Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

his wife believed his older sister to be an authority on having not just lost the plot but having wilfully flushed the entire script down the shitter.

Mick passed the Sunlight building that was on the road’s far side, a Chinese laundry once that breathed out lonely bachelor steam, become an oily car-repair shop still, with the incongruous solar trademark of the previous establishment raised in relief from its white Art Deco façade. A little further down on the same side there stood the dismal shell of the old Labour Exchange where both Mick and Alma and the great majority of their associates had at one point or other stood amongst the shuffling and obscurely guilty abattoir processions, lining up to be inspected by a merciless nineteen-year-old with bolt-gun phrasing.

another bloody-minded kamikaze from the ’Sixties just like Alma was.

failing to understand the high-rise blocks for what they were: two upended and piss-perfumed sarcophagi that would replace the tenant’s back-wall badinage and summer doorstep idylls with more vertical arrangements,

this clump of gibbering tumbleweed

the lad’s face was a bag lady of physiognomy,

and most likely something synthesized last Tuesday rather than the limited array of substances that he himself was very distantly familiar with, mostly through Alma who had tripped for England in her schoolgirl years.

when the insane were that much easier to spot and someone walking down an empty street towards you yelling angrily into the air was certain to have paranoid psychosis rather than a Bluetooth earpiece.

calling out into the smelly echo.

Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.

it had always seemed to Henry how the English liked to puff they past times up as much as anybody, and considerably more than most.

a piece of nineteen-hundreds royalty in exile, traipsing back and forth along the shores of an unfriendly foreign century.

He pulled on his shirt and trousers breathing through his mouth, then grabbed his waistcoat and his shoes and bolted for the landing, finishing adjusting his apparel once he was outside the room and back in a terrestrial atmosphere.

Of course, the biggest stumbling block he had with finding work was that he wasn’t looking, or not very hard, at any rate.

A Northamptonshire Garland

Back then poverty had come with a brass band accompaniment and a cheek full of scone dissolving in hot Brooke Bond;

the queasy catacomb that seemed to rustle with the ghosts of future murders.

He put down the half-empty glass, trying to kid himself that it was still half full,

In the district where they’d both grown up, affectionate displays were never physical. Or verbal, or in any way apparent to the five traditional senses. Love and friendship in the Boroughs were subliminal.

Alma’s voice wasn’t just deep brown, it was infra-brown.

Worcester Cathedral was bombarded by them in a joyous cosmic ray-storm, St. Cecilia reclining in the foreground as she soaked up the UV. A twenty. Welcome to my humble pants, Sir Edward Elgar.

but for now he stuffed the note back in his pocket and began to whistle as he walked towards Abington Square, only relenting when he realised he was giving a rendition of the theme music from Emmerdale.

Mind you, wasn’t it just this last year that Tony Blair had set out his performance targets for the under-fives? There’d be established foetal standards soon, so that you could feel pressurized and backwards if your fingers hadn’t separated fully by the third trimester.

Boys moved like chess knights with concussion,

thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen.

With little May against one shoulder like a set of bagpipes not in current use

May’s “hello” in reply was made from lead. It left her lips and thudded on the mat, a lump of language, blunt and colourless, from which no conversation could be built. The deathmonger stepped round it and went on.

“Don’t say that, dear. It’s both a cheap and silly thing to say, you know it is. And anyway, unless I’m wrong, you don’t wish you were dead at all. It’s just that you don’t want to be alive because life’s rough and don’t make any sense. Those are two very different things, my dear. You’d do well to be sure which one you mean. One can be put right and the other can’t.”

Bugger this for a game of soldiers.

Alma, half-blind even then, had squinted at the ant in question, which had lost a whole dimension,

her eager face lit indigo in ghastly flashes from beneath as a diminutive centurion was turned into a Roman candle.

alone and climbing through an endless blackout with the possibility of earwigs.

You caught more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, and you caught more with bullshit than you did with either.

geometeorology.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” predicted screwed-up Sam O’Day with confidence.

“How does it all work, then, life and death?” How nice. He’d got a little Wittgenstein for company.

Poor kid, he looked scared to death and then scared back to life again.

Phyllis felt the soft touch of a larger hand in these affairs,

“This wiz where I used to live, back when I used to live.”

kali water

the constant wheeze from a catarrh of distant motor traffic

was unlit save for the hissing radiance of a television set tuned to an empty channel.

In his experience, dead people were a lot more down to earth.

with total darkness being much the same in any century.

He was becoming ravenously reminiscent.

and almost immediately his mouth exploded with sensations so immense and intricate he felt his tongue had finally arrived in Heaven with the rest of him.

“Reggie, mate, you’re not the sharpest suit in Burton’s window, are yer?

the long streets of forever.

The night was lively with carnivorous imaginings.

He looked as though he’d played to either a dead crowd or else a rowdy audience in the past, but never both at the same time.