Alan Moore - Jerusalem

I was where was I, I was in my vest and underpants again and I was I know where I was it was a cellar a Northampton cellar in the dream for some reason I think of it as being Watkin Terrace Colwyn Road one of them up there by the Racecourse but the atmosphere it had it felt like somewhere from the Boroughs somewhere really old and I remember now, before that in the dream I’d been just walking in those big grass wastelands with the flooded earthworks giant disused railway bridges and just single red brick buildings sticking up, middle of nowhere under heavy skies a bit like that one house still standing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street but it’s weirder it’s a place I’m sure I’ve dreamed about before perhaps since I was little but it’s hard to tell I’d somehow got inside this house at first there might have been somebody with me but I lost them and the only way that I could get to where I thought they might be it was through this sort of granite shower-block where the lights were out and there were all these toilets without proper cubicles around them and they all had their seats missing or were overflowing all over the floor and I went on and down these stairs, stone stairs and then I went the wrong way and I found myself in these they were like cellars and they were all lit up as if by electric light although I don’t remember seeing any bulbs or lamps and on the floor the rough stone floor it was like straw and sawdust horrible mixed in with it there was a lot of blood and shit you didn’t know if it was animal or human and there was it looked like fish innards and skins and strings of meat all rotten in the corners and I must have gone from one part of the cellar to another trying to find my way out and suddenly there’s the mad poet bloke the one who’s always pissed Benedict Perrit he’s lived down the Boroughs years everyone knows him though I’ve never had a lot to do with him myself he’s standing waiting for me in this cellar smells of frightened animals like in a slaughterhouse I’m getting nervous I explain I’m lost and ask him how I can get out and he does this peculiar high-pitched laugh and says he’s trying to get further in and I wake up with the old heart going at nineteen to the dozen I know that it doesn’t sound much but the atmosphere it was that atmosphere that hangs around the Boroughs and it always puts the shits up me it’s I don’t know it’s ancient, stinks, it isn’t civilised older than that with its collapsing buildings people its collapsing past it’s like a Frankenstein thing stitched together from dead bits of social engineering it’s a monster from another century resentful in its ominous reproachful silence I can tell that I’ve done something to offend it that it doesn’t like me but I don’t know why time and again I wake up sweating here we are the Mayorhold Merruld the old dears down here pronounce it, makes them sound half-sharp

glancing down Bath Street and across the train-tracked valley as the light goes

up the other way a widened Silver Street unrecognisable the thuggish multistorey car park that’s got Bearward Street and Bullhead Lane God only knows what else beneath it somewhere looking out across the grim sprawl of the traffic junction with its lights and colours brighter in the falling twilight almost magical it’s funny when you think that this where it started the whole civic process in Northampton when the Boroughs was the whole town and this was the town square so I’m told with the first guildhall the Gilhalda wasn’t it up at the top of Tower Street here it used to be the top of Scarletwell before Beaumont and Claremont Courts went up in the late ’sixties and there

there they are

the high-rise flats the two giant fingers raised as if to say fuck off

who to though is it them to us or us to them I don’t know what I even mean by that

a window lit up here and there light through cheap curtains coloured squares on the dark blocks darker against the last remains of day over the railway yards the dimming west the tops of higher buildings last to catch the sun and you can still make out the sideways metal N in NEWLIFE with the lettering running down the side I thought that looked quite smart, no, what it was when I was council leader someone made out they were eyesores two monstrosities that shouldn’t have been put up in the first place and proposed we pull them down but I said no that’s not the way to go for one thing social housing in the Boroughs people haven’t got a clue just how precarious it is those towers they house a lot of people and don’t think that when they’re pulled down there’ll be anywhere to put the tenants or there’ll be new housing built dream on that isn’t how it works those towers are all you’re going to get and when they’re gone they’re gone, no, what I said, we ought to do them up refurbish them so that they’re fit to live in and okay you may say where’s the money going to come from but what I suggested was we sell the flats for next to nothing a housing association that I knew was interested at least that way the council’s spared the costs of demolition not to mention all the headache of rehousing so it went ahead and Bedford Housing picked them up at fifty pee apiece I know that there were people at the time and since who questioned that but they don’t understand how much the people here have benefited when you think of the alternative have genuinely benefited and alright that was in 2003 when I stood down from council after speaking out against the situation in Iraq not that the two things were connected it was more that being on the council stopped me from pursuing other ventures shall we say I mean how many companies is it where I’m secretary or director ten something like that so it was proper I should stand down otherwise it might have looked as if I’d got a vested interest and you know how cynical it is these days the view the public have of anyone in politics, no, I stood down so that I could take care of Anglicom in Basra me and Colin though that didn’t work out obviously but also after stepping down that left me free to take up my position on the board of Bedford Housing well if someone’s going to make a profit from it then you tell me why it shouldn’t be a Boroughs resident that’s better surely than it going to someone outside the area and anyway it’s done, it’s history, the other options were much worse I talked it through with Mandy and I don’t see why I need to justify myself

along the walkway on the west side of the Mayorhold making for the crossings that will get me over to the Roadmender in two or three hops when the lights are right it’s like a game of Frogger and down on the left there’s Tower Street and the NEWLIFE buildings and past that you can still just about make out the school Spring Lane those years I was a teacher there back when you couldn’t live on what you made as councillor I mean some of the kids some of the families they were beyond help some of them it was horrific sometimes frankly and that’s really I suppose where I first got a peep into the way these people’s lives work if they work at all and thinking back that’s probably when I first got the horrors just a shudder every now and then about the area and what was going on behind all the net curtains honestly you should have heard some of the stories although by and large the kids were nice I liked them they respected me I think I had a reputation as a decent bloke a decent teacher that was who I was that’s how I saw myself and I was happier then I think I don’t know, can I say that, there’s a lot of benefits to being who I am today but even so perhaps you could say I was happier in myself I think I thought more of myself and everything was more straightforward everything was simpler then not such a moral maze I think that was a program on the television or the radio they asked Cat Stevens Yusuf Islam or whatever he’s called now if he would personally carry out the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and I think he said he wouldn’t but he’d phone the Ayatollah what’s his name Khomeini anyway when you’re a teacher there’s the satisfaction when you feel you’ve made a difference how can I describe it it’s like when you feel as if you’re a good person deep inside beneath it all, it’s not like politics it’s the reverse it’s the exact reverse of that nobody trusts you they’re prepared to think the worst of you they hate you everybody hates your guts and the abuse the personal abuse you get is it a wonder if it gets to you affects your self esteem I don’t mean me specifically just public figures, political types in general what it is it’s hurtful and it makes your blood boil you find that you’re muttering to yourself settling imaginary scores it wears you out and it