by Alan Moore
Roman’s own epiphany comes with the heart attack that marks his fiftieth birthday. It’s around the sleeping-in-a-campfire period of Rome’s existence, when the mania that drives him is at its most phosphorescent. His behaviour at this point is already more than halfway to dismantling his family so he’s alone there in the house all night, on his own, when the left-arm lightning hits. He sprawls there, on his back in the dark living room, and can’t move. There’s no one to call for help and Roman knows that this is it. He’s going to die, and in a few days he’ll be back under the dirt like that time down Paul Baker’s yard except with no Ted Tripp to haul him out. Under the dirt forever, and with so much unresolved. During his long hours in the twilight between quick and dead, Roman reviews his life and is astonished to discover that his foremost fear is dropping off the twig before he gets the nerve up to tell anyone, himself included, that he’s homosexual. All those years he’s taken pride in never backing down to anyone or anything, not to police or management or to those drunken square-bashers or even to the element of fire, to find that he’s been bottling the biggest, pinkest challenge of them all. Roman resolves that if by some chance he survives this he’ll go out for some queer fun and then tell everyone about it. As it turns out that’s what happens, but he’s not expecting love. He’s not expecting Dean, the two of them together on the one horse from then on.
Gay or not, the Knights Templar clearly aren’t the first people to think of folding money – Roman reckons that he can remember something about paper notes in seventh century China – but they are the first to introduce the notion to the West. It still isn’t until the nineteenth century that you see proper printed English dosh, but back at the exclusive Tower of London mint in 1500 you can tell they’re warming up to the idea. The goldsmith-bankers of the sixteenth century issue these receipts called running cash notes, written out by hand and promising to pay the bearer on demand. Even with Caxton’s press, the near-impossibility of printing counterfeit-proof wealth means England’s paper currency will be at least partially scribbled for the next three hundred years or more. The paper concept only gains momentum when the Bank of England is established during 1694 and straight away is raising funds for William the Third’s war on France by circulating notes inscribed on specially-produced bank paper, signed by the cashier with the sum written down in pounds, shillings and pence. In the same year Charles Montague, later the Earl of Halifax, becomes the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years on, in need of a new warden of the mint, he offers the position – “ ’Tis worth five or six hundred pounds per annum, and has not too much business to require more attendance than you can spare” – to a fifty-five-year-old man previously passed over for high office: Isaac Newton.
Roman tells Bert Regan, Ted Tripp and the others that the most feared and respected of their formidable number is officially now travelling on the other bus. Endearingly, given the reputation of the working class for homophobia, they merely take the piss the way they would if he’d told them he was part Irish or developed comically deforming facial cancer, and then carry on as normal. They treat Dean respectfully despite the fact that his OCD impulses do tend to put him at the “Ooh, look at the muck in here” end of the homosexual spectrum. Ted Tripp asks Rome who’s the horse and who’s the jockey, and Rome patiently explains that it’s less about sex than you might think and more about the love. Ted may make arse-related jokes around the situation but he understands, has always been there when Rome needed him, will lend Rome anything, particularly if he doesn’t know he’s doing it. The night when Rome exits the cellar bar with military mockery still ringing in his ears he marches down to the Black Lion in St. Giles Street and there in the notoriously haunted hostelry he finds Ted Tripp in the front room, playing a hand of brag with rotund troubadour Tom Hall and junkyard-owner Curly Bell. Rome sits with Ted and idly chats for a few minutes while Ted’s mind is on the game, and then gets up and leaves. Ted barely registers Rome’s visit, much less that his car keys, which should be on the pub table next to his tobacco, are no longer there.
