When I go and see my acupuncturist April my visits always fall into two distinct halves, and during the first half we talk. We don’t just talk, of course, because that’s not why I’m there: the first needles always go into my feet, two or three in each, which I barely notice, followed by a scattering on both shins, somewhere below the spot where I have awkwardly rolled up both trouser legs. Meanwhile, we chatter away about all sorts. We usually begin by discussing my symptoms before moving on to wider topics; the weather, work, holidays, what we are reading. Today, though, we somehow find ourselves discussing the National Lottery: not a subject I ever imagined coming up in a conversation with my acupuncturist, because I thought she was above such things.
It all starts because April asks about work. She is convinced that I have a very stressful job, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell her that I don’t because she has made up her mind that I’m just being stoic. It just goes to show how little she knows about some things, because there’s nothing stoic about me. I tell her that my boss is leaving and that I have no desire to put myself forward for promotion.
“I’m lucky, because it’s not like I
need to get a better job. I don’t have kids, so I don’t have to worry about the cost of them. Some of my colleagues have to think about how to get a bigger house, or the next car, or whether they can afford to have another child, but none of that is important to me.”
“So what is important to you? What do you want to do in life?”
It’s a fair question. There are so many things I could say in response, and so little time; I wasn’t expecting to be taken down such a philosophical path on a Saturday morning. I think carefully about it before answering because I know that April takes this kind of thing seriously, but also because, in the back of my mind, I wonder whether this is some kind of test.
”I don’t know really, just being happy I suppose. So I don’t care about having a new car or a big house, I just want to spend my time with people I like and care about and see new places and experience new things. I want to never stop learning things and discovering things and meeting new people. Oh, and eating! Eating Is particularly important.”
In the pause that follows, I feel like an idiot.
What do you want to do in life? Just be happy I suppose is hardly the stuff of the great philosophers. It’s because the question ambushed me coming out of the mouth of somebody else, when it should be one I ask myself more often. The sound of ocean waves crashing against an unknown shore wafts out of the CD player somewhere behind me, uninterrupted by voices, for just long enough to be awkward. I can’t see what’s going on behind April’s eyes but they are twinkling, as they always do, with amusement, like she knows something I don’t. I suppose by definition everybody knows something that you don’t, but few people seem to get as much wry enjoyment out of it as she does.
“Yes. That is a good answer.” says April with a big smile, and I feel like I’ve passed.
“Anyway, if I won the lottery I wouldn’t go in to work the next day. I can’t bear those people who win the lottery and say
It won’t change my life, I’m still going to keep up my job as a cleaner, I’ll just buy a slightly bigger house and take the kids to Spain.”
This is true. I think that kind of person shouldn’t be allowed to do the lottery, I think instead that they should be encouraged to put ten pounds a week in a tin which can be couriered across to me every year just in time for Christmas. But then of course I don’t do the lottery, because I know that not taking part doesn’t materially affect your chances of winning. I could rant about this to April for the rest of our session but I decide not to, because I just got a question right and I don’t want to blot my copybook.
“What would you do instead, if you won?”
“Loads of things. I’d write, and travel, and go on lots of holidays. I’d get all my friends to take time off work and I’d take them away on trips with me. And I’d buy lots of houses all over the world.”
“Where would you like to live?”
“Everywhere! I love so many cities. I’d buy a place in Montreal for the summer, when it’s beautiful and hot, and a place in Granada for the winter, when it’s still warm, and a place in Paris for the rest of the time.”
It’s funny, the things you think about in an otherwise innocuous conversation. I realise that April is Korean, and that every city I mention is very Western. I remember that April has uprooted herself to somewhere so different from home, going back to visit her family a couple of times a year, and that by contrast I almost couldn’t manage the culture shock when I lived in Nottingham for a year. Even if I won the lottery I would never have an experience like the one April is having, I’d just be a super-rich tourist who can spend enough money to fool himself that he’s seeing the real thing.
And yet it’s a tempting series of images. I can see myself wandering through the Parisian streets, jotting on notebooks in cafes, standing at my balcony in summer watching clouds of people roll past me, smoke from my cigar spiralling upwards into nothing. I can picture myself sitting at a mirador looking at the Alhambra, drinking mint tea and noticing how the sun takes its time to pick out every tree on the slopes.
“And would you do anything else with your time?”
“Yes, I think I’d take up photography. I mean properly. It would be lovely to have all that time to devote to it, to try and get good at something. That’s the problem, you see, I’m not really that good at anything.”
“What sort of photographs do you like taking?”
“People. I love taking pictures of people. I love the way that they change all the time. If you take two pictures of a view, or a building, they look very similar but pictures of people are always different. I think I just find people fascinating, and I really like the moment when you get a picture and you know it sums them up perfectly.”
“Very good.”
April seems to like this answer too. I am getting all the questions right today, though it helps that she hasn’t asked any tricky ones like
Did you have anything to drink last night? I have told her that I’ve largely given up eating bread, which seems to have appeased her for the time being. It happens to be true.
While I talk away, April places needle after needle in my hand and wrists, the shaft of each one cased in bright pink plastic. I only feel some of them go in, though talking probably helps. Looking out of the window, I see the equally vibrant colours of the leaves on the trees in the square. This is the first day when I find myself thinking about how much longer I have before they start to turn and fall.
