Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The shabby and demoted former neighbourhood green rises to the rear of Peter’s Church, its limestone wrinkles and discoloured liver spots all presently erased by flattering solar gold. First raised in timber by King Offa as a private chapel for his sons in the ninth century, rebuilt in full Gothic effect by legacy-aware Simon de Senlis during the twelfth or eleventh, the near thousand-year-old structure drains all markers of the present from the grassy incline that it trails behind it. Mugging devils in eroded eaves regard him as he labours uphill through the weeds, their stone eyes bulging, their frog lips distended with anxiety at his approach, paralysed apprehension of the gargoyle competition which he represents. For his part, the ascent across a timeless and deceptively sun-burnished wasteland to the ancient place of worship makes him feel reduced to a transparently ill-fated academic in some smugly awful narrative by Montague Rhodes James. Asthmatic laundry, steroid spiders, Gypsy kids with switchblade fingernails, all waiting for him in the largely disused edifice ahead. Now that he thinks about it, M.R. James and the whole English

ghost story tradition must rate as Hervey’s most glaringly apparent by-blows, illegitimate great-grandchildren by way of graveyard versifiers and elite hysterics with exquisite furniture. Then there are modern occultists, the heirs to James’s Karswell and early adaptors of the gothic model in their literary efforts and their leisurewear, with Hervey’s doctrine of Christ’s innate righteousness become a style-guide for diabolists. Studs doubts that Hervey would have felt entirely comfortable with that, but with a self-confessed deployment of arresting imagery to help embed his message the creator of Northampton noir has

no one but himself to blame. Don’t make the wrapping paper more intriguing than the gift inside, an edict which Studs ruefully accepts could equally apply to his own inner loveliness and its regrettably attention-grabbing packaging.

Cresting the slanted verge he walks the almost indiscernible remains of Peter’s Street, along the railed rear of the church and heading east. From unrolled liquorice whips of shade he estimates it to be sometime around five o’clock and briefly knows the phantom-limb sensation of release this hour would herald if he had a proper job and hadn’t been apprenticed to the night. Not that he’d say he was self-conscious when it came to his arresting physiognomy, but Studs has always far preferred the dark. His favourite entertainment, after being taken for a ride by a heart-breaking beauty who turns out to be a man, used to be wandering the shadowy rear entries of the town back in the days before the alleys had been gated off by nervous residents; before behaviour like that could land you on the sex-offenders register. Once, in the cobbled crack between the Birchfield and Ashburnham roads, in the small hours of a brisk Sunday morning, he’d been startled by a massive ball of granite rolling down the darkened corridor towards him in the classic Indiana Jones manoeuvre, only to reveal itself at closer quarters as Northampton’s planetary-scale performing soul, the since-deceased Tom Hall.

Walking a midnight dog, the lyrical behemoth had paused for a moments’ badinage with the sham Shamus, eloquent in his defence of those neglected crevices with their cock-decorated garage doors and frilly bindweed fringes. Clad in dungarees that may well have been a converted Wendy-House, Hall had extemporised upon his thesis that the narrow urban seam which they were currently inhabiting was one of the town’s land-canals, part of its bone-dry network of imaginary pedestrian waterways. Exploring the bare streambeds with their hard Edwardian gooseflesh underfoot, a practiced supra-mariner might readily observe the sunken underworld detritus that’s accumulated at the feet of galvanised steel banks: fiercely-discarded ultimatum porn collections or the ribcages of bicycles, drifted against the alley’s edges where neon-hued minnow condoms shoal among serenely swaying nettles, phlegm anemones. Occasionally a body. Obsolete appliances, embarrassing addictions, wilfully forgotten actions, deeds or purchases thought better of and excised to these margins, scenes that have been scribbled out from daylight continuity and written instead on these unattributed and off-the-record passages, in this piss-splashed Apocrypha. The rotund troubadour had lavishly expanded on his vision for the length of time it took his canine charge to arch up on its tiptoes like a shuddering croquet hoop and squeeze out a heroic movement longer than the hound itself. With that, the dissertation had concluded and the two men had continued on their disparate ways, Studs heading up the drained canal against the wind while the musician bobbed away downstream like an enormous marker buoy that had escaped its moorings, floating off into the visual purple.

Studs has by now reached Narrow Toe Lane, perhaps the Boroughs’ most unusually titled thoroughfare, in truth barely a path that trickles down beside the shaggy grass expanse to the remains of Green Street. He’s got no idea about the name. A misspelled towpath of an insufficient width, perhaps, or, knowing the neighbourhood, a reference to a shared genetic disability which at one point afflicted everybody in the street? Up to his right, running along the east face of the church to Marefair are St. Peter’s Gardens, formerly a disused alleyway but widened twenty or so years ago into a disused promenade by pulling down the school outfitters, Orme’s, which stood at the far corner. Studs remembers going there, mother-accompanied, in his twelfth year to buy a uniform for secondary school. He isn’t certain, but he has an idea that he might have been escorted to the same shop on an earlier occasion to be measured up for his humiliating kilt. As he recalls there used to be a pair of facing full-length mirrors in the changing room, where each excruciating moment of a child’s sartorial ordeal unfolded terrifyingly into a wood-panelled eternity. That cramped and curving passage, longer than the district, longer than the town, stretching away into the solid walls and the surrounding buildings, occupied by an unending queue of mortified and squirming seven-year-olds, where exactly had it gone? When they demolished Orme’s the Tailors, what became of its interior infinities? Had all those other ugly little boys, all those half-silvered layers of identity been folded up together like the painted sections of a lacquer screen and stuck in storage somewhere or, more likely, dumped?

This isn’t even his tough childhood. These aren’t his dismantled memories to mourn, and he’s surprised at how much this brief sortie into someone else’s ruined dreamtime is affecting him. He’d figured Warren was exaggerating in her murderously angry monologues, attempting to transform her girlhood landscape into a betrayed and bummed-out Brigadoon, but this is something different. Studs finds himself genuinely shocked by this matter-of-fact erasure of a place, a stratum of the past and a community. If the reality inhabited by several generations of a thousand or so people can be rubbed out like a cheap hood in the wrong bar on the wrong night, what or where is safe? Hell, these days, is there still a right side of the tracks for anybody to be born on? He’s come here to sniff out the surviving traces of a vanished yesterday, but all he sees in these deleted streets are the defective embryos of an emerging future. And when finally that future’s born and we can’t bear to look at it; when we’re ashamed to be the lineage, the parent culture that sired this unlovable grotesque, where shall we banish it so that we needn’t see it anymore? We can’t do like the Shah and send it to Northampton. It’s already here, already rooted, a condition gradually becoming universal.