by Alan Moore
She sniggered, for once with him and not at him.
“It’s not like I had a lot of choice. You were a man made out of warts. But still, this could be a new trend in portraiture, capturing people when they’ve just had burning shit thrown in their face. Though actually, that might have been how Francis Bacon worked, now that I think about it.”
Fairly sure that Francis Bacon was the person some believed had really written all the works of Shakespeare, Mick was nonetheless unclear about the relevance of facial injuries and so said nothing. Fortunately, before Alma could interpret his enduring silence as a sign of ignorance regarding modern art, she was distracted by her thespian associate Robert Goodman, shouldering his way through the surrounding press of bodies to present Mick’s sibling with a sheaf of pages printed out from Wikipedia and a glower of generalised resentment which allowed no clue as to its origins. The strange old woman that his earlier childhood tormentor had become inclined her massive rained-off bonfire cranium in the direction of the plainly discontented actor, her blast-pattern eyes grown larger while at the same time somehow retracted, pulled back into crater sockets. He realised that he’d been saved by the arrival of a victim more mouthwatering, more in the way of Alma’s primary prey.
“Why, Bobby. We were just this moment talking about likely inspirations for the work of Francis Bacon, and now here you are. Is this random handful of litter you’re holding for me?”
The gorgon Gielgud’s mouth, badly lagged piping at the best of times, was briefly fishhooked sideways at one corner in contempt.
“This, for your information, is the stuff you asked me to find out at the last minute, about William Blake’s connection to the Boroughs. You said if I didn’t that you’d never speak to me again.”
Accepting the loose paper bundle, Alma showed the hurt performer method-school concern.
“Bobby, I’m sure I never said that. Was that what your voices told you?”
“I do not hear voices.”
“Voices? Bobby, no one said that you hear voices.”
“Yes they did! You did! You said it just now. I just heard you say it.”
“Oh. Oh, dear. The doctors were afraid that this might happen …”
By this time already inching imperceptibly away, Mick took the seasoned player’s speechless indignation as a natural break in which he could announce that he was popping outside for a cigarette. Granting permission with a nod, his sister only paused in her psy-ops manoeuvre to demand that he not run off with her lighter, which he promised not to do before remembering that it was in fact his.
He crabbed towards the open nursery doorway with its breeze-breath, squeezing once more past the front edge of the inconvenient table on which rested Alma’s shrink-rayed Boroughs, pressed uncomfortably against its western boundary. Irritating as this was, it did present a further opportunity to inspect details overlooked during that first jaw-dropping presentation, and he found himself examining afresh the scaled down area surrounding Doddridge Church. Just up from the anachronistic Chalk Lane turret with its witch’s hat, he found firstly the church itself and then his current whereabouts, the erstwhile Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dancing school down at the bottom end of Phoenix Street. In keeping with the model landscape’s combinatory chronology, despite the old red-lettered sign above the door proclaiming the school’s terpsichorean tradition, the front windows were those of the later nursery, thin Rizla tissues with the scene within described on their faux glass in watercolour miniature. In this instance, Mick realised, you could actually make out the table upon which a tinier reproduction of this tiny reconstruction was just visible. Feeling a little nauseous he dragged himself away from the exhibit, as he did so noticing for the first time the scrappy note taped to the table’s forward edge. There was no number but the artist had at least made a half-hearted stab at titling the dollhouse slum, even if that was only with an unimaginative tag which read The Boroughs. Shaking his head ruefully, he made for the fresh air.
Outside, inhaling a too-sweet first quarter inch of cigarette, it struck him that all the surrounding flats and maisonettes, diminished by their distance from him, were almost exactly the same size as those inside the gallery, the bygone buildings caught in the wrong end of Alma’s telescope. Those unknown people briefly treading the far balconies, bag-burdened widows shuffling and stout men in premature string vests, were similarly dwindled to the scale of Airfix Royal Fusiliers – they’d never made a box with stems of huddling civilians – and he was surprised to note that the degree of personality which he attributed to these remote pedestrians was hardly more than he’d allow a plastic figure of equivalent size. Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.
