by Alan Moore
The breeze seems cooler on his stubble, and Studs briskly shakes his head to clear it of the memories, the reverie that gets all over you like gunshot residue. How long has he been standing here on Gregory Street’s corner, uselessly deliberating on dead dwarves and how it’s usually the turf that ends up as the loser in a turf war? He detects slight changes in the local ambience which indicate that he’s been holding up this listing wall for quite some time. The western sky is clearer with its light diluted and more palatable, understated tints of colour in its thinning wash as the blue fresco of the day reaches its edges. Distant cars and lorries would appear to have run out of things to say, their conversation flagging and become more intermittent, trailing off to grunts in the post rush-hour hush. Birds arcing down to guttering shrug off their troubles and assume the careless air of almost-home commuters. Friday, May the 26th, makes for the pink, embarrassed blush of its conclusion.
He decides to cast his poorly-placed Mr. Potato Head eye over Horseshoe Street, check out what’s left now of St. Gregory’s other end before he heads for home, calls it a day as if there’s something else that he could call it. In the absence of a bitter wind he turns his leather collar up so that he feels more isolated, and with a last glance at the ambiguous dealership which has supplanted Offa and Jem Perrit and all points between he rolls his shoulders in a hoodlum strut away down Gregory Street with the declining sun behind him. To his left the dereliction of the corner property continues pretty much unchecked while on his right there’s simply nothing there, an agoraphobic stretch of flayed land tumbling uninterrupted down to Peter’s Way and overprinted with a schist of levelled floor-plans like the quantum ripples still discernible on the event-horizon ‘skin’ of black holes, our only surviving record of the cosmic bodies already ingested.
At the street’s bend where it angles sharply to the south stands a three-floor Victorian factory, a great cube of smoked stone which would appear to have been transformed into a recording studio. A fashionably minimal house logo is affixed high on the soot-blasted façade in a naive attempt to impose an identity on the amnesiac edifice, just now pretending to be Phoenix Studios, a well-intentioned effort to evoke the flames of rebirth from the ashes of the neighbourhood, which clearly isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that kind of a fire. In what looks like a disused yard to one side of the building is a heaped moraine of tyres, deposited here long ago as though by a black rubber glacier in the long cold snap following the era of the dino-dozers and tyranno-JCBs, their jointed necks craning and swivelling to take a bite out of a displaced family’s front bedroom, grey wallpaper weeds trailing from yellow metal jaws, an undiscriminating swallowing. He turns right into Gregory Street’s continuation only to discover that there isn’t one. Beyond the studio there’s nothing separating this end of the road from the dual carriageway of Horseshoe Street which runs downhill in parallel, save for a couple of ridiculous low barriers that Little John could have stepped over without noticing. Studs feels a fleeting obligation to walk all the way down and around the edge of where the depots, builders’ yards and houses should have been, out of respect for the dead properties, but that strikes him as both insane and too much trouble so he cuts across the empty dirt instead.
The wide road is to all intents and purposes bereft of cars or people from its foot by the picked skeleton of the gas-holder up to its far summit at the top there, where it runs into the Mayorhold. In the tumbleweed hiatus between clocking off and tying a few on, the district’s voices, both contemporary and ancestral, switch off as abruptly as a background tape-loop. He can hear the empty moments settling like dust on the abandoned highway, muffling its ghosts, the silence bowling off downhill to quiet the supper tables of Far Cotton. Later, almost certainly, comes a cacophony of sirens, retching, intimacies bellowed into mobile phones and all the hairy other, but for now there’s this unscripted pause, the welcome presence of dead air.
He takes his time mounting the incline, feels professionally compelled to notice everything, to let no nuance slip the dragnet of his razor-honed atten-
tion. Here a paving slab cracked into fjords at one corner, there a rear view of the Marefair skyline with its hidden back-yard complications fondly cluttering the rooftop architecture, aerials and fungal growths of satellite dish sprouting from the chimney bricks or drainpipe heights. Across the way, above the low relief of a breeze-block crash-barrier running up the slope’s spine, the far side of Horseshoe Street is in a noticeably better state of upkeep than the tattered edge that Studs patrols, falling within the relatively well-maintained town centre rather than in the forsaken patchwork of the Boroughs. While the one-time motorcycle-
pirate haven of the Harbour Lights is presently enduring the indignity of a rebranding as the Jolly Wanchor or however one pronounces it, the building is at least still standing and may one day see again its leather-armoured clientele. A little further up, an iron-gated yard appended to the 1930s billiard hall looks incomplete without a stumbling and cheery bunch of post-war dads still in their demob suits and taking too long over farewells as they make unhurriedly towards the exit.
Just beyond the snooker parlour is the Gold Street corner where a century ago there stood Vint’s Palace of Varieties, a venue at which the young Charlie Chaplin played on various occasions. Studs is unsure if the great screen hobo’s skittering skid row routines would work as well against a backdrop of contemporary poverty; a different destitution. He thinks not, though that might be because he’s not imagining the Boroughs in decade-evading black and white, nor with its miseries conducted to a tinkling piano soundtrack. Background music changes everything. If they’d stuck some Rick Astley or perhaps the Steptoe theme behind his impaled-sister-raping scene in Besson’s Joan of Arc it would have been hilarious. Or “Nessun Dorma” over his Hamburglar appearances.
