Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  Economics as art starts out figurative, goes abstract, although not until the twentieth century will it become surrealism. Britain starts to leave the gold standard in 1918 which, coincidentally, is when the fifty-year dismantling of the Boroughs kicks off. Nearly all its terraces are gone by the late ’Sixties, when that decade’s fiscal innovations are beginning to come into play. Rome hears about a paper published, early ’Seventies, with new equations to help calculate the value of derivatives based on that of the goods that they’re derived from. Theoretically, this makes such deals a safer bet, and to the money markets that’s a chequered flag. Mathematics-wonks are suddenly the saviours of the industry. There are now new ways to make money, if there weren’t these regulations in the way. At decade’s end Thatcher and Reagan come to power, two eighteenth century Free Market Liberals who share Adam Smith’s mystical conviction that the market somehow regulates itself and subsequently start removing its restraints, just as the 1980s’ big computer boom gets underway. Keeping an eye on stocks, computers can gain or lose fortunes in a millisecond, adding to the system’s volatility. Crashes and crunches come and go, ruining countless thousands, but the bigger players keep on making bigger profits. Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down and it’s like a dam bursting. Scenting blood with its only major competitor’s sudden demise, capitalism slips its leash.

  When Rome’s own crashes come, fiscal analogies break down. He always ends up in the black. Black doves, black ice cream, a black wedding, a black Christmas, simmering in a stock of his own fuck-ups and nothing to do but live through it, to take those long walks up the colour gradient from deepest ebony to manageably neutral grey. Tom Hall calls it “the black dog”, after Winston Churchill’s name for the phenomenon. Back in the early days with his soon-to-be wife Diane, Tom goes for a lie-down on the Racecourse when he’s done something to test her patience, which is often. He can see the dark hound through his half-closed eyelids, sitting calmly on the summer-yellowed grass beside him. Roman misses Tom, but then, who doesn’t miss that planetary presence that kept half the town revolving with its gravity, its levity? That night in the Black Lion after Roman’s brush with the new model army, Tom is playing brag when Roman drops by to nick Ted Tripp’s motor; almost certainly sees Roman swipe the keys but only chuckles to himself and goes on with his game. Rome leaves them to it and, after he picks up something else he’s going to need from the back room, he takes the car from the pub car park. Furiously calm, he drives it round to Abington Street and pulls up beside the Grosvenor Centre’s entrance with his lights off, waiting. Obviously, with the street now pedestrianized you couldn’t do that sort of thing today. It’s Health and Safety gone mad.

  After the wall’s fall, financiers launch into an epic victory binge. Free to proliferate, capitalism mutates fast. Not even a free-market frenzy like the Thatcher-Reagan years, this is something entirely new, but with a few old faces. Alan Greenspan, guiding U.S. finance under Reagan, George Bush, Clinton and Bush Junior, is a big fan of libertarian Ayn Rand and it’s on his watch that some J.P. Morgan wizards invent Credit Default Swaps in 1994. What these are, briefly, is insurance. You lend somebody a lot of dosh at a good interest rate, but they’re all hillbillies with Cyclops babies and you’re worried they’ll default. So you pay a third party to insure the debt. Assuming that the hillbillies pay up, everyone wins. And if the babies one day need to go to Cyclops college and the loan goes bad, no problem. The insurer coughs up, and assuming you’ve not only loaned to Cyclopses it probably won’t bother them much either. This apparently removes the final obstacle to making serious money, which is risk. The banks and companies can now do pretty much exactly as they please, with someone else obliged to pay for their mistakes. Predictably, they go berserk; make record-breaking profits doing so. When the warmed-over Tories now known as New Labour come to power in 1997, which is when Rome leaves the party, they provide the Bank of England with control over the interest rate and thus the whole economy. Profits like that, they must know what they’re doing.

