Jack just won the lottery. He should be thrilled. Ecstatic! He’s a millionaire, twice over! Or…whatever he has left after His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has their way with the check. Problem is, he’s going through a divorce. A freelance English-as-a-second-language teacher may not have to worry about being looted by his ex-wife (what’s she going to take, his bicycle? His forty-year old sedan?), but he has no intentions of letting her take him for hundreds of thousands of pounds. They’ve only been married for a few months, for pete’s sake, and he suspects she was just using him for a work visa. He could try to hide it from her, but she knows perfectly well he always plays the lottery and always uses the same numbers. And she bloody called him right after the numbers were announced, so he knows she knows. So, Jack decides to lie: he forgot to pick up his ticket this week. Of all the luck, right? Only Cindy’s not falling for it, and when Jack confesses to his brother Rich what he’s trying to do, he unwittingly confesses this to Cindy’s new lover, because Rich now knows Cindy in the Biblical way and is breaking numerous rules of the Bro Code and even more rules of Levicitus. Fortunately for Jack and Rich’s relationship, Jack loses the ticket and gets distracted by a new relationship, infatuated by some woman who backed into his new car and destroyed its back end. All’s well that ends with no homicide, right? Only Cindy is looking into ways of claiming the winning on her own, and the ticket is not quite lost. Someone else has got it.

I chiefly read this because I’d just read a Tom Alan and wanted to try another of his works. They’re quite different, aside from the constant political references: The Last App was relatively serious, concerned with a question of how tech changes our lives, while this is is more of a…sitcom episode with gobs of slang and drama. In 17 years of reading in public, I’ll venture to say I’ve never read a book more full of slang, and that’s counting P.G. Wodehouse’s ideolect that saturates every page of a Jeeves and Wooster novel. (Thank you, Anthony Esolen, for that word.) Most of it’s British, but since Cindy is Australian there’s a lot of Australian slang as well and it confuses everyone. Basically, Jack has won the lottery, he wants to hide it from his ex-wife who is boinking his brother, but he’s lost the ticket and doesn’t care because he’s fallen in love with Millie, but then the ticket’s found and it somehow threatens every single relationship until it doesn’t and everyone winds up happy, even that cheating cow Cindy and Rich, the loathesome brother who needs his nose bent.

The novel was…engaging, easy to read, but I didn’t like most of the characters and I really wanted Cindy and Rich to be left at least mildly unhappy and they weren’t. Sure, there’s a happyish ending, but people who cheat on other people should get some comeuppance, not their own happyish ending.This novel is funny, but frustrating, because no one but Jack feels the least remorse about their actions.

Oh, and Jack’s last name is Pott. Jack Pott. Get it? Now I’m off to a weekend in Florida of staring at (potential) tropical storms and Navy airplanes. Oh, and hopefully Spanish artifacts if any have survived.

Highlights:

Ananya Banerjee bustles out from the back, hands flapping, hips threatening the unsteady stacks of chewing gum and football stickers. Cindy steps forward, her gap year in Barcelona has given her a Latin tic of bestowing kisses on people she barely knows, or has only just met, but she pauses – as does Ananya, as if she’s suddenly realised that she’s an Indian shopkeeper who’s spent years trying to learn how to behave with traditional British reserve. The moment is lost, and they stand looking each other up and down, like they’re inspecting fridges in an electrical shop.

When he’s had a think: he got drunk the night he won, not that he remembers it well, but he’s got the evidence of the state of his sweatshirt and chinos and six empty San Miguel bottles. So, where might he have hidden the ticket when in a drunken stupor? You know, not his usual places, but drunken-stupor places…?

The bed was the smallest double imaginable; the mattress was the sort of bit of foam you’d find on a cheap sun lounger in a run-down hotel in Lowestoft. It sagged so spectacularly it was probably marketed as a hammock.

We didn’t argue much – Cindy was too good at it. I remember one tiff; I rather unwisely accused her of always wanting to have the last word. And that was the last word in that conversation. She drained her glass, stood up, walked out of the restaurant, leaving me with two-thirds of a pizza, and the last word. Not that it felt much of a triumph as she proved me wrong, winning the argument with silence and an empty chair.

“He wants to marry his Sheila; he’ll have to pay up or this Sheila ain’t gonna give him an easy Tammy Wynette.’
‘A what?’ Rich’s heard Jack complain about Cindy’s incomprehensible Australianisms. He’s not sure she’s even speaking English any longer.
‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E,’ she spells out for him, twanging her voice like a steel guitar. ‘Keep up, Rich-a-roo.’

“But look, you and Cind! Congratulations! Would never have seen that coming. How is she? Sorry we didn’t make it for the wedding, we wanted to, but there was no way.’
‘No problem, Cindy’s fine…[….] The thing is…’ Jack takes a breath. ‘The thing is – we’re not together anymore. She moved out about five months ago; we’ve agreed to divorce.”