by Alan Moore
Into an intermediary zone.
As from some party in an upstairs flat
He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain,
Forced to do that which goes against the grain,
Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat,
In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown
And finds, now the experience is done,
His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair.
The jumping up and pacing, it would seem,
Were merely part of his unearthly dream.
Exhausted, leaving questions in the air,
He slides into a kind oblivion,
Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass,
The dead to be a literal underclass.
Out of grey nullity to consciousness
He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time,
Aware of self, of where he is and when,
His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den
Notes, after the stark, solarised sublime,
That there is colour, though not in excess
Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet,
Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss
On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue
He finds and spits out the exhausted bung
Of salvia then, needful of a piss,
Rises unsteadily to his bare feet
To navigate that unfamiliar place,
The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat,
Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo.
Fully awake now he peers down into
Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat,
Its exhalations lifting in his face
As memories rise too, sharp as a knife:
The porch of Peter’s Church, his student loan
And, oh God, did he suck Fat Kenny’s prick?
He’s overwhelmed. It’s all too much, too quick.
Den retches and with a despairing moan,
In its entirety, throws up his life
For some few minutes, doubled in a crouch,
Then flushes. In the rattling pipes, trapped air
Bellows in anguish like a minotaur.
Mouth wiped, Den clumps back down to the ground floor
And the mauve gloom of a hushed front room where
Fat Kenny still sleeps, supine, on the couch,
Extinguished pipe clasped in one pudgy hand.
Though keen to leave, Den feels it only right
To say goodbye. “I’m off, then.” No reply.
He notices a flat, green-bellied fly
Orbit the still, shaved skull and then alight
But though he sees he does not understand
Why his host shows no sign of coming round.
“I said I’m going.” Den begins to feel
Uneasy and as he steps closer spies
The motionless breast and unblinking eyes.
With realisation comes a shattering peal
Of sudden dreadful and incessant sound,
A circling and swooping banshee roar
That shivers glass and sets dogs barking but
Appears to have no source save him. Den screams,
An improvised Kurt Schwitters piece that seems
Expressive although inarticulate
And backs in the direction of the door
Which, unlocked, yields at once and opens wide
Whence dazzling rays pour through the gaping hatch
To blind him. Crumpled sleeping-bag forgot
And slammed door ringing like a rifle shot,
Den takes off without bothering to snatch
His shit-smeared sneakers from the step outside
Or to look back. In truth, he doesn’t dare.
The grass is cold and wet – Den has no socks –
As he sprints past the tower blocks – nor a plan –
But then in Crispin Street he spots a man
Whose pale blue eyes and thinning flaxen locks
Are oddly reminiscent, but from where?
Upon Den’s lips unspoken epics burn
And seek release, drugged visions that might be
As those of Coleridge, Cocteau, Baudelaire.
By now he’s reached the guy with sparse blonde hair
Who eyes the gasping boy uncertainly
And asks “Are you alright, mate?” with concern
Made clear. Is Den alright? Aye, there’s the rub,
He thinks, one with De Quincy and Rimbaud,
Preparing for an image-jewelled account
To spill forth as though from some Bardic fount
But all he can come out with is “Yes. No.
Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub.
That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub.”
His mouth won’t stop. “They wouldn’t let us go.”
Won’t pause. “Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out.
It was a pub”, as if that were in doubt,
Language bereft of any metered flow
With words recurring, echoing like Dub
Through burned-out ganglia. The stranger’s stare
Is quizzical. “Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate.
Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept
You at all night?” Although Den’s barely slept
He knows the man is trying to judge his state
Of mind. “Which was it, anyway? Up where?”
“Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub.”
Den babbles, but the blond man nods his head.
“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that”, and then
He mentions, in the corners, little men.
Den strains to comprehend what’s just been said,
Brain washed, or at least given a good scrub.
“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”
Seeming to understand the man takes out
Some cigarettes and offers one to Den
With calm acceptance bordering on Zen
Then lights both. Den squints. What is it about
This quarter of the unforgiving town
That brings such things? His saviour tells him how
He isn’t mad but will take time to mend;
Provides more cigarettes; offers a tip
On where to rest, suggesting a small strip
Of grass with trees at Scarletwell Street’s end,
Adding “They’ll be in blossom around now.”
With syllables become a syllabub
Den calls his benefactor a good bloke
And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill
But looking back to find the stranger still
Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,
Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,
Then carries on down the long slope again,
Barefoot, skirting jewelled spreads of powdered glass,
To the T-junction at the bottom where
A single house stands near the corner there
Amid a great amnesia of grass,
Its presence making a stark absence plain
Yet with no clue as to whose residence
It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.
Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,
With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,
Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among
The lyric rubble of experience
In search of rhymes. The solitary abode
Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,
Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.
Lighting his cigarettes each from the last
Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend
The dead man in his house just up the road,
That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains
At the idea of it; cannot begin
To analyse nor even quite define
How jarringly abrupt t
hat end-stopped line.
Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within
The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain
But finds instead its own signature tread
And sensibility. Den’s narrative
Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity,
A consequence of inability
To put forced stanzas by and only live
His language, though it goes unread
And unrewarded. No more self-deceit.