  After lots of hassle, Dean and Roman trade their flat off Lower Harding Street for a whole council house in Delapré. The new place is much nicer, though they have a neighbour who complains when Dean pops out into the back yard for a smoke one night and unleashes a torrent of loud swearing after stepping in the garden pond. This is the business that the council try to talk up to an ASBO when they’re trying to get at Rome through Dean, through his Hercules Heel. Oddly enough, their old digs in St. Luke’s House end up being used by CASPAR, the shoestring community support group to whom all of the modest improvements in the area can be attributed. Rome only finds this out last night when he’s down at the nursery with Burt Reagan, setting up for Alma’s exhibition, and he meets Lucy, who’s arranging it and gets it in the neck if anything goes wrong. Turns out she works for CASPAR, labouring where him and Dean first make a go of it, make love, make breakfast. She and Rome chat while him and Burt hang the paintings and put the big sculpture or whatever it’s called on the pushed-together tables in the centre of the room. They bond over his old flat’s inconveniently tiny toilet, there amidst the stupefying images of river-monsters rearing over Spencer Bridge, of multiple-exposure charcoal children flickering in a wasteland and the raging giants in nightgowns with their arcing billiard cues, their spraying golden blood like fire.

  The economic watchword is not caution now but innovation, new ways to make loot that are not tested or thought through. Enron borrows upon future derivatives from areas of technology not yet invented, such as shares in Daleks or Transporter Beams but evidently nowhere near as solid. Enron’s bubble bursts as Dubya Bush takes over in 2000, the worst monetary catastrophe in U.S. history, and when the facts emerge nobody can believe the catalogue of madness, the horrific warning that this poses for economy in general. People call for tighter regulation, which would hinder making money, so the Enron business is dismissed as a statistical anomaly, some of its execs go to jail and then everyone carries on as normal. The big market in the U.K. and the U.S. now is housing, and those Credit Default Swaps mean banks can offer mortgages to almost anyone, a million Cyclops hillbillies, safe in the knowledge that insurers pay if it goes wrong. Unless, of course, all of the hillbillies default at once. If Rome’s correct, the world’s swollen financial markets are all resting on the least dependable and most impoverished section of society, on people almost guaranteed to fuck up. People like those in this very district. Schemes intended to reduce risk instead spread it through the whole system like woodworm, until from Beverly Hills to Bermondsey those folk who’d never dream of visiting an area like the Boroughs find instead that it has come to visit them.

  Roman has a capacity for violence, never a propensity. It’s just been part of the equation, scuffling with coppers in an alley or outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, just as it’s always been there in the money markets during their own troubled adolescence. When the Bacaleri di Norhan stage economic protests in 1263, Henry the Third sends in the troops to bash some heads together. When the Poll Tax riots kick off in the late 1980s – also economic protests – Thatcher sends in riot police to bash some heads together. Rome imagines that when the balloon goes up in our hi-tech twenty-first century, whoever’s running things will very probably send in Atari hunter-killer robots to – well, you get the idea. Violence, or at least the threat of it, is always there, hence Rome’s lifelong easy association between finances and criminality. There’s always hired goons somewhere in the mix, bruisers or bailiffs, or riot-samurais, or soldiers. Rome sits in the dark of Ted Tripp’s borrowed car and waits until the half-a-dozen squaddies stagger pissed and bellowing out of the cellar bar to fall into a minibus that’s evidently their ride back to base. It pulls away down Abington Street, most probably bound for Bridge Street, South Bridge and the motorway beyond. Rome gives it a few seconds and then starts Ted’s car up, following the soldiers out past the bright lights of town to where the darkness gathers round Northampton like an angry and protec
tive mother.

