Jerusalem

  All of this had taken only moments, a rose of disaster blossoming and withering in time-delay, plunging the nursery into swirling opacity with everybody coughing, cursing, laughing, stumbling for the exit. Tasting a sour flinch of burning paper in the no-man’s-land dividing nose from throat, Mick blundered blind towards fresh air and freedom. On his way out he collided with a fogbound pit-bull on its hind legs that turned out to be Ted Tripp, the erstwhile burglar ushering his girlfriend Jan before him, both of them apparently more entertained than traumatised. Beside the doorway to the right the white-haired carpenter from item one looked back across his shoulder at the sputtering herd as it stampeded past, while on the left stood Mick himself in mayoral drag with his arms raised in what now read as an apologetic shrug: “Blame her. Nothing to do with me.” He staggered onto the comb-over turf outside, lank green locks plastered to the muddy scalp, trailing asphyxiating ribbons in his wake. Pressing the heels of both hands to his streaming sockets he smeared stinging moisture down across his cheekbones until he could see again.

  The nursery entrance was still belching smoke and people into what was otherwise a pleasant afternoon. Murderous-looking maulers reassured each other that they were okay, asthmatic anarchists sat wheezing on the cusp of Phoenix Street, and Roman Thompson did his best to look compliant when his boyfriend told him that, no, seriously, this really wasn’t funny. Backing off in the direction of the Golden Lion on Castle Street, Melinda Gebbie helped a stunned Lucy Lisowiec to get a cover story blaming everything on unidentifiable street-drinkers into place, the latter gaping with that thunderstone-struck look that Mick had observed often on associates of his sister. Somewhere at his back he heard Dave Daniels say “Where’s Alma?”, and was just beginning to conjecture that the exhibition might have been intended as a Viking funeral pyre when through the smoking portal like a Halloween edition of Stars in their Eyes lumbered the reverse hedge-dragged artist.

  Her eyes were like particle collisions, black matter decay trajectories descending to the chin from watery corners, and in her Sargasso hair perched huge pale butterflies of settled ash. Singed, ugly holes now perforated the new turquoise jumper, but then Mick supposed it would look pretty much the same after a week of Alma’s normal wear and meteoritic hashish-spillage. Smudged vermillion lips were stretched into a ghastly apprehensive rictus as she lifted sooty, blistered palms to her bewildered audience as though attempting to surrender.

  “It’s okay. I put it all out. I’ll buy them another table. Or two tables if they want, how’s that?”

  His sister was like Werner Von Braun trying to mollify senior Nazis after a V2 had detonated on the launch pad, simpering nervously and wiping blast debris from Goering’s frizzled eyebrows. She stood slapping her own bosom where a turquoise brushfire had rekindled, and it seemed to Mick that she had never looked more catastrophically deranged that she did at that moment. He was almost, well, not proud of her, but less ashamed. Then he remembered the old women who’d been standing behind Alma prior to her electing to employ the nuclear option, and who both were very definitely not among the emphysemic huddle of survivors on the fraying verge. Oh fuck. She’d finally killed someone, and when journalists swooped on her friends and family, nobody would affect surprise or offer testimonials to her quietness and normality. Striding towards her, Mick was only shocked that she had somehow managed to restrain herself for as long as she had.

  “Warry, for fuck’s sake, where are those old women, the two that were standing next to you?”

  His sister’s head revolved unhurriedly in his direction, that of a mechanical Turk anxious to persuade spectators that there was no cramped grandmaster dwarf crouched in her ribcage. Focussing a mildly shell-shocked gaze on Mick, her optic hazard-lights blinked stupidly amid the slobbering kohl, a breeding couple of stealth-jellyfish. She looked as though she might get round to working out who he was once she’d answered the same question in relation to herself. The weighted lids went up and down a few more times to no apparent purpose in the long space-shuttle pause before she spoke.

  “What?”

  Mick gripped her shoulder, urgently.

  “The two old ladies! They’ve been here all afternoon. They were behind you when you made your sacrifice or whatever you thought it was that you were doing. They’re not out here, so if they’re still in there underneath a table, overcome by fumes, then …”

  He tailed off. Alma was staring at his tightening hand as though she wasn’t certain what it was, much less what it was doing on her bicep. He withdrew it while it still had all its fingers.

  “Sorry.”

  She frowned at him quizzically, and he could feel the shift as he found himself in the role of babbling psychiatric liability while she somehow assumed the mantle of concerned clinician.

  “Warry, Bert’s mum was the only old gal here other than me, and if she hadn’t already gone home then I wouldn’t have lit the touch-paper. I’m not a psychopath who wants to cull the elderly or something. I’m not Martin Amis. Have a look yourself, you don’t believe me.”

