AFTERLUDE

CHAIN OF OFFICE

With a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamourous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare center’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture.

Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mick with an unprecedented kiss that left his right cheek partially obscured by a wet crimson clown-print, Alma dragged him up onto the doorstep and excoriated him as she unlocked.

“No, seriously, Warry, thanks for only being twenty fucking minutes late. You must get loads of exhibitions based entirely on your mental problems, so, y’know, it means a lot that you’ve turned up at all. I’m really touched. You’re almost like a brother to me.”

Mick grinned, the disquieting barefoot teenager on Crispin Street and his severely localized depression on the walkway of Saint Peter’s House lost in the sooty deltas at the corners of his eyes.

“There’s no need to be nervous, Warry. I’m here now. I know I’m like a superstition with you, aren’t I? I’m your University Challenge lucky gonk. Why didn’t you just open up without me?”

Alma curled her lower lip, as if formally rolling back a no-longer-required red carpet.

“Because fuck off. This is the wrong door for this key. Can’t you just circulate among these …” Alma gestured inexactly at Ben Perrit. “… these gallery-going intellectuals till I get this sorted out? See that nobody starts a fight or pinches anything.”

Performing a constrained about-turn on the step, he overlooked a perfectly convivial crowd which nonetheless seemed to contain innate disorder. A fight, though unlikely, was not utterly out of the question, but there definitely wasn’t anything worth pinching. Nor did any of those present seem particularly larcenous, except perhaps the two old ladies he’d assumed were with Bert Regan’s mom. They stood apart from all the other attendees and looked like they were sharing recollections of the neighborhood, one of them indicating something in the general vicinity of Mary’s Street while her companion grinned and nodded vigorously. The malicious glint in their crow-trodden eyes elicited a warm pang of nostalgia for the monstrous Boroughs matriarchs of yesteryear, and briefly made Mick miss his Naan. Miss his whole genealogy for that matter, with almost everybody gone except him and his sister, whom he didn’t really see as being representative.

Against a layered backdrop where decrepit 1960s flats blocked railway yards and distant parkland further down the slope, Dave Daniels smiled bemusedly in conversation with Rome Thompson’s garrulous and slinky boyfriend. Mrs. Regan told Ben Perrit that he was a silly bugger, a perceptive diagnosis based on just under five minutes of acquaintance. Blackbirds skimmed resurfaced plague-graves in the parking area off Chalk Lane and Mick allowed himself the thought that all the place’s previous warm weekends were also not far off, lingering atmospheres of cobbled pub yards, pocket money and the tuppenny rush infusing the frayed present as a pungent marinade. The light at that precise time, that particular day of the month, had fallen in exactly the same fashion upon Doddridge Church since it was raised. Some of those shadows over there were hundreds of years old, had settled their specific pall on insufficiently despondent pallbearers and hesitating brides alike, on Swedenborgians and repenting rakes. He’d heard of laws protecting something known as “ancient lights”, but couldn’t really picture any protest lobby fighting to conserve the ancient dark, save possibly for easily ignored depressives, Goths and Satanists. Behind him, Alma had eventually reasoned that it was in fact her Yale key rather than the lock, the nursery or the rest of England which was upside-down, and was approximately stating that the exhibition was now open:

“Okay, everybody in. If anybody has constructive criticisms that they’d like to offer, I’ll quite happily enlighten them on their shit dress-sense or the mess they’ve made of bringing up their kids. Remember that you’re only here to gasp. Spill body fluids over it, you pay for it. Apart from that, enjoy yourselves within rational limits.”

And with him and Alma at their forefront, guffawing and arguing, they all went in.

Mick’s first impression was that the choice to exhibit some three dozen pieces in such a ridiculously tiny space had been determined by poor eyesight, hashish-influenced decision-making processes, or else the well-known female handicap when it came to spatial arrangements: the trait which made them imagine penises to be much shorter than they really were. His next impression, after the initial sense of overwhelming optic shellshock had a moment to subside, was that this staggering bag-lady clutter of ideas and images, these closely-spaced airbursts of hue and monochrome adorning every visible vertical surface might well be deliberate, might be a strategy for bullying the intended audience into a different and potentially far more precarious state of mind, assuming anybody other than an evil scientist would ever want to do that. This faint spark of insight was immediately interrupted by his and everyone else’s third impression, which was of an outsized three-dimensional arrangement settled on its table in the center of the already restricted space.

