Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

1.6.1

  The meaning of the message, if indeed you could infer from it any meaning at all, was as cryptic as the Gospel of Thomas, and provoked a brief twitch of interest and excavation from those of the Boys in Blue who were still procedurally piqued at the non-appearance of the loot from that now ancient and obscure but irritatingly unresolved Episode of the Exterminating Van, the details of which they kept on file, and the sights and sounds and smells of which must have been stored too in Tommy’s inner eye and ear and nose and throat, blasted forever on to the surface of his corneas, ringing in his ears, choking off his sleep, a constant waking nightmare, silently guiding his every step.

  1.6.1.2

  For what to the powers that be was but a troubling loose end must have remained to Tommy an existential imperative, compared to which the threats and cajolements of the indefatigable now Detective Sergeant “Danny” Boyle and his colleagues were as the distant song of birds on the new landscape of his vision.

  1.6.1.2.1

  Tommy did glean from his fresh interrogation by that assiduous official the potentially useful information that his two children, Ronnie and Janette, had been removed from Agnes’s custody some years ago, when Agnes’s alcoholism had precipitated Ronnie’s absence from school for just six months longer than had been deemed acceptable, and that both kids had then been taken into the care of the Local Authority, neither natural parent being in any way available and nobody else being interested.

  1.6.1.2.2

  Tommy had not visibly reacted to this intelligence, which had been intended, I imagine, to torture rather than to inform him — and DS Boyle had sat back astounded once again at the moral nonchalance of these bloody people, and concluded the interview, tucking his complex of resentment, ambition and rectitude away for another day.

  1.6.1.2.2.1

  (see below)

  1.6.2

  After some bureaucratic perseverance on Boyle’s part of no mean order, a party of our local filth, led by up to and including DS “Danny” Boyle, having got the police authority to cough up a grudging furball of expenses, had subsequently spent a fruitless week up north, attempting to establish some connection between Tommy Hunter and that remote West Highland locality.

  1.6.2.1

  They did some digging, literally, in the landscape, and figuratively, among the locals, and came away with nothing more than hangovers and a confirmed distaste for the countryside. They did not see what Tommy Hunter saw in that sentimental seascape where he’d never been as far as they could tell, and they unearthed no inkling as to who might have sent him it or what might have been its import.

  1.6.2.1.1

  While Tommy, for his part, back in his cell, gazed now through an interior window for hour after hour, searching in his mind that same never glimpsed or previously heard-of location, all the time becoming more and more confirmed in awful certainty as to the provenance and import of the disputed communication he’d been sent from it.

  1.6.3

  So it was this unsigned postcard from the Country of the Moon, dubious in its origin, worn and yellowed with the damp breath of his withered prison lungs, and the cold fingers of his perpetual holding and staring, faded by the friction of his gaze, it was this thin promise that sustained Tommy Hunter in all his five hundred remaining days and nights of purgation, so that when the time at last came for his release, and the confluence of that long solitude and a vision of the Moon merged with thirty-seven thousand pounds nestling at the top of a swinging carpet bag, it might well be said that as Tommy Hunter emerged from the town cemetery and hesitated for a moment to search his memory and to confirm his direction, and headed into an undistinguished scheme of semi-detached houses, that he knew exactly where he was going.

  1.7

  And a bell rang in heaven, and the seventh seal was opened, and there was silence for the space of half an hour.

  2.0

  A greater man than me once wrote that money is important in a human story in the same way that honey is important in a story about bees.

  2.0.1

  (The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr, if you’re asking.)

  2.0.1.1

  So you’re probably wondering by now what the money from the van had been up to all these years since it had been saved from incineration and returned to general circulation. You’re probably speculating as to what role it had played in the economy meanwhile?

  2.0.1.1.1

  Even if you’re not, I’m telling you anyway.

