Alan Moore - Jerusalem

She breaks from her train of thought to skirt around a recent-looking dog-evacuation that is in her path, a turreted turd-castle that’s as yet unbreached by toddler’s shoe or teenage trainer, perfect end-product of the material world and also its inevitable monument. It gives at least a semi-solid form to the most frequent word, most frequent thought upon the local modern mind, reiterates the creed of the Destructor: “This is where we send our shit, the things that we no longer have a use for. This means you.”

Heading towards the ramp that has replaced the steps that she remembers from her childhood Alma wonders, with a lurch, how many individuals have died down here, how many last breaths have fogged mirrors in unsatisfactory bathrooms or escaped into cramped kitchenettes. It must be hundreds since the flats were put up in the 1930s; all those disappointed souls, their stories worked into the grain of the veneer, encoded in the bar-stripes of the ugly wallpaper. She feels as though she’s walking on the bottom of a sea of ghosts, through suffocating fathoms of unruly ectoplasm reaching far above her. Bed-sand memories and voices rise in clouds of silt at every footstep. Poltergeist shells, astral rubbish, rusted ghoul-cans tumbling through the murk of her periphery. Grey ladies drifting on the sluggish phantom current like a strain of supernatural waterweed. An algae of dead monks. She wades with astronaut deliberation up the ramp, a channel-walker slogging up an underwater rise that might with any luck turn into Dover Beach, uncertain how much longer she can hold her breath beneath this sea of misery, this betiding woe.

Under the concrete of the ramp, the steps she sat on as a child must still be there. She can remember walking home once with her mum and little brother, cutting through from Castle Street to Bath Street. Alma would have been, what, nine or ten? She’d bought a comic from Sid’s bookstall on the market and had run ahead of Doreen so that she could sit here on the steps and read it for a moment while she waited for her mother to catch up. The comic, unsurprisingly, had been Forbidden Worlds . She can’t remember if there’d been a Herbie story in that issue, but it would have certainly contained the work of Ogden Whitney in one form or other. While she’d sat here on her chilly granite perch and marvelled, Whitney would have been already more than halfway down the boozy path that led to the asylum and the grave. She has a chilly premonition that somewhere in the year 2050 there is someone having much the same thoughts about her, as if Alma and Ogden are already both together in a pallid green Unknown with all the wolf-men and the Frankensteins; as if the whole world and its future were already posthumous and she was looking down on all this loveless folly from a point outside and over time, from the forbidden world. Everything’s dead already. Everyone is gone.

She steps out onto Castle Street and pauses, noticing the almost instantaneous shift in mood and light. Well, that was interesting. She turns to gaze back down the ramp, along the central path to Bath Street with the NEWLIFE tombstones rising up beyond, and smiles. Fear of decay and death, she thinks. Fear of depreciation, destitution and decline. Is that the best you’ve got?

With a refreshing dodgem whiff of new resolve flaring her nostrils, Alma heads down Castle Street towards the point where Bristol Street bleeds into Chalk Lane. Crossing over the deserted road towards its south side, Alma eyes up the dilapidated Golden Lion, the establishment where Warry had poured out his wild phantasmagoria to her only a year ago. A year. She can’t remember anything about it except painting, drawing, chewing Rizla papers up and spitting them into a bowl, the shifts of season only noticeable in the change of imagery upon her drawing board or easel, a whole summer spent delineating snotty-nosed dead children in soft pencil. And now here she is.

The junction she’s approaching used to have a sweetshop owned by someone that she and the other children knew as ‘Pop’, a white-haired portly chap with glasses who sold homemade penny ice lollies and penny drinks. The latter had been half-pint milk bottles filled up with tap water and homeopathic doses of fruit cordial, a water-memory of having once been shown a molecule of rosehip syrup. Still, on thirsty afternoons, even the immaterial concept of a tasty beverage had been enough. They’d paid their pennies and had gratefully gulped down a fluid that looked pinkish if you happened to be drinking it at sunset. Looking back, she realises that she should have automatically mistrusted anybody who called themselves Pop. Ah, well. You live and learn.

Down at the bottom end of Castle Street, she passes on her left the little patch of grass, still seemingly unoccupied, where she had almost been abducted as a child. It’s one of the few childhood memories that she still can’t properly resolve, where she’s still not sure what was really going on. Her and some other eight-year-olds had found the rusted shell of an abandoned Morris Minor on the grass and, in an area that offered little in the way of free activities and entertainments, they had treated it as if it were a theme park or at least a proto-bouncy castle. They’d climbed on its bonnet and had sat inside behind its steering wheel. Alma had been on top of the wrecked vehicle, manically jumping up and down on its corroded roof, using it as a heavy metal trampoline, when a black car had glided out of Chalk Lane into Bristol Street to pull up suddenly beside the stretch of turf where they were playing.

When the thin young man with Brylcreemed hair and a dark suit climbed from the driver’s seat and started striding angrily towards the child-infested Morris Minor, all the other kids had been positioned so they could immediately scarper, leaving only Alma stranded on the creaking roof. The man — whenever she tries to remember what he looked like she gets only a false, superimposed photograph of Ian Brady — had grabbed her from atop the wreck and carried her, screaming and wailing, back to his own motor, shoving her inside. There was a youngish woman in the car, with mousy brown hair, although once again Alma’s melodramatic memory has pasted in a shot of Myra Hindley, slightly younger and without the bleach or vampire panda make-up. Alma had been pleading, crying, struggling in the back seat. The young man had said that he was going to take her off to the police station but then had suddenly relented, perhaps when he noticed that the woman with him was by now looking almost as frightened as the tubby, weeping little girl. He’d opened the rear door and let her out onto the pavement before roaring off, leaving her standing sobbing by the roadside for her pals to find when they emerged from hiding. What had all that been about?

Part of her is almost inclined to take the story as it comes. She can quite easily see her would-be abductor as a sour-faced and emotionally strangled young churchgoer of the middle classes and the early 1960s, taking his fiancée for a daring spin through the poor quarter, wanting to impress her with his moral rectitude by scaring straight one of the district’s infant vermin. That seems much more likely than the lurid child-molester narrative she’d retroactively imposed on the scenario, although it doesn’t make her feel a lot less interfered-with, or less angry. She recalls the young man’s pasty skin and his cold little eyes. Whatever he’d imagined he was doing and whatever his intent, he’d been no different from the current rash of curb-crawlers, using the Boroughs as their private zoo. She’d been disturbed to learn that during the alarming weekend of apparent rapes that had occurred last year, one of the victims had reported being dragged into a car in Chalk Lane, almost on the same spot where Alma’s attempted kidnapping had happened. Walking past the unkempt slope of yellow-green she wonders if the place has some malignant genius loci, something in the soil that gives it a predisposition towards a specific crime, repeated down the decades. She remembers hearing that a skeleton had been found at the site during some excavations in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t know if it turned out to be the product of an ancient burial or of a relatively recent murder, doesn’t know if it was male or female, child or adult. Lacking any contradictory evidence, she construes the remains as those of an abduction victim, lonely underneath the earth and calling out for company. Whichever way she looks at it, this is a haunted piece of ground. How typical, then, that she’s chosen this place for her preview.