With Alma having deftly slipped around this eye-catching obstruction out of harm’s way, Mick and his attendant fellow patrons still decanting through the nursery door were brought up short against the nearside of the trestle in a ragged tidal stripe of animate detritus. Roman Thompson’s boyfriend Dean went, “Fuck me,” in an almost reverential tone, Ben Perrit giggled and Bert Regan’s mom said, “Well, I never.” Mick himself could only manage a stunned silence, although whether one of admiration or disquiet at the surely obsessive mental processes involved he could not easily decide.

Built over several months from carefully hand-tinted papier-mâché, spread before them was a maddeningly detailed scale reproduction of the mostly vanished neighborhood as it had almost definitely never been. Just over four foot square, its tallest structures only inches high, his sister’s diorama juxtaposed the Boroughs’ choicest features, irrespective of chronology. The speckled emerald of Spring Lane School’s playing field made room for the resurgent Friendly Arms halfway up Scarletwell Street, an establishment the egg-and-spoon arena had in actuality replaced. Saint Peter’s House in Bath Street coexisted with the seven-inch tall chimney tower of a Destructor which had been demolished in the 30s to allow the flats’ construction. Spanning the wave-wrinkled river, by what looked from tiny Guinness toucan ads to be a 1940s station, was a gated Cromwell-era drawbridge. Flocking ewes surrounded smart-cars parked in Sheep Street, stippled shit on shredded paper fleeces.

Seen from overhead the center court of Greyfriars had what looked like Rizla sheets hung from its spindled clotheslines. This omniscient perspective was too reminiscent of his Harryhausen musings from the sleepless night before. Awkwardly disengaging from the press around the nano-slum’s west boundary he squeezed apologetically along St. Andrew’s Road towards Crane Hill up at the table’s corner. Passing his own shrunken terrace row he noted with approval that Gran’s ornamental swan was now a miniaturist study in the front window of number seventeen. Despite the novelty, it fleetingly occurred to him that he’d viewed their old house from this unusual elevation once before, although he couldn’t for the life of him think when. Turning the corner into Grafton Street along the northern border, he retraced the route of his childhood truck journey to the hospital save for a right at Regent Square, but this time as a casually-dressed giant wading waist-deep through the absence where an implied Semilong should be. Alma was waiting for him on the display’s further, eastern side, looming above the mini round church of the Holy Sepulcher and leering like a monstrous Templar idol, which if Mick remembered rightly was a goat with tits.

“You don’t have to say anything. You’re honored just to be related to me, Warry, I can see it in your eyes. Did you spot Gran’s swan in the window down Saint Andrew’s Road? I did that with a triple-double-zero brush, and they’re not even real. To be quite honest, when I think about myself sometimes, I nearly faint.”

“Warry, everybody nearly does that when they think about you. We’re not made of stone. So, what material did you use for this, then? It’s not walrus dung or anything, I take it?”

Pigeon droppings of exquisite delicacy caked the rim of a scaled-down Destructor. Gathered by the table’s southwest corner Roman Thompson and Bert Regan grinned and squinted at the junction of Chalk Lane and Black Lion Hill, where a queer turret like a witch’s hat had been mashed up with Harry Roserdale’s newsagent’s and the old Gordon Commercial, the hotel. Just the hand-lettering on the advertisements and hoardings was enough to break your heart and ruin your eyes.

“Nah. It’s all made of Rizla papers. Chewed about four hundred packets up and spat them out. It’s probably much sturdier than what they built the Eastern District out of.”

Mick surveyed the slate-hatched rooftops, the pointillist flowerbeds of Saint Peter’s Church.

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But probably it’s also likelier to give you gingivitis.”

