Alan Moore - Jerusalem

the fever cart performs a muted drum roll, more a cymbal whisper as it dwindles with the family’s hopes, trickling away down Fort Street. Sitting on the cold throne of his doorstep since the grey hours of that morning, waiting with his seat reserved for the forthcoming drama, the old troublemaker watches passively while the appalling scene is acted. All its awful flourishes are at a distance to his heart, affecting only in the sense evinced by the much-thumbed engravings of a penny dreadful that have forfeited the frisson of crude shock accompanying their first appraisal. Somewhere off amidst the bubble-and-squeak vapours down the passageway behind him he can hear Louisa cautioning their other children still at home, their Cora and their Johnny, telling them they’re not to go outside and stick their noses in. Out in the smothering hush of Sunday the dismal scenario proceeds through its traditional component stages; the inevitable feet of its exacting meter. Big May, Snowy Vernall’s eldest daughter, stands there in the middle of the rudimentary road and shudders in the arms of her chap Tom as if trying to wring her very life out through her tear-ducts, unavoidably caught in the brutal and indifferent mangle of the moment. Moaning in a universal Esperanto of mammalian bereavement, the young mother with her hair a ginger fizz throws out her freckled arms to the receding wagon while her husband shuts his eyes against this terrible defeat and says “Oh no, oh no”, holding his wife back from the abyss of broad daylight that has claimed their daughter. Squatted on his draughty front-row perch Snowy is gazing down the tunnel-length of continuity to his earliest glimpse of the grown woman whose life is disintegrating there before him, crimson-faced and weeping in a gutter, then as now. More than a score of years back down the track he wobbles on the camber of a Lambeth rooftop, fishing in his jacket pockets for the rainbows he intends to shower upon his firstborn, the confetti spectra that will be her welcome to these fields of light and loss, her memorable and reeking stained-glass debut. Telescoped in Snowy’s baggy eye the howling infant is become the shattered parent bellowing her grief along the church-quiet terraced row, the operatic staging underlined as suddenly a lone orchestral voice from offstage in the wings reprises note-for-note May Warren’s heartsick aria, but in a lower octave. Crouching on his stoop like a presiding gargoyle on cathedral guttering her father shifts his sad gaze and his first-night audience attention from the disappearing horse-drawn ambulance, from the diphtheria bus back to the crowding side-street’s nearer end and the anticipated source of this unkind and inappropriate accompaniment, this mocking counterpoint. His owl-eyed sister Thursa has appeared from nowhere at the elbow of the lane, the corner bending to a contour of the all-but-vanished castle’s previous fortifications. With accordion slung around her stringy neck as though some portable variety of Maxim gun and hair that of a senile gollywog, her entrance is electrifying. Her translucent fingers resting on the false-tooth rows of ivory triggers, Thursa dominates the brick amphitheatre for all of its classic tragedy and pouring radiance. Her older brother understands by the transported smile which plays about his broken and dissociative sibling’s lips that she is listening to the multiplying echoes of May’s scream and her squeeze-box response as propagated in an auditorium with concealed depth and volume, the sounds ricocheting in a supplementary space. He knows that she’s attempting to embed her tribute to May’s dying baby as a sonic solid in the glassy stuff of time, as an exquisite aural headstone for the Fiends and Builders to appreciate at their considerable leisure. His anguished daughter, on the other hand, can only see Thursa’s demented smirk, a silver thread of spit depending at one corner from between the browning molars. Thus provided with an opportune receptacle for her tremendous sense of unacceptable injustice, Snowy’s eldest wheels upon her aunt to vomit noise, a venting of unspeakable emotions from a place where language holds no jurisdiction. The tear-streaked tomato of May’s face ripens towards its bursting point. Her pole-axed soul is audible, its higher frequencies curdling the grubby air while Thursa, beaming and delighted at the thought of being joined in a duet, adjusts her placement on the keys and milks a further repetition of the devastated mother’s utterances out of her asthmatic instrument, once more at a descended pitch from the original. At this renewed affront May’s personality collapses visibly upon itself. She slumps in Tom’s grip, whimpering, and Thursa’s bird-claw hands dance on the keyboard mimicking every despairing vocal flight or fall. Snowy remembers that this is his cue to rise from his worn stone theatre seat and take his part in the eternally reiterated masquerade. Steering his sibling gently by her worsted sleeve he takes her to one side and solemnly informs her that her improvised performance is upsetting everyone; that little May has taken ill and will most likely soon be gone. At this point in her scolding Thursa giggles disconcertingly, recalling the largely-untroubled eight-year-old of near three dozen long winters ago. Eyes gleaming, she excitedly confides that far above mortality and at that very moment little

