by Alan Moore
Doggy-paddling in the lazy, undemanding currents of the ‘C’-stream, David just about completes six year-long pool lengths of his education without drowning. He secures one or two subsequently useless O-levels, fails all the rest and doesn’t see the point of going on to fail his A-levels as well. He doesn’t want to go to college, wants to have these years of pointless and demeaning prelude over with so he can get on with his life in something that resembles a real world. His dad is furious with disappointment. Nothing’s turning out the way that Bernard wanted. Back in Sierra Leone it’s military coup on top of military coup, with ethnic Limba Siaka Stevens finally ending up in charge and straight away revealing his true colours, executing his political and military rivals by means of a gallows on the Kissy Road in Freetown. Bad and getting worse, this is how Bernard sees the prospects for his homeland and his eldest son alike. Dave is demoted in his father’s estimations, although obviously not to the extent of his young brother, Andrew, who has never figured in those estimations. David doesn’t care. Being the chosen one has always been a burden, and he finds that he and Andy grow much closer in the cosy doghouse of paternal disapproval. Whispering and laughing in the darkness after lights-out they begin to plan their bold escape. Outside their parents’ dearly-won front door the 1970s are pooling even in the sump of Kingsthorpe Hollow, a fluorescent froth of platform heels and stick-on stars. The song lyrics are all chrome-dipped in science fiction and Jack Kirby has quit Marvel Comics to turn out a stunningly prolific flood of fresh ideas for their main industry rivals, full of warring techno-gods and revamped 1940s Brooklyn kid gangs. Meanwhile, a real local gang of vicious seventeen-year-old apprentice skinheads have, somewhat uncomfortably, rebranded themselves as “The Bowie Boys” and now wear eyeliner and carry handbags in Bay City Rollers tartan. The decade bowls into town riding a sequin blizzard and leaves drifts of glitter in the gutters. Flaunting its fantastic Biba clothes and Day-Glo hedgehog hair it flirts with the two brothers, finally enticing them to run away from home and join the circus. They move down to London just as soon as they’re both old enough to do so without needing their dad’s never-going-to-happen blessings and consent. It’s a completely different place now to the city that confronted Joyce and Bernard when they first arrived in Brixton twenty years before, and being black is almost fashionable now. This previously undreamed-of world embraces Dave and Andy in a way Northampton never could, finding them flats, finding them work. David commences his employment at a clothing outlet that’s the current talk of the black entertainment field, finds himself recommending gear for Labi Siffre, kung-fu fighting with Carl Douglas and discovering the fragrant world of girls in a way that would be unthinkable in Kingsthorpe Hollow – under Bernard’s gold-rimmed eye and quarantined from females at a same-sex grammar school. It feels to David like he’s living for the first time, dressing how he wants and getting a bit Funkadelic when it suits him, making it through the whole heady period without recourse to dreadlocks or an afro. He and Andrew sometimes pop back to Northampton, just to see their mum and so that David can catch up with Alma, but the atmosphere and barbed-wire silences around their dad mean that the intervals between their visits gradually grow longer. Even Alma is becoming harder to keep tabs on once her terraced row on Andrew’s Road is pulled down, in the final mop-up of the clearance operation that’s been going on down in the Boroughs since the end of World War One. The Warren family get moved to Abington, then Alma takes off on her own into a string of boyfriends, bedsits and addresses without telephones. Slowly the two of them lose touch but by then David has hooked up with Natalie, a beautifully-assembled girl from a Nigerian family who’s looking like a keeper. His life picks up pace until he’s skimming through the years as though he’s on a Raleigh bicycle, with his exhilaration only slightly curtailed by the stark fact that, in life, there don’t seem to be any brakes. You can’t stop and you can’t even slow down.
