Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He checked to see the door had locked behind him, with his mam now being on her own in there, and as he did he saw the big fat druggy with the bald head, Kenny something, lumbering down Simons Walk that ran along the end of Tower Street, at the back of Claremont Court. He had grey slacks and a grey sports-top on, which from a distance looked all of a piece, like one big romper suit, as if the dealer were an outsized baby who’d exceeded the safe dose of Calpol. Benedict pretended he’d not seen him, turning left and walking briskly up towards the street’s far end, a confluence of sunken walkways tucked away behind the traffic vortex of the Mayorhold. How could anybody get that fat on drugs, unless they ate them in a fried bread sandwich? Ah ha ha ha.

Yellow leaves were plastered in a partial lino on the wet macadam at his feet as he passed the Salvation Army building, a prefabricated barracks that he didn’t think he’d ever been inside. He doubted they went in for tambourines these days, much less free cups of tea and buns. The twentieth century had been a better time to be a washout. Back then poverty had come with a brass band accompaniment and a cheek full of scone dissolving in hot Brooke Bond; kindly bosoms heaving under navy blue serge and big golden buttons. Now it came with flint-eyed teenage death-camp supervisors in the no-hiding-place glare of the Job Centre, and whatever soundtrack happened to be playing in the shopping precinct outside, usually “I’m Not In Love”. The short street ended as it met the footpath to the underpass, where a high wall reared up to bound the robot shark tank of the Mayorhold. Patterned with a bar-code stripe of ochre, tangerine and umber, it was probably intended to provide a Latin atmosphere, whereas instead it looked like an attack of vomiting restaged in Lego. Benedict stopped walking for a moment so that he could take it in, the ground where he was standing, with its full historical enormity.

For one thing, it was near here that one of his father’s favourite pubs had been, the Jolly Smokers, although this was by no means the full extent of the locale’s historic pedigree. This spot was where Northampton’s first ‘Gilhalda’ or Town Hall had stood back in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, at least according to historian Henry Lee. Richard the Second had declared it in his charter as the place where all the bailiffs and the mayor were situated. Bailiffs were still seen down here from time to time, though mayors less often these days. Late on in the thirteen-hundreds all the wealth and power had shifted to the east side of the town, and a new Guildhall had been raised down at the foot of Abington Street, near where Caffè Nero stood today. That was the point from which you could most likely date the area’s decline: for more than seven hundred years the Boroughs had been going steadily downhill. It was a long hill, evidently, though as he stood there regarding the emetic tile-work Benedict believed the bottom was at last in sight.

Although the first Town Hall had been located here, that wasn’t why the former town square had been named the Mayorhold, or not as Ben understood things, anyway. His theory was that this had happened later, in the 1490s, at a time when Parliament had placed Northampton under the control of an all-powerful mayor and council made up of four dozen wealthy buggers, sorry matron, wealthy burghers that they called the Forty-Eight. Benedict thought that this was when the people of the Boroughs, like the folk of nearby Leicester, had begun their grand tradition of electing a joke mayor, to take the piss out of the processes of government from which they’d been excluded. They’d hold mock elections in the square here, hence the name, and would award a literal tin-pot chain of office made from a pot lid to whoever they’d randomly appointed, often somebody half cut, half sharp, half missing from a war wound, or, in extreme cases, all of the above. Benedict had a notion that his own paternal grandfather, Bill Perrit, had been one such appointee, but that was based on no more than the old man’s nickname, which had been “the Sheriff”, and the fact that he’d sit there all day blind drunk outside the Mayorhold Mission in an old wheelbarrow that he treated like a throne. Benedict wondered briefly if he could claim office based upon being descended from the Sheriff and on living where the first Town Hall had stood? He fancied himself as a Titchbourne Claimant, as a Great Pretender, one of those who’d put more forethought into getting crowns on heads than keeping heads on shoulders. Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and Benedict Perrit. Names to conjure with. Ah ha ha ha.