  His eyes darted to the nursery door, still simmering. He knew from Alma’s tone, with absolute conviction, that if he should peer inside then it would be exactly as she said. There would be no half-suffocated pensioners collapsed in tragic bundles, nothing but the glowing Dresden mess and twists of drifting yarn that curled up from its squirming embers. He pictured precisely the two women who had definitely been there and now definitely weren’t and felt the same uneasy tingle in his upper vertebrae that he’d experienced when talking to Bert Regan’s mum, a breath of the uncanny on the barbered stubble at the nape. He thought it better that he not continue with the present thrust of his enquiry, and returned his gaze to meet that of his sister.

  “No, it’s … no, it’s fine, Warry. I’ll take your word for it. I must have got mixed up. Here, you do know that this place probably has a connection to the fire station, don’t you? Did you want to be here when the engines came? Or was that why you did it, for the flashing lights and uniforms?”

  She looked at him in earnest startlement.

  “Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Come on, let’s fuck off somewhere else so that I can reflect on what I’ve done and feel remorse.”

  Seizing his elbow she commenced to drag him across Phoenix Street in way of Chalk Lane, calling back to the smoke-damaged refugees still gathered on the nursery’s moth-eaten apron verge.

  “Don’t worry. Everybody gets a refund.”

  Roman Thompson’s chap Dean sounded as though he were at a philosophic impasse.

  “But nobody paid.”

  Towing her brother along the west wall of Doddridge Church, Alma considered.

  “Oh. Well, in that case nobody qualifies. I’ll give you all a call next week.”

  With that the Warrens absented themselves from the potential crime scene, sauntering conspicuously in their efforts not to look like fleeing perpetrators. Scuffing over listing pavement past the loaf-bronze meeting house both of them peered first at the stranded doorway halfway up the rain-chewed stonework, a moustache of flowers and grass along its sill, then at each other, although neither spoke. From the truncated strip of peeling house-fronts opposite crouched under the raised arbour of the designated castle grounds came muffled music that was summery and old, phased in and out of audibility by the continually shifting waveband of the breeze. “Don’t Walk Away, René” perhaps. Assaying branches overdressed in pink like gypsy bridesmaids, blackbird Schuberts hung their fleeting compositions on the grey staves that still ravelled from the nursery, and rattling around the curve of Mary’s Street a flaking ice-blue Volkswagen was for a heartbeat in beguiling contrast with the toffee fringes of the burial ground. Rounding the corner in the juddering vehicle’s wake, Alma and Mick mounted the undemanding run of steps and, without need for conference, agreed to park their ageing arses on the slab-topped wall bounding the chapel’s southern face.

  It was a lulling bee-drone of an afternoon despite persisten
t violated squealing from the smoke detectors, now off on the church’s other side and therefore easier to ignore. Mick tapped a cigarette from his depleted pack and Alma passed his lighter to him without fuss. Its work was done, apparently. After a moment, goaded by the front-bar perfume of her brother’s exhalations, she elected to spark up her last remaining stick of dream-snout and got him to light it for her, leaning in and holding back her locks like petticoats beside a hearth. They sipped their neurotoxins in companionable silence for some little time before the speechless younger sibling thought of anything to say.

  “Your pictures, Warry, what we just saw. There were lots of things I don’t remember telling you. You’d taken some creative licence, I thought, here and there.”

  His sister smiled, becoming briefly radiant in something other than a cracked reactor sense, and crinkled up her nose self-deprecatingly.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I made most of it up, but then I don’t see that it really matters who hallucinated what as long as the real story’s in there somewhere. Anyway, nobody’s ever going to know it isn’t what you said to me. It’s your word against mine and I’m an interstellar treasure.”

  Mick laughed down his nose, in writhing fronds of vaporous chinoiserie.

  “And what’s all this fantastic nonsense going to accomplish, Warry? Have you somehow saved the Boroughs, like you said that you were going to do? Will they rebuild it how it was when we were children and not put up any more Destructors?”

  Still smiling, albeit now more ruefully, she shook her trailing willow-canopy of hair.

  “I’m not the fairies, Warry. I imagine that the Boroughs will go on being ignored until somebody comes up with a half-baked plan they think might turn a profit, then they’ll plough it under, pave it over, get rid of the streets and only leave the names. As for incinerators and destructors, my guess is they’ll roll them out across the country. It’s the cheapest, dirtiest way of doing things, it doesn’t inconvenience anyone who votes or matters, and why interfere with getting on a hundred years of cross-Westminster policy? They started pulling this place down after the First World War, most probably because the Russian revolution had made keeping all of your disgruntled workers in one place look like a bad idea. They won’t stop now.”

