0.0
All
the stories told about Moon Country turn out to be true, even when they
contradict each other.
0.1.0
Oor
Wee Toon is just not big enough for the likes of Tommy Hunter to be here and
nobody notice. If this was London or
Mumbai or somewhere, then it might be big enough for the likes of Tommy Hunter
to have got himself lost.
0.1.0.1
If
Tommy was still here, is what I’m saying, there would have been signs.
0.1.0.1.1
The
animals would have scattered, sensing something, like fire on the prairie. The
skies would have darkened. Graves would have opened. Cattle stampeded. Comets would have crossed the sky and dinged
off the face of the moon.
0.1.0.2
But
there's been nothing. So he's gone.
0.1.0.2.1
That's
all there is to it. The world is everything that is the case.
0.1.0.2.2
It's
surprising how bleak that makes me feel.
0.1.1.
It's
not that Tommy ever wanted trouble. It's just that sooner or later he
always was.
0.1.1.1
Seismic. Off the Richter Scale. In Sensaround Sound.
Like a geological feature.
0.1.1.1
.
You couldn’t help but see him, no matter how hard you tried not to look. Like a
zit on the face of the earth. Something
you could see from space.
0.1.1.2
Like
that bubble of lava that's sat underneath Yellowstone Park. Sooner or later that's gonnae erupt and cover
us all with six feet of irradiated, molten pus, its plume of cthonic shite
blocking out the sun, bringing all of our stories to a close.
0.1.1.2.1
Not
a minute before time, if you ask me.
0.1.2.0
All
there is left of Tommy Hunter, then, is the stories about him. And all of the
stories about Tommy Hunter turn out to be true. Or they might as well be.
0.1.2.0.1
Like
the last time he turned up. All kinds of things got said about that.
0.1.2.0.2
Where
did all that money come from to start with?
Envelopes of the stuff he carried about with him in a carpetbag. A fortune he flung about the place with the
largesse of some medieval monarch purging his soul of temporal entrapment. Doing good, of course, but also prefiguring,
in his penitent disbursement of the stuff of life, our final dissolution and
the contingency of all things.
0.1.2.0.3
There
were lots of stories about that, and they were all true. Or they might as well
have been.
0.2.
There
are those who say, for example, Tommy struck it rich randomly, sitting like a
statue of homelessness in London somewhere - Camberwell Green or somewhere.
0.2.1.
When
a man he’s never seen before, and who has never seen him before, a long, black
man in a long black coat and a black felt hat just walks up to him and drops a carpetbag
full of money on the bench beside him.
0.2.1.2
For
no reason at all.
0.2.1.2.1
Tommy
doesn’t look up to see his face. Just
listens to the clack clack clack of expensive footfalls die away. The Messenger doesn’t break stride and is not
to be identified.
0.2.1.2.1.1
The
Messenger’s purpose is not to be interrogated. His purpose is only to be
fulfilled.
0.2.1.2.
For
it was written that heaven would deliver unto Tommy Hunter that which made
Tommy Hunter a force for right and truth and justice in the land.
0.2.2.
Were
he to have existed in order to have made this spontaneous donation, the Angel
of the Wedge would have been strategically spot-on. Even forces for right and
truth and justice don’t get far in this most fallen of possible worlds without
the financial wherewithal. Not if they’re Tommy Hunter they don't. Not if you’re a guy who can’t walk into a
Post Office to buy a stamp without the alarms going off. Similarly, it would have been no good sending
Tommy a cheque or a BACS payment, because if you’re a guy whose name on a
computer will set off a worldwide electronic aneurysm then you can’t open a
bank account or write off for a Mastercard or shit like that. You can’t be part of the world, not this
world, not a world where everything is known about everybody, not a world where
if you buy a kumquat in Tesco then some cunt in the CIA will know that you’re a
target for exotic fruit marketing.
0.2.2.1
Guys
like Tommy can’t exist in a world like that.
0.2.3.
Others
have suggested a socio-historic sequence of events to account for Tommy's
stash, which is every bit as credible as the angel thing.
