Voice of the Fire

by Alan Moore

  Balkan ceasefire conference chopped up into seven-second mouthfuls by a motherly and helpful camera, to reduce the risk of choking. Both sides’ representatives appear embarrassed, blanching at the flashbulbs. Playground brawlers called out to the front, made to apologize and shake hands with an after-school resentment already apparent in the eyes and voice. Let’s not have any more talk about rape camps or genetic cleansing. Go back to your desks.

  Forthcoming visits to the North of Ireland by President Clinton are expected to focus attention on a peace process that’s rapidly becoming an embalming process. Clinton, Kennedyesque if one measures things in hair and blowjobs, has announced that he won’t come to Ireland just to switch on Christmas lights, although if Congress has the White House phones cut off by then and the electric disconnected, he may think again. Two families of Irish Clintons, one from each side of the border, are contending for the honour of the presidential issue sprayed against their family tree, but hopefully it won’t erupt into sectarian violence.

  An analysis of last night’s budget, which concludes the likeliest effect is that the wealthiest ten per cent will now be better off, the poorest better off dead. The Nigerian government has lynched Ken Saro Wiwa for protesting against the environmental sodomy inflicted on a homeland traumatized by petrochemical adventurism; Shell-shocked. Momentary whiteness under the lagoons of Mururoa.

  Old editions of the local Mercury & Herald from the sixteen-hundreds list Northamptonshire’s then recent deaths from causes long since rendered utterly unfathomable: Rising Lights, the Purples. One man listed here as ‘Planet Struck’. Sat slack-jawed in the cathode aura of this photogenic Armageddon, the phrase seems overdue for a revival. The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us. Nothing is conveyed save for an underlying sense of landscape at its most unstable, pliable as sweaty gelignite. History is a heat, a slow fire with the planet just now coming to the boil, our culture passing from a fluid to a vaporous state amid the violent and chaotic seethings of the phase transition. Here, in the rising steam, a process moves towards its point of crisis, interrupted only by a break for the commercials.

  Startlingly, amidst the beautifully modulated list of global thrills, spills and extinctions, comes a near-unprecedented mention of Northampton: council tenants in the Pembroke Road whose gardens back on to the railway line attempt to call attention to a new leukaemia cluster. You can hear the spectral squeal and mutter of the night freight on the other side of town when there’s a west wind. Brother Mike, who’s prettier, sometimes funnier, but frankly nowhere near as charismatic, lives just off the Pembroke Road with his wife Carol and their kids. They want to move, but showing their prospective buyers round the premises in Haz-Chem suits and helmets isn’t going to make things any easier.

  To be quite fair, the whole spread of estates from Spencer to King’s Heath has had a post-nuclear appearance since the sixties. Just a decade earlier, King’s Heath had won awards for its design, seen as the perfect model for a future England which, unluckily, it proved to be. By 1970 even the sweetshop had steel shutters, and neglected dogs banded together into terrifying medieval hunting packs. The local nightspot seemed to have been decorated by a schizophrenic window-dresser who’d last visited the cinema for Barbarella, or perhaps Repulsion, with gaunt female mannequins emerging anorexic and concussed from wall and pillar into an emetic light show. King’s Heath youth struck matches on the plaster nipples, passing round ten Sovereign, and drank themselves into amnesia or animosity beneath the swirling biriani-coloured radiance of a faulty gel-wheel, later for the most part either knocked or banged up in accordance with their gender. The town shrugs, in timeworn response to its own physical decline: it’s not as if it was expecting something better.

  Switch the television off, momentarily defeated. Partly concealed by three weeks of unread New Scientist and empty biscuit wrappings, is a draft of the preceding chapter. Still not sure whether the shop in Bridge Street that offered a job to Lily Rouse was a confectioner’s or not, but in the end decide to let it stand in deference to the processes of fiction rather than the less substantial processes of history. Lily remains between the sugar-cataracted jars; proclaims her husband’s innocence with wince-inducing loyalty while weighing out the Rainbow Drops. They drive him out to Bedford Prison, Bunyan’s second home, and he goes to the gallows, ultimate suspender, with her name upon his lips, no minor feat of memory when one considers all the wives and co-parents he might have thought to mention. What’s it all about, Alfie?

