by Alan Moore
Of course, they’d banged Bunyan up in Bedford nick for getting on a dozen years, while art and literature are still most usually a product of the middle class, of a Rochester mind-set that sees earnestness as simply gauche and visionary passion as anathema. William Blake would follow Bunyan and, closer to home, John Clare, but both of these had spent their days impoverished, marginalised as lunatics, committed to asylums or plagued by sedition hearings. All of them are heirs to Wycliffe, part of a great insurrectionary tradition, of a burning stream of words, of an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor. At the stone meeting house in Chalk Lane, Philip Doddridge pulled all the diverse strands of that narrative together. Hanging out with Swedenborgians and Baptists, taking up his ministry here in the poorest quarter, writing Hark! The Glad Sound!, championing the dissenting cause, all from this scruffy little mound … Doddridge is Alma’s foremost local hero. It’ll be an honour staging her show in the shadow of his church. Alma elects to walk down Little Cross Street and then follow Bath Street round to Scarletwell and her beloved strip of bare grass on St. Andrew’s Road.
She lopes down through the failing light with blocks of flats to either side of her, the Bath Street buildings’ west face on her right and to her left the 1960s landings and the sunken walkways of Moat Place, Fort Place, outlying features of a long-demolished castle become streets where Alma’s great-grandfather Snowy Vernall had lived, getting on a hundred years ago. Mad Snowy, marrying the landlord’s daughter from the long-since disappeared Blue Anchor pub in Chalk Lane, which he’d visited on one of his improbably long strolls from Lambeth. All these chance events, these people and their complicated lives, the trillion small occurrences without which she would not be her; would not be here.
Across the street, incontinent lamps stand apologetically in puddles of their own piss-coloured light. She just about remembers when Moat Street and Fort Street were still standing, and when Mrs. Coleman’s gingerbread-house sweetshop was down at the lower end of Bath Street, although Alma was no more than four or five back then. A much more vivid memory remains from slightly later, when the maze of red brick terraces had been demolished and there was just wasteland here, before the blocks of flats had been erected. She remembers playing with the first of many best friends, Janet Cooper, on vast fields of rubble and black mud beneath a dirty fleece of Boroughs sky. For some reason there had been industrial off-cuts scattered everywhere and gingering the puddles, L-shaped bits of metal which Alma and Janet had discovered could be plaited into rusty orange swastikas and skimmed across the demolition site like Nazi throwing-stars. Just as with the abandoned Morris Minor, the brick scree and piled-up devastation were regarded as civic amenities, play areas provided for the district’s young, tetanus crèches of a kind then common in the neighbourhood. Mind you, this had been back in the Macmillan years, the later 1950s. Alma and her little pals, flying kites into power lines, opening veins climbing through ragged gaps in corrugated tin, had never had it so good.
She turns left at Little Cross Street’s end, into the bottom part of Bath Street. Now the 1960s housing blocks are on her left, the shabby 1930s elegance of Greyfriars Flats across the darkening road upon her right. As she descends the flow of time becomes more viscous, thickened by historic sediments that have collected near the bottom of the valley. In the settling obscurity around her there are windows lighting up, weak colour washes filtered through thin curtains, faded postage stamps fixed to the night with unseen hinges. Everywhere is gluey with mythology.
The district’s different blocks of flats, which were already crowding out the terraced houses even forty years ago, had been no different to the district’s dumped cars or demolished buildings from a child’s perspective. All of it was landscape, meant to be inhabited and climbed and hidden in, its hulks transformed by juvenile imagination into frontier forts, unheard-of planets, a perpetually mutating Gormenghast of slates and splinters. Greyfriars Flats, being the nearest to their house down on St. Andrew’s Road, had always been a second, more expansive back yard to her for as long as Alma can remember, practically an annex to her tombstone-cold front doorstep. One of her two almost-murders had occurred here, the attempted strangling in a dustbin cul-de-sac, and she’s had dreams about the place that were more vivid than her memories. There was the dream where she was dead and confined to the inner washing-line enclosure of the flats, pursued by a mercury-poisoned and moth-eaten version of Carroll’s Mad Hatter round the overcast and dismal purgatory until the end of time. There was the dream with a tall, futuristic tower of blue glass erupting from the flats’ top end on Lower Cross Street, where Alma remembers being shown a quietly humming oblong mechanism with a small display screen upon which all of the universe’s particles were being counted. And of course, this was where Alma had been visited by her first life-transforming vision. Smiling to herself in the congealing twilight, Alma crosses the deserted road to Greyfriars’ southwest corner, carrier-bags swinging from one ornamented fist.
