Jerusalem Read online

  Michael couldn’t make his mind up if he’d always known that corners went two ways, like this one did, so that they stuck out and poked in at the same time, or if this was a notion that had just this moment popped into his thoughts. It worked, he could now see, in much the same way as those tricky pictures that you found on school chalk-boxes did, with all the cubes stacked in a pyramid, but so you couldn’t tell if they went in or out. He understood, now that he had the chance to see a corner from up close, that they did both. What he had taken for a recess was revealed as a protrusion, less like the indented corner of a living room than it was like the jutting corner of a table, that had fancy carved trim round its edges where the ceiling had a beaded moulding. But of course, if it was like a tabletop then that meant he was looking at it from above, not peering up at it from underneath. It meant that he was sinking down towards it and not rising up to bump his head on it. It also meant the living room had been turned inside out.

  The idea that he was descending, coming in to land upon the corner of a giant table, made more sense of how things looked to him just then, especially because it gave the corner-fairy something to be standing on, whereas before she had appeared to be stuck, unconvincingly, somewhere up past the picture rail. Although, if she was lower down than he was, why would she be calling to him in her bee-sized voice and telling Michael to come up?

  He peered at her suspiciously and tried to tell if she seemed like the sort who’d have him on or play a nasty trick on him, deciding that, yes, probably she did. In fact, the closer Michael got to her, the more the fairy looked like any ten-year-old girl from his neighbourhood, which meant that she was more than likely vicious, one of those from round Fort Street or Moat Street who would knock you cold with shopping bags full of Corona bottles they were taking back for the deposit.

  Like the corner she was standing on or in, the fairy gradually grew bigger until Michael had a better view of her, so that she wasn’t just a squeaking, waving dot in blue and pink among the fly-specks covering their ceiling. He saw also that she wasn’t a real fairy, but a normal-sized girl who had previously been far away and had, therefore, appeared much smaller than she really was. She had blonde hair with just a taste of ginger hanging down an inch or two below her ears, worn in a fringe as if a pudding basin had been placed upon her head and cut around. If she were from the Boroughs, then it very likely had.

  It lazily occurred to him that he was starting to remember bits and pieces of the life or story that he’d been involved in until only a few moments back, before discovering that he was bobbing in the fawn drifts of the upper living room. He could remember pudding basins and the Boroughs, Moat Street, Fort Street and Corona bottles. He remembered that his name was Michael Warren, that his mum was Doreen and his dad was Tom. He’d had a sister, Alma, who would make him laugh or badly frighten him at least once every day. He’d had a gran called Clara who he’d not been scared of, and a nan called May who he most definitely had been. Reassured to have at least these scraps of who he was back in their proper order, he turned his attentions once more to the matter of the little girl, now hopping up and down in agitation a scant inch or two above him. Or below him.

  He had guessed her age as being nine or ten, what Michael thought of as an almost-grown-up time of life, and as he neared her then the more he was convinced that he’d been right. She was a bony, sturdy child, a little older and a little taller than his sister Alma, prettier and slimmer with a wide and smirky mouth that seemed continually on the brink of bursting open in a laugh bigger than she was. He’d been right, as well, about her being from the Boroughs, or at least from somewhere like it. She just had that local look about her in the way she dressed and the condition of her scabby knees. Her white skin, only tanned by Boroughs drizzle, had a grey shine rubbed into its creases from the railway dust that covered everything and everybody in the district. Gazing at her now, though, Michael saw it was the same pale grey that storm clouds sometimes had, where you could faintly make out rainbow tinsels trying to break through. To tell the truth, he thought the dirt looked quite nice as she wore it, as if it were an expensive rouge or powder you could only get from rare and distant islands of the globe.

  He was surprised how good his eyesight was. It wasn’t that he’d ever had a problem with his eyes, the way his mum and sister had, but simply that his vision seemed much clearer now, as if someone had dusted all the fogwebs from it. Every tiny detail of the girl and of the clothes that she was wearing was as sharp as an engagement diamond, and the muted colours of her dress and shoes and cardigan were not so much made brighter but were just more vivid somehow, bringing stronger feelings from him.

