Alan Moore - Jerusalem

With their trailing smoke of after-images, the children had descended gently into the drum-reconditioning premises in St. Martin’s Yard like slow, spent skyrockets. As he’d let go of Michael Warren’s hand the toddler had retied the dangling tartan sash belt of his dressing gown and had stood for a moment taking stock of his surroundings before looking questioningly up at Bill.

“Where’s this place, then?” he’d asked.

This is the place you’re going to work when you’re a man. This is what all those boring hours at school were to prepare you for. All of the hopes and dreams you’re going to have while growing up will all end up here being beaten flat with hammers; being reconditioned. All these answers, honest but too cruel and painful for a child to bear or even understand, remained unspoken at the sore tip of Bill’s bitten tongue. He’d felt a sudden surge of empathy for the poor kid, standing there blissfully oblivious to the bleak, disheartening prospects that were all around him, staring him right in the face. Bill, while he’d been alive, had worked in places just as joyless and soul-deadening, but never for more than six months or so. From what he could remember Alma telling him about her brother, Michael would be labouring in this grey, uninspiring place for far too many years. If he’d have murdered his employers in the way that they so patently deserved, he would have been released from his confinement sooner, the poor little bleeder. Trying to conceal these sombre thoughts behind his most impermeable cheeky grin, Bill had looked down at Michael as he’d tried to formulate an answer to the infant’s question that he thought the kid could live with. Well, not live exactly, but Bill had known what he meant.

“It’s a bad place, titch. Spots like this, Soul of the Hole wiz what we call ’em, and they won’t do you or anybody else no favours. Never ’ave done, never will do. So, if we were to do something a bit naughty, then we’d not be hurting anybody who didn’t deserve it.”

This last bit had been an abject lie. The person who’d be most hurt by the “naughtiness” that Bill proposed would be Michael himself, given an acid facial and then knocked out by an iron bar, and Michael certainly did not deserve to undergo such tribulations. On the other hand, of course, his personal misfortune would be in the service of a greater good, or at least theoretically, but Bill had the uneasy feeling that they’d probably said that to all the whippets they’d had smoking eighty fags a day at the laboratories.

By this time Marjorie and Reggie had alighted too, looking self-conscious as they’d let go of each other’s hands, and had wanted to know what this wild jaunt to the arse-end of nowhere was in aid of. He’d explained as best he could, with Michael being present.

“Look, you know that stuff that Fiery Phil wiz telling us at Doddridge Church, when he said that us lot had got a challenge on our plates, but that the powers that be were confident as we could ’andle it? Well, ’e wiz talkin’ about Willie Winkie ’ere. Apparently, when ’e’s brought back to life, we ’ave to make sure ’e remembers at least some of this what’s happened to him, even though that’s s’posed to be impossible. Now, I think I’ve worked out a way it can be done, but I can’t go into the ins and outs of it in present company. Little pitchers, if you catch me drift.”

Here Bill had been staring at Marjorie and Reggie, who’d both nodded almost imperceptibly to signal that they’d understood and were prepared to go along with Bill, despite the fact he couldn’t really explain anything with Michael present. As for the toddler himself, he’d nodded wisely too, while obviously having no idea what Bill was on about. Encountering no objections, Bill had pressed on with his scheme.

He had originally been intending to have a poke round in the surrounding days and nights, to make sure that they’d got the right date and the right occasion, but he’d changed his mind. It had been what Phil Doddridge said to them, about how they should feel free to take Michael where they pleased and rest assured that anything that happened would be what was meant to happen. This predestination and free will lark cut both ways, as far as Bill had been able to see. If he’d brought Michael and the others to the yard on this precise night, that was divine destiny at work and it would have been almost rude to double-check. Bill had begun to realise that accepting the idea of Fate could actually remove some of the burden of responsibility. You could delegate upwards.

Having thus decided that they were indeed in the right place at the right time, Bill had next led the foursome on a wander round the reconditioning yard, inspecting stock and searching out likely material for what he’d had in mind.

It really had been a depressing place, that yard. Bill had remembered stories that his mum had told him, about when she’d been a little girl and would come round to Martin’s Fields, as this place had then been, when she was out ‘May Garling’. This had been something her and her mates did on the first of May. They’d go round door to door displaying a small basket full of wild flowers with a kiddie’s doll sat in their midst, and for a halfpenny a turn they’d sing their little Mayday song that they’d all learned: “On First of May, my dear, I say, before your door I stand. It’s nothing but a sprout, but it’s well budded out by the work of Our Lord’s hand.” Looking around him at the heaps of dented cylinders, Bill had reflected that the yard, or fields, had sounded a much nicer and more picturesque location in his mother’s day.

From Bill’s own lifetime, his most striking anecdote about the place had been one that he didn’t even feature in himself. It had been there in Martin’s Yard, as he recalled, that the police had placed surveillance officers when they were keeping an eye on the land along the far end of St. Andrew’s Road belonging to Paul Baker, a notorious villain Bill had known back in the day. The coppers had thought Baker might be hiding loot from some bank job or other on the property, and had their suspicions raised when they’d spotted two shady types who’d appeared to be tunnelling into the fifty-year-old piles of ashes and composted waste that hulked from Baker’s territory.

In actuality, these two supposed accomplices had been Bill’s old mates Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp. Ted had been an accomplished and discerning burglar who only burgled stately homes, while Rome had been a fearless union fighter and a celebrated all-round nut job. They’d been on Paul Baker’s patch of ground with his permission, digging in the mounds of compressed mud and cinders dumped there decades earlier as waste from the Destructor up in Bath Street. Ted and Roman had been on a hunt for old Victorian stone bottles, the kind with the little marble for a stopper, for which they could likely get a few bob up at the antique shops. Rome, who’d always taken reckless courage to the point of death-wish, had been tunnelling into the heap’s side, tempted further in and further still by an enticing partial glimpse of the words ‘ginger beer’ upon a curving surface. In the end, there’d only been his ankles sticking out, which had been when the entire hillock had decided to collapse on top of Roman Thompson.

Ted, a sturdy chap considering his size, had taken hold of Roman’s feet and hauled him from the suffocating dirt and clinker in a great surge of adrenaline. It was at this point that some two or three cars full of coppers, who’d been watching the whole episode from up St. Martin’s Yard, had roared onto Paul Baker’s premises and had come screeching to a halt beside the thoroughly disoriented pair. Bill hadn’t known what the police were hoping to achieve by their manoeuvre, but he’d bet they weren’t expecting the appalling sight of Roman Thompson, covered head to toe in black filth, hair and beard plastered to muddy spikes and his crazed, furious eyes blazing amidst the soot and mire. It had occurred to Bill, as he’d thought back upon the incident from there in Martin’s Yard, nosing around with Reggie, Marjorie and Michael, that if not for Ted Tripp’s timely actions, the Destructor would have killed Rome Thompson even after it had been demolished for the better part of forty years. If Bill had been the superstitious type, the sort who readily believed in demons, ghosts and thousand-yard-long river monsters, he might even have concluded that this had been the Destructor’s murderous intent.