Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  Northampton wraps its arms around her, honoured by her presence: she could have gone there-ward but instead washed here-ward in the wake of her unsatisfying tour through European sanatoriums. At last she dances her way out of tempo, out of time into the Kingsthorpe cemetery just up the road from Michael Warren’s house, two or three headstones down from Finnegan himself, with Violet Gibson who shot Mussolini in the nose and was committed to St. Andrew’s Hospital not very far away. Lucia pirouettes ecstatic now on the eternal boardwalks of Mansoul. Now she can see straight. She knows what the work progresses to, and knows that not a single step was wasted.

  I keep up with the continuing argument over ‘Intelligent Design’, although if one subscribes to late twentieth-century ideas of consciousness as an emergent property, the disagreement vanishes. If self-awareness can emerge from systems that have passed a certain threshold of complexity, then is not the expanding universe of space and time, by definition, the most complex system that can possibly exist? Mark that I do not seek to trespass on the faiths or ideologies of others with this observation. I’m just saying.

  I glimpse Alma Warren in her early sixties, standing at her easel in the house there on East Park Parade during the year 2016. She steps off from the canvas, squints and curls her lip, mugging for cameras that aren’t there. She angles her long body forward as if stooping over prey and slops a thick impasto curl of dirty cream along a splashing wave-top, then leans back again, considering.

  The large acrylic image is one of a series that she’s working on at present, for an exhibition tentatively titled Landscapes? These are scenic views which would at one point have been in the category suggested by that title, but are in the process of transforming into something else, a more ambiguous state. The painting that Alma is currently engaged with shows a public house towards the north end of the Yarmouth seafront, an art-deco structure from the 1930s called the Iron Duke. Though semi-derelict as it’s depicted here, the pub retains a grandness and a generosity of spirit, vestiges of the brave, misplaced optimism typifying the decade of its inception.

  A decaying beauty, in its salad days it stands adjacent to North Denes, the busy caravan camp where Alma and Michael are brought by their parents for a factory fortnight, almost every summer of their childhoods. They meet all their Spring Lane classmates and their Boroughs neighbours on the salty promenades, in bulb-lit pub yards carpeted with cockleshells, the greater part of working-class Northampton having relocated to the east coast for the same two long-anticipated weeks.

  The pub is now positioned slightly right of centre, in the painting’s middle-ground. Its rear-yard walls of dark red brick are listing from the building’s central bulk, slowly collapsing, while the glass panes of the higher moulded windows are surprisingly intact. Surrounding the deteriorated edifice are only the North Sea’s expanded waters. Wavelets capped with grey detergent suds lap at the fan of steps that lead, beneath a crumbling portico, from the saloon bar to a submerged car park. The deserted terrace with its curving balustrade now looks more like the fo’c’sle of a foundered galleon. Barnacles have colonised the lower reaches of the flaking drainpipes.

  Alma has applied a texture to the drowned pub’s scabby brickwork, speckling its distressed surfaces with minute dabs of purple that are almost black, so that the walls seem pitted as though by ancient corrosions. This technique, known as decalcomania, is borrowed from the great surrealist Max Ernst, and in this instance is a reference to his jewelled and eerie masterpiece, Europe after the Rain. Off in the distance of her painting’s background Alma has suggested ruined pleasure-beach attractions, decommissioned roller-coasters, skeletal Big Wheels looming above the waterline, their spidery lines just visible through scumbled morning haze that she’s created using a dry brush. She wants the work to be at once serene, sad and unsettling; intends to use the hostelry and its clean Bauhaus contours as a symbol of man’s fragile notions of modernity, succumbing to the old simplicities of time and tide. She wants the viewer to hear gulls, infrequent splashes, and an absence of machines or voices.

  In the cluttered ground-floor front room that she uses as her studio, books and paintings in various stages of completion are arranged haphazardly. A creased and battered paperback edition of The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard’s lyric conjuring of watery apocalypse, rests open on one worn arm of an equally distressed leather settee. A hashish smog has gathered under the high ceiling. It’s been ten years since her exhibition in the Boroughs. She’s more famous, more ungrateful and withdrawn than ever. Alma finds herself identifying with the ruin in the painting, both of them falling to bits and jutting picturesquely and conspicuously from an otherwise flat and unruffled ocean, both of them still decent-looking in a good light, if you like that sort of thing.

  She paints until the brink of dusk, then walks to Marks & Spencer’s on Abington Avenue to buy a ready-meal. Above the cricket ground the evening sky grades like over-diluted lemon squash.

  I sit through all of the extinctions, all the species that have reached the natural end of their extension into the concealed direction.

  Every other week, a human language dies. Beautiful, unique life forms with intricate skeletons of grammar, delicately hinged by syntax, they grow weaker and fold in their wings of adjectival gossamer. They make their last frail noises and then crumble into incoherence, into silence, no more to be heard.

  A stilled tongue, every fortnight. A concluded song. Hark, the glad sound.

