Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The bristles — hog or badger hair, he’d never known for sure — were soft and soothing, slathering the white froth on his cheek. He stared into the bathroom mirror, met his own sad gaze, then drew the open razor in a line across the throat of his reflection, some two inches from the windpipe, gurgling mortally, rolling his eyes and sticking out his long and only slightly furry tongue. Ah ha ha ha.

He shaved, washing the blade clean underneath the cold tap and depositing a scum of tiny hairs around the basin’s tide-line. It was like a tea-leaf residue, but smaller, and he wondered if the future could be seen amongst the random specks. They always used to say down in the Boroughs how if, for example, you had tea-leaves that looked like a boat it meant a sea voyage was in store, only of course it never was. Putting away the shaving kit he patted dry his face and risked a palm-full of Old Spice. He’d thought the fruity smell was girlish when he’d slapped it on the first time as a teenager, but nowadays he liked it. It smelled like the ’Sixties. Looking in the glass at his clean-shaven face he gave a suave, matinee-idol smile and jiggled his thick eyebrows up and down suggestively, a sozzled gigolo attempting to seduce his own reflection. God, who’d want to wake up next to that, next to Ben Perrit and Ben Perrit’s nose? Not him, that was for sure. If Benedict had only got his looks to go on, he presumed that he’d be sunk. It was a stroke of luck, then, that he was a published poet too, on top of all his other charms and virtues.

He went back into his bedroom to get dressed, only remembering the fart when it was too late. Bugger. He pulled on his shirt and trousers breathing through his mouth, then grabbed his waistcoat and his shoes and bolted for the landing, finishing adjusting his apparel once he was outside the room and back in a terrestrial atmosphere. He wiped his watering eyes. By Christ, that was the kind that let you know as you were still alive.

He clopped downstairs. His mam, Eileen, was in the kitchen, hovering by the gas-stove, making sure his breakfast didn’t burn. She’d have begun it, scrambled eggs on toast, when she’d first heard him stumbling to the bathroom overhead. She pulled the grill-pan out an inch or two to check the tan on the sliced white, and poked at the yolk-coloured cumulus congealing in the saucepan with her wooden spoon. She glanced up at her son with old brown eyes that were as loving as they were reproachful, tucking in her jutting little chin, pursing her lips and tutting as if after all these years she was no wiser when it came to Benedict, or what to make of him.

“Good morning, Mother. May I say that you’re particularly radiant this morning? There’s some sons, you know, who wouldn’t be so gallant. Ah ha ha.”

“Yiss, and there’s some mothers as do ’ave ’em. ’Ere, come on and ’ave yer breakfast ’fore it’s cold.” Eileen retrieved the toast, skimmed it with marge and dumped the steaming, scrambled mass upon it, seemingly in one continuous movement. She pushed back a grey strand that had worked loose from her bun as she gave Benedict the plate and cutlery.

“There y’are. Don’t get it dayn yer shirt.”

“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha.”

He sat down at the kitchen table and began to wolf his way into what he perceived as necessary stomach-lining. He’d got no idea why everything he said came out as if it were a punchline or a previously unknown comic catchphrase. He’d been that way as far back as anyone remembered. Perhaps it was just that life was easier to get through if you thought of it as an unusually long instalment of The Clitheroe Kid .

He finished breakfast, swilled down with the cup of tea his mam had meanwhile made for him. He gulped the brew … I can’t talk now, I’m drinking … keeping one bright, hedgehog-baking Gypsy eye upon the coat pegs in the passage where his hat and neckerchief were waiting, while he sat there plotting his escape. Escape, though, except into poems or fond memories, was the one thing that Benedict had never been successful with. Before he’d set his empty teacup down into its saucer and commenced his dash for freedom, Eileen shot him down.

“Shall yer be lookin’ out fer work today, then?”

This was yet another aspect of the mornings, quite apart from thinking about death the moment you woke up, that Benedict found problematic. It was two things, actually, that he was largely unsuccessful with. Escape, and finding work. Of course, the biggest stumbling block he had with finding work was that he wasn’t looking, or not very hard, at any rate. It wasn’t all the actual work that put him off, it was the job: all the procedures and the people who came with it. He just didn’t think he had the heart to introduce himself to a collection of new faces, people who knew nothing about poetry or Freeschool Street and wouldn’t have a clue what Benedict was all about. He couldn’t do it, not at his age, not to strangers, not explain himself. To be completely frank, he never had been able to explain himself at any age, to anybody, or at least he’d never managed to explain to anybody’s satisfaction. Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.

“I’m always looking. You know me. The eyes that never rest. Ah ha ha ha.”

His mother tipped her head to one side while regarding him, with fondness and bone-tired incomprehension at the same time.

“Ah, well. It’s a pity that yer eyes can’t pass the trick on to yer arse, in that case. ’Ere. ’Ere’s summat fer yer dinner. I expect I’ll see yer when yer get back in, if I’m still up.”

Eileen pressed ten Benson & Hedges and a ten-pound note into his hand. He beamed at her, as if it didn’t happen every morning.

“Woman, I could kiss yer.”

“Yiss, well, you do and you’ll get this.” This was his mam’s fist, thrust upwards like a haunted Aboriginal rock outcrop. Ben laughed, pocketing the tenner and the fags, then went into the hall. He fastened his burnt-orange neckerchief across the swallowed Carlsberg bottle of his Adam’s apple, squinting at the daylight filtered through the frosted panel by the front door and deciding it looked bright enough to leave his coat behind, though not so bright that he need bother taking his straw hat. His waistcoat looked like brothel curtains as it was. He didn’t want to over-do it.

He transferred the ciggies from his trouser pocket to his canvas satchel, where he’d also got some Kleenex tissues and an orange, with a copy of A Northamptonshire Garland edited by Trevor Hold and published by Northampton Libraries. It was just something he was dipping into at the moment, just to keep his hand in. Bag across one shoulder, Benedict called goodbye to his mam, drew in a fortifying breath before the hallway mirror and then, flinging wide the front door, he launched himself valiantly once more into the fray, and the frayed world it was conducted in.

Spit-coloured clouds moved over Tower Street, formerly the upper end of Scarletwell. The street had been renamed after the high-rise, Claremont Court, that blocked out half the western sky upon his right, one of two brick stakes hammered through the district’s undead heart. On recently refurbished crab-paste brickwork were the words or possibly the single word NEWLIFE, a sideways silver logo, more a label for a mobile phone or for an everlasting battery than for a tower block, he’d have thought. Benedict winced, attempting not to look at it. For the most part, he found it comforting to still reside in the beloved neighbourhood, except for those occasions when you noticed that the loved one had been dead for thirty years and was now decomposing. Then you felt a bit like someone from an item out of Fortean Times , one of those lovelorn and demented widowers still plumping up the pillows for a bride who’s long since mummified. Newlife: urban regeneration that they’d had to literally spell out because of its conspicuous absence otherwise. As if just bolting up the mirror-finish letters made it so. What had been wrong with all the old life, anyway?