Still, that seventeenth century: a bastard from the outset and then it builds up to Isaac fucking Newton as its big finale. It kicks off with the gunpowder plot and Francis Tresham’s head impaled down at the end of Sheep Street, then it picks up pace with the Enclosures Act when all the toffs are given liberty to fence off areas of common land, legally sanctioned smash-and-grab with all the main protestors being local, all the doomed and dashing Captains, Swing and Slash and Pouch, this last one landing on a spike in Sheep Street within eighteen months of his posh adversary Francis Tresham. You can see what makes the land-reclaiming Diggers and the class-war Levellers so popular when they arrive in the mid-1640s to support Oliver Cromwell, alongside all of the other ranting, quaking dissidents that use Northampton as a millenarian theme-park in those years. The town backs Cromwell. He turns out to be like Stalin but without the sense of humour. Anyway, he’s dead by 1658, his son and heir fucks off to France and so by 1660 Charles the Second’s on the throne. Upset about Northampton’s role in getting his dad’s head lopped off he has its castle torn down as a punishment, but he’s concerned about the currency as well. Charles’s reign sees the introduction of milled edges to some of the previously hammered coins to prevent clipping, but the practice is still rife in ’96 when Isaac Newton comes to town, the Eliot Ness of English finance in the sixteen-hundreds.
If Roman’s in bed, his arms around his boyfriend, drifting off into the dark behind his corrugated eyelids, all the madness in his life makes perfect sense. When him and Dean first hook up in the early 1990s, that’s when his and Sharon’s young son Jesse starts to come unglued. Part of the Rave scene, Jesse necks assorted disco biscuits – ecstasy and ketamine and Christ knows what – halfway to a drug-aggravated breakdown, like Bert Regan’s stepson Adam, Jesse’s best mate at the bleary, blurry sunrise parties. Jesse takes Rome’s coming out hard, undeniably, but there’s a lot of other factors in the mix. Pal Adam goes spectacularly crazy and decides he’s gay as well; a gay male angel with his wings torn off by treacherous women – this meant literally. For Jesse it must seem reality has suddenly become untrustworthy so he stops going out, starts drinking to damp his by-now perpetual hallucinations, to blot out the cats with human faces, and then somewhere down the line he learns that in the blotting-out stakes heroin beats booze. His junkie new best mate is first to overdose, to fall off of the world in Jesse’s bedroom back at Sharon’s place, and then a few months later Jesse’s dead as well, bang, just like that. Ah, fuck. Sharon blames Rome for everything, won’t even have him at the funeral. It’s black, and doctors finally put a name to Roman’s driving fire, his contradictory soul: manic depression. Like police car sirens or economies, it seems Rome has his ups and downs.
This role as warden of the mint is meant as a seat-warming post, but Isaac takes it seriously, smells blood and money in the water. Coming to the job in 1696 when forgery and clipping still degrade the currency, Newton begins his Great Recoinage, where he recalls and replaces all the hammered silver coin in circulation. It takes two years and reveals that getting on a fifth of all the coins recalled are counterfeit. While forgery is classed as treason, punishable by evisceration, getting a conviction is a bugger, but the gravity man rises to the task. Disguised as a habitué of taverns Newton loiters, eavesdrops, gathers evidence. He then gets himself made a Justice of the Peace in all of the Home Counties so that he can cross-examine suspects, witnesses, informers, and by Christmas 1699 he has successfully sent twenty-eight rogue coiners to be drawn, hung, and then quartered, off down Tyburn way. In recognition of a job well done, in that same year he’s made the master of the mint, his wages bumped from Montague’s five or six hundred pounds to between twelve and fifteen hundred quid a year. Newton’s recoinage has reduced the need for low-denomination hand-scrawled bank notes so that anything under a fifty is withdrawn. Of course, it’s only those in Newton’s income bracket who will ever notice, given that for most people their ye
arly earnings in seventeenth century England are far less than twenty pounds and they will never see a bank note in their lives.
