“A new century,” said a lady in a straw hat as a ragamuffin called Winston deftly relieved her of her purse. “Who knows what wonders it will bring.”
“Electrical lighting,” said The Man in the Street, as Winston’s brother, Elvis, deftly relieved him of his clockwork pocket watch. “And something called the internal combustion engine, which I am told will supersede horse-drawn transportation.”
“Electrical lighting?” The lady in the straw hat laughed. “That’s just a music-hall trick. And nothing will ever supersede the horse. You’ll be telling me next that man will be able to fly.” Winston’s other brother, Kylie, deftly relieved the lady of her false teeth.
“Fly?” said The Man in the Street. “I wouldn’t go that far. And I think you’re right about the horses. But it’s my opinion that by the year of nineteen twenty, every street and thoroughfare of this country will be nose to tail with horse-drawn vehicles and London will be thirty-five feet deep in horse manure.”
“Now that makes sense,” said the lady, although she lisped somewhat as she said it, due to the lack of her teeth. “That would be an accurate prediction for the future.”
And fireworks blossomed in the twentieth-century sky.
And Queen Victoria went inside and had a cup of tea.
47
On the first of January, in the year two thousand two hundred, Mrs Starling of number seven Mafeking Avenue, Brentford, gave birth. She gave birth to twin boys and named them William and Timothy. They were not born into the dystopian future of the sky towers and acid rains that our Will had been born to. Nor were they born into the Utopian super future that Will’s other self had grown up in as the Promised One. Nor indeed any twist or permutation of these two.
William and Timothy were born into our future, the future that will be what we make it to be, and a future which, if the past and the present are anything to go by, won’t be all that bad.
It won’t be all that good either, of course.
But it won’t be all that bad.
It will be somewhere in the middle.
It will just be the future.
Our future, which won’t be so bad, will it?
And that, of course, should be that: the end of our tale, and as near to a “happy ever after” as it’s possible to be.
If it wasn’t just for a few loose ends.
Five loose ends, in fact, which probably means that it isn’t the end, but only the beginning of a great deal more.
And then some.