Daisy thought about this for a moment, trying to accept it, but always running away from the outcome. It wasn’t her kind of world being described. Where were the laws of mathematics in this? She had nothing to fall back on, nothing to guide her. Numbers, for sure, but just a total of the dead. Hackle was talking about murder!
‘I’m not sure about this. Professor.’
‘Of course. I understand. It is only the beginning…’
‘But nobody knows who Mister Million is. The security is a government-level system. It’s unbreakable.’
‘There are ways. And regarding Mister Million… I already know who it is.’
‘You do?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do I get to find out?’
Hackle stared at Daisy for a few seconds, as though working her out, a tangled equation, and then spoke.
Play to win
I was a terrible child, keen to do the worst of all things, never the best. Blame it on my upbringing, if you will, or else my place of birth. Or else the time of birth, 1941, conceived by the war. I make no such excuses. I was a self-made brat, only interested in myself. Fuck the world, that was my most complex statement, and believe me, I knew such words at the age of four. Primary school was a disaster zone with me around. If I couldn’t learn, why should anybody else. Not that the teachers cared, they were the bottom of the pile themselves, working in this God-awful dump of a school in Droylsden. Nobody cared about us, you see? That’s the key to what happened later. Nobody cared if we all failed and beat each other up in the process. I can honestly say that by the time I was seven and ready to go to junior school, my knowledge of the world was limited to the end of my nose. I could barely write my own name, never mind add up a series of simple numbers. The funny thing is, I wasn’t anywhere near the worst pupil in class, but more of that later.
Junior school didn’t help. The teachers there probably cared less about us than the primary teachers. I guess, having reached that age without an ounce of knowledge, we were already marked down as factory fodder, or potential beggars. I honestly can’t remember much of the first year, only the intense pleasure of escaping into the summer holidays. I was in two minds about going back, I can remember that. The whole thing seemed so pointless. Only my dad’s threat of the strap persuaded me to turn up on the first day of second year. I was put in this class called 2c, and the first thing we knew, the headmaster came in and told us we had a new teacher starting today, and that she was going to look after us. We were going to make her life hell, more like. After all, that’s why our last teacher left. Anyway, the head introduced us to this Miss Sayer, who was fairly young for a teacher. She must have been in her late twenties, I suppose. Nobody knew where she came from, or why she’d chosen this particular job. Punishment, most probably, for some earlier crime. The headmaster leaves us to it.
Miss Sayer just stared at us for a while, and then smiled at us, and some girl started giggling. She didn’t even say hello, or ask us to call out our names. Her first words were these, and I shall never forget them: ‘Who can tell me how many children there are in this classroom?’ This must have confused us a little because some of us even tried to look round to work it out. I was one of them, even though the highest number I could count to was thirteen. ‘Has anybody got an answer for me?’ Nobody had. ‘Very well, I shall tell you myself. There are twenty-eight children in this classroom. Now, has anybody ever played a game called dominoes?’ That was easier. Most of us put up our hands. ‘Good. Because I’ve brought a set of dominoes with me.’
I think we were all a bit puzzled by now, or else expecting an easy ride. Games were what you played in primary school, surely. Then she started to count the dominoes out loud as she lay each one, face-down, on her desk. ‘One… two… three… four…five… six…’ and so on, all the way up to twenty-eight. ‘Now isn’t that interesting? If anybody ever asks you how many children there are in your class, you can tell them there’s the same number as there are pieces in a domino set. Won’t they be impressed? They will be, because they won’t know how many pieces there are in a domino set. So you’ll have told them the right answer, without telling them the answer.’
By this time some of us were getting pretty excited. But the next thing she did was even stranger. She had all twenty-eight of the dominoes face-down on her desk, and she shuffled them all around, like this, so we couldn’t know which was which. Then she asked us to come up and choose a piece at random, any piece we liked. ‘But choose carefully,’ she said, ‘because this will be your number from now on until you leave me. OK, who wants to choose first?’