by Peter Arnott
1.0.3.1
Frank and Joe had always hated each other. For the very good reason that being as close as they were, they knew everything there was to hate about each other.
1.0.3.1.1
Which was loads, obviously.
1.0.3.2
Frank will have argued on the basis of logic and operational security that it was now Tommy that was obliged to execute their soon-to-be-former co-conspirator; whereas Joe would have appealed more abstractly to sentiments of solidarity and general precepts of manhood in support of the same conclusion.
1.0.3.2.1
So they both would have went at him at the same time, Tommy’s face sweating under his IRA balaclava.
1.0.4
And Tommy will have ended up doing it — murdering Choleric. That was never actually proved, of course. The bizzies found no powder burns on Tommy. Practical Frank had had all of them gloved and shoed and zipped in disposable cagoules.
1.0.4.1
You could argue, as Frank later did, that these strictures had vindicated themselves in operational terms, in that only Hunter out of all of them, after all, ever did any time for robbery and murder, though it was well known about the Toon exactly who had pulled off the blag, hours of speculative banter being wasted (in my opinion) in the intervening years as to exactly who did what to whom, when and why?
1.0.4.1.1
It was Tommy that had pulled the trigger on what’s-his-name. I’d stake my narrative reputation on it, because it’s the only way the sequence of events on his return fourteen-odd years later makes any sense.
1.0.4.1.2
Bang.
1.0.5
Now, everyone who knows anything will concede that Tommy Hunter, in his latter days, incontrovertibly occupied his allocation of the universe quite uniquely. But I’m saying here and now that even then, at that virgin time, he felt something more than a generalised guilt at having just taken part in a robbery where two poor fuckers on minimum wages had been quite unnecessarily slaughtered.
1.0.5.1
I say here and now that pulling that trigger changed him, all of a sudden, from one kind of cunt into another kind of cunt entirely.
1.0.5.1.1
Other sources may argue that he only arrived later on and in the course of his long stretch of incarceration at his fully evolved ontology. But I’m a simple soul, and I say that it was at the exact second when Tommy eased springs and turned Eric’s head into a stump that Tommy Hunter quantum jumped from one kind of existence into another. From then on, he was just getting used to it.
1.0.5.1.1.1
Okay. The moment before he committed the murder he was still one of us, already a recklessly unreflective sort of cunt, I grant you, but recognisably of our weft and weave. But the moment after, and without measurable transition, I believe, he began to experience himself as other, as a prodigy, a stranger — a Gnostic of repentance, if you will. The world instantaneously inflated outside him like a landscape and inside him like a gulf, and now he knew himself, catastrophically, to be at odds with everything else that ever was or ever is or ever could be, and he suddenly had to learn to breathe in an atmosphere entirely different from that to which his former adaptive suitability had accustomed him. That event beyond time or space or good or evil emitted a new universe, and Tommy precipitously came upon himself already mutated into another order of being, like the big baby at the end of Stanley Kubrick, looking down on the rest of us with a stunned amalgam of bewilderment and rage.
1.0.5.1.1.1.1
It was the rest of us that stayed the same.
1.0.5.1.1.1.1.1
Apart from Colin (or Eric), obviously.
1.1
Whatever the Mendelian mechanics of the matter, the DNA inside of Tommy Hunter had set itself off in a phenomenal recombination of which he himself was unconscious, but which was, by contrast, immediately apparent to his comrades, who themselves now shared an instant, unspoken and unspeakable epiphany as to the irrevocable erstwhile-ness of their association with the once upon a time “Tommy Hunter”.
1.1.1
He glowed. He gave off an unearthly light. That’s about the size of it. And they were sore afraid.
1.1.1.1
Because they all sort of knew, all at once, how the story was going to go, in the fullness of time. That this wasn’t going to be the end of it.
1.1.1.1.1
No. This was just the start of something for which their culture held no conscious precedent and offered them no guidance, but was something fundamental nonetheless to the way the world is. (Or was now, or had suddenly become.)
1.1.1.1.1.1
They were now and forever a destiny one unto the other. Life had a meaning and Time had a direction. The Future was a destination in the direction of which the events of the present were to be interpreted as comprising an itinerary. They were conjoined now in a teleology of tyrannical certainty. They were on to a loser. They could feel it. They could feel destiny’s cold hand reach up into their trousers, grab hold of their testicles and squeeze.
1.1.1.1.1.1.1
Call it fate or kismet. Pick one and cough.
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1
Apart from Tommy himself, it was probably Frank who actually caught on first, him being the brains of the outfit. Even in his newly blasted state, Tommy thought he caught Frank looking at him funny.
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1
That was about it for the moment. Nothing overwhelmingly conclusive, I grant you, but something definitely passed between the two of them that permanently defined the parameters of their future relationship.
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1!
Anyway, though it was Frank that was the first to give the feeling a thought, I’m sure they all knew now that which it seemed had always been there to be known, that their fate was now rewritten but as if from the beginning of time in their testosterone and bad haircuts, and that there was nothing to be done right now but to get their arses in the motor and think about it later.