As he draws level with the snooker joint across the road he pulls his focus back to the distressed concrete hypotenuse he’s currently ascending, on the scummy side of the street with its disinterred carcass aesthetic and an angry pseudonym on every lamppost. Reckoning that this must roughly be the spot on which the east end of St. Gregory’s once stood he halts his climb to take stock of the victim district’s injuries, to gauge the full extent of what seem almost frenzied mutilations to its substance, even to its map. The surgical removal of the vital organs, could that be the killer’s signature? Some of the shallower cuts to the masonry look like defensive wounds in Studs’ professional opinion, and he’d put good money on discovering skin traces such as planning application notices beneath the chipped slates of the area’s fingernails. Struck by the unexpected poignancy of his hardboiled analogy he finds he’s starting to fill up. The neighbourhood, it’s … you know. Raped and with her face smashed in, but she put up a fight. Good girl. Brave girl. Sleep tight.
Finding a cafeteria serviette deep in one jacket pocket, Studs wipes quickly at his shiny sockets, blows his nose and pulls himself together before he resumes his survey. Nothing in the crazy-quilt of random surfaces and signs before him indicates even the homeopathic water-memory of a church. The past is cauterised. There’s even a dull red patch halfway up one mongrel wall which, without benefit of his corrective lenses, looks to him like a wax seal on the doomed territory’s document, a deal that was signed off some several generations back, all done and dusted. Nonetheless, this isn’t what James Hervey the short-trousered gothic schoolboy saw, scuffing his satchel on the rough sills of the eighteenth century. This isn’t what the unnamed pilgrim monk home from Jerusalem experienced a thousand years before, prompted by angels to the centre of his land and carrying a rugged cross to put there when he found it, hewn from heavy rock, a message from Golgotha like a petrified kiss on a postcard. And back then, there would have been no doubts about the provenance of the communication, not with Fed Ex seraphim arranging the delivery. Nobody would have wondered who the sender was, even with no return address. The angel couriers were rigorous scientific bona fides, their cruciform stone the equivalen
t of a Higgs boson particle arrived to validate the standard theocratic model. A big deal, in other words. An enchilada that was more than whole.
No wonder they made such a fuss about the artefact, set it into the Horseshoe Street face of St. Gregory’s where it remained a site of pilgrimage for centuries, all of those last-ditch fingertips tracing the worn-smooth axes to their intersection, all the lame and blistered feet which bore them here. The centre of the country, measured by God’s own theodolite. That surely must have carried some weight with King Alfred when he named Northampton foremost of the shires, effectively the capital in an alternate history where William never came. The great cake-scorcher was just rubberstamping policy laid down by the Almighty. More than merely royal pasturage this spot was holy ground, marked out by things with burning haloes at the say-so of an ultimate authority. That’s how they saw it, how it was: a violent and miraculous reality much like Studs’ own, perfumed by horseshit for the want of cordite. In a dark age the noir outlook would be a foregone conclusion.
And yet, even with the gulf of a millennium to separate the relic’s origins from Hervey’s schooldays, wouldn’t the conceptual charge and inspirational importance of the object remain undiminished in believing eyes, especially those of a seven-year-old boy whose father was a clergyman? For ten years, near enough a quarter of his prematurely interrupted life, the ailing child had laid his hands or eyes upon the primitive and earnest talisman, the chiselled X on an interior treasure-map, a seeding crystal of Jerusalem itself. The simple, fundamental shape would have been printed on his bedtime eyelids, colours back to front in the screensaver drift before sleep, a test pattern on the hypnagoggle-box. Enough to stamp that minimalist template onto Hervey’s coming life, Studs would have thought. A fragment carried here from the eternal holy city could provide the dynamo which drove the young ecclesiast in one side of John Wesley’s operation and then, acrimoniously, out the other. The Rood in the Wall they called it, manifesting Hervey’s granite-hard conviction, powering his writings, Theron and Aspasio or his sepulchral meditations, energies eventually earthed in William Blake who closes off the metaphysic circuit when he writes Jerusalem.
Slow increments of early dusk are gathering around the scowling Sherlock as he contemplates the haphazard assembly of a dozen centuries, the spectrum of failed social strategies and mix of incompatible building materials represented by the mural mess in front of him. The rood has long since disappeared and taken the wall with it, leaving only a conspicuous and desolating absence. He can’t help but wonder where it went, the crude-cut icon sent to tag the middle of the land, the centre of his pulp investigation. Was it spirited away by sharp-eyed demolition workers, either mercenary or conceivably devout? Perhaps more likely, did it go unrecognised, its aura faded, its significance by then bled out into the thirsty dirt, abandoned in a deeper drainage ditch than that in which the tombstone of Saint Ragener was finally discovered sometime in the nineteenth century? Composed of matter near as ancient and enduring as the world itself, a great plus-symbol to denote the site’s positive terminus, Studs knows that it must still exist somewhere, as widely scattered shards if nothing else. When space and time are ending the device’s disparate molecules will still be there for the finale, possibly intact, a symbol that has long outlived the doctrine symbolised, with its imputed righteousness remaining aeons after Hervey, Doddridge, Blake and everybody else are gone the way of all flesh at the far ends of a predetermined universe.
