Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Idling towards the wreckage of the car, unhurried now, he glances from the driver’s body half emerged across the crumpled bonnet to the duplicate that stands amidst a pavement spray of shattered glass and stares at the black bloodstains soaking its white shirtfront in incomprehension. Someone else lurks at the end of Fitzroy Terrace, looking on, who Freddy takes at first to be a mortal passer-by until he spots the mismatched eyes.

“It looks like he could use a drink”, says sympathetic Sam O’Day.

Against his twitching eyelids Mick screens a montage, commencing with the buckled vehicle at rest against the tunnel wall, almost immediately lost in a dissolve of swarming flashbulbs which resolves to snapshot images highlighting the events of the next … had it really only been a week? Kensington Palace bleeding flowers and cellophane, New Labour’s rush to spin the shroud, newspaper editors demanding a response from those they’d helped bereave, the whole fast-forward flicker of activity concluding with a still shot of Westminster Abbey, hushed in dull September light.

At the approach to sunrise thousands clog the Solo-Yogya highway, fearing a reprise of the tsunami two years previously and fleeing inland, leaving ruptured homes to opportunist burglars who, in districts high above sea level, nonetheless spread tales of an impending tidal wave that never comes. Almost six thousand dead, six times that many injured and along the highway’s teeming margin in Prambanan a collapsing ancient Hindu temple complex spills its god-encrusted pinnacles into the dust below, cracked deities become unmoving obstacles for the incoming surf of refugees to flow between in curling eddies, with so many in pyjamas that it all seems a bewildering mass dream.

As though time isn’t really passing, she sits motionless beside the table while green swirls of paramedic and fluorescent yellow surges of police orbit her in a gaudy palette of concern, bright twists of colour artfully embedded in the great glass marble of the moment. Audrey — that’s the woman’s name — Audrey is telling the attending officer that she’s a former patient of St. Crispin’s Hospital up Berry Wood turn, relocated to this halfway house during the care-in-the-community initiative. Marla’s not really listening; not even really Marla anymore. The capable and unafraid perspective from which she’d viewed her backseat ordeal has not receded alongside the threat of imminent annihilation, and whoever she is now it’s somebody considerably older than eighteen. There in the vastness of the tiny kitchen objects are illuminated in church window hues: the muted turquoise label on a tin of beans, her forearms bruised to plush cinema-seat maroon and Audrey’s slippers, pink as sugar-iced flamingos. Every detail, every sound, each thought that passes through her mind is outlined with the glorious blood and gold of martyr-fire. She hears her own voice answering the policewoman’s questions and it’s strong, it isn’t weak. It isn’t ugly.

“No, he had a chubby build, with rosy cheeks and dark hair greying at the sides. I didn’t see his eyes.”

And all the time there’s part of her that’s still there in the juddering Escort; still there on the doorstep looking up at Audrey with her head all filament-glare and combustion, speaking that peculiar name from J.K. Stephen’s doggerel and a dozen spine-lined ripperbacks, as if she’d known it would be recognised. A brandied slur of syllables or an elaborate sneeze, a name that nobody was ever called just lying around empty, waiting for the individual singular enough to put it on: Kaphoozelum. New point of view, resuming black and white.

