Jerusalem

  the relentless bag of bones runs on, hunchbacked with innocence. The barren avenue that vanishes beneath him is entirely featureless save for the welcome clusters of chronology-defying Bedlam Jennies, so much so that these oases, blossomed from the bedrock at roughly millennial intervals, become the travellers’ only clock or calendar. Even the apertures that once looked down on the terrestrial First Borough are now mostly gone, healed over with what seem to be volcanic sediments, and other than celestial dramas acted on the canopies of night or daylight overhead their expedition is without event. At their infrequent rest-stops they read chapters from Miss Driscoll’s book to one another and attempt to calculate, from the configurations of the sky, how many billion years they are from home. Snowy thinks two but May seems relatively certain that it’s three. In the nocturnal stretches of their journey into afterwards the overhanging firmament seems crammed with hyper-stars, a lot more than there used to be. The learned infant speculates that this stellar profusion has resulted from the Milky Way commencing its collision with another astronomical array, most probably Andromeda. Her theory is corroborated after seventy or eighty further Puck’s Hat patches have been passed, by which point the immeasurable dark above them is a chaos of crashing suns, a catastrophic ballet staged in extra mathematical dimensions. The appalling centrepiece of this performance is a struggle to the death between two fields of nothingness, hungry immensities which May informs her grandfather are said to lurk unseen at each star-system’s heart, their frightful mass responsible for turning the jewelled nebulae. The spheres of blackness are made visible by radiating silver halos of what the eighteen-month-old believes to be unfolded X-rays spindling out to fill the heavens, the twin auras overlapping in a terrifying moiré of annihilation. Further scrutiny reveals that both monstrosities are wearing trophy-belts of dust accumulated from the helpless interstellar bodies they have whirled around at inconceivable velocities and smashed together, pulverised on impact. Inexorably the dark giants make their mutual approach, cannibal emperors unwavering in their determination to devour each other there in the arena of a ruined cosmos. Trying not to look at the deranging spectacle above them, Snowy and his granddaughter pass on. Years in their thousands are left trampled underfoot. The warring midnight absences presiding over that bare strip of track appear to be attempting some tremendous fusion into one light-swallowing colossus, with the rioting stars about them gradually resolved into a new merged galaxy that Snowy dubs Milkdromeda but May refers to as the Andy Way. The travellers persevere, amusing themselves by inventing names for the unrecognisably collided constellations, birth-signs for an era without births: the Great Chrysanthemum, the Bicycle, the Little Tramp. They carry on, and during the diurnal reaches of their passage observe that the unpacked fireball about which the planet spins is noticeably larger, an effect that can no longer be attributed to atmospheric vagaries. The white-gold orb’s engorgement worsens and when they have hiked another million or so years there is above them nothing but inferno from horizon to horizon, Mercury and Venus both engulfed already in the bloody solar bloat. For what seems an unending distance the intrepid pair are journeying in flame and settling down to sleep on ember stones that pulse red and translucent even through the ectoplasm of the couple’s eyelids. Both agree that slumber on a burning bed is contrary to every human instinct and thus offers little in the way of respite, though of course they are no more discomfited by the apparent heat than by the icebound floorboards of what now seems an eternity ago. To their considerable relief, the fairy-fungus that sustains them seems alike impervious to such perceived amendments of the temperature, and at their next stop they discover an extensive colony of the exquisite radiating doll-forms thriving on that furnace-bright terrain. Soldiering on, when May and Snowy have at last become accustomed to incessant conflagration so that pyrotechnic vistas are no longer cause for comment, it takes countless centuries before they realise that the elderly and swollen sun is dwindling by steady increments in the long, shamefaced aftermath of its infanticidal binge. A near-incalculable distance later it has been reduced to a discarded cigarette-end, winking out of being in the universe’s lightless gutter. Solemnly aware that they are witnessing the death of day, the old man and the child proceed with their excursion into unrelieved immortal night. As they progress the dark above them is evacuated of its last illuminations when even the starlight is extinguished, Arcturus and Algol either snuffed like candles or else relocated by a constantly expanding universe to somewhere out beyond the curvature of spacetime; over the continuum’s horizon and too far away for even radiance to travel. Navigating with their dead-sight they move through a landscape with its contour outlines stitched in tinsel. Finally disoriented by his own duration, Snowy wonders if the whole adventure is another of his fabulous delusions, flashing momentarily through his disordered mind as

