Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Black Charley’s dying in his house on Scarletwell Street, getting out just a few months before they knock it down to put up flats and move him and his family somewhere else what they won’t like so much. Selina and his children come and go about the bedside in a kind of sleepy blur that Henry can’t keep track of with the medicine they give him so his chest don’t hurt. Across the road he’s told it’s pretty much all gone except for Spring Lane School and them few houses down the bottom there. He doesn’t want to see it as it is, just heaps of bricks on scrubland, but likes to imagine that one stable that’s still there in back of the surviving homes down on Saint Andrew’s Road. Since he don’t care to go to church and couldn’t get there these days even if he wanted to, then that old barn’s the nearest thing to Henry’s idea of a place of worship what’s in walking distance if Henry could walk, and what’s at least in thinking distance seeing as he can’t. He presumes he’s getting close to that occasion in his life when it might do him good to have a few words with his maker and so what he does, he goes down to that old shed in his mind without once having need to get out of his bed. He pictures himself getting onto his old bike what he gave to his son Edward to play on some few months back after it become apparent that he’d not himself be needing it no more. In his imagination he pretends he’s rolling off down Scarletwell Street, which is just the way it was with Newt Pratt and his drunken critter both outside a likewise resurrected Friendly Arms and greeting Henry with well-meant but unintelligible noises as he rattles past them heading for Saint Andrew’s Road, the way they had when he could still ride bicycles and they were both alive. He sees himself all young and vigorous, turning his vehicle along the cobbled alley what they call Scarletwell Terrace on the right there just before you reach the main road, trundling down it to the rear gates of the stable, which in Henry’s mind are open and not boarded up the way he hears they are in ordinary life now that the horses what were once within have gone. Henry leaves his imaginary contraption leaning up on the imaginary wall outside and pictures himself opening the rusted latch and going in, summoning all the scents and noises of a place like that as well as he is able with the flutter of the nesting pigeons and the smell of straw what’s not been changed in years: stale oats and a faint memory of dung. Light through the busted slates above as Henry falls on his imaginary knees and asks the thing what he feels might be listening somewhere if he’s truly soon to die and if there’s anything he should look forward to after that happens. When he gets no answer, same as usual, Henry asks himself just what kind of an answer he might be expecting, just what kind of afterlife he thinks that he could be contented with for the long next part of eternity. He’s not that sold on the idea of Heaven like you see in Bible illustrations. He’ll admit that it looks clean and pretty with the clouds and marble stairways but, like with these modern blocks of buildings what they say they’re putting up, he can’t see any place for Henry in the picture, or at least no place as looks like he’d feel comfortable. Well, if he don’t want that, what does he want? He’s entertained the notion what the Hindoo fellers have of getting born again in a new life as someone different, maybe even as some kind of witless animal, and he’s not taken with it. If he dies and someone else gets born next week who’s a completely different person what has got no memory of ever being him, in what way is that Henry George? Unless there’s something in the idea what he’s missing, it seems pretty plain that that’s somebody else entirely who’s their own self and not Henry George at all. No, when he tries to call up his idea of paradise he finds he’s summoning the things he knows, what have already happened. He thinks how he’d like to see his pop again, and hear his mom when she was singing in the fields. He’d like to live again those careless years when he was just a child, before he got his mark when everything seemed sort of kindly and mysterious. He’d like to be meeting Selina for the first time and out walking with her by the River Usk where it runs through Abergavenny, or be lying with her in their useless ragged tent beside the great herd after they were wed and headed out of Wales towards Northampton. He yearns to be back on that afternoon when he’s just got his pay and him and his Selina first set eyes on Scarletwell Street where he’ll live and shortly die, wants to be with his wife and little Mrs Gibbs the deathmonger when they call him to the confinement room to see his newborn babies. He wants his old bicycle with the rope tyres back from the past along with the ability to ride it. It occurs to him that what he wants the most is his whole life again, all of the things what are most dear and most familiar to him. If he could have that, Henry reckons that it would be worth the branding and the seasick nights aboard The Pride of Bethlehem . That’s all he wants, but in his thoughts the sunlight tumbling through the broken roof onto the rafters striped with pigeon droppings seems as though it’s getting brighter, and then later when Selina brings his dinner in to see if he can eat a little of it she can’t rouse him.

