Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“Warry, I know it’s awesome and it’s only right that you should bow before it, but your worship’s blocking everybody’s way. If I’d known you were going to show me up like this I’d never have invited you. Oh, yeah, and can I have a borrow of your lighter?”

With a heavy sigh of resignation, Mick turned from the disconcerting nocturne to regard the Doctor Martin’s boots with twelve holes but incompetently fastened laces which appeared to be addressing him. Levering cumbersomely back up to his feet he fished with some resentment in one trouser pocket, finally producing the requisite three-for-a-pound stick of amethyst. It wasn’t that he minded Alma borrowing his lighter; it was more the way she stood there with her palm out, as though he was nine and she was confiscating it.

“Here. Don’t forget to bring it back. You do know, Warry, don’t you, that these are just disconnected images with nothing tying them together, unless you count the crushed centipede you call a signature? And what has any of this got to do with how I nearly choked to death?”

Casually pocketing the half-filled plastic lozenge without comment or apparent gratitude, his sister scrutinised him from beneath drug-and-mascara-weighted lids, reluctant to let in too many photons of his philistine rebounded light.

“Well, Warry, for the exhibition’s climax, in an improvised performance piece I’m going to ram a five pound jar of cough-sweets down your throat, finish the job, and very likely cop the Turner. People like you are the reason why the working class can’t have nice things.”

He shook his head slowly and pityingly, a pessimistic vet.

“And people like you are the reason they can’t even find their shitty lighters, Warry.”

Alma gave him an elaborate triple V-sign that involved two hands and also forearms crossing at an acute angle from the elbow, which to Mick looked like a ritualised fit, before she flounced out of the open door to both take and pollute the air. He watched her through the nursery window, an immense dust bunny made of turquoise fluff that seemed to bowl in a contrary breeze across the threadbare mound outside as she paced back and forth, sparking a spliff only a little shorter than her usual blind-man’s cane but which his sister no doubt thought of as discreet and unobtrusive. Bloody women and their inbuilt inability to grasp spatial relationships. Of course, it might be that she’d chosen such an inappropriately tiny venue so that even if only two people and a dog showed up she’d still be playing to a heaving crowd. From out the slaughterhouse press of humanity immediately surrounding him he heard Bert Regan venture a not-unrelated diagnosis.

“Hur hur. Fuck my arse. What does she think this is, Agoraphobics fuckin’ Anonymous, or what? She’s never been on the same page as everybody else, has she, your kid?”

Mick turned and grinned at the preposterously sturdy-looking ne’er-do-well and chancer, somehow still glaringly ginger even now that his remaining hair was grey.

“Hey up, Bert. Tell the truth, I think she’s in a different book. It might even be in a different language, more than likely one that she’s made up. Here, is the lady that I saw you standing next to earlier your mum? I heard her talking. I’ve not heard a Boroughs accent like she’s got in years.”

The landlocked pirate bared his handful of surviving teeth, a sledgehammered piano keyboard, in a fond smile.

“Ah, yeah. She don’t look a bad old gal for eighty-six or whatever the fuck she is now, does she? Grew up around Compton Street just off Spring Lane. Me and me brother and me sister reckon she’ll outlive the lot of us, just from sheer Boroughs bloody-mindedness.”

Mick followed Bert’s eyes, azure chips of castoff china ditched below the oxidising privet of his brow, and spotted the self-possessed pensioner in question on the far side of the makeshift gallery, in animated conversation with a captivated Lucy and Melinda. All he caught was, “Ooh, yiss, I remember ’ow we use ter git dressed up un’ goo dayn tayn”, but that was all he needed to submerge him in a recollected aural floodtide of genetically defective vowels or missing-and-presumed-dead consonants; of chip-shop queue confessions and school-gate soliloquies. To hear a Boroughs woman of that vintage talking was to feel beneath your fingertips the embossed lettering on oval Co-op milk checks, penny-coloured and quietly dependable in value. Marvelling, he returned his attention to the erstwhile gasfitter, knife crime early adaptor and Dodge City plumber at his side.

“You’re lucky to still have her, Bert. Who were those women I saw with her when I turned up earlier? Are they two mates of hers?”