  he goes wandering from his Fort Street home, uncertain of what year it is or where he lives. Shuffling lost down Moat Street he remembers it as being filled with water once and wonders when they had it drained. The fish must have looked dreadful, flopping and asphyxiating in the gutters. It all changes in a wink these days, everything vanishing or turning into something different. Following a path of least resistance, a well-trodden street-plan crease, he rolls up Bristol Street and down Chalk Lane where there are poppies squirting out of brown-gold crevices in the old burial ground’s limestone wall. Across the way the turquoise paint on the Blue Anchor’s signboard peels and curls beguilingly beneath the sharpened Wednesday morning sunshine, every detail of its scabby surface limned in fire. He knows they’ve got a lovely girl behind the bar there at the Anchor, beautiful Louisa who he got his oats with down in Beckett’s Park a while ago. He only hopes his missus never learns of it. Beneath a fleeting cloud of muddled guilt he shambles on through summer, heading for Black Lion Hill and Marefair down the dappled lane. Carthorses nod in passing to each other on the blinding cobbles and he weaves his passage cautiously between them to the sanctuary pavement outside Peter’s Church while all the crumbling monsters of its stonework gape at him in outrage. When he makes his way along a hairline alley to the building’s rear the Saxon chapel seems to him ablaze with moment and significance as if he’s looking at it for the first time or the last, and in Narrow Toe Lane he finds he cannot see for tears although he doesn’t know what they’re in aid of and within a dozen paces has forgotten them. White cumuli slide down the sky like foamy spittle over Green Street. Underfoot the York stone flags carry the scars of ancient rivers, fossil fingerprints that he supposes were made several hundred million years ago when only trilobites and ammonites lived in this little row of terraced houses, slithering out to sit and chat on their front steps during the warm Precambrian evenings. The ancestral buildings, crouched and tired and leaning on each other, have an aura of familiarity as if the millipede of his true form expressed through time has on countless occasions doubled back and forth upon itself along these weathered slabs, and it occurs to him that he has family here. Doesn’t he have a daughter living somewhere round these parts, a girl named May? Or is it May who died of the diphtheria when she was just a baby? Snowy trudges past a sequence of ill-fitting wooden doors, their numbering up in the high eighties, and at last finds one he thinks he recognises right at the far end, Elephant Lane, down that way, next door to the builder’s merchants with the painted gate. Unpolished and thus slowly darkening, the old brass doorknob squirms reluctantly against his sweaty palm then yields. The heavy slab of pitch-stained black swings open with a whinny from its hinges to reveal a passageway, its weak illumination and tea-brown obscurity conflated in the old man’s senses with its bouillon scent of rising damp and sagging flesh. He sees the human odours, smells the light and cannot recall ever having done things otherwise. Shutting the door behind him without looking he moves down the cramped hall, calling out a speculative greeting to the darkness squatting halfway up the stairway but the dark has clearly had enough of him, like everybody else, and doesn’t answer. Nobody’s a
bout, his entrance to the silent living room confirms, excepting for a cat that he believes might be called Jim, asleep before an unlit fireplace, and three bright viridian meat-flies that he doesn’t know the names of. A south-facing window ladles rays across the room in strictly rationed measures, smearing yellow honey on the glazed bulge of a flower-vase or along the varnished curve of the piano-lid and suddenly it comes to him that he’s known all of this before, the cat, the flowers, the angle of the sun, the same three nameless flies. He’s known this moment all his days, down to its most excruciating detail. Part of him has always been here in this half-lit cubicle while he’s been otherwise engaged with swaying on the Guildhall’s slates and walking in a trance to Lambeth, visiting his father in the madhouse, copulating on the riverbank or being sick over the little folk. By the same token he knows he’s still there in all those other places even now and doing all those other things, still wavering on the brink of that tall rooftop; that short woman. He is teetering now upon the speckled hearthside rug, finally overcome by vertigo at the sheer drop of his own continuity. Exhausted by it all he sinks into a battered armchair and the window-shine behind him turns his thinning hair to phosphorous. The chained dog in his stomach growls reproachfully and he’s forgotten the last time he ate, along with all his other vital details. This is where he dies, he understands that. These walls that enclose him are his last ones and the world beyond this square of carpet is a world he’ll never tread again. He feels remote from his own creaking frame, hungry and aching in the chair, as if his circumstances were all something happening in a play, a well-known closing act repeated line for line, night after night; life a recurring dream the dead have. The old nuisance can’t tell if he’s really here, the unnamed flies impatiently anticipating his demise, or if