Wet tarmac glints in an abrupt theatre shush, as though some drama were about to start. The boot’s been sprung by the collision — fuck, what will he say to Irene, say to the insurers — and the children’s beach toys and inflatables are scattered in the road as pale and grey as uncooked crabs. Exasperated and confused he tries to kick a punctured armband to the curbside, but he’s either seeing double and he misses or his foot goes through it like it isn’t there. Given his probable concussion he decides the first of these alternatives is the most likely, although this still leaves him with the problem of that mangled body sprawling through the absent windshield. Did he hit somebody? Oh, shit, he’s in trouble now, but then how did they manage to go through the screen feet first, that isn’t possible, and finally he glimpses the glass-freckled ruin of the face but still can’t quite determine where he knows it from. That’s when he notices the two old boys stood watching him from further down the street, both of them wearing hats, which isn’t something that you very often see these days. The nearer of the two comes up to him, asks him if he could use a drink and Derek says yes just like that, grateful for anybody who might let him in on what’s just happened. The old dosser tells him there’s a place nearby, the Jolly Something, where he’ll have a chance to get his bearings now the sat-nav’s fucked. They start to walk together back up towards Regent’s Square and, actually, this could all still turn out okay. Remembering the tramp’s companion he asks “What about your mate?” They both pause and look back. The other man — one eye looks like it’s got a cataract or something — smiles and lifts his hat, at which point Derek understands exactly where he is. He starts to weep. The vagrant near him quietly takes his arm and leads him, unresisting, off into a soot and silver Friday night. New point of view.

As Freddy sees it, once he’s led the snivelling new statistic down Daguerreotype walkways to the Jolly Smokers, that’s him done, his duties and responsibilities discharged. Puzzlingly, at the ghost-pub there are two men made of wood that seem to have arrived from somewhere, one of them embedded face-up in the worm-drilled floorboards while the other one, more corpulent but similarly naked, stands beside the bar with tears of varnish rolling down his grain-whorled cheeks and Mary Jane’s initials gouged into his arm. As Freddy makes excuses and slips out the back door, he looks round and sees the distraught new arrival being introduced to the likewise disconsolate fat manikin by Tommy Mangle-the-Cat, fragments of a brutal smile sliding across his juggled physiognomy. There’s no need to see any more; no need to know the precise nature of the justice that’s administered above the streets. He smoulders out into the sodium-stained darkness at the top of Tower Street, where above a fast-disintegrating overcoat of cloud are stars that look the same to dead and living. He feels differently about things now, not least about himself. Some of the stains have gone from his escutcheon, blots evaporated from his copybook. When it came down to it, he’d done the right thing. He’s been better than the man he thought he was, the man who was resigned to an ink-wash eternity, too guilty and impoverished in his character to ever go Upstairs. He’s paid the district back for all its pints of milk, its loaves of bread, its disappointed doorsteps. Much to his surprise he finds his worn-out shoes are leading him down Scarletwell Street to his friend’s house, Audrey’s house there at the bottom with its crook-door, with its Jacob Flight. He’s hurrying now, past the deserted playing fields. He thinks he can remember yellow, thinks he can remember green. Cut to interior, night.

His breath so regular that he’s forgotten it, Mick falters at the brink of dream, that overcast September afternoon nine years ago replaying in an emptied cranial cinema. They’d watched on television, him and Cathy and the lads, and it had all seemed stage-managed and strange, more like a Royal Variety Performance than a funeral beneath its Cool Britannia branding. Needing something three-dimensional and more authentic than a screen could offer they’d all climbed into the car and Cathy drove them out to Weedon Road, where they could watch the cortege on its way to Althorp. All the people that were gathered at the roadside there, as quiet as ghosts, nobody really certain why they’d come except the sense that something old was happening again and that their presence was required. Almost asleep Mick starts to misplace the dividing line between event and memory. No longer horizontal and in bed he’s helping Cathy shepherd Jack and Joe between spectators on the verge, somnambulists with tongues stilled by mythology. Finding a clear spot in the threadbare grass beside the curb it seems to him that these exact same people must have turned up to remove their hats for Boadicea, Eleanor of Castile, Mary, Queen of Scots and any dead queens who have slipped his slipping mind. An engine is approaching in the distance, loud for want of any other sound, even the birds remaining mute for the duration. It glides past them like a ship, imagined bow-wave rippling the asphalt, floral wreathes like lifebelts on the bonnet, bound for its pretended island grave. Having attended to her homecoming the crowd and vision both begin to break up like commemorative crockery, melting into the throng at Alma’s exhibition that’s tomorrow morning. Letting go of everything, Mick sinks into another of his five-and-twenty thousand nights. He fades to black.