Alan Moore - Jerusalem

On it went, a steeply angled ladder of estrangement. Clearly only there for its shock-value, Mick decided, the next exhibit depicted the bare back of an adult black male, in an ingeniously-crafted frame precisely contoured to contain the muscled curvatures of the rich purple and mahogany expanse. Distressingly, the skin in question appeared lately flogged, possibly by a cat-o’-nine-tails that had left close-spaced red horizontal lines across the glistening shoulder-blades. It came to him belatedly that these marks were intended to suggest a terrible musical stave on which what had seemed random blots of gore revealed themselves as carefully placed notes in some appalling composition. Queasily, he cast an eye over the nearby makeshift label. Blind But Now I See , apparently, although Mick couldn’t for the life of him. Although entirely certain that his sister would not have intended any such thing, he thought this particular piece might well be construed as racist, or at least as racially insensitive. He wondered what Dave Daniels would make of it, and next wondered if wondering that might in itself be racist.

Then there was a pencil-crayon study of somebody who looked like Ben Perrit ambling disconsolately at the bottom of an ocean, clouds of sediment arisen from his heels and what seemed to be murky fragments of St. Peter’s Church protruding from the seabed in the background, weed in ribbons trailing from the gaping mouths of Saxon monsters in relief below the eaves. Next came a larger work accomplished in a medium which Mick distantly remembered was called scraperboard, a steeply-angled vista looking up towards a silhouetted figure standing straddling a roof-ridge with some kind of glass or crystal sphere held up aloft in either hand, and lower the black surface scratched away in random smudges to reveal prismatic tinfoil underneath. There followed not a pictorial work of any kind but rather a white apron, hand-embroidered at the hem with unexpectedly uplifting butterflies and bees. It looked as if a lot of effort had gone into it, but once again he found he’d no clear notion as to what, if anything, the crisp white linen was meant to be saying beyond “Everybody look at me. I can embroider.” Nor was item ten, identified by a desultory biro scrawl as Hark the Glad Sound , any more enlightening. Rendered, conceivably, in oil pastels it depicted a young woman clad in 1940s clothes, alone and sitting in a gas-lit parlour playing a piano. Only after several moments did he realise that Titanium White highlights on the figure’s cheeks evoked refracted tears. If anything it looked a little sentimental; chocolate-boxy even, like that bloke who did the picture with the singing waiter, Vettriano. Once again, no reference to Mick himself was anywhere in sight. Had all that been just one of Alma’s barely comprehensible or indeed noticeable jokes, only remotely funny to a somehow-sentient encyclopaedia who’d never heard any good gags?

It was at this point that the object of his musings once again materialised at his side, ostensibly to give him back his borrowed lighter, though in actuality to see if she approved of his reactions to her paintings. This made him feel vaguely apprehensive, then annoyed that Alma should invert the usually understood relationship between art and its audience. Granted, he hadn’t been to many exhibitions, but he’d come away with the impression that at these gallery openings it was the artist who was nervous about being judged, not the attending public. Once he’d arm-wrestled his lighter from her lacquered talons he raised this point with his sister, although not as lucidly as he had managed in his head. Her flue-brush eyes regarded him with genuine puzzlement.

“Why, Warry, what a wonderful and otherworldly notion. Do you know, that honestly never occurred to me before? A piece of art is obviously pronouncing judgement upon everyone and everything that’s not the piece of art. Well, my art is, at any rate. Can’t speak for anybody else.”

Starting to notice his own critical deficiency of nicotine, Mick’s comment was perhaps more sharp in its delivery than he’d intended. Still, this didn’t matter, Alma being oblivious to rebuke.

“So it’s not art that’s judging everybody, Warry, is it? It’s just you, being judgemental.”

She stared at him for a moment and then, lowering her eyes, she sighed.

