by Alan Moore
ghost story tradition must rate as Hervey’s most glaringly apparent by-blows, illegitimate great-grandchildren by way of graveyard versifiers and elite hysterics with exquisite furniture. Then there are modern occultists, the heirs to James’s Karswell and early adaptors of the gothic model in their literary efforts and their leisurewear, with Hervey’s doctrine of Christ’s innate righteousness become a style-guide for diabolists. Studs doubts that Hervey would have felt entirely comfortable with that, but with a self-confessed deployment of arresting imagery to help embed his message the creator of Northampton noir has
no one but himself to blame. Don’t make the wrapping paper more intriguing than the gift inside, an edict which Studs ruefully accepts could equally apply to his own inner loveliness and its regrettably attention-grabbing packaging.
Cresting the slanted verge he walks the almost indiscernible remains of Peter’s Street, along the railed rear of the church and heading east. From unrolled liquorice whips of shade he estimates it to be sometime around five o’clock and briefly knows the phantom-limb sensation of release this hour would herald if he had a proper job and hadn’t been apprenticed to the night. Not that he’d say he was self-conscious when it came to his arresting physiognomy, but Studs has always far preferred the dark. His favourite entertainment, after being taken for a ride by a heart-breaking beauty who turns out to be a man, used to be wandering the shadowy rear entries of the town back in the days before the alleys had been gated off by nervous residents; before behaviour like that could land you on the sex-offenders register. Once, in the cobbled crack between the Birchfield and Ashburnham roads, in the small hours of a brisk Sunday morning, he’d been startled by a massive ball of granite rolling down the darkened corridor towards him in the classic Indiana Jones manoeuvre, only to reveal itself at closer quarters as Northampton’s planetary-scale performing soul, the since-deceased Tom Hall.
Walking a midnight dog, the lyrical behemoth had paused for a moments’ badinage with the sham Shamus, eloquent in his defence of those neglected crevices with their cock-decorated garage doors and frilly bindweed fringes. Clad in dungarees that may well have been a converted Wendy-House, Hall had extemporised upon his thesis that the narrow urban seam which they were currently inhabiting was one of the town’s land-canals, part of its bone-dry network of imaginary pedestrian waterways. Exploring the bare streambeds with their hard Edwardian gooseflesh underfoot, a practiced supra-mariner might readily observe the sunken underworld detritus that’s accumulated at the feet of galvanised steel banks: fiercely-discarded ultimatum porn collections or the ribcages of bicycles, drifted against the alley’s edges where neon-hued minnow condoms shoal among serenely swaying nettles, phlegm anemones. Occasionally a body. Obsolete appliances, embarrassing addictions, wilfully forgotten actions, deeds or purchases thought better of and excised to these margins, scenes that have been scribbled out from daylight continuity and written instead on these unattributed and off-the-record passages, in this piss-splashed Apocrypha. The rotund troubadour had lavishly expanded on his vision for the length of time it took his canine charge to arch up on its tiptoes like a shuddering croquet hoop and squeeze out a heroic movement longer than the hound itself. With that, the dissertation had concluded and the two men had continued on their disparate ways, Studs heading up the drained canal against the wind while the musician bobbed away downstream like an enormous marker buoy that had escaped its moorings, floating off into the visual purple.
Studs has by now reached Narrow Toe Lane, perhaps the Boroughs’ most unusually titled thoroughfare, in truth barely a path that trickles down beside the shaggy grass expanse to the remains of Green Street. He’s got no idea about the name. A misspelled towpath of an insufficient width, perhaps, or, knowing the neighbourhood, a reference to a shared genetic disability which at one point afflicted everybody in the street? Up to his right, running along the east face of the church to Marefair are St. Peter’s Gardens, formerly a disused alleyway but widened twenty or so years ago into a disused promenade by pulling down the school outfitters, Orme’s, which stood at the far corner. Studs remembers going there, mother-accompanied, in his twelfth year to buy a uniform for secondary school. He isn’t certain, but he has an idea that he might have been escorted to the same shop on an earlier occasion to be measured up for his humiliating kilt. As he recalls there used to be a pair of facing full-length mirrors in the changing room, where each excruciating moment of a child’s sartorial ordeal unfolded terrifyingly into a wood-panelled eternity. That cramped and curving passage, longer than the district, longer than the town, stretching away into the solid walls and the surrounding buildings, occupied by an unending queue of mortified and squirming seven-year-olds, where exactly had it gone? When they demolished Orme’s the Tailors, what became of its interior infinities? Had all those other ugly little boys, all those half-silvered layers of identity been folded up together like the painted sections of a lacquer screen and stuck in storage somewhere or, more likely, dumped?
