Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over

But life goes on and this ol’ world will keep on turning 

Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together

There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning

It’s the song that came over me in the hotel room with Kathy. Only Tommy has turned it right back to the beginning. He’s singing how it began, I says to myself, and how it ends.

I felt dizzy, like somebody had shuffled the cards of my life and everything was in a different order. Then he skipped a verse. He skipped the verse whose arms I had lain in at the hotel room (leaving a little gap in the song) (a little gasp) and went on to the next verse.

I’ll get along, you’ll find another, and I’ll be here if you should find you ever need me, don’t say a word about tomorrow, or forever, there’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me.

Patricia passed me one of her silk handkerchiefs. It was damp and I could smell her perfume. I held it over my mouth and my nose and I closed my eyes as tight as I could.

*

The morning of the big day. We’ve arranged to meet at the shop, just like normal. I walk in and Barney is playing this music, this fucking hippy-music bollocks. What the fuck is this? I shout through to him. It’s Dark Side of the Moon, he says. Pink Floyd. It’s a concept LP about life, he says. I’d take life behind bars before I had to sit through this pish, I says to him.

Barney’s in the back room, going through boxes of comics. We’re sitting on a fucking goldmine here, he says to me. Look at this stuff. This is all original Gold and Silver Age material. What’s the Golden Age, I says to him, what’s that mean? Gold is the best, he says, when it was all new. Silver is when they knew a bit more about it. What then? I says to him. Bronze, he says. What’s that? I says to him. Average, he says.

What age is Ireland in, do you think? I says to him. Gold, he says without a pause. And how do you figure that out? I says. Because we’re making it up as we go along, he says. Because we’re right here, at the beginning. These are the golden years, my friend.

We should do one of them conventions, Barney says. Beavis says we’d clean up. Barney, I says to him, I cannot believe you sometimes. We’re trying to bring an end to the fucking future and you’re making plans to go to some fucking comic geeks’ meeting? Have we not got nothing more important to be thinking about, don’t you think? Anyways, Barney says to me. There’s Tommy.