The bottom entrance to the inner rectangle is gated off with black iron rails and has been for some years. Residents only, which she finds entirely understandable. She can still stand there at the gate and peer along the path to where the little patch of shrubbery is partly visible. As she recalls, it had been on a chilly day in early Spring when she’d been eight or nine, sauntering home for lunch from Spring Lane School up at the top of Scarletwell Street. On a whim, she’d taken a diversion through the flats purely because she’d thought it might make a more interesting view than the plain slope of the old hill, the empty playing fields that bordered it, the rear windows of their surviving terrace on St. Andrew’s Road. Idling down the concrete pathways of the block’s interior amongst the flapping sheets and baby-clothing, she had reached the triangle where all the bushes grew down at the bottom end. She might have walked past and paid the familiar vegetation no attention were it not for the intriguing detail that had caught her junior miniaturist’s eye.
Hung from the thinnest needle of a twig, there on a waxy evergreen, was a translucent white grub that appeared to levitate, so fine was the material by which it was suspended, its minute head blind and glistening. Dangling in the cold crystal of the morning air it curled and shimmied like an escapologist, albeit one whose act worked in reverse and hinged upon secreting his own straitjacket. Twisting and contorting it deliberately wound itself up in the near-invisible strands that it was somehow producing. Alma had stooped closer to the bush in awe, her nose only an inch or two from the dependent caterpillar. She remembers wondering if it was thinking anything and making up her mind that probably it was, if only squishy little caterpillar thoughts.
She’d never witnessed this precise form of activity before, and she had puzzled over why the tiny creature was alone in its pursuit. She’d realised that she must be looking at the manufacture of a rice-grain sized cocoon, but hadn’t previously understood that this was such a solitary operation. It was then that Alma had observed to her relief that the grub had at least one little friend, another pallid maggot that laboriously inched along a nearby shoot, where there were …
Alma had gasped noisily and taken a step back. Reality had shivered, reconfiguring itself before her startled eyes. On every branch, on every twig and under every leaf of the coniferous shrub had been a thousand more identical white worms, all patiently engaged in the same task. The bush itself was an immense white cobweb, suddenly alive with writhing threads of alien purpose. How could she have stood there for five minutes and not noticed this spectacular and otherworldly sight? The moment had been an apocalypse, in the sense that the poets of that school might use the term, people like Henry Treece or Alma’s favourite, Nicholas Moore. She’d realised in that instant that the world about her was not necessarily the way she saw it, that amazing things might constantly be happening under everybody’s noses, things that people’s mundane expectations stopped them from perceiving. Watching what she’d later realised must be silkworms colonise what she’d belatedly con
strued to be a mulberry bush, she’d formed a vision of the world as glorious and mutable, liable to explode into unlikely new arrangements if you simply paid enough attention; if your eye was in.
She stands there, a suspicious figure peering through black bars and evening murk into the Greyfriars courtyard, and feels phantoms swarming everywhere around her. She is always here at this precise location and this moment, her ordained position in the simultaneous and unchanging 4D gem of space-time. Life is on an endless loop, her consciousness revisiting the same occasions for eternity and always having the experience for the first time. Human existence is a grand recurrence. Nothing dies or disappears and each discarded condom, every dented bottle-top in every alleyway is as immortal as Shamballah or Olympus. She feels the unending marvel of a beautiful and dirty world swell to include her in its fanfare music. Lowering her caked lashes, she imagines everything around her wriggling and alive, suddenly made out of a billion glossy organisms that she has not previously noticed, the whole landscape covered in a spectral gauze, a fresh-spun silk of circumstance.
