Alan Moore - Jerusalem

With the drinks arrived and Tommy’s dotty great-aunt taken care of, he’d sat down with his quiet auntie Celia and his lively uncle Johnny, who he got on well with and could be relied upon to keep Tom company till closing time. Tom could remember, back before the war, being with Walt and Jack and Frank one night in the Criterion up King Street when their uncle Johnny Vernall had come in and had a drink with them. He’d kept them all enthralled with tales of what the almost empty pub had been like in its heyday, with a loaf of bread, a ham, a jar of pickles and a wedge of cheese provided free on every table. The increase in custom, Uncle Johnny said, had more than paid for the comestibles, and you’d had no one getting drunk or rowdy since they’d all got something in their stomachs to soak up the booze. To the four brothers it had sounded like an Eden, a lost golden age.

Sitting down with his aunt and uncle in the Black Lion’s snug, Tommy had asked them how they were and also asked after his cousin Audrey, who just about everybody in the family had a soft spot for, and who played piano accordion in the dance band that her father, Uncle Johnny, managed. This was the same band that had performed so well at Walt’s wedding reception up in Gold Street just a few months previously, when Tom and Frank had both been lectured by their mam and where, in Tom’s opinion, his young cousin Audrey hadn’t ever played so well or looked so lovely as she did upon that night, belting out swing and standards to the lurching celebrants who packed the dance-floor. Audrey was a little smasher, all the family thought so, but on that particular night in the Black Lion, Tom’s uncle had just shook his head when Tom enquired about her, and said Audrey was at home and going through a lot of young girl’s sulks and moods at present. Tom had been surprised, since Audrey had always seemed such a sunny little thing, but he’d supposed that this reported tantrum was to do with women and the changes that they went through, which at that point, mercifully, Tommy had known almost nothing of. He’d nodded and commiserated with his aunt and uncle, and had told them he was sure their daughter would get over it and be back to her old self in a day or two. On that count he’d been wrong, as it turned out.

Hobnobbing with his relatives, Tom had reflected on how much he liked his uncle Johnny, who he thought added a touch of colour to the family with his loud ties and his jacket’s mustard check, his showbiz flair. There was just something up-to-date about the bloke, the way he ran a band and talked of dates and bookings, as if he were rising to the challenge of the world and future we’d got now, after the war, bursting with energy and eager to get on with a new life. According to Tom’s mam, her younger brother Johnny had since childhood talked of nothing except going on the stage, of being part of all that sequinned razzmatazz, although he’d got no talent of his own to speak of. That was no doubt why he’d hit on managing a dance band if he couldn’t play or sing in one. When his young Audrey had turned out so talented with the accordion, a taste for which she’d evidently picked up from her great-aunt Thursa, Johnny must have been as pleased as Punch. Tommy had often thought that when his uncle Johnny hovered in the wings and watched adoringly while Audrey played, it must have been like he was seeing his young self out there, all of his hopes and dreams at last parading in the footlights. Well, good luck to him. Perhaps the baby boy that Tom was waiting on now in the Wellingborough Road would end up good at something Tom himself had always had a hankering for, like, let’s say, football. Tommy couldn’t swear that if that happened he’d not be stood on the touchlines cheering, just like Uncle Johnny beaming proudly in the dark and tangled wires offstage.

Tom’s auntie Celia was a different matter in that she was quiet where Johnny made a noise, and didn’t fuss over their Audrey quite so much as Johnny did. Aunt Celia was always friendly, even cheerful in her way, but never seemed to have a lot to say for herself about anything. She weren’t stuck up or toffee-nosed, but if Tom’s uncle Johnny should crack one of his blue jokes she’d only smile and look away into her bitter lemon. Tommy’s mother didn’t care much for her sister-in-law, and said that she thought Aunt Celia had got no gumption, but then Tommy’s mam didn’t care much for anyone.

He’d kept his aunt and uncle company, that February night five or six years ago, until the landlord called out for last orders and they’d said that they’d not have another one. They’d finished up their drinks while Tommy was just starting his last pint, then got their coats on ready to go home. They hadn’t far to go. Johnny and Celia lived with Audrey down in Freeschool Street, just uphill of Jem Perrit and his family, so it was only round the corner past the church. Tommy remembered Uncle Johnny standing up from his chair in the snug and settling his titfer on his head, what made him look as if he were a bookie. Helping Auntie Celia to her feet, Johnny had sighed and said, “Ah, well. I ’spect we’d better goo back ’ome and face the music”, meaning Audrey and her bad mood, which was no more at the time than just an innocent remark.

They’d said ta-ta, and Tom had watched their exit from the smoky pub, with its interior as clouded as the foggy street revealed outside when Celia and Johnny had shoved open the Black Lion’s door and stepped into the night. Tommy had taken his time finishing the half of bitter what were left out of his pint, eyes roaming idly round the bar on the off chance there might be a half-decent-looking woman in there. He was out of luck. The only female still remaining in the Black Lion other than the landlord’s dog was Mary Jane, the brawler who was found more often up the Mayorhold at the Jolly Smokers or Green Dragon, one of them. One of her eyes was closed and violet, puffed up to a slit, and her whole face looked like it had once been a very different shape. She sat there staring into space, shaking her head occasionally as if to clear it, though you couldn’t tell if that was because she were punchy, or if it were from the drink she’d put away. Even Tom’s great-aunt Thursa had slipped out the pub while he weren’t looking. Tommy was alone in an entirely masculine, predominantly broken-nosed domain, even including Mary Jane in that appraisal. While he was used to having mostly men around him from his work, and while he found that much less nerve-wracking than an extended company of women, it was much duller in the bargain. Tommy had knocked back the thin dregs of his pint, said goodnight to the people that he knew, and headed for the door himself while fastening his coat.

Outside the Black Lion, with the cold burning his throat, he’d been in two minds as to which way was the quickest home, back to his mam’s in Green Street. Finally he’d opted to walk up by Peter’s Church and cut along the alley there to Peter’s Street, that marked the top edge of the green. It was just slightly longer than if he’d gone down around Elephant Lane, but being drunk and sentimental Tom had thought he’d like to head up by the churchyard so that he could say goodnight to Jack, or to the monument at any rate. What had been left of Jack was still out there somewhere in France.

Leaving the pub behind, Tommy had gone up Black Lion Hill and onto Marefair, with the mist now snagging on the iron churchyard railings to his right. He’d nodded, half-embarrassed, to the war memorial that poked up from the bed of drifting cotton wool around its base, and wondered who’d struck up the tune that he could hear, come from the inn that he’d just left. It had took Tommy several moments, beer-befuddled as he was, to work out that there wasn’t a piano to be found at the Black Lion, and anyway, the noise hadn’t been coming from behind him but instead was faint and shimmering, emerging from the Marefair shadows that were curdling up ahead.