Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“I wiz forgetting that yer don’t know anybody in the gang. This ’ere is John, and over there that’s Reggie, in the ’at. Reggie’s been in the gang longer than anybody, aytside me and ayr Bill, because ’e’s been cold the longest. This is Marjorie, who drayned dayn Paddy’s Meadow, and this is ayr Bill. We’re the Dead Dead Gang, so we play ayt after dark and after death, and won’t goo ’ome until we’re called. Now, should you like to see ayr den? It’s only dayn the jitty ’ere and up Spring Lane a bit.”

Without agreeing vocally to anything that had just been proposed the little boy fell into step with the loose gaggle of dead children as they started to meander down the alleyway and left the Attics of the Breath behind them. Michael Warren trotted dutifully along over the damp, fog-coloured cobbles, in between Phyllis herself and Handsome John. The kid would first peer up at one of them and then the other, frowning slightly and still with a lot of questions clearly on his mind.

“Why did you scrawl yourselves the Dead Dead Gang? It’s funny when you say it twice like that.”

John chuckled, with a lovely toasty sound that Phyllis would have ate for breakfast if she could.

“Well, when we wiz alive we wiz in different gangs. Me and my brothers used to hang out in the Green Gang, Phyllis here wizzle be in the Compton Street Girls, while old Reggie wiz a member of the Gas Street Mob and then the Boroughs Boys. Drowned Marjorie, I think, wiz in a secret club from Bellbarn. Just about the only one of us who didn’t grow up in the Boroughs was Phyll’s little Bill, and he was in a bunch of kids up … Kingsthorpe, was it, Phyll?”

Casting an eye to where Bill walked ahead of them along the jitty’s gloomy urban crack with Marjorie and Reggie Bowler, Phyllis piped up briefly in correction.

“Kingsley. ’E wiz in the Kingsley Lads.”

“Kingsley, that’s right. So, anyway, rather than argue over whose old crowd we’d take our name from, Reggie said we ought to call ourselves the Dead Dead Gang. From what I can remember, it wiz from a dream he’d had while he was still alive. He’d dreamed he wiz in school, having his lessons, and the teacher held a book up what he said that they wiz going to read from. It had got a green cloth cover with a line drawing embossed in gold what showed a load of kids, and one of them had got a bowler hat on and an overcoat down to his ankles like what Reggie wore. The book was called The Dead Dead Gang . Reggie suggested that was what we called ourselves, and we all thought it sounded snappy so we went along with him.”

Wandering down the narrow alley with brick walls on one side, back gates on the other and a memory of leaden sky above, John grinned at Michael.

“As for what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All that I could think of was, some people are dead lucky and some people are dead clever, but not us lot. We’re dead dead.”

A little further down the alleyway, young Bill had evidently made some smart remark that had upset Drowned Marjorie. A pushing match had then ensued, and Phyllis was alarmed to note that Marjorie, who’d set her mouth in a determined line, had taken off her spectacles and handed them to Reggie Bowler for safekeeping. This was never a good sign with Marjorie, and Phyllis thought someone had better intervene before affairs got out of hand.

“John, go and see to them. Tell Marjorie to put ’er specs back on and tell ayr Bill that if he dun’t behave I’ll smack his arse so ’ard ’e’ll end up in another cemetery.”

John smiled and nodded, ambling ahead of Phyllis and the toddler on his long legs with the grey socks pulled up smartly. Reaching Bill and Marjorie he draped a friendly arm around each of their shoulders, walking in between them so that neither one could take a wild swing at the other, steering them along the cobbled jitty as he steered their conversation into calmer waters. Handsome John could always be relied upon to sort things out so that nobody was left feeling in the wrong, Phyllis observed with a faint glow of second-hand pride, just from being in the same gang as what he was. He was such a natural peacemaker that Phyllis found she couldn’t picture him at war, for all she knew how fearless he could be.

Walking beside her, Michael Warren pointed suddenly towards the recessed entrance of a staircase, dark behind an iron gate set in the alley wall upon their right.

“That’s where I thought you’d gone to when I lost you, up them stairs. The steps wiz dark and there wiz crunchy things on them I thought wiz earwigs, but they turned out to be wrappers off of Tunes. There was a horridor up at the top that had a radigator what played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, then after that the devil caught me.”

Phyllis nodded as they passed the gated alcove. As the leader of the Dead Dead Gang she knew all of the secret passages and the hereafter shortcuts.

“Yes. It leads up into someone’s dream of Spring Lane School, if I remember right. Spring Lane’s a lovely school if yer still down in the Twenty-five Thousand Nights, but if yer find yerself there in yer dreams it’s a bit frightening, and frightening things can ’appen. Specially at night, but even in the day it’s never very bright inside. I’m not surprised that bogey found you there.”

They were just scuffling past the beautiful imaginary gas-lamp standard that in Phyllis’s opinion was the nicest thing about the jitty. What, down in the solid world, was only a plain cylinder and stem had been transformed, up here, to sculpted bronze. An oriental-looking dragon that had tarnished to a pale sea-green with glinting golden flecks of metal showing through from underneath wound down the tall post to coil sleepily in low relief about the base, where a nostalgia for grass thrust up in tufts out of the summer grit and puddle gravy. Up atop the serpent-circled shaft, the lamp itself had stained-glass panes in its four tapering windows. Of these only three were visible, the panel at the rear being continually out of sight, and since the lamp was not alight at present even these three weren’t that easy to make out.

The leftmost one, as looked at from the front, was decorated by the portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman who had a blunt and thuggish face yet wore a pastor’s wig and robes and collar. Over on the right-side pane was the translucent image of a coloured chap with white hair, sat astride a bicycle contraption that had rope, not rubber, fastened round its wheel-rims. Phyllis knew that this was meant to be Black Charley, who had lived in Scarletwell Street while he was alive and who you sometimes saw still, pedalling around Upstairs. The central pane between these two was without colour and had only black lead lines on its clear glass. It showed a poorly-rendered symbol rather than a proper picture: the loose ribbon of a road or pathway and above it a crude balance, little more than two triangles joined by two straight lines. This, Phyllis knew, was the town crest of Mansoul and you saw it everywhere, although she wasn’t sure what it was meant to represent.

Beside her, Michael Warren wasn’t taking any notice of her favourite lamppost, but from his expression was engaged in brewing up another silly question.

“What’s that what you said, Twenty-five Thousand Nights? It sounds like stories about skying carpets or a turban genie-bottle.”

Phyllis looked at the dishwater sky above the alleyway and pushed her lips out while she thought about it for a moment.

“Well, I s’pose it wiz a lot of stories abayt wondrous things that ’appened once and then never again, but it’s ayr stories that folk mean when they say that, Twenty-five Thousand Nights. It’s just the number of nights, roughly speaking, that most people get, seventy years or so. Of course, there’s some get more, and then there’s some … especially raynd ’ere … who got a good sight less. Poor Reggie Bowler froze to death when ’e wiz sleeping rough on the old burial ground by Doddridge Church, that wiz some way back in the eighteen-sixties or the seventies, and ’e wiz no more than thirteen. Four thousand nights, give or take a few ’undred. Or there’s Marjorie, who went into the river dayn at Paddy’s Meadow when she wiz nine, trying to get ’er dog ayt, silly little sod. ’E got ayt right as rain, but Marjorie didn’t. She washed up where it gets shallow under Spencer Bridge. They didn’t find ’er till next day. Three thousand nights or thereabouts, that’s all she ’ad. When they say twenty-five, that’s just the average.”