In truth, it was taking all of Mick’s determination not to look impressed. It was as if his sister had removed a clipping from the undergrowth of backstreets and then husbanded it patiently to generate a bonsai locale, even or perhaps especially those features which had disappeared. His every eye-movement uncovered more of them. The rising curve of long-gone Cooper Street up to Bellbarn elicited a muscle-memory of straggling past the fading rose gates of Ferd Bosworth’s haulage yard halfway uphill, with at the top of the chewed-paper incline a painstaking reconstruction of St. Andrew’s Church so perfect in its Gothic detail that the building’s 1960s demolition seemed flatly impossible, not merely unbelievable. By leaning like one of the clearance area’s perpetual derricks over Sheep Street, Broad Street and the Lilliputian back yards
of St. Andrew’s Street, Mick could just make out the infinitesimal front window of his childhood barber, Albert Badger. So why had they always called him Bill? Painted there on the tissue glass in spidery fluorescent pink, he was obscurely heartened to find an illuminated Durex sign. Three doors down was the Vulcan Polish & Stain Company, no larger than a lesser Lego brick and wholly non-existent in Mick’s memory until that moment. Ant-proportioned hopscotch grids in colored chalk sweetly defaced the vanished tilt of Bullhead Lane, and microscopic milk bottles next to sienna-crusted loaves of bread bedizened the front steps on Freeschool Street. Attention seized by every hair-thin drainpipe, by the petrol spectra reproduced in every other puddle, it occurred to him that you could go mad looking at this stuff, let alone building it. Beside him, Alma’s forehead corrugated pensively.

“You don’t think that there’s some element missing? As if I was using all the obvious effort as a camouflage to hide the fact that I’m not saying very much, the way I used to plaster every piece of illustration work with that laborious stippling, all little dots, when I was starting out? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if this whole exercise had nothing to it but ridiculously grandiose nostalgia?”

Mick frowned at his sister in astonishment, not so much at her vanishingly rare attack of doubt as at the lack of self-awareness evidenced by her last question.

“No, of course I wouldn’t, Warry. No one would. We’re scared of saying anything in case you turn on us with a debate about things we don’t understand. I think it’s fair to say you won’t get honest criticism out of anybody in arm’s reach of you, because you’re such a touchy bitch.”

She narrowed the blast-craters of her soot-ringed eyes as she considered, unkempt head cocked to one side, her level and unblinking gaze fixed on her brother for long, anxious seconds before Alma ventured her reply, surprising him by resting a comradely hand on his left shoulder.

“That’s an excellent point, Warry, and well made.”

She took the hand away, but not before he’d worried that she planned to drop him with a Star Trek nerve-pinch. Mick, of course, knew there was no such thing, but what if Alma didn’t? Other people were arriving now, latecomers poking trepid heads around the nursery door on the far side of the oppressively meticulous tableau. He recognized his sister’s actor friend, Bob Goodman, although that was hardly more of an accomplishment than saying that he recognized Ayers Rock. Mick could at least tell one of these eroded landmarks from the other, principally by the fact that Ayers Rock never wore a leather jacket, a black beret or such an abiding look of deep resentment and mistrust. More cheeringly, behind the thespian with his deathwatch demeanor Mick made note of Alma’s shipwrecked transatlantic artist pal, Melinda Gebbie, someone with whom he could have an entertaining conversation if the exhibition flagged. Moreover, since his older sibling had privately ceded that the pretty Californian was by a head the better painter of the two, Mick felt that he could shelter behind her authoritative statements and opinions if his sister engineered to give him an artistic duffing up. Accompanying her was someone else that he’d met at least once before, Lucy Lisowiec, an extramural muralist who also worked in the Boroughs community and whom he thought Alma had said was helping to secure the daycare center for this afternoon. The women laughed and chatted, hanging on each other’s arms, the younger of the two so wonderstruck by the art-smothered walls that her lids appeared insufficient to contain her eyes. More punters dribbled in through the propped-open door behind them, some he thought he knew and some he didn’t. Alma, by his side, sighed heavily, still brooding over her reconstituted natal turf.

“I can see that I’m going to have to reach my own conclusions about what this installation might be lacking, rather than relying on your valuable insights. Listen, I think Roman Thompson said he’d got something to tell me, so I’d better go and have a word with him. If you were going to look at any of the other pieces, start to our right of the door and work your way around the room from there. Oh, and I hope you’ve got a lighter on you. I’ve left mine at home, so if I need to pop outside and have a smoke I’ll have to borrow yours.”

