Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Off from behind the reappointed and Viagra-fuelled atrocities of the two rearing giants, from the more humanly-proportioned residences spread between them and the constant rumble of the Mayorhold at their rear, Mick caught what sounded like a garbled shriek immediately followed by a door-slam, the report slurred by the distance and the dead acoustic of the concrete flat-fronts. Running or more properly careening over the bleached lawn extending round the high rise edifices came a gangling, panic-stricken figure, looking to Mick’s slightly narrowed eye to be a teenager around nineteen, brown-haired and pale-complexioned, just a few years older than Mick’s eldest son. The flailing boy was barefoot, clad in jeans that seemed intent on merging crotch and ankles, and a FCUK top that looked too large and likely borrowed, fitting the distraught young man like an Edwardian nightshirt. He was gurgling and gasping, making a repeated sound of horrified denial that came out as ‘nnung’ and taking frantic looks behind him as he ran.

Whether this clump of gibbering tumbleweed had spotted Mick and veered towards him or whether their separate trajectories had simply happened to converge he couldn’t later say. The youth’s flight from whatever frights pursued him ended in a wheezing halt some feet in front of Mick, compelling him in turn to stop dead in his tracks and take stock of this sudden and as yet inscrutable arrival. The scared boy stood doubled over with hands planted on his knees, staring with red eyes at the earth beneath his feet while trying to draw breath and whimper simultaneously with neither effort an unqualified success. Mick felt obliged to say something.

“Are you all right, mate?”

Gazing startled up at Mick as if he hadn’t realised there was anybody there until he heard a voice, the lad’s face was a bag lady of physiognomy, trying to wear all its expressions at the same time. Pasty white skin at the corners of the eyes and lips twitched and convulsed through a succession of attempts at an emotional display, embarrassment, amazement, blanked-out disassociation, each without conviction, each immediately abandoned as the trembling individual sorted frantically among his clearly ransacked wardrobe of responses. Drugs of some sort, Mick decided, and most likely something synthesized last Tuesday rather than the limited array of substances that he himself was very distantly familiar with, mostly through Alma who had tripped for England in her schoolgirl years. This wasn’t acid, though, where people burned all their evaporating sweat away into an incandescent peacock shine, nor was this like the knowing grin of magic mushrooms. This was something different. Random winds stroked the half-hearted grass, funnelled by tower-block baffles until they were lost, bewildered, disappearing in frustrated eddies, turning on themselves. The kid’s voice, when he found it, was a piping yelp that Mick seemed to recall from somewhere, just as he had similarly started to detect a nagging shadow of familiarity in the teenager’s dough-toned features with that shake of cinnamon across the nose.

“Yes. No. Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub. The pub’s still up there. I was in it. It’s still up there, and they’re all still there. Me mate’s still there. That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub. They wouldn’t let us go. Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out. It was a pub. It was a pub, still up there. I was up the pub.”

All this was said with wild-eyed urgency, apparently unconscious of its tics or its obsessive repetitions, its conspicuous lack of any point. Mick found himself with nothing he could read in the by now disturbingly familiar youngster’s fractured body language or his babbling conversation. On the street’s far side a gnome-like woman in a headscarf walked along beside the Upper Cross Street maisonettes with circulation-dodging fingers hooked about the handles of her plastic shopping bag. She stared at Mick and his unasked-for company, a glowering disapproval that went without saying, so that he wished there were some convenient semaphore by which he could convey that he had simply been accosted by this raving stranger in the street. Other than pointing to his temple and then to the auburn-haired kid he could think of nothing, so he switched his gaze from the old lady back to his incomprehensible assailant with the pleading eyes. Mick tried to tease a thread of sense out from the tumbling rubble of the young man’s opening speech.

“Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate. Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept you at all night? Which was it, anyway? Up where?”

The boy, no more than eighteen, Mick decided, stared imploringly from out behind the glass of his own failure to communicate. He waved one skinny forearm and its baggy, flapping sleeve in the direction of the Mayorhold, up behind them. There’d been no pubs on the Mayorhold for some decades now.

“Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub. The roof’s a pub. The pub’s still up there, in the roof. They’re all still there. Me mate’s still there. That’s where I was all night. They wouldn’t let us go. Oh fuck me, I’ve been up the pub, the pub up in the roof. Oh, fuck, what’s happened? Something’s happened.”

Mick was startled and could feel his scalp crawl at the nape, but made an effort not to let it show. No point in getting jumpy when you’re trying to talk somebody back into their skin, although that bit about the roof had gotten to him. It was too much like the way that he’d described his recalled memories to Alma as adventures in the ceiling. Obviously, it had to be just happenstance, a space-case turn of phrase that by some fluke chimed ominously with his own childhood experience, but combined with the still-gnawing sense that he’d met with this lad before somewhere, it bothered him. Of course, it also loaned him an at least imaginary commonality with the young man, a way he could respond compassionately to the poor kid’s helpless gibberish.

“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that. Like when there’s people in the corners trying to pull you up?”

The youth looked dumbstruck, with his pink-rimmed eyes wide and his mouth hung open. All the panic and confusion fell away from him, replaced by something that was almost disbelieving awe as he stared, suddenly transfixed, at Mick.

“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”

Mick nodded, fumbling in his jacket for the brand new pack of fags he’d picked up half an hour back on the way down Barrack Road. He peeled the cuticle of cellophane that held the packet’s plastic wrap in place down to its quick, shucked off the wrapper’s top and tugged the foil away that hid the tight-pressed and cork-Busbied ranks beneath, the crinkled see-through wrapping and unwanted silver paper crushed to an amalgam and shoved carelessly into Mick’s trouser pocket. Taking one himself he aimed the flip-top package at the grateful teenager in offer and lit up for both of them using his punch-drunk Zippo with the stutter in its flame. As they both blew writhing, translucent Gila monsters made of blue-brown vapour up into the Boroughs air the boy relaxed a little, letting Mick resume his pep-talk.

“You don’t want to let it get you down, mate. I’ve been up where you’ve been, so I know how it can be. You can’t believe it’s happened and you think you’re going mental, but you’re not, mate. You’re all right. It’s just when you come back from one of them it takes a while before this all feels real and solid like it did. Don’t worry. It comes back. Just take it easy, have a think about it all, and gradually the bits all fall back into place. It might take you a month or two, but this will all get better. Here.”

Mick pulled a clump of cigarettes out from the pack, approximately half a dozen thick, and gave them to the barefoot psychotropic casualty.