Above, amidst scudding vanilla floss on Cerulean Blue, a shifting and elastic flock of starlings momentarily assumed the outline of a single bird. It was a more ingenious effect than anything seen thus far at the exhibition, although he’d admit that the last item had both impressed and unnerved him. Glancing back across his shoulder at the nursery’s picture window, he construed the riotous jumble of attendees visibly contained within its bordering frame as an art statement in itself, perhaps a lurid study by one of those vicious Weimar stylists like George Grosz or somebody like that. He could see Alma as she stood attempting to console or further condescend to an offended-looking Robert Goodman and beyond her made out the malevolent old ladies, definitely sisters he decided, whom nobody seemed to know, both standing listening and nodding eagerly as Roman Thompson and Melinda Gebbie laughingly recounted something which involved extravagant gesticulation to the weathered anarchist’s unconvinced boyfriend. Taking a last few fugitive puffs on his greatly truncated cigarette, as though before the scaffold, he corkscrewed its stub into the damp grass at his feet, deciding that he should once more retire within since Alma’s effigies weren’t going to castigate themselves.
Through the propped-open entrance, window-lensed air slapped him with a warm, ethereal flannel. Tacking through the scrum along the forward edge of the obstructing table, essaying a path of tight diagonals that took him past Dave Daniels, late arrivals he identified as Ted Tripp and Tripp’s shrewd and saucy lass Jan Martin, plus a hangdog and trail-dusted figure who Mick thought might have been Alma’s dealer, he arrived eventually at the point where he’d left off, a little way along the nursery’s northern wall. Pointedly trying not to look at item twelve’s industrially scoured facial landscape, he turned his attentions to the largish landscape-ratio pencil crayon drawing on its right.
This time the scrawled, perfunctory label was taped to the plain frame’s lower spar and simply read Upstairs. More accurately it read Upstars, a tiny letter ‘i’ and a directional dart of blue biro added underneath the misspelled title as a hasty and corrective afterthought. All this untidiness, he realised, was beginning to upset him. Having previously had only limited experience of the phenomenon, he’d hoped for more from serious culture. More professionalism. Though it wasn’t actually his area of expertise he felt his sister must be showing Art up somehow, making it look more like fly-tipping than the prestigious social institution he’d assumed that it was meant to be. Already miffed with item thirteen after brief perusal of its messy caption, Mick lifted his gaze to the wide-angle piece itself and found it near infantilising in its wondrousness; in the proportions of its marvel.
The frankly celestial view presented was as if the viewer gazed along the length of a gargantuan boulevard or hallway, broad and high enough to lose a town in and appea
ring to run on forever, desperately pursuing an escaped vanishing point. His reeling spatial equilibrium recovering, he realised belatedly that he was looking at a monstrous and impossibly enlarged Emporium Arcade, with distant bounding walls that rose, tier upon tier, towards a glass train-station roof wide as the Amazon. Through this, replacing weather there were complex geometric figures, massive and irregular in dotted white lines against blue as though a manual for atmospheric origami. Other than this vertigo-inducing ceiling, the vast corridor appeared to be made out of wood. Pine planking of extravagant dimensions stretched away to the remote convergence of the background, with at intervals what looked like outsized horizontal picture-frames, a grid of bevel-bordered holes filling the staggering expanse from edge to edge. The closest of these apertures had one end of its oblong visible in close-up at the picture’s bottom centre, the restricted glimpse down into it revealing only setting jelly, stained glass, or perhaps some novel combination of the two. Out from the roomier of these containing rectangles, a half-mile off along the indoor avenue, rose trees that were preposterously magnified, a silver birch scaled up to a sequoia with the badly drawn eyes of its bark now those of a leviathan. The work achieved immensity in the contrasting placement of almost microbial human figures to supply the necessary agoraphobic size and distance, sparsely strewn flea-circus individuals in dreamlike stances like the hybrid offspring of Delvaux and R.S. Lowry. Closest to the lower foreground and thus most discernible, two children stood on the raised wooden far edge of the nearest floor-hole, gazing off away from the observer and surveying an interior infinity. The smaller of the pair he recognised from the blond curls and tartan dressing gown as his own infant likeness, last seen via the medium of chronic dermatitis in the previous image, seated on his mother’s knee in their back yard. The taller urchin was the little forehead girl, also from item twelve, identifiable by her skinned-rabbit scarf. A far light wet and white drenched the extremities of the huge gallery in sloppy dazzle.