  2.0.2

  In theory they’d all four of them had an equal share of the scratch. In practice it had been Frank, unsurprisingly, who of the Musketeers had been the most successful in translating the loot into something like sustainable prosperity. He had been thrifty and shrewd with his tranche, washing it through pubs and taxis into a bank account or six, and had then persisted, overriding some protest, in housing his young and growing family for the succeeding three or more years, in a four-roomed housing association flat, while he strategically parlayed his growing pile into the field of age management.

  2.0.2.1

  Frank had read the papers, and the papers told him that property and senility were where a sudden cash injection best belonged in the middle 1990s. So Frank bought a terraced house for old cunts to live in — you could still do that round here for thirty-odd grand in those days — and filled it with cast-offs from the geriatric wards of our local hospital (itself not long for this world) at four hundred quid a Pop (or Nan) paid regularly from the Social.

  2.0.2.1.1

  That’s each. Every week.

  2.0.2.2

  And what with this being only a Wee Toon where officialdom is comparatively cheap, and with very few questions getting asked if you can lift a few names off the waiting list for any damn thing, and what with needing to spend only so much on minimally suitable staff on minimum wages, plus laundry, strained fruit and wheat flakes, Frank had the big house and garden for himself and his family soon enough. And then some more. And then some more on top of that.

  2.0.3

  Joe, by contrast, had shot his wad on drinking, snorting and fucking, all inside of six months, and, returning to his uppers, he thereupon, without Frank’s knowledge, leave alone prior approval, turned over a post office in order to maintain the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. Making an utter cunt of it, Joe got himself sentenced to a seven-year stretch, dragging, as it happens, the dragooned Jack Webster down — and into prison — with him.

  2.0.3.1

  On his release after serving four and a half years, Joe had gone to work for Frank in one of his (by then) five asylums for the gaga.

  2.0.3.1.1

  By the time Tommy turned up, Frank owned or part-owned mebbe fifteen properties in the towns and hamlets of the county, plus there were the pound shops and the taxis and the share portfolios. This was plenty to weather any kind of seizure in the secondary accumulation of investment income that might be precipitated by a burst balloon of easy credit — the poor, as ever they would, needing somewhere they could fuck off to and die.

  2.0.4

  Old Jack Webster had moved on too, since his release, or at least he had since he’d moved away to the Big Toon and thus avoided the company of Joseph Wheen. Having put a bit of his own share of the aboriginal accumulation in a sock in a drawer at his mum’s best pal’s house, Jack had been heretofore, and was even now, circumnavigating ruin in the used car and dodgy firearm trade of the nearby metropolis.

  2.0.5

  As for Tommy Hunter, be it on account of his long years of silent contemplation or of his original transformative experience, all that the money did for him was to conceal in a magician’s cloak of financial transaction the fact that Tommy Hunter’s arrival back on earth was more apparent than actual. That he had some money on him may have accidentally made a certain level of communication with the rest of us possible, but this could not alter the necessary and superior truth that was the case, which was, and I’m aware that I’m repeating myself, that Tomm
y Hunter inhabited another universe from the rest of us. Money was incidental to his being, a means and not an end. A word, and not a thought. His wealth made him not a whit less extraterrestrial.

  2.0.5.1

  To Tommy, you see, “the world” was a place where everything made sense, where everything was connected to everything else, where every experience coalesced with every other experience into a comprehensible unity imbued with purpose, meaning and direction.

  2.0.5.1.1

  To put it another way, Tommy Hunter was insane. And nobody from the real world was in any position to help or hinder or understand him. Even your narrator’s exceptional insight can offer only an approximation, rather as in the Cloud of Unknowing, wherein one discovers the truth only by excluding everything you first thought of, and then everything else you might ever think of, and then what’s left when you’re exhausted and can’t think of anything, is God.

  2.0.5.1.1.1

  What was left, in this instance, when you had abandoned judgement, or it had abandoned you, was Tommy Hunter.

