Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The little boy appeared to think about this for a while, perhaps attempting to work out how many nights he’d personally had. As Phyllis calculated it, it was a bit more than a single thousand, which was in itself no reason he should feel hard done by. There were those who’d died when they were tiny babies and had only a few dozen or few hundred days … and, unlike Michael Warren, they would not be coming back to life again to notch up who knew how many more thousand nights before they finally and permanently passed away. He didn’t know just how well off he was. The ghost-kids these days, Phyllis thought not for the first time, they don’t know they’re died.

Over against the jitty’s left-hand wall ahead of her and Michael, Phyllis noticed Mrs. Gibbs’s brazier, that she’d got John and Reggie to dispose of. It was already beginning to break down into the dream-mulch that collected at the curbs and corners of Mansoul, starting to lose its form and function as the rusting fire-basket curled back in corroded petals from the spent coals resting at the blackened centre. Its three tripod legs were buckling together, fusing to a single stalk so that the whole thing looked like it was turning to a metal sunflower, charred from having grown too near the sun. It didn’t pay to sit still for too long here in the Second Borough, where things slid and shifted and you never knew what you’d end up as.

Stumbling along beside her, Michael Warren gave her what was probably as close as he could get to an appraising look.

“How old wiz you, then, befour yew wiz dread? Did you get many nights?”

Phyllis gave him a look that could have fried an egg.

“Don’t be so cheeky. Yer should never ask a lady when it wiz she died. Old as me tongue and a bit older than me teeth, I wiz, and that’s as much as yer’ll get ayt of me.”

The child looked mortified and slightly scared. Phyllis decided that she’d let him off the hook.

“Now, if yer’d asked when I wiz born, that’d be different. I wiz born in 1920.”

Obviously relieved to find he hadn’t irrecoverably overstepped the mark, the little boy moved onto safer ground as he resumed his questioning.

“Wiz that round here, down in the Boroughs?”

Phyllis gave a little hum of affirmation.

“I wiz born in Spring Lane, up the top. When I wiz late for school I could climb over ayr back wall into the playground. Dayn ayr cellar, yer could pull a board away and look dayn in the dark upon the spring itself, what Spring Lane wiz named after. There wiz never any money, but my childhood up there wiz the happiest time I ever ’ad. That’s why I’m like I am now. This is me ’ow I remember me when I wiz at me best.”

Ahead of them, the other four had reached the alleyway’s far end, where it emerged into Spring Lane. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler were already out of sight, having apparently turned right and started trudging up the hill, but Handsome John and Marjorie were hanging back to make sure Phyllis and her small companion knew where they were going. John waved to her from the jitty’s mouth and pointed up Spring Lane to indicate that was where him and Marjorie were heading next and Phyllis grinned, raising one thin arm in reply. The infant shuffling beside her in his slippers was still seemingly preoccupied by her last statement, about how she looked now being what she thought of as her best.

“Well, if this wiz your best, why wiz them niffy raggit-thins all round your neck?”

If she’d have wanted, Phyllis could have took offence at having the rank odour of her garland raised in conversation, when to her it was a smell she hardly noticed anymore. However, she was starting to find Michael Warren at least tolerable company and didn’t want to bust things up when they were going well. She kept the faint affront out of her voice as she replied to him.

“There’s lots of reasons. Rabbits are the ’oly magic animal raynd ’ere, along with pigeons. There are some who say that’s why they call this place the Boroughs, that it should be ‘Burrows’ ’cause of ’ow the streets are tangled in a maze and ’ow folk dayn there breed like rabbits. That’s not really why it’s called the Boroughs, naturally, but it just shows yer ’ow some people think. One of the reasons why I wear them is because, up ’ere, the rabbit stands for girls just like the pigeon stands for boys. Abington Street up town wiz what they used to call the Bunny Run because of all the factory girls went up and dayn it and yer’d have the chaps stood at the edges, whistling and winking. I wiz told that Bunny wiz an old Boroughs expression for a girl, by reason of another name for rabbit being coney, what wiz also called a cunny, and … well, it involves bad language what I shouldn’t say, so yer’ll just ’ave to take my word for it. And then, of course, they say that Chinamen can see a lady in the moon where we can see a man, and that she’s got a rabbit with ’er, so there’s one more reason rabbits are to do with girls.

“As for the Boroughs, rabbits sum it up, the life down ’ere. There wiz so many of them on the wastelands and the bits of meadow what we ’ad about, we thought of ’em as vermin, just like all the people as lived at the better end of town would think of us: all ’opping raynd between the weeds and looking for a scrap to eat, all in ayr grey and brown and black and white, all ’aving lots of children because we knew nature would take some of them away. We thought of them as vermin, rabbits, or we thought of them as supper, and ayr dad would go ayt ’unting them, then bring ’em ’ome and skin ’em by the fire. We’d eat the meat and ’ang the skins up on a string, and when we’d got enough, ayr mam would send me up the rag-and-bone yard where the man would give me a few coppers for them. They’d be in a great long necklace, just like they are now.

“One time I ’adn’t gone straight to the junkyard with them, because I wiz ’aving fun pretending that I wiz a duchess with me fur coat raynd me shoulders. I wiz playing with the other Compton Street Girls, up Bellbarn and Andrew’s Street and all raynd there, and in St. Andrew’s Church there wiz a wedding gooin’ on. Of course, we thought all that wiz very glamorous and so we slipped into the chapel and we took a pew together at the back, so we could watch.

“The smell from off my rabbit skins wiz so bad that they ’ad to stop the wedding while the ushers chucked us ayt. I didn’t care. I liked ’em, and I still do. After all this time I’ve got so I can’t smell ’em anymore. Give it a while and yer won’t notice them yerself.”

They were now almost at the alley’s end, where it met Spring Lane’s slope in a T-junction. Phyllis noticed Michael Warren peering up at the old metal street-sign bolted to the jitty wall, black painted letters on a white ground specked with faecal orange, the plaque’s edges oxidised to friable iron wafer. Neither of the two words on the sign was wholly visible, obliterated by the rust so that only the cryptic message SCAR WELL RACE remained. Phyllis translated, for the toddler’s benefit.

“Scarletwell Terrace. It wiz what the jitty wiz before it wiz a jitty. That’s what all these back gates are that we’ve been passing on ayr right. Daynstairs in the three-sided world, all this ’as been pulled dayn by your time and there’s just the bottom playing-field of Spring Lane School, but up ’ere in the dream-crust it’s still standing.”

Michael didn’t comment on what Phyllis had just said, but seemed to understand. They traipsed around the corner, turning right into Spring Lane and facing up the hill. The view stopped Phyllis’s diminutive companion in his slipper-slapping tracks and made him gasp, so that she had to forcibly remind herself that all of this was new to him. Beyond the Attics of the Breath and the back alley they’d just left, the toddler had seen nothing of Mansoul itself. Watching the feelings and reactions wash across his upturned face as he gazed up the sloping lane, she tried to put herself back to when she was fresh arrived here in the Second Borough, tried to see the dream-hill as the child was seeing it.