Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“If I were you, mate, I’d go off and find yourself a quiet place to sit down where you can sort your head out, somewhere out of doors without the ceilings and the corners and all that. I’ll tell you what, down at the other end of Scarletwell Street over there, there’s a nice bit of grass with trees for shade. They’ll be in blossom around now. Go on, mate. It’ll do you good.”

Incredulous with gratitude, the youngster stared adoringly at Mike, as if at something mythical he’d never seen before, a sphinx or Pegasus.

“Thanks, mate. Thanks. Thanks. You’re a good bloke. You’re a good bloke. I’ll do that, what you said. I’ll do it. You’re a good bloke. Thanks.”

He turned away and stumbled barefoot off across the grit and shattered headlight glass of Scarletwell Street corner, where it joined with Crispin Street and Upper Cross Street, as the former had by that point technically become. Mick watched him go, tenderly picking his way over the rough paving by the chain-link fence of Spring Lane School like a concussed flamingo, stuffing the donated cigarettes into a misplaced pocket of his low-slung pants. As he began to head off down the hill towards Mick’s recommended quiet spot, he stopped by the school gates and glanced back. Mick was surprised to see that there appeared to be tears streaming down the youngster’s cheeks. He looked towards Mick gratefully and with some difficulty worked his face into a kind of smile. He gave a helpless shrug.

“I was just up the pub.”

Resignedly, he carried on away from Mick and was soon out of sight. Mick shook his head. Fuck knew what that was all about. As he resumed his own walk along Upper Cross Street, taking tight drags on his cigarette at intervals, it struck him that he felt in some way oddly lifted by the lunatic encounter. Not just by the dubious warm glow of having lent a modest hand to somebody in need, but by the hard-to-explain reassurance that the mad boy offered. An authentic Boroughs nutcase, just like he’d run into when he was a child, when the insane were that much easier to spot and someone walking down an empty street towards you yelling angrily into the air was certain to have paranoid psychosis rather than a Bluetooth earpiece. Mick just wished he could remember where he’d met the lad before.

The stuff about him being in the roof had knocked Mick back a bit, but that had got to be coincidence, or ‘synchronicity’ as Alma had attempted to explain it to him back when she was in her twenties and still had a crush on Arthur Koestler, before finding out he’d been a wife-beating bipolar rapist, which had rather shut her up. As far as Mick could understand the concept, it defined coincidences as events that had some similarity or seemed to be connected, but which weren’t linked up in any rational way, with one causing the other for example. But the people who’d come up with the word ‘synchronicity’ still thought that there might be some kind of bond between these intriguing occurrences, something we couldn’t see or understand from our perspective and yet obvious and logical in its own terms. Mick had an image in his mind of koi carp gazing upward from the bottom of their pool to see a bunch of waggling human fingers dipping through the ceiling of their universe. The fish would think that it was several separate and unusually meaty bait-worms, could have no idea these unconnected wrigglers were all part of the same unimaginable entity. He didn’t know how this related to his meeting with the barefoot boy, or to coincidence in general, but it seemed in some way muddily appropriate. Taking a last pull on his cigarette he flicked the smouldering butt-end to the ground ahead of him, its arc like space junk burning up upon re-entry, then extinguished the crash-landed ember underneath his shoe-sole without breaking step. Still thinking foggily about coincidence and carp he looked up with a start to find he was in Bath Street.

He’d been wrong. He’d been quite wrong to think that he was over his unsettling dream, his sojourn in the ceiling. He’d been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn’t. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you’d put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here.

He looked across the street at Bath Street flats, their front and not the rear he’d seen by dark a year ago with Alma. Since he’d had no call to venture through the Boroughs since that night, he realised that this must be the first time he’d been confronted by the bad side of his vision since he blinded himself, knocked himself out and recalled it, all those months ago. The sickening punch he felt, a bunch of fives impacting in his gut and driving all the air out of him was much worse than he’d expected. Leadenly, as if toward a scaffold, Michael Warren walked across the road.

Of course, he didn’t have to cut across the flats, up the wide central avenue with lawns to either edge, concluding in the broad brick-sided stairs that would deliver Mick practically to the doorstep of his sister’s exhibition. He could turn right and walk down to Little Cross Street, which would take him by the lowest edge of the shunned living units into Castle Street, thus circumventing the whole business, except that would prove Alma’s contention that she’d always been more of a man than he was, and he wouldn’t suffer that. Besides, this was all rubbish and Mick didn’t even know for sure if all that stuff that he’d remembered really was what happened when he’d choked that time, or whether it was all a dream he’d dreamed he dreamed, a spastic rush of images that had come to him only when he lay there flat out on the tarmac of the reconditioning yard with fireballs in his eyes. Even Mick’s youngest, Joseph, had long since ceased to let bad dreams colour waking life, had learned that the two realms were separate, that night-things couldn’t get you in clear daylight when your eyes weren’t shut, and Joe had just turned twelve. Attempting an indifferent air, Mick sauntered through the central gap in the low bounding fence and up the spacious walkway, heading for the steps just sixty or so feet ahead, just twenty paces off. What was it, anyway? For fuck’s sake, it was just a block of flats, in many ways more pleasant than the others that he’d passed that day.

He’d gone a step or two before the dreadful stench of burning garbage made him flinch and snap his head back, scanning the surrounding terra cotta chimneys for a source and finding none. Alma had told him once that to smell burning was a symptom schizophrenics suffered from, adding “but then they probably set fire to things quite often, so it’s bound to be a tricky judgement call.” Strangely enough, he found himself preferring the idea of schizophrenia and its olfactory hallucinations to the worse alternative that had occurred to him. As he remembered Alma pointing out during their meeting of the previous year, it wasn’t that he might have gone insane that was the prime cause for concern, but rather the alarming possibility that he might not have done. Clenching his nostrils against the pervasive charnel reek he carried on towards the stairs that, as he neared them, turned out to have been replaced during the last few years by a more wheelchair-friendly ramp.

A clot of blackness on the gravel path ahead of him fragmented into whirring charcoal specks like the precursor to a migraine, with a looping ochre turd briefly revealed, a footprint breaking its mid-section into ridge and trough, before the cloud of blowflies regrouped and resettled. Coming this way had been a mistake. The verdant swathes to either side of him were bounded at their far rims by long walls that ran along in parallel beside the central footpath and its bordering tracks of grass. The walls, built in the same dark red brick mottle as the rest of the accommodation, were alleviated by faux-Bauhaus half-moon windows that allowed an interrupted view of the wide, empty stretches of split-level concrete, the flats’ gardens, sulking birdless there beyond. When he’d first heard of Limbo he had visualised these courtyards, somewhere dismal where the dead might spend eternity, sat on a flight of granite steps below a featureless white sky. The semi-circles had been recently adorned by fans of iron spokes that made them look like cartoon eyes, the black rails forming radii across a negative-space iris. Seen in pairs they looked like the top halves of Easter Island faces buried to their ears in soil but still alive with begging, suffocating gazes. Young trees on the verges, more contemporary additions, threw their gloss-black shadows on the stifling masks, liquid and spider-like, ink droplets blown to form runny mascara patterns by an infant’s straw.