Mick nodded, waving her away, struck by the use of the word “if” in her last sentence, as though Alma popping outside for a smoke were some remote contingency rather than the abiding certainty that they both knew it for. With the pretended gallery beginning to fill up, its jostling horde squeezing together in embarrassed waltzes between wall and table-edge, he called to mind when this place had been Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dancing school, cadet Nijinskies clattering on open parquet. Anybody teaching toddlers the Gay Gordon these days, he reflected, would be on a list. Deciding that he’d better make a start on staring blankly at his sister’s pictures if he wanted to be out of there by nightfall, Mick took a last marveling glance at the fag-paper precinct – a metallic silver painted pond between the tanning-yards along Monk’s Pond Street; seed-sized starlings just discernible against the school’s slate rooftops – and negotiated a laborious course between the jam of punters, heading for the exhibition’s recommended starting-point behind the nursery’s wedged-open door. This turned out to be a large canvas, hung or rather propped so as to partly cover the adjacent window. Never having been to one before, Mick wasn’t absolutely sure what art shows were supposed to be like, but with that said he was fairly certain that they weren’t supposed to be like this. The claustrophobic kindergarten squash of imagery didn’t look organized so much as it looked like someone had detonated an art-teacher in a confined space. Already irritated, Mick turned his besieged attentions to the sunlight-blocking rectangle that had been specified as the extravaganza’s point of entry.

Fastened to the window frame above the exhibit with blue adhesive putty was a note in biro giving the acrylic painting’s title, Work in Progress, with a rather patronizing scribbled arrow angled down towards the frame below, as if intended for an audience of hens. The sense of sloppiness suggested by the hasty caption was, in Mick’s opinion, also present in the piece of art to which it was appended. The thing clearly wasn’t finished, as if Alma had lost interest two-thirds of the way through. Which was a shame because the bit she’d bothered to complete, a lustrously embellished area around the upper center of the work, was actually quite good. Judged by its trailing sepia jellyfish of Conté under-drawing, the intended scene was a plain wood interior seen from a steeply angled point of view, as if that of a crouching adult or perhaps a child. The viewer looked up from this disempowered perspective at a towering quartet of roughhewn and broad-shouldered men with the physiques and leathered hands of laborers, who nonetheless were clad in what looked to be outsized christening gowns of white applied in such a manner that it somehow shimmered. The four figures stood about what Mick deduced must be a sawhorse, with the pristine draped expanses of their backs presented to the onlooker and their heads bowed in muttered consultation, no doubt a discussion of some technical necessity from which all save the hulking craftsmen were excluded. Only one of the assembled crew appeared aware that he and his three coworkers were being watched, turning a prematurely bleached head to gaze down across one shoulder at the cowering observer, tanned face stern and sapphire thunderbolts in his affronted eye.

Still wondering how his sister had effected the ethereal sparkle on her navvies’ dazzling and incongruous frocks, Mick squinted closer to discover that what had appeared to be a uniformly snowy hue from further off was actually a plain matt undercoat to which gloss squares and oblongs filled with similarly shiny spirals, glyphs or leopard spots had been fastidiously added, white on white. Looking up past the radiant workmen with their faintly Soviet connotations, deep into the composition’s further ground from the distorting worm’s-eye vantage, he could just make out the sketched-in wooden beams and rafters of the ceiling’s underside, from where a single naked light-bulb dangled on its flex above the heads of the conferring artisans. That vague ellipse of fully-rendered content, in the higher middle reaches of the canvas, was realized so beautifully that the straggly brown traceries surrounding it, the dropping folds of the white robes, the caterpillar curls of shaved wood at the huddled carpenters’ bare feet, made Mick feel actively annoyed at Alma’s slapdash attitude. Why couldn’t she have put more effort into it? As far as he could see, between the cluttered, amateurish presentation and the half-done opener the only statement she was making seemed to be “I can’t be assed”, though to be frank she wasn’t even making that with much conviction.

Somewhere in the throng behind he heard Ben Perrit laugh, although that could as easily have been at some veiled subtlety in Alma’s oeuvre as it could have been at a knock-knock joke or, indeed, an Al Qaeda outrage. Or a Crunchy wrapper. From across the room Rome Thompson’s circling vulture rasp was interrupted by a raucous outburst that he recognized at once as issuing from his distressingly close blood relation.

“Rome, for fuck’s sake. Are you serious?”

Elsewhere, infrequent bursts of Californian cackling or David Daniels’ lulling murmur were distinct above the rustle of the rhubarb. Hoping that things might pick up, Mick shuffled to his right to best appreciate the next course in this oddly flavored taster-menu, a far smaller job in oils with a much more elaborate frame, identified in ballpoint pen by an adjoining Post-it sticker as A Host of Angles.

