Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Episodes from Saint Paul’s life surrounded Ern as he rode his ramshackle elevator up amongst them, from the Damascene conversion to a vividly depicted shipwreck, with the various disciples under-lighted as though by a forge or opened treasure chest while ray-pierced cloudscapes roiled behind. The fresco that Ern planned to clean up and retouch today, over upon the echoing concavity’s southwestern side, was one that he was not familiar with from sermons. In its background was a place of warm, rough stones that might have been a gaol, with stood before this a wide-eyed and wretched man whose awe seemed to be at the very brink of terror, gazing at the haloed saints or angels who looked back with lowered eyes and small, secretive smiles.

Ern’s wooden dais climbed now past the Whispering Gallery where one could fancy that the walls still crept with century-old prayers and where the windows allowed Ern his final glimpse out over a drenched London to Southwark Cathedral’s tower in the south-east before he was moved higher, up into the dome itself. Around the lowest rim of this, on the encircling tambour just above the gallery, he was dismayed to note that a whole swathe of border detail at the bottom of each fresco had been covered over in stone-coloured paint, no doubt to easily and inexpensively mask water-damage that had been discovered during earlier renovations. Ern was muttering beneath his breath about the shameful lack of pride in one’s endeavours showing in this shoddy workmanship when blinding brilliance and tumultuous din so close they were a single thing exploded all about him and his platform dropped a sickening inch or two as startled bruisers far below lost then regained their grips upon the pulley-ropes. Ern’s heart was thudding while his suddenly precarious stand resumed its screeching progress upwards and he cautiously approached its right rear crook thinking he’d risk a peek down just to see if all was well.

As he wrapped one tight round the rope, Ern found his hands were wringing wet with perspiration, so that he supposed he must be frightened of heights after all, despite what everyone had always said. He peered down past the planking’s rough-cut ends and, though he could not see his fellow workers, was astounded to find how far up he was. The St. Paul’s clergy looked like earwigs inching over the white, distant floor and Ernest watched with some amusement as two of the clerics waddled unaware towards each other along the adjacent sides of a giant pier, colliding at the corner in a flurry of black skirts. It wasn’t the mere sight of a downed clergyman that made Ern chuckle, but his realisation that he’d known the two priests would bump into one another before they themselves did, just by virtue of his lofty vantage point. To an extent he had been able to perceive the destinies of land-bound people moving back and forth on their flat plane from the superior perspective of a third dimension up above theirs that they seldom thought about or paid attention to. Ernest imagined this was why the Romans had got on so well, seizing the tallest peaks as lookout posts and watchtowers in their conquests, their perceptions and their strategies both wonderfully advantaged by the higher ground.

His perch had by now reached the level he’d agreed with Billy Mabbutt, where it came to rest and was tied off, securely Ernest hoped, more than two hundred feet below. He was around the upper reaches of his first appointed fresco with the cloudburst’s flickering, percussive heart an almost constant presence right above him now. Once his expanse of floor space had stopped moving, Ern decided to begin his restorations with a halo-sporting figure in the picture’s upper left, angel or saint he couldn’t tell, the face of which had been somewhat discoloured by decades of censer-fume and candle smoke. He started gently with his cloths, stood there upon the platform’s brim wiping the smuts and layered dust from a visage he was surprised to find measured at least four feet from crown to chin when seen from right up next to it, the almost girlish features turned halfway towards the right and looking down demurely with the small lips pursed in that same smugly knowing smile. An angel, Ern decided, on the basis that those saints he could remember all had beards.

Ern was all on his own in what seemed the bare-boarded attic of the world, much more elaborately decorated and more spacious than the one at his mum’s house in East Street. Once he’d cleaned off as much superficial grime as he could manage from a quarter-profile near as long as he was, Ernest settled to the serious affair of mixing up a shade that would exactly match the holy being’s weathered peach complexion. Using the least mucky-looking handle of a brush that he could find he whipped the six yolks in their basin, then allowed a miserly amount of the resulting copper cream to pour into one of his mixing bowls. Another brush-handle served as a slender spoon with which Ern measured minute servings of what he believed to be the necessary colours from their varnish-tubs, wiping the brush-stem after every measure with a rag and stirring different quantities of lurid powder in his mixing bowl amongst the beaten egg.

He started with an earthy, rich Burnt Ochre, adding Naples Yellow for its touch of summer afternoon then followed this with a restrained pinch of Rose Madder. Next the bloody and translucent drizzle of rich crimson was mixed vigorously with the combination, tiny beads of yolk frosted with colour crushed into each other by the stirring squirrel hairs. He supplemented the already-satisfying mixture with his secret touch, the trick he’d learned from Jackie Thimbles, which was to employ a sprinkling of Cobalt Blue, this simulating the depleted veinal blood that circulated just below the human epidermis. If the blue and reds should prove too much Ern would offset them with a drop of white, but for the moment he was pleased with how the blending had turned out and set about preparing his light skim of gesso, shaking the blanched gypsum from its bag into a little water and then pouring his flesh tempera to colour the thin plaster once it had been mixed. Taking a useful range of brushes in his trouser pocket Ernest walked across the aerial theatre’s boards, holding his bowl containing the painstakingly assembled medium between both hands, back to the platform’s southwest point where he commenced to work on the gigantic countenance, his head tipped back as he reached upward slightly to the image on the concave wall directly over him.

Applying first a shallow coating of the fleshy-coloured gesso down the long sweep of the angel’s side-lit jaw line, Ernest waited until it was dry before he rubbed it down to a fine finish with his glass paper and then got ready to lay on a second coat. He’d barely started slapping this with hurried, practiced motions on the yard-wide face before he noticed to his consternation that the tints upon its far side, which he hadn’t touched yet, had begun to run. The storm outside had mounted to its zenith with a staggering barrage of thunders as Ern squinted up, bewildered and alarmed through an incessant lantern-Morse of lightning, at the dribbling colours moving on the angel’s flat and slightly in-bowed head and shoulders.

Squirming droplets, each a different shade, were running up and down and sideways on the inner surface of the dome round the angelic face, with their trajectories in shocking contravention of all reason’s laws. Moreover, the fast-swarming rivulets did not appear to Ern to have the glisten that they would if they’d been wet. It was instead as if dry streams of grains, infinitesimal and rushing, poured across the brushwork features following their inward curve like bright-dyed filings swimming over a weak magnet. This was an impossibility and, worse, would almost certainly be stopped out of his wages. He took an involuntary, faltering step back, and as he did so widened his appreciation if not comprehension of the frantic, trickling activity and motion going on before him.