Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He reached both hands into the darkness underneath the bed and carefully slid out a slopping jerry over the bare floorboards, setting it before him like a pauper’s font. He fumbled for his old man in the itchy vent of the grey flannel long johns, staring dully into the sienna and blood-orange pool already stewing in its chip-toothed china pot, and made an effort to recall if he’d had any dreams. As he unleashed a stair-rod rigid jet of piss at the half-full receptacle he thought that he remembered something about working as an actor, lurking backstage at a melodrama or a ghost-tale of some kind. The drama, as it now came back to him, had been about a haunted chapel, and the rogue that he was playing had to hide behind one of those portraits with the eyes cut out, such as you often found in that sort of affair. He wasn’t spying, though, but rather talking through the picture in a jokey frightening voice, to scare the fellow on the other side that he was looking at, and make him think it was a magic painting. This chap that he’d played the trick on in the dream had been so rattled that Ern found himself still chuckling at it in mid-stream as he knelt by the bed.

Now he’d thought more on it, he wasn’t sure if it was a theatrical performance that he’d dreamed about or a real prank played on a real man. He had the sense, still, that he’d been behind the scenery of a pantomime, delivering lines as the employee of a repertory company of sorts, but didn’t think now that the victim of the gag had also been an actor. A white-haired old pensioner but still young-looking in his face, he’d seemed so truly terrified by the enchanted daubing that Ern had felt sorry for him and had whispered an aside from there behind the canvas, telling the poor beggar that he sympathised, and that Ern knew this would be very hard for him. Ern had then gone on to recite the lines out of the play that he apparently had learned by heart, bloodcurdling stuff he hadn’t really understood and was unable now to bring to mind, except that part of it, he thought, was about lightning, and there was another bit concerning sums and masonry. He’d either woken at this point, or else could not now recollect the story’s end. It wasn’t like he placed a lot of stock in dreams as others did, as his dad John had done, but more that they were often smashing entertainment that cost nothing and there wasn’t much you could say that about.

Shaking the last few drops from off the end he looked down in surprise at the great head of steam that brimmed above the po, belatedly apprised of just how icy the October garret was.

Pushing the now-warmed vessel back under the bed-boards he rose to his feet and made his creaking way across the attic to an heirloom washstand by the far wall opposite the window. Bending to accommodate the sharp decline in headroom at the loft-room’s edges, Ern poured some cold water from his mam’s jug with the picture of a milkmaid on into the rusty-rimmed enamel washbowl, splashing it with cupped hands on his face, ruffling his lips and blowing like a horse at the astringent bite of it. The brisk rinse turned his mutton-chops from arid, fiery scrub to freshly-watered ringlet fronds, dripping below his jutting ears. He rubbed his face dry with a linen towel, then for a while looked on its faint reflection that gazed from the shallow puddle in the bowl. Craggy and lean with straggling wisps of pepper at the brow, he could see in its early comic lines the doleful cracks and seams of how Ern thought he might appear in later life, a scrawny tabby in a thunderstorm.

He dressed, the fraying clothes chilled so that they felt damp when first he put them on, and then climbed from the attic to the lower reaches of his mother’s house, clambering backward down pinched steps that were so steep that they required one’s hands to mount or to descend, as with a ladder or a quarry face. He tried to creep across the landing past the doorway of his mum’s room and downstairs before she heard him, but his luck was out. A cowering, curtain-twitching tenant when the rent-man called, his luck was always out.

“Ernest?”

His mum’s voice, like a grand industrial engine that had fallen into disrepair stopped Ern dead with one hand on the round knob of the top banister. He turned to face his mother through the open door that led into her bedroom with its smell of shit and rosewater more sickly than the smell of shit alone. Still in a nightgown with her thinning hair in pins, Mum stooped beside her nightstand emptying her own room’s chamber pot in a zinc bucket, after which she would go on to make the rounds of both the nippers’ room and his and Annie’s quarters, emptying theirs as well and then later depositing the whole lot in the privy at the bottom of their yard. Ernest John Vernall was a man of thirty-two, a wiry man with a fierce temper whom you wouldn’t seek as an opponent in a fight, with wife and children, with a trade where he was quietly respected, but he scuffed his boots against the varnished skirting like a boy beneath his mother’s scornful, disappointed frown.

“Are you in work today, ’cause I shall ’ave to be along the pawn shop if you’re not. That little girl won’t feed ’erself and your Anne’s like a sleeve-board. She can’t feed ’em, baby Thursa or your John.”

Ern bobbed his head and glanced away, down to the worn, flypaper-coloured carpet covering the landing from its stair-head to his attic door.

“I’ve got work all this week up at St. Paul’s but shan’t be paid ’til Friday. If there’s anything you’ve hocked I’ll get it back then, when I’ve ’ad me earnings.”

She looked to one side and shook her head dismissively, then went back to decanting the stale golden liquid noisily into her bucket. Feeling scolded, Ern hunched down the stairs into the peeling umber of the passageway, then left and through a door into the cramped fug of the living room, where Annie had a fire lit in the grate. Crouching beside the baby’s chair and trying to get her to take warmed-up cow’s milk from a bottle meant for ginger ale that they’d adapted, Annie barely raised her head as Ern entered the room behind her. Only their lad John looked up from where he sat making a pig’s ear of his porridge by the hearth, acknowledging his father’s presence without smiling.

“There’s some fried bread doing in the kitchen you can ’ave for breakfast, but I don’t know what there’ll be when you get ’ome. Come on, just take a spot o’ milk to please your mam.”

This last remark Anne had directed at their daughter, Thursa, who was still red-faced and roaring, turning with determination from the weathered rubber teat as Ern’s wife tried to steer it in between the baby’s yowling lips. It was a little after seven in the morning, so that the dark-papered cuddle of the room was mostly still in shadow, with the burnished bronze glow from its fireplace turning young John’s hair to smelted metal, gleaming on the baby’s tear-tracked cheek and painting half his wife’s drawn face with light like dripping.

Ern went through and down two steps into the narrow-shouldered kitchen, its uneven whitewashed walls crowding and spectral in the daybreak gloom, a memory of onions and boiled handkerchiefs still hanging in the bluish air, cloudy as though with soap scum. The wood-burning stove was going, with two end-cuts of a loaf frying upon its hob. Clarified fat was sizzling in a pan black as a meteor that fell out of the stars, and spat on Ernie’s fingers as he carefully retrieved the noggins with a fork. In the next room his baby daughter wearily allowed her furious weeping to trail off into accusing hiccup-breaths at sulking intervals. Finding a crack-glazed saucer that had lost its cup to accident he used it as a plate, then perched upon a stool beside the knife-scarred kitchen table while he ate, chewing upon his mouth’s right side to spare the bad teeth on its left. The taste of singed grease flooded from the sponge-pores of a brittle crust as he bit down, scalding and savoury across his tongue, bringing the phantom flavours of their last week’s fry-ups in its wake: the bubble ’n’ squeak’s cabbage tang, the pig cheek’s subtle sweetness, a crisped epitaph for Tuesday’s memorable beef sausage. When he’d swallowed the last morsel Ern was pleased to find his spittle thickened to a salty aspic where the resurrected zest of each meal still enjoyed its culinary afterlife.