Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Across the street, the mutable and transient hoardings flicker past. Charity outlets with batty proprietors and racks of cardigans that someone’s died in, Caribbean grocer-shops all facing north with no sun for the crated yams that languish in pink shadow. Alma sniggers at the name of one establishment, Butt Savouries, although at her age you’d hope she’d be more mature. A little further down the road is a kebab-house, Embers, that makes her feel wistful for the days when it had been Rick’s Golden Fish Bar. Not that she had ever been a customer, but she had often entertained the fantasy of going in and being served with mushy peas and chips by Humphrey Bogart, who would eye her ruefully and drawl “Of all the golden fish bars in the world, she has to walk into mine.” Somewhere behind her, the rapid staccato beep of the Pelican crossing slides subliminally into her awareness, prompting her to hum the fast bit of “The Donkey Serenade” without having any clue why she is doing so. There is another crossing, back along the Kettering Road in Kingsley, with an even more up-tempo rhythm that can leave her whistling “The Sabre Dance”. Susceptible as an eight-month-old baby and invulnerable as a pterodactyl made of diamonds, she continues into town.

A skinny boy in modern hair and spectacles stops in his tracks and gapes at her incredulously, face contorting in a rubbery cartoon expression which, if he were not so youthful, might be taken for a paralysing stroke. Remembering she hasn’t bothered putting on her knickers, Alma glances down to make sure that the zipper on her jeans is still intact then realises that the thunderstruck young man is an admirer. He tells her she’s Alma Warren, which she’s always grateful for. One of these days, when she’s gone wandering from the home, she’ll need that information. As he lists his favourite album sleeves, dust-jackets and comic-book covers Alma smiles, attempting to convey a girlish modesty but actually delivering the lipstick rictus and unblinking gaze of Conrad Veidt in a lost outtake from The Man Who Laughs . She shakes her stage-door Johnny’s nerveless mitt and thanks him for his kind words before carrying on down the Kettering Road, privately noting that his handshake had been far less manly than her own. Mind you, he more than likely hadn’t practised since the age of ten like she had, red-faced as she squeezed a set of bathroom scales until she could exert her own substantial weight with just the pressure of her thumbs. Before she’d left Spring Lane she’d given two boys a good strangling for picking, ill-advisedly, on her or little Warry. One of them had been left with appalling bruises round his throat like a jet necklace and his mother had come to the school and yelled at Alma. This would seem to have been largely ineffectual in that to this day she hasn’t properly absorbed the concept of a measured and proportionate response to anything.

She trots over another crossing, this one with the slow beep of a faltering heart-monitor that doesn’t provoke any musical accompaniment on her part, to the street’s far side. After a few more grocers’ shops with enigmatic individual atmospheres and an outlet for decent-looking Hip Hop clothing she is crossing Grove Road, with the once-majestic bulk of the Essoldo cinema just up the way. As far as Alma can remember, it was in Grove Road during the 1970s that people had their windows blown out by an IRA bomb at the RAF club that was somewhere in the neighbourhood. The government back then had been reluctant to describe the mess that everybody was involved in as a war of any kind, much less a war on terror. This had been before the war on drugs, of course, when launching military campaigns against abstract emotions or inanimate materials would have been seen as the behaviour of highly-strung and over-reaching Daleks.

On the corner with the Kettering Road is Queensgrove Methodist Church, an impressive nineteenth-century red brick edifice that is today without the posse of nice-looking black guys who in slightly warmer weather decorate its steps. Less than a dozen paces further on Alma walks past the open-plan contemporary phone booth that has played host to a fatal stabbing only a few nights before. What a way to go out, she thinks, in a glass coffin that’s been shrink-wrapped with an ad for season two of Prison Break . It’s good to talk.

The way she heard it, both the victim and the perpetrators had been black, and Alma doesn’t care much for the U.S. cop-show ring that has about it. That isn’t the way she likes to think about Northampton being stacked. The town’s relationship with racial issues is a subtle and a complicated thing that goes back centuries, and simplifying it all down into a criminal profiler’s class-skewed vision of society seems both disastrous and highly probable to Alma. She thinks about Black Charley — Henry George — one of the first black faces to be seen about the county and, in 1897, a tremendous novelty. That sense of novelty had lasted up until at least the 1960s, when her mate Dave Daniels had been the first non-white pupil at the Grammar School on Billing Road. They’d run a full-page article about it in the Chronicle & Echo at the time, including a large photograph of David looking apprehensive, just in case he wasn’t feeling singled out enough already.

Back during the 70s and 80s, all the rudeys and the rastas had set up a club in the magnificent Salvation Army fort that used to stand on Sheep Street, just across the road from where Phil Doddridge founded his academy. Three floors of people with impeccably cool names like Elvis, Junior or Pedro, coming, going, children playing round their ankles and always a pot of bean stew simmering somewhere upstairs, that was the old Matta Fancanta club. Its antique boards had quaked in time with U-Roy or Lee Perry on the sound system, dub beats she’d been convinced were deep enough to make her womb fall out. As she remembers, it had been when vehicles that should have only been affordable to whites began to manifest in the adjoining car park that local authorities began to take an adverse interest in the place. The fort — which should have been, surely to God, a listed property — had been demolished, as if it had proven easier to pull it down than shut it down. There’s only the ubiquitous bare grass there now where it once stood, just down from the arse-backwards gargoyle mass of Greyfriars bus station, built wrong way round to start with and more recently voted to rank amongst the most disgusting buildings in the country. That had been that for the public face of genuine black culture in Northampton, or at least until comparatively recently. Now there is a Northamptonshire Black History Association that is setting all the records straight, and Alma has been hanging out with a determined, racially-diverse young bunch of rappers from the Boroughs that are trading under the collective name of Streetlaw, which she thinks is at the very least a cute coincidence. Justice above the street and all that. No, it isn’t all gloom for the black community by any means, assuming that it can resist the dead-end role that Hollywood’s casting departments and the major record labels are apparently considering it for: let’s make the underclass a glamorous and edgy place to be, then people won’t mind being stuck there quite so much and we can craft dramatically-lit and well-mastered versions of their struggle to sell back to them for the few quid they’ve not already spent on scratch cards. Everybody wins.

Alma walks on, past the arched entrance to a cobbled yard, an unmistakeably Victorian construction that has “Dickens Brothers, Ltd” hand-lettered up above the archway. She suspects that elsewhere in the town there stands a black-beamed Tudor premises called “Shakespeare’s” and perhaps a “Chaucer & Sons” half-thatched cottage out near Hardingstone. Northampton, after all, is a well-labelled town. Once, from her window, she saw two vans pass each other, travelling in opposite directions on East Park Parade. One, possibly belonging to a mattress company, had the word DREAM stencilled upon its side. The other one, perhaps a television or computer retailer, was blazoned with the word REALITY. She’d noted that REALITY was heading for town centre, which was unsurprising, while DREAM followed a trajectory that would eventually lead it to Kettering. She thought that it was more than likely going there to die.