  As frequently occurred when she was off on one, Alma’s neglected reefer had gone out. Anticipating her requirements, Mick retrieved the lighter from his pocket and allowed her to suck the extinguished end of her hashish Havana back to angry ruby life, whereafter she resumed her diatribe.

  “And even if they did rebuild it, down to the last doorstep, that would just be horrible. That would just do for buildings what Invasion of the Body Snatchers did for people. It would be some sort of deprivation theme-park. Unless you restore it how it was, with all its life and atmospheres intact, it’s not worth bothering. I’ve saved the Boroughs, Warry, but not how you save the whale or save the National Health Service. I’ve saved it the way that you save ships in bottles. It’s the only plan that works. Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time.”

  There in the May sky over Marefair and Saint Peter’s a blancmange of cumulus set to a snoozing rabbit, moulded for a stratospheric children’s party. Whispered wind washed from Far Cotton and Mick felt the breeze’s skin brushing against his own as it politely slid around him and continued with its northbound journey. He was thinking about what his sister had just said concerning the impossibility of anything saving an arts-and-letters rescue or retrieval for the neighbourhood’s lost causes when he was reminded of Ben Perrit’s poem, creasing in his pocket. Leaning back at a precarious angle so that he could get his hand into the tight-stretched linen mouth he fished it out and handed it to Alma, who perused it with a softening of her belligerent brow and then, refolding it to fit in some compartment of her own pipe-cleaner jeans, looked up at Mick.

  “Bless that poor, suffering inebriate bugger, but he does a lovely poem. True, they’re all about some loss that he can’t get past, although if he could he’d have no need to write. Or drink. I sometimes think that loss is all he runs on; that he never loves a thing so much as when the wheels have fallen off. I hope that he’s alright. I hope that everyone’s alright.”

  She lapsed into another round of concentrated puffing on her spliff in order to prevent it going out again. The rabbit cloud was now two separate hamsters over Pike Lane, and Mick risked a sideways glance at his big sister.

  “How is Ben not being able to get past his loss a different thing from how you handle yours?”

  Alma tipped back her head and spat a thin beige genie at the upturned azure bowl above.

  “Because what I’ve made, Warry, is a glorious mythology of loss. That back there was an older testament, a pantheon of tramps and kids with nits. I’ve squeezed the bricks till they bled miracles and filled the cracks with legends, that’s what I’ve done. I …”

  She broke off, and a fireworks night of marvel and delight declared itself across her face.

  “Here, did I tell you, about what Rome Thompson said, the thing about the mill?”

  Mick’s blank look was her answer and her prompt to press enthusiastically ahead.

  “It’s the gas-holder down on Tanner Street, the back of where Nan used to live. According to what Rome said, back in the twelfth century it used to be a corn-mill called ‘the Marvellous Mill’. If you go down by the river, underneath the bridge with all the beer cans and syringes and disembowelled handbags, you can see there’s the old stones along its sides which used to be the race that powered the waterwheel. In the twelve-hundreds it was claimed by the monks of Saint Andrew’s Priory, who controlled the other mill in town and figured that they might as well run both of them. Then, in the sixteenth century Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries and ownership reverted back to the townspeople. Two hundred years sail by and next thing anybody knows it’s the seventeen-hundreds …”

  She paused to breathe in, although only drugs.

  “1741, there’s this consortium of businessmen. One of them’s Dr. Johnson, which supports my theory that from Bunyan to Lucia Joyce this whole thing is to do with the development of English as a visionary language. Anyway, they buy the place and turn it from a cornmill to a cotton mill.”

  Uncertain what whole thing his sister was referring to, and even more unsure how the discoverer of baby-powder fitted into the scenario, Mick pursed his lips and merely nodded.

  “There were cotton mills in Birmingham by that time, turned by donkeys, but the one down Tanner Street was the first power-driven mill anywhere in the world. So it’s not just the crusades and the Cromwells. The Industrial Revolution kicked off up at the far end of Green Street. As you might expect the local cottage industries went down like ninepins, as would happen everywhere over the coming century. The mill had three big cotton looms, all working round the clock with no employees other than some kids to sweep the corners and to manage the untangling if the mechanism snagged.”

  Mick listened, only partially distracted by the portly and diminutive form labouring up Chalk Lane towards them, white hair curled into a head of froth atop unusually pallid stout, the pint of cuckoo spit they draw after they’ve changed the barrel. Thinking to have previously seen the sweltering individual somewhere, Mick at last decided that it was that councillor who had a column in the paper. Cockie, was it? Lived down near Black Lion Hill, which would explain his presence in Chalk Lane. As he approached the man regarded Alma and her brother through his perching spectacles with vague affront. Oblivious to his presence, Alma carried on her narrative regardless.