1.2
Tommy came home to Janice and the kids that night drenched from head to foot in gore. The Wheen boys had dropped him off at home, retaining the spoils for later distribution, as, they now argued, had been planned all along, and as now more than ever seemed providentially prudent.
1.2.1
Joe had threatened him, and Frank had made him promises, the brothers severally enjoining the positive and negative arguments for silence. Old Jack Webster had still been throwing up out of the rear passenger window.
1.2.1.1
When he was out of the car and standing by a puddle of Jack’s sick, and when the Wheens had hissed their final admonitions at him and had driven angrily away, Tommy had stood alone for a contemplative moment in the battered street and sudden quiet of night.
1.2.2
Maybe it was the silence that changed him. Maybe it was then that the silence got into him and changed him. Who can say?
1.3
It was Agnes, his grandmother-in-law, whose house it was he lived in then with Janice and the kids, who had had to let him in. Tommy’d dropped his house keys in the woods beside the burnt-out armoured van — which turned out to be a matter of no little significance in the short and intense police investigation — and which particular carelessness went no way towards reconciling his newfound beatitude to his colleagues, let me tell you.
1.3.1
Perhaps from an excess of karmic enthusiasm for the closed circle, there are even some who are persuaded by the idea that Tommy left the keys not out of stupidity or shock as his co-conspirators variously later alleged, but in a moment of clarity as to how the rest of the story was meant to go — but I think that’s overthinking things.
1.3.1.1
And it was only Eleanor, Frank’s wife, who’d read more books than the rest of them put together, that could have really thought that logic through, and that was only years later, actually, when she told Frank that there were no such things as accidents. Positivistic, Freudian wee
tart that she was.
1.3.1.1.1
(Eleanor’d never liked Tommy. She’d always thought he was what her daddy had called “a loose cannon”.)
1.3.2
Agnes had never liked Tommy either. Not when Janice had left home with Gerry and had come home with Tommy with one kid in tow and another on the way — from Germany and Cyprus and South Armagh in succession, just to get that on the record. Her opinion of him had not improved when Ronnie had been born when Tommy was in Saughton doing six months for punching someone, losing both his pub job and his council tenancy, so that Janice and Janette and newly born Ronnie had all had to move in with the bitter old bitch. Then when Tommy had been released to crowd his monstrous personality within those same four walls as well, some familial tension had been well-nigh unavoidable.
1.3.2.1
The tin lid on it for Agnes was Tommy arriving home that night and waking her up — and her having to open the door to him standing there with a weird wee smile on his face and bits of somebody else’s brains in his hair.
1.3.2.1.1
“Couldnae find my keys,” he said, which was the kind of thing he always said.
1.3.2.1.1.1
Understatement in the face of the apocalypse was Tommy’s rhetorical style, and it made you feel wild inside, it really did. He was a rush to be with sometimes. He seriously was. But Agnes wasn’t his audience at the best of times.
1.3.2.1.2
Agnes did her banshee impersonation for him, and then there was a rush of wife and children into the hallway and a lot more screaming and recrimination for the next couple of minutes. Janice had known that Tommy was going out robbing, of course, and had wholeheartedly approved that he was finally making an effort to better himself, but the reeking thing in her grandmother’s hallway calmly insisting that it was time to take a family holiday could not, on this occasion, work any of its charm on her.
1.3.3
Tommy adored Janice. You’ll need to understand that as well. Janice was a privilege for him, an unbelievable blessing, as were the two children, miracles in half their genes as far as Tommy was concerned. None of the rest of us quite saw Janice the way that Tommy did. She was horny as Jezebel, and dolled up in a certain light was often mistaken for nice-looking, true enough. But to Hunter she was his intimation of a unified theory of everything. Touching her, he touched the infinite. In her eyes and smile he found his forgiveness and his evidence of God. In the possibility of her love was justification for the past, purpose for the present and eventual happy synthesis for the future. Janice was his eschatological hump.
1.3.3.1
The family he had with her was the one good thing he’d ever had. And he’d never managed to take them away anywhere. The prospect of a wee holiday trip with the family at last had been what had tipped the balance in favour of taking part in the robbery in the first place.
1.3.3.1.1
So Tommy took his baby son from her arms, then took his daughter’s hand and smiled his infinite love for Janice in her face.
1.3.3.2
“Aw that fucken BLOOD” she was screaming at him as she followed him outside.
1.3.3.2.1
“Where’s the fucken MONEY?” she went on as Tommy strapped wee Ronnie into his booster seat and Janette cried and cried and cried.
1.3.3.3
He thought they’d go up North, he said.
1.4
Tommy and the family never made it much past Pitlochry. He and the kids got trapped at the gate of the Drumochter Pass, severe weather warnings and a cassette of Walt Disney Sing-Along-Songs having offered them no protection from that happenstance. Or at least, that’s where the country bizzies picked them up, out of petrol in the black mountains, sleet streaking the windows, Janette holding wee Ronnie on her lap as he slept, Tommy catatonic with shame and loss on the passenger seat as “I Wanna Be Like You” pumped out at a volume that distorted the what-passed-for-speakers that they fitted in motors back then.
