by Alan Moore
Alma looked towards the vista Mick had indicated, tightening her thick-caked lashes into a contemptuous spaghetti western squint so that her eyes were jumping-spiders tensing for the fatal pounce.
“Of course it’s not too late, you girl. There’s no point sending you a vision if there’s nothing to be done about it, is there? And, look, I’m a genius. They said so in the NME. I’ll do these paintings and we’ll get this sorted. Trust me.”
And he did, implicitly. While it was obvious to a blind man that Mick’s sister was both self-infatuated and delusional, in his experience Alma also often turned out to be right. If she said that she could repair a cataclysm with some tubes of paint, Mick was inclined to put the money on his sister rather than the meteor strike or whatever it was had happened to the Boroughs. All her life she’d made perverse decisions that had worked out for her against all the odds and nobody could say their Alma hadn’t done well for a Boroughs kid. Mick had got faith in her, though not the wide-eyed faith of her devoted audience, many of whom appeared to think of her as having origins within the region of the supernatural or else the field of clandestine genetic research, a god-sent mutation who could talk to stones and raise the unborn, let alone the dead.
“I can’t believe you’re Alma Warren’s brother”, he’d had more than one fan of his sister’s paintings tell him, mostly female workmates of his wife’s whom Alma was convinced only responded to her as “a badly misjudged lesbian icon” rather than an artist. Sometimes, if they knew Mick’s background, they’d sit looking thoughtful before asking him how anyone like Alma Warren could have possibly emerged from a notorious urban soul-trap like the Boroughs. He considered this a stupid question, as if there were any other place she could have come from, Hell or Narnia or somewhere. How long was it since there’d been even a trace of the authentic working class, if its conspicuous products were today unrecognisable as dodos? What had happened to that culture? Other than those parts of it which had been tempted up into the low boughs of the middle classes or drained off into the cardboard jungle, how had it all vanished so that these days if they saw it, no one had a clue what they were looking at? Where had it gone? Why hadn’t somebody complained?
They’d turned left and were walking down the lowest edge of Castle Hill, towards the wall of Doddridge Church, heading for Chalk Lane, Marefair and the cab rank of the station at the bottom, on the end of their beloved Andrew’s Road. Alma was back to conjuring another as yet non-existent masterpiece, eyes staring fixedly into the ink-wash empty space before her as if she already saw it framed and hanging there.
“I had this idea, right, when we were talking. I could do my dream, the one about the carpenters down at the corner of the market in the middle of the night. I could do something really big, a bit like Stanley Spencer with enormous figures bent over their lathes, facing away from us. I’ll do some bits in loving detail but I’ll leave the rest unfinished with, like, dangling pencil lines. I’ll call it ‘Work in Progress’ …”
Alma trailed off, stopping in her tracks to gaze up at the eighteenth-century Nonconformist church that they were passing. Set into the toffee-coloured stonework of its upper storey was a closed pitch-painted doorway that led into empty air, clearly a loading bay of some sort, except why would anybody need one halfway up a church? It looked as if it was intended to lead to an unseen upper floor of the impoverished district, one long since demolished without trace, or possibly a planned extension yet to be constructed. She looked from the senseless angel-door to Mick and when she spoke her train-wreck voice was small and marvelling, more like that of a little girl than when she’d been one.
“That’s one of the places, Warry, isn’t it? From in your seizure or whatever?”
Alma’s brother nodded and then indicated the turfed-over wasteland up beyond another car park, on Chalk Lane approaching to their right as they resumed their walk.
“Yeah. That’s another, but that’s like an earthworks. It’s much bigger though, and older, and the puddles have unfolded, sort of, into a lagoon.”
His sister nodded slowly, taking it all in as she surveyed the tuft of land rising behind the car-crèche, its surveillance camera babysitter monitoring her charges from a litter-pocket corner. One forked tree or maybe a close-planted pair stretched up out of the mound in silhouette against the sodium lamp bleed above the nearby station. Trees were the enduring features of a landscape, its true face beneath the pantomime dame crust of leisure centre and dual carriageway, cosmetic affectations wiped away at intervals. The oak and elm defined the view across great tracks of time, were vital structural elements, constant as clouds and like the clouds mostly unnoticed.
