He thinks ab
