Alan Moore - Jerusalem

WIFE: [ After a long pause, tonelessly and emotionally drained .] God help me, Johnny, but I hate you. I hate you so much that I’m exhausted by it.

HUSBAND: [ Equally flatly and without real feeling .] And I hate you, Celia. With all my heart, I hate you. I can’t stand you.

WIFE: Well, at least there’s that. At least we still mean something to each other.

HUSBAND: [ Without the couple looking at each other, the HUSBAND reaches out and takes his WIFE ’s hand. She accepts this without comment or reaction. There is a long pause as they sit and stare expressionlessly into space .] Are we still planning to … you know. With Audrey, and the hospital. Is that still something that we want to do?

WIFE: It’s something that we’ve got to do.

HUSBAND: Yes, I suppose so. [ After a pause .] Not just yet though, eh?

WIFE: No. In the morning. I’m not looking forward to it any more than you are.

HUSBAND: No. No, I suppose not. But it’s something that we’ve got to do, you’re right. You’re dead right. In the morning, we’ll go down there and we’ll step up to the bat.

WIFE: Yes. When it’s light.

HUSBAND: Will it ever be light?

WIFE: I couldn’t say. I’m waiting for the clock to strike again. If it’s just once we’ll know that we’re in hell or else it’s broken. If it’s twice, it’ll be getting on for morning in an hour or two. We can go down to Freeschool Street and take care of it then.

HUSBAND: Yes. Yes, I will. I’ll be a man about it. I’ll go down there and take the bull by the horns.

WIFE: We’ll see the necessary doctors.

HUSBAND: In the morning, when it’s light, I’ll go down there and do what’s to be done.

WIFE: We’ll go down there. We’ll go down there and set the matter straight.

HUSBAND: We will.

WIFE: We will. We’ll put it all to rights.

HUSBAND: We’ll face the music.

WIFE: [ After a long pause .] Do you know, I think the clock’s about to strike.

HUSBAND: I think you’re right.

WIFE: And then we’ll know.

HUSBAND: Yes. Then we’ll know.

CURTAIN

“What are you thinking about now?” the naked eighteen month-old girl asks, mounted on the similarly naked old man’s shoulders. In each tiny fist she holds a lock of his white hair as reins. His leather hands, articulated bone and sinew birdcages, are closed around the infant’s ankles to prevent her falling off as they progress down the enormous icebound hallway under diagrams of failing stars. These are the Fimbul distances of the time-avenue. Puzzle-ball beads of hyperwater, frozen into glass sea-urchin intricacies, chime and tinkle in the drifts about the wading ancient’s knees. “I’m thinking now of how I died,” says he, “When I wiz

Snowy Vernall always sitting, always snuffing it there in the daughter’s house on Green Street. Orange, sage and umber mottled in a hearthside rug of wool-ends where the black cat is asleep and snoring. In between the clock ticks you can hear dust settle on the sideboard, on the emerald glass bowls, one full of golden apples withering, the other full of hard-boiled sweets becoming damp and soft. There is a mildew perfume on the indecipherable crowns-and-lilies wallpaper, just sliding off like skin above the skirting board where it’s that wet and heavy. From behind, below, the muffled fuss of chickens tutting in the long back yard outside as it drops down the slope onto Saint Peter’s Way, from which there’ll sometimes come the echo-silvered clop of hooves or else a rag and bone man’s speech in tongues, frail little noises shouldered by the smelly summer wind that’s always blowing on that Wednesday afternoon. There in the daughter’s house, there in the living room a table on the left — with fifty years of slipping cutlery and scalding teacups logged meticulously in the varnish — and upon it stands a china vase of tulips; stands the china vase of tulips. Glorious, they are. Bright custard yellow, icing-sugar pink, blackcurrant purple deep as midnight, you should see them. An old man alone, let himself in, come visiting with everybody out and starting to get loose in his intelligence, starting to have a trouble with the old perspective as he nears the mortal turning. Up above the sideboard there’s a mirror with another hanging opposite above the hearth, or rather up above the sideboard there’s a window with another set into the south wall opposite. It isn’t easy telling which it is, the same as how the corner of a room can be concave and convex at the same time if stared at for long enough. Adrift in the warm air with opal motes all blazing there are other details

