Free The Thompson Gunner by Nick Earls Page A

details – that’s what Emma said she wanted. And usually there’s no one happier to oblige than me.
    I wanted emails from Murray and Elli. I had an idea that I’d log on and there they would be, full of non-gory detail. Murray on how he’s now heard enough Avril Lavigne to last a lifetime, but if his major parenting issue is persuading his daughter to spell ‘skater’ without a number in it, things aren’t too bad. Elli on Murray’s Sunday morning French toast going badly wrong, and how he had to stand on a chair to put a plastic bag around the smoke alarm.
    The person at the terminal next to me laughs at an email she’s just opened. It’s a big backpacker place, this Internet cafe, but definitely one of the better ones, neither as soulless as a Kinko’s nor as much of a cyber sweatshop as plenty of others.
    The one down the street was all war-gaming boys when I looked in – rank with late-teenage pheromones and overrun with the clamour of machines. You leave those places feeling like you’ve been sprayed with Essence of Boy’s Armpit. The air’s so thick with it your instinct is to keep your mouth shut in case it’ll coat your teeth.
    If cyber war is like this, what does real war smell like? You’d have to hope there was a breeze or the collateral damage from boy smell could be grim indeed.
    I’m killingtime, sitting here dreaming about emails I’m not going to get and the blur that Internet cafes become as the cities go by. I’m killing time and paying for it, at the rate of about a dollar for each quarter hour.
    My hands are sweating on the plastic armrests.
    The X-ray is ready within minutes, and the dentist shows me the image, holding it between two fingers in front of my face and pointing out the deep intact root system that will allow the job to be done in one go, and this afternoon. There’s so much of the tooth below the surface and, by the looks of it, even in the jaw that the X-ray suggests I’ve done no worse than clip three corners off the top of it, though my tongue tells me almost all of it’s gone.
    â€˜So, this is good,’ he says. ‘We knew too much of it was gone to simply fill in the space, but we’ll make you a crown. It’ll be porcelain. Porcelain looks good but the main thing is it gives an excellent long-term result. I don’t imagine you’ll feel much at all when we get to work, but we’ll make sure you don’t. You might get a bit bored, though. In which case, you might as well watch a movie.’
    I assume he’s kidding, but he pulls an overhead TV monitor around and his assistant holds a folder up in front of me.
    â€˜Recent releases are at the back,’ she says. ‘This’ll take a couple of hours, so pick anything you like.’
    The list runs to a dozen pages or more, sheets of names of movies and TV shows in plastic sleeves. I ask if there’s anything they haven’t watched, as if we’re three housemates standing in front of the new-to-weeklies at Blockbuster before we order our pizza.
    â€˜I’llprobably be concentrating on the tooth,’ the dentist says. ‘But I’ve seen Mister Bean enough times, if that’s all right.’
    I pick
EDtv
. I missed its cinema run, since I was on tour at the time. I’ve heard it’s pretty good but, really, if it’s a crap movie and Matthew McConaughey gets his shirt off a few times, all is not lost.
    The assistant straightens my bib, and fits a pair of massive sunglasses of the kind worn over regular glasses by people who are past caring. The dentist applies topical anaesthetic, then injects the local, which stings once or twice but never badly. A firm grip on the armrests gets me through. He keeps testing and testing to see that it’s all properly numb, but I don’t give in lightly and I jump at the merest hint of sensation.
    â€˜We’ll make a start,’ he