Alan Moore - Jerusalem

God knows how many times she’d played the tune already before Tom or anybody else had ventured into Freeschool Street to hear it, but as he and his great-aunt had stood there separately listening in the fog he’d heard the song repeated at least four more times, all the way through, before it had eventually ended in a sudden yawning silence that had been in some way even more upsetting than the row preceding it.

A tense few moments had elapsed, perhaps to make sure the recital was completely over, and then great-aunt Thursa had, from nowhere, pressed just four notes from the squeeze-box slung on its worn leather strap around her stringy neck, four grave and trudging tones that Tom had recognised with a mild tingle of alarm as the beginning of “The Funeral March”, or at the time he’d thought that’s what it was, at any rate. But with only that mournful opening completed his great-aunt had fallen silent and allowed her parchment fingers to drop from the keys. Abruptly, Thursa had turned round and marched away down Freeschool Street as if, aside from her own brief musical contribution, there was no more to be done. Within a moment her gaunt figure had dissolved into the cold seethe of the night.

Tom realised now, stood shuffling in the forecourt of St. Edmund’s Hospital, that it had been the last time he’d encountered great-aunt Thursa, who’d took ill with bronchial troubles and had died some two months afterwards. The mental picture of her walking off into the fog, into the roiling mystery, was the last image of her he could call to mind. Perhaps her short rendition of “The Funeral March” had been a prophecy, though as he thought about it now he saw that those four notes could just as well have been “Oh Mine Papa”, or probably a dozen other tunes.

After his great-aunt had departed, Tom had stood there for perhaps five minutes more, just staring at the now-hushed house across the way with the soft gaslight filtered through drawn curtains from its parlour window. Then he’d stumbled off down Freeschool Street, along Green Lane to his mam’s house in Green Street. May had been abed already by the time that he got in, and Frank hadn’t come home yet from the Anchor. Tom had lit the mantle, lit a fag from the same match, then had a sit in the armchair for a few minutes, just before he went to bed.

Across a small room shrunken further by the gaslight, up against one wall had stood the family piano, black and polished like a coffin. Perched on top of it had been an empty vase and a big, glossy eight-by-ten inside a prop-up frame. The photo had been taken for the purpose of publicity, clearly by a professional, and was a group shot of the outfit Uncle Johnny managed. Standing front and centre of the picture, no doubt with an eye to showing off the dance band’s most attractive asset, there had been Tom’s cousin Audrey with her piano accordion almost bigger than what she was. Resting on its keys her slender hands were placed so elegantly you could tell that it was artificial; she’d been told to hold the pose and the accordion in just that way by the photographer. Tom could imagine it, the chat and patter while he’d took the shot, with the flirtatious manner blokes like that seemed generally to have about them. “Right, that’s lovely, let’s have a big smile now from the ravishing young lady.” And then Audrey would have cast her eyes up, just as she was doing in the picture, looking comically exasperated as she laughed away the compliment — “Oh, honestly!” — but flattered, pleased he’d said it even if he’d done so just to make her smile. Her head was tipped back slightly as if she were making an appeal to heaven, asking for deliverance from men and their smooth, silly talk, and you could see the strong line of her chin, the straight slope of her nose, the finely sculpted head with her dark hair cascading down onto the shoulders of her ironed white blouse. His cousin at that time had been around eighteen years old, and Tommy had thought that the photo looked as if it had been taken two or three years earlier, when Audrey had been fifteen or sixteen. She’d looked so lively and so wry that Tom had sat there in the gas-lit living room a good half hour just trying to fit together the young woman in the picture and the frightening performance he’d just heard in Freeschool Street.

Of course, over the next two or three days, Tom had learned more of what had happened on that night. According to his mam, who by that time had heard her younger brother’s full account of things, Tom’s uncle Johnny and his auntie Celia had got back home to Freeschool Street from the Black Lion to find their only child had locked them out the house while she sat there inside and played the same lament repeatedly on the piano, pointedly ignoring all their poundings on the door and their demands to be let in. As the demands had swiftly turned to worried pleas, his cousin Audrey had apparently made vocal interjections of her own, shouting above the avalanche of her own playing: “When the grass is whispering over me, then you’ll remember.” Finally her parents had just given up and slunk away into the mist, away up Gold Street where they’d sheltered under All Saints’ portico all night, crushed by the realization of the dreadful thing that had just happened. Their one daughter, their bright, pretty, talented young daughter who they’d hoped would carry all their dreams into the future had gone off her head, gone round the corner. That next morning doctors had been called and Audrey Vernall had been taken up the Berry Wood turn to St. Crispin’s mental home, struggling and kicking, screaming out all manner of fantastical delusions as Tom’s uncle Johnny had recounted it. She’d been in the asylum ever since, would very likely be there all her life, a shame and a disgrace upon the family. Her name was only mentioned rarely now.

The general consensus, naturally, had been that Audrey’s problems were inherited, part of the curse passed down amongst the Vernalls, as displayed in both Tom’s granddad Snowy and his great-aunt Thursa.

There it was. The madness in the family. That was a cheery thing to think about while you were waiting for your first child to arrive, but Tom supposed there was no hiding from it. It was just a fact, part of the complicated lottery of birth that would decide whether the baby had brown hair like Doreen or black hair like Tom, whether its eyes were blue or green, if it was to be tall or short, well-built or skinny, sane or insane. Nobody had a say in how their children would be born, but then nobody had a say with most of the important things in life. All you could do was make the best of what you had. All you could do was play your cards as they’d been dealt.

He glanced around at his surroundings, at the gauze fog bandaging the blackness, at the crumbling church across the street, its weight and presence felt rather than seen. On Tommy’s left a necklace of dim streetlamps wound away through the dark miles to Wellingborough. To his right the mongrel rhapsodies of Mad Marie were tangled round town centre in haphazard strands of flimsy tinsel and behind him loomed the rehabilitated workhouse, like a thuggish bailiff who’d been given a new job and uniform and swore he was a reformed character. Tom realised with a start that they were more than halfway through the twentieth century already.

Tom also began to see that it weren’t just the blood and the heredity that would determine how a child developed. It was everything. It was the aggregate of all the planet’s parts and all its history, of every fact and incident that made the world, that fashioned the child’s parents, all of these components leading up to that specific baby floating there in that specific womb. With his own offspring brewing now inside Doreen’s distended belly waiting to be poured out, Tommy understood that there would be no element of his or his wife’s lives that would not influence their baby, just as every circumstance of their own parents’ lives in turn had made its mark on them.