  There is a television channel that is broadcast only to the nearly dead, transmitted on a disinfectant fug through care-home dayrooms, terminal ward twilights. Senile screens provide the best reception, signals sparking in corroded diodes, fraying synapses. The station’s logo, white upon closed-eyelid black, depicts a crudely rendered set of balances above the winding ribbon of a stylised path. Accompanying this there is a four-note trumpet flourish, serving as the channel’s theme-tune.

  Albert Good sits in the armchair at his Duston home, having just woken from a nap to find the telly on and some sort of afternoon play in progress. Even though it’s all in black and white, Albert can tell immediately that it’s one of those modern dramas that he doesn’t care for much, one of those Wednesday-night things where somebody’s always either sleeping rough or pregnant. He’d get up and switch it off, but he’s been feeling so run-down just lately that he hasn’t got the energy, can only sit and watch.

  There seems to only be one set involved in the production, with the audience looking at a broad flight of stone steps which rise beneath the huge porch of a church. Giant stone columns, more than likely made from painted plywood, rear up at each side, framing the scene. To Albert, it looks very like the front of All Saints Church here in Northampton, although he supposes that there must be lots of places throughout England that look similar, having been built around the same time and in the same style. Between the Gothic pillars it is night. The only lighting is positioned to resemble that of off-stage streetlamps, filtering into a pearly gloom beneath the portico.

  Whichever town the play is set in, it appears to be almost deserted after dark. To Albert’s way of thinking this suggests it’s taking place some years ago, possibly just after the war, before midnight town centres were lit up like Christmas trees and full of drunken youngsters. All the props and scenery have that cosy post-war feel about them, something Albert only finds these days in local photograph collections or in reprints of the annual Giles editions, the authentic flavour of the air back then. He squints uneasily in the direction of the relatively tiny screen and tries to make sense of what’s going on.

  A man and woman, both in middle age, are sitting on the cold stone steps, stage centre. Albert finds the pair familiar and is almost certain that he’s seen both actors previously, in something else. The man, who wears a loud checked jacket, might have been in Hi-de-hi, now Albert comes to think of it. The woman, with her coat pulled tight around her neck against the evening’s chill and weeping intermittently, is possibly Patricia Haynes when
she was younger. Though they seem to be a married couple, there is too much space upon the step between them. When the husband shuffles closer to the wife she flinches and moves further off, away from him. Their dialogue is sparse and cryptic, with long silences between the questions and the answers. Albert can’t make head or tail of it.

  Even more baffling are the drama’s other characters, four or five figures in outlandish clothes who loiter underneath the portico, behind the man and woman in the foreground. Despite the oddness of their clothing and how loudly they are talking, neither of the seated couple seem to be aware of them. Eventually Albert works out that these other players, the ones chatting in the background, are meant to be ghosts of some sort. They can see the living wife and husband sitting on the church steps, and pass comment on them, but the mortal pair can’t see the phantoms and presume they are alone. Albert finds this disturbing. It gives the impression of so many ghosts that every paving stone and public toilet in the country must surely be haunted, every human conversation overheard by the eavesdropping dead.

  He doesn’t want to look at this. He turns away and shuts his eyes. Although he isn’t able to determine the exact point at which he nods off again, he later realises that he must have done. When he awakens, Lou has come back from the shops. The television is now silent, from which Albert concludes that Lou must have switched it off when she came in. She asks him how he’s feeling, and he tells her about the upsetting play or old film or whatever it was meant to be.

  “I watched this thing on telly that had ghosts in it. I didn’t like it much, to tell the truth. It put the willies up me. I don’t think they ought to show that kind of effort in the afternoons, when you’ve got kiddies home from school. I think it’s shocking. I’ve a good mind to complain.”

  Lou cocks her head on one side like a bird and looks at him, then glances at the unplugged television set, which is just as she left it when she went out earlier. She clucks over her husband sympathetically, agrees that all the programmes these days are a waste of license money and then makes a pot of tea for both of them. Within an hour the mystery theatre presentation is forgotten.

  When this secret television station of the near dead is off air it cannot be detected, except as a high-pitched and near ultrasonic whistling tone experienced in the inner ear. If you just listen carefully, you’ll find that you can hear it now.

  Hymns are, of course, tremendously important, be they penned by William Blake, John Bunyan, Philip Doddridge or John Newton. An attempted transcendental poetry intended for the common multitude, they fertilise the dreams and visions that shall grow into the very boardwalks of Mansoul. As they delineate Hell or depict Heaven, so too do they build those places, brick by brick, stanza by stanza. Come, lift up your hearts and voices and rejoice. Give me a platform of ideas and harmonies on which to gesture and unfurl my wings. Give me a place to stand.

  I know I am a text. I know that you are reading me. This is the biggest difference that there is between us: you do not know that you are a text. You don’t know that you’re reading yourself. What you believe to be the self-determined life that you are passing through is actually a book already written that you have become absorbed in, and not for the first time. When this current reading is concluded, when the coffin-lid rear cover is eventually shut tight, then you immediately forget that you’ve already struggled through it and you pick it up again, perhaps attracted by the striking and heroic picture of yourself that’s there on the dust-jacket.