  Bunyan: first to chart the land of spirit and imagination lying under middle England, mapping actual journeys undertaken in the solid realm on to his allegorical terrain. Likewise, it seems that the intention of his work was to awake the apprehension of a visionary landscape from beneath the subjugated streets and fields; fire an incendiary dream to make the dull and heavy matter of the shires and townships burn with new significance, and be transformed. September 1681 saw a new charter brought down by the Earl of Peterborough in Northampton, with these scenes reprised in Bunyan’s Holy War the following year, but relocated to the allegoric town of Mansoul. In this alias, the sense of mythic weight and moment wielded by the place and its inhabitants is underscored, the town’s huge and invisible centrality confirmed.

  One great advantage that The Pilgrim’s Progress as a narrative enjoys over the current work is in its structure, with the pilgrimage progressing to a necessary ending in redemption. Here, however, there is no such tidy resolution within reach. The territory is the same, but here we have no single pilgrim save perhaps the author, or the reader, and only uncertain progress. While redemption’s not out of the question, it’s an outside chance at best. It’s hardly been a major theme thus far.

  This final chapter is the thing. Committed to a present-day first-person narrative, there seems no other option save a personal appearance, which in turn demands a strictly documentary approach: it wouldn’t do to simply make things up. This is a fiction, not a lie.

  Of course, that tends to place the burden of responsibility for finishing the novel on the town itself. If all its themes, motifs and speculations are to be resolved, then they will be resolved in actual brick and flesh. Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. All of the subtle energies pass through here on their journey into form. If properly directed, they’ll provide the closures that the narrative demands: the terrible black dogs shall come. There shall be fires, and severed heads, and angel language. An unlikely harmony of incident and artifice is called for, that may take some tracking down. There’s nothing for it but to take a walk.

  Outside, the rain falls hard upon Phipps’ Fire Escape, a constant amber static through the Lucozade glow of the sodium lamps. This whole estate was raised by brewer and industrialist Pickering Phipps around the turn of the century as a last-ditch attempt at spiritual salvation. Long odds, from the look of things.

  He placed a foundry up on Hunsbury Hill to overlook the town and gouged away at the remains of the adjacent Iron Age settlement in search of ore to build the railway. Most of what he paid his labourers would be returned to him across the bar-tops of his taverns on the Friday night he doled it out. Northampton had a lot of pubs back then. You could start at the top of Bridge Street and with only half a pint of bitter at each stop along the way never reach the Plough Hotel down at the bottom end, by then receded to Infinity.

  Phipps reasoned that his drinking dens might be perceived as having set temptation on the straight path of the righteous and that taking a dim view of all this, the Almighty would be certain to condemn him to the flames. His only chance, the way he saw it, was to curry the Creator’s favour by constructing an estate that had four churches but no public houses. By slipping this modest bribe to God, seen as Northampton
Borough representative writ large, the brewer thought to thus avoid a furnace deemed more hideous than that which he’d erected up on Hunsbury Hill. Though designated ‘Phippsville’ in official documents, native consensus soon re-christened it Phipps’ Fire Escape. Home of ten years now, at one house or other.

  There seems to be a local predilection for expressing contours of the spirit world in terms of stone and mortar, matter in its densest, most enduring form. Phipps builds a dry and austere maze, its terraced streets become the rungs of his ascent to Paradise. Simon de Senlis builds his round church as a Templar glyph to mark the martyrdom and resurrection. Thomas Tresham codes the outlawed Holy Trinity into his lunatic three-sided lodge. These testaments of brick are weighty paragraphs writ on the world itself and therefore only legible to God. The rest of us who do not build express our secret arcane souls in scripts more fleeting, more immediate to our human instant: wasting spells or salesman’s patter. The betraying letter. Prose, or violence.