0.2.3.1
So,
it might just as well have been that on a dusty day in April a red bearded
tramp in an old tweed coat, no shirt, Jesus sneakers, no socks and a set of
cut-off jeans walked into a venerable solicitors' office in West Nile Street,
the wind blowing rags of chip paper in his wake. Mrs. Golightly, faithful receptionist, will
have looked up over the purple rims of her bifocals into the face of Satan
himself, the Prince of Darkness quietly demanding, in a voice like Clint
Eastwood but in an accent that could have welded ships, to meet with Mr. Hugo
Moncrieff, a senior partner lost to gout and corruption some half a dozen years
before. On being informed of that
Georgian gentleman’s predecease, the apparition will have chuckled softly to
itself, and said its own name, "Ah'm Tommy Hunter," with the inconsequence
of an asteroid detonating off the coast of Mexico, this self-nomination sending
an eel of fear wriggling through Mrs Golightly’s sexagenarian vitals, and
setting her fingers to fumbling blindly across the intercom, thereby summoning
a random gaggle of junior partners, secretaries and personal assistants to
cluster nervously behind the modishly curvilinear reception desk, staring
helplessly at this ill smelling irruption from the Gehenna of the penal system,
only one of them finally recognizing him, kindly old Mr. Meyer, brought into
the firm to handle the Newton Mearns trade back in 1974. Old Meyer’s nut brown face will have cracked
in welcome saying, “Come on in, Tommy, son,” extending a Semitic and arthritic
paw to gather in the lost sheep.
0.2.3.1.1
And
as they sat together in the dark plush of the meeting room, the Ragged Man and
the Old Jew, sentimentally conjoined by some trope of wandering, perhaps, they
will have talked about the old days - about Frank and Eleanor, Joseph and
Janice, maybe even about old Jack Webster, while a minion will have got sent
with a Banker's Draft for thirty seven thousand pounds across the road to the
Royal Bank of Scotland.
0.2.3.2
Course,
he maybe just dug it up, his share of the ancient loot, resurrecting a worm
eaten bin bag from a hole by a loch, Rob Roy’s Castle reflected in the muddy
tarn, fourth tree down from the stone shaped like a pirate’s skull.
0.2.3.3
Or
mebbe he just saved up his wages up from the jile. He was in there for long enough and he never
smoked as far as I can remember. That's most likely the truth of it, and the
truth has no obligation to be interesting.
0.2.3.4
But
call me whatever the fuck, I favour it was this way.
0.2.3.4.1
I
see Tommy Hunter haunting the streets somewhere, newly expelled from the
inferno to gaze once more upon the stars, somewhere on this middle road of
life, near destitution, paralyzed though restlessly mobile, waiting for
something, perhaps acclimatizing to being on the outside, more likely not
getting used to it at all, blindly wandering alien streets full of undifferentiated
noise and movement, all these bloody people all around him suddenly, and him
still wrapped in prison stink, a bubble of bad smell, uncaring and unheeding,
face like stone and glass, hour after unstructured hour, buying a pie and
chips, not enjoying it, absently stroking a dug, scaring folk away with that
monster stare of his, standing at the park gates gazing into the lost world of
the playground, mothers hustling their little ones away.
0.2.3.4.1.1
All
loss, he must have been. All isolation. A mad jakey, a middle-aged catastrophe,
talking to himself, if he ever talked to anyone at all. You'll've seen them
about. They're everywhere.
0.2.3.4.1.1.1
The
sudden shouters, the schizoid self-debaters, the mad, the flotsam, the casually
beaten and set fire to, the socially excluded if you want to get governmental
about it, the economically inactive, the internal exiles of the marketplace,
hostile and fucking weird, ex-servicemen, ex-prisoners, ex-inmates, ex-humans,
really, startling folk on buses with philosophical questions, peering into
second hand Yankee comic book shops, clashing their wrists together and turning
into Captain Marvel...that kind of thing.
0.2.3.4.1.2
I
think if you'd have seen Tommy then, you'd not have looked at him twice. In order to avoid some insane dialogue or
aggressive begging or both, you'd have passed him by on the other side, and
you’d’ve been wiser than you could have known, truth be told.