  Her pink jumper, worn into a threadbare safety-net of faded rose strands round its elbows, had the strawberry ice-cream glow of summer teatimes to it, when the last rays of the sinking sun leaned in through the small stained-glass window set into the west wall of the living room. It looked as right and natural with her frock of navy blue as the idea of happy sailors eating candyfloss from sticks upon a bulb-lit promenade. Her slush-white socks had crumpled into concertinas or shed caterpillar skins, one noticeably lower than the other, and her scuff-toed shoes were dyed or painted in an old, deep turquoise with a faint map of burnt orange cracks where you could see the leather showing through from underneath. The fraying straps with their dull silver buckles looked as full of history as charger-bridles from a knight-and-castle past, and then there was the swanky duchess stole she had around her shoulders. This gave Michael quite a start when he examined it more closely.

  It was made from twenty-four dead rabbits hung together on a bloody string, all hollowed out to flat and empty glove-puppets with paws and heads and velvet ears and cotton-wool-ball bums attached. Their eyes were mostly open, black as elderberries, or the backwards midnight eyes that people had in photo negatives. Though he supposed a scarf of furry corpses was quite horrible, something about it seemed excitingly adult at the same time. It was most probably against the law, he thought, or at least something you could get told off for, and it only served to make the little girl appear more glamorously adventurous.

  Only the whiff of her pelt-garland put him off, and at the same time told him that it wasn’t just his eyes that had been suddenly rinsed clean. The scent of things had never previously made a big impression on him, or at least not when compared with the rich, bitter broth he was experiencing now. It was like having orchestras up both sides of his nose at once, performing symphonies of stench. The girl’s life and the four-and-twenty rabbit lives around her neck were stories written down invisibly, in perfume, and he read them through his squinting nostrils. Her skin had a warm and nutty smell, mixed with the ruddy-knuckled odour of carbolic soap and something delicate like Parma Violets on her breath. Wrapped round all this was the aroma of her gruesome necklace with its flavourings of tunnel dirt and rabbit poo and green juice chewed from grass, the sawdust fustiness of all those dangling empty coats, the tinny sniff of gore and putrid fruitiness lifting in warm waves from the meagre, mangy meat. The reek from all of this combined was so intoxicating and so interesting that he didn’t even think of it as ghastly, necessarily. It was more like a pungent soup of everything that had the whole world somewhere in its simmering, the good bits and the bad bits both at once. It was the tang of life and death, both taken as they came.

  Michael was seeing, smelling, even thinking much more clearly than he could remember doing as a floor-bound three-year-old, when all his senses and his thoughts had been comparatively fuzzy, as though viewed through streaky glass. He didn’t feel three anymore. He felt much cleverer and more grown up, the way he’d always thought that he would feel when he reached seven, say, or eight, which was about as grown up as he could imagine. He felt properly adult. This brought with it a sense of being more important, just as he’d expected it to do, but also brought the troubling notion that there were now more things he should worry over.

  The most urgent of these new concerns was probably the mat
ter of what he was doing bumbling up against the ceiling with this smelly little girl. What had just happened to him? Why was he up here now, and not down there, where he’d been before? He had the vaguest recollection of a sore throat and the safety of his mother’s lap, of fresh air and of puny wallflowers rooted in the soot between old bricks, then there had been some sort of a commotion. Everybody had been running round and sounding frightened like they did on those occasions when his gran let down her bun and, combing out her long and steely hair before the open hearth, set it on fire. This time, though, it had been something much worse, worse even than Michael’s grandmother with a burning head. You could tell from the panic in the women’s voices. Distantly, it came to him that this was what was causing all the lovely thunder mumbling around him: it was how the high-pitched shrieking of his mother and his grandmother would sound if it was slowed down almost to a stop, with all the different noises just left hanging there and trembling in the air.

