Alan Moore - Jerusalem

In headline black and white through stammering, convulsive light the skirling deadbeat churns around the vehicle, a rancid cyclone. Car walls being nothing but a flimsy tissue three or four years thick at most, the vagrant vapour-trail could easily reach through them to continue the assault but it’s deterrence and not punishment on the agenda here, much as he wishes it were otherwise. Just scare this tubby little bugger off and then make sure the woman’s safe, those are the things he needs to keep his petrifying eye on. Never mind what somebody who’d do that to a young girl might deserve: that’s a decision better left in larger hands than his, although with half a chance what devastation wouldn’t he bring down upon this animal, this wretched failure of masculinity that he so nearly could have been? He’d do a Banquo, do a Hamlet’s dad, a Tam O’ Shanter with his ghastly oppoes from the Jolly Smokers drafted in to help, a ragged locomotive smoke of pitiless and violent dead men shadowing this mucky fucker through his every waking moment and his every dream, for the remainder of his worthless life and then they’ll just be getting started. There’s no Hell, no merciless retributive Inferno save for the Destructor, but the bilious spirit is convinced that with the inspiration of a life and death transacted in the Boroughs one could be arranged, to beggar Dante and to make blind Milton look away.

Pulling a train of chalk and charcoal sketches in a falling domino progression he encircles the throat-clearing automobile as it starts, his eerie Doppler howl pursuing him through the flash-punctuated and torrential night, his floating coat a rippling funeral banner in his wake. An aggregate of dust and retribution, in the gabardine sieves of his pockets all the grievance of the outraged neighbourhood is carried, the deferred affront viciously vented as a steaming horse-piss stream on the intruder, a malign deluge to sluice him from these wounded streets until him and the other knicker-rippers learn to keep away. New point of view, reverting to full colour.

Smeared across a stranger’s doorstep in the pounding torrent she’s a broken toy, discarded with torn seams and every bit of psychic stuffing gone, one button eye obscured by sticky cordial. All of her hurts. She doesn’t care if the dull footfalls in the hallway that she’d heard were only wishful thinking, doesn’t much mind if her persecutor catches up and finishes the job. She just wants this to end and is less fussed about the manner of that ending by the moment. Treacherously cosy lassitude descends, every last vestige of intent or motion drained out with the contents of her emptying bladder. Self and personality are a retreating tide strained rattling on synaptic shingle and she barely comprehends the light that strikes pink through her lowered eyelids; can’t remember the phenomenon or what it means. At length the lashes unrestrained by blood-glue flutter open and she squints up into puzzle-colours, clots of shine and shade resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she knows from somewhere, framed by the now-open door. Against a ground of patterned wallpaper and mismatched carpet, limned in sixty watts of Pentecostal fire stands an old woman built from long and knobbly bones and crowned with white hair like ignited phosphorous, one thin hand pressing on the lintel. Veiled in gloom by incandescent blaze beyond, the tallow contours of an Easter Island face hang heavy on the bone and oh, her screech-owl eyes. Pale grey with golden irises they stare down, reservoirs of depthless fury and compassion, on the smashed child at her threshold. Gaunt cheek tracked by angry brine the occupant stoops, creaking, crouched on leather haunches to cup Marla’s chin while a free hand tenderly smooths the bloodied braids.

“All hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem,” pronounces Audrey Vernall, and her voice chokes with an all-redeeming pride. Pull back to planetary mosaic, abruptly edited.

Bulbs pop and data effervesce. Wigan police release footage of car involved in fatal hit-and-run with cyclist. Reefs quietly disintegrate. Convicted Enron fraudster Kenneth Lay says he believes good will come out of his predicament. The stars of supermarket magazines change shape, change partners. Arctic ice recedes. A paralysed Welsh rugby player calls to ban contested scrums and startlingly tenacious tubeworms offer hope of life on other worlds. Quantum or nation, states collapse when looked at. Oil chess, fiscal figure skating and the tendency of Homo sapiens to fuse with its technologies. Australian mountain climber Lincoln Hall is briefly believed dead. A badger harasses sports centre staff in Devon. Mice glow and grow joke-shop ears. Racism fears dog World Cup build-up. Budgets shrivel and reality shows relocate their target audience inside the television, closing the ouroboros. New forms of carbon and new scales of manufacture. An ethereal scrapyard orbiting the world. Popular culture, formerly disposable, dragged to the curbside for recycling and art residing solely in the pitch. Internal interregnum. Double helix turns informant. Touch-screen intimacy. Algorithms of desire. Bespoke need, and text messaging a carrier pidgin. New, new, every second bigger than the last. The populace recline obese with novelty yet consume ever more enthusiastically, as if to master the onrushing future by devouring it; to drink the tidal wave. Cut to interior, night.

Flat on his back, Mick listens to the rain against the glass and thinks about Diana Spencer. It’s a natural extension of his restless thoughts on chess or chase-the-ace or tiddlywinks, with the whole Princess Di phenomenon a game — or a compendium of games — that had apparently got badly out of hand. That almost literal unveiling in the newspapers, a first glimpse of the nursery assistant standing in a cheesecloth skirt with pouring backlight, prurient X-Ray specks illusion of grey silhouetted limbs caught by an opportunist snapper to be sure, but who was playing who? For all her shy fawn glances from beneath the fringe, a strategy established even at that early stage, this was a scion of the Red Earl whose name was writ in road, estate and public house across the face of working-class Northampton. Dodgy dynasties had been reduced to bouillon in her blood, from fifteenth-century livestock farmers passing themselves off as relatives to the House Le Despencer, through to five or six authentic bastards sired by Stuarts and thus a genetic conduit to the lines of Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach and Hanover; of Sforza and Medici. Chromosomes not to be trifled with, and this before an admixture of Churchills are infused into the Northamptonshire family’s already-potent genealogical concoction. Poisoners, tacticians, bloody-minded warrior kings.

Born Althorp in 1730-something and one in a lengthy line of Johns, the first Earl Spencer proper fathered Lady Georgiana, later to be made Duchess of Devonshire and famously alluring doppelganger of her later tabloid-teasing relative. The fifth Earl Spencer, born around a century thereafter, was the red one if Mick has his local history straight, a mate of Gladstone’s named after the colour of his ostentatious beard. As Lord Lieutenant out in Ireland it appears he’d done his bit to play fair with the Fenians and even came out for Home Rule, which saw him ostracised by everybody from Victoria down. However, earlier in the 1880s he’d had people hung for murdering his secretary and Gladstone’s nephew, so the nationalists all hated him as well. Mick glances to his left, at Cathy’s soft topography beneath its turf of duvet, and observes not for the first time that there’s no pleasing the Irish. Dull discomforts start to mutter in his hips and shoulders — none of us are getting any younger — and he essays the manoeuvre to his port side, curls himself about his sleeping wife’s turned spine like fingers round a hand-warmer. New angle.