Alan Moore - Jerusalem

John Vernall, mad John Vernall was a faceless silhouette stood on the roof-ridge with the sun behind his head and white hair like St. Elmo’s Fire or phosphorus, his arms flung up to heaven, a gaunt storm-bird come after the flood with rainbows shredded in its lifted claws, radiant streamers leaking from the cracks between clenched fireball talons. Spectra splashed over the silenced throng in luminous and vivid moth-wings, shed and yet still fluttering on drainpipes, doorsteps, people’s cheeks and drooping chins. The fresh-delivered child stopped crying, squinting mystified up into her first glimpse of being, and his wife, released from her ordeal and giddy with reprieve, began to laugh. Others amongst the gathered crowd joined in, one man even beginning to applaud but trailing off embarrassed and alone into the general hilarity.

At length he let his arms sink to his sides, returning the glass doorknobs to his jacket pockets. From the street below he heard Louisa tell him to stop buggering about, to come and see their daughter. Fishing from behind one jutting ear a stub of yellowed chalk secreted there, he turned his back upon the rooftop’s edge and took three careful steps along its ridge towards the tall brick chimney breast that now loomed up before him. In a generous and looping hand he scribbled “Snowy Vernall springs eternal” on the brickwork, standing back a moment to admire his work. It would not be washed off by the next rain, which would come from the east, but by the shower immediately thereafter.

Snowy sighed, and smiled, and shook his head, and then went down to face the endless music.

The Fort Street deathmonger was Mrs. Gibbs, and on that first occasion when she called her pinafore was starched and spotless white with butterflies embroidered on its hem. May Warren was then just nineteen years old, scared stiff in her confinement’s final stage, but even through the unexpected pain and scalding tears she was aware that she had never known this woman’s like before.

It was still freezing and the outside lav was blocked with ice, which meant these last two days they’d had to burn their business on the fire. The living room still stank but Mrs. Gibbs made nothing of it, taking off her coat to show the splendid apron underneath, white as a lantern in the downstairs gloom, with summer moths in pink and orange thread ascending her stout thighs and winter paunch.

“Now then, my dear, let’s see what we’re about.” Her voice was like bake pudden, thick and warm, and while May’s mam Louisa made fresh tea the deathmonger produced a tin of snuff, small as a matchbox, with upon its lid the late Queen in enamel miniature. Thumb curled back so a hollow was produced between the bones where they met with her wrist, next Mrs. Gibbs, with great precision, tipped a measure of the pungent russet dust into the shallow cavity thus formed. Hand lifted and head lowered she swept up the heaped gunpowder in two fruity snorts, half in each barrel, which she then discharged explosively into a handkerchief, something of a brown study in itself. Beaming at May she put the tin away and got down to her work between May’s knees.

The young mother-to-be had never seen a woman taking snuff before and was just going to ask about the habit when contractions drove the question from her mind. May growled and moaned and at the kitchen door her mam appeared with tea for Mrs. Gibbs. She eyed her daughter sympathetically yet could not keep herself from pointing out that May’s own birth had been a worse ordeal.

“You think that’s bad, gal, you’ve got no idea, all of the trouble that I had with you. You’re not abed because we’ve got no fire upstairs, so you’re down here on the settee, but you be glad you’re not on Lambeth Walk, like I was, with your dad up on that roof.”

May huffed and glared and turned her face away towards the wallpaper behind the couch, smoke cured so that its pimply rose designs had each turned with the faltering indoor light into a sad-faced tawny lioness. She’d heard it told that many times before — the tale of how she’d come into the world on cobbles flecked with phlegm and orange peel, her dad perched like a gargoyle up above — as if it somehow made her mother proud to start a family tree that had its roots sunk in the poorhouse and the madhouse both.

She heard a muffled bump from the front room: her brothers or her sister playing up, most probably because they were all vexed to be shut in the parlour out the way. May’s sister Cora, lately turned sixteen, was keen to know what pregnancy entailed, while their Jim was as keen that he should not. Young Johnny, having reached the dirty age, just wanted to look up a woman’s frock.

Her mother, who had heard the noise as well, went tutting from the room to find its source, which left May on her own with Mrs. Gibbs. The deathmonger explored May’s private parts as though a fragile ledger of accounts, careful as a solicitor or judge. She seemed to be above the meat and mess the way May thought a druid might have been, unmoved while cutting a lamb’s throat at dawn. The hearth flames, greenish when they’d burned the shit, did not so much illuminate the scene as lend it a dull torture-chamber scowl and startle shadows from beneath its chairs. Fire-lit down one already florid cheek the older woman glanced up now at May. Ceasing her intimate inspection she next rinsed her hands and dried them on a rag, a tight smile signifying all was well.

“Let’s have some light in here, shall we, my dear? It wouldn’t do to have a baby born into a world without a bit of cheer.”

Taking an oil lamp from the mantelpiece and lifting off its milky covering, the deathmonger produced and struck a match. Touched to the limp black caterpillar wick it yielded a small flame of mystic blue, an engineer smell, safe and workmanlike. The lamp’s tall chimney, tiger-striped with soot around its base, flawed by a ghostly crack, was set back into place so that the room was steeped now in a pale, warm yellow glow. The worn-out curtains looked like velvet wine. The room’s glass surfaces shone like doubloons, a splendid glitter everywhere upon the mirror and barometer, the face of the slow-thudding Roman-numbered clock. May’s dark red hair burned bright as gorse at dusk, even where it was plastered to her brow or slicked down on her damp and gleaming mound. The dismal birthing-pit was quite transformed into a painting done by Joseph Wright of Derby, like his air-pump or his forge. May started to make comment on the change but halfway through was interrupted by her next contraction, the most wrenching yet.

When finally her scream broke like a wave into a shingle hiss of trickling sobs the frightened girl slowly became aware of Mrs. Gibbs close by, holding her hand, hushing and humming sympathetically, as natural and comforting as bees. Her fingers had a dry and papery feel, cool at least in comparison with May’s. Her voice took May back to the nursery.

“My goodness, dear, that sounded like it hurt. You’ve not long now, though, if I’m any judge. Just try to rest while I nip out the room and have a little conference with your mam. I think it’s better if she stays through there and keeps your sister and your brothers quiet, then we can manage things between ourselves without nobody sticking in their nose. Unless of course you’d rather she be here?”

It was like Mrs. Gibbs had read May’s mind. May loved her mam in the fierce, angry way that she loved all her family and friends, but just that minute she could do without Louisa’s tales of greater suffering, of waters broken far more copiously, as if pain and embarrassment were just a competition her and May were in. May looked up eagerly at Mrs. Gibbs.