This isn’t even his tough childhood. These aren’t his dismantled memories to mourn, and he’s surprised at how much this brief sortie into someone else’s ruined dreamtime is affecting him. He’d figured Warren was exaggerating in her murderously angry monologues, attempting to transform her girlhood landscape into a betrayed and bummed-out Brigadoon, but this is something different. Studs finds himself genuinely shocked by this matter-of-fact erasure of a place, a stratum of the past and a community. If the reality inhabited by several generations of a thousand or so people can be rubbed out like a cheap hood in the wrong bar on the wrong night, what or where is safe? Hell, these days, is there still a right side of the tracks for anybody to be born on? He’s come here to sniff out the surviving traces of a vanished yesterday, but all he sees in these deleted streets are the defective embryos of an emerging future. And when finally that future’s born and we can’t bear to look at it; when we’re ashamed to be the lineage, the parent culture that sired this unlovable grotesque, where shall we banish it so that we needn’t see it anymore? We can’t do like the Shah and send it to Northampton. It’s already here, already rooted, a condition gradually becoming universal.
Though St. Peter’s Street continues on between the relatively new and mostly vacant office buildings into Freeschool Street itself, Studs thinks he’ll maybe go the long way round, down Narrow Toe Lane into the picked carcass of the former Green Street and work his way up from there. There might be clues: a footprint or perhaps a witness previously too intimidated to come forward, some surviving stonework in amongst the brick veneers that might turn stool pigeon given the right incentive. Hands in his high jacket pockets and the elbows sticking out like dodo wings he makes his way down the vestigial lane, mentally colouring his sketchy image of James Hervey as he goes.
As Studs imagines it, the probable scenario has seven-year-old Hervey walking in from Hardingstone to school each morning, more than likely unaccompanied and for at least half of the year making the journey in pitch blackness. He’d have started out from his home village, which two centuries thereafter would acquire further gothic credentials in the person of ‘Blazing Car’ murderer Alf Rouse. The little boy, perhaps with the same delicate look, the same primly pursed lips and a tendency to bad coughs even then, scraping along utterly lightless rural byways with nothing but sudden owls for company to the old London Road. There, every weekday of his early life, the hulking headless cross, one of the stone memorials raised by Edward the First at every spot where Queen Eleanor’s body touched the earth on its long transport back to Charing by the Thames, looming up still and black against a pre-dawn grey. With little Jimmy Hervey’s front door barely closed behind him, the religiously inclined and sickly infant would have been immersed immediately in the ancient town’s mythology, with the decapitated monument a gatepost at the mouth of its funereal romance.
Then a long downhill trudge towards the blacked-out urban mass below, as yet devoid of even gaslight, the frail schoolboy making e
ntry through the reeking shadows of St. James’s End where cursing traders pulled too soon from their warm beds load carts and barrows, calling to each other in an unfamiliar patois through the gloom. Squashed adult faces with strange blemishes, squinting, half turned towards him in the lurching candlelight and from a gated yard the steaming, shuddering snort of horses. His pink fingers numb with cold, who knows how many books beneath one weedy infant arm, the future fatalist would be obliged to mount the hump of West Bridge with the dark of the unbroken day ahead diluted almost imperceptibly at every grudging step, the timeless river heard rather than seen somewhere beneath him. At the crest, the midpoint of the span, the castle ruins would have made themselves apparent to the child in those antipodes of dusk before a risen sun could burn the fog away, a sprawling twilight acreage of tumbled stones with shrill and flittering specks about the lapsing walls, the stumps of amputated towers. Was Northampton’s crumbled fortress, currently its hooker-hub and railway station, once conceivably the larval form of every subsequent Otranto, every Gormenghast?