1.4.1
No Janice, though. No sight or sign or spoor of Janice.
1.4.2
Tommy sat bereft. Of speech, of expression, of response. He never even looked at the constable from Coupar Angus as the flashlight played across his devastation. And to the subsequent loss of his children and his freedom, no trace of reaction crossed his features, as they took him away and the keys found in the woods were found to fit the house and the tale was told.
1.4.2.1
The keys had been found, incidentally, by then Police Constable Daniel “Danny” Boyle, who even as a poor plod of a bluebottle constantly plagued his superiors with theories and interpretations of the mayhem he so enthusiastically examined. Boyle was one of those souls in the public service who thought of knowledge as something one should act upon, rather than as something one should avoid so that all responsibility could be evaded if anyone should ask you later on.
1.4.2.2
Tommy never said a thing to “Danny” or to anyone. Not his lawyer, not the judge. About what had happened to Janice or about the van he had robbed. Or about the double murder. Or about the inside man. Or about either of the Wheens. Or about old Jack Webster.
1.4.2.2.1
Nothing. Never. Nada.
1.4.3
He spoke not a word as they sent him down, in his own defence or by way of incrimination of those others unnamed but universally known to have been his confederates in the dreadful, callous crime. “Yes” to his own name and “Guilty” to his own sin was all of Tommy’s song. These were the only words anyone heard him say before they found him on the floor of his High Court cell on the morning of the verdict with his throat raggedly and inexpertly cut, and Tommy Hunter was sewn up and remanded for psychological evaluation before sentencing.
1.4.3.1
Not another word.
1.5
It was five years four months and eleven days before he asked anyone for anything.
1.5.1
A Bible, as it happens. He’d had a lot of thinking to do and now he was going to check up on a couple of things.
1.5.1.1
His catatonic silence had landed him in Carstairs by then, where the chaplain, an ex-army Episcopalian, had responded to Tommy’s croaky request for the Good News with an enthusiasm heightened by the satisfaction that his professional rivals, the Reichians, Jungians, Kleinians and all the rest of their atheistic, atomising breed had drawn no response from Tommy to their chemicals and cant, while Jesus, it now seemed, had battered his way into the heart of this most lost of all lost souls with his siege engine of redemption. Not that it entirely escaped the chaplain’s notice in the succeeding three years that Tommy breathed in his forgiveness and breathed out his hellfire, that what Tommy seemed to have found in Jesus Christ was not so much a personal saviour as a personal equivalent — a being alike extraordinary in his alienation from earthly appetites and as uncompromising in his holy, angry joy. And it had been the chaplain, in fact, who had retreated from Tommy’s revelation, and taken early retirement, his arteries prematurely furred by a fear he could not bring himself to name. It was shortly thereafter that Tommy declared himself theologically and intellectually satisfied and never opened another book of any kind again.
1.5.2
Eight more years of relative silence followed as Tommy quietly wore away the time that had been given to him on earth. Keeping himself to himself, his nose clean, out of bother … out of all contact of any kind in fact, as far as was possible, given the overcrowding … his aura discouraging camaraderie as well as intimidation from his fellow inmates, while he remained unvisited, also, from the outside.
1.5.2.1
For in all of that time, the endless fucking deserts of it, no single cunt once braved the journey down to Carstairs, or to any of the progressively less astringent institutions for the engineering of the soul through which Tommy descended like a rock through wet layers of bureaucratic tissue paper, inexorably heading towards his freedom and the manifestation of whatever
frightful change all those years of silence and solitude had wrought in him. Not one.
1.5.3
None of us ever heard anything from Janice either. Nobody could say what had happened to her. Ronnie had been too wee, and Janette had testified that Mummy and Daddy’d left the car together somewhere en route, and that her father, sad, had returned to them alone. That was it. And of course the bizzies had kept at him for a while, before the trial and after the sentencing. But there is inertia in all things. There was never a corpse found. And Tommy was saying nothing. So he was never charged with Janice’s murder. Even though we all knew he must have murdered her. Where the hell else was she otherwise?
1.5.3.1
There are Hunterologists who to this day put the cart before the causational horse in my view when they argue that Tommy offed Janice and consequently went catatonic. I think that’s too obvious and doesn’t take account of the previous murder he’d committed. At least, in my opinion. And anyway he got the postcard. And I’m coming to the postcard.
1.5.3.2
(see 1.6 and 11.3.2.2)
1.6
When the postcard of Night on Calgary Beach arrived for him at Shotts (with a Tobermory postmark), thirteen and a half years after his conviction, it sat for four months in the prison sorting office, as the screw in charge had assumed that Hunter 47931 had died, or had been transferred or something, as Tommy’d never received so much as a pamphlet in the post since his brief and intense period as an evangelist years before had occasioned him a flurry of hating literature from across the pond. Besides, the postcard was itself an eccentric communication, with only Tommy’s name and a previous address “Care of Her Majesty” being written upon the reverse of a retouched and frankly improbable rendering of a picturesque Inner Hebridean strand by exaggerated moonlight.