Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Arguments or shouting matches, those he was all right with, but a fight was something he’d try anything he could do to avoid. Some of the older entertainers that he knocked about with on the circuit reckoned things were looking bad between England and Germany and thought sooner or later there might be a war. He’d be just twenty-one next April and then he’d have the key of the door, never been twenty-one before and all of that, but he’d still be of army age if anything should start. He didn’t fancy that idea at all, and still hoped there was some way he could be safe in another country, if and when it happened. He’d been booked in for a month to play at the Folies Bergère for Karno earlier that year and he’d enjoyed it so much that he hadn’t wanted to come home. He’d seen more lovely women than he’d ever dreamed of, which was saying something with his dreams. He’d met Mr. Debussy, the composer, and he’d had the only real brawl of his life with the prize-fighter Ernie Stone in Stone’s hotel room after too much absinthe. Stone had won, of course, but he’d not done too bad considering and had surrendered only when the lightweight boxer hit him in the mouth so that he’d thought that he might lose his teeth. Returning to the old routines of Mumming Birds and touring gloomy northern towns after all that had been a disappointment, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he got to go abroad again, preferably not in a tin hat as a conscript of the army. Karno had been going on about America, but then Fred Karno talked about a lot of things and only some of them would ever come to fruit. He’d keep his fingers crossed and see what happened.

Oatsie took a few more quick puffs on his fag, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out beneath a swivelling boot before he kicked it off the curb. The crossroads’ gutters brimmed with empty cigarette packs, Woodbines, Passing Clouds, and an unappetising salad of dead leaves. He had to squint about a bit before he caught sight of the trees that these had evidently fallen from, some way along the crossroads’ westward route so that he only saw the tops of them, gold in the setting sun. Now that he looked he saw that there were also saplings sprouting from a couple of the chimneys closer to him, rooted in the dirty brickwork, like the one he could see growing up above the roofline of the public house across the street, the Crow and Horseshoe. Noticing a street-sign bolted up on the far corner and made near unreadable by soot and rust, he saw the slope he stood on was called Horseshoe Street, which helped explain at least the second part of the pub’s name. And if those further trees whose tops he could just glimpse were standing in a graveyard then that might explain the first part, he supposed. He pictured chubby carrion birds all perched there screeching on their tombstones where the names had been erased by moss, and then he wished he hadn’t.

He was only twenty after all. He didn’t need to think of all that morbid business for a long time yet, although there’d been lads killed in the Boer War a good sight younger than what he was now. For that matter, there had been kids in Lambeth who’d not got to their tenth birthdays. He wished he could still believe in God the way he had that night in Oakley Street, down in the basement where he was recovering from fever, when his mother had performed the most dramatic scenes from the New Testament to keep him occupied. She’d put all of the talents from a stage career she’d only recently abandoned into the performance and had almost done too good a job, with him left hoping that he’d have a relapse in his fever so that he could die that night and meet this Jesus who he’d heard so much about. She’d been that passionate, he’d never doubted any of the stories for an instant. Mind you, that had been before him and his brother were dragged through the workhouse with her, and before she had been put in the asylum for a spell. He wasn’t quite so sure today about the heaven that he’d heard described that night, so vividly he couldn’t wait to touch it.

These days, though, he’d lowered his sights and if he thought about what might be after death at all it was in terms of how he’d be remembered, or else how he’d be forgotten. What he wanted was his name to live on after him, and not just as a character from pubs around Walworth and Lambeth, how his father had been posthumously labelled. What he wanted was to be well thought of and well spoken of when he was dead, the way that someone like Fred Karno would be. Well, perhaps that was a bit ambitious, given Karno’s stature in the business, but at least he’d like to be recalled as someone in the same division, even if he was a fair sight lower down in people’s estimation than what Fred would be. Considering the future, when there’d be more people everywhere, he could see how the Music Hall would be much bigger and much more important than it was today, and Oatsie thought there was a chance that he’d get written up somewhere as a contributor to the tradition’s early days, at least if he could manage not to get killed in a war before he’d got his break.

The ideas he was entertaining had begun to get him down. He swept his long-lashed girlish eyes across the passing throng in hope of spotting a big bust or pretty face that might distract him from his own mortality, but he was out of luck. There were some women who looked nice enough, but not what you’d call notable. As for their bosoms it was much the same tale. There was nothing that stood out, and so he drifted back to his uneasy contemplations.

What it was with death that worried him was that it made him feel like he was trapped upon a tramline that was only going to one place, that the iron rail was set already in the road in front of him, that it was all inevitable, although actually that was the thing that worried him with life as well, upon consideration. It was how life seemed sometimes like a skit that had been written out beforehand, with a punch line that was set up in advance. All you could do was try and keep up with its twists and turns while the momentum of the story dragged you through it, one scene following another. You were born, your father ran away, you sang and danced on stage to keep your family out the workhouse but they went there anyway, your brother got you a position with Fred Karno, you went off to Paris, came back home, missed out on Harry Weldon’s former star role in The Football Match because of laryngitis, you got stuck with Mumming Birds instead and ended up back in Northampton, and then some time after that, a long time hopefully, you died.

It was all the “and then and then and then” of it that scared him, one scene following another, its events determining how all the acts thereafter would unfold, just like a great long line of dominoes all falling, and it didn’t seem you could do anything to change the way they fell, the prearranged precision of it, regular as clockwork. It was as if life were some great big impersonal piece of machinery, like all the things they had in factories that would keep rolling on whatever happened. Getting born was just the same as getting your coat lining caught up in its wheels. Life pulled you in and that was that, you were enmeshed in all its circumstances, all its gears, until you reached the other end and got spat out, into a fancy box if you were lucky. There seemed very little choice in any of it. Half his life had been dictated by his family’s financial situation, and the other half dictated by his own compulsions, by his need to be adored the way his mother had adored him, by his frantic scrabble to get somewhere and to be somebody.

But that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Oatsie knew that was what everybody thought about him privately, all of his so-called pals from in the business, how they saw him as a climber, always chasing something — chasing women, chasing any scrap of work he had a sniff at, chasing fame and fortune — but he knew they’d got him wrong. Of course he wanted all those things, wanted them desperately, but so did everybody else, and it was never really the pursuit of recognition that propelled him through his life so much as the great black explosion of his background rumbling behind him. Mother starving her way into madness, father swelling up into a stinking, sloshing water-bomb, all of the pictures flickering past to a percussion made by fists on flesh and dustbin lids on gratings, hammering and clanging in the rising sparks. What kept him on the move, he knew, was not the destiny that he was chasing but the fate that he was running from. What people saw as climbing was no more than him attempting to arrest his fall.