Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“What about the cows ’n’ ’orses, then? Why ent they green, when they eat grass?”

Unflappable, Alma had waved aside her mother’s hesitant appeal to common sense.

“They are green, some of them. The ones that ent will go green when they’ve eaten enough grass.”

Too late, Mick’s mum had realised she was entering the world of quicksand nonsense that was Alma’s centre-parted, pigtailed, butterfly-slide-decorated head. She’d made a feeble yelp of protest as reality gave way beneath her feet.

“I’ve never seen a green cow! Alma, are you making all this up?”

“No” — this in a hurt, reproachful tone of voice. Doreen remained to be convinced.

“Well, then, why ent I seen one? Why ent I seen a green cow or ’orse?”

Alma, sitting beneath the window of the living room, had looked up at their mother levelly, her big grey-yellow eyes unblinking.

“Nobody can see them. It’s because they blend in with the fields.”

Despite, or possibly because of the dead serious tone in which this was delivered, Mick had been unable to prevent himself from laughing. Luckily, his ragged throat had done this for him, and the laugh came out as an unlubricated squeak, exploding halfway through into a jumping-jack-like string of coughs. Doreen had glared at Alma.

“Now look what you’ve done wi’ yer green cows!”

Surprised by their mum’s sudden conversational manoeuvre, Alma had for once been at a loss, unable to come up with a reply. Irrationality: Alma could dish it out all right, but couldn’t take it. Doreen had turned her attention to her youngest child, hacking and mewling there upon her knee.

“Ahh, bless ’im. ’Aya got a poorly throat, me duck? E’yar, you ’ave a pep like what the doctor said you should.”

“Pep” was the Boroughs’ term for sweet, and as Mick thought about it now it struck him that he’d never heard it used outside the district, or outside the homes of people who’d grown up there. Keeping Michael on her lap with one arm round his waist, Doreen had fumbled in her pocket for the square-shaped foil-and-paper tube she’d bought at Botterill’s, finally emerging with the pack of cherry-menthol Tunes. Deftly and with one hand, Doreen had carefully opened one end of the packet with her generous fingernails, squeezed out a single cough-drop, then proceeded to unpick the envelope-tucks of its individual wax-paper wrapping, where the tiny word “Tunes” was repeated several times in medicine-red. With a polite “ ’Scuse fingers” Doreen had held up the sticky crimson jewel to Michael’s lips, which had immediately parted like a hatchling’s beak so she could place the square-cut crystal on his tongue. He sucked it slowly, with its blunted corners poking up against his palate and his gums, especially the sore white-tipped ones at the back where teeth were starting to come through.

Doreen had sat there looking down at Michael fondly, her big face obscuring most of the blue Boroughs’ sky that had been visible between the leaning housetops. She must have been in her early thirties then, still trim and pretty with long features and dark, wavy hair. She’d lost the ghostly and unearthly silent film-star beauty that she’d had in pictures Mick had seen of her when she’d been younger, with her huge, wet, dreamy eyes, but it had been replaced by something warmer and less fragile, the appearance of somebody who’d at last grown comfortable with being who they were, somebody who no longer wore those painful clip-on button earrings. He’d gazed back at her, the cough-sweet tumbling and turning over in his mouth, losing its edges in his cherry-infused spittle, gradually transformed into a thin rose windowpane. Smiling, his mum had brushed a stray curl from the damp pink of his brow.

And then he’d coughed. He’d coughed until the air was forced out of his lungs and then had drawn a great big sucking breath in order to replace it. Somewhere in amongst this spluttering and confused bronchial activity, Mick had inhaled the Tune. Like a stray sink-plug dragged into the plughole of a draining basin to arrest its flow, the sweet fitted exactly in the small gap which remained in Mick’s absurdly swollen windpipe.