Henry and this place where he lives are running out of luck, he knows it, if they ever had any to start with. There’s a stiffness in the joints and hinges, there’s a rheumy quality comes in the eyes and windows, and a never-again feel to things. Some of the streets and plenty of the people what he’s been familiar with are disappeared. Around Chalk Lane where it’s all coming down and everybody’s moving out, he sees these ladies that he knows just stood there weeping and one saying to the other “Well, this is the end of our acquaintance”. He feels sorry for the fallen buildings, dust and rubble where it meant something to someone once, but they’re hard stone and it’s the people, what are softer, that get hurt most cruelly. It’s the bonds between them that are delicate and built up over years what get tore up, all on a stroke of someone’s pen at the town hall. There’s friends and families get scattered without rhyme or reason like so many billiard balls, sent shooting off to the four corners of Northampton with their whole lives gone a different way and Henry can’t but feel it’s all a shame. From how he hears it, it won’t be that long before it’s Bath Street, Castle Street and his own Scarletwell Street what are next for demolition and he knows a time will come when even the Destructor is destroyed, with all of this replaced by some variety of great big modern rooming-houses that he don’t much like the sound of. He allows that it might be a little cleaner and more sanitary round here after all the changes, but from what he’s seen of diagrams and drawings that get printed in the evening paper it’s not nowhere near as friendly in appearance, and he isn’t certain there’ll be a position for no deathmongers or crazy people such as Thursa Vernall; for the mooching kind like Freddy Allen or else Georgie Bumble; even for Black Charley with his funny-looking bicycle and cart. He drags his wooden blocks more on the roads now when he’s going down these tilted lanes for fear that if he picks up speed him and his vehicle alike will both be shook to bits. One day when Henry’s resting on the grass up by the stump of the old castle he gets into conversation with a nice enough young gent who’s well brought-up and seems like he’s been educated quite a bit in ancient history. This boy brings up the subject of Black Charley’s skin, but in a nervous way in case it’s not polite to mention it, when he says that it’s not the first time that these falling-down old stones have been acquainted with a black man. Then when Henry asks him what he means he talks about this feller by the name Peter the Saracen, a coloured man come from the Holy Land or Africa who’s living here around the year twelve hundred, working as a crossbow maker for who they call Bad King John, near seven hundred year before Henry himself arrives in these parts. On the one hand Henry will admit to feeling a touch disappointed that he isn’t the first man of his complexion hereabouts, but then that’s only prideful vanity, and on the other hand he’s pleased he’s got another hero what can socialise with Walter Tull and Britton Johnson in his idle daydreams. He imagines how he leads the three of them on his contraption with the rope instead of tyres, escorts the crossbow-maker, footballer and cowboy all the way back home to Tennessee and sixty years ago, so they can liberate all Henry’s people with their fancy shooting and their deadly silent crossbow bolts and their goal-scoring capabilities. He sleeps more these days and so has more time for all his flights of fancy. Meantime out of his front window and just over Scarletwell they’re taking down the warehouses and so on that are at the bottom, so that no more than that narrow terraced strip of homes is left on the Saint Andrew’s Road. A little way uphill The Friendly Arms is all shut down and boarded up, ready to vanish when its time comes. He finds out from somebody how Mr. Newton Pratt was taken ill and died some years ago with the pneumonia, or anyway that’s what he’s told. Of what befell Pratt’s legendary beast, however, Henry never hears a word and in the end he’s half-convinced he must have dreamt it, its existence being to his mind a more unlikely prospect than the get-together between Walter Tull, Peter the Saracen and Britton Johnson. Henry dozes while the world out past his doorstep comes to pieces.