  Just last year in 2005, amidst the tube-bombs and ongoing nightmare of Iraq, big Gordon Brown sells off the last of Britain’s gold reserves right when the going rate is at a temporary low. There’s nothing solid holding things up anymore, not even paper, only electronic impulses and mathematics swirling in the ether. Rome, as a manic depressive, entertains dark possibilities: when banks begin to crash, as any airborne vessels held aloft by bubbles surely will, how will governments deal with that? The money’s bound up in the banks, especially in Britain where they’ve run the show since 1997, and if they go down the whole economy goes with them. No one’s going to let that happen. In effect, the banks are now immune to government control or reprimand. They have, by stealth, become a monarchy. It’s not even capitalism anymore, not the brutal Darwinian free-for-all proposed by Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes and Margaret Thatcher. This is some refried early seventeenth century arrangement, with a coddled and capricious ruler dominating even parliament. Rome’s not sure what you’d call the set-up – it’s a moneylenderocracy or something like that – but it would seem that the banking sector sees itself as royalty. Roman agrees. He sees them, more precisely, as King Charles the First. And everybody round these parts knows how all that ends up: in fire and pikes, wet innards and dry powder. Worlds turned upside down. Screams in the night.

  The B-roads outside town are submerged in a rural blackness. There’s nobody else about, no other cars. Roman accelerates, pulls alongside the mini-bus. They think he’s overtaking until he slams into them, BDANK! The bus squeals, trying to regain control, with everybody on board thinking it’s a dreadful accident, when Rome lurches across, deliberately ramming them again, BDANK! This time they swerve into a ditch, roll over and land upside down. Rome stops a few yards further on, retrieves the billiard cue from the Black Lion that he’s got stashed in the back, then slides out of the car. He takes his time walking back up the road, the pole over his scrawny shoulder. No one’s going anywhere. The nearside door of the crashed troop-transporter turns out to be open. Roman climbs aboard. The soldiers are all dangling in their safety belts, concussed and bleeding. Out of those who can focus their eyes, nobody’s what you might call pleased to see him. He walks down the aisle between the seats, well, actually he walks along the inside of the bus’s roof but it’s the same thing. He walks down the aisle and scrutinises all the stunned, inverted faces, picking out the ones who’d given him the aggro. “You.” The thick end of the billiard cue jabs forward, into teeth. “And you.” Again the cue comes down, again. He pots a black eye, a pink throat, a cue-ball skull. Again. Again. Rome clears the table in a single visit and the crowd here at the Crucible goes wild.

  The thing is, even if this century concocts a Cromwell who drags all the bankers to the chopping block, despite the fact that Rome finds it a lovely image, it won’t do a bit of good. The west is broke. There’s no nice way of putting it. Broke and in debt for generations, but still keeping up a front the way that Emperor Diocletian does when he begins to water down the empire’s coinage. Any revolutionary who succeeds in toppling the banks is going to inherit the same dismal situation, the appalling world they’ve left us with after their dizzy and intoxicated spree, fucked up beyond all recognition. No, just executing the executives is a non-starter. What you need to execute is money, or perhaps just money as it is from Alfred the Great onwards. Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on. Rome can see a battered future Britain where a cow’s still worth five magic beans or the equivalent, which has no standard currency and thus no standard government, no kings, no credit agencies. Only a thousand colourful and ragged flags.

  The Leveller kisses his boyfriend through the smoke in Castle Street and there’s a siren closing from the distance, whooping oscillations swooping from the Mounts to Grafton Street, driver perhaps starting to realise that it’s difficult responding to alarm calls from the Boroughs, its streets closed with bollards in an unsuccessful effort to prevent curb-crawling which has nonetheless been quite successful in obstructing every other fucking thing. He gives Dean’s bum a quick squeeze and can feel the all-at-once of himself welling up around him. He knows he’s still somehow up there on the rooftops as a seven-year-old, nicking moonlight. He’s still at the barricades, still messing up his life with Sharon, still under the mudslide in Pete Baker’s yard, still shifting Ted Tripp’s dodgy merchandise from the unguarded lockup, still half dead in the dark living room on his fiftieth birthday, still broke and still furious, still sleeping in the fire, still stalking through the upturned mini-bus with his apocalyptic staring eyes, his bloody snooker cue. He’s who he is, exactly, perfectly, and if what Alma says about that endless circuit of Delft tiles up on the nursery’s north wall is true, he’s who he is forever. The forlorn and lovely little pauper streets with all the precious memories are burning down somewhere behind him. Roman Thompson stares the future in its hairy eye, and knows that he won’t be the first to look away. Screaming its panicked aria, that siren’s getting nearer.

