Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“Does this Upstairs have a religature? Has it got Pearl & Deany gates, or toga-gods with chess and peeping-pools like at the pictures?”

Though her eyes did not light up at his renewed interrogation, at least this most recent question didn’t seem to make her more annoyed with him.

“All the religatures are right in parts, which means none of ’em are ’cause they all thought as it was only them knew what wiz what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what yer believe when yer daynstairs, although it’s best for yer that yer believe in something. Nobody up ’ere’s much bothered what it wiz. Nobody’s gunner make yer say the password, and nobody’s gunner throw yer out because yer didn’t join the right gang dayn below. The only thing what really matters wiz if you wiz ’appy.”

Michael thought about this as he walked beside her down the row of floor-doors. If the girl was right and all that mattered in life was one’s happiness, then he’d done relatively well, having enjoyed three years during which time he’d hardly managed to stop giggling. But what about if people had been happy doing things that were unpleasant, even horrible? There were such people in the world, he knew, and wondered if the same criteria applied to them as well. And what about those who through no fault of their own led lives that were continually miserable? Would that be held against them here, as if they hadn’t had a rotten enough time already? Michael didn’t think it sounded fair, and was about to chance his arm by asking Phyllis to explain herself when movements on one of the elevated balconies they were approaching caught his eye.

The pair had almost reached the near side of the cavernous arcade, and thus were close enough for Michael to make out the various people strutting back and forth along its levels in more detail. On the platform that had captured his attention, a railed walkway two or three floors up, two grown-up men were standing talking. Both seemed very tall to Michael and he judged them to be quite old, in their thirties or their forties. One of them had whiskers and the other had white hair, though, so he couldn’t really tell.

The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand — in his other hand he held a long staff — as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.

Just then a gust of breeze must have blown down the walkway, with the bearded man’s confusion of green pennant rags all fluttering wildly as a consequence. Michael was startled to discover that each flapping scrap was lined upon its underside with silk of brilliant crimson. As the wind disturbed the laughing figure’s tatters they flared upwards, rippling in abandon, so that the effect was like a leafy shrub that had spontaneously and suddenly burst into flame. It was a wonder, Michael thought, that the man’s leather hat had not blown off as well. Probably it was held in place with cord tied underneath his whiskered chin much like the headgear worn by Spanish priests, which it resembled.

Michael realised that he was in danger of becoming engrossed in this place’s details once again, and lowered his gaze from the crow’s-nest perches overhead back down to Phyllis Painter. She was by now quite some way in front of him and Michael felt a surge of panic as he ran to catch her up. He knew that if he lost sight of her it would be the way it was in dreams, where he could never find the people that he’d promised he would meet.

He overtook her just as she was coming to the end of the long boardwalk, with the last line of the inset vats reaching away on either side of her. A quick peep into one of these revealed another aerial view of a back garden not his own, despite some superficial similarities. Since it was right at one end of the mile-long row, he wondered if it might be the back garden of the corner house, where Andrew’s Road ran past the foot of Scarletwell Street. Michael had no time to ponder this idea, since Phyllis Painter was already marching out beyond the endless grid of apertures to where the wooden floorboards ended, somewhat startlingly, in a raised curb made of worn grey brick and then a broad strip of distressed and fractured paving slabs, just like the ones along St. Andrew’s Road.

Across these flagstones, facing Michael and the bunny-collared little girl, the lowest level of the monster arcade’s bounding wall confronted them, a lengthy terrace made from disparate brick buildings that were clearly not intended to be standing side by side with one another. Two or three of them resembled houses from his street but changed, as if they’d been remembered incorrectly, so that one had got its front door halfway up the wall on the first floor, with almost twenty stone steps rising to it rather than the normal three. Another had the nettle-fringed earth entrance of a rabbit hole where the brick hollow of the boot-scrape should have been, at pavement level down to one side of the doorsteps. In amongst these hauntingly familiar yet distorted house-fronts there were other almost-recognisable constructions, though the places they reminded Michael of did not belong in Andrew’s Road. One of them bore a strong resemblance to the school caretaker’s house up at the top end of Spring Lane, with black iron railings fencing off a downstairs window that was set perhaps a foot back from the street. Beside this was a section of the school wall which enclosed the always-locked arched entranceway that led into the juniors’ playground.

Set between this odd assortment of locations, which at least were all from the same neighbourhood, was one half-glass door with a display window next to it that Michael thought more properly belonged in the town centre. More precisely, it belonged in the real-life Emporium Arcade, that dim-lit incline rising from the fancy scrolling ironwork of its gateway on the Market Square. The shop that he was looking at, nestled incongruously amongst the displaced houses, was an almost perfect duplicate of Chasterlaine’s Joke, Novelty & Toy Shop, halfway up the right side of the arcade’s slope as you ascended. The wide window with the shop’s name in antique gold lettering above it, as he saw it now, was bigger than it should be and the words upon the sign seemed to be wriggling into different orders as he watched, but it was definitely Chasterlaine’s, or at least an approximation of the place. “Realist chanes” was what the shop appeared to be called at the moment, though when he looked back it seemed to read “Hail’s ancester”. How long had he been able to read, anyway? Regardless, Michael was so taken by surprise at this familiar store in such an unfamiliar setting that he thought he’d ask the girl about it as they walked the last few yards of floorboards to the boundary of the massive passageway.

“Are we in the Euphorium Arcade, like on the market? That place there looks like the Choke & Joy Shop.”

Phyllis squinted in the vague direction that one baggy sleeve of Michael’s dressing gown was pointing.

“What, yer mean The Snail Races?”