When Rome’s first diagnosed as a bit swings and roundabouts they stick him on the new anti-depressants, the SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors like Prozac, that in 1995 appear to be the British medical profession’s first response to anything from clinical depression to occasional ennui. The drugs, in Rome’s opinion, are born of the probably-American idea that those in the developed world have an inalienable right to be contented every hour of their existence. So what if these happy-pills haven’t been around long enough for any adverse side-effects to show up so far; are effectively untested? There’s a market eager for an end to all their troubles, there are pharmaceutics corporations eager to make money, and the blue sky ethos of that endless economic boom-time stipulates instant gratification. Anyone dissenting from this mandatory manic optimism is a Gloomy Gus, a scaremonger or pessimist, is out of step with all the laissez-faire euphoria and would most probably feel better on a course of Prozac. Rome gives it a go, not having been informed that one occasional by-product of SSRIs is suicidal black depression. When Dean asks what’s wrong Rome drop-kicks him across the living room. He throws the pills away and in the dark troughs he goes for long walks and sorts it out himself. The manic peaks he saves for council meetings, for campaigns or organising protests. Energy efficiency. It’s one of the first principles you learn in engineering.
Newton, who’s familiar with the principle, brings chemical and mathematic know-how to the mint. After his Great Recoinage he’s asked to repeat the trick in Scotland, 1707. This leads to a common currency and the new kingdom of Great Britain. Not content yet, in 1717 the seventy-six-year-old first proclaims his bi-metallic standard where twenty-one silver shillings equals one gold guinea. England’s policy of paying for imports with silver while receiving payment for exports in gold means there’s a silver shortage, so what Newton’s doing here is moving Britain’s standard from silver to gold without announcing it. Personally he’s doing nicely, coining it, well-minted. Trusting his ability with sums to double up his cash he invests in the sure-fire high-return world of the South Sea Bubble, dropping twenty grand – three million by the current reckoning – when in 1721 the whole thing goes tits up. The fiscal genius of the day loses his shirt. He lets greed override his risk-assessment faculties, displays an expert’s fatal overconfidence in his abilities, the way that it’s mostly mycologists who end up killing themselves with a death cap omelette. And what brings Sir Isaac down is dabbling where he should know better, in a market bloated by a form of bonds known as derivatives, partly responsible for the Dutch Tulip-bulb fiasco that occurs in 1637 five years before Newton’s birth, and probably about to sink the world economy nearly three hundred years after his death.
Roman and Dean get digs in St. Luke’s House, a block between St. Andrew’s Street and Lower Harding Street, where Bellbarn used to be. He’s known the Boroughs all his life but this is the first time he’s lived there. Roman finds himself in love with its crushed population, with its relic tower blocks braced against the rain. Blanched grass sprouts from the seams of maisonettes and in it Rome can read an English bottom line. This area is up in the top two per cent of UK deprivation. Simply living here takes ten years off your life. These people at the shitty end of economic theory are the product of all that creative number-crunching. Individuals betrayed by bankers, governments and, yes, Rome sticks his hand up, by the left wing. Dean’s mixed race and they’re both gay, but neither of them see much benefit from the left wing’s promotion of racial and sexual equality. How does it help that Peter Mandelson and Oona King are doing okay, when the inequality between the rich and poor that socialism was intended to put right remains conspicuously unaddressed? Rome turns in his red star in ’97 at the first whiff of New Labour and its rictus-grinning frontman, to become an anarchist and activist. The malcontents that he attracts are sometimes “Defend Council Housing”, sometimes “Save Our NHS”, depending what will look most swinish to oppose. Thompson the Leveller has found his sticking place: the levelled ground where he can stage his gunsmoke stand.
Dying 1727, in his eighties and still at the mint, Newton sees the beginning of the shift to paper money. In 1725 banks issue notes where the pound sign is printed, but the date, amount and other details are hand-written by the signatory, like a cheque. Cash gradually becomes more abstract, but a greater sleight of hand takes place hundreds of years before with the invention of derivatives, the concept that helps scupper Newton. A derivative – a bond deriving from the actual goods for sale – occurs when someone makes a deal to sell their goods for an agreed sum at some future date. Whether the market price rises or falls before that time determines who’s made the best bet, but what’s important is that the derivative bond now has a potential value and can be sold on, with its projected worth continually increasing. This uncoupling of money and real goods contributes to the Tulip Craze and South Sea Bubble, while the current value of the world’s derivatives, from what Rome hears, is up to ten times larger than the sixty or so trillion dollars that is the whole planet’s fiscal output. The divide between reality and economics is a hairline fissure widening across the centuries to a deep ocean vent from which unprecedented forms of life squirm up with dismal regularity: bubbles and crazes, Wall Street crashes and Black Wednesdays, Enron and whatever bigger fuck-up is inevitably coming next; the bad dreams of a rational age that good old William Blake calls “Newton’s sleep”.