Almost every colour was a layered glaze of others in a wordless palimpsest, with this fastidious technique swiped openly from the superior crayon work of Alma’s pal Melinda, as his sister had often attested. The depicted great hall, once seen, made the tiny nursery in which it was exhibited seem even more cramped and oppressive by comparison, with a typhoon of elbows and the aural carpet-fluff of conversation hyphenated by Ben Perrit’s tape-looped laugh, an Ancient Mariner on nitrous oxide. Taking a last glance at the bright landing and its liberating endlessness, he shuffled to his right between some fellow connoisseur sardines and scrutinised the next two offerings, both narrow portrait-aspect slats of polychrome hung one above the other. Uppermost was exhibit fourteen, and frowning at the exercise-book tag affixed beneath it, this time with the blue ballpoint fading to nothing mid-word before it resumed in red, revealed the title to be An As odeus Flight.
Dear God, the thing was all in coloured biro, all one foot by three of it, and quite a disconcerting thing it was. Mick had an inkling he remembered Alma telling him about this piece when she was working on it sometime around last September, saying that she’d managed to track down a source of the immensely satisfying multi-coloured biros that had been her chosen medium during childhood. She’d complained that these days anything in coloured biro would most likely be considered as Outsider Art, although she thought this term a middle-class evasion to avoid having to speak of Nutcase Art which, meant admiringly, was her preferred description of the genre. In the case of item fourteen, Mick thought that she definitely had a point. The person who’d laboriously tinted this imposing image, graded scribble over graded scribble, burnished until every hue became a sucked-sweet sticky gemstone, shouldn’t be allowed to go outside. The most disturbing thing about it was that it resembled an accomplished illustration from a nineteenth-century children’s book, albeit one conceived and executed in some maximum security environment of either Hell or Bedlam. From the glass roof in the exquisitely doodled upper background to the pale wood floorboards in the lower, Mick deduced that this scene was apparently occurring in the same unlimited interior space as the preceding panorama, as though the whole numbered sequence of seemingly unrelated pieces had decided to resolve themselves into a linear story of a sort, a ludicrously grandiose wordless comic strip albeit one with precious little in the way of continuity between its monster panels. At least this one had an actual monster in. Down at the bottom a small group of people, mostly children, stood about what looked to be one of the old-style workmen’s braziers that Mick could not recall with any accuracy when he’d ceased to see around. Two of the kids, he thought, were his own toddler avatar and the mysterious girl with the necrotic necklace from the last two pictures, although these were very small and, as in item thirteen, faced away from the percipient. Four other children were in view, all unidentifiable, accompanied by a more sombre and ever so slightly bigger figure which appeared to be that of a strange old woman in a bonnet and black apron. Like him and the rabbit-wrapped girl, all these had their backs turned, gazing both up and away towards the unbelievable monstrosity that all but filled the picture’s further reaches. Mountainous in its incomprehensible dimensions, this was a grotesque three-headed horror sat astride a low-slung dragon creature only slightly less appalling than its hideous rider. One head was that of a picador-crazed bull, while balancing it on the other shoulder was a snorting ram with curled horns like black ammonites, if ammonites could outgrow whales. The central cranium belonged to a crowned man of startling ugliness and apoplectic rage, the overall proportions of this triple-headed dragon-jockey having something of the dwarfish to them. Naked, in one fist the furious abomination clutched a lance on which streamed rivulets of filth, a sharpened barber’s pole of shit and blood that scratched the cloud-high ceiling glass with its appalling tip. Mick thought that there seemed something biblical about the tableau, albeit a bible where the schizophrenia was unambiguous. He shuddered inwardly and moved on to the piece beneath.