  2.0.5.2

  Tommy’s “life” in Tommy’s “world” — was a story that was never interrupted. He told himself this story every moment that he woke, and he dreamed it every moment that he slept. No one else could tell him anything, and he still wasn’t talking. He knew no contradictions. Solitary by nature, his prison time had merely confirmed his mastery of all existence. He understood everything.

  2.0.5.2.1

  No. He really did. He was one of a kind.

  2.0.5.2.1.1

  Good thing too. If everyone was like that, we’d be extinct in a fortnight.

  2.0.6

  You and me, unlike Tommy Hunter, despite the best efforts of philosophers and religious teachers, we’ve all of us (or almost all of us) always known, really, what life is all about.

  2.0.6.1

  We know, for instance, that every time we get an idea about anything, it’s already doomed to failure. We know from birth the sheer humiliation of waking up every morning, of showering without hope and blearily reaching for a towel and a story to wrap around our helplessness. As soon as we’re dressed up as ourselves, we pass the rest of our waking time in the fruitless attempt to distract ourselves from the terrible trap we find ourselves in. We seek for unconsciousness, if we’re lucky, in work, in culture and in love. All too aware of the futility of living, we go on doing it anyway, not even dreaming of recovering Eden any more, knowing all too well that knowing things never made anything any better.

  2.0.6.1.1

  Look what happened to Adam and Eve, we say to ourselves. We are what happened to Adam and Eve. And who wants that?

  2.0.6.1.1.1

  We are fallen and we’ve always known that we are fallen. We’ve known there was something terribly wrong with us ever since we started knowing anything.

  2.0.6.1.1.1

  And yet, despite it clearly being an evolutionary liability, we carry this curse of consciousness all through our lives, despite the coffee and the telly and the shit music and the shopping. Nothing we can do about it, no matter how rich or drunk we get. Our consciousness is always there, perversely trying to make sense of it all, uselessly trying to make a picture of things within which we can include our own self-image without it being too fat or thin or young or old or just plain manky.

  2.0.6.1.1.1.1.1

  We already know, too, even as we paint these unreliable pictures, that our renditions will always get insulted by the amalgamated millions of alternative and equally unreliable pictures of “reality” that every other bugger is painting or projecting on to the mere accident of being, projecting their egocentric and inaccurate world orders, inevitably coming into conflict with our own efforts to evade the acknowledging of entropy. And then let slip the dogs of war.

  2.0.6.1.1.1.1.1.1

  “Chaos has come again,” we say to ourselves, more in weariness than anger, as, every night, we crawl unfulfilled and weeping into our scratchers, seeking again in the womb of night, some little, palatable intimation of escape, while knowing all too well that soon we’ll have to get up and go through the whole ghastly rigmarole once more; that the cosmos will once more stare balefully upon us from the empty heavens and from the unsympathetic eyes of our fellow sufferers, and demand, without pity or expectation, who the fuck do we think we are?

  2.0.6.1.1.1.1.1.1.1

  Although we can’t answer that question, we can more or less survive the asking of it. We can get through life. Of course we can. Of course we do. What else is there? What, other than a grateful dive under a speeding train, is the alternative to this always renewable ritual of humiliated accommodation to the way the world is? And to ourselves the way we are?

  2.0.7

  Tommy Hunter is what alternative there is. No doubts, no pain, no need for entertainment, no possibility of distraction. No curiosity, no weakness. No comprehension that the few people up and about at this early hour on that Tuesday morning were all looking at him like that — staring at him, walking into lamp posts — because he was so absolutely terrifying, so terrifyingly absolute. They balked at his stronger existence, like he was a band of purple light walking up the pavement, brighter and more terrible even than the world itself, like Rilke’s angel, staring back at them with empty, indifferent eyes, seeing them for what they were, annihilating them, destroying everything by understanding everything and caring nothing about it.

  2.0.7.1

  Real Life — into which Tommy Hunter was inserting his horrible clarity — this is the place where you and I live, where things only make sense for moments at a time, where some cunt will always come along to scribble their name over your masterpiece, trip your melody with an inappropriate rim-shot or giggle at your halting pentameters. Tommy knew with crystalline certainty exactly what he was doing and why. So there was no way for Tommy Hunter to cope with real life, or it with him.

