Listen to Con Men and Call Girls performed by Tom Phillips, lyrics by Will Ferguson

It’s hard to know, isn’t it? Where things begin. Why we end up taking one path and not another. With me, I think maybe it started when I got arrested. That was out east, in Louisiana. All part of the plan, and it worked wonderfully well, but I do feel perhaps that’s when everything started to go awry.

Say a pair of friends are playing cards and one catches the other cheating, so he goes home, gets a gun, loads it, comes back, puts a bullet clean through the other fellow’s chest. Well, when did that murder occur, exactly? What was the moment of no return? Was it when the bullet left the barrel? Or when it hit that man? Was it when the man’s heart stopped beating? Was it when his friend pulled the trigger, or when he failed to talk said friend out of shooting him? Maybe if he’d pleaded his case just a little more effectively. Had wept just a little more. Or was it when his friend first left the card table, went home to get a gun? Maybe it goes back further still, to the roots of their friendship, to how they were bred, what they were taught, whether they were raised rich or poor, Godfearing or scientific. When was the clock set to ticking? When did that second man’s life really end?

Or take something bigger. A railroad disaster, say. When things go off the tracks like that, it can be tricky trying to pinpoint the specific cause of the derailment. You might trace the catastrophe back to a signalman, asleep at the switch. But why was he asleep? Was he up through the night on account of his neighbor’s dog baying at the moon? And if so, are the train wreck and the destruction that followed the dog’s fault? Or is it the moon’s? And who put that moon to spinning, anyway? Yes sir, you could pull at the threads of a thing forever and never succeed in unraveling the truth.

In my case, maybe it went back further than Louisiana. Further than Virgil and Miss Rose. I think maybe in my case it started with the dust.

Extracted from Spanish Fly by Will Ferguson, published by Harvill Secker, January 17, 2008, £12.99

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