At first people thought Uncle Jack had been killed in a hit-and- run, mowed down crossing the road near the May Road dairy. That was what Lorenzo heard in the first delirious phone calls from his mother: Uncle Jack had been mown down, and it was a brutal, heartless and sadistic act, no doubt perpetrated by someone twenty-one and Chinese in a brand new car with a learner's licence and no insurance.

In fact, Uncle Jack had just collapsed while crossing the street and died from a heart attack. This was explained in the second wave of phone calls. Cigarettes killed him, and cream on his porridge, and old age. He was eighty-six, and on his way to buy a Lotto ticket.

‘Thinking of us’, said Lorenzo's mother, ‘right to the end.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Lorenzo. He imagined murmured last words, overheard by Good Samaritans kneeling at the side of his great-uncle's frail, crumpled body.

‘Well, he didn't need the money, did he?’ said Lorenzo's mother. ‘What would he have done with it, if he'd won?’

Gone to Bali, Lorenzo suspected. Last year one of Uncle Jack's RSA friends had gone to Bali for the first time, aged seventy-eight, and returned with news of a much younger girlfriend. He'd sent her and her family almost ten thousand dollars before his grown-up children got wind of it, and changed his mobile phone number so the girlfriend in Bali had no way of tracking him down.

‘Uncle Jack was always thinking of us,’ said Lorenzo's mother. She was ringing Lorenzo from the big New World because they would be needing food, huge amounts of it, when the undertakers brought Uncle Jack back to the house. He would lie there in his coffin for three days, and people would need to be fed.

‘Why was he walking all the way to the May Road dairy?’ asked Lorenzo, because part of him still wanted to believe there was something suspicious about all this, something needing investigation and possibly a visit from TV3 News.

‘We'll never know,’ said his mother. ‘This trolley squeaks. Why do I always get the bad trolleys? They spend all this money on a big new supermarket, and the trolleys are already useless.’