  You wade once more through the glossolalia of the novel’s opening and that startling birth-scene, all in the first person, foggily described in a confusion of new tastes and scents and terrifying lights. You linger in delight over the childhood passages and savour all the powerfully realised new characters as they are introduced, the mother and the dad, the friends and relatives and enemies, each with their memorable quirks, their singular allure. Engrossing as you find these youthful exploits, you discover that you’re merely skimming certain of the later episodes out of sheer boredom, thumbing through the pages of your days, skipping ahead, impatient for the adult content and pornography that you assume to be awaiting you in the next chapter.

  When this turns out to be less an unalloyed joy, less abundant than you have anticipated, you feel vaguely cheated and you rail against the author for a time. By then though, all the story’s major themes are welling up around you in the yarn, madness and love and loss, destiny and redemption. You begin to understand the true scale of the work, its depth and its ambition, qualities that have escaped you until now. There is a dawning apprehension, a sense that the tale might not be in the category you have previously supposed, that of the picaresque adventure or sex-comedy. Alarmingly, the narrative progresses past the reassuring borderlines of genre into the unnerving territory of the avant-garde. For the first time you wonder if you’ve bitten off far more than you can chew, embarked upon some weighty magnum opus by mistake when you’d intended to pick up only a pot-boiler, holiday reading for the airport or the beach. You start to doubt your capabilities as reader, doubt in your ability to stick this mortal fable out to its conclusion without the attention wandering. And even if you finish it, you doubt that you’re astute enough to understand the saga’s message, if message there be. You privately suspect that it will sail over your head, and yet what can you do but keep on living, keep turning the calendar-leaf pages, urged on by that cover-blurb that says: “If you read only one book in your life then make it this one.”

  Not until you’re more than halfway through the tome, near the two-thirds mark, do the earlier, seemingly random plot points start to make some kind of sense to you. The meanings and the metaphors begin to resonate; the ironies and the motifs reveal themselves. You’re still not certain if you’ve read all this before or not. Some elements seem awfully familiar and you have occasional premonitions as to how one of the subplots will work out. An image or a line of dialogue will sometimes strike a chord of déjà vu, but by and large it all seems like a new experience. It doesn’t matter if this is a second or a hundredth reading: it seems fresh to you, and, whether begrudgingly or not, you seem to be enjoying it. You don’t want it to end.

  But when it is concluded, when the coffin-lid rear cover is eventually shut tight, you immediately forget that you’ve already struggled through it and you pick it up again, perhaps attracted by the striking and heroic picture of yourself that’s there on the dust-jacket. It’s the mark of a good book, they say, if you can read it more than once and still find something new each time.

  If you could view the lone house there on Scarletwell Street’s corner from a higher geometrical perspective, you would understand why complex and unlikely circumstances had to come about in order for that edifice to remain standing, even when the terrace that it once was part of had been long demolished. When seen in the light of the events and the chronologies it is supporting, it becomes apparent that the isolated house is a load-bearing structure. It provides the anchor and foundation stone for a specific moment and occasion, and it cannot be pulled down before that date, tonight, Friday, May 26th, 2006. It would have been impossible to do so. Seen from one dimension up, the reasons for this would be obvious: time simply isn’t built like that. It was one demolition that was never going to happen, or at least, not until it was ready.

  In the yellowed light of the front parlour sits the building’s occupant, the Vernall made responsible for that specific corner. Humming a jazz standard, they anticipate the frantic banging at the front door that will herald their celestial visitor. Tonight’s the night. It’s on the cards, it’s in the tea leaves. All they have to do is sit and wait for fate, for destiny, and it will all come marching in.

  I see the world, and, through a lens of prose or paint or song or celluloid, the world sees me.

  The emerald bauble of the planet, nested on a sequin-dusted jeweller’s cushion of black velvet, this is not the world. The several billion apes with improved posture that cavort across the planet’s sur
face, these are likewise not the world. The world is no more than an aggregate of your ideas about the world, of your ideas about yourselves. It is the vast mirage, baroque and intricate, that you are building as a shelter from the overwhelming fractal chaos of the universe. It is composed from things of the imagination, from philosophies, economies and wavering faith, from your self-serving individual agendas and your colourful notions of destiny. It is a flight of fancy spun to while away those empty-bellied Neolithic nights, a wishful fantasy of how mankind might one day live, a campfire tale you tell yourselves and then forget is just a tale that you are telling; that you have made up and have mistaken for reality. Civilisation is your earliest science-fiction story. You come up with it so that you’ll have something to do, something to occupy yourselves during the centuries to come. Don’t you remember?

  For all that it manifests materially in castles, hospitals, sofas and atom bombs, the world is founded in the immaterial reaches of the human mind, is standing on a flimsy paradigm that has no actual substance. And if that foundation does not hold, if it is based perhaps upon a flawed perception of the universe that does not match with later observations, then the whole confection falls into an abyss of unbeing. Both in terms of its construction and its ideology, the world is far from sound. To be quite honest it’s a creaking death-trap, and there are all of these health and safety regulations. I don’t make the rules.