Alan Moore - Jerusalem

There on the other side, across the wall he was now walking past, was the palpable absence of St. Edmund’s Church, an empty yawn of green with intermittent tombstones jutting, carious, discoloured, suffering from built-up birdshit plaque, the green and grassy gums beginning to recede. Upon the plus side, Benedict could make out lark song underneath the grumble of the main road’s traffic, bubbling notes erupting in a brilliant effervescence to distract cats from the fledglings hidden low down in the graveyard grass. It was a nice day. The eternal was still there, a promising suggestive bulge concealed behind the present’s threadbare drapes.

Heading on eastwards out of town along the strip of pubs and shops, he thought of Alma. At the age of seventeen she’d been a glaring giant schoolgirl up at the Girl’s Grammar, giving the impression her resentment was occasioned by the fact that she was really twenty-nine and couldn’t find a uniform that fit her. She’d been involved in an arty student magazine called Androgyne , providing wonky stencil illustrations for a curate’s egg of fifth-form verses. Benedict had been at the Boy’s Grammar School by that time, and despite the distance that there was between the two establishments, fraternization did occur. The two had seen each other now and then, and Alma, who’d been going through a period of lofty futurist disdain for Ben’s romanticism, had asked grudgingly if he might submit something to their alternately simpering and foul-mouthed rag.

Encouraged by this half-hearted solicitation, Benedict had written several movements of what had turned out to be an epic piece of juvenilia, only the shortest parts accepted by a clearly disappointed Alma, who dismissed the rest as being, in her critically mature opinion “fucking sentimental girly rubbish”. He was mortified to think that he could still remember the rejection, word for word, some thirty-five years later. At the time, with even less sense of proportion than he currently possessed, he’d been incensed and had resolved to patiently exact a terrible revenge. He’d take the off-cuts Alma had discarded from his poem cycle and he’d build them into a new edifice, a work to shudder the foundations of the ages. Then, when he was welcomed up to literary Olympus, he’d reveal that she had lacked the insight to appreciate his magnum opus and her reputation would be shot. She’d be a laughingstock and a pariah. That would learn her, her and all her Andy Warhol Bridget Riley migraine art. This grand endeavour would be a heartbroken hymn to conjure the departed world, the rustic landscape of John Clare, the golden-lighted lanes that Benedict was born too late to walk outside of reverie. He’d strung it out almost two years before he’d realised it was going nowhere and abandoned it. It had been called “Atlantis”.

Benedict glanced up to find that he was some way out along the Wellingborough Road from the last place he’d noticed, which had been the peeling shell of the Spread Eagle, on the corner past St. Edmund’s Hospital. Now he was getting on for Stimpson Avenue and that end, starting to think twice about his planned walk in the park, already feeling footsore. Clare, who’d hobbled eighty miles from Essex back home to Northamptonshire, would probably have laughed at him. They’d built their lyric nutters sturdier in his day. Ben thought he might wander round Abington Park some other time, contenting himself for the moment with a visit to the Crown & Cushion, a short distance further up the busy street. He’d only taken to the notion of a leafy stroll when there was nothing else to do, before he’d met with Alma, but now things were different. Now he had a business plan.

He’d not been in the Crown & Cushion for a while, although at one time, just after he’d broken up with Lily, it had been his regular dive. He supposed that his relationship with the pub’s clientele was at its best ambivalent, but then the place itself was somewhere he felt comfortable. Largely unchanged, the hostelry at least still traded under its historically appointed name, hadn’t become the Jolly Wanker or the Workhouse or the Vole & Astrolabe. Benedict could remember, with a twinge of mixed embarrassment and pride, how he’d once stormed into the bar demanding satisfaction when he’d felt his fellow drinkers weren’t taking his claim to be a published poet seriously. A poem of Ben’s had just been printed in the local Chronicle & Echo , and when he’d burst through the Crown & Cushion’s swing door like a piano-stopping gunfighter he’d thrown the thirty copies of the paper that he happened to be carrying into the air with a victorious cry of “There! Ah ha ha ha!” They’d naturally barred him on the spot, but that was years ago, and with a bit of luck that era’s staff and customers would all be dead or memory-impaired by now.

Even if not, traditionally the pub had always shown tremendous tolerance and even fondness for the various eccentrics passing through its portals. That was another reason why Ben liked the place, he thought as he pushed open its lounge door and stepped into the welcome gloom from the bright, squinting dazzle of the day outside. They’d had far worse than him in here. There was a story from back in the very early 1980s which insisted that the great Sir Malcolm Arnold, trumpeter and orchestral arranger of such hits as “Colonel Bogey”, had been living in the room above the Crown & Cushion’s bar, mentally ill and alcoholic, guest in some accounts, virtual prisoner in others, dragged down almost nightly for the entertainment of a drunken and abusive crowd. This was the man who’d written Tam O’ Shanter , that delirious accompaniment to Burns’ inebriated night-sweat, the carousing highland hero chased by a Wild Hunt of fairies through the brass and woodwind dark. This was Sir Malcolm Arnold, who Ben thought had once been the Director of the Queen’s Music, a musical equivalent to Poet Laureate, banging out tunes on the joanna for a herd of braying and pugnacious goons. Old and tormented, ambisextrous, in his early sixties then, who knew what imps and demons, djinns and tonics, might have been stampeding through his fevered skull, glistening with perspiration and tipped forward over pounding yellow ivories?

Benedict stood there just inside the door until his pupils had sufficiently dilated to locate the bar. The staff and decor, he observed, were new since his last visit. This was just as well, especially about the bar staff, since as far as Ben knew he’d done nothing to offend the decor. Some, of course, might not agree. Ah ha ha ha. Benedict stepped up to the rail and bought a pint of bitter, slapping down his twenty on the freshly wiped and moisture-beaded bar-top with a certain swagger. This was undercut, though, by his deep regret at having said goodbye to Elgar. Some of this regret was purely on Ben’s own account, but mixed with this there was a genuine concern about Sir Edward, an uneasiness at leaving the composer in the Crown & Cushion. Look at what they’d done to Malcolm Arnold.

Taking his glass to an empty table, of which there were an unseasonable number, Ben fleetingly entertained a morbid fantasy in which, as punishment for the newspaper incident, he was incarcerated here in the same way that Arnold had reputedly been held. Each night intoxicated thugs would burst into his room and herd him down to the saloon, where he’d be plied with spirits and made to recite his earnest and wept-over sonnets to a room of jeering philistines. It didn’t sound that bad, if he was honest. He’d had Friday nights like that, without even the benefit of being plied with drink. Now that he came to think about it, he’d had entire years like that. The stretch just after Lily told him he should find another billet, when he’d lived in a house broken into flats along Victoria Road, had been like Tam O’ Shanter playing on a loop for months. Arriving home at 3.00am without a key, demanding as a published poet that he be let in, then playing Dylan Thomas reading Under Milkwood at top volume on his Dansette until all the other residents were threatening to kill him. What had that been all about? Creeping downstairs to the communal kitchen one night and devouring four whole chicken dinners that the surly and abusive tattooed couple in the flat above had made for the next day, then waking up another of the building’s tenants so that he could tell them. “Ah ha ha! I’ve ate the bastards’ dinner!” Looking back, Ben realised he was lucky to have come through those dire days unlynched, and never mind unscathed.