Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Dinner was tasty and appreciated and passed by without event. During the main course, Cathy turned reproachfully to Jack and scolded him about his eating habits.

“Jack, I do wish that you’d eat your vegetables.”

Her eldest son gave her a look of condescending sympathy.

“Mum, I wish women would fall at my feet, but we both know it isn’t going to happen. Let’s just face it and move on.”

Halfway through pudding, little Joe — if only they’d have named his elder brother “Hoss”, Mick suddenly thought, ruefully — had broken from his customary introverted silence to announce that he’d decided what he’d like to be when he did Work Experience next year: “A fridge.” Mick, Cath and Jack had all looked at each other worriedly, then gone on eating their desserts. It was a fairly normal dinnertime, as those things went.

After they’d done the washing up, Jack said he had the second series of Paul Abbott’s Shameless which was out on DVD, and asked if they could watch it. Since there wasn’t much of interest showing on terrestrial or Sky, Mick had agreed. Besides, he didn’t get to view a lot of television, what with getting up so early in the mornings, and although he’d heard Alma and Jack discussing the new sink-estate-set comedy, he hadn’t seen it yet. He’d got the rest of the week off from work, most probably as a result of Cathy’s phone call, and so could afford to sit back with a beer and take it in. If nothing else, it would be a distraction from the frightening train of thought his family had interrupted by arriving home. Although the sitcom’s sense of humour was notoriously grim, he doubted it was grimmer than a memory of dying in the Boroughs at the age of three.

It was the second season’s final episode they watched, Jack having seen the others previously. Though Cathy shook her head and tutted, wandering off to get on with some chores around the house, Mick thought the show was pretty good. From what he’d overheard of Jack and Alma’s fierce debate about its merits, Alma hadn’t liked it, or had liked it only grudgingly, but then Mick’s sister would find fault with almost anything that wasn’t her own work, as if on principle. “Like Bread with STDs”, that had been one of her off-hand dismissals. If Mick understood the gist of Alma’s doubts about the programme, what she didn’t like was the portrayal of the working class as having inexhaustible reserves of strength and humour in adversity, with which they could laugh off the gruesome deprivations of their genuinely dreadful situation. “Families like that,” she’d say regarding the show’s central clan, the Gallaghers, “in real life the old man wouldn’t be such an ultimately loveable disgusting drunk, and every train-wreck that he dragged his family through with him wouldn’t end up in a heart-warming group cackle. That thirteen-year-old girl with the supernatural coping skills would have been shagged by half the married blokes on the estate for alcopops. The thing is, people watch a show like that … and it’s well made, well written, funny and well acted, I’m not arguing with that … and in a funny way it reassures them about something that they shouldn’t feel so reassured about. It’s not okay that people have to live like that. It’s not okay that terms like sink estate are even in the language. And this plucky, mirthful underclass resilience, it’s a myth. It’s one the underclass themselves are eager to believe so they don’t have to feel so bad about their situation, and it’s also one the middle class are eager to believe, for the exact same reason.” As Mick now recalled, on that occasion Alma’s diatribe (which had been vented, it must be remembered, at her fifteen-year-old nephew) had been terminated when Jack ventured his own counter-argument: “Jesus, Aunt Warry, lighten up. They’re only puppets.”

Mick was more or less on Jack’s side there. At least in Shameless there was a more honest picture of existence in the lower margins than in shows like Bread , with or without the STDs. And how could Alma honestly expect a situation comedy to reproduce her own bleak and consistently enraged view of society? It would be like an episode of Are You Being Served? by Dostoevsky. “Mr. Humphries, are you free?” “None of us are truly free, dear Mrs. Slocum, unless it is in the act of murder.”

No, the only problem with the show for Mick was that the longer it went on, the more he was reminded of the strange anxieties that he was watching television in an effort to forget. That little figure he’d remembered, calling from its upper corner of the living room at 17, St. Andrew’s Road, what could that mean except that he had died, been taken up into some kind of afterlife by some, Mick didn’t know, some sort of angel?

Well, it could mean he was going round the corner. Going barmy. There was always that to be considered in the Vernall clan and offshoots, like the Warrens. Hadn’t his dad’s grandfather gone mad, and his dad’s cousin, Audrey? It was in the family, everybody said, and looked at logically was a more likely cause for Mick’s peculiar memories and feelings than that he’d been lifted up to Heaven by an angel. Anyway, the more he thought about it, then the less the tiny person that had been perched in the corner seemed like any sort of angel that he’d ever heard of. It had been too small, too plainly dressed, in its pink cardigan, its navy skirt and ankle-socks. A girl. Mick could remember now that the homunculus he’d seen had been a little girl with blonde hair in a fringe. She hadn’t looked much more than ten, and definitely hadn’t looked much like an angel. She’d had no wings and no halo, though there had been something odd, what was it, draped around her neck like a long scarf? A fur scarf, that was it. All drenched in blood. With little heads grown out of it. Oh, fuck.

He didn’t want to be insane, he didn’t want his wife and kids and friends to have to see him in that state, to feel bad when they left it longer each time between visits to whatever institution he’d end up in. Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn’t get away with it down Martin’s Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You’d find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This was not an idea that Mick found agreeable, or even bearable, but at that moment it appeared to be a serious possibility. Mick could feel thousands of unlikely details as upsetting and impossible as the girl’s blood-soaked fur scarf, bulging from underneath the floorboards of his memory, waiting to burst up from below and overwhelm his happy, ordinary life. Ideas like that just wouldn’t fit in Mick’s existence. They would bend it out of shape, destroy it. With renewed determination, Mick fixed his attention on the episode of Shameless he was watching. Anything in order to avoid the stubbornly persistent vision of that little girl, dressed in her furry necklace made of death.

The hour-long show was almost over, with the Gallaghers all massed in a communal living-room and trying to get the two twin babies they’d been left in charge of off to sleep. The babies’ mother, an emotionally-overwrought Seroxat casualty, had left instructions that the twins could be lulled into nodding off by singing hymns to them, their favourite being Blake and Parry’s almost universally admired “Jerusalem”. The family are croaking their way through another repetition of the much-loved standard, with no obvious effect upon the howling babies, when the mother of the twins at last gets home. Despite her welders’ goggles and her OCD, she then proceeds to send the twins to sleep with a surprisingly ethereal rendition of “Jerusalem” delivered in an unexpectedly well-trained and beautiful soprano. “And did those feet, in ancient time … ”