“Then – and listen, this is brilliant. Adam Smith, the bloke who’s on the twenties, the economist, he either comes and sees the mill or hears about it, with its looms all working nineteen to the dozen and its shuttles whizzing back and forth and no one there, as though it were a factory being run by ghosts. He thinks it’s wonderful, tells everybody that he knows how it’s as though a massive unseen hand were guiding all this furious mechanical activity, some manner of industrial Zeus rather than basic principles of engineering. It’s what always happens with new science in a religious age, like all of these holistic fizzy water manufacturers who babble about quantum physics.”
Mick, who found both quantum physics and expensive fizzy water equally unlikely concepts, watched the fat man waddle by them on their right, seemingly headed for the lightly smouldering day nursery. Behind his lenses customarily complacent eyes regarded the pair sitting on the church wall with suspicion as he barrelled past, particularly Alma whom he more than likely recognised. Either unbothered by his presence or else unaware she pressed on with her tale excitedly.
“So Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idiot-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Reagan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone that we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.”
A dog barked, away on their left in the vicinity of Mary’s Street, one bark, then three, then silence. Not for the first time since getting up that morning, Mick felt an encroaching air of strangeness. There was something going on, something unsettlingly precise in its familiarity. Had this happened before? Not something like this but this exact situation, with his buttocks going dead from the stone wall’s chill striking through thin trousers. First one bark, then three, then silence. Wasn’t there something about Picasso, or had that not happened yet? Floundering in the déjà vu, he had a feeling Alma was about to mention a glass football.
“Warry, seriously, everywhere’s Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein’s right, then space and time are all one thing and it’s, I dunno, it’s a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they’re there forever. Nothing’s moving. Nothing’s changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl. And when our films, our lives, when they come to an end I don’t see that there’s anywhere for consciousness to go but back to the beginning. Everybody is on endless replay. Every moment is forever, and if that’s true every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city. You know, if I’d thought to put that in a program or a booklet at the exhibition, I suppose that people might have had more chance of working out what I was on about. Ah, well. It’s too late now. What’s done is done, and done just one way for all time, over and over.”
Cue the chubby councillor. This thought had just occurred to Mick, by now slack jawed and reeling with recurrence, when the white-haired and white-bearded Christmas bauble rumbled back down Chalk Lane and once more into their field of view. From his outraged expression and the faint wisps of charred papier-mâché smog which wafted their malodorous tendrils after him, it was apparent that he’d witnessed the evacuated nursery and had very probably gone in to see the burned-out model Boroughs at first hand. All of a sudden, Mick knew down to the last syllable exactly what would transpire next and how Pablo Picasso had a part in it. It was that anecdote, the funny story he’d heard Alma tell at least a half a dozen times, about when Nazis visited the artist’s Paris studio during the occupation and came, with some dismay, on Guernica. The huffy councillor was going to say the same thing that the German officers had said on that occasion, and Mick’s sister would then shamelessly appropriate the Cubist sex-gnome’s spirited and memorable reply. And then the dog would bark again, four times. Scalp tingling, Mick took another turn round on the ghost train.
Stubbing her illicit fag out on the slab where she was sitting, Alma raised her less-than-interested grey and yellow gaze in time to notice the rotund former official for the first time. Near to apoplexy he raised his left arm, a trembling finger pointing back towards the daycare centre where the smoke alarms still sounded, and unwittingly delivered the Gestapo dialogue regarding Guernica.
“Did you do that?”
It was the perfect set up. Beaming beatifically, his sister offered up her plagiarised reply.
“No. You did.”
Blinking dazedly and without an articulate response the erstwhile council leader trundled off in the direction of Marefair, a haywire snowball that got smaller as it rolled downhill instead of bigger. From St. Mary’s Street came the predicted canine outburst: woof, woof, woof and then a faint pause. Woof.
Despite the clockwork eeriness, Mick found that he was chortling. Kicking her heels beside him, never one afraid to laugh at her own stolen jokes, Alma joined in. Somewhere upslope behind and right on schedule, sirens were approaching through the stopped streets of a broken heaven.