0.2.3.4.2
Yes.
I think this was Tommy Hunter, that April, two weeks out of the slammer,
invisibly prowling after himself, arriving at the door of some bed sit or other
he'd got sent to by the probation service, run, as such establishments
invariably are, by money grubbing cunts of the lowest variety, in this instance
of South Asian extraction, justifying their Cupidity in the name of the Ummah
with the same defensive, self-righteous bitterness as the Humean natives do in
that of enlightened self-interest or whatever the fuck it is we say these days
; one Assam in this instance, he being the third and least academically able
son of the proprietor, specifically entrusted in lieu of a career in Medicine,
Law or Pharmacy with the cleaning and maintenance of the family property, his
duties being performed in a spirit of desultory incompetence - and also, much
more successfully, auto-directed to provoke the tenantry at every opportunity.
This exiled and unconscious scion of the Punjab now alerts our Tommy to the
arrival of a package with his name on.
0.2.3.4.2.1
“Ah
hud tae fucken sign fur this” Assam informs Tommy, contemptuously extending the
communication with the aggrieved self-importance of Hermes on a jihad.
“So
fuck?” sez Tommy with his hand out, adding interrogatively, “Did ye look in
it?”
“Naw,
did ah fuck!” Assam continues in his grammatically challenged manner, but
handing over the blue and red striped bundle without further demur, for, dumb
fucker though he is, Assam knows better than to mess too persistently with this
particular cunt. While therefore only
pantomiming his defiance, he is nonetheless driven to playing up a bit, so as
not to avow himself entirely dick-less in the presence of the infidel.
0.2.3.4.3
Tommy
doesn’t grant the prick another glance, however, as, now raised to the status
of human congress by the arrival of communication, he pushes past his
landlord’s agent and unlocks the door to his dingy room, dismissing Assam from
his consciousness, shutting the door behind him without further acknowledgement
or thanks.
0.2.3.4.3.1
Assam
batters on the door - (just the wance) - and says a bad word.
0.2.3.4.4.
Meanwhile,
inside, Tommy roughly splits the envelope and pours the money on the bed,
thirty seven thousand pounds in used tenners, spreading like a sheet of
possibilities on the duvet of no return, light in the gloom, hope in the
darkness, glory spread thin upon the surface of the sordid world.
0.2.3.4.4.1
And
his face doesn’t change a bit.
0.2.3.4.5
That's
what must have been the case, in my book.
The hell with whatever is the case in your book.
0.3
However
Tommy Hunter in fact acquired his fiscal equipage, and whatever message or
instruction to stay away was included, tacitly or explicitly, with this
windfall, the incontrovertible fact of the matter was that here it was he
manifested himself, one wet dawn in April a few years ago, skipping his
probation, swinging down from the cab of an articulated bone rattler in a layby
at the very edge of Oor Wee Toon, long ago invented, employed and defined as a
single, specialised but long since superannuated link in the supply chain of
the motor manufacturing industry, and now solely delineated by the ironic,
taunting motorway that cuts through it like a grey swathe, a glimmering path
that leads through it and out of it and away from it.
0.3.1
Away!
That first word we sucked at our mother’s tit!
Away! Tae fuck!
0.3.2
Tommy
had been away all right, but now he had come back to the very break in the very
stretch of fence of the very cemetery where the poor cunts who'd never gone
anywhere at all had ended up; and as he swung his leading leg over that fence
at the exact same spot he'd used to when getting off his bus from special
school, and he’d set off striding uphill, through the dead and towards those as
yet barely and furtively alive, who knew what dark thoughts seeped into his
feet from that Corpse Fed Potters’ Field? Who knew what dull, burning certainty
of purpose filled his heart and drove his steps, him and his bad memories and
his aching soul and his bag of stolen money, howsoever recovered, howandsoever
temporarily in his care? Who knew what
brought him up that hill?
0.4
Well.
We’ll just have to see about that, won’t we? Tommy Hunter had came hame. And everything that followed, whatever else
you‘ve heard, was as pre-destined as the rain that leaked into his tennis
shoes.