At length she turns away from the locked gate and carries on down Bath Street into Scarletwell Street and on to St. Andrew’s Road. The short strip of ancestral grass is still the same. As usual she puzzles over the still-standing corner house and tries without success to work out where the Warren residence had once been situated. Actually, she’s pretty sure it was the spot between two young and sturdy trees about halfway along. It feels appropriately eerie, but she can’t be certain. Finally it strikes her that to be stood motionless beside the road down in this quarter of the town might possibly be sending the wrong signals and she turns away to walk the long route home, up Grafton Street to Barrack Road and then around the Racecourse back onto East Park Parade.
Crossing the Kettering Road up by the oddly decorative sheltered tram-stop where the town’s principal gallows at one time resided she is thinking about art in the Charles Saatchi era; art become mono-dimensional commercial gesturing directed at an audience so culturally lost it feels it has no platform from which it can venture criticism. Only other artists – and then only renegades – seemed confident enough in their opinions to effectively mount a rebuttal. She recalls the last time that she’d had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin’s work which Alma wishes that she’d said herself: “My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everyone you ever slept with in a tent?” Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestions for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda’s list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.
Making her way along the gorgeously eroded pavement of East Park Parade she at last reaches her own door, fumbling in her too-tight trouser pockets to retrieve a temporarily elusive key before effecting entry. Inside Alma switches on the lights and winces ruefully at all the mess and clutter. Why can’t she be tidy like a proper adult? Inwardly, she blames it on the influence of Top Cat. When she and her brother Warry were both growing up they’d both aspired to live in a converted dustbin like their feline hero, somewhere where you could just brush your teeth then switch the nearby streetlamp off with a convenient pull-cord before pulling on the battered lid and bunking down. Only much later had she wondered where he spat the toothpaste.
Alma stuffs her peppers, covers them with feta cheese and sticks them in the oven. As they roast she rolls a joint and smokes it while she makes a start on leafing through her copy of New Scientist. After supper she has three or four more reefers while she finishes the science magazine, reads Private Eye and then re-watches two more episodes from the last season of The Wire. Around eleven she stubs out her final fatty of the day, gulps down her Red Rice Yeast pill and her ineffectual Kalms and turns off all the lights before retiring.
Naked underneath her duvet, Alma rests on her right side and pulls a tuck of quilt between her bony knees. Off in the smash and puke of Friday night are sirens, catcalls, curses from over-relaxed young men and women navigating their ways back and forth along East Park Parade. She rubs her feet together, satisfied by the dry rasp of sole on sole. Mulberry cobwebs creep across the inside of her eyelids.
On the edge of sleep, her mind replays an incidental image from the beautifully-written television drama that she’s just been watching: a bandanna-sporting corner-boy sits on his stoop amidst the desolated vacant lots or syringe-carpeted back alleys of West Baltimore. The muddily-remembered snapshot brings her suddenly awake with a deep pang of dread and loss that she does not immediately understand. Something about the Boroughs, something about all the neighbourhoods that are essentially just like it, right across the world. All of the men and women, all the kids inhabiting this universal landscape of cracked pavements, steel-jacketed grocer shops and meaningless corroded street-names from another century, living their whole lives among these sorry dead-ends with the knowledge that the concrete bollard and the chain-link fence will still be there when they are all long gone, long gone.
A bottle smashes, somewhere off along the Kettering Road. She pushes all the haunting thoughts of ghetto and mortality away, and tries instead to let the revelatory silkworms wrap her in a merciful cocoon of anaesthesia.
Alma’s got a big day ahead of her tomorrow.
ROUND THE BEND
Awake, Lucia gets up wi’ the wry sing of de light. She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D’actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin’ grimpill’s progress. Her arouse from drowse is like a Spring, a babboling book that gorgles up amist the soils o’ sleep, flishing and glattering, to mate the mournin’ son. Canfind in this loquation now she gushes and runs chinkling from her silt and softy bed, pooring her harp out down an illside and aweigh cross the old manscape to a modhouse brookfast. Ah, what a performance, practised and applausible. She claps her hands, over her ears, to drone out all the deadful wile-ing and the sorey implecations of whor farmlay. With her bunyans all complainin’ she escapes the Settee o’ Destraction and beguines her evrydaily Millgrimage towar’s ridemption or towords the Wholly Sea; to wards, the tranquilisity of night.