From there, with a determinist momentum hastening his pace the pious, ailing youngster would have trickled from the scoliotic bridge to its far bank, rolling into the Boroughs and the tangled yarn of streets, the madcap turrets wearing witch’s hats of pigeon-spattered slate. Then Marefair and St. Peter’s Church, the weathered buttresses embossed with gurning Saxon imps, Hieronymus Bosch extras yawning from some long-passed Judgement Day. A few steps further on, Hazelrigg House where Cromwell dreamed an ironclad English future on the eve of Naseby. A last right turn into Freeschool Street would bring the budding ghastly visionary to his place of education, just as a left turn is by now taking Studs into the same street’s other, lower end.
The district, which Studs still recalls from his insomniac night-jaunts of twenty years back, is unrecognisable, a loved one’s face on the first visit to Emergency after the accident. The broken spar of Green Street that has brought him from the foot of Narrow Toe Lane to his current junction has no buildings anymore, no southern coastal levees shielding the disintegrating land from the erosive tidal traffic swirl of Peter’s Way. As for the uphill climb of Freeschool Street before him now, it’s a transparent and insultingly inaccurate imposture, someone who looks nothing like your mum but turns up a week after the cremation claiming to be her. The steep lane’s western flank, once dominated by Jem Perrit’s woodyard, number fourteen, is now for the most part untenanted business premises all the way up to Marefair. As the hatchet-faced investigator haltingly ascends he tries to recreate Ben Perrit’s missing-and-feared-dead family home; superimpose the teetering two or three storey hillside edifice with its attendant stables, lofts, goats, dogs and chickens on the nearly vehicle-free forecourt of the memory-resistant modern structure that succeeds it, but to no avail. Some isolated features cling in his recall like tatters of a bygone show bill doggedly adhering to a corrugated fence – the three steps up to a black painted door, heirlooms and horse brasses displayed in the front parlour – but these fragments simply hang in empty recollected space without connective tissue, lobby cards and teasers for an unrecoverable silent classic.
Just across the way from the conspicuous absence of the Perrit home, on the untidy freehand margin that is Freeschool Street’s east side, Studs draws abreast of Gregory Street’s carious maw with the collapsing brickwork at one corner bounding an eruptive buddleia-jungle, once the backdoor entrance to St. Gregory’s Church and the free school which it incorporated when James Hervey was a pupil here. At some point after that a row of terrace houses occupied the previously sanctified ground, all odd numbers counting up from seven through to seventeen down at the Gregory Street corner if Studs’ memory serves him right, coincidentally the ages between which the young James Hervey would be visiting this humble gradient every morning. Studs thinks he remembers his client Alma Warren saying she’d had relatives who lived in one of the now derelict and roofless properties, an aunt or second cousin who’d gone mad and locked her parents out while she sat all night playing the piano. Something like that, anyway, one of the countless grubby dramas since supplanted by a butterfly bush smothering the untouched twenty-year-old rubble.
Studs is half across the spindly capillary, glancing reflexively uphill to see if anything is coming even though he doesn’t think cars are allowed down this way these days, when he notices a man and woman standing at the street’s top end apparently engrossed in conversation. Something about the flamboyant orange blur of waistcoat that the man is wearing strikes a chord and has Studs fumbling in an inside pocket for his spectacles. Reaching the street’s far side he saddles them on his ice-breaker beak and peers around the deconstructed corner house, pressed flat against its bowing wall in case one of the couple glances down the lane and spots him, the pretended habit of a lifetime.
It’s Ben Perrit.