  2.0.8

  He was so far away from us that he couldn’t even see us. But we could see him.

  2.0.8.1

  Tommy Hunter, in the real world, was as sudden as a tiger and as disconcerting as a snake.

  2.1

  Mrs Elspeth Dewar of 31 Balmoral Crescent had no thought that morning that she’d shortly be opening her front door to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was still, in that particular suburb of humanity, very early on. Her son Donald lay asleep upstairs. All unconscious of what was going to happen to her in a minute, or in the days to come, she herself was drinking her second sugary tea at her kitchen table and rasping on her third cigarette, scolding herself half-heartedly for those indulgences, when the doorbell rang.

  2.1.1

  Oddly enough, though only forty-one, Elspeth already felt that she had seen too much and lived too long. Widowed at twenty-four, even the pity of her neighbours and the solicitude of randy, married men had faded to indifference in the intervening years. In the meantime, she retained sufficient self-respect to leave her cigarette burning in the ashtray when she went to answer her door to whatever the world had brought to offer her this morning.

  2.1.1.1

  Big mistake.

  2.1.2

  Swathed in a yellow dressing gown lifted slightly by a puff of underfloor heating, suspecting nothing, she opened her front door. The smiling, shabby, middle-aged man in front of her in his old coat carrying a carpet bag and some days’ growth of beard caused her no immediate surprise. There are still Wee Toons like Oors where itinerant craftsmen and other panhandlers, some with skill, most without, as yet ply their trades from door to door, and will wash your windows and buff up your Flymo for the price of a breakfast. There was, however, nothing Elspeth Dewar wanted cut, cleaned or sharpened that morning, and she made to close the door with a muttered, “No, thank you,” only to find its swing impeded by a wet, badly shoed foot.

  “Mrs Dewar?” the man enquired politely, his voice still gravelly from disuse. “Mrs Elizabeth Dewar?”

  “Elspeth,” she corrected without thinking.


  “Elspeth, I’m so sorry.” He smiled then, this husky and well-mannered stranger. She stared at him for some sign of familiarity, deeming it unlikely that so ragged a figure might be here on District Council or other official business. The voice of a teenaged boy intervened sleepily from upstairs.

  “Who is it, Mum?”

  The man renewed his smile and took half a step into the hallway.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you so early, Mrs Dewar. Might I trouble you for a moment?”

  There was something practised and deliberate in this gentility that sped her negative reply.

  “I’m sorry. It’s not a good time. I don’t want anything.”

  Once again, she attempted to close the door on him. But the stranger was persistent, and again her effort was frustrated by that interposed, leaking sneaker.

  Tommy spoke again in his voice like broken stones, measured and insistent. After all, he had rehearsed all this endlessly in his cell, and he wasn’t going to be deflected from his performance just because nobody wanted it.

  “Mrs Dewar, forgive me. But would I be right in thinking that some years ago, you suffered a tragic loss?” he said, like he’d started copping his dialogue from Henry James or some such cunt.

  Elspeth’s heart lurched and dipped suddenly. She pulled the robe more tightly about her ample yet still not ungainly figure in recognition and resentment at the stranger’s inappropriate knowledge of her affairs, as well as the excellent grammar which contrasted unnervingly with that mineral, gutter voice and tramp’s appearance.

  “Who is it, Mum?” the grumpy and now all too vulnerable boy from on high inquired again, more fully awake now.

  “Who are you?” she echoed quietly, now on the defensive, lower tummy squirming.

  “I want you to know,” Tommy said slowly, his voice aching with the truth of his testimony, “that I am sorry for your trouble.”

  There could be no question of not believing this assertion, and no knowing from what district of hell it might originate. This avatar was undoubtedly sorry for something. But her suspicion kept her mute and guarded.