He turned along the sunken footpath, with ahead of him the steps that led up to the corner where the upper end of Bath Street met the top of Horsemarket. Even from this low vantage he could see the higher storeys of both tower-blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, where they poked up above the Spanish-omelette tiling of the dyke wall hulking on his right. The towers, for Benedict, had always marked the real end of the Boroughs, that rich, thousand-year-long saga that had been concluded with these overly-emphatic double exclamation marks. Newlife. It made you want to spew. Two or three years back there’d been calls to tear the barely-habitable monsters down, acknowledgements that they should never have been put up in the first place. Benedict had briefly thought he might outlive the bullying, oppressive oblongs, but then Bedford Housing had made some deal with the Council — still four dozen of the wealthy buggers, still the Forty-Eight after five centuries — and purchased both blocks for what was reputedly a penny each. The urine-scented ugly sisters had been tarted up and then turned out, supposedly, as fit accommodation for “Key Workers” that it seemed Northampton needed, mostly siren-jockeys: nurses, firemen, policemen and the like. Newlife. New life that had been parachuted in, in order to contain the previous inhabitants when they got sick or stabbed or set themselves on fire. As things worked out, though, what the tower blocks had been filled with was a stream of human leftovers … outpatients, crack-heads, refugees … not obviously different to the people who’d been living there before.

The leftie Roman Thompson from St. Andrew’s Street had once shown him a list of Bedford Housing’s board, which had included former Labour councillor James Cockie in the roster. This might possibly explain the penny price tags. Benedict turned left before he reached the steps to Bath Street corner, taking the pedestrian tunnel under Horsemarket that was sign-posted for town centre. Here the bilious orange-brown mosaic was all round him, rising to the arched roof of the tunnel where dim sodium lights at intervals emitted their unhelpful amber glow.

Ben’s gangling, insufficiently-lit shape sloped through the queasy catacomb that seemed to rustle with the ghosts of future murders. An abandoned shopping trolley rolled towards him menacingly for perhaps a foot, but then thought better of it, creaking to a sullen standstill. Only when he passed beneath a ceiling-lamp did his heroically-proportioned features or his tired, resigned smile flare into existence, like a head-and-shoulders sketch by Boz that somebody had put a match to. The unwelcome thought of Councillor Jim Cockie, possibly in combination with these subterranean surroundings, would appear to have unlocked a previously forgotten dream in which the councillor had featured, which Ben suddenly remembered from the night before, if only as a fuzzy string of cryptic fragments.

He’d been wandering through the generic terraces of elderly red brick and railway-arch-bound wastelands that appeared to be the default setting for his dreams. Somewhere within this eerie and familiar landscape there had been a house, a teetering old Boroughs house with stairs and passageways that never quite made sense. The streets were dark. It was the middle of the night. He’d known that family or friends were waiting for him in the building’s cellar, but he’d suffered all the usual dream-frustrations finding his way in, picking his way apologetically through other people’s flats and bathrooms, navigating laundry-chutes that were part-blocked by antique wooden desks he recognised from Spring Lane School. At last he’d reached a kind of boiler-room or basement that had blood and straw and sawdust on the floor, as if the space had been used as a slaughterhouse just recently. There was an atmosphere of squalid horror, yet this was somehow connected to his childhood and was almost comforting. He’d then become aware that Councillor Jim Cockie, someone that he barely knew, was standing in the gory cellar next to him, a corpulent, bespectacled and white-haired form dressed only in his underpants, his face a mask of dread. He’d said “This place is all I dream about. Do you know the way out?” Ben had felt disinclined to help the frightened man, one of that Forty-Eight who had historically destroyed the Boroughs, and had answered only “Ah ha ha. I’m trying to get further in.” At this point, Benedict had woken from what still seemed like somebody else’s nightmare. He emerged out of the tunnel, shaking off the bad dreams with the darkness of the underpass, and puffed up the steep gradient to Silver Street.