Alan Moore - Jerusalem

May’s sole reaction was to look away though she conceded, at least inwardly, that Mrs. Gibbs had hit on something there. She’d had no one to talk to properly these last two days, she thought, except herself. She couldn’t speak above two words to Tom without she’d weep. They set each other off, and they both hated crying. It was weak. Besides, Tom wasn’t there. He was at work. May’s mam, Louisa, that was useless, too, not just because her mam wept easily. It was more May had let her mother down. She’d not been a good mother in her turn, not kept up the maternal tapestry. She’d dropped a stitch and failed the family. She couldn’t face them, and they couldn’t help. Her aunt’s attempt had been an awful scene that May was keeping shut out of her mind.

As a result, May had been left cut off. It was her fault, along with all the rest, but she was stuck with nobody to tell about all that was going on inside, the frightening thoughts and ideas what she had, too bad to say out loud to anyone. Yet here she was, and here was Mrs. Gibbs, a stranger, outside May’s immediate clan or any clan as far as May could see, except that of the deathmongers themselves. Mrs. Gibbs seemed outside of everything, as carefully impartial as the sky. Her apron, deep and private like a night, or like a well, was a receptacle that May could empty all this horror in without it ringing round her brood for years. May raised her sore red eyes only to find the other woman’s grey ones gazing back.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know how I shall get over it. They’re burying her tomorrow afternoon and then I shan’t have nothing left at all.”

May’s voice was rusty, cracking with disuse, a crone’s voice, not a twenty-year-old girl’s. The deathmonger pulled up the fraying stool, then sat down at May’s feet and took her hand.

“Now, Mrs. Warren, you listen to me. You’re not to tell me you’ve got nothing left. You’re not to even think it of yourself. If nothing’s left, what was your child’s life worth? Or any of our lifetimes, come to that? It’s all got value, else none of it has. Or do you wish you’d not had her at all? Should you prefer that you’d not seen me once if you were going to have to see me twice?”

She took it in and found it was all true. Put like that, asked in such straightforward terms if little May were better never born then she could only dumbly shake her head. The lank red strands, uncombed, fell on her face. She’d not got nothing, she’d got eighteen months of feeding, burping, going down the park, laughing and crying, changing tiny clothes. The fact remained, though, that she’d not got May. She’d got her memories of her little girl, favourite expressions, gestures, favourite sounds, but they were painful in the knowledge that there’d be no new ones added to the list. And that was just her sorrow’s selfish part, her pitying herself for what she’d lost. It was her baby should be pitied more, who’d gone into the dark all on her own. May looked up hopelessly at Mrs. Gibbs.

“But what about her? What about my May? I want to think she’s up in Heaven but she’s not, is she? That’s just what you tell kids about their cat or dog when all the time you’ve found it with its back broke in the street.”

At this she wept again despite herself and Mrs. Gibbs gave her a handkerchief, then squeezed May’s hand between her papery palms, a bible closing on May’s fingertips.

“I don’t hold much in Heaven, personally, nor in the other place. It sounds like tosh. All I know is, your daughter’s upstairs now, and whether you believe me or you don’t is none of my concern and none of hers. That’s where she is, my dear. That’s what I know, and I’d not say it if I wasn’t sure. She’s upstairs, where we all are by and by. Your dad’s told you already, I dare say.”

The mention of May’s father made her start. He had said that. He’d used that very word. “She’s upstairs, May. Don’t fret. She’s upstairs now.” In fact, now that she thought, she’d never heard him speak of death in any other way. Not him, her kin, nor anyone round here. They never said “in Heaven” or “with God”, nor even “up above”. They said “upstairs”. It made the afterlife sound carpeted.

“You’re right, he did say that, but what’s it mean? You say it’s not like heaven in the clouds. Where is it, this upstairs, then? What’s it like?”

In May’s own ears her voice was sounding cross, angry that Mrs. Gibbs was so cocksure about a thing as terrible as this. She hadn’t meant it to come out that way and thought the deathmonger would take offence. To her surprise, Mrs. Gibbs only laughed.

“Frankly, it’s very much like this, my dear.” She gestured, at the armchair, at the room. “What else should you expect it to be like? It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.”

May wasn’t angry now. She just felt strange. Had someone said those words to her before? “It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.” It sounded so familiar and so right, although she’d got no idea what it meant. It felt like those occasions, as a girl, when she’d been let in on some mystery, like when Anne Burk told May the facts of life. “The man puts spunk on the end of his prick, then puts it in your crack.” Though May had thought spunk would be soap-flakes in a little pile, spooned on a flat-topped cock-end into her, she’d somehow known that the idea was true; made sense of things she’d previously not grasped. Or when her mam had took her to one side and gravely told her what jamrags were for. This was like that, sat here with Mrs. Gibbs. One of those moments in a human life when you found out what everybody else already knew but never talked about.

May glimpsed the coffin at the room’s far end and knew immediately it was all junk. Upstairs was heaven with a different name, the same old story trotted out again to console the bereaved and shut them up. It was just Mrs. Gibbs’s atmosphere, the way she had, that made it sound half-true. What did she know about the hereafter? She was a Boroughs woman, same as May. Except, of course, she was a deathmonger, which gave the rot she talked that much more weight. Mrs. Gibbs spoke again, squeezing May’s hand.

“As I say, dear, it doesn’t matter much if we believe these things or if we don’t. The world’s round, even if we think it’s flat. The only difference it makes is to us. If we know it’s a globe, we needn’t be frit all the time of falling off its edge. But let’s not talk about your daughter, dear. What’s happened can’t be helped, but you still can. Are you all right? What’s all this done to you?”

Again, May found she had to stop and think. No one had asked her that, these last two days. It wasn’t something that she’d asked herself, nor dared to in the wailing, echoing well her private thoughts had recently become. Was she all right? What had this done to her? She blew her nose on the clean handkerchief that she’d been given, noticing it had no butterflies, just one embroidered bee. When she was done, she screwed the hanky up and shoved it in one jumper-sleeve, a move that meant Mrs. Gibbs letting go May’s hand, although once the manoeuvre was complete May slid her fingers voluntarily between the digits of the deathmonger. She liked the woman’s touch; warm, dry, and safe in the wallpapered whirlpool of the room. Still sniffing, May attempted a reply.

“I feel like everything’s fell through the floor and dropping down a tunnel like a stone. It doesn’t even feel like I’m meself. I sit and cry and can’t do anything. I can’t see any point in doing things, brushing me hair or eating, anything, and I don’t know where all of it shall end. I wish that I was dead, and that’s the truth. Then we’d be put together in one box.”