  Squinting through the dark and drizzle, turn from Cedar Road to Collingwood, the downpour now a steady sizzle of dull platinum on the uneven paving slabs. Pass by the small, uncertain row of shops with a sub-post office so often blagged that it’s established a cult following among the audience of Crimewatch, most of whom are criminals who tune in for industry news and gossip. Walking on, past alley mouths that open on the long and lightless gullets of back-entries, puddles rippling in the sumps and sinkages of century-old cobble, iridescent moss accrued between the blunt grey stones. Rapes here, and strangled schoolboys, yet these miserable and poignant corridors don’t even get a walk on in the local A-Z. Our real, most trenchant streetplans are mapped solely in the memory and the imagination.

  A right turn, into Abington Avenue, the cold slap of its crosswind and the driven rain. Across the street stands the United Reform Church, one of the four pillars upon which rests Phipps’ blind swing at redemption. Francis Crick came here to Sunday school back in the 1920s, evidently so impressed by Bible stories of a seven-day Creation that he went on to discover DNA. The dual helical flow of human interchange spirals around the recently refurbished building: brawls at closing time, and copulations. Love and birth and murder in their normal vortex.

  Kettering Road, and the backwater junk emporiums that have collected in the tributaries of the town, an algae of grandfather clock and gas-mask. The abandoned Laser-Hunter-Killer Palace with the soaped up windows where the future closed down early for lack of local enthusiasm. Further down, stranded amidst the traffic flow of Abington Square on the brink of the town centre, stands Charles Bradlaugh’s statue, finger raised and resolutely pointing west towards the fields beyond the urban sprawl, assisting Sunday shoppers who’ve forgotten how to get to Toy Us.

  Charles Bradlaugh was Northampton’s first Labour MP and the first atheist allowed to enter parliament, though not without debate. The night that his admission to the Commons was decided saw a demonstration in the Market Square with riot policemen sent in to administer the smack of a firm government. No stranger to controversy, he did time with Theosophist and Match-Girl agitator Annie Besant for the distribution of an ‘obscene publication’, being contraceptive information of a kind thought generally unsuitable for wives or servants. Amongst local politicians he has little competition save perhaps for Spencer Perceval, British Prime Minister unique for being, firstly, from Northamptonshire, and, secondly, assassinated. Bradlaugh stands upon the grassy knoll and points accusingly at Abington Street, at the shopping precincts, at the fag-end of the twentieth century.

  Abington Street, pedestrianized some years ago, has flower baskets dangling from the gibbets of the reproduction Dickens-effect streetlamps, with a creeping sub-Docklands aesthetic gradually becoming evident in its façades. It’s as if when Democracy and Revolution came at last to Trumpton, the corrupt former regime of Mayor and Council were airlifted out with CIA assistance and resettled here, to brutally impose the values of their Toytown junta on this formerly alluring thoroughfare.

  Some fifty years ago this was the Bunny Run, the sexual chakra of the town, where giggling factory girls would squeal and totter through a well-intentioned gauntlet of the neighbourhood testosterone. Now, in 1995, the cheerful lust has curdled into harm and frequent bruisings, violence manifested in the architecture of the street itself, inevitably percolating down to find its outlet on a human scale. The sumptuous and majestic New Theatre was demolished first in 1959. Faint echoes of George Robey, Gracie Fields and Anna Neagle pining from the sorry rubble. Next went Notre Dame, a red-brick convent school, Gothic receptacle for ninety years of schoolboy longing, and then finally the yellowed art deco arcade of the Co-Operative Society: a beautiful, faintly Egyptian relic with a central avenue sloping down as if designed to roll the final stone that would wall up alive those slaves caught browsing in the Homecare Centre.

  Here, unmasked, a process that distinguishes this place as incarnated in industrial times. The only constant features in the local-interest photograph collections are the mounds of bricks; the cranes against the sky. A peckish Saturn fresh run out of young, the town devours itself. Everything grand we had, we tore to bits. Our castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking madhouse. Jesus Christ.

