Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“You don’t have to say anything. You’re honoured just to be related to me, Warry, I can see it in your eyes. Did you spot Gran’s swan in the window down Saint Andrew’s Road? I did that with a triple-double-zero brush, and they’re not even real. To be quite honest, when I think about myself sometimes, I nearly faint.”

“Warry, everybody nearly does that when they think about you. We’re not made of stone. So, what material did you use for this, then? It’s not walrus dung or anything, I take it?”

Pigeon droppings of exquisite delicacy caked the rim of a scaled-down Destructor. Gathered by the table’s southwest corner Roman Thompson and Bert Regan grinned and squinted at the junction of Chalk Lane and Black Lion Hill, where a queer turret like a witch’s hat had been mashed up with Harry Roserdale’s newsagent’s and the old Gordon Commercial, the hotel. Just the hand-lettering on the advertisements and hoardings was enough to break your heart and ruin your eyes.

“Nah. It’s all made of Rizla papers. Chewed about four hundred packets up and spat them out. It’s probably much sturdier than what they built the Eastern District out of.”

Mick surveyed the slate-hatched rooftops, the pointillist flowerbeds of Saint Peter’s Church.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But probably it’s also likelier to give you gingivitis.”

In truth, it was taking all of Mick’s determination not to look impressed. It was as if his sister had removed a clipping from the undergrowth of backstreets and then husbanded it patiently to generate a bonsai locale, even or perhaps especially those features which had disappeared. His every eye-movement uncovered more of them. The rising curve of long-gone Cooper Street up to Bellbarn elicited a muscle-memory of straggling past the fading rose gates of Fred Bosworth’s haulage yard halfway uphill, with at the top of the chewed-paper incline a painstaking reconstruction of St. Andrew’s Church so perfect in its Gothic detail that the building’s 1960s demolition seemed flatly impossible, not merely unbelievable. By leaning like one of the clearance area’s perpetual derricks over Sheep Street, Broad Street and the Lilliputian back yards

of St. Andrew’s Street, Mick could just make out the infinitesimal front window of his childhood barber, Albert Badger. So why had they always called him Bill? Painted there on the tissue glass in spidery fluorescent pink, he was obscurely heartened to find an illuminated Durex sign. Three doors down was the Vulcan Polish & Stain Company, no larger than a lesser Lego brick and wholly non-existent in Mick’s memory until that moment. Ant-proportioned hopscotch grids in coloured chalk sweetly defaced the vanished tilt of Bullhead Lane, and microscopic milk bottles next to sienna-crusted loaves of bread bedizened the front steps on Freeschool Street. Attention seized by every hair-thin drainpipe, by the petrol spectra reproduced in every other puddle, it occurred to him that you could go mad looking at this stuff, let alone building it. Beside him, Alma’s forehead corrugated pensively.

“You don’t think that there’s some element missing? As if I was using all the obvious effort as a camouflage to hide the fact that I’m not saying very much, the way I used to plaster every piece of illustration work with that laborious stippling, all little dots, when I was starting out? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if this whole exercise had nothing to it but ridiculously grandiose nostalgia?”

Mick frowned at his sister in astonishment, not so much at her vanishingly rare attack of doubt as at the lack of self-awareness evidenced by her last question.

“No, of course I wouldn’t, Warry. No one would. We’re scared of saying anything in case you turn on us with a debate about things we don’t understand. I think it’s fair to say you won’t get honest criticism out of anybody in arm’s reach of you, because you’re such a touchy bitch.”

She narrowed the blast-craters of her soot-ringed eyes as she considered, unkempt head cocked to one side, her level and unblinking gaze fixed on her brother for long, anxious seconds before Alma ventured her reply, surprising him by resting a comradely hand on his left shoulder.

“That’s an excellent point, Warry, and well made.”

She took the hand away, but not before he’d worried that she planned to drop him with a Star Trek nerve-pinch. Mick, of course, knew there was no such thing, but what if Alma didn’t? Other people were arriving now, latecomers poking trepid heads around the nursery door on the far side of the oppressively meticulous tableau. He recognised his sister’s actor friend, Bob Goodman, although that was hardly more of an accomplishment than saying that he recognised Ayers Rock. Mick could at least tell one of these eroded landmarks from the other, principally by the fact that Ayers Rock never wore a leather jacket, a black beret or such an abiding look of deep resentment and mistrust. More cheeringly, behind the thespian with his death-watch demeanour Mick made note of Alma’s shipwrecked transatlantic artist pal, Melinda Gebbie, someone with whom he could have an entertaining conversation if the exhibition flagged. Moreover, since his older sibling had privately ceded that the pretty Californian was by a head the better painter of the two, Mick felt that he could shelter behind her authoritative statements and opinions if his sister engineered to give him an artistic duffing up. Accompanying her was someone else that he’d met at least once before, Lucy Lisowiec, an extramural muralist who also worked in the Boroughs community and whom he thought Alma had said was helping to secure the daycare centre for this afternoon. The women laughed and chatted, hanging on each other’s arms, the younger of the two so wonderstruck by the art-smothered walls that her lids appeared insufficient to contain her eyes. More punters dribbled in through the propped-open door behind them, some he thought he knew and some he didn’t. Alma, by his side, sighed heavily, still brooding over her reconstituted natal turf.

“I can see that I’m going to have to reach my own conclusions about what this installation might be lacking, rather than relying on your valuable insights. Listen, I think Roman Thompson said he’d got something to tell me, so I’d better go and have a word with him. If you were going to look at any of the other pieces, start to our right of the door and work your way around the room from there. Oh, and I hope you’ve got a lighter on you. I’ve left mine at home, so if I need to pop outside and have a smoke I’ll have to borrow yours.”

Mick nodded, waving her away, struck by the use of the word “if” in her last sentence, as though Alma popping outside for a smoke were some remote contingency rather than the abiding certainty that they both knew it for. With the pretended gallery beginning to fill up, its jostling horde squeezing together in embarrassed waltzes between wall and table-edge, he called to mind when this place had been Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dancing school, cadet Nijinskies clattering on open parquet. Anybody teaching toddlers the Gay Gordon these days, he reflected, would be on a list. Deciding that he’d better make a start on staring blankly at his sister’s pictures if he wanted to be out of there by nightfall, Mick took a last marvelling glance at the fag-paper precinct — a metallic silver painted pond between the tanning-yards along Monk’s Pond Street; seed-sized starlings just discernible against the school’s slate rooftops — and negotiated a laborious course between the jam of punters, heading for the exhibition’s recommended starting-point behind the nursery’s wedged-open door. This turned out to be a large canvas, hung or rather propped so as to partly cover the adjacent window. Never having been to one before, Mick wasn’t absolutely sure what art shows were supposed to be like, but with that said he was fairly certain that they weren’t supposed to be like this. The claustrophobic kindergarten squash of imagery didn’t look organised so much as it looked like someone had detonated an art-teacher in a confined space. Already irritated, Mick turned his besieged attentions to the sunlight-blocking rectangle that had been specified as the extravaganza’s point of entry.