Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He raised his glass for a commemorative sip, a sip being approximately half a gill with eight sips to the pint. Taking the pack of Bensons and a street-bought three-for-a-quid lighter from his shoulder bag he gripped one of the cigarettes between eternally-wry lips, lighting it with the stick of liquid-centred amethyst. Ben squinted through the first blue puffs of smoke across the lounge bar. This had filled up, although not with anyone he recognised. Off somewhere to his left, a burbling audial cascade of virtual coins was punctuated with stabs from a science-fiction zither. Sighing non-specifically, he opened the anthology of local poets to its John Clare section, where he hoped that “Clock-a-Clay”, written from the perspective of a ladybird, might prove an antidote to the contemporary flash and jangle that he felt so alienated from. The miniaturist imagery was certainly transporting, though disastrously he couldn’t help but read on to the poem that was reproduced immediately after, which was Clare’s asylum-penned “I Am”.

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea of waking dreams,

Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

Even the dearest that I loved the best

Are strange — nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

That was entirely too close to the nerve, instantly sinking Benedict’s half-decent mood, already holed below its waterline. He shoved the book back in his satchel, downing the three sips remaining in his pint and purchasing another one before he knew he’d done it. This relieved him of his small-change buffer and exposed his queen, Eliz th. Fry, precariously. Her rainy turquoise eyes stared out of the remaining note into his own, with something of his mother’s look of worried resignation when she gazed appraisingly on Ben and Ben’s unjustly punished liver.

The next thing he knew, it was mid-day. He was emerging from the narrow barroom of the Shipman’s, basically a passageway that had a pub where most people have coatpegs, into Drum Lane. Down the alley on his right he could see All Saints’ Church across the road, with on his left the waning bustle of the Market Square. Eliz th. Fry, apparently, had left him for another man, most probably a landlord. He lugubriously noted that he still had custody of several little ones, silver and copper orphans to the sum of eighty-seven pence. A bubbling protest from his long-drowned instincts for self-preservation told him he should probably invest this in a pasty. Turning right he made his way down the perpetual shadow-channel of Drum Lane, towards the bakery opposite All Saints’ in Mercer’s Row.

Ten minutes later he was swallowing the last of what he thought was more than likely lunch, tongue probing optimistically in the mysterious ditches of his mouth for any lingering mince, tenacious pastry or recalcitrant potato. Blotting his lips in what he thought might well be the manner of a nineteenth-century dandy on the serviette the snack had come with, Benedict screwed up the tissue with its gravy kiss-print, dropping it into one of the litter bins in Abington Street, which he’d by now reached and was ascending. He was roughly level with the photographic shop close to the mouth of the most recent shopping arcade, Peacock Place. This crystal palace had taken the place of Peacock Way, an open precinct leading to the Market that had cake-shops and cafés where he’d munch gloomily through teenage comfort teacakes, mooning over whichever heart-stopping Notre Dame or Derngate schoolgirl had just told Ben that she liked him as a friend. Originally, this had been the Peacock Hotel, inn or coach-house for five hundred years. People still talked about the lovely stained-glass peacock, one of the establishment’s interior decorations, which had more than likely fallen prey to salvage men during the hotel’s senseless demolition in November 1959. Up on the glasswork of the arcade’s entrance these days was a pallid stick-on imitation, stylised craft-kit product from an overpaid design team.

Passing Jessop’s, the photography equipment shop, he wondered if they still had Pete Corr’s photograph of Benedict, framed and for sale up on their wall. Corr was a local shutterbug now married, living somewhere out in Canada by all accounts, under the mock-Dutch moniker of Piet de Snapp. Formerly just plain Pete the Snap, he’d specialised in portraits of the town’s outlandish fauna: Ben’s old Spring Lane schoolmate Alma Warren, posing moodily in sunglasses and leather jacket, mutton dressed up as Olivia Newton-John; the Jovian mass and gravity of much-missed local minstrel-god Tom Hall in customary daywear, individually-engineered playschool pyjamas and a tasselled hat swiped from the Ottomans; Benedict Perrit sat in state amongst the snaking roots of the eight-hundred-year-old beech in Sheep Street, smiling ruefully. As if there were another way to smile. Ah ha ha ha.

He carried on through Abington Street’s pink, pedestrianised meander. Without curbs to bound and shape all the frenetic motion that had poured along this main drag for at least five hundred years, it seemed as if these days the street mainly attracted those who were themselves similarly unfocussed and directionless. As Benedict himself was, come to think of it. He’d no idea where he thought he was going, not with only twenty-seven pence remaining in the wake of his impulsive pasty, gone now save for the occasional flavour-haunted burp. Perhaps a long walk up the Wellingborough Road to Abington would do him good, or would at any rate not cost him anything.

Continuing uphill, pleasantly numbed against existence in a warm cocooning fog, the entrance to the Grosvenor Centre crawled past on his left. He tried to conjure the thin mouth of Wood Street, which had occupied the spot some thirty years before, but found his powers of evocation blunted by the beer. The half-forgotten terraced aperture was too feeble a spectre to prevail against the glass wall of swing doors, the sparkling covered boulevard beyond where the somnambulists somnambled, lit like ornamental crystal animals by the commercial aura-fields they passed through. Everyone looked decorative in the all-round illumination. Everyone looked brittle.

Twenty-seven pence. He wasn’t even sure that would still buy a Mars Bar, though he could still savour the self-pity. Benedict picked up his pace a little passing by top Woolworth’s, these days more precisely only Woolworth’s, hoping the increased velocity would straighten out his veer. He gave this up for lack of a result after approximately thirty seconds, lapsing to a melancholy trudge. What was the point in walking faster when he wasn’t going anywhere? More speed would only bring him to his problems quicker, and in his state might lead inadvertently to crossing the blurred line between a drunken stumble and a drunken rampage. The unbidden vision of Ben gone berserk in Marks & Spencer’s, running nude and screaming through a hail of melting-middle chocolate puddings, should have been a sobering one but only made him giggle to himself. The giggling didn’t help, he realised, with his tactic of not looking pissed. This still made only four things he was useless at, namely escape, finding a job, explaining himself adequately and not looking pissed. Four trivial deficiencies, Ben reassured himself, and as naught in the sweep of a man’s life.

He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy. The retail parks outside the town had drained the commerce from Northampton’s centre, which had been an increasingly ugly proposition for some years now, anyway. Rather than try to stop the rot, the council had allowed the town’s main veins to atrophy and wither. Spinadisc, the long-established independent record shop that Benedict was now approaching on the street’s far side, had been closed down to make way for a rehab centre, something of that kind. Predictably, there were considerably less substance-users on the premises now that the music and ephemera were gone.