Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Earth’s scudding satellite outruns filleted clouds above the cattle market, keeping pace with Snowy and the landlord’s bonny daughter from the Anchor, a celestial chaperone for their first proper evening out. He doesn’t know the town that well as yet except through an amalgamated sense of premonition and nostalgia, so has no idea where she’s taking him. The mellowing bouquet of cow-manure along Victoria Promenade is somehow intimate, and even though he hasn’t seen Louisa for the six long months that he’s had work in Lambeth, he is firm in his presentiment that by the time tonight is done with he’ll have had her knickerbockers down over those shapely ankles and will also have proposed his sex-damp hand in marriage. Overhead the July stars are diamond pepper grinded from the mills of space and at his side, night-amplified, the metronome tock of her heels is music he will set his life to. Talking in low voices so as not to dissipate the atmosphere he lets her warm, demanding counterweight on his right arm steer both of them into the reaching black of the Cow Meadow, giggling and unsupervised to where the only jurisdiction is of tactful shadow. Caught in resin by the gaslight near the lavatories two working men exchange a bristly kiss and fumble with each other’s buttons, while girls coo from out the rustling bushes like nocturnal pheasant eager for their beaters. Whispering, Louisa and her beau pass on into the gasping dark as all around another Friday ends in moonlit joy and jetting seed and grass-stain; in the peerless and abiding silver luxury of dogs or paupers. Rolled out on benighted pasture in a carpet grey as beaten tin, their path delivers them unto a gravel walk beside the tinkling river, crawling away east between tall undertaker trees towards tomorrow morning. Upstream a reflected moon puffs pockmarked cheeks and holds its breath beneath the tinsel surface but here, overlooked by conifers, an iron bridge arcs across obscure torrents that are made from only sound, a gush of metal syllables like small change jingling in a wishing well. At the halfway point of the creaking span a breeze unpins one strand of her sienna hair, and in his tender stretch to tuck it back their lips fall upon one another as though feuding sea-anemones until Louisa says “Not here” and leads him, blind, onto a starlight-painted island bifurcating the onrushing waters. Worn by countless feet down to its sandstone nub, a track lassoes the land’s perimeter. They walk around it to the isle’s far side, attempting casualness at first, then hurrying, then laughing as they each abandon all pretence and break into a run. The worn turf bank, moulded by love across the course of several smelly-fingered centuries, has overlaid impressions of ten generations’ breasts and buttocks visible to fancy as a palimpsest in the slope’s contours. An accommodating sycamore spreads out its knuckled roots for the forthcoming game of jacks, and current catches on stout reeds, and sky snags on the clawing branch-tops. Standing, kneeling, lying down, they sink by stages in the foaming clover with tongues jousting and their hands at war with fastenings, with elastic. Blouse discarded and the rudimentary flesh-tone camisole displaced, Louisa wears her tits with necessary pride, white lionesses slumped magnificently on their ridge above the hollow of her ribcage. An innovative, ambitious tamer without either whip or chair, sequentially he takes their heads into his mouth. Sweat-savoury, the nipples swell as if about to hatch fritillaries and Snowy and Louisa are both thrilled and gasping kids at the perennial circus. Underneath the marquee linen of her skirt warm thighs part like some tight-pressed crowd granting admission to a secret sideshow, where his callused digits are allowed ingress two at a time. Like undecided customers they hover at the velvet entrance, venturing inside before withdrawing only to push in once more, unable to make up their minds. The hem goes up like curtains and the drawers go down like lights and there, there is the never-before-seen exotic animal; there is the slippery slapstick stage. A cat crouched at its saucer, hunching there between her legs he laps and tries to savour like a connoisseur but in the end gives up to guzzle like a costermonger. Gnawed ferociously she spends and screams and then is glazed with acquiescent shock, a downed and shuddering wildebeest and when he takes his prick out of his trousers it’s like iron, newly cast and ready to be quenched, immersed, with a great rush of steam. She reaches awkwardly to steer it home by hand and he is launched into her, an exquisitely slow slide on an oiled gantry, sinking into warmth up to his curly waterline. The scent of cunt and river curving to a lime-sharp edge of pressed mimosa fires him, and he understands their furious coupling in the engineering sense, both of them functioning as one rapturous lubricated moving part, hissing and racketing in time’s invisible machinery. Slick mercury boils over from its bulb and he ejaculates inside her, spurts their daughter May into a Lambeth gutter and their same-name granddaughter into the fever cart. He squirts a thousand names and histories, spunks Jack into a foreign grave and Mick into a steel-drum reclamation yard and Audrey into an asylum. He comes grief and paintings and accordion music, as he knows he must, to guarantee that several million years away in the abandoned ruins of paradise

