The metaphor of life as lottery is hardly an original one. The Ancient Greeks were onto it. They used contraptions not unlike Lotto’s Arthur and Guinevere to allocate civic duties. Your name on a shard of clay could land you on a jury, or, more terrifying, as judge. Thomas Hobbes was onto it. “If a lottery be made of things equally good, he that draweth first has no reason to complain of his luck”. (True, Thomas, unless everyone’s lot is dire). Dostoevsky was onto it. Though his Gambler learned the easy way the oldest lesson of them all: that winning at the game could mean losing at life.

But have you ever considered the metaphorical potential latent in a scratchcard? No, nor I. Not until I found myself perusing the Lucky Numbers web page a few weeks after Tariq first arrived at our door.

These are the Game Procedures for LUCKY NUMBERS (the “Game”). When the Game is played, the Rules for Scratchcard Games (the “Rules”) and these Procedures apply. The Rules can be viewed at Retailers and on the National Lottery website at national-lottery.co.uk.

So these aren’t the rules. Nobody will ever tell you the rules. You can go and look up the rules, probably, but nobody’s going to just tell you them.

What kind of person would look up the rules? The same kind of person who’d look up the Procedures, I suppose. But I had pretty good reasons.

There were no answers, of course, to the big question. But I already knew the answer, really. What was it going to say? “Prize recipients must have purchased the card themselves”? “Scratchcards are void if purchased using a stolen credit card”? Yes, Tariq’s plan would probably work, if we wanted it to.

Any word or term in these Procedures that has a specific meaning will have the meaning given to it in these Procedures or the Rules (unless the context clearly indicates otherwise).

Context is everything. Remember that when you see “recently divorced” on a Hinge profile.

How to play and win: There are four Play Areas on a Scratchcard labelled as ‘MAIN GAME’, ‘BONUS GAME 1’ and ‘BONUS GAME 2’ (each a “GAME”, collectively the “GAMES”).  Players can win up to 18 times on a Scratchcard.

It doesn’t seem fair does it, that one player can win eighteen times, and another can win only a silver-skin bookmark.

I tried to tell Kay we’d already won in life.

“I mean, fifty thousand pounds isn’t exactly a life-changing amount for us, is it?”

She put down the onion she was about to cut and turned to face me, but she kept the knife levelled at my stomach. “Well it would change our lives. So yes, in that sense, I think it’s fair to say it would be life-changing.”

“It would change our lives for a year, maybe. But it’s not going to mean either of us could quit our jobs. Or that we could buy a bigger house.”

“Well we could buy a bigger house, couldn’t we. With an extra fifty thousand pounds we could sell this house and buy a bigger one. That’s actually exactly what I’d do with an extra fifty thousand pounds.”

“There’s nothing wrong with this place.”

“We’d have a spare room. I could have a study.”

“We’ve already got a study.”

“I could have a study.”

“Do you not like working together in the same study?”

She turned back to the onion, bisected it, began slicing and dicing.

It was my eyes that began watering first.

MAIN GAME: The MAIN GAME Play Area consists of five GAMES labelled as ‘GAME 1’, ‘GAME 2’, ‘GAME 3’, ‘GAME 4’ and ‘GAME 5’ (individually a “GAME”, collectively the “GAMES”)… You will, providing the requirements of the Rules and these Procedures are met, win a Prize if, in a GAME, You reveal a Play Symbol with its matching Play Caption under the coating of a ‘?’ motif in the Your Numbers Section that matches the Play Symbol with its matching Play Caption under the coating of the ‘✉’ motif in the Winning Number Section for that GAME.

Could anyone really be expected to understand all this? But then it’s like any game isn’t it: the rules only really become clear as you play. Like marriage. Like the justice system.

I didn’t know I was such a die-hard liberal until I was looking at the footage in the police station. It was something about the officer’s tone. She was one of those lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key types.

“So you can clearly see the suspect in this shot,” she said.

I made a noncommittal noise. You couldn’t clearly see the suspect. You couldn’t clearly see anything. It had the weird spectral quality of CCTV footage since CCTV footage became a thing. In CCTVland it’s always the nineties.

Squinting into the greyscale simulacrum of the shop on the screen my mind drifted to a reverie on the tendency of police officers to see the world in black and white. Good and bad. Guilty and innocent. When I came round, she was saying, “And I think it’s pretty obvious he’s high or whatever.”

How exactly could see tell he was “high or whatever” when you could hardly discern the contours of him, never mind whether his pupils were tunnels, or his heart was a kick drum.

“I’m not sure it’s him,” I said suddenly.

She looked at me significantly. “He clearly matches the description you gave,” she said, slowly, as if she was explaining something to an idiot. She was explaining something to an idiot. “If we don’t get your assent that this is him, we almost certainly won’t be able to take the case forward.”