  At the street’s lower end a ghostly and deserted Market Square rises upon the right, while All Saint’s elderly patrician bulk looms underlit upon the left. A rank of Hackney cabs shelters against the church’s flank, hunched in the rain and glistening, like crows. The shop-fronts opposite on Mercer’s Row invite another reading of the town: only the ground floors have been modernized, as if the present moment were a heat-haze of tumultuous event that ended fifteen feet above street level, with the higher storeys in the lease of earlier centuries. Go upstairs at the butcher’s, Sergeants, and the Geisha Café would be open still, with spectral waitresses gliding between the murmuring, empty tables bearing sandwiches, triangular and numinous. Bram Stoker sharing tea for two with Errol Flynn between the Repertory Theatre matinées.

  Splash on, rounding the front of All Saint’s with its sheltering portico. A plaque here to the memory of John Bailles, a button-maker of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the county’s best attempt to date at a robust, no-nonsense immortality. Near six score years and ten: a long time to spend making buttons. Only zips and Velcro killed him.

  The church stares with blank Anglican disdain down Gold Street’s narrow fissure; stone-faced Protestant resentment is directed at any Semitic shades remaining in this former haunt of money-lenders. In the thirteenth century it was from here that local Jews were taken out and stoned to death, accused of sacrificing Christian babies in the course of arcane, cabbalistic rites. This was among the earliest incidents of violent European anti-Semitism that were recognizable as such, the town as eager and precocious in its pogroms as it was reluctant to stop burning witches.

  During World War II a bomber crashed up at the street’s top end, a great tin angel with a sucking chest wound fallen from the Final Judgement. It was drawn down inexorably by tractor beams of sympathetic magic emanating from the subterranean speakeasy that’s under Adam’s Bakery behind the church, a marvellous forgotten space designed to reproduce the shape and seating of a buried aeroplane. Imagined engine-drone above the cold flint jetstreams, the clay strato-cumulus, like calling unto like, dragging the bomber overhead into a helpless and enraptured nosedive. One lone cyclist with a broken arm after the impact knocked him from his saddle, otherwise no casualties. These streets again show their surprising and capricious mercy. One by one the townsfolk file out through the Welsh House from the burning Market Square. The cyclist rises dazed and injured from the wreckage and stares dumbstruck at Jane Russell, pouting, painted on the ruined fuselage.

  From Gold Street over the dual carriageway of Horsemarket, more horse-power stampeding there now than ever, where a left turn would lead down towards the Fritz Lang horror of the Carlsberg Brew
ery. It was in the Copenhagen branch of this establishment that physicist Niels Bohr first formulated his axiom that all our observations of the universe can only be seen, in the last analysis, as observations of ourselves and our own processes. A haunting notion, hard to write off as the product of one Special Brew too many, and as true concerning observations of a town as when relating to the cosmos, or the hidden quanta.

  Cross Horsemarket into Marefair with the unforgiving mausoleum of the Barclaycard credit control headquarters on our right. Poker-faced, its gaze concealed behind opaque black windows, it gives nothing away. Northampton, once the centre of the boot and shoe trade, that grew fat on war and saw John Clare’s long desperate hike as one more pair sold, is now the seat of Barclaycard and Carlsberg, perfect icons of the Thatcher years reflecting our new export lines: the lager lout, the credit casualty. Here we go, here we go. Here we go.

  Across the street are council offices where Cromwell is reputed to have slept and dreamed the night in 1645 before he rode to Naseby and midwifed the gory breach birth of our current parliamentary democracy, the adult form still clearly warped and traumatized by this unspeakable nativity. They marched the Royalist prisoners out to Ecton afterwards and herded them into a paddock by the Globe Inn for the night before the march to London, trial, imprisonment or execution. Many of the wounded died there in the field behind the Inn. A century later William Hogarth, a recurring patron, offered to design and paint a new sign for the Globe, and changed its name to the World’s End with a depiction of the planet bursting into flames. The pub signs of the county are a secret Tarot deck, with this card the most ominous, the local theme of fire asserted in its final, terrifying aspect.