  THE RAFTERS AND THE BEAMS

  Mashed in the Atlantic’s iron-green jaws off Freetown, on his skinny ship out of a Bristol plump from sugar and the sale of Africans, John Newton weeps, makes promises which he will not immediately keep, pleads for amazing grace and on the skyline, lightning-lit, are tumbling granite manes, are snarling caves and heavy paws of avalanche. The Lion Mountains, as the Portuguese adventurer Pedro da Cintra calls the land in 1462: Serra de Leão. Romarong, as it’s known to the local Mende tribesmen. Sierra Leone, the name tawny with dust or rank with ambush, where sweet hymns are pressed from vintages of mortal panic and undying shame.

  When he gets to be old, Black Charley don’t care for the songs no more and don’t care for the chapels. He makes church in empty barns, with his rope-rimmed contraption left outside and leaning up against a rain butt. Henry George, down on a hard dirt floor, straw prickling his knees through his worn pants. He breathes the musk of long-gone horses, pale palms pressed together, talking to whatever it is Henry can feel listening to him from somewhere long ways off, outside of all the stars and moons, just listening and never answering or interrupting, never saying anything at all. Above, birds come and go through gaps between the slates, and over his head Henry hears their soothing language; beating wings when they alight on beams and tarry rafters pinstriped with ancestral droppings. His quiet prayers float up past rugged joints, past bowing timbers, rather than into a company of marble saints and saviours martyred in the coloured glass. He will allow that worshiping like this has led him to imagine paradise as all built out of wood and with a smell like sawdust and manure, not stairs and statues everywhere. He counts this view of some rough heaven as preferable to what the ministers describe, and much more likely in its reasoning. Where would a thing that’s truly holy find the need to put on airs? Black Charley has no faith in Colonel Cody, nor religious songs and paintings, neither any institution making a big show about itself. From where they’ve broken holes in the barn roof, pillars of toppled brightness are propped slanting one against another like old, dusty ruins of light, and Henry scratches at the branded shoulder through his patched-up jacket before he commences once again to murmur.

  Africa’s west coast, an ancient frontal lobe inflamed and swollen, bulges into cooling ocean with Sierra Leone on the underside, Guinea above it and Liberia below. Pedro da Cintra finds the country, names it for the pride of hills about its bay and after him, inevitably, come the traders and the slavers; first from Portugal and later France and Holland. Then, a hundred years after da Cintra’s ruinous discovery, from England, when John Hawkins ships three h
undred souls to meet the great demand arisen from that nation’s colonies, newly established in America. Two centuries as western Africa’s principal slave-port follow and then, in 1787, a collection of British philanthropists establish a Province of Freedom where they settle a small population of the Black Poor, Asians and Africans whose mounting presence on the streets of London has become too costly to support, including black Americans who, just a decade earlier, had joined the British side during the War of Independence with the promise of their liberty as an enticement. Five years later, numbers thinned by illness or by hostile native tribes, these are augmented by more than a thousand come from icy Nova Scotia, mostly escaped slaves from the United States, and subsequently Freetown is established as the first refuge for African-Americans who’ve fled their work-gang or plantation, neighbouring Liberia only following this bold example after thirty-five years. Gradually more liberated slaves return to swell the settlers’ ranks, known as the Krio people for their creole tongue, a Pidgin English by way of America. The haven flourishes, with both women and blacks given the vote before the eighteenth century’s end. In 1827 the Fourah Bay College is established, western Sub-Saharan Africa’s first university upon the European model, making Sierra Leone a hub of education. It is at this institution in the 1940s that the sleek and handsome Bernard Daniels, studying law, begins to contemplate a life in England.