Alan Moore - Jerusalem

It’s 1997 and the Railway Club along the end of the St. Andrew’s Road by Castle Station is pretty much all that Eddie George is living for. He’s getting on, eighty or more, and he’s got one of those things that he can’t pronounce, sclerosis or what have you, but if he can get out from his place in Semilong down to his usual table in the club he’s happy just to have a Guinness and see all his friends. You get all sorts of people from the district going in there, that’s what Eddie likes about it. Couples with their children, lots of old gals and old fellers like himself and all the beautiful young women where there isn’t any harm in looking. Often when he’s in there he’ll bump into young Mick Warren and his family, Cathy his wife, sometimes his scruffy-looking sister and his two boys, Jack and Joe. Jack’s around six or seven and he seems to like having a chat with Eddie when he sees him. Eddie likes it too. They mostly talk a lot of nonsense with each other and it takes him back to when he was a boy himself, playing with all his sisters and his brothers on the pavement right outside their house in Scarletwell Street with his little wagons, and then later when his dad gave Eddie his own funny bicycle and cart before he died. The damn thing fell to bits only a few weeks after. It makes Eddie chuckle just to think of it while he’s calling his cab to take him to the Railway Club, but that sets off a thudding in his chest and so he just sits on the sofa and calms down while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It’s a grey day and what with Eddie’s eyes it’s looking kind of murky as he sits there in the tiny living room. He’s thinking about turning on the light just for a bit of cheer, damn the expense, right when his car turns up and toots its horn outside. Just standing up makes him feel dizzy, as if all the thoughts and the sensations in his head are draining to his feet. He lets the capable young driver shuffle him from his front door into a back seat of the vehicle, where he needs help to get his seat belt buckled properly. At least it’s warm, and when the engine starts up and they roll away he’s looking out the window at his neighbours’ flats and houses sliding backwards up the hill as he descends down Stanley Street towards St. Andrew’s Road. Stanley Street, Baker Street and Gordon Street. It’s taken Eddie some good years of living here in Semilong to figure out that they’re the names of famous English generals who relieved Mafeking and all that business, back more than a hundred years ago. For a good while he’s laboured under the impression that it’s all something to do with the film actor Stanley Baker, and that makes him smile as well. The taxi-cab turns left into St. Andrew’s Road, and on his right there’s all the yards, furniture reclamation businesses and lock-ups that have been here for as long as Eddie can remember, some with signboard lettering upon their peeling wooden gates that looks to Eddie’s eye like it might be Victorian or something. Across the road from these and on his left, there are the openings to the neat row of hilly streets that make up Semilong, all parallel with one another, Hampton Street and Brook Street and all them. Eddie’s always been very happy here. He likes the neighbourhood, but nobody could say that it was doing well. It’s not the worst of places by a long shot, but in terms of getting taken care of then it’s plain that Semilong’s a fair way down the list. What it’s about as far as Eddie sees it is that where he lives now is too close to where he used to live, which is to say the Boroughs, or Spring Boroughs as they seem to call it nowadays. It’s as if things like being poor and having low property prices are contagious and will spread from area to area if they’re not kept in isolation, maybe with a blanket soaked in disinfectant hung across the door the way they used to have up Scarletwell Street when somebody had the scarlet fever. Just like with his mix-up over Stanley Baker, Eddie can remember when he thought that scarlet fever is something that only people living up in Scarletwell Street got; that maybe people down in Green Street got afflicted by green fever. How you think when you’re a youngster is something that never ceases to amaze him, and he hopes that little Jack is maybe going to be there when he gets up to the club. Out of the window on the right now is the stretch of turf and trees that run down to the brown-green river, which in Eddie’s younger days is always known as Paddy’s Meadow although he expects they’ve got some different title for it now. He peers through bloodshot eyes at the old children’s playground at the bottom of the grassy slope there that he still calls Happy Valley. There’s a little sunlight falling through the clouds to strike upon the rusty roundabout and on the blade of the dilapidated slide, and Eddie feels a lump come to his throat because it’s all so precious. He recalls adventuring amongst the reeds down at the water’s edge with all the other grubby little boys, and how they liked to scare each other by pretending that there was a terrible long monster in the river what would snatch them if they get too close to it. He looks out at the empty meadow now and feels convinced somehow that all those days are still there, in the rushes, on the squeaking swings, still going on except that he’s too far away to see it all. That must be how it is. He cannot find it in himself to think that any moment, anybody, anything is ever truly lost. It’s just that him and everybody else moves on, and find themselves washed up in times and circumstances they don’t fully understand or like much, necessarily, without a way of getting back to where they’re happy and contented. There’s a lot about the world these days that Eddie doesn’t have the measure of. He’s not sure what to make of this new government that just got in, these Labour people who don’t talk or look much like the Labour people he remembers, and the business with Princess Diana getting killed in that car accident takes Eddie by surprise as much as anyone, how the whole country seems to have fallen to pieces for a while with all the crying. It appears to Eddie like there’s more news all the time these days, until he feels like he’s full to the brim with it and one more model with an eating disability or gang of raping footballers could make all of the knowledge that’s already in him spill out on the floor. By now his taxi’s at the traffic lights where Andrew’s Road crosses the foot of Spencer Bridge and Grafton Street, and he finds himself looking at the lorry park just past the lights and on the far side of the road, the Super Sausage place that used to be a meadow with a public baths up at one end. It’s still too light for any of the girls to be around, and Eddie’s glad because he hates to see that, how the women in that line of work are getting younger all the time. He’s tired. The world’s making him tired, and Eddie fidgets in the rear seat where it feels as if his seat belt is too tight, like it’s not done up the right way. The lights go green, the cars move on and now they’re coming past the fenced-in lorry park to where the train yards are behind the wall there on the right, and on their left is the short strip of grass between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street that was once a row of terraced houses. Eddie can’t help taking a long look up the street he was born in as his cab goes by the bottom of it, where that eerie single building still survives down near the corner there all on its own. The old slope rises up with the Spring Lane School playing fields on one side, and across the road there on the other are the flats they put up in the 1930s after they tore down the homes where Eddie and his family and their friends all lived. The rounded balconies are peeling and the entrances to the courtyard inside have all got gates on now. Up at the hill’s top there are those two blocks of flats bigger than all the rest, Claremont and Beaumont Court, the towers standing there victorious when everything around has been knocked flat. The street don’t look much, he admits, but it’s where he began and it’s still got that sort of light inside it. Eddie shuts his eyes upon his birthplace, and there’s all those floating jelly blobs of colour that you get. The accidental pattern that they have to them reminds Eddie of something and he can’t think what, then realises it’s the scar his dad’s got on his shoulder with the triangles, the wavy lines. He thinks about his parents and it comes to him that it’s one hundred years exactly, maybe even to the month, since they first came here to Northampton and laid eyes on Scarletwell Street. How about that? Doesn’t that beat everything? A hundred years. He kind of feels the car pull up outside the Railway Club and kind of hears the driver say “We’re here” which gives him satisfaction, but if truth be told by then Eddie’s already dead a good few minutes.