  It struck him suddenly, an ominous gong sounding in his stomach, that his mum’s and gran’s distress might be connected with his current puzzling circumstances. It was Michael that they were upset about, a fact so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t hit on it immediately. He must have had a shock, so that he’d needed time to put his thoughts in order. It seemed reasonable to assume that what had shocked him was the same thing that had made his mum and gran sound scared to death …

  No sooner had the word entered his mind than Michael, in a rush of helpless terror, understood exactly where he was and what had happened to him.

  He had died. The thing that even grown-ups like his mum and dad lived with the fear of all their lives, that’s what this was, and Michael was alone in it just as he’d always dreaded that he would be. All alone and far too little, still, to cope with this enormous thing the way that he assumed old people could. There were no big hands that would grab him up out of this fall. No lips could ever kiss this better. He knew he was entering a place where there weren’t mums or dads or fireside rugs or Tizer, nothing comforting or cosy, only God and ghosts and witches and the devil. He’d lost everyone he’d had and everything he’d been, all in a careless moment where he’d just let his attention wander for an instant and then, bang, he’d tripped and fallen out of his whole life. He whimpered, knowing that at any moment there would be an awful pain that would just crush him to a paste, and then there’d be a nothing that was even worse because he wouldn’t be there, and he’d never see his family or his friends ever again.

  He started struggling and kicking, trying to wake up and make it just a petrifying dream, but all his desperate activity served only to make everything more frightening and more peculiar. For one thing, all the empty space around him wobbled like a slow glass jelly as he thrashed about, and for another, all at once he had too many arms and legs. His limbs, which he was slightly reassured to find were still clad in his blue and white pyjamas and his dark red tartan dressing gown, left perfect copies of themselves suspended in the air behind them as they moved. With one brief, wriggling spasm he had turned himself into a lively, branching bush of stripy flannel that had pale pink finger-blossoms by the dozen sprouting from its multiplying stems. He wailed, and saw his outcry travel in a glittering trumpet ripple through the crystal glue of the surrounding air.

  This only seemed to make the little blonde girl who was in or on the corner cross with him, when what with finding out that he was dead and all of that, he’d quite forgotten she was standing there. She stretched her grubby hands towards him, reaching up or down depending on which aspect of her chalk-box optical illusion he was focussing upon. She shouted at him, near enough now so that he could hear her, with her voice no longer like that of a beetle in a matchbox. Closer up, Michael could hear the Boroughs creaking in her accent, with its grimy floorboards and its padlocked gates.

  “Come up! Come on up ’ere, yer’ll be all right! Gi’ me yer ’and, and pack up wi’ yer fidgetin’! Yer’ll only make it worse!”

  He didn’t know what could be worse than being dead, but since at that point he could hardly see her for a forest full of tartan trees and striped-pants shrubbery he thought he’d better do as she advised. He held himself as still as he could manage and, after a moment or two, was relieved to learn that all the extra elbows, knees and slipper-covered feet would gradually fade away to nothing if you gave them enough time. Once all of his superfluous body parts had disappeared and weren’t obstructing his view of the corner-fairy anymore, he cautiously reached out towards the hand that she was holding down or up to him, moving his own arm very slowly so that all the trailing after-pictures were reduced to a bare minimum.

  Her outstretched fingers wrapped around his own, and he was so surprised by how real and how physical they felt he almost let them go again. He found that, as with sight and scent, his sense of touch had suddenly been made a lot more sensitive. It was as though he’d taken off a pair of padded mittens that had been tied on his wrists soon after he’d been born. He felt her palm, hot as a new-baked cake and slippery with sweat, as if she’d held it guarding pennies in her pocket for too long. The soft pads in between her digits had a sticky glaze, like she’d been eating ripe pears with her bare hands and had not had time to wash yet, if she ever did. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been anticipating, possibly that being dead his fingertips would simply pass through everything as if it were made out of steam, but he’d not been expecting anything as clammily believable as this, these humid crab-legs scrabbling for his wrist and clamping on the baggy cuff of Michael’s dressing gown.