It’s Ben Perrit, talking to a woman who’s not half his age, her hair in rows and a provocatively short red coat on that looks like it’s made from PVC. To all appearances she’s canvassing for coitus. While the beery bard has clearly raised his sights since the embrace with Alma Warren, Studs still can’t help feeling that Ben could have travelled further and done better for himself. The local poet’s prospects for romance, however, aren’t Studs’ most immediate concern right now. What’s Perrit doing here, especially in light of that apparently chance Abington Street sighting earlier? It has to be more than coincidence, or at least in Studs’ current mise en scène it does. He briefly contemplates the possibility that Perrit might be an improbably inexpert tail, perhaps employed by Warren to keep surreptitious tabs on her pet private eye, but hastily dismisses the idea. Ben Perrit, for as long as Studs has known him, has been in no state to follow his own literary calling, let alone pursue another person with perhaps less rubber in their legs.
He risks another peek around the dog-eared corner. Up at Freeschool Street’s top end the woman is now backing carefully away from Benedict, who giggles and gesticulates obscurely at her as she goes. No, definitely not a tail. Not in that vivid carpet-remnant waistcoat and not with that laugh that’s audible from all the way down here, the polar opposite of unobtrusive. All the same, they must add up to something, these suggestive near-encounters. Ducking back behind the listing wall he tries to put his finger on the feeling that he has, the sense he’s missing something here, some part of the big picture he’s not privy to. He understands that, in real life, to inadvertently bump into someone twice in the same day is nothing special, but he’s trying to keep in character. From Studs’ perspective, Perrit’s multiple appearances can only be some kind of narrative contrivance, an essential story mechanism or device which signals the impending resolution of the mystery, an unexpected drawing in of all its mucky threads: Ben Perrit and the girl in the red plastic mac, Doddridge and Lambeth and determinism. William Blake. James Hervey.
When he next peers up the lane both Perrit and his piece of skirt are gone. Studs puts his spectacles away and leans against the psoriatic bricks. What now? He’s reached the place that he’s been looking for, and short of a probably suicidal climb over the wall he’s propped against into the overgrown bee-cafeteria beyond, he can’t go any further. He can’t occupy the spaces that James Hervey’s body heat once passed through; doesn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish with this pilgrimage through disappearance in the first place. Treading in a dead guy’s footprints like some toddler following his father through the snow, running on nothing but a blind faith in location as if walking the same streets as someone else forged any kind of a connection, how could he have been so stupid, such a schlemiel, possibly a patsy? Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.
He can remember Little John, during one of the relatively thoughtful and less raucous conversations that they’d had together. His folkloric friend had been in a more wistful, even plaintive humour than was usually the case, talking about a childhood that
he couldn’t properly recall, Arabian Nights he’d never really had.
“Y’know, I’d like to go back one day, Persia, the old country. See what it was like.”
No, John, mate. You can’t do that. Persia’s gone. ’79, they had a revolution after Jimmy Carter made the CIA stop paying off the ayatollahs so they’d leave your grandfather alone. They kicked him out and let the cancer finish him, and it’s a safe bet that the new regime aren’t big admirers of your family. It’s called Iran now. You’re not wanted there. You never were.”
Of course, you couldn’t say that. You could only mumble non-committally and wish him luck, ask him to bring you back a winged horse or a flying carpet, duty free, safe in the knowledge that by the next time John sobered up, the fond, nostalgic jaunt to Mordor would have been forgotten. It’s too bad that Studs ignored his own unspoken words of advice, hadn’t realised until right this moment that what’s true of Tehran is as true of Freeschool Street. This scruffy piece of ground has seen its revolutions, tyrannies replaced by other tyrannies, its character revised by different stripes of fundamentalism, socio-political or economic: King Charles, Cromwell, King Charles Junior, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Now that Studs thinks about it, the terrain beneath his feet even shares Little John’s status as deposed royalty: the rough trapeze of land bounded by Freeschool Street on one side and Narrow Toe Lane and Peter’s Gardens on the other would have been the grounds of Offa’s Saxon palace, with St. Peter’s and St. Gregory’s as the two churches flanking the construction to the west and east respectively. The yawning entrance to Jem Perrit’s buried wood-yard might have opened onto royal stables once, and if he’d only had the foresight to be born twelve hundred years odd earlier then Jem’s son Benedict could have been Offa’s jute-clad poet laureate, or possibly his fool. Poor Tom’s a-cold and a sheep’s bladder on a stick. Ben would have been a natural.