With horrific clarity, which made him grip the arm of the settee as he sat in the peaceful Kingsthorpe living room, Mick could remember the appalling moment when he knew his breath had stopped, a memory he had been spared until revived from his concussion earlier that day. He could recall his sudden and uncomprehending shock, his realisation that something was badly wrong and his uncertainty as to what it might be. It was as if he hadn’t previously noticed he was breathing, not until he found he couldn’t do it anymore.

The terror of the moment had been overwhelming, and he’d somehow drawn away from it, as if to a remote place deep inside himself. The sounds and movements of the garden seemed far off, as did the desperate, frightened tightness in his chest. His eyes must have glazed over, staring up into his mother’s overhanging face, and he remembered how her own expression had changed instantly to one of puzzlement and then mounting anxiety. He’d known, from his dissociated vantage, that he was the cause of her concern but couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d done that had upset her so.

“Ooh Guy, ayr mam! Come quick! Ayr Michael’s chokin’!”

The receding porthole that was Michael’s field of vision had been jiggled frantically, turned on one side and then the other, with his grandma’s taut-skinned features suddenly protruding into view, alarm suppressed beneath the glitter of her bird-like eye. Shudders of impact came from far away, hard and repetitive, like someone banging on a television set when the reception went. That must have been his gran or Doreen, thumping him upon the back as they attempted to dislodge the cough-sweet, but it hadn’t budged. He could remember the sensation of an animal with a metallic taste like pennies that had tried to climb inside his mouth, so that he’d bitten down reflexively on his mum’s fingers as she’d struggled to retrieve the blockage from his throat. There had been voices in the distance, women shouting urgently or wailing, though he hadn’t thought that this had anything to do with him.

The picture of the garden he was seeing had turned upside down at one point, which, from what he’d heard about the incident from Alma and his mum, must have been when Doreen had shook him by his ankles, hoping gravity would do the trick where all her other efforts had drawn blanks. Mick had an image of a red inverted face, an unfamiliar thing between a dog and a tomato that he’d never seen before, a kind of joke-shop devil mask he did not recognise as his distraught and weeping older sister. His short life and all its details, as they’d slid away from him, had seemed like a strange little picture-story that he’d only been half-reading anyway, with all the settings and the characters forgot even before the book was closed and put aside. The sobbing objects in the dwindling illustration, he had dimly recollected, were called people. These were something like a toy or rabbit, in that they were always doing funny things. The bricks surrounding them, piled up in flat or bulky shapes, were something he was pretty sure was known as a back-yarden in the story. Something like that, anyway, although he didn’t know what such arrangements had been used for or to do with. On the blue sheet up above were big and drifting shapes of white that you called lions. No, not lions. Cabbages, was that the word? Or generals? It didn’t matter. All these things had just been silly bits and pieces in the dream that he was waking up from. None of it was real, nor had it ever been.

He had been floating through the air, presumably borne by his mother, and was gazing up at the unfolding forms of all the lions and generals above. There’d been a gruff voice in amongst the ladynoise, which he assumed now had been that of Doug McGeary from next door, the yard with the big wooden gates on Andrew’s Road and the ramshackle stable at the rear. According to what Mick had been told afterwards, mostly by Alma, once the situation had been hurriedly explained to Doug, the fruit and veg purveyor had offered immediately to drive Mick to the hospital in his delivery lorry that he kept parked in the leaking stable. The unbreathing three-year-old, eyes glazed and staring, had been passed by Doreen over the back wall into the sure hands of Mrs. McGeary’s eldest son, or so the story went. Now, though, as the event came back to him, he saw that Alma must have got it wrong, at least that bit of it. His mum had merely held him up to show to Doug, not handed him across the wall. That made a lot more sense than Alma’s version, now he thought about it. Doreen had been too upset to pass her choking baby to somebody else, and what would be the point, in any case? Doug had to start his lorry up and get it out the barn, to wrangle it around the corners of their L-shaped yard, out through the splintering and distressed front gates onto St. Andrew’s Road. He wouldn’t need a half-dead toddler in the cab beside him while he took care of all that.