Alan Moore - Jerusalem

“Nomen est omen”, that was how their dad had put it, an illiterate somehow quoting Latin proverbs. This had been the stated rationale, if such it might be called, behind the naming of his youngest children Messenger and Appelina, with one moniker suggestive of a herald angel and the other of our fallen mother Eve. Nomen est omen. The name is a sign. Ern had explained to John and Thursa that there was a place “upstairs” where what we thought of down here as our names turned out in many instances to be our job descriptions. Vernalls, as their father had defined the term, were those responsible for tending to the boundaries and corners, to the edges and the gutters. Though a lowly post in the ethereal hierarchies it was a necessary one that carried its own numinous authority. In Snowy’s understanding, by the odd linguistic laws of the superior plane that Ernest had referred to, Vernall was a word with connotations similar to “verger”, both in the old sense of one who tended verges and of one who bore the verge, or rod of office, as in the ecclesiastical tradition. But the language of “upstairs”, according to Ern Vernall, was a form of speech that were as though exploded, every phrase uncrumpling itself into a beautiful and complicated lacework of associations. Rods were wands of government and yet were also rulers made for measurement, which was presumably how rods of land beside a property were first called verges: grassy strips erupting into life with Spring, the vernal equinox, which also led back to the family name. This aspect of fertility was echoed in Old English, wherein the expression “verge” or “rod” was slang for what men kept inside their trousers, or at least thus was the etymology as passed on by their father, who could neither read nor write. In sum, a Vernall ministered to borderlines and limits, to the margins of the world and the unmowed peripheries of worldly reason. This, Ern had insisted, was why Vernalls tended to be raving mad and penniless.

As he looked down on the arrival of the latest baby to be thus afflicted, he allowed his consciousness of time to crystallise around the quarter-inch of the duration axis that the moment represented so that things slowed to a crawl, the progress of events barely perceptible. It was another talent or disease that he and Thursa had inherited, the means to charm the universe unto a standstill. “Pigeon eyes”, their dad had called this gift, without explaining why. The clouds were stopped and curdled in the sky’s blue juice, masking a sun that had moved on a little past its peak and was just fractionally behind him, its scant warmth upon his shoulders and the rear top of his head.

Below his parapet in Lambeth Walk the thoroughfare was now become a sculpture garden, all its mid-day rush and bustle rendered motionless. Litter and dust snatched up by the March breeze was frozen in its blustering ascent, suspended in the air at distinct intervals, so that the unseen currents of the wind were speckled with debris and thus made visible, a grand glass staircase sweeping up above the street. A pissing horse produced a necklace-string of weightless topaz, tiny golden crowns formed where the droplets were caught in the process of disintegrating on the slimy cobbles. The pedestrians who had been captured halfway through an action were now posed like dancers in outlandish ballets, balancing impossibly on one foot with their weight thrown forward in an uncompleted stride. Impatient children floated inches over hopscotch squares and waited for their interrupted jumps to finish. Young men’s neckerchiefs and women’s unpinned hair flew sideways in a sudden gust and stayed there, sticking out as stiff as wooden flags from railway signal-boxes.

Noise was also slowed, the chorus-voice of Lambeth Walk now born by sluggish waves as though through a more viscous medium, become a dark bass slur, an aural bog. The seamless clattering of hooves was turned to endlessly reverberating single anvil beats sounded at lengthy intervals by a fatigued and unenthusiastic blacksmith, while the rapid trills of indecipherable birdsong had a cadence reminiscent now of trivial and pleasant conversation between old boys playing dominoes. Street vendors’ cries from down on Prince’s Road creaked like ghost story doors that opened with excruciating languor on some fettered horror. Two dogs fighting down in Union Street mimicked a background rumble of industrial machinery, their barks extended to the snarl of buried engines, to a humming undertone of violence, a continuous vibration in the pavements that was seldom noticed, always there. Amidst it all there swelled the wavering soprano counterpoint of poor Louisa’s latest scream, drawn out into an aria. The pregnant midwife kneeling on the filthy street beside her had been halted halfway through a further exhortation for his wife to push, and was emitting a protracted minotaur-like bellowing that Snowy took to be a vowel inflated to the point of bursting.

Snowy’s wife seemed similarly puffed up and upon the brink of an explosion. Almost half the baby’s head was out, a bluish rupture greased with blood emerging from the stretched lips of Louisa’s privates, now impossibly distended to a painful circle, a pullover neck. A torus.

In the dreadful halls of Bedlam, Ernest Vernall had leaned in towards his children, his remaining clumps of hair unkempt and white as hedgerows on a drovers’ path. His voice descending into a dramatic whisper both conspiratorial and urgent, he’d impressed upon them the supreme importance of this previously unheard word, a term most usually employed in either architecture or solid geometry. A torus, as their father had explained it to them, was the rubber-tyre shape generated by the revolution of a conic disc around a circle drawn on an adjacent plane, or else the volume that would be contained by such a spatial movement. Tori, at least as their dad defined them, were the single most important forms in all the cosmos. All Earth’s living creatures that had more than one cell to their names essentially were tori, or at least they were when looked at from a topographical perspective; irregular tori with their mass arranged around the central holes provided by their alimentary canals. In its fixed orbit round the sun, if this should be considered without the illusion of progressing time, their world described a torus. So did all the other planets and their moons. The stars themselves, rotating with the swirling vortex of the galaxy, were tori of stupendous magnitude that had diameters one hundred million years across from side to side. Ernest had intimated that the glittering universe in its entirety revolved about a point in uncreated nothingness (although there were no means by which we might detect this motion, being relative to literally nothing), and that should both space and time be seen as one undifferentiated substance then the whole of God’s creation might be held to be toroidal.

This, apparently, was why the humble chimneypot was such a potent and unsettling configuration. This was at least partly why Ern Vernall’s eldest son spent so much of his time on rooftops, in amongst the reeking stacks: you had to keep your eye on them.

The chimneypot … essentially a stretched-out torus when considered topographically … was a materialisation of the form in its most dreadful and destructive aspect, was the great annihilating void that it contained made manifest, its central hole become a crematorium pipe up which things deemed no longer necessary to requirements might be easily disposed of; corpses, broken bedsteads and outdated newspapers belched as a foul miasma from these stone or terracotta death-mouths into an insulted sky. The blackened smokestacks thus served also as a social oubliette, as vents that whole swathes of the lower classes had been stuffed up, children first. They smouldered with the awful breath of nothing. The banked chimneypots that Snowy knew stood four abreast behind him on the ridge were fragile shells surrounding empty pits of that same non-existence men came out of and eventually went into, were a grim inversion of that other torus gaping currently between Louisa’s thighs that spilled out life where they spilled out its opposite.