An atavistic pineal tingle tells him that he’s being watched, an ingrained P.I. reflex critical to his imaginary line of work. Swivelling his extraordinary profile, like the cliff-face simulacrum of an Indian chief in Fortean Times, he glares uphill to where a rotund little man with curly white hair and a matching beard, possibly one of Santa’s helpers, stands poised apprehensively on Marefair’s corner. The rube’s face, bespectacled eyes wide and fixed on Studs with an expression of startled incomprehension, rings a faint ’40s hotel reception bell in his recall, sets him to shifting the half-empty coffee cups and stacked pornography from his internal filing cabinet, sifting through the outdated mug-sheets for a moniker to go with the familiar, shifty features.
As the piece of work turns hurriedly away like he’s pretending that he hasn’t just been clocking the detective, making across Marefair for the other side and pointedly not looking back, the penny drops. The interloper on Studs’ private made-for-TV drama is the former councillor James Cockie, that same jovial countenance affixed beside the header of a weekly column in the local Chronicle & Echo, copies of which he’s perused while staying at his mum’s place. This being the code name for his office. You can’t be too careful.
Watching the retired council head laboriously roll his fleshy snowball off up Horsemarket towards the Mayorhold, the unfrozen Piltdown man-hunter reflects on Cockie’s late but perhaps pertinent arrival in this last stretch of the storyline. While technically the genre generally demands the killer be a character the readers or the viewers have been introduced to early in the game, there’s always those convention-bucking mavericks like Derek Raymond, with his greasy beret still behind the bar down at the French in Soho, mimicking real life in that the culprit’s often no one who’s been seen before. In oddball works like that, Studs soberly reflects, the tale turns out to have been more about the labyrinthine mental processes of the protagonist than the contortions of the case he’s trying desperately to solve. That said, there’s no compelling literary imperative that rules out the ex-councillor from the inquiry. With the former Labour politician’s dwindling mass receding from view in a slow red shift, Studs puts it all together.
Having had, presumably, a hand or at the very best a chubby finger in the neighbourhood’s brutal demise while still in office, even if entirely passively, Jim Cockie fits the profile. There was that look in his bugged Tex Avery eyes, furtive and guilty, right before he’d turned around and walked off in a hurry. Don’t they say, if you wait long enough, the murderer always returns to where it happened, to the crime scene? Sometimes it’s to gloat, or sometimes in a panic-stricken effort to conceal incriminating evidence. Occasionally, so they tell him, it’s to masturbate, although Studs doubts if that would be the motive in this current instance. Once in a long while, of course, the perp’s compulsion to revisit the chalk outlines of their killing ground might be born of a genuine remorse.
Uphill, the new prime suspect is diminishing away to nothingness like a white phosphor dot shrinking into the starless vastness of a cooling 1950s telly. Curling his lower lip until he’s worried that it could roll up and travel down his chin, the stumped P.I. turns south and heads back down the way he came. He knows that Cockie is protected; knows that he could never get a case to stick. Forget it, Studs. It’s Chinatown.
The triangles and diamonds of a stencilled sky behind the old gas-holder hulking further down the slope are starting their decline to indigo, and he can feel the utter jet of night descending on whatever narrative he’s in, the big obsidian coming down upon this over-complicated continuity with desperate hours to go before tomorrow morning and his rendezvous with Warren at her exhibition. He heads back to where he left the, oh, he doesn’t know, time-travelling De Lorean or something, with his craggy head a place of gothic transepts and determinism, the soul-crushing clockwork of the hackneyed, billiard-ball plot trajectory, this character-arc passing for a life.
He thinks of crosses, double-crosses and the Mr. Big behind the scenes pulling the strings for Hervey, Wesley, Swedenborg and all the rest, the man upstairs who’s always careful to keep out the picture, an elusive boss of night and mortal intrigue, frequently reported dead but always with some wiggle room left for a sequel.
He locates his car in the protracted slow dissolve of twilight, drives home, checks to see if any casting agencies have left a message, eats his warmed-up dinner, goes to bed. After a great while and a mug of Horlicks, everything goes noir.
THE JOLLY SMOKERS
Den wakes beneath the windswept porch al
one
On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet
Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,
Ground to which he feels no entitlement
Nor any purchase on the sullen street;
Unpeels his chill grey cheek from chill grey stone
Then orients himself in time and space.
The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor
With on one wall some obsolete decree
Meant for the Cypriot community
And at the near end an iron-studded door,
A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face,
Or that of some more academic tome.
He struggles up onto one threadbare knee.
Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day
Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway
Thanks to the shame of university
And a conviction that he can’t go home,
Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves
Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch
Through furthering Den’s literary bent.