Just five or six decades up the road David is gliding comfortably into the 1980s, married now to Natalie and b
lessed with two fine kids, Selwyn and Lily. The science-fiction predilections of his boyhood mean that when the first commercially available computers hit the shops he seizes on them with delight, these fabulous devices previously unknown outside the Bat Cave. Having always been much smarter than his C-stream Grammar School track-record would suggest, he quickly finds that he knows nearly everything about the new technology, almost alone in a still-dazzled world that doesn’t seem to have the faintest clue. Like some explorer on a distant, savage planet who subdues the awestruck natives with a mirror and a box of matches, David’s smooth facility with getting a recalcitrant machine to work again is looked on as miraculous by those who witness it and before long he finds himself working in Brussels, home at weekends, as a highly valued cybernetic trouble-shooter. When he gets the chance he stays in touch with Andrew, who is married with two children of his own and also doing well, but while there’s been a measure of rapprochement with their dad, David still finds he only gets back to Northampton once in a blue moon. All that he sees of how the town is changing is, therefore, a disconnected string of snapshots in a poorly-maintained photo album where whole years of continuity are simply missing. On a visit around 1985, as an example, he discovers that the town’s largely Jamaican black community has taken over a Victorian Salvation Army fort that resides by itself upon its patch of Sheep Street wasteland down from the aesthetic pickaxe-in-the-face of Greyfriars Bus Station. David imagines that some sort of preservation order keeps the beautiful old structure standing after everything around it’s been torn down. Its new inhabitants, with caterpillar locks crammed into knitted Ethiopian flag bulbs atop their heads, have fashioned the neglected fort into an energetic hive of Afro-Caribbean activity. Renamed as the Matafancanta Club after what David understands is the Jamaican for something like “place of sharing” he sees them minding the pre-school toddlers, giving local artists and sound-systems somewhere they can set up and rehearse and keeping a perpetual stew going in their canteen on the second floor. The building, with its rose-pink brick façade and graceful scrollwork of its mouldings given life by all the goings-on inside it, looks terrific. When he passes through Northampton just a few years later it’s been bulldozed and there’s nothing but the stretch of yellowing grass and a few stories about evidently untrustworthy trustees pissing off back home to Kingston with the funding, youngsters with colourful street-names dealing ganja and eventually police raids after one too many BMWs get spotted in the edifice’s car park. So much for a preservation order, if there ever was one. On the same trip David is relieved to find that the incredibly old beech tree which he just about remembers from his infanthood is still alive and thriving in a courtyard further along Sheep Street, and of course the similarly ancient bulkhead of St. Sepulchre’s is right there where it always was, that and the beech tree as apparently immovable as Alma Warren, who he’s back in touch with. Keeping up a dwindling comic habit with infrequent visits to a Covent Garden shop called Comics Showcase, David first becomes aware that his old mate is doing nicely for herself when overhearing other customers discuss her recent cover-work in tones of muted awe. He picks a couple of the books up for himself and has to say he’s impressed by the haunting realistic quality that Alma brings to silly thirty-year-old costumed characters by taking them all much more seriously than they would seem to deserve. Then, just a few weeks later, David meets Alma herself in the same shop when he’s out with his tiny daughter Lily riding on his shoulders. They’re both overjoyed to see each other, have a lot of catching up to do and from that point his travels to Northampton are a bit more frequent. He’d go there more often, but the situation with his dad and Andrew is still strained and awkward. After Bernard’s efforts to encourage one son at the disadvantage of the other founder on David’s refusal to engage in such a competition, the old man has found a way to carry his unwanted and divisive favouritism on to a new generation, doting on Selwyn and Lily while ignoring Andrew’s two boys, Benjamin and Marcus. What particularly upsets David with their dad’s behaviour is how much it hurts Andrew, much more than when it was only him that Bernard left out in the cold. Andy could shrug that off, but he can’t watch it happening to his babies. He starts to become obsessed with making sure his offspring get the same advantages that he perceives as being heaped on David’s pair, spurring them on through school and college, doggedly determined that sheer academic excellence will force their granddad to acknowledge them. David advises Andrew to forget about their dad, but he can see that’s easier said than done when it’s your own kids being treated badly right in front of you. He sees the bitterness and the resentment in his brother’s eyes, and David doesn’t know where this is going but suspects it’s nowhere good.
