Alan Moore - Jerusalem

All the details of the incident in the back garden that had been wiped from his memory as a child had, after more than forty years, been given back. Granted, they’d been returned in a compressed and jumbled form that mainly manifested as a vague uneasy feeling, but if Mick just sat and thought it through he felt convinced that he’d be able to untangle it, to pick this sense of being haunted that he had apart like so much yarn. He closed his eyes, as much to stop them stinging as to aid his reverie. He saw the yard, saw the old stable that was visible across a five-foot-high back wall, its roof with the black gaps where slates were missing like a crossword puzzle blank. The sofa’s cushions underneath him were Doreen’s lap, and its hard and bony wooden edge her knees. He sank into the warm ancestral dough without the slightest difficulty or resistance as the spacious living room surrounding him contracted to a narrow brick enclosure, with the backsides of the terraced houses rising up to right and left, a ragged patch of washed-out blue sky overhead.

The Boroughs had been an entirely different place back then, that smelled and looked and sounded nothing like the abattoir of hope and joy it was today. Admittedly, the odour of the neighbourhood had been much worse in those days, or at least in the most literal and obvious sense. There’d been a tannery just north along St. Andrew’s Road, with great mounds of mysterious turquoise shavings piled up in its yard and a sharp chemical aroma like carcinogenic pear drops. This came from the noxious blue substance painted on the sheepskins to burn out all the hair follicles and make the wool coats that much easier to pull, and wasn’t half as bad as the smell coming from the south, which issued from a rendering plant, a glue factory on St. Peter’s Way. The west wind brought a perfume of scorched engine oil blown from the railway with an iron aftertaste of anthracite from the coal merchants, Wiggins, just across the road, while from the opposite direction when the dawn sun rose above the stable’s leaking rooftop it would lift the rich scents from the Boroughs’ streets themselves, wafting them downhill from the east in an olfactory avalanche: the steamy human essence piping from a hundred copper boilers, good food, bad food, dog food and dog carcasses, brick dust and wild flowers, rancid drains and someone’s chimneypot on fire. Hot tar in summer, the astringent smell of frosty grass in winter, all of this and then the River Nene on top, its cold and green bouquet drifting from Paddy’s Meadow just along the way. These days the Boroughs had no distinct fragrance that the nose could ascertain, and yet in the imagined cilia of the heart it reeked.

As for St. Andrew’s Road itself, or at least as far as their little strip of it had been concerned, that was just gone, replaced by a grass verge that harboured a few trees and the odd ornamental shopping trolley, stretched between the foot of Spring Lane and the foot of Scarletwell. There’d been twelve houses there, two or three businesses, God knows how many people on a plot that now seemed to be the sole province of the upturned mobile birdcages, the cold and hard providers of three generations’ packaged sustenance sprawling there in the weeds like obsolete wire mummies that the lab chimps had at last lost interest in.

Sitting there on the sofa in his Kingsthorpe living room he let his mind trickle away down vanished conduits and lost lanes to soak into the past. He saw the narrow jitty that ran parallel with Andrew’s Road, up past the back yards of the row, a solitary disused gas lamp halfway down its length. For some years after all the houses were demolished you could still make out the cobbles of the obsolete back alley as they bulged up through the turf; the sawn-through base of the old lamp standard, a ragged-edged iron ring inside which the cross-section bores of smaller wires and pipes had still been visible, the neck-stump of a buried and decapitated robot. This was gone now, swallowed by the grass, or by the bulging fence that ran along the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing field, this boundary having crawled a little to the west within the thirty years or so since his home street had been pulled down and its inhabitants strewn to the wind. There was nobody left who could object or halt the playing field’s encroachment. In another twenty years Mick thought the wandering chain link barrier might have got down to Andrew’s Road itself, where it would have to wait beside the curb for a few centuries before it crossed.

The road, named after the St. Andrew’s Priory that had stood along its northern, Semilong end long before, had once been the town’s western boundary. This was in the twelve-hundreds, when the area called the Boroughs now was then Northampton, all there was of it. The locals and the Bachelerie di Northampton — the notoriously radical and monarch-baiting student population of the town — had sided with Simon de Montfort and his rebel barons against King Henry the Third and the four dozen wealthy burgesses who had been governing the place for fifty years since Magna Carta, creaming off its profits, and were forerunners of the still forty-eight-strong council that was running things today, in 2005. Back then in the 1260s, an irate King Henry had sent out a force of soldiers to quell the revolt with extreme prejudice. The prior of St. Andrew’s, being of the Cluniac order and thus being French, had sided with the Norman royal family and let the King’s men enter through a gap within the priory wall, probably more or less across the street from where the Warrens’ house had later stood. The troops had sacked and burned the previously prosperous and pleasant town, while in reaction to the rabble-rousing students it had been decided that it would be Cambridge that became a seat of learning, rather than Northampton. As Mick saw things, that was where the punishment and disenfranchisement of his home turf had started, kicking off a process that continued to the present day. Refuse just once to eat the shit that you’ve been served up and the powers that be will make sure there’s a double helping steaming on your plate at every supper for the next eight hundred years.

That day in 1959 the district had been spread out like a musty blanket on the summer, stalks of bleaching grass poked through its threadbare weave. The factories clanged at intervals or sprayed acetylene sparks in brief, shearing arcs behind smoked Perspex windows. Martins chattered in the baking eaves to either side of tilting streets where women in checked headscarves trotted stoically along beneath their panniers of shopping; where old men at ten past three were still attempting to get home, dizzy with dominoes, from their quick lunchtime half down at the Sportsman’s Arms. The school uphill across the yellowed playing field, deserted for the holidays, was deafeningly silent with the non-shrieks of two hundred absent children. It had been a harmless, pleasant afternoon. The tower blocks hadn’t been erected yet. The sand-blonde film of demolition dust coating the neighbourhood evoked only the season and the beach.

The whole front of the terraced house had been deserted, Mick’s dad Tommy being off at work over the brewery in Earl’s Barton and the other family members out in the back yard taking advantage of the weather. From the smooth-worn pavement of St. Andrew’s Road, three steps led up into the alcove cowling the tired red of their front door, a black iron boot-scrape, which Mick hadn’t fathomed the intended function of until he was approximately ten, set back into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. To the door’s right, as seen by a visitor, there was the framed wire grid at pavement level ventilating the pitch-dark coal cellar, and above that was the front room window with the china swan gazing disconsolately out at Wiggins’s yard, the rust-and-bindweed railway sidings stretched beyond and the occasional passing car. Left of the front door was a mutual drainpipe and then the front door and windows of Mrs. McGeary’s house, which had a frayed and peeling wooden gate beside it giving access to the cobbled yard and the dilapidated stables at the rear.