Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

  “Bob, for fuck’s sake, what’s that voice about? You sound like you’re an old Etonian child-molester. This is Alma, by the way. Sorry to call you at your mum’s, but if you’re coming to the show tomorrow don’t forget to bring along the Blake stuff that I asked you to dig up, assuming you’ve come up with anything. If not, it’s no big deal. Just never speak to me again. And why is Robert Goodman not in at the moment? Is he playing polo? ‘Robert Goodman’. Bob, nobody calls you Robert. To be frank, most people aren’t polite enough to even call you Bob. Most people groan and make a sort of gesture with their hands. Then they sit down, and then they cry. They cry like babies, Bob, at the idea of your existence. Anyway, I hope to see the Blake material at the exhibition, with you holding it if absolutely necessary. Take care, Bobby. Never change. Talk to you soon.”

  His blood, he notices, is not immediately turned to ice there in his veins. That’s storybook detective stuff and in real life the best that he can manage is pink slush, but, still, it ain’t a pretty feeling. Sure, Studs knows the name, the voice, the avalanche of undeserved abuse. He knows the dame: a long, tall drink of battery acid going by the moniker of Alma Warren. Think of those surprisingly large clots of hair you sometimes haul from a blocked bathtub trap, and then imagine one with eyes and a superior demeanour: right there’s a description that a police sketch artist could work from. She’s the kind of cast-iron frail you don’t forget without hypnosis, and yet somehow the whole Warren case has slipped Studs’ bullet-creased and woman-addled mind until just now, this moment.

  How it is with Warren, she’s got some variety of modern art scam going for her where the rubes pay out big bucks to see her schizophrenic scribbles. Months back, Studs called in at her bohemian dump along East Park Parade, just up the street from where he used to flop when he was living in here in town, presumably at some point after his tough hard-knock boyhood in the Bowery district of New York, or Brooklyn, or wherever it was Studs grew up. It’s only backstory. He’ll figure it out later. Anyway, he’d dropped by at the artist’s squalid dive to find her working frantically amidst billowing cumuli of contraband, bewildering images in different media propped all around the parlour until Studs had felt like he was trapped inside some kind of busted Grateful Dead kaleidoscope. Between pulls on a reefer long enough to qualify as penis envy and erratic daubs at her unfathomable canvas, she’d explained she was preparing something like three dozen pieces for a new show she was holding in the run-down neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Studs frankly doubts it was as rough and desperate as his own upbringing in the mean streets of the Bronx – perhaps Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Bidet, somewhere colourful like that – although by all accounts the Boroughs is still having lousy luck. Warren’s old district ain’t just on the wrong side of the tracks, it’s on the tracks themselves, in pieces and squashed flat by near eight hundred years of rumbling social locomotion.

  He remembers having an unpleasant run-in with the place back in his childhood, when his parents had insisted that he take dance-classes at the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School in Phoenix Street, around the back of Doddridge Church. Or was it him, insisting on the dance class? Studs, his memory crammed full of bodies, barrooms and the brunettes he’s let slip between his fingers, can’t recall. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he had to wear a kilt. A nine-year-old boy in a kilt, taken to dancing classes in a thug-menagerie like Alma Warren’s former neighbourhood. Studs thinks that ought to count as child abuse. He’s mentioned it to Warren and her only comment had been that if she’d encountered him back then she’d more or less have been compelled to beat him up: “Posh kids in kilts, it’s one of the unwritten laws”. Now that Studs thinks about it, he was beaten up more often as a soft-centred young schoolboy than as a hard-bitten private eye, and on the great majority of those childhood occasions he was wearing ordinary trousers. He suspects the business with the kilt is only part of the equation.

