Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“The ghost-seam’s what it saynds like. It’s a ragged seam what joins the Upstairs to the Dayn-below, and it’s where all the real ghosts ’ang ayt, all the ones what don’t feel comfortable up ’ere. It’s like the Second Borough’s on the top with the First Borough underneath, and in between them there’s the ghost-seam, like when yer go in a pub and all the fag-smoke’s ’anging in the air like a grey blanket, wobblin’ abayt when people move and cause a draught. That’s what the ghost-seam’s like. ’Ere, look ’ere on the right. It’s Spring Lane Terrace, what I said abayt, one of the streets what got pulled dayn to make the playing field.”

They were just walking past the corner where the terrace trickled off due south, towards their right, with house-fronts in a line to either side of dusty flagstones that were smeared with a thin margarine of morning light. Rather than peering down the tributary street, however, Michael Warren was more interested in the corner of it that was opposite the one which he and Phyllis had just passed, the corner they were now approaching as they walked across the mouth of Spring Lane Terrace. In the stead of doorways and net-curtained downstairs windows like the ones that started further down the side street, up this end was only plain brick wall supporting low slate roofs, which Phyllis knew to be the backside of a row of stables. As the pair of them continued up Spring Lane, leaving the offshoot terrace in their wake, they passed the gated yard upon their right out onto which the stables opened. There was the warm, hairy Bovril scent of horses and the stronger smell of disinfectant, which, though Phyllis didn’t like it, always made her nose excited.

The small boy gazed pensively at the closed gate as they walked by it, carrying on uphill. The deep fire-engine red that its gnawed woodwork had once been was faded by forgotten decades to the colour of a kiss. Phyllis explained, before the kid could ask.

“I think this yard’s still ’ere while yer alive, but it’s part of a factory by your time. Back when I was living dayn ’ere, though, it wiz the place they kept the fever cart.”

It made her ghostly substance shiver, even to pronounce the words. The fever cart, to Phyllis, had since she was small seemed to be from the night-side of the Boroughs. Rattling down the huddled byways it had been one of those sinister phenomena, like deathmongers or phantom monks, which she’d believed to be peculiar to the area. Such things spoke of the neighbourhood’s relationship with death, a tiger-trodden foreign land to little girls enjoying a relationship with liquorice-whip and dandelion-clock life.

The baby in his night-things, trotting there beside her, just stared at her blankly.

“What’s a fever cart?”

She sighed theatrically and rolled the memory of her childhood eyes. She’d obviously been right in her assumption that this nipper had been brought up soft. Phyllis supposed that most of those born in the ’Fifties had things cushy, what with all the science and medicine they had by then, at least compared with how things were when she was young.

“Yer don’t know nothing, do yer? What the fever cart wiz, it wiz a big wagon what they put the kids in when they ’ad the smallpox and diphtheria and that. It took ’em to a camp near the stone cross what’s ayt near ’Ardingstone, that’s there to mark the spot where Queen Eleanor’s body wiz put down when she wiz being taken back to London. In the fever camp, ayt in the open air with all the other children what were ill, they’d either die or they’d get better. Usually they’d die.”

The child was gazing at her now with a new look in his blue, long-lashed eyes. Above them, the remembered Boroughs sky graded from Easter yellow into watery rose.

“Wiz there a lot of things what made you poorly, when you wiz down here? Wiz that what made you dead?”

Shaking her head, she put him straight.

“No. There wiz a lot of bad diseases, right enough, but none of ’em put paid to me.”

She rolled one pink sleeve of her jumper up, wearing a gruff and businesslike expression as though Phyllis were a pint-sized stevedore. Thrusting her bony arm out under Michael Warren’s nose she showed him two blanched areas the size and shape of sixpences, close to each other on her pale, soft bicep.

“I remember I wiz playing raynd the Boroughs with ayr sister. Eight, I must have been, so this wiz still back in the ’Twenties. We saw this big queue of people leading ayt the door of Spring Lane Mission over there, where we’d go for ayr Sunday School.”

She gestured to the far side of the lane that they were climbing, where the tan stones of the mission’s plain façade wore their humility and lowliness with a pride that was almost luminous.

“Seeing the queue I thought as they wiz giving something ayt, so I got on the end of it and made ayr sister do the same. I thought it might be toys or something good to eat, ’cause back in them days sometimes yer’d get parcels give by better-off folk, what they’d distribute around the Boroughs. Anyway, it turned out it wiz vaccinations they wiz lining up for, against smallpox and diphtheria, so we got given ’em as well.”

She rolled her jumper sleeve back down again, concealing once more the inoculation scars. Her young companion glanced behind him at the yard that they’d just passed, and then returned his gaze to Phyllis.

“Did the other places in Northamstrung all have their own fever carts as well?”

On this occasion Phyllis didn’t snort or role her eyes at his naivety, but merely looked a little sad. It wasn’t that the boy was stupid, she decided. Just that he was innocent.

“No, me old duck. Only the Boroughs ’ad a fever cart. Only the Boroughs needed one.”

They went on up the hill in silence. On their left across the lane they passed the mouth of Compton Street, which ran off north towards a recollected Grafton Street with hazy Semilong beyond. The burnished lustre of Mansoul hung over everything, lovely and slightly wrong, as with hand-tinted postcard photographs: the doors that stretched away to each side of the street looked like they’d just been painted, apple red or powder blue, and faced each other in two ranks like guardsmen with their chests puffed out, stood waiting for inspection. Doorknobs seemed more gold than brass, and in the dusty fawn meniscus of the summer roadway flecks of mica winked the promise of a jewel mine. We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls …

Phyllis remembered every one of them. Cath Hughes. Doll Newbrook. Elsie Griffin. The two sisters, Evelyn and Betty Hennel, and Doll Towel. Phyllis could see their faces sharp as anything, recalled them far more clearly than the people that she’d sat with in church congregations and school classrooms while she was alive. That was the thing with gang allegiances. You made them when your soul was pure and so they counted for much more than your religion, or the party what you voted for when you wiz old enough, or if you joined the Freemasons or something. She suppressed the urge to run off up the ghost of Compton Street to number 12 and call on Elsie Griffin, and instead turned her attentions back to Michael Warren. He was, after all, the job she had in hand.

The other four, ahead of them, had by now reached the summit where the north-south line of Crispin Street and Lower Harding Street ran straight across the top end of Spring Lane. Reggie and Bill were halfway round the factory corner on the top left, disappearing into Lower Harding Street, with Marjorie and Handsome John some way behind them. Phyllis knew that John was hanging back to keep the drowned girl company, since she’d got shorter legs than him and couldn’t climb the slope as fast as he could. Phyllis thought that Handsome John was wonderful.