Spoonin’ the tousled egg into her scrambled head she wells, as iffer, on the past now. Sadly hatched in Triste at seven past the century and seven past the year, born to the clench and stamour of a paupoise warld, she was denied the mummer’s teatre. Not a dripple Nora drop was she aloud. The molcow was sucked dry, by George, who went from one mamm to an udder all of his serpenitentine life. Eve’n the girden of her garlhood he had snaken from her, eden then, with him the dirty apple of their Mermaw’s eye and allwas raising cain, which Lucia had resistered for as long as she was abel. He’d been furteen, shy was only ten, to pet it baldly. Wristling under milky and transluciant sheets in a suck-session of clamped, crusterphobic rended rooms, the da off summerwhere with all his righting and the mudder rural, pagan in her unconcern, forever standing pisspots on the parlour table where they lifft their venerable beaded halos on the varnish. Giorgio’s dragon would rear up, out from the scampy wondergrowth and orgiantly demanding her at-ten shuns while their Moider only smirled, ingently dull, and let her borther press a head with his idventure, up into the little light, the little depth.
Not that she hoydent wellcomed his hardvances, penfull at forst, back then when she still beliffied that he loved her, back there in their papadise when she was tigrish in the milibloom of her youth-ray tease. Setting in the die-room now she chews over her toast, raised two old tines, and wanders if he ova reilly and tooralee was her brooder. Hidn’t there once been a scarlet letter, a dismissive from their Further in the Land of Ire? He’d met with Cowsgrope the Invincible who had confleshed to scraping the odd barnacle in nineteen nundread-for, the year that Orgy-porgy-puttin-pie was farst consceptered. Is Dis Nod my sun, her darkglassed da had cried in his tormental angruish, to witch the briny mare durst not deply. The mater had been l
eft unseddled. Woden that expain a Lot, now, about Morma and her Gorgo? How the peer of hum were all-ways clost, unhearthily so in her cestimation, from the grendle to the crave? She maddily recalls her fishermum warmin’ up the jung mastur’s bait incide her muth on chillywilly ofterrnoons, or thinkshe-thinkshe does. Of curse, it wurd make plaint for alter see why they t’woo had insested she be liplocked with insanatoriums, fear Luci-lippi was heir poppy’s seed, his sperkle efferdent in all she set or dit, they way she allwise spoke her wheel, whoreas in Dirgeo was not a wit o’ the same subsdance to be scene. Old Gnawer had deicided then and there that her firstbore should carryon the dinnersty, no mutter that he mite halve been an utter mance. As for her lital gill, the da’s reel darter, shutter up in lumatrick asylence, like at Pranginstein’s or finalee herein Saif Handrue’s house-piddle.
Lucia’s nicey-nercy, featherly Patrisia, sips besight her while she bibs her searly monin’ cuppla Tees and mentalpatiently ensquires jest what the flameous rider’s cross-i, dot-t doubter well be druin’ with hersylph toda.
“Will, I thought I might have a wonder in the ground, now, seeing as it’s such a liffley day and all the flawers are in Bloom. I dent mind bein’ bi myself, and I dar say you’ve auther fish to frey. Bee off, and don’t you weary about me, Pat. Isle be writer’s reign.”
With her compinion thus-why’s beassured, Lucia blots her nips upon a paper lapkin and excurses herself, skipling out and thistling down a freshly dizzifected carrydor towheres glass D’orways at its fatherst and, light runnin’ inter light.
Outsighed, she stunnds and tics it in, from the cerebrulean skullbowl of the fymirment above to the sage cortin of the fir hereyeson, ur the flarebeds close at hand withal their petalsparks and fleurwork sprays o’ culeur. Though it’s not ideyll she likes displace the best of all she’s in-bin. She injoys the handson dictors with their bed’s-eye menners, und dien, roughly for o’cock, she aften langours at the gaits to watch the jesslin’ squallboys from the Glammar Scruel that stems adjescent to hier pysche-hattrick instincution. Spitty as a pricksure they go scruffling down the Bulling Roude beyond the iron realings, snurchin’ up each other’s badgered caps an’ grubbin’ at each other’s bawls wit’ wilde hellarity, obliffeyus to her sprying from the foolyage in wishtful, privet larchery.