May rides her grandfather’s shoulders, the agreeable face of their ambulatory totem pole, along the narrow avenues of what amounts to an extended city of the pyramidal, modernistic anthills that the duo have encountered, singly and at wide-spaced intervals, during the last few decades of their stampede through the biosphere’s decline. The mathematically self-referential shapes, repeating their own neatly pointed structure at progressively reducing scales, surround the travellers on every front in mesmerizingly exact and ordered chessboard rows, each geometric edifice perfectly equidistant from its fellows in a dizzying grid that reaches to the vast emporium’s eroding edges. The uninterrupted blue concavity of sky that’s presently surmounting this optically challenging expanse contains only the unpacked golden ingot of an ageing sun which shrivels the remaining crumpled tissue scraps of hypercloud to nothing. Picking their way daintily like a two-headed Gulliver through the thorny metropolis of an insectile Lilliput, the pair attempt a disquisition on the subject of the obviously highly adapted mounds and their significance. As the most senior member of the family present, it is Snowy’s firmly held contention that the ants are in all likelihood still-living creatures that have blundered physically into this spatially enhanced domain much as the pigeons and occasionally the cats do, back in those now-distant reaches of the temporal overpass where cats and pigeons still exist. Conversely, as the longest-dead of the two Armageddon tourists, May asserts her own belief that in all probability the oddly regular protrusions represent a posthumous extension of the hierarchically-arranged and combinatory awareness corresponding to each individual construction. Further, she suggests that the collective consciousness of every hill has seemingly evolved to a condition where it can imagine a continuation after its destruction or eventual dismantling. This evolution is implied, the baby reasons, by the arithmetically sophisticated alterations to the hills’ basic design. Being himself numerically inclined, her grandfather finds that he is reluctantly persuaded to this point of view. Begrudgingly he posits that the markedly self-replicating property displayed by these arresting figures indicates a calculating system of considerable sophistication and complexity, which in its turn perhaps denotes a level of mentation able to conceive of a hereafter, as his infant passenger maintains. The ever-smaller reproductions of the overall configuration would at least appear to demonstrate a grasp of algorithms, Snowy postulates, and in this manner their debate goes back and forth as they progress amongst the man-sized alien sandcastles. The azure lens of afternoon floods bloody as the human dray strides on through a declension of rich iris, tarry purple, and so forward to another of the subordinate planet’s nights. The couple tiptoe down a formic acid-fragranced boulevard beneath the radically extended risen moon, a compound of eight separate lunar spheres fused to a single brilliant cluster with its light a colloidal suspension silver-plating the hushed ranks of polyhedral bill-spikes stretching off in all directions. They go by the treasure-fountain of another daybreak and the soot-fall of a further dark, and there is no abatement to the neatly regimented ranks of prickly ziggurats that are distributed so as to occupy the floor-space of the chronologic causeway most efficiently. Snowy is gradually becoming apprehensive: “I don’t fancy bedding down between these buggers much, but I expect we’ll have to. It most probably runs on like this for centuries while this lot have their time Downstairs, with all these rows like cemetery markers and nowhere that we can stretch out and be comfortable.” After a pensive silence, his granddaughter shakes her catkin locks in disagreement. “I think that they might have had their time Downstairs already. Carry on another day’s length and we’ll see.’ Though doubtful, her antique conveyance does as he’s instructed. They continue through the paradise of ants while over them the cloudless stratosphere adjusts its palette, moon-chromed darkness burnishing to salmon dawn and thence to the monotonous, oppressive lapis of a world that’s dying for want of bad weather. Trudging through a lap approximately corresponding to mid-afternoon, May issues a reconnaissance appraisal from her elevated vantage: up ahead the dense-packed lattice is now chequered, every second pismire monument removed to leave a square of empty space. This gradual depopulation is persistent, and when they at last attain the violet outreaches of dusk there are no more ochre assemblies to be seen. The toddler theorises that an advanced species of ant may have been extant for a millennium or more without conspicuously manifesting at these altitudes of being, since colony-organism anthills are effectively immortal unless wiped away by some external force. The recently traversed apparent city, May believes, might be more properly perceived as indicator of a mass extinction, one concluded in only a day or so. They contemplate this as they make their camp, devour their last few Puck’s Hats and retire. On rising, they discover that the wolfskin bag is once more inexplicably refilled, and while they march on Snowy thinks of how