Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening. Game-plagued as he flips his pillow in a vain search for its fabled cool side he has now progressed to a consideration of the playing card. Before the board games with the satisfying creak of their unfolding or the mystique of their top-hat tokens, cards had been the staple recreation of his childhood in St. Andrew’s Road. At some mysterious adult signal, passed between his gran, his parents and such aunts or uncles as were present, it would be decided that a round of cards was called for. The white tea-time tablecloth would be replaced by the far cosier deep rose one which was Mick and Alma’s favourite, and then from the sideboard drawer that was its ritual resting place the battered and revered familial deck was next produced. He realigns his problematic knees and tries to conjure up a tactile memory of the talismanic pack, the waxy box worn by the handling of at least four generations and declining like the then-traditional extended family unit inexorably towards disintegration, folds becoming perforations. Like the converse of the weathered pasteboard tiles inside, this fragile packaging had been predominantly purple on a ground of twilight lilac, where a silhouetted schoolgirl in a long Victorian pinafore-dress bowled her wooden hoop among midsummer poppies through the gathering violet dusk. Beneath the child’s capering shoes this image was inverted so that for some years Mick had been under the impression that it was the ingénue’s reflection in a puddle at her feet, before he’d noticed that the lower girl was running in the opposite direction. Even as a maroon outline she’d looked pretty, and with hindsight Mick supposes that she might have been his first crush. He’d been faintly anxious for her safety, he recalls. What was she doing out so late to make her race home under darkening skies, across the overgrowing summer meadow? He knows that if she’d got into any trouble, if there’d been somebody waiting in the tall mauve grass for her or for her bouncing, trembling circlet he’d have wanted at the age of five to rescue her, this being then the limit of his amorous imagination. Ninja-quiet in his determination not to puncture Cathy’s well-earned rest he shifts once more onto his back, face up and freshly dealt. New angle.

Supine, the chalk-outlined posture of a Cluedo victim, he remembers Alma telling him about Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Band, stretched out flat on stage before an audience and talking to the rafters: “Hello, God. Here’s what I look like standing up.” It strikes Mick that imagining ourselves as seen from some superior elevation, some projected and omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, old as civilization; Harryhausen’s Greek gods at their fatalistic chessboard peering down through tattered cirrus. Perhaps modern scepticism and the consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play. Mick rests a blond-fuzzed forearm on his brow and shimmering amongst the shoal of slippery night-spawning ruminations in his catch there is a fugitive impression of how everything is flattened when perceived from overhead, from the perspective of the player. Fleetingly he wonders if these hypothetical celestial gamblers would see everyone as being two-dimensional, as hieroglyphs with no more depth or substance than the inversely reflected royalty compressed onto the court-cards, but the thought melts to the slap of trumps on a red tablecloth. The things they’d played down Andrew’s Road were exercises in precisely regulated tedium — Whist, Sevens, Draw-the-Well-Dry — though he’d found them all sufficiently engaging at the time. Just as each wireless, motorcar or socket seemed to have a face, so too had every card possessed its own distinct charisma, from the almost military formation of the fives to the precariously stacked crates of the nines. The aces, in their abstract grandeur, had been the four archangels or maybe the quartet of fundamental forces constituting spacetime, spades bewilderingly singled out by an impressive Gothic filigree. This attribution of a personality to each design reminds him of the tarot images his sister maintains both precede and serve as basis for the ordinary deck, the stack of archetypal bubblegum collectables that Alma drags to Mick’s house every year at Christmas dinnertime so that she can read Cathy’s fortune or at least pretend to; Hanged Man, Chariot and all the rest of the unsettling crew, as if that’s any sort of proper seasonal tradition. To hear his crow-scaring elder sibling tell it, Draw-the-Well-Dry is derived from divination while all board-based pastimes are descended from those tricky magic squares where all the rows and columns add to the same number, as though every innocent and commonplace pursuit were only a degenerated form of sorcery. She has a wilfully Carpathian worldview, Alma, although now he thinks about it games might well have had some metaphysical or more important human function back at their inception, judging from the terminology found everywhere in language. Hunting some animal down and killing it, that makes it game. Being prepared to carry out some act is to be game. Something that offers easy opportunities for exploitation is regarded as fair game and then of course there’s prostitution, going on the game. Game face, game on, game over, plays of light and sports of nature, Einstein making out God does not dice with matter. Mick’s not sure about the last of these, suspecting that not only do the powers that run the universe do a fair bit of shaking, rattling and throwing, but that generally they do this so the die end up behind the settee and you have to take their word about the double six. With a dismissive grunt directed at the certainties of physics and religion he elects to take another punt on slumber and begins to gradually roll the bones onto his left side, facing Cathy’s curled back. Come on, come on, just this once be lucky. Insert jump-cut sequence.

Spread below, an oriental carpet realised in fibre optics, there are causal curlicues; there are affray motifs. In Scotland a humanitarian award commemorating Robert Burns is given to a youthful relief worker in Baghdad, albeit posthumously. In Peru a clash of adversarial supporters at the run-up to elections ends with injury and gunfire, and in Hereford West Mercia Police appeal for witnesses after a man is violently assaulted by a group of teenagers. With Mandelbrot self-similarity, structures repeat at different scales throughout the system and there remains ambiguity regarding whether harm is percolated up or else decanted down. Wrath boils and steams, where soon thereafter cold and ruthless condensation is precipitated as a trickled legislation. The resultant culture, internal combustion driven, is a clown car only jolted forward by a series of explosions, without any linear progression and no entertainment value save in the anticipation of the vehicle’s inevitable knockabout collapse. A pin-mould creep of neon media adorns the planet’s carcass ideologies, metabolising incoherent chaos into palatable narrative, an edited awareness of experiential deluge. In near-extinct newsrooms still perfumed by cigarette smoke, telephone calls of the newsworthy are intercepted, victim’s family or adulterous celebrity alike, while in the Congo brutal territorial disputes are waged over the mining of the necessary tantalum required by every trilling mobile and, like Tantalus, the world discovers its anticipated banquet future disappeared. Predators more accustomed to the higher reaches of the food chain are compelled to shin down several blood-oiled links in search of alley-scraps. Zoom in through icy flight-paths and cop-copter altitudes on Lower Bath Street.