Alan Moore - Jerusalem

Around the public seating outside the dead jukebox of the former pop emporium, small crowds of black-clad teenagers still congregated in school holidays and at weekends. Ben thought they might be skate-goths or gangsta-romantics. Happy-stabbers or whatever. He had difficulty keeping up. Shifting his doleful gaze from the murder of hoodies flocked on Abington Street’s further edge, he looked back to the side along which he was walking. A vague drift of people flowed towards him past the still-magnificent façade of the town library, and there came a synaptic jolt, a minor judder and resettling of reality as Benedict realised that one of them was Alma Warren. Ah ha ha.

Alma. She always took him back, a walking memory-prompt of all the years they’d known each other, since they’d been together in Miss Corrier’s class at Spring Lane School when they were four. Even back then, you’d never have confused her with a girl. Or with a boy, for that matter. She was too big, too single minded, too alarming to be anything but Alma, in a gender of her own. Both of them sideshow novelties in their own ways, they’d been inseparable throughout long stretches of childhood and adolescence. Winter evenings shivering in the attic up above the barn in his dad’s wood-yard down in Freeschool Street, Ben’s telescope poking into the starlight through an absent windowpane when they were both on flying saucer watch. The tricky post-pubertal stretch when he began his poetry and she her painting, and when Alma would get furiously angry and stop speaking to him every other fortnight, over their artistic differences as she insisted, but most probably when she’d just fallen to the communists. They’d both made idiots of themselves in the same pubs, in the same stencil-duplicated arts-group magazines, but then she’d somehow managed to talk up her monomania into a prosperous career and reputation, while Ben hadn’t. Now he didn’t run into her much, nobody did, except upon occasions such as this when she came flouncing into town dressed like a biker or, if she were wearing her pretentious cloak, a fifteenth-century nun who’d been defrocked for masturbation, more rings underneath her eyes than on her ostentatiously embellished fingers.

These were currently raised up in an arterial spatter of nail gloss and gemstones, pulling the distressed fire-curtain of her hair back from the pantomime that was her face. Her kohl-ringed and apparently disdainful gaze described a measured arc across the precinct as if Alma were pretending to be a surveillance camera, dredging Abington Street’s fast-deteriorating stock of imagery in search of inspiration for some future monsterpiece. When the slow swivel of her so-unblinking-they-seemed-lidless fog lamps got to Benedict, there was an anthracite glint suddenly alight deep in the makeup-crusted sockets. Carmine lips drew taut into a smile most probably intended to look fond rather than predatory. Ah ha ha ha. Good old Alma.

Benedict went into a routine the moment that their eyes met, first adopting an expression of appalled dismay then turning sharply in his tracks to walk away down Abington Street, as if frantically pretending that he hadn’t seen her. He turned this into a circular trajectory that took him back towards her, this time doubling up with silent laughter so she’d know his terrified attempt at flight had been a gag. He wouldn’t want her thinking he was really trying to run away, not least in case she went for him and brought him down before he’d got five paces.

Their paths met outside the library portico. He stuck his hand out, but Alma surprised him with a sudden lunge, planting a bloody pucker on his cheek, spraining his neck with her brief one-armed hug. This was some affectation, he concluded, that she’d picked up from Americans with galleries who put on exhibitions. Exhibitionists. She hadn’t learned it in the Boroughs, of that Benedict was certain. In the district where they’d both grown up, affectionate displays were never physical. Or verbal, or in any way apparent to the five traditional senses. Love and friendship in the Boroughs were subliminal. He flinched back from her, wiping at his stained cheek with the back of one long-fingered hand like an embarrassed cat.

“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”

Alma grinned, apparently pleased at just how easily she had unsettled him. She ducked her head and leaned a little forward when she spoke, as if to best facilitate their conversation, although really she was just reminding him how tall she was, the way she did with everyone. It was one of what only Alma thought of as her range of subtly intimidating mannerisms.

“Benedict, you suave Lothario. This is an unexpected treat. How’s things? Are you still writing?”

Alma’s voice wasn’t just deep brown, it was infra-brown. Ben laughed at her query on his output, at the sheer preposterousness of her even asking.

“Always, Alma. You know me. Ah ha ha. Always scribbling away.”

He’d not written a line in years. He was a published poet in the transitive and not the current sense. He wasn’t sure that he was any sort of poet in the current sense, that was his secret dread. Alma was nodding amiably now, pleased with his answer.

“Good. That’s good to hear. I was just reading ‘Clearance Area’ the other day and thinking what a smashing poem it was.”

Hum. “Clearance Area”. He’d been quite pleased with that himself. “Who can say now/ That anything was here/ Other than open land/ Used only by stray dogs/ And children breaking bottles on stones?” With a start he realised that had been almost two decades back, those writings. “Weeds, stray dogs and children/ Waited patiently/ For them to leave./ The weed beneath;/ The dog and child/ Unborn inside.” He tipped his head back, unsure how he should receive the compliment except with an uncertain smile, as if expecting her at any moment to retract her praise, expose it for the cruel post-modern joke it doubtless was. Eventually, he risked a tentative response.

“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”

He’d meant to say It weren’t bad, as a reference to the poem, but it had come out wrong. Now it sounded as though Benedict thought of himself in the past tense, which wasn’t what he’d meant at all. At least, he didn’t think that it was what he’d meant. Alma was frowning now, it seemed reproachfully.

“Ben, you were always a considerable way beyond ‘not bad’. You know you were. You’re a good writer, mate. I’m serious.”

This last was offered in reply to Benedict’s plainly embarrassed giggling. He really didn’t know what he should say. Alma was at least Z-list famous and successful, and Ben couldn’t help but feel as though in some way he were being patronised. It was as if she thought that a kind word from her could mend him, could inspire him, raise him from the dead and make him whole with just the least brush of her hem. She acted as though all his problems could be solved if he were just to write, which only showed, in Benedict’s opinion, just how shallow Alma’s understanding of his problems really was. Did she have any idea, standing there with all her money and her write-ups in The Independent , what it was like having only twenty-seven pence? Well, actually, of course she did. She’d come from the same background he had, so that wasn’t fair, but even so. The troubling notion of his present finances, or at least relative to Alma’s, had bobbed up from the beer sediments currently settled at the bottom of Ben’s mind, and wouldn’t bob back down again. Before he even knew that he was going to do it, he’d broken the habit of a lifetime and tapped Alma up for cash.

“ ’Ere, you ain’t got a couple o’ quid spare, ’ave yer?”

It felt wrong as soon as the words left his mouth, a terrible transgression. He immediately wished that he could take it back, but it was too late. Now it was in Alma’s hands, and she would almost certainly find some way she could make it worse. Surprised, her flue-brush lashes widened almost imperceptibly, but she recovered with a deadpan look of generalised concern.