Alan Moore - Jerusalem

If Mr. Darwin were to be believed, then it was from the timeless dapple of the forest’s canopy that men had first descended, and it was the forest’s roots that drank men’s bodies when they died, returned their vital salts back to the prehistoric treetops in gold elevator cages made of sap. The parks, their Eden swathes of olive drab amongst the tweedy tooth of residential rows, were outposts of an emerald aeon, pools of wilderness left stranded by a swaying ocean now receded that would one day foam again across the urban beachhead, silencing its trams and barrel-organs under rustling hush. He flared his nostrils, trying to catch the scent of half a million years from now above the present’s foundry reek. With all of London’s people gone, erased by some as-yet-unborn Napoleon, Snowy imagined that the buddleia would swiftly prove itself to be the city’s most enduring conqueror. From whispering marble banks and ruptured middens perfumed bushes would burst forth with friable white tongues of flower, where Julius Agricola had raised but a few fluttering standards, and Queen Boadicea naught but flames.

The heavy brothel sweetness would lure butterflies in watercolour blizzards, parakeets escaped from zoos to eat the butterflies and jaguars to eat the parakeets. The rarities and gorgeous monsters of Kew Gardens would break loose and overrun the abdicated town to its horizons, eucalyptus pillars railing off the shattered boulevards and palaces surrendered to colossal ferns. The world would end as it began, as beatific arbour, and if any family crests or luminary busts or graven names of institutions were yet visible between the droning hives and honeysuckle, they would be by then wiped clean of any meaning. Meaning was a candlelight in everything that lurched and shifted in the circumstantial breezes of each instant, never twice the same. Significance was a phenomenon of Now that could not be contained inside an urn or monolith. It was a hurricane entirely of the present, an unending swirl of boiling change, and as he stood there gazing out towards the city’s rim, across the granite fields of time towards the calendar’s far tattered edges, Snowy Vernall was a storm-rod, crackling and exultant, at the cyclone’s dangerous and brilliant eye.

From fifty feet beneath, Louisa’s gush of alternating anguished bellows and incensed tirade came floating up to him, a commonplace but awesome human music, where the full brass notes of torment seemed now more insistent and more frequent, dominating the arrangement, drowning out the piccolo abuse, the effing and the blinding. Looking down he noticed an impromptu band convened about his wife, providing an accompaniment of soft and sympathetic strings for her, a rumbling kettle drum of disapproval for her husband straddling the roof above them as they cooed and booed the pair in strict rotation. None of them appeared to be of any more practical use to the distressed and labouring woman than Snowy himself would be, even if he were still down there on the pavement at her side. The milling bystanders were an unpractised orchestra in a continual state of tuning up, their muttered scorn and soothing ululations striving painfully to reach some sort of harmony, their wheezing discords drifting off down Paradise Street, off down Union Street to join the background cymbal-roll of Lambeth, building gradually across the ages as if to some clarion announcement, rattling hooves and drunkards’ songs and rag-and-bone men’s lilting calls combined into a swell of everlasting prelude.

Like a hurried stage-assistant, the brisk wind wound on the painted cumulus above, and from the angle of the daylight’s sudden downpour Snowy judged it to be not far off midday, the sun high overhead and climbing with increasing confidence up the last few blue steps to noon. He let his leisurely crow’s-nest attentions wander from the well-attended birth throes of his child below and out into the intestinal tangle of surrounding alleyways, where dogs and people wrapped up in their own experience went back and forth, threads of event that shuttled on the district’s loom, either unravelling from one knot of potential circumstance or else unwittingly converging on the next. Across the Lambeth Road, just visible above some low-roofed buildings to his right, a pretty, well-dressed pregnant woman was emerging from Hercules Road to cross the street between the plodding drays and weaving bicycles. A little nearer to him several boys of twelve or so were batting at each other with their caps, play-fighting as they made their way unhurriedly along the grimy seam of a rear-entry passage, cutting through between the smoking housetops and the nappy-flagged back yards from Newport Street. Snowy’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded. All the clockwork of the minute was in order.

Judging from the light and from Louisa’s escalating uproar he appeared to have another thirty minutes of just standing here, and so allowed his senses to resume once more their phosphorous evaluation of the city. London spun about him like a fairground novelty with Snowy as the ride’s attendant, standing balanced there amongst the painted thunderbolts and comets of its central pivot. Turning his head to the northeast, Snowy looked out over Lambeth, Southwark and the river to St. Paul’s, its bald white dome that of a slumbering divinity professor, all unmindful of its misbehaving charges, sinning everywhere about it as it drowsed and nodded. It was while employed restoring frescoes on the dome’s interior that Snowy’s father Ernest Vernall had been bleached by madness, near two dozen years before.

Snowy and sister Thursa went to Bethlehem Asylum when they visited their dad, which wasn’t often. Snowy didn’t like to think of it as Bedlam. Sometimes they’d take Ernest’s other children with them, Appelina and young Mess, but with their father being put away when those two were still small, they’d never really got to know him. Not that anyone, even their mother Anne, had ever known Ern Vernall through and through, but John and Thursa were still somehow close to him, particularly after he’d become insane. With little Messenger and Appelina there was never that communication, and their visits to the stranger in the madhouse only frightened them. When they’d grown older and were more robust sometimes they would accompany Snowy and Thursa, although only from a sense of duty. Snowy didn’t blame his brother or his youngest sister. The asylum was a horror, full of piss and shit and screams and laughter; men who’d been disfigured with a spoon during their dinners by the person sitting next to them. If he and Thursa hadn’t been so caught up in the rambling lectures that their father saved exclusively for them, they’d never have gone near the place themselves.

Their dad had talked to them about religion and geometry, acoustics and the true shape of the universe, about the multitude of things that he had learned while touching up the frescoes of St. Paul’s during a thunderstorm, one morning long ago in 1865. He told them what had happened to him on that day, as well as he was able, with admonishments that they should never tell their mother or another living soul about Ern Vernall’s holy vision, that had cost his mind and all the hot bronze colour in his hair. He told them he’d been by himself up on his platform a great distance over the cathedral floor, mixing his tempera and getting ready to begin his work when he’d become aware that there was now an angle in the wall. That was the way he’d said it, and his children had eventually come to understand that the expression had at least two meanings, an example of the word games and invented terms that peppered Ernest’s conversation since his mental breakdown. Firstly it meant just what it appeared to mean, that Ernest had discovered a new angle that was somehow in the wall and not in the relationship between its surfaces. A second, more obscure interpretation of the term related it specifically to England and its ancient past, when “Angles” were the people of a tribe that had invaded England, giving it its name, after the Romans left. This second meaning had connected to it by association a quote from Pope Gregory … “Non Angli, sed Angeli” … uttered while inspecting English prisoners in Rome, a punning play on words that led Ern’s eldest children to a gradual realisation of just what their father had encountered in the upper reaches of St. Paul’s on that eventful day.