Black Charley’s dying in his house on Scarletwell Street, getting out just a few months before they knock it down to put up flats and move him and his family somewhere else what they won’t like so much. Selina and his children come and go about the bedside in a kind of sleepy blur that Henry can’t keep track of with the medicine they give him so his chest don’t hurt. Across the road he’s told it’s pretty much all gone except for Spring Lane School and them few houses down the bottom there. He doesn’t want to see it as it is, just heaps of bricks on scrubland, but likes to imagine that one stable that’s still there in back of the surviving homes down on Saint Andrew’s Road. Since he don’t care to go to church and couldn’t get there these days even if he wanted to, then that old barn’s the nearest thing to Henry’s idea of a place of worship what’s in walking distance if Henry could walk, and what’s at least in thinking distance seeing as he can’t. He presumes he’s getting close to that occasion in his life when it might do him good to have a few words with his maker and so what he does, he goes down to that old shed in his mind without once having need to get out of his bed. He pictures himself getting onto his old bike what he gave to his son Edward to play on some few months back after it become apparent that he’d not himself be needing it no more. In his imagination he pretends he’s rolling off down Scarletwell Street, which is just the way it was with Newt Pratt and his drunken critter both outside a likewise resurrected Friendly Arms and greeting Henry with well-meant but unintelligible noises as he rattles past them heading for Saint Andrew’s Road, the way they had when he could still ride bicycles and they were both alive. He sees himself all young and vigorous, turning his vehicle along the cobbled alley what they call Scarletwell Terrace on the right there just before you reach the main road, trundling down it to the rear gates of the stable, which in Henry’s mind are open and not boarded up the way he hears they are in ordinary life now that the horses what were once within have gone. Henry leaves his imaginary contraption leaning up on the imaginary wall outside and pictures himself opening the rusted latch and going in, summoning all the scents and noises of a place like that as well as he is able with the flutter of the nesting pigeons and the smell of straw what’s not been changed in years: stale oats and a faint memory of dung. Light through the busted slates above as Henry falls on his imaginary knees and asks the thing what he feels might be listening somewhere if he’s truly soon to die and if there’s anything he should look forward to after that happens. When he gets no answer, same as usual, Henry asks himself just what kind of an answer he might be expecting, just what kind of afterlife he thinks that he could be contented with for the long next part of eternity. He’s not that sold on the idea of Heaven like you see in Bible illustrations. He’ll admit that it looks clean and pretty with the clouds and marble stairways but, like with these modern blocks of buildings what they say they’re putting up, he can’t see any place for Henry in the picture, or at least no place as looks like he’d feel comfortable. Well, if he don’t want that, what does he want? He’s entertained the notion what the Hindoo fellers have of getting born again in a new life as someone different, maybe even as some kind of witless animal, and he’s not taken with it. If he dies and someone else gets born next week who’s a completely different person what has got no memory
of ever being him, in what way is that Henry George? Unless there’s something in the idea what he’s missing, it seems pretty plain that that’s somebody else entirely who’s their own self and not Henry George at all. No, when he tries to call up his idea of paradise he finds he’s summoning the things he knows, what have already happened. He thinks how he’d like to see his pop again, and hear his mom when she was singing in the fields. He’d like to live again those careless years when he was just a child, before he got his mark when everything seemed sort of kindly and mysterious. He’d like to be meeting Selina for the first time and out walking with her by the River Usk where it runs through Abergavenny, or be lying with her in their useless ragged tent beside the great herd after they were wed and headed out of Wales towards Northampton. He yearns to be back on that afternoon when he’s just got his pay and him and his Selina first set eyes on Scarletwell Street where he’ll live and shortly die, wants to be with his wife and little Mrs Gibbs the deathmonger when they call him to the confinement room to see his newborn babies. He wants his old bicycle with the rope tyres back from the past along with the ability to ride it. It occurs to him that what he wants the most is his whole life again, all of the things what are most dear and most familiar to him. If he could have that, Henry reckons that it would be worth the branding and the seasick nights aboard The Pride of Bethlehem. That’s all he wants, but in his thoughts the sunlight tumbling through the broken roof onto the rafters striped with pigeon droppings seems as though it’s getting brighter, and then later when Selina brings his dinner in to see if he can eat a little of it she can’t rouse him.