“Ah, Warry. Why is it always the wisdom of subnormal children that’s most humbling? But I’m not entirely certain why you raised the issue in the first place by suggesting I’d be critical of any negative reactions. What’s your own reaction so far, Warry, that’s caused all these troubling and unaccustomed thoughts?” Head cocked to one side, Alma eyed her brother both forensically and quizzically, a watchful poisoner alert for the first telltale symptoms of success. “It couldn’t be that … well, that you don’t like these pictures that I’ve taken great pains to create especially for you?”

It was exactly what he’d dreaded and he’d brought it on himself. Her drug-dilated pupils, nested in the pissed-on ashes of her irises, were welded to him and her eyelids seemed no longer to be functioning. His tongue had dried onto his palate and the punchline to a Roman Thompson joke across the cramped impromptu gallery became the raucous dinner-etiquette of crows. Alma still hadn’t blinked. There was no way to quit the field with honour, so reluctantly Mick struck what he hoped was a pugilistic stance as he went on the conversational offensive.

“But you’ve not, though, have you, Warry? How are these especially for me, particularly Charlie Chaplin made of World War One and watch-parts? What links me with Charlie Chaplin?”

Her seemingly lidless gaze swung to the ceiling as if in consideration, and then back to Mick.

“Well, you’re both much-loved symbols of a betrayed proletariat, and you both walk like people with explosive diarrhoea. So there’s that. But Warry, really, what’s all this about, this truculence? It wouldn’t be that you’ve formed your opinion after seeing only the first six or seven pieces, would it?”

Widening her mill-wheel eyes enquiringly, Alma awaited his affirmative reply so that she could kick off at him and somehow make her random, disconnected paintings his fault. Fortunately, this time Mick was ready for her.

“Warry, you’ve completely underestimated me, as usual. I’ve seen the first eleven.”

Belatedly, it struck him that this sounded as though he’d watched a school cricket team. He could perhaps have phrased it better and yet felt the basic point was sound enough. The corners of his sister’s mouth, however, steadily migrated to the region where her ears were last reported.

“Oh, yeah, right. The first eleven. So you’ve not seen number twelve?”

That dreadful smirk. What did it mean? He said that no, he hadn’t, and the rictus became even broader, to the point where he feared that the top of Alma’s head would separate and slide off slowly, falling with a wet thud to the nursery floor. She aimed one blood-dipped fingernail towards a point behind him on his left, and with heart sinking he turned to confront the exhibition’s twelfth display.

A by-this-point anticipated ballpoint tag announced the large acrylic work as Choking on a Tune . Mick’s own sandblasted features following his accident at work filled the enormous canvas top to bottom, edge to edge, a post-apocalyptic landscape with a peeling nose and a surprised expression. Watering eyes, wet blue and aggravated red, were aerial views of toxic puddles sunk in a corroded junkyard face. The vivid orange dust that the collapsed steel drum had breathed all over him submerged the portrait under swarming cayenne pinpricks, sore and fiery, carefully applied in pigment that he later learned was not only the earliest available source of the colour but was also in itself fatally poisonous. Dots of fire-opal teemed on a ground-zero physiognomy in speckled rivulets, in rust swirls eddying around and in between pink discus blisters, dolly-mixture pustules ranging in size from full stops to bullet points erupting from the chemically abraded epidermis, each bump bulging from the surface and accentuated with a vanishingly minute fleck of highlight Chinese White on its meniscus. Understandably, Mick found the picture hard to look at, painful in all its painstakingly depicted paining pain. It was a shocking image, certainly, of striking technical proficiency, but it seemed heartless like the flayed black shoulders of exhibit seven. With a sick pang of familial disappointment he was almost ready to consign his sister to the same chill gulag of disdain where he had almost every other soulless and attention-seeking modern British artist already confined and on a diet of their own shoes, when his attention was seized unexpectedly by something in the constellated pimples fanned across the doppelganger’s cheeks and forehead. He leaned closer. It was almost certainly his pattern-finding faculties at work, like when you got those snarling leper-monkeys in mahogany, but there existed something tantalising in the texture of the raw depicted skin with its precision re-enacted burns. Annoyed now, he leaned closer still.