What If..?

Five years ago today I stepped off the boat in Aberdeen for the last time.

Sometimes, in my lower moments, I've wondered how things would have turned out if I hadn't done what I did next – if, instead of scuttling back south to lick my wounds, I'd taken that morning as a new beginning and tried to rebuild my life where I stood. I don't think the idea even occurred to me at the time – I wasn't thinking exactly clearly, and hadn't had long to consider my options – but certainly that would have been the adventurous, the picaresque thing to do: the thing that would have made the better story later. Could it have worked, and what would the consequences have been?

It wouldn't have been easy to get started: as I recall, I had about forty quid in the bank, most of which in real life promptly went on my train fare. Had I stayed where I was, it wouldn't have lasted a great deal longer – so the first thing I'd have had to do was acquire an address and an income stream before it ran out. Who knows, maybe the scale of the uncertainty involved in that did colour my thinking at the time, I can't remember. I don't know what out-of-the-way shithole Aberdeen City Council would have found to house me in, how long that would have taken or what I'd have done with the hundredweight of clothes and books I was humphing around in the meantime – sold 'em for food, probably, if I could – but people have been known to survive such processes, and assuming I got through those difficult first few weeks at least I'd have been in a real city with a life of its own, not stuck out in the badlands of my miserable youth. For better or worse, I'd have been somewhere new.

The next two years could have been very different: there are friends and bits of work I'd have missed, but who knows what would have been in their place. Here's the strange thing though: as time went on, there are things that would have happened regardless.

I'd still have returned to comics in 2008, when the first signs of early-onset presbyopia briefly gave me the now-or-never heebie-jeebies (though fortunately it's gotten no worse since); and I'd probably still have spent a lot of 2009 drawing and marketing Burke & Hare, and the summer of 2010 trying to get the rights back when the publisher collapsed. The trouble with my mother's neighbour which my presence brought to a head in 2007 would have rumbled on without me until she had to be rehoused anyway, probably not much later than she did in fact; and in entirely separate developments, she'd still have been ill last year, which would have brought me back to the ol' briar patch anyway.

All of that would still have happened not just if I'd stayed in Aberdeen in 2006, but also if I'd never gone to Shetland at all, or if I'd got any of the jobs outside Glasgow I applied for in 2004-5 and had to move somewhere else. Go back further: the family stuff would still have happened if Black Ship Productions had taken off in '03 and restarted my comics career then, or if either run of Something Fast had led on to other things earlier, or whatever other ways my adult life might have diverged from its actual course. If there are parallel universes out there in which versions of me have been better-travelled, richer, or luckier in love or work, a lot of those timelines have been converging with our own lately.

All the might-have-beens lead here. A terrifying thought, but a strangely liberating one.

So much for backstory. Refresh, reboot, relaunch. There's nowhere to go but forwards…