Alan Moore - Jerusalem

As a small child, he’d hated their outside lav after dark and wouldn’t use it, far preferring either just to hold it in or else use the pink plastic chamber pot stuck under his and Alma’s bed. For one thing, he’d been slightly built back then, rather than a great hulking lummox like his sister. Whereas she could confidently clomp off down the garden path with a huge sloshing bucket in one hand and flickering night-light in the other, he could barely lift the bucket using both his hands; would only have been able to affect a comic stagger as far as the garden steps before he’d spilled the ice-cold water down his leg and/or set his blonde curls alight with the incautious flailings of his candle.

Anyway, even if somehow back then in his larval cherub stage he could have managed to successfully transport the heavy pail, their yard by night was altered, unknown territory, too eerie to negotiate alone. The gap-toothed stable roof across the bottom wall was a mysterious slope of silver slate where rustling night-birds came and went through the black apertures. Its grey, ramshackle incline with the dandelions and wallflowers struggling from between its cracks was a steep ramp that led up into night. The tiny five-by-three-foot stretch of alleyway between the toilet and the garden wall was plenty big enough to hold a ghost, a witch and a green Frankenstein, with lots of room left over for those black and spiky imps like charred horse-chestnuts that there used to be in Rupert . Mick had always had the feeling, during childhood, that the back yards of St. Andrew’s Road by night were probably a bustling thoroughfare of ghouls and phantoms, though that may have just been something that his sister told him. Certainly, it had that ring about it.

It had been all very well for Alma. Not only had she been big enough to lift the bucket, but she’d always been much, much too comfortable with the idea of spookiness. It was a quality, he thought, that she had actively aspired to. Nobody could end up like Mick’s sister had unless it was on purpose. He remembered when, aged eight, he’d had a passion for collecting boxed battalions of minuscule Airfix soldiers: British Tommies just two centimetres tall in ochre plastic, ant-sized snipers sprawling on their bellies, others posed on one leg charging with fixed bayonets; or Prussian Infantry in bluish-grey, frozen in mid-throw with their funny rolling-pin grenades. You’d get a dozen soldiers sprouting from each waxy stem, fixed by their heads so that you had to twist them free before you played with them, perhaps five stems in every window-fronted cardboard box. He’d been halfway through an elaborate campaign — French Foreign Legion versus Civil War Confederates — when he’d become aware that both his armies were abnormally depleted. Ruling out desertion, he’d eventually discovered that his elder sister had been stealing soldiers by the handful, taking them down to the outside toilet with her (and her bucket and her candle) when she paid it a nocturnal visit. She’d apparently discovered that if you should light the soldiers’ heads using the candle-flame, then miniature blue fireballs made of blazing polythene would drip spectacularly down into the waiting bucket, making an unearthly vvwip — vvwip — vvwip sound that was terminated in a hiss as the hot plastic met with the cold water. He imagined her, sat there on the cold wooden seat beside the bent nail in the whitewashed wall where scraps of Tit-Bits or Reveille would be hung for use as toilet paper, with her navy knickers round her swinging ankles and her eager face lit indigo in ghastly flashes from beneath as a diminutive centurion was turned into a Roman candle. Was it any wonder that the thought of lurking back-yard spectres hadn’t bothered her? The moment that they’d heard her footsteps and the clanking bucket, they’d be off.

On that particular occasion with Mick, aged three, convalescing on his mother’s lap, Doreen had quickly wearied of her eldest child’s stampede around the otherwise agreeable and peaceful yard.

“Ooh, Alma, come and sit dayn ’fore yer make us dizzy. Aya got St. Vitus’ Dance or what?”

Like Mick, his sister generally did as she was told without resistance, but had obviously learned that if she over- did what she was told then it could be a lot more fun than actual disobedience, and was much more difficult to punish or to prove. Obligingly, his sister had skipped up the steps and sat herself down with her legs crossed on the warm and dusty tiles beneath the window of the living room. She beamed up at her mum and ailing baby brother with bright-eyed sincerity.

“Mum, why is Michael croaking?”

“You know why ’e’s croakin’. It’s because ’e’s got a sore throat.”

“Is he turning to a frog?”

“No. I just said, ’e’s got a sore throat. ’Course ’e’s not turnin’ into a frog.”

“If Michael turns into a frog, then can I have him?”

“ ’E’s not turnin’ to a frog.”

“But if he does, then can I keep him in a jam-jar?”

“ ’E’s not … No! No, ’course yer can’t. A jam-jar?”

“Dad could use a screwdriver and punch some air-holes in the lid.”

There’d come a point in any conversation between Alma and their mum in which Doreen would make a huge strategic blunder and would start to argue in the terms of Alma’s logic, whereupon she would immediately be lost.

“You couldn’t keep a frog inside a jam-jar. What’s it s’posed to eat?”

“Grass.”

“Frogs don’t eat grass.”

“Yes they do. That’s why they’re green.”

“Is it? I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”

This was the juncture at which Doreen would compound her previous tactical mistake by doubting her own intellectual capabilities as an adult against those of her infant daughter. Mick’s mum didn’t think that she was very clever or well-educated, and would endlessly defer to anyone whom she suspected might have a more firm grasp of the facts than she herself did. Ruinously, she included Alma in this category for no more reason than that Alma, even at the age of five, pretended to know everything and made her proclamations with such ringing confidence that it was simply easier to go along with her than to resist. Mick could remember how on one occasion, his eight-year-old sister had come home from school demanding beans on toast, a dish she’d heard her classmates mention but which was a new one on Doreen. She’d asked how Alma’s school-friends’ mothers would prepare the meal, at which Mick’s sister had insisted that cold beans were tipped onto a slice of bread, which was then toasted on a fork held to the fireplace. Astonishingly, Doreen had attempted this, purely on Alma’s say-so, and had not thought to employ her own superior judgement until their whole hearth was smothered in baked beans and splashes of tomato sauce with coal dust in suspension. That, or something equally unlikely, was how things turned out whenever anybody took Mick’s sister seriously. He could have told his mum that, back there in the shade and sunlight of the upper yard, if he’d been able to say anything through the balloon of sandpaper that was then steadily inflating in his throat. Instead, he’d shifted on her slippery lap and grizzled slightly, letting her get on with the ridiculous discussion that she’d stumbled into. Alma was now nodding in excitement, backing up her ludicrous assertion.

“Yes! All of the animals that eat grass are turned green. They told us it at school.”

This was a flat lie, but was one which played on Doreen’s insecurities about her own substandard 1930s education. You heard such a lot of marvellous new ideas in 1959 what with the Sputniks and all that, and who knew what astounding and unprecedented facts were being taught in modern classrooms? Decimals and long division, things like that, which Doreen’s own school days had barely touched on. Who was she to say? Perhaps this business with green animals all being fed on grass was something new that people had found out. But still she harboured doubts. It had been Alma, after all, who’d told her that lime cordial poured in boiling milk would make a kind of hot fruit milkshake.