The rusting caterpillar eyebrows crept together for a puzzled face-off.

“You’re not talkin’ about Mel and Lucy?”

Shaking his head like a wet dog, Mick surveyed the cramped premises papered with his big sister’s hallucinations hoping he could point the pair out, but they’d either left already or had nipped outside to get away from all the noise and people, not that you could blame them.

“No, these were both older than your mum. They looked like they’d been living round here quite a while, how they were dressed.”

Bert pushed his lips out in an oral shrug.

“I never noticed ’em. I know that Rome, Rome Thompson, ’e was goin’ out ’round all the flats and sheltered housing yesterday to tell ’em about Alma’s exhibition, so most likely it was two old dears from this patch come to ’ave a butchers and see what was up.”

They both agreed that sounded about right and made a cast-iron aspiration to talk later before conversational convection currents dragged the genial urban ogre off into the grunt and mumble. Watching Regan borne away, Mick made a mental note to ask his sister how things were progressing with Bert’s hepatitis-C which, last he’d heard, had failed to budge even after two blackly suicidal interferon courses, last-chance remedies far uglier than the disease. Returning his attention to the copious vomit of ideas and colours tricking down the walls of the establishment, he picked his way through the next several pieces in disgruntled search of some tenuous thread connecting Alma’s peacock technical display with his own near-death episode, coming up empty-handed.

With Rough Sleepers , next of what appeared to be a largely arbitrary sequence, he found himself looking at the riotously hued gouache delineation of a pub’s front bar, conceivably the Old Black Lion, where luridly bright customers listed in an inebriate over-familiarity or threatened to unhinge their lower jaws in raucous laughter, both the fleshy sprawl of social drinkers and their colour-saturated habitat distorted and exaggerated till they bordered on the abstract. Sat unnoticed and ignored amid the gem-like greens and purples of a braying modern clientele was an anachronistic 1950s tramp rendered entirely in warm stubble greys with lamp black in his creases, wet titanium on a rueful eyeball. Almost photographically realistic in comparison to the oblivious Weimar grotesques surrounding him, his newsprint tones contrasting starkly with their Technicolor, the itinerant clearly existed on a separate plane to all the other careless revellers represented and appeared to be invisible in their beer-goggled sight. The single figure present with no glass before him or in hand, alone amongst the garish throng to meet the viewer’s eye, he looked out from beneath his battered hat-brim and the picture’s depths with a sad, knowing smile, possibly aimed at the insensate horde about him, or the painting’s audience, or both. An oddly poignant scene that was, again, nothing to do with Mick.

Next up, X Marks the Spot , was realised as what he believed might be a lino-print, the solitary pilgrim it portrayed made out of fractured slabs of solid Indian red on heavy watercolour paper that was yellowed, flecked with age or tea. The monkish form was stooped beneath the burden of a heavy-looking and most likely allegorical sack hefted on one buckling shoulder, struggling up an incline recognisable from the intrusive quilt of modern block-cut signage in the background as halfway down Horseshoe Street. Frankly, Mick didn’t have a fucking clue, and item six was hardly more enlightening. On board roughly two feet by one was what appeared from a few paces off to be the grainy head-and-shoulders portrait of a hat-clad Charlie Chaplin, but which on approach dissolved into mixed media collage. A large industrial watch-part cog, perhaps clipped from a technical or scientific magazine, described the upper semi-circle of the silent star’s iconic bowler, while its band and brim were a rectangular munitions factory and a silhouetted barbed-wire fence respectively. The face beneath, pasted together from torn photo-scraps of carefully composed and graduated half-tone densities, was an incongruous carnival of Dior models, shell-shock victims, stockpiled gasmasks, Punch cartoons skewering contemporary art and what appeared to be a period street-plan of Lambeth. The left cheek was bleached-out poppy fields, one eye a face that Mick identified as the young Albert Einstein and the other one a lifebelt ring from the Titanic . The moustache, he thought, might be Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s notorious Sarajevo motor vehicle. He didn’t even bother looking at the hastily scrawled ballpoint afterthought that gave the gimmicky assemblage its no doubt clever title.