Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He risks another peek around the dog-eared corner. Up at Freeschool Street’s top end the woman is now backing carefully away from Benedict, who giggles and gesticulates obscurely at her as she goes. No, definitely not a tail. Not in that vivid carpet-remnant waistcoat and not with that laugh that’s audible from all the way down here, the polar opposite of unobtrusive. All the same, they must add up to something, these suggestive near-encounters. Ducking back behind the listing wall he tries to put his finger on the feeling that he has, the sense he’s missing something here, some part of the big picture he’s not privy to. He understands that, in real life, to inadvertently bump into someone twice in the same day is nothing special, but he’s trying to keep in character. From Studs’ perspective, Perrit’s multiple appearances can only be some kind of narrative contrivance, an essential story mechanism or device which signals the impending resolution of the mystery, an unexpected drawing in of all its mucky threads: Ben Perrit and the girl in the red plastic mac, Doddridge and Lambeth and determinism. William Blake. James Hervey.

When he next peers up the lane both Perrit and his piece of skirt are gone. Studs puts his spectacles away and leans against the psoriatic bricks. What now? He’s reached the place that he’s been looking for, and short of a probably suicidal climb over the wall he’s propped against into the overgrown bee-cafeteria beyond, he can’t go any further. He can’t occupy the spaces that James Hervey’s body heat once passed through; doesn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish with this pilgrimage through disappearance in the first place. Treading in a dead guy’s footprints like some toddler following his father through the snow, running on nothing but a blind faith in location as if walking the same streets as someone else forged any kind of a connection, how could he have been so stupid, such a schlemiel, possibly a patsy? Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.

He can remember Little John, during one of the relatively thoughtful and less raucous conversations that they’d had together. His folkloric friend had been in a more wistful, even plaintive humour than was usually the case, talking about a childhood that he couldn’t properly recall, Arabian Nights he’d never really had.

“Y’know, I’d like to go back one day, Persia, the old country. See what it was like.”

No, John, mate. You can’t do that. Persia’s gone. ’79, they had a revolution after Jimmy Carter made the CIA stop paying off the ayatollahs so they’d leave your grandfather alone. They kicked him out and let the cancer finish him, and it’s a safe bet that the new regime aren’t big admirers of your family. It’s called Iran now. You’re not wanted there. You never were.”

Of course, you couldn’t say that. You could only mumble non-committally and wish him luck, ask him to bring you back a winged horse or a flying carpet, duty free, safe in the knowledge that by the next time John sobered up, the fond, nostalgic jaunt to Mordor would have been forgotten. It’s too bad that Studs ignored his own unspoken words of advice, hadn’t realised until right this moment that what’s true of Tehran is as true of Freeschool Street. This scruffy piece of ground has seen its revolutions, tyrannies replaced by other tyrannies, its character revised by different stripes of fundamentalism, socio-political or economic: King Charles, Cromwell, King Charles Junior, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Now that Studs thinks about it, the terrain beneath his feet even shares Little John’s status as deposed royalty: the rough trapeze of land bounded by Freeschool Street on one side and Narrow Toe Lane and Peter’s Gardens on the other would have been the grounds of Offa’s Saxon palace, with St. Peter’s and St. Gregory’s as the two churches flanking the construction to the west and east respectively. The yawning entrance to Jem Perrit’s buried wood-yard might have opened onto royal stables once, and if he’d only had the foresight to be born twelve hundred years odd earlier then Jem’s son Benedict could have been Offa’s jute-clad poet laureate, or possibly his fool. Poor Tom’s a-cold and a sheep’s bladder on a stick. Ben would have been a natural.

The breeze seems cooler on his stubble, and Studs briskly shakes his head to clear it of the memories, the reverie that gets all over you like gunshot residue. How long has he been standing here on Gregory Street’s corner, uselessly deliberating on dead dwarves and how it’s usually the turf that ends up as the loser in a turf war? He detects slight changes in the local ambience which indicate that he’s been holding up this listing wall for quite some time. The western sky is clearer with its light diluted and more palatable, understated tints of colour in its thinning wash as the blue fresco of the day reaches its edges. Distant cars and lorries would appear to have run out of things to say, their conversation flagging and become more intermittent, trailing off to grunts in the post rush-hour hush. Birds arcing down to guttering shrug off their troubles and assume the careless air of almost-home commuters. Friday, May the 26 th, makes for the pink, embarrassed blush of its conclusion.

He decides to cast his poorly-placed Mr. Potato Head eye over Horseshoe Street, check out what’s left now of St. Gregory’s other end before he heads for home, calls it a day as if there’s something else that he could call it. In the absence of a bitter wind he turns his leather collar up so that he feels more isolated, and with a last glance at the ambiguous dealership which has supplanted Offa and Jem Perrit and all points between he rolls his shoulders in a hoodlum strut away down Gregory Street with the declining sun behind him. To his left the dereliction of the corner property continues pretty much unchecked while on his right there’s simply nothing there, an agoraphobic stretch of flayed land tumbling uninterrupted down to Peter’s Way and overprinted with a schist of levelled floor-plans like the quantum ripples still discernible on the event-horizon ‘skin’ of black holes, our only surviving record of the cosmic bodies already ingested.

At the street’s bend where it angles sharply to the south stands a three-floor Victorian factory, a great cube of smoked stone which would appear to have been transformed into a recording studio. A fashionably minimal house logo is affixed high on the soot-blasted façade in a naive attempt to impose an identity on the amnesiac edifice, just now pretending to be Phoenix Studios, a well-intentioned effort to evoke the flames of rebirth from the ashes of the neighbourhood, which clearly isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that kind of a fire. In what looks like a disused yard to one side of the building is a heaped moraine of tyres, deposited here long ago as though by a black rubber glacier in the long cold snap following the era of the dino-dozers and tyranno-JCBs, their jointed necks craning and swivelling to take a bite out of a displaced family’s front bedroom, grey wallpaper weeds trailing from yellow metal jaws, an undiscriminating swallowing. He turns right into Gregory Street’s continuation only to discover that there isn’t one. Beyond the studio there’s nothing separating this end of the road from the dual carriageway of Horseshoe Street which runs downhill in parallel, save for a couple of ridiculous low barriers that Little John could have stepped over without noticing. Studs feels a fleeting obligation to walk all the way down and around the edge of where the depots, builders’ yards and houses should have been, out of respect for the dead properties, but that strikes him as both insane and too much trouble so he cuts across the empty dirt instead.