  The real kicker is that the dishevelled artist’s show is scheduled for tomorrow, and that furthermore it’s taking place at the day nursery in Phoenix Street which used to be the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School. This exhibition is connected with the case she wanted Studs to take up when he called to see her that day on East Park Parade. As Warren had explained it to him then, she had twenty or thirty pieces finished but the subject matter wasn’t all connecting up the way she hoped it would. From Studs’ perspective it was like she’d loaded up a sawn-off shotgun with a buckshot of significance then fired it at a wall expecting the blast-pattern to make sense. There were some images inspired by hymns, a tile arrangement based upon the life of local Holy Joe Phil Doddridge and some nonsense that concerned a stone cross brought here from Jerusalem. One picture seemed to be a likeness of Ben Perrit, a poetic rummy Studs knows from back in the day, and there was some mixed-media business meant to represent determinism and the absence of free will, or at least that’s what the pot-saturated painter claimed. In Studs’ opinion, Warren’s exhibition is a random four-lane pile-up of ideas with nothing joining them together, and to make things worse she seems to think the whole mess should somehow connect with William Blake.

  “I mean, I’ve got a lot of references to my family having come from Lambeth, but I’m thinking it needs something more substantial, something that pulls all the themes together. So, Bob, that’s what I want you to do. Find out how Blake ties into all of this. Find out what links Blake with the Boroughs and I promise that I’ll paint you, Bobby. I’ll immortalise you, and together we’ll inflict your face upon a blameless future. How’s that for an offer?”

  Studs’ opinion, which he didn’t venture at the time, is that the offer is a standard Alma Warren contract in that it involves no actual money. Immortality and £1.50 will buy Studs another pack of biros. Still, it’s work, and he accepted it. The paint-flecked hag has Studs over a barrel and if he can’t make good on the case he knows he’s finished in this town. Warren will see to it. She knows too much about him, all those stories buried in his violent past that he prefers to keep that way. He grimaces as he recalls the time he bumped into her on the Kettering Road and she’d asked, no doubt in an affectation of concern, why he was limping.

  “Well, I was, uh … I was in Abington Park last night, up by the bandstand. As you know, I like to keep my hand in with the acting. What I do is, I rehearse parts so that I’ll be ready if I’m offered them. It was a sort of secret agent role where the scene opened with me standing on the bandstand and then, at a signal, what I do is vault over the handrail and land on the grass so that I’m in a cat-like pose. I look around, scanning the darkness, then run off into the shadows.”

  Warren had just stared at him, blinking her creepy eyes in disbelief.

  “And so that’s how you hurt your leg?”

  “No, no, I did all of that perfectly, but then they wanted one more take. The second try, one of my feet caught on the railing when I vaulted over.”

  Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.

  “ ‘They’ ?” She’d gazed at him like he was something unexpected in a Petrie dish. “They wanted one more take? The film crew in your mind, Bob, wanted one more take. That’s what you’re telling me?”

  Yeah, that’s what Studs was telling her and looking back he wishes that he hadn’t. Information, in the hands of an unstable woman artist, is a weapon. Probably a weapon like a nail-file in that it’s not very masculine but could still do a lot of damage, say for instance if somebody stuck one in your eye. The upshot is that Warren has Studs where she wants him, and if he can’t solve the Blake case then his reputation’s shot. It’s blackmail, pure and simple. Only not so pure. Or simple.

  Wearily he reaches for the leather jacket which, he rationalises, maybe stands in for his customary trench coat when it’s at the cleaners getting all the blood and booze rinsed out, plus invisible mending on the profuse bullet holes.

  “Moths”. That would be his likel
y quip when the staff at the cleaners asked him what had made them. “38-calibre moths.”

  Leaving a brief note for his secretary with regard to dinner preference, Studs hauls his morally bruised carcass out into the unforgiving light and heads towards his car or would a yank say automobile?

  Twenty minutes later he remembers where he got that InterCity grid of frown-lines, nudging his frustrated vehicle up another ramp onto a higher level of the Grosvenor Centre’s crowded multistorey car park. Who’d have thought there would be all these people on a Friday? Finally he wins a space by staring threateningly at a silver-haired old lady in a Citroen and, when he has both paid and displayed, makes his way down by elevator into the tinnitus hum and sizzle of the shopping centre’s lower floor. Studs weaves his way through the sedated-looking human surf, among the scrunchie-tufted mums who steer their buggy-bubbled offspring at a stately, ceremonial pace over the glittering electric-lighted tiles; between the strangely marginal and ghostly teenagers who limit their defiance to a smirk, a woolly jumper and the uncontested occupation of a bench outside the Body Shop. Studs curls his lip on one side in what’s meant to be disdain until he notices the strolling shoppers glancing at him worriedly in case he’s either having or recovering from a stroke. Taking a right turn at the elbow of the muttering arcade into a stretch that had been Wood Street once, Studs doggedly heads for the daylight out beyond the glass doors at the walkway’s end.

