Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“… God! This child’s got the worst case of tonsillitis that I’ve ever seen. Give me a tongue-depressor so that I can …”

Michael’s reverie was interrupted by a cry from Reggie Bowler, who had taken charge of Mammy and was feeding Puck’s Hats to the docile mammoth as he led her down the wide, tiled pathways of the grid arrangement.

“Phyll? I reckon that this ’ere’s the lobby, over ’ere. That must be where they bring ’im in, like. Come and ’ave a look, see if the young ’un recognises anybody.”

Dutifully, everyone traipsed over to where Reggie and their shaggy mount were standing, next to one of the great thirty-foot long openings that were set into the floor. Leaning across the raised tiles of the edge, the gang peered down into the living world below where motionless and colour-filled transparent coral forms stood woven in a complicated knot, the whole glass-animal array suspended in a jelly-cube of time.

Michael gazed down into the jewellery, the strangles, into the twenty-five thousand nights. The space below appeared to be about the same size as his living room down in St. Andrew’s Road had looked when he had seen it from the Attics of the Breath, all of those Mansoul weeks ago and getting on ten worldly minutes back. He guessed that he was looking at some sort of doctor’s office or a little side room running off from the hospital lobby. There were four — no, five — distinct shapes intertwining in the chamber’s aspic depths, and with a sudden rush of joy the child identified one of the elongated figures as his mum, Doreen. He knew her by the gentle green glow emanating from inside her, not a showy emerald but the deep, sincere green that you found on mallards’ necks. With Doreen in the room there were four other fronded gem-forms, their streaming trajectories crossing or intersecting with her own, elaborately. One of the extended see-through statues had a rich, earth-coloured light within it that made Michael think, for no good reason, about nice Mr. McGeary who lived next door to them in St. Andrew’s Road, although he wasn’t certain why Mr. McGeary should be down there at the hospital, standing near Michael’s mum.

The other three jewel-patterns in the mortal room below were also grouped together in a cluster. There was a calm blue one, like a gas flame, that the ghostly infant thought might be a doctor, and a reddish growth of crystal that was possibly a nurse. This rose-tinged structure had translucent frills of arms along its winding flanks, the foremost pair clasping together at the toothpaste-squeezing’s front end as though holding something at the level of its chest, where a bust bulged out from the abstract shape’s façade as did a plump maternal face a little higher up — both of these features sculpted in pink glass. The final jewel-form, smaller than the rest and a pale, lifeless grey, was clasped at the convergence of the trailing limb-fins and held up before the rubicund extravagance’s bosom. Michael comprehended with a start that this was him, this colourless glass starfish at the heart of the display. This was his little human body. The tall blue construction, curled above it like a wave, seemed to be poking something down a tiny hole in the top end of it, of him.

“… can see it. Come on out, you little blighter. Aa! I almost had it. Let me just …”

His throat hurt, but that might have just been because he was going to have to say goodbye to all his friends, that hot lump that he sometimes felt when people went away. He leaned back from the aperture and turned around to sit instead on its raised boundary, kicking his slippered feet, with the Dead Dead Gang and their mammoth standing round and smiling at him fondly. Well, the mammoth wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t glaring at him or looking offended either. Phyllis crouched down on her haunches so that she was at his eye-level, and took his hand.

“Well, then, me duck, it looks like this wiz it. It’s time for yer to goo back dayn where yer belong, back in yer own life wi’ yer mum and dad and sister. Shall yer miss us?”

Here he started snuffling a little bit, but blew his nose upon his dressing gown instead until he’d got himself under control. Michael was nearly four, and didn’t want the older dead kids thinking that he was a baby.

“Yes. I’ll miss all of you very much. I want to say goodbye to everybody properly.”

One by one, the rest of the gang came and kneeled or squatted beside Phyllis to make their farewells. Reggie Bowler was the first, lifting his hat off when he crouched as though he were in church or at a funeral.

“Ta-ta, then, little ’un. You be a good boy with yer mum and dad, and if yer dad goes off to prison and yer mum chuck’s ’erself out the bedroom window, don’t go sleepin’ in a packing crate, not when it’s winter. That’s the best advice what I can offer. You take care, now.”

Reggie straightened up and went to stand beside the mammoth, who contentedly chewed on her cud of Puck’s Hats. Marjorie took Reggie’s place, kneeling in front of Michael with her eyes swimming like tadpoles in the jam-jars of her spectacles.

“You look after yourself now, won’t you? You look like you’ll turn out to be everybody’s favourite character, in what seems to be everybody’s favourite chapter. I suppose we’ve solved the Riddle of the Choking Child, and so this is the chapter’s ending. Don’t go getting knocked down by a car in two years’ time and spoiling it so that I have to do a re-write. Although when you do die of old age or whatever it wiz, and you come back up here, then don’t forget to look us up. We can all get together for the sequel.”

Marjorie kissed Michael on one burning cheek and went to stand with Reggie. Michael hadn’t got the first idea what any of what she’d just said to him had meant, but felt it was meant kindly all the same. The next in line was Bill. Not much taller than Michael in his current form, the ginger-haired rogue didn’t have to kneel or crouch, but just reached out and shook the dressing gown-clad child by his free hand, the one that Phyllis wasn’t holding.

“Cheery-bye, kid. Say ’ello to Alma for us when you see the mental bint, and I expect that we’ll meet up again in forty year or so, downstairs, when we don’t recognise each other. You’ve got bottle, mate. It’s been good knowing yer.”

Big John came after Bill, so tall he had to grovel to look Michael in the eye, but grinning in a manner that suggested that he didn’t really mind.

“Goodbye for now, then, nipper. You give your dad, your nan and all your uncles and your aunts my love. And you can tell me one last thing: did your dad Tommy ever talk about his brother Jack at all?”

Though puzzled by the reference, Michael nodded.

“He’s the one what got killed in the war, I think. Dad talks about him all the time.”

John smiled and seemed inordinately pleased.

“That’s good. That’s good to hear. You have a good life, Michael. You deserve one.”

Standing up, John went to stand beside the others, which left only Phyllis crouching there before him with her dangling rabbit feet and faces, with her scabby knees protruding bluntly from beneath her navy skirt’s hem as she squatted.

“Goodbye, Michael. And if we’d ’ave met somewhere else in a different life or in a different time, I should ’ave loved to be yer girlfriend. You’re a smashin’-looking kid. You’ve got the same good looks as John ’as, and that’s sayin’ summat. Now, you go back to yer family, and try not to forget all what you’ve learned up ’ere.”

The infant nodded gravely as Phyllis gently detached her hand from his.

“I’ll try. And you must all look after one another and try not to make so many enemies. I shouldn’t like it if one of them hurt any of you. And Phyllis, you must look after your little brother and not always be all cross with him like Alma is with me.”