that may come to me after a while, but that’s the long and short of it.” He picks his bony, barefoot way amongst cold dunes of spiny hypersnow accumulating on the frosted parquet of that stupefying corridor. May squirms uncomfortably, a small warm weight on her grandfather’s nape, and squints through an intense chandelier flurry of suspended, whirling crystals that have more than three dimensions, a hypnotic meta-blizzard. Gazing past this diamond spindrift, the profoundly beautiful nude baby focuses her sad Galapagos eyes on the soaring cliff-face walls that border perpetuity’s gargantuan emporium, away to either side across the intervening miles of tundra floor. She knows that in these latitudes of Always there are fewer living people in the neighbourhood downstairs, and that they have less complicated dream-lives. Consequently, the immense arcade surrounding her and Snowy has accumulated very little in the way of astral furnishings and decorations, trimmings borrowed from the sparse imaginings of a polar encampment that has less to dream about. Set into the north face is something May believes might be somebody’s vision of a massively expanded trading-post, with walls of varnished wooden shields and drapes of wolf-pelt that are bluish-white speckled with faun. Elsewhere, her almost-turquoise eyes alight upon what she supposes to be the inflated dream-form of a twenty-second century hostelry, the excavated ground floor of an ancient office block where she can make out local date-specific ghosts with their fur burkhas and their wind-up radios, their barbed and ornate wolf-killing ‘vulpoons’ inevitably clasped in one raw fist as they trudge stoically through a bereft Valhalla. Other than this, the endless hallway offers only the occasional stone edifice or concrete hulk enduring from a previous era, set amongst an unrelieved expanse of towering rock and chiselled ice. The optically confounding hyperflakes fall silently around them, an obscuring lingerie-lace hung on air. She tilts back her exquisitely made head, haloed in hair golden and nebular, perusing the ruined canopy above this chronologic thoroughfare’s unending winter vastness. The green-tinted glass that had once sheltered the great boulevard is long broken and gone, with its containing framework of Victorian iron reduced to rusting carcass spars through which unfolding blueprint constellations made from overstars are visible. Recalling the conspicuous array of shops and buildings to be found only a hundred years or so back down the hall, May understands that there may not be streets or street-names anymore down in the territory below. A perfectly developed mind within a glorious arrested form she feels a distant disappointed pang at the idea but nothing more, consoling herself with the observation that there are at least still trees. Weathered immensities as realised on this upper plane, the crystal-heavy giant pines extend up out of the remaining floor-holes here and there, where these have not been covered over by the glaze of permafrost or else collapsed entirely. It occurs to her that the material ground below their higher mathematic reaches is most probably no longer called the Boroughs, and she even wonders if these arctic furlongs of the overworld are still referred to as Mansoul. Returning her attention to the mad old man on whom she’s riding, May asks him a question, her voice an unsettling blend of infant gurgle and elderly lady syntax. “Do the builders and the devils ever make it up as far as here?” His sunburned neck gripped fast by the precocious toddler’s knees, her grandfather is chuckling, almost giggling as he replies, “Of course they do. You’ll still find them about when there’s not people any longer. It’s just that they tend to hang about more in the populated bits of time, like in the stretch that we’re from. And before that, if you ever choose to go back that far, you’ll find even more of ’em. Back in the pastures there, they even venture downstairs every now and then, when they’re directing that monk here from Geographical Jerusalem or when they’re ordering that Saxon halfwit back to Peter’s Church so he can help dig up Saint Ragener. One speaks to poor old Ern, my dad and your great-granddad, in the dome of Saint Paul’s during all the usual thunderstorm and lightning that they seem to favour, though it’s really just all the electromagnetism that’s discharged. It’s thundering when I have that one speak to me that time, when I wiz drunk and on top of the Guildhall in St. Giles Street if you can imagine that: your granddad on the roof’s crest swaying in