  Abington Street’s pink incline seems bereft despite the florets of spring sun that drop haphazardly through flimsy cloud. This former main drag of the town, the bunny-run, looks weighed down by the realisation that it has no purpose anymore. It keep its head down, tries not to be noticed and sincerely hopes it’s overlooked in any forthcoming wave of redundancies. It seems to shrink from the flint glint that’s in Studs’ eye as if ashamed, like when you recognise some used-up junkie hooker as your teacher from first grade, not that he’s ever had such an improbable encounter. Certainly not with Miss Wiggins, anyway. Aw, Christ. He wishes that he hadn’t conjured that specific image. A real private eye, he tells himself, would manage to come up with hard-boiled metaphors that didn’t actually turn his own stomach. A crushed skull that’s like a broken wholegrain mustard server, for example, is a simile that gets the point across without being indelicate. Miss Wiggins hobbling up and down next to a busy traffic junction in her hearing aid, a mini skirt and heroin withdrawal is another thing entirely, a thing scorched indelibly onto Studs’ forebrain to the point where he can no longer remember what the monstrous imagery was meant to represent. Oh, yes – Abington Street. How did he get from there to all that business with … it doesn’t matter. Just forget it. Focus on the case in hand.

  He slouches up the hill past Woolworths, then decides to try a saunter and eventually compromises with a kind of speedy Chaplin shuffle that’s abandoned as unworkable before he reaches the Co-op Arcade. He’s headed for a joint he knows here in this crummy burg where he can get his information from reliable sources. It’s the kind of place that ordinary people tend to keep away from, a suspicious dive where you can spot the criminal activity just from the way that everybody talks in whispers, and where any joker who don’t play by the house rules is looking for some serious payback, possibly a fine. Studs hasn’t visited Northampton library in years, but he’d still bet his last red cent it’s got the answers that he’s looking for, and what the hell’s a red cent, anyway? Is it a rouble? Or a kopek? There’s so much about this line of work, this idiom, that he doesn’t know.

  To Studs’ surprise, the library’s lower door beneath its handsome portico no longer offers entry to the building, which necessitates a short stroll past the structure’s grand façade to the top entrance. Ambling self-consciously beneath the slightly condescending gaze of Andrew Washington, uncle of the more famous George, he’s almost reached the safety of the swing doors when he realises something doesn’t feel right. Trusting instincts honed in Vietnam, Korea or conceivably in World War One, Studs glances up and stops dead in his tracks. Up at the street’s far end a black and threatening weather-front approaches, bowling downhill in a whirlwind of displaced pedestrians and flurried litter. Alma Warren.

  Nerve-ends screaming like a four alarm fire, praying that she hasn’t spotted him already, Studs hurls himself through the entrance and into the leaflet-papered library reception area. Flattening himself to an unsightly leather stain against the neon handbills on the east wall, he sucks in a breath and holds it, eyes fixed on the glass door as he waits for the intimidating harridan to stalk past in the street outside. He isn’t even really sure why he’s avoiding her, except that automatic furtiveness in any situation seems like good form from a private eye perspective. It’s what Studs would do. Besides, he hasn’t got the information that his nightmare client is counting on him to retrieve regarding the Blake situation, and things could turn ugly.

