You really don’t deserve me, you know… (Not that I
really believe that anyone apart from myself will ever actually believe that).
Nevertheless, the thought still strikes me as we have now reached a point of overlap.
The first part of the story is now “out there” in the world, whilst the ending
has yet to be written. It all now exists in a potentially “quantum state” where
anything and nothing is possible, but I’ll have to be extremely careful if I am
not to risk having created one of those frustrating “unfinished stories” that
can so intrigue and inspire future generations to tinker.
Not that “future generations” will be paying this
story any heed, of course, but nevertheless it does run the risk of becoming that
kind of thing. A misplaced foot on a stair, an unexpected patch of black ice,
or a cream cake too far, and our story, much like Old Marley, might remain in
limbo forever.
Less happily, those first couple of episodes have been
something a ratings disaster. If this were a TV show we wouldn’t have even made
it past the pilot, never mind making it to the annual sweeps, or to the giddy
excesses of the Superbowl. It’s almost as if writing you a story is like
hitting a brick wall in terms of not giving the people what they want.
Actually, in those specific terms, i.e. not giving the people what they want,
it’s been something of an absolute (if minor) personal triumph. Although my
inner demons start to pipe up, and I do begin to wonder whether there was any
point to it all, and whether my expectations of people and what they choose to
engage with still remain far too great after all, despite what I’ve failed to
learn.
Still, in the spirit that you can take a horse into a
library, but you cannot make it read, and that it’s probably rather unwise to
take a horse into a library anyway, we ought to pick up our little tale from
where we last left it, where, because of the twisted nature of both time and
storytelling, the “present-day” Mr Snatch manages to enter the living room of
the “future” Mr Snatch just after he had left to take his daily look at the
horizon via his brass telescope as we discovered way, way back at the beginning
of this little festive tale (even though it seems that nobody else is likely to
actually remember that, and there’s been precious little that has been festive
or jolly about the whole experience, I imagine).
All of this introspection is, of course, a blatant
attempt to distract you from the awful truth that very little actually happens
in this particular segment apart from some rather leaden and badly written
exposition which I’ve not had the time to rewrite, but now that I’ve warned you
about that, I’m hoping that you might at least be more forgiving of these, the
tentative scribblings of an obvious amateur.
And so, Mr Snatch entered the currently unoccupied
little room of another Mr Snatch and was surprised to find both a television
burbling away to itself and just the slightest attempt at a Christmas tree
standing in a corner of the room. He quickly looked around and, despite being
sorely tempted to just take advantage of the warmth coming from the tiny stove
that was burning away, he resisted.
After all, he didn’t want to run the risk of scaring
the legitimate owner out of his wits by being found there. Instead he decided
to just leave the note and make a discreet exit and hope that he would be asked
to return, if the owner of this little haven was feeling suitably willing to
receive a guest.
He looked around, looking for somewhere to place the
card where it might be most noticed. He thought about the television, but
couldn’t see any obvious way of attaching the card to it, and time was running out. The
occupier was bound to return any second, and so he decided that his best course
of action was to attach it to the door, and he headed towards the exit.
As he was on the brink of leaving the oasis of warmth,
he noticed a dancing cube sitting upon a shelf just beside the doorway. It
was just like the one he had found in his old coat when he’d dug it out of the
trunk. “Just how many of these things had they made…?” he began to wonder,
before picking it up and looking at it more closely.
He bit his lip in shame. It had been carefully glued
back together, and, when you looked at it for any length of time, the sequence
did appear to jump a few frames every so often, so it was undoubtedly the very
invitation which he had swept from the hand of Olive Scrimp in another life, a
whole other world, not more than a few hours earlier.
It was even addressed to her, which made him feel even
worse about everything.
He noticed a drawing pin sticking out of the door
jamb, not realising at all how something so useful could become so precious in
a world where there is nothing, and prised it out, attaching the card with it
to the wall behind the dancing cube. After all, he reasoned, it seemed to be an
important object in the unfortunate occupant’s life.
Then, with a last longing look at the warm fire, he
scuttled out and headed upwards again, towards the now milky light of the moon,
until he realised that he was running out of ladders and stairs and approaching
the moonlight and the cold again. Worse than this, he realised that his
potential host was also up there, looking towards the horizon once again,
hoping against all hope for some kind of human company.
Mr Snatch took this as a good sign that things might
go well in terms of their meeting and backed away quietly and returned
downstairs to wait.
You may, or may not, remember that, once upon a long
ago, the “future” Mr Snatch was disturbed by a creaking upon the stairs behind
him…? Well, I might well try my very hardest to persuade you that it was the
“present day” Mr Snatch that he heard, if that hadn’t occurred at a completely
different time of the day, but if it makes you feel better to see a pattern in
these things where there aren’t really any, or believe that I might have
actually planned this story in some way, then you can believe what you like.
After all, it could merely have been Old Marley’s
ghost, still cursed to be walking the Earth long, long after the Earth no
longer had much in the way of humans to occupy it, just checking in to see how
the handiwork of his younger ghostly self was working out, because he did, after all, have a pretty long memory, if little else.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that a few minutes
later, as Mr Snatch loitered in a lower corridor feeling a little like he
imagined a nervous potential employee might feel like as he awaited his
interview (because that was something he had never himself experienced, despite
having held hundreds of the things over the years), as you will clearly remember
if you’ve been paying attention, the card had indeed been discovered, and with
a bellow of rage the “future” Mr Snatch had found his long-forgotten voice and
found himself hurtling down the steps two at a time to take the opportunity to accuse
his wicked ancestor.
“You!” he bellowed furiously, “This is all your fault!”
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