Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The painting opened, flowering with new planes and perspectives like a stupefying pop-up to enclose him. Nose perhaps ten inches from the picture it became apparent that the tiny cerise boils and intermingled motes of caustic tangerine hid pointillistic Seurat miniatures, entire scenes emerging from the inflamed dermal mist. Below the portrait’s horrified right eye, the back yard of his childhood home swam into mottled definition, where on the cracked checkering of the constrained enclosure’s upper level his mum Doreen sat in profile on her high-backed wooden chair, caught in the act of popping something small into the baby-bird mouth of the dressing gown-wrapped infant balanced on her lap. Spreading across the shaven area above the painted face’s upper lip, a russet-dusted bubble wrap of blistering resolved into a vista of almost ecclesiastical solemnity, with to the left his tearful mother passing the limp form of her dead-looking toddler to the worried worker leaning from his lorry’s cab there on the right, one of the lifeless bundle’s bare legs dangling poignant in the central philtrum. The visage’s jawline was from ear to ear a necessarily distorted overhead view of the makeshift ambulance’s route from Andrew’s Road to Grafton Street, with Regent Square now centred on the dimple of his chin, across the Mounts to York Road and the hospital, this last a reproduction on the left jowl detailed and complete down to the birdshit-crowned bust of Edward the Seventh which adorned the building’s northeast corner. It was for the brow with its receded hairline, though, the broadest unobstructed space in view, that the most striking vignette was reserved: the hot rose stipple and corrosive ginger peppering arranged into converging lines, perhaps the upper corner of a room where a firm-jawed girl of approximately ten wearing a fetid boa of dead rabbits was somehow suspended, reaching down with one hand to the viewer. Startled, Mick recoiled, pulling away, and everything immediately melted once more into boiling acne.

He was back, back in the room, back in his body and no longer with awareness part dissolved in an impressionistic rash of citrus polyvinyl. Backlogged sensory answerphone messages received during his absence flooded in like Virgin broadband offers, the olfactory grapefruit tingle of whatever Alma had used on her hair that morning and Bert Regan’s laughter, ugly as an airlocked drain. Bright afternoon light toppling through the west window sparked a fire of detail, bald spots, single earrings trembling on a lobe, or T-shirt slogans fading in the mind and cotton blend alike. Eyes blinking as if to expel the smarting residue of imagery he turned back to his sister, standing with one hip dropped and angora arms tangled together, clocking his reactions with the lead eyes of a Nazi lab assistant.

“So, then, Warry. Warts and all. Is that what you were going for?”

She sniggered, for once with him and not at him.

“It’s not like I had a lot of choice. You were a man made out of warts. But still, this could be a new trend in portraiture, capturing people when they’ve just had burning shit thrown in their face. Though actually, that might have been how Francis Bacon worked, now that I think about it.”

Fairly sure that Francis Bacon was the person some believed had really written all the works of Shakespeare, Mick was nonetheless unclear about the relevance of facial injuries and so said nothing. Fortunately, before Alma could interpret his enduring silence as a sign of ignorance regarding modern art, she was distracted by her thespian associate Robert Goodman, shouldering his way through the surrounding press of bodies to present Mick’s sibling with a sheaf of pages printed out from Wikipedia and a glower of generalised resentment which allowed no clue as to its origins. The strange old woman that his earlier childhood tormentor had become inclined her massive rained-off bonfire cranium in the direction of the plainly discontented actor, her blast-pattern eyes grown larger while at the same time somehow retracted, pulled back into crater sockets. He realised that he’d been saved by the arrival of a victim more mouthwatering, more in the way of Alma’s primary prey.

“Why, Bobby. We were just this moment talking about likely inspirations for the work of Francis Bacon, and now here you are. Is this random handful of litter you’re holding for me?”

The gorgon Gielgud’s mouth, badly lagged piping at the best of times, was briefly fishhooked sideways at one corner in contempt.

“This, for your information, is the stuff you asked me to find out at the last minute, about William Blake’s connection to the Boroughs. You said if I didn’t that you’d never speak to me again.”

Accepting the loose paper bundle, Alma showed the hurt performer method-school concern.

“Bobby, I’m sure I never said that. Was that what your voices told you?”

“I do not hear voices.”

“Voices? Bobby, no one said that you hear voices.”

“Yes they did! You did! You said it just now. I just heard you say it.”

“Oh. Oh, dear. The doctors were afraid that this might happen …”

By this time already inching imperceptibly away, Mick took the seasoned player’s speechless indignation as a natural break in which he could announce that he was popping outside for a cigarette. Granting permission with a nod, his sister only paused in her psy-ops manoeuvre to demand that he not run off with her lighter, which he promised not to do before remembering that it was in fact his.

He crabbed towards the open nursery doorway with its breeze-breath, squeezing once more past the front edge of the inconvenient table on which rested Alma’s shrink-rayed Boroughs, pressed uncomfortably against its western boundary. Irritating as this was, it did present a further opportunity to inspect details overlooked during that first jaw-dropping presentation, and he found himself examining afresh the scaled down area surrounding Doddridge Church. Just up from the anachronistic Chalk Lane turret with its witch’s hat, he found firstly the church itself and then his current whereabouts, the erstwhile Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dancing school down at the bottom end of Phoenix Street. In keeping with the model landscape’s combinatory chronology, despite the old red-lettered sign above the door proclaiming the school’s terpsichorean tradition, the front windows were those of the later nursery, thin Rizla tissues with the scene within described on their faux glass in watercolour miniature. In this instance, Mick realised, you could actually make out the table upon which a tinier reproduction of this tiny reconstruction was just visible. Feeling a little nauseous he dragged himself away from the exhibit, as he did so noticing for the first time the scrappy note taped to the table’s forward edge. There was no number but the artist had at least made a half-hearted stab at titling the dollhouse slum, even if that was only with an unimaginative tag which read The Boroughs . Shaking his head ruefully, he made for the fresh air.

Outside, inhaling a too-sweet first quarter inch of cigarette, it struck him that all the surrounding flats and maisonettes, diminished by their distance from him, were almost exactly the same size as those inside the gallery, the bygone buildings caught in the wrong end of Alma’s telescope. Those unknown people briefly treading the far balconies, bag-burdened widows shuffling and stout men in premature string vests, were similarly dwindled to the scale of Airfix Royal Fusiliers — they’d never made a box with stems of huddling civilians — and he was surprised to note that the degree of personality which he attributed to these remote pedestrians was hardly more than he’d allow a plastic figure of equivalent size. Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.