  he’s sprinting through the final night that has no dawn with his dead grandchild yanking at his ears to spur him on. Above, the void disorganises. Heat is fled save for those vestiges at the reactive cores of cosmic halo objects, vast accumulations of dark matter only rendered visible by a decreasing pulse of infrared until this too is ceased. The muffled metronome of padding feet on stone is their accompaniment in straits where universal darkness and frigidity are made inseparable; where black is just cold’s colour. Doggedly they journey on, spacetime’s last spectres running blind towards a limit that they only know is there because they’ve met themselves returning from it. This is the one certainty they cling to through the endless, lightless distances, and it only when they are beginning to doubt even this that from her human crow’s nest May reports a fleck of radiance at the vanishing point of their all-but vanished highway. By the time they’ve drawn a few millennia closer, this scant spark has swollen to contain the empty skies above in their entirety, a shimmering butterfly corona from horizon to horizon, a display of shifting marbled hues which the two pilgrims have all but forgot the names of. Stood against this dazzle where the road appears to end abruptly in an iridescent nothing is what seems to be a single silhouetted figure of unusual height and girth, positioned as though waiting patiently for Snowy and his granddaughter to reach it. Both adventurers can feel the hairs raise on their necks as simultaneously they reach the same conclusion with regard to the obscure shape’s probable identity. They’ve each thus far reacted with a studiedly dismissive flippancy to the idea that their peregrinations might entail such an encounter, but with its reality almost upon them the old man and baby girl alike become uncertain and, for the first time, afraid. May’s voice beside his ear is an uneasy whisper. “Do you think it’s him?” His own reply is hoarse and strangled, a constricted rasp he’s never heard before. “Yes, I suppose it is. I had a lot of things to say to him, but I’m so frit I can’t remember what they were.” The confrontation they have privately longed for and dreaded, whilst a terrifying prospect, is significantly less unbearable than the alternative of turning round and running back the way they came. They carry on in their approach of the inevitable form which looms at the conclusion of their path, naked into that presence, and John Vernall grows increasingly confused about which segment of his caterpillar continuity he’s currently experiencing. All his moments fall upon him in a pack, coterminous, a fugue as complex and disorienting as his sister Thursa’s compositions, bringing an unprecedented yet somehow familiar sense that

  he’s about to meet his maker. Catapulted from the armchair by a fear that death should find him sitting down he stands there swaying in the cluttered room his universe has been reduced to. Woken by this sudden flurry of activity the cat weighs up the situation and decides to exit by the window, open on its sash, leaping from ledge to garden wall to rain-butt and descending by instalments to the sunken yard outside. The flies attempt to follow but are insurmountably confounded by frustrating panes. Reeling with one hand clutching at the chair-arm for support, Snowy appreciates only too well the impetus behind this animal and insect exodus: the damp and crowded chamber, with careening ice-rink scratches on the sideboard’s varnish and with gold fruit softening in its bowl; this is the end of the time. Who could have thought that it would be so little? His gaze darts around his final vista as he tries to cram his eyes full with its details and make a last meal of their significance, eventually alighting on the mantelpiece where something glints intriguingly. The single halting step he takes towards the hearth for a closer inspection is as jittery as any that he took upon the slippery rooftops of his youth. The item that has captured his attention turns out to be a medallion, a Saint Christopher that he believes might be the one he wore for all his Lambeth-to-the-Boroughs marathons so long ago. He scoops it up within one liver-speckled and vibrating hand, only to instantly forget that he has done so as his wandering awareness is next seized by the decrepit fellow staring at him from the glass above the fireplace. There is something in the haggard features that he recognises, and it comes to him that this is Harry Marriot from the next house along. He looks much older than he used to, but it’s been a little while. Lifting the hand containing the religious talisman Snowy gesticulates in greeting to the other man, obscurely reassured when the same gesture is immediately returned. He’s glad that Harry, at least, still seems pleased to see him. Peering into what he takes to be the similarly furnished house next door he notices what seems to be a further window in its far wall. This affords a view into another Green Street domicile with yet another old boy – possibly Stan Warner from a little further down – facing the other way and waving through a subsequent portal at what might well be Arthur Lovett from just up the road. Turning to glance behind him, Snowy spots the aperture on his own room’s far side that looks onto a similar procession of frosty-haired veterans in endlessly receding parlours. He appears to be stuck in a queue of ancients lining up for their demise, all waving to each other amiably, their individual domestic spaces reconfiguring into a single tunnel. It’s as if

  he’s in a relatively narrow channel of near-infinite extent, finally close enough to the imposing shape that blocks his path to see that it is actually a pair of nine-foot giants who are stood shoulder to shoulder. Both are barefoot, clad in plain white linen smocks, and each one holds a snooker cue proportionate to their tremendous size. The figure on the left has hair as colourless as Snowy’s, and is instantly identifiable as Mansoul’s trilliards champion, Mighty Mike. His curly-haired and russet-bearded counterpart has mismatched eyes, one red, the other green. This latter rumbles with amusement at the human couple’s tremulous approach. “Look at the faces they’ve got on them! Why, you’d think they were expecting the Third Borough!” Perched atop her grandsire, May’s smooth forehead corrugates to a suspicious frown. “Perhaps we were. But aren’t you Asmoday, the thirty-second spirit? What are you dressed as a Master Builder for?” The erstwhile fiend raises his bristling brows in mock surprise. “Because that’s what I am. I served my sentence and got my old job back. At this point in time,” he gestures to the cosmos-spanning spectrographic backdrop, “all the scores are settled and the falls are far behind us. We can let bygones
be bygones, surely, here where everything’s a bygone?” As the infant chews this over, her grandfather at last finds his voice