Alan Moore - Jerusalem

With a sneer that curled her luscious glistening lips to form a swimming-pool inflatable the woman snapped a lid across the sardine tin, contemptuously tossing it into the innards of a cartoon dog that sprawled there gutted on a work-surface and which John finally identified as some variety of handbag. Tipping back her office chair and flipping through a file she’d taken from a shallow wire tray on her desk, she was magnificent, quite unlike any female John had seen before. Although he didn’t hold with women swearing and although he’d never really been attracted to what he thought of as half-caste girls, this one possessed a kind of atmosphere or aura that was absolutely riveting. She had as much intensity about her as Oliver Cromwell had, a short walk down Marefair and getting on four hundred years ago, except that the force burning in her was less black and heavy than the energy that churned inside the Lord Protector.

She was also a much healthier and more attractive specimen. Her ludicrously splendid mane of catkin hair fell to her shoulders which were naked where her thick, masculine arms, those of a lady weightlifter, emerged from the chopped-off sleeves of her T-shirt. This had a man’s face printed upon it, his hairstyle almost identical to that affected by the garment’s wearer, with above it the word EXODUS and then below it the phrase MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE. The girl looked to be in her late thirties, but the radiance of youth was undercut by the grown-up and very serious-looking ragged seam of flesh just over her left eyebrow. This did not deface her beauty so much as it loaned a strength and gravity to her young countenance. John was just thinking that her powerful, mannish arms and air of resolute nobility gave the impression of a Caribbean Joan of Arc when he put two and two together and remembered where he’d heard about this girl before, blurting the answer out to Michael Warren.

“It’s the saint. It’s that one that I’ve heard about who looks after the refugees here in the twenty-fives. I think that I’ve heard people call her ‘Kaff’, so I suppose that’s short for Katherine. She pioneers some treatment here that wizzle save lives right across the world, folk who are on the run from wars and floods and that. They say that in the nothing-forties people talk about her like a saint. She’s the most famous person that comes from the Boroughs in this century, and here we are getting a look at her.”

Michael regarded the oblivious woman quizzically.

“Where did she get that nasty cut that’s near her eye?”

John shrugged, with briefly multiplying shoulders.

“I don’t know. I don’t know much about her, to be honest, other than the saint thing. Anyway, we can’t stand nattering here. Let’s find our way back to the first floor and catch up with Phyllis and the rest.”

Walking around the seated goddess as she finished with her scrutiny of the plain folder and replaced it with another from the same wire tray, Michael and John stepped through the office wall and found themselves in a short corridor that had the lower reaches of a stairway leading up from it. As the pair floated up this on their way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Dead Dead Gang, John found himself considering what it would take to get you labelled as a saint.

It all depended, very probably, upon the times that you were in, the background that you came from. In the middle ages it required a miracle, like the one that was said to have occurred here in St. Peter’s Church down in 1050-something, where an angel had apparently helped find the body of the man who would become Saint Ragener, the brother of Saint Edmund. Then in Cromwell’s day, a hundred years after Henry the Eighth had severed England’s ties with Rome, the saints were living people, men like Bunyan who believed that they were destined to be counted with that rank when sinful worldly kingdoms had been swept away and were replaced by an egalitarian society united under God, an entire nation of the saintly that would not be needing either priests or governments.

Just when he thought he’d finally forgotten all about it, John found that he was reminded of the blowing-up man there on Mansoul’s landings. Wouldn’t he be thought of as a saint, a martyr, by the people who believed what he did? John supposed that one thing that united Bunyan, Cromwell, Ragener, the human bomb — and from the look of that scar near her eye the girl downstairs as well — was that they’d all passed through some sort of fire. That was a factor, clearly, although not the only one, otherwise John would be a saint as well after his own dismemberment in France. John thought that it must be the attitude with which one went into the flames that made the difference. It must be one’s courage, or the lack of it, that sainthood rested on. There was much more to being canonised than getting shot at by a cannon.

Just when John and Michael reached the first floor, pandemonium erupted. At its top end, the staircase emerged into a corridor with two doors leading off on the right side, which John assumed must be the dormitories they’d caught a glimpse of earlier. He was about to poke his head into the wall looking for Phyllis when a small and sickly flying saucer sailed out through the nearest of the shut-fast doors with insubstantial doubles of itself behind it, marking its trajectory. Before it hit the floor, a whirling tumbleweed of streaming motion like two Siamese cats fighting followed the disc through the solid door and caught it in mid-hover. Still for just a second, this grey blur resolved into Drowned Marjorie and then ducked back into the presumed dormitory taking the captured object with her. John and Michael looked at one another in astonishment then raced across the passageway to follow Marjorie in through the chamber’s flimsy modern wall.

As John had guessed, on the wall’s far side was a dormitory, a more or less identical male counterpart to the girl’s quarters that they’d passed through a short while ago. As for the frantic action taking place inside, however, John had not predicted that at all.

Four living men sat playing cards, their ages ranging from about eighteen to forty, all completely unaware of the spectral commotion going on around them. In the riot of proliferating ghost-forms hurtling around the room it was almost impossible at first to make out what was happening, but after a few moments John believed that he had grasped the situation: counting John and Michael there were seven ghosts inside the dormitory, six being the assembled Dead Dead Gang. The seventh was an adult phantom, a rough sleeper that both John and Phyll had known of while they were alive, named Freddy Allen. In his mortal day Freddy had been a well-known Boroughs vagrant, sleeping under railway arches in Foot Meadow and keeping alive by pinching loaves of bread and pints of milk from people’s doorsteps, slinking off in the deserted and conspiratorial hush of early morning. Since his death, he’d been one of the most anonymous and harmless spirits to frequent the sorry territories of the ghost-seam, much less of a terror than Malone, or Mary Jane, or old Mangle-the-Cat. Unfortunately, this made Freddy a convenient and relatively risk-free target for Phyll Painter’s ongoing vendetta against grown-up ghosts.

What must have happened was that Freddy had been up here in the twenty-fives and minding his own business, sitting in upon a mortal hand of three-card Brag, when Phyllis, Reggie, Bill and Marjorie had burst in through the wall and started mucking him about. The ‘flying saucer’ that John had seen Marjorie retrieving from the corridor a moment or two back was Freddy’s hat, plucked from his balding crown by one of the ghost-children, who were now engaged in running round the dormitory and throwing Freddy’s battered trilby back and forth to one another while the paunchy and out-of-condition revenant flailed helplessly there at their centre, trying to catch his headgear as it whistled past. As the Dead Dead Gang tossed the ghostly hat from hand to hand, its after-images persisted long enough to leave a looping chain of wan and cheerless Christmas decorations strung around the upper reaches of the room.