As they reached the top of Chalk Lane, to the east past Doddridge Church on its grass hillock were the flats and houses of St. Mary’s Street where the great fire was started, and past that the traffic rush of Horsemarket, running uphill to void into the dead monoxide junction where the Mayorhold used to be. Ahead of them the crack of Chalk Lane dipped through darkness, south and down to Marefair’s headlight ribbon with the devil-decorated eaves of Peter’s Church across the way, an ibis hotel and attendant entertainment complex up towards town on the left. A neon tumour styled by Fabergé, this had been raised upon the site of the demolished Barclaycard headquarters, previously an endearing tangle of small businesses and hairline alleyways, Pike Lane, Quart Pot Lane, Doddridge Street and long before that a royal residence that governed Mercia and with it most of grunting Saxon England. There weren’t ghosts here; there were fossil seams of ghosts, one stacked upon another and compressing down to an emotive coal or oil, black and combustible.
Alma tried to imagine the whole listing quarter right from Peter’s Way to Regent Square, from Andrew’s Road to Sheep Street and Saint Sepulchre’s, a petrifying side of boar still with the jutting tower-block arrows that impaled and brought it down, still with its street lamp bristles and its alehouse crackling; tried imagining it all in context of Mick’s vision as if the distressed topography and broken skyline still plugged into something humming and impalpable, some legendary machinery long disappeared but still perhaps in working order. It was awesome and it made her need a joint. Campaigners said it wasn’t possible to get addicted to old-fashioned hashish, but to Alma’s way of thinking they just couldn’t have been trying.
They stepped out of Chalk Lane onto Black Lion Hill, a million years of gradient presided over by four hundred years of public house at the arse-end of Marefair. By the alley-mouth there’d been another paper-shop where Alma from the age of seven had bought comics for their pictures, garish flotsam shipped here from America as ballast with skyscraper-scented pages and electrifying banners: Journey into Mystery, Forbidden Worlds and My Greatest Adventure. Over the resurfaced lane had stood a melancholy guesthouse hanging back behind a screen of elders, with existing photos from a date still earlier showing a mill-like structure dominated by a lantern cupola that previously ruled the corner. There was a short row of faceless 1960s houses perched there now, behind the high wall overlooking the main road, with tenants hanging on until the area was one day gentrified, part of a ‘Cultural Mile’ that council wonks had blue-skied and attempted to talk up, before they sold high and bailed out for somewhere less accusing, somewhere without all the bad dreams trapped like astral rising damp in the foundations. Alma had from somewhere the impression that a local councillor had occupied one of the buildings once, but whether he still lived there she had no idea. Rounding the corner to their right, they walked down to the lights and crossed St. Andrew’s Road, continuing to the approach of Castle Station.
This was where the sex-commuters pulled in at the weekends, prostitute away-teams hot from Milton Keynes or Rugby riding in upon a Silverlink express to the well-publicised red-light zone of the Boroughs, the rich pickings of the all night truck-stop on its northwest corner, where the hump of Spencer Bridge met Crane Hill at the foot of Grafton Street, the area’s northern boundary. Walking AIDS vectors and their managers routinely filter
ed through the station forecourt, through the former medieval castle where Shakespeare’s King John commences, where reputedly they held the world’s first parliament during the thirteenth century and raised the poll tax that sparked off Wat Tyler’s uprising of 1381, where various Crusades were planned, where Becket was condemned, here at the end of the soot-blasted road where Mick and Alma had grown up, their derelict arcadia. As they descended to the hackney cabs unwinding round the station’s yard from its front entrance, Alma was reflecting on the grave enormity of what she’d promised she’d see through. She wasn’t going to have to simply do these pictures. She was going to have to do the fuck out of them.
