Alan Moore - Jerusalem

May was surprised how well-behaved they were, tiptoeing in and talking in a hush. Her mam Louisa cooed and fussed about while Jim was bright red with embarrassment or joy, beaming and nodding in delight. Cora was dumbstruck by the baby’s looks, her face much like the deathmonger’s had been. Even their John was at a loss for words.

“She’s lovely, sis. She’s grand” was all he said.

Louisa made another cup of tea for everyone, and May had one as well. It was hot nectar, strong, with sugar in, and while her mam and sister carefully passed the baby round, May sipped it gratefully. The atmosphere, the low and murmuring talk with baby May’s infrequent drowsing cries, was like a church event, not even jarred when her Tom and her father came back home.

Dad smelled of beer, but Tom had nursed a half all morning long, which meant his breath was clean. May put her tea down so that they could kiss and cuddle before Tom picked up their child. He seemed amazed, kept looking back and forth between his two Mays. His expression said that he could not believe his and May’s luck at turning out this painting of a child. He gave her back, then went to buy May flowers.

Her dad, half cut, declined to hold the babe, which saved the trouble of forbidding him. He’d had six pints before noon, two for lunch, bought with caricatures and rude cartoons, the funny-looking drawings Snowy did of folk, insults for which they paid in ale. Even with a prolific morning’s work, May thought it odd her father had been sent on such a bender by his grandchild’s birth. Just as rare for her dad, the booze appeared to have brought on a melancholy mood. He couldn’t take his eyes from little May, although he viewed her through a quivering lens of tears, the soppy bugger. She’d not known her dad had got a sentimental bone in all his wide-eyed, staring, scrawny frame. She found she liked him a bit more for it. If only he were like it all the time.

Snowy now looked toward the elder May. By this time both creased lids had overflowed and wet was running down her father’s cheeks.

“I didn’t know, m’love. I never dreamed. I knew she’d be a smasher like your mam and you, but not a precious thing like this. Oh, this is hard, gal. She’s that beautiful.”

Snowy reached out and placed one hand upon May’s arm, a poorly-hid crack in his voice.

“You love her, May. Love her with all you’ve got.”

With that her father bolted from the room. They heard him clump upstairs, most probably to sleep off all the beer he’d put away. Throughout all this Mrs. Gibbs had sat quiet, drinking her tea, speaking when spoken to. May’s mam Louisa slipped the deathmonger two shillings, twice the usual going rate. Firmly, Mrs. Gibbs gave one of them back.

“Now, Mrs. Vernall, with all due respect, if she’d been ugly I’d not charge half price.”

Stooped by the couch she said farewell to May, who thanked the deathmonger for all she’d done.

“You’ve been a godsend. When I have me next I’ll make sure that they send for you again. I’ve made me mind up that I want two girls, then after that I’ll stop, so I suppose you’ll be back when me second daughter’s due.”

May got a wan smile in response to this.

“We’ll see, my dear. We’ll see” said Mrs. Gibbs.

She said her goodbyes to the family, the lengthiest her one to baby May, then said no one need show her from the room. She put her hat and coat on. They could hear her as she stamped along the passageway and, after fumbling briefly with the catch, went out, leaving the front door on the latch.

The tuneless wail of an accordion moved on the river’s surface with the light and rippled the September afternoon. From where May stood upon the wrought-iron bridge between the river island and the park, her eighteen-month-old daughter in her arms, she could make out Aunt Thursa, far away, a small brown dot that walked the green’s far edge towards the cattle market further up.

Although too distant to be clearly seen May could imagine all too vividly every distressing detail of her aunt, who, next to her dad Snowy, May believed to be their family’s worst embarrassment. She could just picture Thursa’s bird-like head with its proud beak, its pale and staring eyes, its grey hair that erupted up in tufts and looked as though her brains were smouldering. She’d have her brown coat on and her brown shoes, bloody accordion slung around her neck, an ancient mariner with albatross. Both night and day she’d wander through the streets extemporising, fingers fluttering on the grey keys of her weighty instrument. May’s sense of shame would not have been so great if Thursa had displayed the faintest sign of any musical ability. Instead, her aunt made an unholy row, short stabs of falling or ascending chords all smudged into a skirling banshee wheeze, which stopped dead at the sudden precipice of Thursa’s frequent random silences. From noon till midnight seven days a week you’d hear her frightening cacophony, winding amongst the yards and chimneypots, that scared cats and woke babies in their cribs, that scattered birds and showed the Vernalls up. Stood there upon the bridge, May watched the speck of noisy sepia that was her aunt as, like a heron, the madwoman picked her way along the shore of Beckett’s Park, where leaves frothed up against Victoria Prom. When Thursa and her grim accompaniment both faded in the distance, May turned back to the blonde infant cradled in her arms.

The red hair that May’s daughter had at birth had fallen out and come back as white-gold, luminous catkins in a halo blaze that looked, if anything, more glorious than the hot copper with which she’d been born. Looked even more unearthly, certainly. The younger May grew lovelier each day, to May and Tom’s uneasy wonderment. She’d hurt to look at if it carried on. Both parents had at first merely assumed their child was only marvellous to them, that friends were being complimentary, but gradually had come to realise from the reaction everywhere she went that this was beauty without precedent, beauty that startled up a flock of gasps, a nervous awe, as if onlookers saw a Ming vase or the first of a new race.

May purred and drew her baby close to her so that their foreheads touched, pebble to rock, and so that their eyelashes almost beat against each other’s like two courting moths. The child gurgled with unrestrained delight, her sole response to nearly everything. She seemed that pleased to simply be alive and evidently found the world at large just as astonishing as it found her.

“There. All that nasty racket’s gone away. That was your auntie Thursa who’s half sharp, out with her squeeze-box kicking up a fuss. But she’s cleared off now, so that me and you can get on with our visit to the park. Out on the island there might be some swans. Swans. Should you like that? Here, I’ll tell you what, let your mam get into her pocket here, and you can have another rainbow drop.”

Fumbling in a side vent of her skirt her fingers found the small brown paper cone, top twisted, that she’d bought at Gotch’s shop in Green Street on their way down to the park. One-handed, with her other full of child, May unscrewed and then opened up the bag, reaching in to retrieve three chocolate drops, hundreds-and-thousands speckling their tops, one for her infant daughter, two for her. She held the first sweet to her baby’s lips, which opened with a comic eagerness to let May place it on the minute tongue, then pressed the two remaining chocolate discs together into one, shaped like a lens, the coloured flecks now beading the outside in little dots like the French painters used. She popped it in her mouth and sucked it smooth, her favourite way of eating rainbow drops.