Alan Moore - Jerusalem

He was the snow-capped pole of Lambeth and the borough whirled beneath his feet. Up to the north, beyond the chimneypots, was sooty Waterloo. Down on his left and to the south, he thought, was Mary’s Church, or St. Mary’s-in-Lambeth as it was more properly called, where Captain William Bligh and both the flora-cataloguing Tradescants were buried, while due west in front of him stood Lambeth Palace. Not far to the east, of course, not far enough for him at any rate, was Bedlam.

He’d not seen the place in seven years, not since he was a lad of nineteen with their Thursa two years younger, which was when his father Ern had finally passed away. There’d been a notifying letter come from the asylum, at which he and Thursa had made the short journey up the road to see their parent prior to burial. A trip of at the most ten minutes’ walk, it had become apparently more lengthy and more difficult to make with every passing year, dwindling from a monthly to an annual occurrence, usually at Christmas, which for Snowy ever since had seemed a dreadful season.

That wet afternoon in the July of 1882 had been the first time Snowy or his sister had seen someone dead, this being some few years before their father’s mum, their grandmother, had gone as well. The two unusually quiet and dry-eyed youngsters had been shown through to a rear shed where the corpses were laid out, a cold and overcast place in which Ernie Vernall’s alabaster body seemed almost the only source of light. Face upward on a slab of pale fishmonger’s marble with his eyes still open, John and Thursa’s dad had the expression of a military recruit stood to attention on some ultimate parade ground: carefully neutral, focussed resolutely on the distance, trying hard not to attract the scrutiny of an inspecting officer. His blanched skin, now a hard and chill veneer beneath John’s cautiously exploring fingertips, had turned the colour of his hair, had turned the colour of the sheet with sculpted, dropping folds that covered the nude form to just above its navel. They could no longer determine, quite, the point at which their father’s whiteness finished and that of the mortuary plinth supporting him began. His death had chiselled, sanded down and polished him, transformed him to a stark and beautiful relief.

This was their father’s end. Both of them understood that, though not in the same sense that most other people would have done, with ‘end’ as a mere synonym for death. To John and Thursa, tutored by the late Ern Vernall, it was no more than a geometric term, as when one talked about the ends of lines or streets or tables. Side by side they’d looked in awe on his arresting stillness, knowing that, for the first time, they saw the structure of a human life end-on. It had been wholly different from the side-on view one usually had of people while they were alive, while they were still caught up in the extension and apparent movement of their selves through time, along Creation’s hidden axis. Snowy and his sister stood regarding their dead father, both aware that they were gazing down the marvellous and fearful bore of the eternal. Thursa had begun to hum, a fragile little air of her own slapdash and impromptu composition, rising strings of notes left hanging with unnaturally long intervals, during which Snowy knew his sister heard an intricate cascade of subdivided echo filling in the gaps. He’d cocked his head and concentrated until he could hear the same thing she did and then taken Thursa’s warm, damp hand, the two of them together in the morgue-hut’s whispery pall and thrilling to an implied music that was both magnificent and bottomless.

As Snowy thought about it now, high in the eaves of Lambeth, he and Thursa always had been differently disposed towards the worldview that their father had impressed upon them. For his own part, Snowy had elected to immerse himself entirely in the storm of the experience, to plunge into this new exploded life the way that, as a child, he’d plunged unhesitatingly into the iron-green wall of each oncoming wave upon the yellow shore at Margate. Every moment of him was a roaring gold infinity with Snowy spinning giddy and resplendent at its whirlpool heart, beyond death and past reason.

Thursa on the other hand, as she’d confessed to him not long after their dad’s demise, saw in her brother’s glorious tempest a devouring force that could mean only the disintegration of her more frail personality. Instead she’d chosen to block out the broader implications of Ern Vernall’s madhouse lessons and to fix all her attention on one narrow strand, this being how her father’s new conception of geometry applied to sound and its transmission. She had trained herself to hear a single voice in the arrangement rather than risk being swallowed by the fugue of being in which Snowy was consumed. She hung on to herself for dear life, clinging tightly to the mooring of her piano accordion, a scuff-marked veteran beast of fawn and tan which Thursa carried with her everywhere. At present both she and her skirling instrument were lodged with relatives at Fort Street in Northampton, while her eldest brother wore a pendulum track between there and Lambeth, hiking three score miles and back from one location to the other.

Down below the woman with the stagy accent urged Louisa to push harder. Snowy’s wife, her thick limbs and broad features glistening with perspiration, only bellowed.

“I am fucking pushing, don’t tell me to fucking push! Oh no, I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it.”

He adored Louisa, loved her with his every fibre, with each strange and convoluted thought that passed, like party streamers in a gale, through Snowy’s frost-crowned head. He loved her kindness, loved the thick-set look of her, at once as plain and pleasing to the eye as fresh-baked bread. Her mass of personality ensured that his wife was a creature of the earth, one grounded in the solid world of streets and bills and childbirth, of her body and biology. She did not care at all for spires or sky or the precarious, preferring hearth and walls and ceiling to her husband’s altitudes, the steeplejack obsessions he’d inherited from his late father. She cleaved to the gravity that Snowy knew he’d spend the whole of his unusual existence trying to overcome, and doing so became his counterweight, a vital anchor that prevented him from bowling off into the heavens like a lost kite.

In return, Louisa could enjoy the more remote and somewhat safer thrills of the kite-handler, watching heart in mouth or cheering with delight as he negotiated each fresh updraft, shivering and squinting sympathetically in the imagined gust and glare. He knew that fifty years from now, after his death, she’d hardly venture out of doors again, shunning a firmament into which, by that time, her painted paper dragon would have long since blown away and left her only with a memory of the wind that tugged with such insistence on his string, an elemental force that would at last have won its battle and pulled Snowy Vernall from her empty, reaching fingers.

That, of course, was all in the now-then, while down beneath him in the now-now he could hear, behind Louisa’s screams and the bystanders’ muffled mutter, the low storm-front rumble of his daughter’s coming life as it approached this worldly station. Snowy thought about the cross of whispered rumours that his child would always carry with her, all the talk of madness in the family like something from a gothic novel. First her great-grandfather John, who Snowy had been named for, then poor Ern, the grandfather that she would never know, both locked away in Bedlam. Snowy knew that such was not to be his fate, but that his reputation as a madman would be none the less for this, and neither would the heavy legacy his soon-born daughter should be made to carry. Looking down towards the square of paving where his and Louisa’s baby would be shortly making her appearance, he recalled the eerie splendour that had spoken to his father in St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago; the words with which, according to Ern Vernall, that extraordinary conversation had commenced. Snowy was smiling with amusement and yet felt the hot tears pricking in his eyes as he repeated the phrase softly to himself, while overlooking all the furious activity in Lambeth Walk below.