  Her grip, not only startlingly real, was also much, much stronger than he would have thought to look at her. Yanking him by the arm she hauled him up, no, down towards her, much like someone trying to land a frantic, flapping fish. He suffered an unpleasant moment during this when both his eyes and stomach had to flip from thinking he was being pulled down to a table corner that poked out, and instead see it as a backroom corner that tucked in, with the girl straddling it and reaching down as if helping him up out of a swimming pool, while she stood safely in the dry astride the junction where its edges met. The room lurched outside-in again as he was dragged up through a sort of hinge, where everything you thought was going one way turned out to be actually going in the other, and next thing he knew Michael was standing wobbly-kneed on the same painted wooden ledge as the small girl.

  This narrow platform ran around the rim of what appeared to be a big square vat some thirty feet or more across, with their precarious perch being the lowest level of a tiered amphitheatre that sloped up for several steps on all four sides, like a giant picture-frame enclosing the wide fish-tank void he’d just been rescued from. The ten-yard sweeps of stair that led up from the edges of the pool-like area were, even in his confused condition, obviously impractical and ludicrous. The treads were far too deep, being some feet across from front to rear, while at the same time all the risers were too shallow, no more than three inches high, harder to sit on than a roadside curb. The gently-stepped surround seemed to be made of tiered white-painted pine with its sharp corners rounded into curves, covered all over with a thick and flaking coat of paint, a yellowing cream gloss that looked as though it had been last touched up before the war. To be quite frank, the more he peered at them the more the steps resembled the old beaded moulding that ran round the ceiling of their living room in Andrew’s Road, except much bigger and turned upside down. As he stood with his back towards the rectangular pit he’d been pulled out of, he could even see a patch of bare wood where the paint had peeled away leaving a shape a bit like Britain lying on its back, identical to one he’d noticed once up on the decorative trim above their fireplace. That one, though, had been no larger than a penny postage stamp, whereas this was an unjumpable puddle, even though he felt sure that the wriggling contour lines would prove a perfect match on close inspection.

  After blinking at the woodwork in astonishment for a few seconds, Michael shuffled round in his plaid slippers until he was fa
ce to face with the tough little girl who stood beside him on the pine boards with her collar made of rancid rabbits. She was just a fraction taller than he was himself, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that she was wearing proper clothes while he was still dressed in his night-things, made him feel as if she had him at a disadvantage. Realising that they were still holding hands, he let go hurriedly.

  He meant to say something along the lines of “Who are you,” or “What’s been done to me,” but what came out instead was “You who,” followed almost instantly by “Worlds bent under me.” Alarmed, he raised his fingers to his lips and felt around to make sure that his mouth was working properly. Lifting his arm to do so, Michael noticed that he was no longer leaving picture-copies every time he moved. Perhaps that only happened in the floaty place he’d just that moment been fished out of, but right then Michael was more concerned about the rubbish he was coming out with when he tried to talk.

  The girl stood looking at him in amusement with her head cocked on one side, her wide lips pressed together in a thin line so that she could keep from laughing. Michael made a fresh attempt to ask her where they were and what had happened to him.

  “Ware whee are, wore ’way? And throttles happy tune me?”

  Though the stream of nonsense was no less upsetting, Michael was astonished to discover that he almost understood himself. He’d asked her where they were as he’d intended to, but all the words had come out changed and twisted round, with different meaning tucked into their crevices. He thought that what he’d said translated roughly to “Where are we, in this place where I feel so aware, that makes we want to shout whee, but which makes me wary, looking all run-down and worn away, the way it does? And what has happened to me? I was happy where I was, but fear I may have throttled on a Tune that has choked off my joyous song.” It sounded a bit posh and weedy put like that, but he supposed that it contained the feelings he was trying to convey.