Rome combs the Boroughs streets looking for trouble. In some of the last remaining council dwellings there’s asbestos that the council won’t own up to, much less take away. Attempts to entice people into private housing schemes by entering them in a draw for prizes that are never won; do not exist. There’s endless scams or deprivations to attend and Rome has mission-creep, as likely to campaign against the selling-off of eighteenth-century houses in Abington Park as to bellow abuse through a loudhailer when they bring in Yvette Cooper, housing minister, to launch the NEWLIFE towers flogged to a housing company by former councillor Jim Cockie just before he joins their board. And there’s always some new affront on the horizon. At the moment there’s moves to put Euro-dosh meant for the Boroughs into a big needle like the Express Lifts Tower, but on Black Lion Hill. Roman suspects that this is to facilitate backhanders from whichever company lands the deal. Rome plans to feign disinterest, let them think his eye is off the ball. They’ll set dates for a secret ballot, to vote the proposals through without constituents knowing that they’ve backed this clearly bad idea. Then, on the afternoon before, Rome will call in a favour from someone with council clout, get them to change it to an open ballot, lift the stone to shed light on the wriggling things beneath and make them vote against it if they want to keep their seats. It’s all a complicated business, but then he’s a complicated man.
Money continues to evolve – particularly after the remarkable events at a Northampton cornmill that Rome has related to a slack-jawed Alma not an hour ago. 1745 sees partly-printed notes from twenty to a thousand pounds. Fifty years later, after the Napoleonic Wars, the bank stops paying gold for notes in what’s called the Restriction Period. This is when Sheridan calls the bank “an elderly lady in the City”, which cartoonist Gilray artfully tarts up as “the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”. In 1821 the gold standard’s reinstituted and endures in a robust condition up until the First World War. The part-handwritten papers are made legal tender for all sums over five pounds in 1833, becoming proper modern banknotes. Then in 1855 they go the whole hog with the notes completely printed. Britain finally leaves the gold standard in 1931, its currency now backed up by paper securities rather than bars of precious metal. By the middle of the twentieth century, as Roman sees it, we’ve a world economy relying more and more upon the logic of a huge casino, and we’re just about to see a wave of post-war innovation that will change the planet. When these new ideas impact on the money markets they create the
preconditions for a scale of ruin never previously witnessed or imagined. Eddies in the cash flow deepen into whirlpools, maelstroms, and we have the makings of a catastrophic storm. As they say in the ’Sixties, it don’t take a weatherman.
Not all Rome’s tasks are so dramatic. There’s fundraisers like the poster Alma does, and slogging door to door to make sure everyone’s informed. Like yesterday: Rome spends it letting people know about Alma’s do at the nursery while walking off the tail-end of a downer, one of Rome’s bear markets of the soul. Fresh air makes him feel bullish, while attempting all those stairways in the flats should do some cardio-vascular good. Trudging the tower blocks he checks on some of the older residents. They won’t be interested in the exhibition, but it’s an excuse to see if they’re okay. Near Tower Street he spots Benedict Perrit setting out on a day’s drinking and then pretends not to notice minor local drug czar Kenny Nolan, an amoral little shit who’s running down the district when he’s not even a councillor; not even being paid to do it. Crossing Bath Street, Roman mounts the scabby ziggurat of front steps to look in on little Marla Stiles, who’s on the skids, the game and crack, respectively. Her hungry lemur eyes dart everywhere when she comes to the door. She isn’t listening as Rome gives her the spiel on Alma’s show, but at least he can see she’s still alive. How long for, well, that’s anybody’s guess. He goes on up the flat-blocks’ central walk to visit other causes for concern around St. Katherine’s House, and on his way back later has to veer around a fresh-laid dog turd distantly resembling a dollar sign. It’s funny, isn’t it, the little details that you notice?