Alan Moore - Jerusalem

At length she turns away from the locked gate and carries on down Bath Street into Scarletwell Street and on to St. Andrew’s Road. The short strip of ancestral grass is still the same. As usual she puzzles over the still-standing corner house and tries without success to work out where the Warren residence had once been situated. Actually, she’s pretty sure it was the spot between two young and sturdy trees about halfway along. It feels appropriately eerie, but she can’t be certain. Finally it strikes her that to be stood motionless beside the road down in this quarter of the town might possibly be sending the wrong signals and she turns away to walk the long route home, up Grafton Street to Barrack Road and then around the Racecourse back onto East Park Parade.

Crossing the Kettering Road up by the oddly decorative sheltered tram-stop where the town’s principal gallows at one time resided she is thinking about art in the Charles Saatchi era; art become mono-dimensional commercial gesturing directed at an audience so culturally lost it feels it has no platform from which it can venture criticism. Only other artists — and then only renegades — seemed confident enough in their opinions to effectively mount a rebuttal. She recalls the last time that she’d had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin’s work which Alma wishes that she’d said herself: “My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everyone you ever slept with in a tent ?” Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestions for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda’s list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.

Making her way along the gorgeously eroded pavement of East Park Parade she at last reaches her own door, fumbling in her too-tight trouser pockets to retrieve a temporarily elusive key before effecting entry. Inside Alma switches on the lights and winces ruefully at all the mess and clutter. Why can’t she be tidy like a proper adult? Inwardly, she blames it on the influence of Top Cat. When she and her brother Warry were both growing up they’d both aspired to live in a converted dustbin like their feline hero, somewhere where you could just brush your teeth then switch the nearby streetlamp off with a convenient pull-cord before pulling on the battered lid and bunking down. Only much later had she wondered where he spat the toothpaste.

Alma stuffs her peppers, covers them with feta cheese and sticks them in the oven. As they roast she rolls a joint and smokes it while she makes a start on leafing through her copy of New Scientist . After supper she has three or four more reefers while she finishes the science magazine, reads Private Eye and then re-watches two more episodes from the last season of The Wire . Around eleven she stubs out her final fatty of the day, gulps down her Red Rice Yeast pill and her ineffectual Kalms and turns off all the lights before retiring.

Naked underneath her duvet, Alma rests on her right side and pulls a tuck of quilt between her bony knees. Off in the smash and puke of Friday night are sirens, catcalls, curses from over-relaxed young men and women navigating their ways back and forth along East Park Parade. She rubs her feet together, satisfied by the dry rasp of sole on sole. Mulberry cobwebs creep across the inside of her eyelids.

On the edge of sleep, her mind replays an incidental image from the beautifully-written television drama that she’s just been watching: a bandanna-sporting corner-boy sits on his stoop amidst the desolated vacant lots or syringe-carpeted back alleys of West Baltimore. The muddily-remembered snapshot brings her suddenly awake with a deep pang of dread and loss that she does not immediately understand. Something about the Boroughs, something about all the neighbourhoods that are essentially just like it, right across the world. All of the men and women, all the kids inhabiting this universal landscape of cracked pavements, steel-jacketed grocer shops and meaningless corroded street-names from another century, living their whole lives among these sorry dead-ends with the knowledge that the concrete bollard and the chain-link fence will still be there when they are all long gone, long gone.

A bottle smashes, somewhere off along the Kettering Road. She pushes all the haunting thoughts of ghetto and mortality away, and tries instead to let the revelatory silkworms wrap her in a merciful cocoon of anaesthesia.

Alma’s got a big day ahead of her tomorrow.

Awake, Lucia gets up wi’ the wry sing of de light. She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D’actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin’ grimpill’s progress. Her arouse from drowse is like a Spring, a babboling book that gorgles up amist the soils o’ sleep, flishing and glattering, to mate the mournin’ son. Canfind in this loquation now she gushes and runs chinkling from her silt and softy bed, pooring her harp out down an illside and aweigh cross the old manscape to a modhouse brookfast. Ah, what a performance, practised and applausible. She claps her hands, over her ears, to drone out all the deadful wile-ing and the sorey implecations of whor farmlay. With her bunyans all complainin’ she escapes the Settee o’ Destraction and beguines her evrydaily Millgrimage towar’s ridemption or towords the Wholly Sea; to wards, the tranquilisity of night.

Spoonin’ the tousled egg into her scrambled head she wells, as iffer, on the past now. Sadly hatched in Triste at seven past the century and seven past the year, born to the clench and stamour of a paupoise warld, she was denied the mummer’s teatre. Not a dripple Nora drop was she aloud. The molcow was sucked dry, by George, who went from one mamm to an udder all of his serpenitentine life. Eve’n the girden of her garlhood he had snaken from her, eden then, with him the dirty apple of their Mermaw’s eye and allwas raising cain, which Lucia had resistered for as long as she was abel. He’d been furteen, shy was only ten, to pet it baldly. Wristling under milky and transluciant sheets in a suck-session of clamped, crusterphobic rended rooms, the da off summerwhere with all his righting and the mudder rural, pagan in her unconcern, forever standing pisspots on the parlour table where they lifft their venerable beaded halos on the varnish. Giorgio’s dragon would rear up, out from the scampy wondergrowth and orgiantly demanding her at-ten shuns while their Moider only smirled, ingently dull, and let her borther press a head with his idventure, up into the little light, the little depth.

Not that she hoydent wellcomed his hardvances, penfull at forst, back then when she still beliffied that he loved her, back there in their papadise when she was tigrish in the milibloom of her youth-ray tease. Setting in the die-room now she chews over her toast, raised two old tines, and wanders if he ova reilly and tooralee was her brooder. Hidn’t there once been a scarlet letter, a dismissive from their Further in the Land of Ire? He’d met with Cowsgrope the Invincible who had confleshed to scraping the odd barnacle in nineteen nundread-for, the year that Orgy-porgy-puttin-pie was farst consceptered. Is Dis Nod my sun, her darkglassed da had cried in his tormental angruish, to witch the briny mare durst not deply. The mater had been left unseddled. Woden that expain a Lot, now, about Morma and her Gorgo? How the peer of hum were all-ways clost, unhearthily so in her cestimation, from the grendle to the crave? She maddily recalls her fishermum warmin’ up the jung mastur’s bait incide her muth on chillywilly ofterrnoons, or thinkshe-thinkshe does. Of curse, it wurd make plaint for alter see why they t’woo had insested she be liplocked with insanatoriums, fear Luci-lippi was heir poppy’s seed, his sperkle efferdent in all she set or dit, they way she allwise spoke her wheel, whoreas in Dirgeo was not a wit o’ the same subsdance to be scene. Old Gnawer had deicided then and there that her firstbore should carryon the dinnersty, no mutter that he mite halve been an utter mance. As for her lital gill, the da’s reel darter, shutter up in lumatrick asylence, like at Pranginstein’s or finalee herein Saif Handrue’s house-piddle.