Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The thing is, even if this century concocts a Cromwell who drags all the bankers to the chopping block, despite the fact that Rome finds it a lovely image, it won’t do a bit of good. The west is broke. There’s no nice way of putting it. Broke and in debt for generations, but still keeping up a front the way that Emperor Diocletian does when he begins to water down the empire’s coinage. Any revolutionary who succeeds in toppling the banks is going to inherit the same dismal situation, the appalling world they’ve left us with after their dizzy and intoxicated spree, fucked up beyond all recognition. No, just executing the executives is a non-starter. What you need to execute is money, or perhaps just money as it is from Alfred the Great onwards. Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on. Rome can see a battered future Britain where a cow’s still worth five magic beans or the equivalent, which has no standard currency and thus no standard government, no kings, no credit agencies. Only a thousand colourful and ragged flags.

The Leveller kisses his boyfriend through the smoke in Castle Street and there’s a siren closing from the distance, whooping oscillations swooping from the Mounts to Grafton Street, driver perhaps starting to realise that it’s difficult responding to alarm calls from the Boroughs, its streets closed with bollards in an unsuccessful effort to prevent curb-crawling which has nonetheless been quite successful in obstructing every other fucking thing. He gives Dean’s bum a quick squeeze and can feel the all-at-once of himself welling up around him. He knows he’s still somehow up there on the rooftops as a seven-year-old, nicking moonlight. He’s still at the barricades, still messing up his life with Sharon, still under the mudslide in Pete Baker’s yard, still shifting Ted Tripp’s dodgy merchandise from the unguarded lockup, still half dead in the dark living room on his fiftieth birthday, still broke and still furious, still sleeping in the fire, still stalking through the upturned mini-bus with his apocalyptic staring eyes, his bloody snooker cue. He’s who he is, exactly, perfectly, and if what Alma says about that endless circuit of Delft tiles up on the nursery’s north wall is true, he’s who he is forever. The forlorn and lovely little pauper streets with all the precious memories are burning down somewhere behind him. Roman Thompson stares the future in its hairy eye, and knows that he won’t be the first to look away. Screaming its panicked aria, that siren’s getting nearer.

Mashed in the Atlantic’s iron-green jaws off Freetown, on his skinny ship out of a Bristol plump from sugar and the sale of Africans, John Newton weeps, makes promises which he will not immediately keep, pleads for amazing grace and on the skyline, lightning-lit, are tumbling granite manes, are snarling caves and heavy paws of avalanche. The Lion Mountains, as the Portuguese adventurer Pedro da Cintra calls the land in 1462: Serra de Leão. Romarong, as it’s known to the local Mende tribesmen. Sierra Leone, the name tawny with dust or rank with ambush, where sweet hymns are pressed from vintages of mortal panic and undying shame.

When he gets to be old, Black Charley don’t care for the songs no more and don’t care for the chapels. He makes church in empty barns, with his rope-rimmed contraption left outside and leaning up against a rain butt. Henry George, down on a hard dirt floor, straw prickling his knees through his worn pants. He breathes the musk of long-gone horses, pale palms pressed together, talking to whatever it is Henry can feel listening to him from somewhere long ways off, outside of all the stars and moons, just listening and never answering or interrupting, never saying anything at all. Above, birds come and go through gaps between the slates, and over his head Henry hears their soothing language; beating wings when they alight on beams and tarry rafters pinstriped with ancestral droppings. His quiet prayers float up past rugged joints, past bowing timbers, rather than into a company of marble saints and saviours martyred in the coloured glass. He will allow that worshiping like this has led him to imagine paradise as all built out of wood and with a smell like sawdust and manure, not stairs and statues everywhere. He counts this view of some rough heaven as preferable to what the ministers describe, and much more likely in its reasoning. Where would a thing that’s truly holy find the need to put on airs? Black Charley has no faith in Colonel Cody, nor religious songs and paintings, neither any institution making a big show about itself. From where they’ve broken holes in the barn roof, pillars of toppled brightness are propped slanting one against another like old, dusty ruins of light, and Henry scratches at the branded shoulder through his patched-up jacket before he commences once again to murmur.

Africa’s west coast, an ancient frontal lobe inflamed and swollen, bulges into cooling ocean with Sierra Leone on the underside, Guinea above it and Liberia below. Pedro da Cintra finds the country, names it for the pride of hills about its bay and after him, inevitably, come the traders and the slavers; first from Portugal and later France and Holland. Then, a hundred years after da Cintra’s ruinous discovery, from England, when John Hawkins ships three hundred souls to meet the great demand arisen from that nation’s colonies, newly established in America. Two centuries as western Africa’s principal slave-port follow and then, in 1787, a collection of British philanthropists establish a Province of Freedom where they settle a small population of the Black Poor, Asians and Africans whose mounting presence on the streets of London has become too costly to support, including black Americans who, just a decade earlier, had joined the British side during the War of Independence with the promise of their liberty as an enticement. Five years later, numbers thinned by illness or by hostile native tribes, these are augmented by more than a thousand come from icy Nova Scotia, mostly escaped slaves from the United States, and subsequently Freetown is established as the first refuge for African-Americans who’ve fled their work-gang or plantation, neighbouring Liberia only following this bold example after thirty-five years. Gradually more liberated slaves return to swell the settlers’ ranks, known as the Krio people for their creole tongue, a Pidgin English by way of America. The haven flourishes, with both women and blacks given the vote before the eighteenth century’s end. In 1827 the Fourah Bay College is established, western Sub-Saharan Africa’s first university upon the European model, making Sierra Leone a hub of education. It is at this institution in the 1940s that the sleek and handsome Bernard Daniels, studying law, begins to contemplate a life in England.

Half a century ago, back in the 1890s, Henry George admits he isn’t so much thinking of a life in England as a life away from the United States. Now in his forties with both parents gone he’s got no reason to abide there in a place that’s never done him any favours and has burnt its mark into his arm. The truth be told, he’s all for leaving sooner but his momma and his poppa they can’t bear the thought of all that distance over water. Unlike Henry, born down there in Tennessee, the both of them have been on a long ocean voyage before and aren’t in any hurry to repeat it. “You go, Henry,” they both tell him. “You go over there while you’re still young and got your strength, and don’t you worry about us.” But Henry’s not the kind of man could ever do that, and so he takes care of them and waits it out, is genuinely glad for every minute they’re alive. Soon as they’re in the ground, though, he’s got nothing holding him, nothing to keep him from his berth aboard The Pride of Bethlehem , come steaming out of Newark bound for Cardiff and in one sense drawing in the third line of an ancient triangle for Henry, a pointed and dangerous shape connecting Africa, the U.S.A. and England on the stained three-hundred-year-old maps. On those long, lurching nights of the Atlantic crossing, though, he’s not thinking about any of that. He’s flipping scornfully through Buffalo Bill chapbooks in the sliding lamplight and he doesn’t entertain the slightest thought or speculation about what the country of his destination might turn out to be like; rarely thinks of it by name but instead inwardly refers to it as Not America.