The Witches of Chiswick

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.