He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop,
Pay off his debt and wait for the day when
He’s had a life to write about. Just then
A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop
At the round-shouldered curbside up the street.
A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist
Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race,
The younger of the two and yet more frail
With bandages in lieu of bridal veil
Surmounting her exquisite, battered face
And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist
To emphasise the matrimonial air.
Their car left at the corner of the block
One helps the other slowly up the hill
Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still
Hear their muffled exchange before they knock
The door of the lone house that’s standing there,
This summons answered after a long pause.
There’s conversation too hushed to make out
Before the women, minus one bouquet,
Return to their parked car and drive away,
A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt
Regarding its effect, still more its cause,
But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.
Arse chill with dew he reconstructs his night,
The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been,
Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen:
A stripped-down attic statement, still and white,
Without a trace of ambiguity
Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude
To anything. Den needs a modern voice
As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare,
Words adequate to these new ruins where
We may describe the wastelands of our choice
In language that’s been shattered and re-glued
To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit
For one last cigarette then phone his mum.
Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail
Diapasons of disaster and yet fail
To mar his sudden equilibrium,
The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite
In time’s jewelled action, where future and past
Shall stand inseparable at the last.
GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN
Viewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26th, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams.
Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to an impasto skim.
War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The continually adjusted now – a hairline crack between the stupefying masses of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked – is a hot interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to interior, night.
Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying to minimise the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummelled by the working week just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlours reconfigured as the stylised paths of palace gardens wherein varicoloured button dynasties conduct their patient courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his speciality and he is thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic, rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box. Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the consideration of annoying games. New angle.
Levering by stealth onto his back he fancies that from overhead he must resemble one of those stone medieval knights, asleep on cold sarcophagi with petrified retrievers at their feet. There must have been a Middle Ages battle game at one point, he supposes, keeps and castles, jousting and the rest, although he can’t call one to mind. Amongst the various John Wadham’s pastimes of his younger days, historically-themed entertainments had been thin upon the ground, the focus mostly on a modern world then trying to compose itself from out the bombsite rubble of the 1940s. He remembers one called Spy Ring, plastic head and shoulders busts of men in trench-coats and fedoras inching between foreign embassies, an accurate embodiment of Cold War machinations in that rules of play were by and large impenetrable and made no apparent sense. Alma and Mick had given up on it almost immediately and consigned the whole thing to an oubliette beneath the wardrobe, an effective and achievable detente. Monopoly, he thinks, has always been preoccupied with a hard-nosed modernity, a compensatory ritual to suit those long years of post-war austerity, imaginary Weimar wheelbarrows piled with confetti-coloured currency in which to lose your ration book, if only briefly. In his childhood play, he realises, he’d been largely quarantined within the present day. He thinks he can recall Napoleonic stylings to the packaging of Risk, the game of global strategy that made world domination by Australia seem unavoidable, but then megalomania, he decides, has always been more timeless than historical. It’s like a leather jacket, never out of date. Tight close-up.
Blinking lids descend like long exposure shutters on the s
late-blue irises, silicate debris swept discretely to the corners. Pupils expand, saturated, blotting up the midnight ink. It comes to him that all human endeavour is a game of some sort or, more properly, a great compendium of games that are obscurely interwoven and connected, a confounding complex of pursuits with pre-set difficulty levels where the odds are always with the house. A game, he thinks, is surely any system with an arbitrary set of imposed rules, either a contest which results in many losers and a single winner or some non-competitive arrangement where the pleasure of participation is its own reward. And obviously, unless the rules are those of physics they are arbitrary in one sense or other, made up by somebody, somewhere, sometime. Capital and finance are quite clearly games, probably poker or roulette, at least to judge by those Enron executives who’d featured on the evening news before Mick went to bed, trading in future markets they’d invented out of thin air and were trying, unsuccessfully, to will into existence. Actually, that kind of play, rogue traders and all that, it’s not like poker or roulette so much as it’s like Buckaroo, seeing how many gold-prospecting pickaxes and shovels you can hang on the spring-loaded donkey of market credulity before, inevitably, it explodes and startles everybody.
Status, reproduction and romance, political manoeuvring or the cops-and-robbers interplay of crime and legislation, all of it a game. His sister’s exhibition in the morning which he’s partly dreading, partly looking forward to; all of the paintings, all the art, it’s just a different sort of game that’s played with references, nods and winks to this or that, the highbrow clever-dickery that it alludes to. Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilisation and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddlywinks. It’s ludicrous, as if the species had developed higher consciousness in order to invent a more elaborate form of noughts and crosses. When is everybody going to get serious? Even when people are engaged in slaughtering one another like in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s just Cowboys and Indians run disastrously out of hand. The last time Britain had been twat enough to interfere in Afghan matters, with the British and the Russian Empires staging their almighty pissing contest in the hundred years preceding World War One, they’d come right out and called it the Great Game. Perhaps the toppled pawns back in their flag-draped boxes for a final toytown tour of Wooton Bassett could be viewed as forfeit tokens in a game, although he can’t see what’s so great about it. Wearying of this internal shuttlecock, this back-and-forth, he opts to take another run for goal, the goal being insensibility. Closing his eyes is purely aspirational as he commences the commando roll onto his right side. Pull back to a streaming, howling stratosphere.