Alan Moore - Jerusalem

There was still water in the copper boiler what was warmish, and he run himself some in a white enamel bowl what he set down into they deep stone sink. The sink was stood below they kitchen window, looking out on the back yard where everything was black now so’s you couldn’t see. He took his jacket off and draped it on the laundry basket what was by the door, and then commenced unbuttoning his shirt.

It was still Pastor Newton he was thinking of. The man had done tremendous good, to Henry’s mind, and had committed likewise a tremendous sin. Henry weren’t sure as he was big enough to judge a man whose vices and whose virtues was of such a size. But then, who was it would call men like that to they account, if it weren’t Henry and his kin and all them others what was treated so unfairly? All the men what was important, with they hymns and statues and they churches living after them and telling folks for years to come how good they was. It seemed to Henry as these monuments was all like Colonel Cody’s rooftop plaque what he’d seen early in the day. Just ’cause a feller was remembered well, that didn’t mean as he’d done something to deserve it. Henry wondered where the justice was in all of this. He wondered who decided in the end what was the mark of a great man, and how they knew as it weren’t just the mark of Cain? His shirt and vest was off by now, hung with his jacket on the basket down beside the kitchen door. Out in the black night, through the steam rose up from his enamel bowl and past the window panes, he seen his own reflection standing in the dark of they back yard, stripped to its waist and looking in at him.

His own mark was just there on his left shoulder, where they’d branded him when he was seven. Both his momma and his poppa had one just the same. He’d got no proper memory of the night the iron was put on him, and even after all these years he’d still got no idea the reason why they done it. Weren’t like there was nigger-rustling going on, as he could recollect.

It was a funny thing, the mark, no better than a drawing what some little child had done. There was two hills, looked like they got a bridge between ’em, else like they was pans hung on a scale for weighing gold. Down under this you’d got a scroll, or could be that it was a winding road. The lines was pale and violet, smooth like wax there on the purple flesh of Henry’s arm. He lifted up his other hand and run his fingers over the design. He waited for the wisdom and the understanding what would answer all the questions in his heart, about John Newton, about everything. He waited for the grace so he could put aside all his hard feelings, though he owned as it would truly have to be amazing.

Outside in the royal blue heaven over Doddridge Chapel, stars was coming out and night birds sang. His wife and child was in the next room, pouring out his tea. He cupped warm water with a little soap there in his palms, dashing it up into his face and eyes so everything was washed away into the grey, forgiving blur.

Foul fanthoms five his farter lies, and office bones are cobbles made. Ah ha ha ha. Oh, bugger, let him stay down here and underwater in the warm, the sweaty linen currents drefting him away, aweigh in anchor chains and scrabble crabs and mermaids mermering to their slowmile phones, their fishbone combs, don’t make him swim up to the light just yet, not yet. Five minutes, just five minutes more because down here it isn’t any time at all, it could be nineteen fifty-eight and him a five-year-old with all his life uncoiled unspoiled before him, down here in the warm and weeds and winkles, with his thoughts bright-coloured tetras streaming in amongst the tumbled busts, the dead men’s chests, but it’s too late, already it’s too late. A mattress-spring is poking through the ocean bed-sands, up into his back, and he can feel his jellyfish-limp arms and legs trailing around him in a salty sprawl as he reluctantly floats up through dream-silts in suspension, back towards the dappled dazzle of the surface, where his mother’s got the wireless on down in the kitchen. Bugger. Bugger it.

Benedict Perrit half-opened his eyes into their first wince of the day. It wasn’t 1958. He wasn’t five. It was May 26 th, 2006. He was a coughing, farting wreck of fifty-two, a piece of nineteen-hundreds royalty in exile, traipsing back and forth along the shores of an unfriendly foreign century. Ah ha ha ha. Wreck was a bit strong, actually. He was in better shape than most his age, to look at. It was more that he’d just woken up, and he’d been on the ale the night before. He’d pick up later on, he knew, but morning always came as something of a shock to Benedict. You hadn’t had a chance yet to get your defences up, this time of day. The thoughts that later on you could avoid or brush aside, they were all on you like a pack of dogs when you were just woke up and hadn’t had your breakfast yet. The cold unvarnished facts of his own life, by morning’s light, were always like a straight punch in the face: his lovely sister Alison was dead, a bike smash more than forty years ago. His dad, old Jem, was dead. Their house they’d lived in, their old street, their neighbourhood, those were all dead as well. The family he’d started for himself with Lily and the boys, he’d messed that up, that was all finished now. He was back living with his mam in Tower Street, what had been the top of Scarletwell Street, up behind the high-rise blocks. His life, in his opinion, hadn’t really worked out how he might have hoped, and yet the thought that in another thirty years it would be over horrified him. Or at least it did when he’d just woken up. Everything horrified him when he’d just woke up.

He let his demons chew on him a minute or two more, then threw them off along with the top sheet and blankets, swinging down his knobbly, hairy legs onto the bedside floor as he sat up. He ran his hands over the mountainous relief-map of his face and back into the still-black tangles of his hair. He coughed and farted, feeling vaguely disrespectful to be doing so while in the presence of his bookshelves, up against the room’s end wall. He could feel Dylan Thomas, H.E. Bates, John Clare and Thomas Hardy staring at him pointedly, waiting for him to own up and apologize. He mumbled a “beg pardon” reaching for his dressing gown, hung on a chair beside the ancient writing desk, then stood and padded barefoot out onto the landing, farting once more to assert his independence just before he closed the bedroom door and left the pastoral poets to discern the romance in his flatulence. Ah ha ha ha.

Once in the bathroom he took care of his evacuations, which, thanks to the drink the night before, were wretchedly distressing but concluded fairly quickly. Next he took his dressing gown off while he had a wash and shave, stood at the sink. The central heating, that was one thing from the modern world that he was glad of. Down in Freeschool Street where he’d grown up it had been much too cold to wash more than your face and hands each day. Perhaps you’d have a proper scrub in a zinc bath on Friday nights if you were lucky.

Benedict ran some hot water in the basin — he would grudgingly admit hot water could be seen as an improvement, too — then splashed himself all over before lathering up with his mum’s Camay, utilising his abundant pubic hair as an impromptu soap-pad. For the rinse he dragged a towel down from the rail to stand upon, so that he wouldn’t soak the bathroom carpet, leaning forward so his genitals hung down into the white enamel basin while he scooped the water up and let it pour across his chest and belly, sluicing off the suds. He used a sponge to wash away the foam beneath his arms, then gave his legs and feet a mostly-soapless rubdown before drying off upon another, larger towel. He put his dressing gown back on, then took his dad’s old shaving brush and straight-edge razor down out of the bathroom cabinet.