the nude berserker and his piggybacking conscience start to gradually decrease their frightful pace when they are some three geographic days from the two well-dressed strangers, coming finally to a standstill, eye-to-eye in the miscoloured furnace of another post-organic dawn. The woman, short and shapely, wears a dress of shimmering viridian to her knees with dove-grey stockings and jade court shoes, hair an auburn tumble to her bare and handsome shoulders. Her escort has the appearance of a late Victorian dandy clad in just-discovered mauves and wistful violets, his immaculate frock-coat ensemble topped incongruously by a battered junk-shop bowler hat that looks like someone might have died in it. Against the tangerine effulgence of a compound sunrise their contrasting hues affect a lurid harmony of the kind sometimes found in dreams. Beside the duo, covering a gingham tablecloth unfolded on the petrifactive arcade floor is a mouth-watering heap of fresh-picked Puck’s Hats. “My name’s Marjorie Miranda Driscoll while this is my consort, Mr. Reginald J. Fowler, and I must say it’s a privilege to meet the pair of you. You’re in a book I’m writing — I hope that’s alright — and we’ve been tunnelling through the ghost-seam to keep you supplied with food. I don’t think we can do it anymore, though. There’s not much left of Mansoul beyond this point, so there’s no way of climbing up here. I’m afraid there’s no more rations after this, so I thought that we’d take the opportunity to introduce ourselves and tell you where the Bedlam Jennies have been coming from.” Her voice and her delivery, though adult and well-spoken, have a quality like that of a child playing dress-up or an actress who’s still settling into her role, so that Snowy surmises neither she nor her companion have been attired in their current semblances for very long. The young man seems especially discomfited by his well-heeled apparel, running a censorious finger round inside his high starched collar and occasionally expectorating a dismissive wad of ecto-phlegm, more as a statement than for any decongestant purpose. At their feet the barren stone is wet with citrus light where their stilt-walking shadows are stretched tight behind, like rubber bands nearing the limit of Hooke’s law. Having shook hands in formal introduction and with May dismounted, the unusual quartet arranges itself comfortably about the square of linen for a fungal picnic under skies abandoned save for blinding apricot. Convivially, they interrogate each other. May enquires after the seemingly ongoing dissolution of this upper realm, beyond the causeway’s distant and subsided bounding walls, and learns that there is nothing left: even the Works is a deserted shell, with its remaining crook-doors made progressively more inaccessible by the continuing collapse. Next, the demure Miss Driscoll asks if Snowy and his granddaughter, as the protagonists of her forthcoming second novel, are expecting to encounter the Third Borough anywhere between here and the end of time. After a thoughtful pause, the white-haired veteran replies that no, he’s not anticipating any such convergence. “Although if we haven’t stumbled over him by then, at least we’ll have a good idea of where he’s not.” Out of a satin cloche-bag that she carries the young authoress produces a slim tome with green cloth boards, inlaid with a gold illustration and the volume’s title, which is “The Dead Dead Gang” . This, as she explains, is a signed presentation copy of her debut that she would be deeply honoured were they to accept. Turning the offering over in his starved spider-crab hands Snowy admires the binding, wondering aloud if Mr. Blake of Lambeth was not in some measure an accomplice to its manufacture. Both their world’s-end guests nod eagerly at this and Mr. Fowler breathlessly recounts, with the excitability of a far younger man, how he and his intended have gone all the way along the Ultraduct from Doddridge Church out to the higher regions up above Hercules Road, soliciting advice on publishing from the pugnacious and inflammatory divine. “ ’E wiz a smashing bloke. I really liked ’im.” Equally enthusiastically, May tells how she and her bedraggled nag have called upon the roughneck visionary and his wife when they themselves essayed the dazzling overpass along its length from Chalk Lane to terrestrial Jerusalem. “When we met with them they were being Eve and Adam, reading Mr. Milton’s verses to each other in the nude. That’s really why we thought we’d go without clothes on this longer expedition. It just seemed like something that the Blakes might do.” Miss Driscoll scribbles something in an oyster-tinted notebook at this juncture, yet when asked about it blushes crimson and explains that she is merely jotting brief descriptions as to both the timbre and the colouration of the marvel-baby’s voice. “Melt-water trying to be serious” is all she’ll let them read. “It wizn’t very good. I’ll more than likely change it.” They trade anecdotes in the unwavering amber of the dead world’s daybreak and then load all the remaining Puck’s Hats into May and Snowy’s predatory haversack, along with the donated book, before making their last farewells. Sartorially splendid in the fires of Earth’s unmaking the young couple wander hand in hand towards the avenue’s far margins. Taking May once more onto his shoulders, Snowy reminisces about