Somewhere else it’s 1991 and Bernard Daniels, now retired, decides that he and Joyce should visit Sierra Leone once more before they’re both too old to travel. David doesn’t know a lot about the politics prevailing in West Africa just then but isn’t sure the journey is a good idea, and Andrew feels the same. Their dad waves their concerns aside. His sons are Brixton born, have never been to Africa and no doubt see it through their native English eyes as somewhere threatening, as a dark continent. Bernard and Joyce are Africans and have no such anxieties. They’re simply going home, and David harping on about the tensions growling round the lion mountains at the moment isn’t going to dissuade them. Bernard casts a cursory glance over the international pages in The Times, concluding that the situation over there is just business as usual by Sierra Leone standards. Siaka Stevens steps down a few years ago in favour of another ethnic Limba, Major General Joseph Momoh. There are all the customary attempts at overthrow, or at least allegations of the same, and all the usual retaliations by way of low-hanging fruit along the Kissy Road. Admittedly, there’s all this business going on with Momoh being forced to re-establish multi-party politics, with plenty of dark mutterings breaking out already in the opposition ranks, but Bernard knows that if he waits for a politically clear day to make their trip then he and Joyce will wait forever. It’s all settled. Flights are booked. There’s nothing else that David, Andrew and their families can do but cross their fingers and hope for the best, which obviously never works. In all their fretting over the fraught politics of Sierra Leone nobody has considered what’s currently happening across the border in Liberia, this being bloody and horrific civil war, most of it orchestrated by the leader of the National Patriotic Front, Charles Taylor. This is the man responsible for the most forceful and compelling slogan ever used in an election anywhere:

I KILLED YOUR MA.

I KILLED YOUR PA.

VOTE FOR ME.

Taylor decides it’s in his interests if fighting kicks off in Sierra Leone as well. He helps to found the Revolutionary United Front with ethnic Temne army corporal Foday Sankoh, expert in guerrilla warfare, trained in Britain and in Libya. When civil war erupts in Sierra Leone, Bernard and Joyce are in the middle of it, in their seventies, both ethnic Krios who are disliked by the native tribes, with no flights to or from the country and thus no way to get out. It’s terrifying. Lives are ending right across the street in unimaginable shock and fear and pleading, seldom with a gunshot, seldom swiftly. There are fashionable necklacings with burning tyres and twenty-minute executions using blunt machetes that can leave the murderers exhausted. Cowering in their hotel the couple peer out from between drawn curtains at the drifting smoke, the angry black tide sluicing up and down the street. Meanwhile, in England, David and the family are frantic, making calls to travel agents, embassies, and in the end somehow they bring their parents home, severely shaken but unharmed. Unharmed, and, in the case of Bernard, seemingly unaltered. Everything he’s seen confirms his strongly-held conviction that Sierra Leone’s native tribes are savages who only benefited from colonial rule and find themselves unable to exist without it. As for his opinions on events closer to home, these remain similarly unaffected. Bernard still refuses to bestow affection and encouragement on Andrew’s kids to the degree he does with David’s, while Andrew’s attempts to prove their father wrong by forcing Benjamin and Marcus to shine academically are by now ingrained and obsessive. David watches this unfolding and it’s like a ghost story, a haunting, an uncanny repetition of events and attitudes out of the past eerily manifesting in the present day, in 1997. Finally he gets a phone call from his brother one Saturday morning where Andrew can hardly talk, can’t get the words out properly. Marcus, his eldest son, has killed himself. Andy’s just heard about it from the college. Pressure of exams, they think. Oh, Christ. A terrible slow car crash that’s begun in Freetown forty years before reaches its point of impact and the Daniels family find themselves sat dazed and paralysed in the emotional debris, with blossoms nodding in the breeze all up and down the Kissy Road.