It was raining again when I left Brian to go home to his mum and say he’d fallen over playing football. He was looking like it didn’t matter, but it did and I was gonna get him some of the reward, so he could go on telling me where the ground was. My mum was home in the kitchen, marking the pools. I was bursting to tell her, but I couldn’t. She was going across and down in columns.

‘How does that work?’ I said when I’d got out my wet clothes and she was still doing it.

She looked up like I’d stopped her working it out. ‘It doesn’t,’ she said, ‘but I do it anyway.’

‘What’s it for?’

She put the pencil down, and did a big sigh and shook her head, like what did I want? But she tucked my vest in for me and said, ‘For you. To give you things I can’t.’

There was the smell she had when she wasn’t feeling well. She leaned back to have a look at me. I wanted to give her the news but I couldn’t. I could have told Busola but she was staying over with Nana.

‘I’d have to win, though,’ she said, ‘and that doesn’t always happen.’

You could win the pools? Doing marks with a pencil? That didn’t sound likely to me. ‘What happens if you win? Do you get money?’

‘You all get your own room, and everyone gets a bicycle,’ she said.

I jumped up and laughed, and clapped my hands. I felt like I’d won already, because we were rich and she didn’t know, even though she was watching me. The door went downstairs and I rushed to get it. My dad was coming in shaking out his jacket from the rain.

‘Hello, Daddy, Mummy’s doing the pools!’

He looked up like he wasn’t interested. But he didn’t know either. I was going to get a bicycle. I waited for him as he closed the front door and came swinging his work lamp up the stairs after me.

‘Mrs Brown of Luton,’ he called out, ‘has never in this world done well. Millionaire and can’t care. Where’s the food? And what’s all this mud on the floor?’

I’d trailed it in, but I couldn’t tell him I’d dug up treasure. Or Manus had. I had to get my mum to tell him about the pools, ‘Come and see,’ I said.

He looked in over my shoulder at the kitchen door and saw my mum with the pools spread out on the table. He held up his lamp to see even though it was off, ‘Poor man’s problem solved. The more you play, the more you pay.’