“You have pretty hands.” she tells me.
“Thank you! It’s because I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life.”
Normally, this is the point where my visit to April would get to the second stage, where I stop talking, lie back and relax and let everything wash over me. But I’ve warmed to my theme by now, so I tell her about a similar conversation we were having over lunch at work the previous day.
My colleagues James, Simon and I had been sitting round chewing the fat, which turned out to be more appealing than chewing our lunch; fish and chips Friday, in our canteen at least, has never delivered anything more than fish and chip shaped disappointment. So we got to talking about the Euromillions, and what we would all do if we won, and then James started to tell us a story about his uncle.
“My uncle lives in Ireland, and one day there was a picture of him on the front cover of one of the Irish national papers holding a pint of Guinness, underneath a headline saying
Is this the unluckiest man in Ireland?”
“What happened?” said Simon between mouthfuls. He’s a funny one, Simon; he joins us for lunch about once a month, mainly talks about his kids and the MA he’s studying for, but always makes you feel like he thinks he’s doing you a favour lunching with you at all. Despite that I rather like him, though I think that would change fast if he came to lunch more often than once a month.
“My uncle was standing in the queue at the local newsagent waiting to pick up a lucky dip for that night’s lottery draw. Just as he got to the front of the line, this woman he knew from the village hared into the shop, clearly in a hurry. Because my uncle is such a gentleman, he gave her his place in the queue.”
“And she bought…”
“…a lucky dip ticket. Exactly. She bought his lucky dip ticket, the one he was meant to have, and she won something like ten million Euros. And he got nothing except a photo opportunity on the front page of the national paper, holding a pint and grinning like a moron.”
Put that way, it was hard to argue. It wasn’t a glowing advertisement for chivalry, after all.
“Did she offer him a share of the money?”
“No. He wouldn’t have taken it anyway. He’s not materialistic in the slightest.”
When I heard that I found myself quite pleased that he hadn’t won. If he had, he would still have been on the front cover, still holding a pint of Guinness, under a headline saying
It won’t change my life, says Ireland’s newest millionaire, still grinning like a moron.
”I’ve got a Lottery story too.” said Simon. “One day my mum was sitting in front of the telly holding her ticket watching the numbers come in. The first number was on her ticket. So was the second, and the third. When the fourth one came up, she couldn’t believe it, and when the fifth one was also there she nearly passed out.”
“What happened?”
“Put it this way, my mother’s never let me forget it. She says to me,
If only you’d been born on the forty-third of June instead, we’d be millionaires today. She says that every time I see her.” He frowns. “It was only funny the first time.”
I felt a little guilty, because it was indeed funny the first time. But then I imagined, if Simon is anything like me, that getting that laugh when he tells the story to somebody is the only thing that makes up for having to hear his mother tell it so often. Then I remembered that I too had a story which seemed relevant.
”My friend Laura dated this guy for a few months when she was living in London. He was really sweet and good-natured, but she couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t really going anywhere. He wasn’t ambitious, didn’t really have any prospects and he was very unreliable. He just wanted to sit around smoking dope all day. So she ended it.”
“And?”
“About a year later he won eight million pounds on the Lottery. She still has to see him socially. Let’s just say that his lifestyle is very different these days.”
“That is terrible.” said James. I couldn’t blame him. It seemed like everyone who had a story about the lottery had a story about somebody else winning it.
“The worst thing about it is that, given that I know someone who knows someone who’s won the Lottery, my chances of winning it must be even slimmer than those of the average person. I always tell Laura that she’s jinxed me. That’s why I don’t play.”
Even as I said it, I knew that statistically it wasn’t true. But then, statistically at least, if your numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 you have as much chance of winning as anybody else, but nobody in their right mind would pick those numbers. It had nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with luck, and ours was rotten. That’s why we were sitting in the canteen on a Friday lunchtime dreaming of speedboats, beautifully phrased letters of resignation and balconies in Paris. If we’d had the right amount of luck we would have been elsewhere. If we’d had any luck at all, the fish and chips might have tasted palatable.
All the way through my story about the conversation at lunch, April has been busy. I look down to see the handful of needles has been transformed into a forest, all placed with perfect precision by this small, slight, smiling woman who I think I could tell almost anything to. Later on, she will tell me that they are on a very important meridian which travels all the way to my heart. I realise that April didn’t laugh at Simon’s joke about his birthday being on the forty-third of June, and I wonder what she must make of me prattling away while she’s trying to do her job.
The last of the needles goes in, and April gives me a look of infinite patience like a mother’s, or at least like somebody else’s mother’s.
“The universe has a plan for us. It’s just that we don’t know what it is.”
When I go and see my acupuncturist April my visits always fall into two distinct halves, and during the second half there is no talking. So I lie back on the couch with my eyes closed, and the waves crashing in the background, a forest of silent needles up my arm, and I only just make out the door closing behind April. I’m too busy thinking about what I want and what I said that I want, thinking about what makes me happy and wondering whether I even really know. Last of all, I’m thinking about what April said just before she left the room. And everything is fine. I don’t know what the universe’s plan is, for me or for anyone, but at moments like this I’m happy just to let it have its way.
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