And she did. Fourteen months later on a cold Spring Saturday in 2006 Mick had lunch with his wife and boys up at their house in Whitehills, then walked down through Kingsthorpe to the Barrack Road, coming upon the Boroughs from its northeast corner and the crater that had formerly been Regent Square. He’d passed his driving test but still preferred to go by foot, sharing his family’s antipathy to motor vehicles. Neither his sister and their parents nor all save one of their various aunts and uncles had ever possessed a car, and Mick still felt uneasy on the rare occasions that his designated driver Cathy was away, obliging him to climb behind the wheel.
Alma had called him weeks ago to say she’d finished with the paintings she’d commenced after their meeting at the Golden Lion the year before. She planned to kick the exhibition off with a small viewing that she’d set up at the playgroup where Pitt-Draffen’s dance school used to be, up on one sawn-off corner edge of Castle Hill. His sister had invited him to see the images his vision had inspired, including ‘Work in Progress’ with its midnight carpenters, a piece that she particularly wanted him to see called ‘Chain of Office’, and another work that Alma said was ‘three dimensional’ and which might only be available for viewing at this opening event.
In slacks and loafers and a plain tan sports shirt underneath a jacket he still wasn’t sure if he was going to need he strolled facing the breeze down Grafton Street, a fit and handsome forty-nine-year-old who still maintained a gleam of infant animation in his pale blue eyes, which were at least one normal colour and weren’t something out of Village of the Damned like Alma’s. She of course would counter that she’d kept her hair while his had made the dignified retreat into a cloud of golden fuzz high on his suntanned brow, not wholly different from the burnished, lonely ringlets of his babyhood. If he was feeling rash or lucky he might point out in riposte that he’d kept all his teeth, a literal sore point with the munchie-prone and periodontinitis-stricken Alma who would probably then glare at him, go dangerously quiet and that would be the end of that. He realised that rehearsing these encounters with his sister and stage-managing their banter that might never happen was a mark of insecurity, but in Mick’s previous experience with Alma it was always best to be prepared.
The plunge of Grafton Street gushed with a growling steel and rubber torrent, vehicle flow swollen by a rain of lunchtime drinkers, weekend shopping trips and booming penis publicizers, threatening to overspill its banks. An anaconda laminate of molten tyre that snaked across the pavement just ahead of Mick bore testament that such a breach had happened only recently, most probably during the Friday night just gone. White-water driving by some Netto Fabulous crash-dummy who bled Burberry, shooting the traffic island rapids in his hotwired kayak, home to Jimmy’s End across the river in the west, head full of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas and horse tranquilliser, pinprick pupils, squinting in the spindrift of oncoming headlights.
Ambling down the draughty slope beneath a panoramic sky, 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. Mick was grimly satisfied to note that the dour arbiter of worker’s fortunes was itself these days redundant, the indifferent prison-warder gaze its windows used to have replaced now by the look of tremulous, disoriented dread that comes with growing old in a declining neighbourhood. They never like it when it’s them, Mick thought, as he passed by St. Andrew’s Street there on his left and carried on downhill into the wind.
St. Andrew’s Street, receding now behind him, had once led to the raised bump where stood St. Andrew’s Church, long since torn down, itself built on the site of the St. Andrew’s Priory that had been there hundreds of years before and which accounted for the great preponderance of phantom Cluniac monks amongst the district’s roster of reported ghosts. At one time, Mick remembered, almost all the half-a-square-mile’s multitude of pubs – what was it, eighty-something? – were alleged to have a chanting apparition seeking absolution in the snug, or drawing painstaking illuminated pricks with gilded scrollwork on the lavvy wall. Mick wondered where the spectres had all gone in 1970 or so, when the last fag ends of the area were swept away. The Boroughs’ mortal residents were siphoned off to flats in King’s Heath like the one that his nan May had died in, or to the genetic sumps of Abington like Norman Road, where his and Alma’s gran upon their mum’s side, Clara, had dropped off the twig, both grandmas passing within weeks of their uprooting from the Boroughs where they’d buried husbands, where they’d buried kids. What struck Mick was that clearly it had never been a big priority to suitably relocate Boroughs dregs like him and Alma and their family, who, although possibly dishevelled, were at least alive. How much less effort had gone into the rehousing of the region’s wraiths, who’d all been dead, gruesomely so, for years? Did spooks from pulled-down pubs now shiver and clutch tight their glowing bed-sheets under the shop doorways of Northampton’s centre, like its other dispossessed? Did they have shelters for the bodiless as well as for the homeless; magazine street-vendor schemes for revenants, like The Dead Issue, maybe?
