Alan Moore - Jerusalem

John and Michael neared the entrance of the schoolyard, with its own iron crossing barrier stood there in front of it, the gates locked for the summer holidays. Across the road from this the mouth of Lower Cross Street opened, running south along the bottom of the maisonettes to cut across the slope of Bath Street, heading towards Doddridge Church in the blurred snapshot of the distance. Down this side-street, rumbling towards the junction where it met with Scarletwell, there came a baffling assortment of fused body parts and cycle-wheels that Michael couldn’t come to terms with for a moment. It appeared to be a man in a dark trilby, riding on a bicycle, but all the images that he left trailing after him had got their black and white reversed, like when you saw the negatives of photographs. This, Michael thought, was surely a notorious and perhaps dangerous rough sleeper. He tugged hard upon John’s sleeve and stammered the alarm, although the tall lad didn’t seem unduly worried by the apparition. After a few moments Michael understood the reason why, or, at least, he began to understand it.

The gruff-looking fellow in the trilby turned left at the corner and free-wheeled away down Scarletwell Street on his bicycle, a creaking old contraption that looked pony-sized to Michael. As the man rolled off downhill he left no pictures of himself behind, which meant that he was still a living person. The peculiar thing that Michael had at first mistaken for a string of after-images in negative remained, unmoving, at the end of Lower Cross Street.

This turned out to be a coloured man with white hair, also sat astride a bicycle, who appeared fleetingly familiar to the little boy. Had Michael glimpsed a picture of this old chap somewhere recently, an image on a circus poster or a stained-glass window or something like that? The black man changed his grip upon the handlebars, and Michael noticed a brief flurry of too many fingers, from which he deduced this cyclist was the ghost, and not the other one. When Michael had first noticed him approaching Scarletwell Street, he must have been riding his ghost-bicycle so that he occupied the same space as the trilby-sporting white man, which explained how they’d seemed all mixed up together. Looking closer, Michael also realised that the black man’s bike (which pulled a two-wheeled cart behind it) had white tyres made out of rope, rather than the black rubber ones that had been on the living rider’s vehicle. This had probably helped give him the impression that one cyclist was a reversed copy of the other, now he thought about it.

As they both approached the school gate and its finger-worn gunmetal crossing barrier, John ducked his head to whisper an aside to Michael, who was diligently shuffling along beside him.

“That bloke who just rode off down the hill, the living fellow with the trilby on, he wiz the one you should be scared of out of them two. He’s George Blackwood, who rents half the houses in the Boroughs out, and half the women too. Bit of a gangster, Blackwood wiz, collecting rent and his cut of the takings from the prostitutes. He’s got a lot of hard men who he pays to back him up. ‘Soul of the Hole’, we call his type up here. He’s one of them where you can see the first signs of a kind of emptiness that gets into a place and turns it rotten.”

Michael didn’t have the first idea what John was on about. He merely nodded wisely so that his pale ringlets bloomed double-exposed into a lamb-white catkin-bush, and let the older lad continue.

“Everybody’s scared of Blackwood. The exception, funnily enough, wiz your nan, May. May Warren treats him just the same as she treats everybody else, which wiz to say she tells him off and scares him stiff with a right earful and then asks him if he wants a cup of tea. Old Blackwood likes her. He respects her, you can tell. And I’d not be surprised if him and his young ladies hadn’t needed a good deathmonger at times over the years, if you know what I mean.”

Though Michael didn’t, he tried hard to look as though he did. The bigger boy went on.

“The coloured feller, on the other hand, he’s good as gold. His name’s Black Charley and you won’t find anybody more well-liked throughout Mansoul. The Mayor of Scarletwell, that’s what they call him. If you look close you can see he’s got his chain of office on, around his neck.”

Michael looked closer, as instructed, and saw that the black chap had indeed got something like a rough medallion hanging down to his white shirt-front. In its way, it was as memorable a piece of neckwear as the scarf of rabbit-hides that Phyllis had got on. It seemed to be a tin lid hanging from a lavatory chain, but with the pale grey metal polished so that it was blinding when it caught the silver of the sunlight. The old coloured bloke was gazing, not unkindly, at the gang of kids as they approached the junction, obviously waiting there upon his funny-looking bicycle so he could talk to them. Michael spoke from the corner of his mouth to John, in much the way that tough Americans talked in the films you saw on telly.

“Wiz he a rough sleeper?”

John dismissed the notion with a wave, a dozen hands in grey-white like the pages of a fanned-through book.

“Nah. Not Black Charley. The rough sleepers, for the most part, hang about here in the ghost-seam because they don’t think they’d like it in Mansoul, up in the Second Borough. I’ve heard some say as the ghost-seam’s purgatory, but if it wiz, it’s one that people chose themselves. It’s not like that with Charley. He’s like us, he comes and goes exactly as he pleases. He’s as happy Upstairs as he wiz down here, and if he’s passing through this layer it’s because he wants to, just like us. What’s more, he’s one of the few ghosts, along with Mrs. Gibbs, that Phyllis shows respect for, so there’s no bad blood between Black Charley and the Dead Dead Gang, just for a change.”

They were now down beside the crossing barrier, outside the padlocked gates of Spring Lane School. John raised one hand and called across the road to the old black man on the other side. He had to shout a bit to get his voice to carry in the deadened atmosphere of that unusual half-world, where there wasn’t even any colour to the sound.

“What ho, Black Charley. How’s death treating you, then?”

All the other children had by this point reached the school gates, catching up with John and Michael, and were calling their own greetings to the phantom cyclist. The black rider laughed and shook his tight white curls into a phosphorescent blur, as though in amiable resignation at the sight of the dead urchins. Easily distracted, Michael noticed that a windborne sheet of newspaper was leaving a whole magazine of after-images behind it as it tumbled off down Scarletwell Street. He supposed it must be a ghost-newspaper, ghost-rubbish snatched up by the faint ghost of a breeze he thought he felt on his bare neck and ankles. Putting it out of his mind he turned his full attention back to the old coloured man who sat across the street astride what looked like home-made transport.

“My eternal life be treatin’ me just fine, thankin’ you kindly, master John. I’m just here carryin’ out the duties what I got as Mayor o’ Scarletwell, warning the local dead folks about this bad weather we got comin’ up and tellin’ ’em to get theyselves indoors, but now I’m more concerned about you little outlaws, gettin’ up to trouble all the time. Miss Phyllis, don’t you play no stunts on any o’ them gentlemen what takes their liquor at the Jolly Smokers. They’s a rough crew, so take my advice an’ keep away from ’em.”

He glanced around at all the other children, as if counting heads and making sure they were all present and correct.

“Miss Marjorie and Master Bill, hello to you, and to old Reggie Got-His-Hat-On I can see stood up the back there. And who’s this young feller what you’re no doubt leadin’ into wicked ways?”