Alan Moore - Jerusalem

With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamorous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare centre’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture.

Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mick with an unprecedented kiss that left his right cheek partially obscured by a wet crimson clown-print, Alma dragged him up onto the doorstep and excoriated him as she unlocked.

“No, seriously, Warry, thanks for only being twenty fucking minutes late. You must get loads of exhibitions based entirely on your mental problems, so, y’know, it means a lot that you’ve turned up at all. I’m really touched. You’re almost like a brother to me.”

Mick grinned, the disquieting barefoot teenager on Crispin Street and his severely localised depression on the walkway of Saint Peter’s House lost in the sooty deltas at the corners of his eyes.

“There’s no need to be nervous, Warry. I’m here now. I know I’m like a superstition with you, aren’t I? I’m your University Challenge lucky gonk. Why didn’t you just open up without me?”

Alma curled her lower lip, as if formally rolling back a no-longer-required red carpet.

“Because fuck off. This is the wrong door for this key. Can’t you just circulate amongst these …” Alma gestured inexactly at Ben Perrit. “… these gallery-going intellectuals till I get this sorted out? See that nobody starts a fight or pinches anything.”

Performing a constrained about-turn on the step, he overlooked a perfectly convivial crowd which nonetheless seemed to contain innate disorder. A fight, though unlikely, was not utterly out of the question, but there definitely wasn’t anything worth pinching. Nor did any of those present seem particularly larcenous, except perhaps the two old ladies he’d assumed were with Bert Regan’s mum. They stood apart from all the other attendees and looked like they were sharing recollections of the neighbourhood, one of them indicating something in the general vicinity of Mary’s Street while her companion grinned and nodded vigorously. The malicious glint in their crow-trodden eyes elicited a warm pang of nostalgia for the monstrous Boroughs matriarchs of yesteryear, and briefly made Mick miss his Nan. Miss his whole genealogy for that matter, with almost everybody gone except him and his sister, whom he didn’t really see as being representative.

Against a layered backdrop where decrepit 1960s flats blocked railway yards and distant parkland further down the slope, Dave Daniels smiled bemusedly in conversation with Rome Thompson’s garrulous and slinky boyfriend. Mrs. Regan told Ben Perrit that he was a silly bugger, a perceptive diagnosis based on just under five minutes of acquaintance. Blackbirds skimmed resurfaced plague-graves in the parking area off Chalk Lane and Mick allowed himself the thought that all the place’s previous warm weekends were also not far off, lingering atmospheres of cobbled pub yards, pocket money and the tuppenny rush infusing the frayed present as a pungent marinade. The light at that precise time, that particular day of the month, had fallen in exactly the same fashion upon Doddridge Church since it was raised. Some of those shadows over there were hundreds of years old, had settled their specific pall on insufficiently despondent pallbearers and hesitating brides alike, on Swedenborgians and repenting rakes. He’d heard of laws protecting something known as “ancient lights”, but couldn’t really picture any protest lobby fighting to conserve the ancient dark, save possibly for easily ignored depressives, Goths and Satanists. Behind him, Alma had eventually reasoned that it was in fact her Yale key rather than the lock, the nursery or the rest of England which was upside-down, and was approximately stating that the exhibition was now open:

“Okay, everybody in. If anybody has constructive criticisms that they’d like to offer, I’ll quite happily enlighten them on their shit dress-sense or the mess they’ve made of bringing up their kids. Remember that you’re only here to gasp. Spill body fluids over it, you pay for it. Apart from that, enjoy yourselves within rational limits.”

And with him and Alma at their forefront, guffawing and arguing, they all went in.

Mick’s first impression was that the choice to exhibit some three dozen pieces in such a ridiculously tiny space had been determined by poor eyesight, hashish-influenced decision-making processes, or else the well-known female handicap when it came to spatial arrangements: the trait which made them imagine penises to be much shorter than they really were. His next impression, after the initial sense of overwhelming optic shellshock had a moment to subside, was that this staggering bag-lady clutter of ideas and images, these closely-spaced airbursts of hue and monochrome adorning every visible vertical surface might well be deliberate, might be a strategy for bullying the intended audience into a different and potentially far more precarious state of mind, assuming anybody other than an evil scientist would ever want to do that. This faint spark of insight was immediately interrupted by his and everyone else’s third impression, which was of an outsized three-dimensional arrangement settled on its table in the centre of the already restricted space.

With Alma having deftly slipped around this eye-catching obstruction out of harm’s way, Mick and his attendant fellow patrons still decanting through the nursery door were brought up short against the nearside of the trestle in a ragged tidal stripe of animate detritus. Roman Thompson’s boyfriend Dean went, “Fuck me,” in an almost reverential tone, Ben Perrit giggled and Bert Regan’s mum said, “Well, I never.” Mick himself could only manage a stunned silence, although whether one of admiration or disquiet at the surely obsessive mental processes involved he could not easily decide.

Built over several months from carefully hand-tinted papier-mâché, spread before them was a maddeningly detailed scale reproduction of the mostly vanished neighbourhood as it had almost definitely never been. Just over four foot square, its tallest structures only inches high, his sister’s diorama juxtaposed the Boroughs’ choicest features, irrespective of chronology. The speckled emerald of Spring Lane School’s playing field made room for the resurgent Friendly Arms halfway up Scarletwell Street, an establishment the egg-and-spoon arena had in actuality replaced. Saint Peter’s House in Bath Street coexisted with the seven-inch tall chimney tower of a Destructor which had been demolished in the 30s to allow the flats’ construction. Spanning the wave-wrinkled river, by what looked from tiny Guinness toucan ads to be a 1940s station, was a gated Cromwell-era drawbridge. Flocking ewes surrounded smart-cars parked in Sheep Street, stippled shit on shredded paper fleeces.

Seen from overhead the centre court of Greyfriars had what looked like Rizla sheets hung from its spindled clotheslines. This omniscient perspective was too reminiscent of his Harryhausen musings from the sleepless night before. Awkwardly disengaging from the press around the nano-slum’s west boundary he squeezed apologetically along St. Andrew’s Road towards Crane Hill up at the table’s corner. Passing his own shrunken terrace row he noted with approval that Gran’s ornamental swan was now a miniaturist study in the front window of number seventeen. Despite the novelty, it fleetingly occurred to him that he’d viewed their old house from this unusual elevation once before, although he couldn’t for the life of him think when. Turning the corner into Grafton Street along the northern border, he retraced the route of his childhood truck journey to the hospital save for a right at Regent Square, but this time as a casually-dressed giant wading waist-deep through the absence where an implied Semilong should be. Alma was waiting for him on the display’s further, eastern side, looming above the mini round church of the Holy Sepulchre and leering like a monstrous Templar idol, which if Mick remembered rightly was a goat with tits.