It was what he had in his hands that had wrongfooted me. I couldn’t make any of it out perfectly, but there were a couple of tins, and a bag of rice, and I was pretty sure from the outline – and this was the one that really got me – a Kinder Surprise. It was the humility of it. If I’d just stolen someone’s wallet, I’d have bought a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and a couple of packs of Marlboroughs at best. Who was the Kinder Surprise for? I wasn’t sure what would be the more affecting answer: his child (waiting for his dad to come home from another day failing to make ends meet) or himself. Himself! My heart!

“I can’t be sure it’s him,” I said again.

“Well then, Mr Gribbin, I’m afraid, on this occasion…” etc. etc.

“I quite understand,” I said.

“You don’t,” her eyes said back.

The Prize will be the amount of the Prize Symbol shown with its matching Prize Caption under the coating of the Prize Box immediately below the matching Play Symbol with its matching Play Caption in the Your Numbers Section.

This is how these games get you. They show you the money. Let you sniff the additional zeroes of it in your bank account. Anticipate its leavening effect on your life.

“Fifty. Thousand. Pounds.”

She would just say it like that some nights. No discussion, because the discussion wrote itself. Fifty thousand pounds. Discuss. That would have been the essay title.

What she was really asking, as she became more exasperated with me, and the steadfastness of my principles, was, “Are you really going to jeopardise our marriage for the sake of fifty thousand pounds?”

But I didn’t think I was the one introducing jeopardy. We’d never had that money in the first place, only the idea of it. It was the idea of it that had become so toxic.

Clever of them, to put millions of smaller prizes in, when there’s only a handful of big winners. It’s capitalism’s oldest trick. Little wins for the drones, so we get a taste for them. The big winners are there for everyone to see, to become in their daydreams, but the chances of the giant “IT’S YOU” finger from the heavens are one in a million. One in seven million, three hundred and forty-four thousand, seven hundred and ninety-two, actually.

Maybe that’s how Tariq got hooked in the first place. Maybe he bought one card and won a hundred quid. Maybe he sat at home one night scratching away at hope fifty times. He’d have been bound to get a few more small wins in that pile. But he'd have been bound, also, by the statistics. Keep reinvesting and eventually he’d be back to square none. For the Tariqs of this world there are only diminishing returns.

His face said he knew that when he came to our door. I didn’t even recognise it. He was just another unfortunate, probably here to sell me something. In a sense, he was.

“So sorry,” he said, and cast his gaze to my feet. He held my wallet forward in both hands, like a beggar would hold a cap.

“I … Oh. It’s you.”

“So sorry,” he said again, and he looked at me, pushed the wallet forward.

“Thank you,” I said, stupidly, and I took it, began rifling through. The cards were all there. I was grateful, at least for the reduced admin. “That’s very honest of you, to bring it back to me,” I said.

He smiled. “Sorry,” he said again.

For a moment I had the preposterous thought that the universe was reimbursing me for my kindness at the police station.

“My name Tariq,” he said, touching himself on the chest. “I come from Syria. I try to feed my family.”

I was bracing myself for the polite but firm rejection. For some reason, outrage hadn’t yet crept in. I could see his angle.

“I buy this with card,” he said, and he reached into his back pocket, pulled out the scratchcard. He held it, like the wallet, in both hands, only this time he was showing it to me, rather than offering it to me. His grip was firm. “I give you half.”

“Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t being belligerent, I was just struggling to keep up.

“I win,” he said. “Hundred thousand pounds.”

He pointed to the numbers.

“Oh wow.”

“Yes. Very big prize. You get prize. You give me half.”

I stood there, blinking. I remember clocking the change of tack. I give you half; you give me half. I remember how quickly I understood the situation then. Why he needed me. I remember looking at the sun, which was sinking behind him, melting into the horizon, and lending him an amber backdrop that made the whole scene look softer than it really was.

I don’t know how or why my mind made itself up so quickly.

I took a disciplinary breath before I spoke. “No, I’m afraid not,” I said, and I closed the door in his face, decisively.

I trotted upstairs, so I could check he wasn’t lingering by the door. He wasn’t. He walked with the gait of a man resigned to the death sentence.

As Prizes are won, the number of Prizes available in each category will reduce. Once the last top Prize has been validated, Retailers will be allowed to continue selling those Scratchcards that have already been activated for sale and any unactivated Scratchcard stock will be withdrawn.

So they can keep selling you the dream even when they know it’s gone to another bidder. And still the idiots will keep on buying them.

They’re not even idiots, they’re just renting hope. But someone’s got to be a winner, they’ll think.

It’s this kind of hangdog optimism that brought Tariq to our door, I suppose.

It’s that kind of optimism that’s brought me back to Hinge.

We play on, though we know, deep down, what the rules are.

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Image by Waldemar Brandt.