Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“Grey into skull corner” was a fair approximation of what he’d said.

This was getting interesting. Freddy didn’t know quite who the grey ball made him think of. It was someone bald, balder than Freddy, even, and was also someone grey, grey in a moral sense, perhaps even more grey than Freddy was as well. The grim-faced Russian-looking builder took his shot. The white ball streaked with its pale comet-tail across the table to clap loudly up against another ball that Freddy couldn’t tell the colour of. Was it the grey one Yuri-something meant to hit, or something else? Whatever colour it might be, this second ball shot off towards the skull-marked corner.

Oh no, Fred thought suddenly. It came into his head just who the hurtling ball was meant to represent. It was the little brown girl with the lovely legs and the hard face who he’d seen by St. Peter’s Church the other afternoon and then again today, sat watching him and Patsy at their Bath Street assignation. She was going into the skull pocket, and Fred knew that this meant nothing good for the poor child.

A hand’s breadth from the death’s-head drop, the hurtling ball impacted with another. This one, Freddy thought, must be the grey ball that the Russian-looking player had declared to be his target. It was knocked into the pocket Yuri-something had intended, whereupon he and the other Master Builders all threw up their arms into a dazzling spread of feathered rays and shouted out in unison their “Yes!” with all its splintering, diminishing reverberations. Just as suddenly, however, all the uproar died away when everybody noticed that the ball Yuri had used to knock the grey into the hole was now itself perched at the northeast pocket’s rim. This was the ball that Freddy had associated with the brown girl he’d seen earlier. This wasn’t looking good. The grim-faced player who’d just made the shot looked down towards the ball now teetering upon the brink of the skull-pocket that he’d chosen as his own, then looked across the table and at Mighty Mike, the white-haired local champion. The Russian-looking fellow flashed a chilly little smile and then began to pointedly chalk up his cue. Fred hated him. So did the crowd. He was like Mick McManus or a wrestling villain of that nature, someone who the crowd would hiss, except of course they wouldn’t in this case, however they might feel. Nobody hissed at builders.

It was now the sturdy white-haired favourite’s turn to take his shot, but he looked worried. His opponent clearly planned to knock the threatened ball into his own skull corner pocket with his next go, unless Mighty Mike could somehow move it out of danger. It was so close to the hole, though, that the slightest touch might send it tumbling in. It was a bugger. Fred was so wound up he almost fancied he could feel his heart pound in his chest. The local hero slowly and deliberately walked round the monstrous snooker table to a spot on its far side, where he crouched down to make his fraught and crucial play. Just as he did so he looked straight across the baize and into Freddy’s eyes, so that it made him jump. The look was sober, hard and obviously intentional, so that even Jem Perrit, stood beside Fred, turned and whispered to him.

“Watch ayt, Fred. The big man’s lookin’ at yuh. What are yuh done now?”

Fred numbly shook his head and said that he’d done nothing, at which Jem had cocked his head back and regarded Fred suspiciously and cannily.

“Well, then, what are yer gunner do?”

When Fred did not know how to answer this, both men turned back to watch the builder take his shot. He wasn’t looking now at Freddy, with his eyes instead fixed firmly on the white ball he was lining up. Amongst the crowd of onlookers you could have heard a pin drop. This is all to do with me, Fred thought. The way he looked at me just now. This is to do with me.

“Brown in cross pocket,” said the white-haired Master Builder, although what he really said was a fair bit more complicated.

Straight away his cue shot out — a boxer’s jab — and sent the white ball slamming up the table with its after-images a stream of bursting bubbles in its wake. It whacked explosively into a ball whose grey seemed slightly warm so Freddy thought it might be red, and sent it like a rocket so it struck between the brown ball and the death-trap pocket with a noise that sounded like it hurt, so all the rough-shod audience winced at the same time. The brown ball shot into the southeast pocket at the cross-marked corner of the table like a thunderbolt, and everybody in the room, not just the robe-draped foursome that were playing, threw their arms above their heads and shouted “Yes!” all with one voice. The only difference that there was between the players and spectators was that the fanned shapes the former made when they threw up their arms were blinding white, while those the audience made were grey and looked more like the wings of pigeons. Having pulled off this spectacular accomplishment, the white-haired builder looked once more across the table and directly into Freddy’s eyes. This time he smiled before he looked away, and an exhilarating shiver ran through Fred from one end to the other.

With the possibilities for play apparently exhausted on the east side of the table, it was now the turn of the two Master Builders on the west side to pick up the game. Freddy had no idea what had just passed between him and the frost-haired player, but he felt excited anyway. He’d watch to see how the remainder of this championship event turned out and then head up the Jolly Smokers on the Mayorhold so that he could keep his word to Mary Jane. Fred grinned and looked around him at the other down-at-heel departed, who were grinning too and nudging one another as they whispered their amazement at the stunning trick shot they’d just seen performed.

This looked like it was going to turn out to be quite a night.

On his return, from the white cliffs he’d walked the Roman road or bumped along on carts where he should be so fortunate. He’d seen a row of hanging-trees like fishing poles set out beside a river, heavy with their catch. He’d seen a great red horse of straw on fire across a murky field, and an agreeable amount of naked teats when herlots mocked him from an inn near London. At another inn a dragon was exhibited, caught in a mud-hole where it sulked, a kind of armoured snake that had been flattened, having dreadful teeth and eyes but legs no longer than a footstool’s. He had seen a narrow river dammed by skeletons. He’d seen a parliament of rooks a hundred strong fall on and kill one of their number in amongst the nodding barley rows, and had been shown a yew that had the face of Jesus in its bark. His name was Peter but before that had been Aegburth and in France they’d called him Le Canal, which in their tongue meant channel, for the way he sweated. This was in the year of our Lord eight hundred and ten, about the Vernal Equinox.

He’d ventured half a world and back, stepped on the skirt’s edge of Byzantium and walked in the dazed wake of Charlemagne, had sought the shade of heathen domes in Spain with their insides a myriad blue stars and not a cross in sight. Now he was come again to these close and encircling horizons, to this black earth and grey sky, this rough-made land. He was returned to Mercia and to the Spelhoe hundreds, though not yet to Medeshamstede, to his meadow home there in the bogs of Peterboro, where they must by this time think him dead and would already have allowed his cell to pass on to another. He’d get back there soon enough, but in his travels he had taken on an obligation that must first be properly discharged. The content of the jute-cloth bag slung over his right shoulder, where there was a callus grown he had been bearing it so long, must be delivered unto its precise and rightful destination. These were his instructions, given to him by the friend he’d met when in another place, and it was his resolve to see them now fulfilled that led him up this dry mud path, with spear-sharp grass and weeds on every side, towards a distant bridge.