  In the sorry precinct out beyond the glass a great untidy avalanche in lipstick rumbles past from right to left, and Studs exhales. Unpeeling himself from the laminated posters at his rear he steps back to the door and opens it, poking his ruptured punch-bag head around the edge to squint inquisitively at the unsuspecting beatnik artist as she flaps and flounces down Abington Street away from him, like a receding storm. As he enjoys the private eye’s prerogative of watching somebody while unobserved, a further element of intrigue enters the already curious picture: heading up the street on a collision course with the descending painter is the waistcoat and straw hat clad figure of the Boroughs’ own bard-in-a-bottle, the near-universally anomalous Benedict Perrit.

  As these two distinctive products of Northampton’s oldest neighbourhood approach each other, Studs is witness to a mystifying ritual. On catching sight of Warren, the inebriated poet swivels and heads back the way he’s come for several paces before turning once again and staggering in the direction of the artist, this time doubled up with laughter. Misaligned eyes narrowing, Studs wonders if Ben Perrit’s strange behaviour could be some kind of code or signal. Maybe this apparent chance encounter between the dishevelled painter and one of her current subjects isn’t quite as random as it seems. Suspicions deepening he watches Warren plant an uncharacteristic kiss on Perrit’s cheek – it’s certainly not how she says hello to Studs – and then after a moment or two’s conversation there’s a furtive transfer as what might be money or perhaps a message changes hands. Are the decrepit pair conspirators, or grotesque sweethearts, or has Warren reached the age where she pays drunks to let her kiss them? Ducking back inside the library entrance as at last the couple separate and carry on with their respective journeys up or down the sloping street, Studs muses that whichever way the cookie falls or the dice crumbles he’s now almost certain that Ben Perrit’s involved in the Blake case right up to his bleary, wounded-looking eyeballs. All Studs has to do is find out how.

  To that end, he strides further on into the changed and only intermittently familiar library. He orients himself by the tall Abington Street windows in the north wall, where the filtered daylight pours down on display stands that now occupy an area which used to serve as the newspaper reading room. He can recall the register of local hoboes who once occupied the long-since vanished armchairs, most conspicuously if it happened to be raining. There would be Mad Bill, Mad Charlie, Mad Frank, Mad George and Mad Joe, possibly even Whistling Walter who, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, was the sole member of that company who suffered from a noticeable mental illness. All the rest were merely homeless and half-cut, though local folklore had attributed to each of them the ownership of blocks of flats in nearby towns. Conceivably, this inferred status as eccentric millionaires was dreamed up as justification for not giving any spare change to the down-at-heel, or at least that’s why Studs himself would have come up with that kind of a yarn. Progressing through to the main concourse of the venerable institution, he recalls a last-minute addition to his list of browsing bums, this being W.H. Davies who had scribbled down his Autobiography of a Sup
ertramp there under those tall windows in among the muttering and probably infested throng. And now he thinks about it, didn’t Davies go on to collaborate with one of Warren’s heroes, cockney occultist and artist Austin Spare, on their arts publication Form? The way Studs understands it Spare was an Edwardian weirdo who at one point claimed to have been William Blake in a prior incarnation, although he supposes this connection is too tenuous to be the kind of thing that his employer’s looking for. There’s nothing for it. He reluctantly accepts he’s going to have to do some heavy digging.

  The best place to start, he reasons, is with Blake himself, the enigmatic figure at the centre of this cold case. Swiftly hunting down an oversized edition of the Lambeth visionary’s work, Studs finds himself a table and a chair where he can catch up with the skinny on his presumed victim. Skimming through the volume’s introduction he confirms that Blake’s dead, very dead, since 1827. The prime suspects seem to have been complications brought on by a bowel complaint, although some time before his death the poet himself had put the finger on the English Winter as a likely culprit. It’s a tempting theory, but Studs rapidly dismisses the frequently castigated season from the frame for want of motive. Without so much as a scrap of evidence providing any leads the case is going nowhere. Hell, it turns out they don’t even have a body yet, with both Blake and his wife dumped into a communal paupers’ grave at Bunhill Fields, their headstone giving only an approximate location for the pair’s remains. The other well-known literary occupants of the East London cemetery, Bunyan and Defoe, both known to have made journeys to Northampton town and to have written on their travels here, are marked by a sarcophagus and obelisk respectively. Why couldn’t it be one of them that Warren was obsessed by?