It was another one in portrait ratio if the portrait’s subject were a lamppost, a long plunging slot of fruit-gum colours in tart sherbet light. Almost predictably by this point a close view revealed the medium as cut or powdered glass, a palette that Mick recognised from the upmarket mineral water bottles in his big sister’s recycling bin. A sugaring of tinted crystal had apparently been glued to what he thought must be some sort of paint-by-numbers outline on the board or canvas underneath, with clear glass over painted colours where presumably hues were required for which no readily available commercial match existed. After some few seconds of adjustment to a grainier focus he became aware that he was looking at a steeply-angled Spring Lane as seen from its lower end, a waterfall of grimy and unrinsed milk-bottle grey with vivid Perrier weeds between its paving slabs, below a scintillant and flame-blue sky of smashed Ty Nant. Placed in the middle ground approximately halfway up the archery-slit composition was a pride, a murder or a parliament of children dressed in glittering real ale browns, too tiny for identifying detail but most probably the same grubby ensemble that had featured in the piece above. Crouched nervous in the foreground, in their number and essential colouration matching that of the kids further up the hill, was a sextet of rabbits with crushed bicycle reflector lights for eyes. Indeed, a glance at the perfunctory blood-biro scrawl beneath the work confirmed that Rabbits was its title. Mick quite liked it. He thought that for once he could discern the picture’s meaning and intention: Alma had removed a slice of their neglected neighbourhood and turned it into a church window, a poor man’s church window made from fight-dashed empties and yet no less a receptacle for saints. Or possibly she’d just meant that the district had a lot of bottle.
Exhibits sixteen and seventeen were both in black and white, which he found came as a relief after the battering his rods and cones had taken from the previous pieces. Both were relatively small, perhaps A4 if that was the same paper-size he thought it was, not quite so gangly as foolscap nor yet quite so squat as quarto. High up on the nursery wall and s
ide by side above a large and sumptuous scene in oils immediately beneath, Mick had to go up on his toes to see them properly, considerably more work than he felt should be expected of the public at an exhibition. The first, on the left side, was a pen and ink-wash halftone illustration, something from a children’s annual that had been hallucinated by a child running a temperature, its amateurish subtitle declaring it to be The Scarlet Well. Down in its lower reaches, sheltering below a low brick wall in what appeared to be someone’s back yard, were the by now familiar half a dozen ragamuffins, closer to the viewer here and thus more easily deciphered. Other than his infant self and the kid with the roadkill garland there was a small girl with glasses and a serious demeanour, a tough looking older boy with freckles and a bowler hat, a little roughneck having features not dissimilar to the young lady with the rabbit salad, and a tall and decent-looking kid who had the bearing of the sensible one from the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. The entire group were crouched, all peering up with understandable alarm into the blind white heavens visible beyond their brick wall’s capstones where a nightmarish array of forms seemed to be tumbling through the sky, streaming a vapour of grey after-images behind them. At the top, eye-damagingly small and far away, a horse-drawn milk-cart somersaulted through some eight of nine reiterations, while below a hurricane of multiple-exposure dogs, cats, hymnbooks, fishwives, gasmasks, cigarette cards, teddy boys, prescription glasses, dentist’s chairs and cutlery cascaded inexplicably through empty space, a weather of post-war ephemera. Something about the presence of the children made the vista seem more wondrous than unnerving, an excited sense that this would be a sight to see.
Immediately to the right was item seventeen, identified by its toe-tag as Flatland and comprising what Mick thought to be a mezzotint, pressed from a copper plate with lines scraped on its uniformly textured surface to reveal a realm of smoky, granulated masses held in place by startling blanks; by shell-bursts of chalk white. A trio of the juvenile delinquents from the previous picture stood near-silhouetted at the centre front, two of them small with one of these most likely his own infant likeness, and the central figure there between them that of the much loftier and more Dickensian youth in trailing overcoat and bowler hat. Beyond them, smouldering malignantly against a background that he realised was a view down Bath Street at the block of maisonettes on Crispin Street, was a dispiritingly massive fuming vortex, a slow and appalling gear in the movement of purgatory which intersected, as though insubstantial, with both the dark buildings that it nested in amongst and their unwitting residents revealed by cutaway within. Seemingly caught in this nocturnal maelstrom were what first looked to be dismal scraps of rag that on examination proved to be instead the husks or emptied skins of hapless individuals, punctured humanoid inflatables with all their bone and tissue filling gone, forgotten washing left there to disintegrate on an infernal spinner. The three children under a black firmament had something of spectators at a bonfire in their manner, although none of that exuberance. An air of desolation hung about the image, as if rather than a guy everything good was burning, going up in delicately stippled smoke.