Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Intrigued, Tom had walked past the narrow alley that ran down between the church and Orme’s, the gent’s outfitters, where he’d been intending to cut through to Peter’s Street. He’d wanted to know who it was, making a row at this hour of night, and to make sure that there was nothing untoward transpiring in the neighbourhood. Besides, as he went on past Cromwell House, Tommy could hear the slightly frantic-sounding tune more clearly, and could almost make out through his middling stupor what it was. It had appeared to be emerging from the neck of Freeschool Street just up ahead of him, the tumbling refrain flowing across the pavement with the fog and tangling round Tom’s half-cut feet to trip him up.

He’d paused, outside the brown stone building where the Lord Protector had been billeted the night before he’d gone to fight at Naseby field, and steadied himself with one hand on the rough wall to check his wavering balance. That was when he’d seen his uncle Johnny and his auntie Celia come reeling out of Freeschool Street into Marefair, clutching their mouths, holding their hands across their faces as though they were weeping, hanging on each other’s sleeves like two survivors of a train wreck clambering up the embankment. What on earth had happened?

What he should have done, he thought now, blowing in his hands to warm them up outside the hospital, was simply to have called out to his aunt and uncle, asking what was wrong. He hadn’t done that, though. He’d stood there hidden in the mist and watched the couple, looking like they’d aged ten years within the last ten minutes, as they’d stumbled off into the damp miasma clinging to each other, lowing like maimed animals. They’d headed off in the direction of Horsemarket, the wet noises of their misery becoming fainter. Tom had watched them go from his place of concealment and had burned with shame to think that he’d seen family in distress and simply stood there doing bugger all, not even offering to help.

It had just seemed so private, Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia’s grief. That was all Tom could say now in his own defence. He’d been brought up to help people when things were going rough for them, but then he’d also been taught not to poke his nose in others’ private business, and it sometimes felt like a fine line between the two. That was the way that it had been with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia that night. It looked as though their lives had just that moment fell to bits, as though they’d fallen in upon themselves, as though whatever had upset them was so personal and so humiliating that to have someone intrude upon it would have only made it worse. Thinking about it now, perhaps what he’d picked up on was that Celia and Johnny weren’t seeking assistance with whatever had occurred. They weren’t out banging on the neighbours’ doors and asking somebody to fetch a fire engine or ambulance. They hadn’t gone just down and round the corner to Tom’s mam’s in Green Street, Johnny’s own big sister. They’d not sought help in the Boroughs, but had made for Gold Street and town centre. Tom had later learned that Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia had sat till dawn both huddling devastated on the steps of All Saints, underneath its portico.

Upon the night itself, he’d watched his aunt and uncle until they were gone, then wandered into Freeschool Street to find out what was going on. He’d stumbled haltingly down the black crevice, where the Free School had been situated in the fifteen-hundreds, walking in the face of all the mournful, stirring music that rang from the haze more loudly with Tom’s every cautious step. All the low notes had resonated in the lightless window-glass of the soot-dusted manufacturing concerns to Tommy’s right and left, making the panes buzz like trapped flies. It had been round about then that he’d first caught on what tune was being played over and over, being banged out on an old joanna somewhere in the gloom towards what used to be Green Lane. He’d started singing it, inside his head, familiar words all coming back to him before he’d even hit upon its title, though he’d recognised it as a song that he knew well. How did it go? “Why tell them all your secrets …”

Tommy had progressed hesitantly down the unlit street, as much for fear of tripping over something in the fog and knackering himself as of what he might find when he got further down towards the bottom end. He’d known already that it would be Uncle Johnny’s house the tune was coming from, that it would be their Audrey playing it. Who else down Freeschool Street could trot out such a lovely piece as that? “They’re buried under the snow …” Ever so well he knew it, he just hadn’t at that time been able to remember what the thing was called. The missing title nagging at his mind, Tommy had staggered further down into the invisible harmony.

In twenty paces, by the time he’d reached the junction with St. Peter’s Street, it had become clear that the old song was indeed emerging from his cousin’s house across the road, down near the Gregory Street corner. He had also realised that Freeschool Street was utterly deserted save for he himself and for one other: standing rooted in the crawling vapour that was boiling over Uncle Johnny’s doorstep, rigid and stick-thin with her wild head tipped back to gaze up at the lit-but-curtained parlour window that the music came from, had been Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa. In her arms she’d cradled the accordion like a mute and monstrous child, the waxy and translucent fingers of one hand stroking distractedly across the keyboard, back and forth as if to calm the silent instrument and to allay its fears at this alarming situation. Thursa hadn’t make a sound herself, but she’d been listening so intently to the music leaking from inside the house that you could almost hear her doing it. It carried on, the tune, stitching its thread of half-remembered lyrics on the blanket of the mist. “Whispering grass, don’t tell the trees …”

Of course, by that point Tommy had recalled the title he’d been grasping for. “Whispering Grass”. That had been an old favourite for years by then, had even worked its way into the language as the slang for an informer, or at least that’s where Tom thought that the expression “grass” had come from. Prior to that point it had been Tom’s opinion that the song, though haunting, was too soppy and too whimsical, with its idea of grass and bushes talking to each other, just like something that Walt Disney might have done. Hearing it from the creeping fog in Freeschool Street though, on that February night, it hadn’t sounded whimsical at all. To Tom’s ear, it had sounded terrible. Not terrible as in the sense of bad or badly played, but more as if it spoke of something terrible, of some great hurt too terrible to mend, or of some terrible betrayal. It had sounded angry in the way its chords crashed out, notes almost splintering beneath the impact of the unseen fingers. It had sounded like an accusation and, as well, like an unburdening, an agonized confession that could never be retracted, after which things couldn’t be the same again. It had been music for the end of something.

“… ’cause the trees don’t need to know.” Ashamed. That had been, Tom thought now, another quality apart from hurt and anger that the tune had brought to the dank evening air: an overpowering sense of shame. Even the awful jollity into which the refrain would sometimes break sounded sardonic, sounded vengeful, sounded wrong. Tommy had been disturbed, mostly because he hadn’t for the life of him been able to imagine such an unexpected torrent of confused emotions pouring from so self-effacing and demure a vessel as his cousin Audrey. What can have been going through her mind for it to have emerged in the spine-tingling, feverish way it had? What had she been feeling that produced a reeling, stomach-dropping noise like that?