Alan Moore - Jerusalem

All of this had taken only moments, a rose of disaster blossoming and withering in time-delay, plunging the nursery into swirling opacity with everybody coughing, cursing, laughing, stumbling for the exit. Tasting a sour flinch of burning paper in the no-man’s-land dividing nose from throat, Mick blundered blind towards fresh air and freedom. On his way out he collided with a fogbound pit-bull on its hind legs that turned out to be Ted Tripp, the erstwhile burglar ushering his girlfriend Jan before him, both of them apparently more entertained than traumatised. Beside the doorway to the right the white-haired carpenter from item one looked back across his shoulder at the sputtering herd as it stampeded past, while on the left stood Mick himself in mayoral drag with his arms raised in what now read as an apologetic shrug: “Blame her. Nothing to do with me.” He staggered onto the comb-over turf outside, lank green locks plastered to the muddy scalp, trailing asphyxiating ribbons in his wake. Pressing the heels of both hands to his streaming sockets he smeared stinging moisture down across his cheekbones until he could see again.

The nursery entrance was still belching smoke and people into what was otherwise a pleasant afternoon. Murderous-looking maulers reassured each other that they were okay, asthmatic anarchists sat wheezing on the cusp of Phoenix Street, and Roman Thompson did his best to look compliant when his boyfriend told him that, no, seriously, this really wasn’t funny. Backing off in the direction of the Golden Lion on Castle Street, Melinda Gebbie helped a stunned Lucy Lisowiec to get a cover story blaming everything on unidentifiable street-drinkers into place, the latter gaping with that thunderstone-struck look that Mick had observed often on associates of his sister. Somewhere at his back he heard Dave Daniels say “Where’s Alma?”, and was just beginning to conjecture that the exhibition might have been intended as a Viking funeral pyre when through the smoking portal like a Halloween edition of Stars in their Eyes lumbered the reverse hedge-dragged artist.

Her eyes were like particle collisions, black matter decay trajectories descending to the chin from watery corners, and in her Sargasso hair perched huge pale butterflies of settled ash. Singed, ugly holes now perforated the new turquoise jumper, but then Mick supposed it would look pretty much the same after a week of Alma’s normal wear and meteoritic hashish-spillage. Smudged vermillion lips were stretched into a ghastly apprehensive rictus as she lifted sooty, blistered palms to her bewildered audience as though attempting to surrender.

“It’s okay. I put it all out. I’ll buy them another table. Or two tables if they want, how’s that?”

His sister was like Werner Von Braun trying to mollify senior Nazis after a V2 had detonated on the launch pad, simpering nervously and wiping blast debris from Goering’s frizzled eyebrows. She stood slapping her own bosom where a turquoise brushfire had rekindled, and it seemed to Mick that she had never looked more catastrophically deranged that she did at that moment. He was almost, well, not proud of her, but less ashamed. Then he remembered the old women who’d been standing behind Alma prior to her electing to employ the nuclear option, and who both were very definitely not among the emphysemic huddle of survivors on the fraying verge. Oh fuck. She’d finally killed someone, and when journalists swooped on her friends and family, nobody would affect surprise or offer testimonials to her quietness and normality. Striding towards her, Mick was only shocked that she had somehow managed to restrain herself for as long as she had.

“Warry, for fuck’s sake, where are those old women, the two that were standing next to you?”

His sister’s head revolved unhurriedly in his direction, that of a mechanical Turk anxious to persuade spectators that there was no cramped grandmaster dwarf crouched in her ribcage. Focussing a mildly shell-shocked gaze on Mick, her optic hazard-lights blinked stupidly amid the slobbering kohl, a breeding couple of stealth-jellyfish. She looked as though she might get round to working out who he was once she’d answered the same question in relation to herself. The weighted lids went up and down a few more times to no apparent purpose in the long space-shuttle pause before she spoke.

“What?”

Mick gripped her shoulder, urgently.

“The two old ladies! They’ve been here all afternoon. They were behind you when you made your sacrifice or whatever you thought it was that you were doing. They’re not out here, so if they’re still in there underneath a table, overcome by fumes, then …”

He tailed off. Alma was staring at his tightening hand as though she wasn’t certain what it was, much less what it was doing on her bicep. He withdrew it while it still had all its fingers.

“Sorry.”

She frowned at him quizzically, and he could feel the shift as he found himself in the role of babbling psychiatric liability while she somehow assumed the mantle of concerned clinician.

“Warry, Bert’s mum was the only old gal here other than me, and if she hadn’t already gone home then I wouldn’t have lit the touch-paper. I’m not a psychopath who wants to cull the elderly or something. I’m not Martin Amis. Have a look yourself, you don’t believe me.”

His eyes darted to the nursery door, still simmering. He knew from Alma’s tone, with absolute conviction, that if he should peer inside then it would be exactly as she said. There would be no half-suffocated pensioners collapsed in tragic bundles, nothing but the glowing Dresden mess and twists of drifting yarn that curled up from its squirming embers. He pictured precisely the two women who had definitely been there and now definitely weren’t and felt the same uneasy tingle in his upper vertebrae that he’d experienced when talking to Bert Regan’s mum, a breath of the uncanny on the barbered stubble at the nape. He thought it better that he not continue with the present thrust of his enquiry, and returned his gaze to meet that of his sister.

“No, it’s … no, it’s fine, Warry. I’ll take your word for it. I must have got mixed up. Here, you do know that this place probably has a connection to the fire station, don’t you? Did you want to be here when the engines came? Or was that why you did it, for the flashing lights and uniforms?”

She looked at him in earnest startlement.

“Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Come on, let’s fuck off somewhere else so that I can reflect on what I’ve done and feel remorse.”

Seizing his elbow she commenced to drag him across Phoenix Street in way of Chalk Lane, calling back to the smoke-damaged refugees still gathered on the nursery’s moth-eaten apron verge.

“Don’t worry. Everybody gets a refund.”

Roman Thompson’s chap Dean sounded as though he were at a philosophic impasse.

“But nobody paid.”

Towing her brother along the west wall of Doddridge Church, Alma considered.

“Oh. Well, in that case nobody qualifies. I’ll give you all a call next week.”

With that the Warrens absented themselves from the potential crime scene, sauntering conspicuously in their efforts not to look like fleeing perpetrators. Scuffing over listing pavement past the loaf-bronze meeting house both of them peered first at the stranded doorway halfway up the rain-chewed stonework, a moustache of flowers and grass along its sill, then at each other, although neither spoke. From the truncated strip of peeling house-fronts opposite crouched under the raised arbour of the designated castle grounds came muffled music that was summery and old, phased in and out of audibility by the continually shifting waveband of the breeze. “Don’t Walk Away, René” perhaps. Assaying branches overdressed in pink like gypsy bridesmaids, blackbird Schuberts hung their fleeting compositions on the grey staves that still ravelled from the nursery, and rattling around the curve of Mary’s Street a flaking ice-blue Volkswagen was for a heartbeat in beguiling contrast with the toffee fringes of the burial ground. Rounding the corner in the juddering vehicle’s wake, Alma and Mick mounted the undemanding run of steps and, without need for conference, agreed to park their ageing arses on the slab-topped wall bounding the chapel’s southern face.