Alan Moore - Jerusalem

That was the war, of course, a lot of that. Four brothers setting out, three coming home. It still upset him when he thought of Jack, and at the time he hadn’t seen quite how the Warren family would get over it, although you did, of course. You had to. It was like the war itself. It had been inconceivable to everybody while they were still getting through it that there’d ever be another way of living, that they could recover from it, all the bombs, all the dead relatives. Nobody could imagine much beyond more of what they were suffering already, only worse. The future, back then, it had been something that Tommy couldn’t think about, a place he’d never honestly expected he should see.

Yet eight years later here he was, a married man stood waiting for the birth of his first child. As for the future, Tommy thought of nothing but. Things weren’t the way they’d been before the war. Nothing meant quite the same as what you’d thought it did, and England was a different country now. They’d got a pretty young queen that the papers likened to the previous Good Queen Bess, and even ordinary working people had got televisions so as they could watch the coronation. It was all like something out of Journey into Space , how quick the onslaught of this modern world had been, as though the war’s end had removed a great impediment and finally let the twentieth century catch up with itself. Tom and Doreen’s first child — and they’d talked already of another one — would be one of these New Elizabethans everyone was going on about. They might grow up to live a life that Tom could never dream of, all the things that scientists would have discovered and found out about by then. They might have all the chances that Tom hadn’t had, or else had been compelled by circumstances to forgo.

Off in the curdling greyness, Mad Marie still serenaded him with “My Old Man Said Onward Christian Soldiers”, her piano sounding small and far away, a broken music-box that had been set off accidentally in another room. Tom thought of his maths scholarship again, the one that he’d passed up to take the brewery job instead. While it was true he’d not resented missing out on education if it meant that he could help his family, he still missed all the fun he used to have with sums and numbers, when it was all new to him.

It was his granddad, Snowy, who he’d got the skill with figures from. Although the old boy had passed on in 1926 when Tom was nine (gone mad and eating flowers out of a vase according to Tom’s mam), the pair had got on well and in those last two years of his grandfather’s life Tom had spent most Saturday afternoons at his grandparents’ house in the grim, narrow crack of Fort Street. While Tom’s granny Lou had fussed around in the dark kitchen, Snowy and young Tom had chanted their way through all the multiplication tables, sitting in the living room. Geometry, that was another thing that Tommy’s granddad had instructed him upon: rough circles drawn around milk-bottle bases with a titchy stub of pencil, sheets of butcher’s paper covering the tea-table until you couldn’t see the wine-red tablecloth. Snowy had told his grandson that most of the know-how came from his own father, Tom’s great-granddad Ernest Vernall, who had once worked touching up the frescoes of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Victorian times. Snowy said him and his sister, Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa, had been given lessons by their dad while he was at a rest home. Only some years later, after badgering his mam, had Tommy found out that the rest home had been Bedlam, the original asylum what they’d had in Lambeth.

He recalled the afternoon, fumbling now in his mac pocket for the pack of Kensitas, when they’d been working on the eight- and nine-times-tables. His granddad had pointed out how all the multiples of nine, if you just totalled up their digits, always added up to nine: one plus eight, two plus seven, three plus six and so on, for as high as you could go. The memory smelled of fruitcake, from which Tom assumed his gran had been out in the kitchen baking, that particular occasion. It had tickled him, the thing about the number nine, and for a lark he’d added up the digits in the answers to his eight-times-table, too. The first was just eight, obviously, while the next, sixteen, was one plus six and therefore added up to seven. The next, twenty-four, was two plus four and added up to six, while thirty-two reduced in the same way to five. Tommy had realised with a growing sense of intrigue that his column of additions counted down from eight to one (eight eights were sixty-four, in which the six and four thus added up to ten, the one and nought of which totalled just one), and then began the countdown all again commencing with the number nine this time (nine eights, seventy-two, the seven and the two of which made nine). This run of numbers, nine to one, was then repeated, on and on, presumably unto infinity. That had been when Tom’s grandfather had pointed out that this was the same sequence as the one-times-table, only in reverse, and that had set both of them thinking.

Taking one short untipped cigarette out of the pack, with its sleek, smarmy butler mascot in red, black and white, Tom lit it with a Captain Webb’s and threw the spent match in the vague direction of an unseen gutter, lost somewhere in the cold smoulder down around his feet. The fag-pack with its butler and the matchbox with its bold, moustachioed channel swimmer both went back into his raincoat pocket. He’d a Fry’s Five Boys bar in there, too, with a quintet of lads at various emotional extremes upon its wrapper. All this advertising and this packaging that you got nowadays, it meant that he was carrying seven tiny people in his pocket, just so he could have a smoke and possibly a square of chocolate if he should feel peckish later on.

Upon that memorable afternoon getting on thirty years before, Tom and his grandfather had swiftly reckoned up the digits in the answers to the rest of the multiplication tables. He remembered the excitement that he’d felt, the giddy, sheer thrill of discovery now come back to him in a fruitcake rush of allspice, candied peel and Snowy Vernall’s rubbing liniment. The two-times-table, if you added up the figures of the products, it transpired, resulted in a number-pattern that first ran through all the even numbers, two, four, six, eight, then all of the odd ones, one (one plus nought), three (one plus two), five, and so on up to nine (eighteen, or one plus eight). Remembering the way the one- and eight-times-tables had both yielded up numerical progressions that were backwards mirror-versions of each other, Snowy and young Tom had looked at the seven-times-table, where they’d learned that first the added answers counted down through the odd numbers, seven, five (one plus four), three (two plus one), one (two plus eight, which made the ten, the digits of which added up to one), and then went on to run down through the even numbers. Eight (three plus five), six (four plus two) and so on until the countdown of odd numbers started up again. The number seven seemed to work exactly like the number two, but with the sequence running back to front.

The number three, which just went three, six, nine, three, six, nine, unendingly if you made sums out of its multiples, appeared to be twinned with the number six, which went six, three, nine, six, three, nine, if you did the same thing. The number four produced a pattern that seemed complicated at first sight, in that it counted down from two numbers in parallel, and alternated in between the two. Thus, what you got was four, then eight, then three (or one plus two), then seven (one plus six), then two (two plus nought), six (two plus four), one (two plus eight, adding up to ten, or one plus nought), five (thirty-two, or three plus two), et cetera, et cetera. The five-times-table, unsurprisingly by now, did just the same thing in reverse. It alternated in the same way between two progressions, this time counting up instead of down, so that the sequence in this case was five, one, six, two, seven (two plus five), three (three plus nought), eight (three plus five) and so forth. Tommy and his grandfather had looked at one another and just burst out laughing so that Tom’s grandma Louisa had come out the kitchen to see what was up.