It had been along St. Andrew’s Street that he and Alma had once known a barber, forty years ago, with the unlikely name Bill Badger. They’d pretended, just between themselves, that he was one of Rupert Bear’s accomplices grown up, shaved by his own hand to appear more human, forced by circumstance to get a proper job. His shop had been an odditorium, its crowding walls filled to the ceiling with unfathomable, strangely charismatic products like Bay Rum and styptic pencils that would seal up cuts and which, during his childhood, Mick had thought might be a handy thing to carry round with you so that there was at least a chance that you could stick your head back on if you’d been guillotined. Of course, the shop was gone now, both it and the church replaced by the same blocks of flats with which the district had been steadily and surely tiled since 1921 or thereabouts. Last year there’d been a young, mentally ill Somali under armed police siege up St. Andrew’s Street, threatening to kill himself, while still more recently a cousin of Mick’s lovely and formidable wife Cathy, herself a benignant outgrowth of the town’s notorious and hydra-headed Devlin clan, had put St. Andrew’s Street into the news again by strangling his spouse. She’d been “doing his head in”, so he claimed.
The place was cursed. Only that lunchtime Mick had seen a hoarding for the local Chronicle & Echo that reported yet another hooker raped and beaten in the small hours of the night before and left for dead down at the base of Scarletwell Street, only saved by intervention from a resident, such incidents reported every month although occurring every week. Nothing good happened in the Boroughs anymore but once, down Grafton Street towards Crane Hill there lived a woman that Miss Starmer who had run the post office would speak of, who’d been standing on her step one morning when a passing stranger thrust a newborn child into her arms and ran away; was never seen again. The child was taken in and raised, b
rought up as though the woman’s own, and fought in World War One. “You can tell what a lovely family they were to bring him up”, Miss Starmer used to say, “but they were in the Boroughs. That’s the kind of families that we had in the Boroughs then.” And it was true. Even confronted by the stark reality of how the neighbourhood had ended up, as an environmental head-butt where the woman’s stunning act of altruism was today unthinkable, Mick knew that it was true. There’d been a different sort of people then that seemed another race, had different ways, a different language, and were now improbable as centaurs.
He turned left from Grafton Street and into Lower Harding Street, a long straight track that would deliver him to Alma’s exhibition on the Boroughs’ far side by the most direct route. This was where his sister’s lefty activist mate Roman Thompson lived, another bloody-minded kamikaze from the ’Sixties just like Alma was. ‘Thompson the Leveller’ she called him fondly, probably one of her know-all references, and he lived with his slinky, stroppy boyfriend here in Lower Harding Street. Roman had been a firebrand since the UCS ship-workers’ strike four decades earlier, had broken through police lines to punch out one of the leaders in a National Front march through Brick Lane and had once wreaked terrible revenge upon a unit of drunk squaddies who’d made the mistake of thinking that this wizened terrier posed less of an immediate threat alone than they, en masse and army-trained, could muster. Rome was in his early sixties now, some ten years older than Mick’s sister, but still closed his jaws upon the arse of an oppressor with undimmed ferocity. At present he was on the militant arm of the local Boroughs action group, campaigning to prevent the sale and demolition of the area’s few remaining council dwellings. Alma had consulted with her old friend once or twice while she was working on this current run of paintings, she had told her brother, who would not have been surprised if Thompson and his chap should turn up at the exhibition Mick was making for.