Now, this was more like it. The restrained dimensions, something like twelve inches by eighteen and dwarfed by their gilded surround, barely contained a concentrated field of light and magnifying-lens embellishment. The portrait-aspect vignette, like its predecessor, once again presented an interior although on this occasion it appeared to be that of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Curdling yellow luminosity, as though from an incipient storm without, allowed for burnished highlights of warm gold like syrup to emerge from the prevailing umbers of a scene which Mick presumed, despite its air of authenticity, to be imaginary. On the decorated flags beneath the building’s Whispering Gallery was erected an impossibly tall gantry strung with pulleys and stout hawsers, the innumerable struts and crossbeams of the scaffolding’s construction starkly contrasting with the predominantly circular designs of the cathedral and perhaps embodying the many angles mentioned in the painting’s title. At its loftiest extremities the feat of engineering looked to be supporting a precarious pie-slice platform, but if that were so he was unable to explain the purpose of the surely dream-scale sandbag with its stupefying mass hung only a few inches over the immaculately polished floor. It had to be some kind of counterweight, yet for the life of him Mick couldn’t figure out what it was balancing until a closer squint revealed less than a foot of clearance under the huge framework at the center of the composition. The whole thing was hanging from the inside of the dome above, conceivably so that the nineteenth-
century laborers converged about the structure’s base in falling shafts of jaundiced sunshine could rotate it. Mick stood back in wonderment, strangely convinced by the spectacular unfeasibility of the arrangement that the picture chronicled actual occurrences; events and mechanisms that had really
happened or existed, all in brushstrokes so small as to be almost invisible. The sense of echoing space and the ecclesiastic hush evoked by the depiction’s false depths bordered on the tangible, to the extent that he could almost hear the tensile creak of thigh-thick rope or catch a faint ghost of the previous Sunday’s incense. It was quietly magnificent, and the one element which bothered him about the work was its transparent lack of anything to do with him or his experience. The same was true of the preceding piece as well, now that he thought about it.

And, as it turned out, the next one, which was propped against the nursery wall beneath A Host of Angles, thus requiring Mick to crouch down on his haunches if he wanted to inspect it. Shifted by this action to a toddler plane inhabited by trousers as distinct as faces, he attempted to take in the offering expediently, painfully aware that he presented an obstruction to the studiedly polite and yet inwardly seething knees about him in the narrow aisle. Roughly the same in scale as the cathedral scene above but this time in a mounting of pristine white board, a hasty label clinging to the skirting board informed him of the picture’s title, ASBOs of Desire. A shadowed oblong with a plate-sized circle halfway up, he realized after a disoriented pause that he was looking at a close-up of a security camera, staring dead into the glass of its dilated pupil. Small already and made even more diminutive by the foreshortening, an isolated female figure was reflected in the lens’s center, caught in its authoritarian snowglobe and defined in delicate white traceries against the work’s predominating swathes of sooty darkness, purples that were almost black and crumbling to a fine grain at their edges. Thinking back to boyhood episodes where he had inadvertently intruded on his older sister while she was preoccupied with art – much more unsettling than barging in while she was on the toilet – Mick thought the image might be realized in a carefully-masked application of the surely obsolescent spray-diffusers that he’d seen her use, hinged tubes you blew through to produce a flecked mist in the manner of an Amish airbrush. This would make it very likely that the medium was colored ink, Windsor & Newton’s strangely satisfying roster of glass pyramids with labels like children’s-book heraldry. The woman held in the surveillance gaze had high heels and a short skirt, fists thrust in the pockets of a furry collared jacket and her weight on one foot, head turned to peer off into the dark as if waiting impatiently for someone. She seemed unaware that she was being furtively observed, which emphasized her vulnerability and made Mick faintly worried for her. The impassive lens too much recalled a voyeuristic eye belonging to some masturbator in the shadows. Carefully delineated beads of condensation, jeweling its cold meniscus, stood like lecherous sweat on a molester’s brow.

“Warry, I know it’s awesome and it’s only right that you should bow before it, but your worship’s blocking everybody’s way. If I’d known you were going to show me up like this I’d never have invited you. Oh, yeah, and can I have a borrow of your lighter?”

With a heavy sigh of resignation, Mick turned from the disconcerting nocturne to regard the Doctor Martin’s boots with twelve holes but incompetently fastened laces which appeared to be addressing him. Levering cumbersomely back up to his feet he fished with some resentment in one trouser pocket, finally producing the requisite three-for-a-pound stick of amethyst. It wasn’t that he minded Alma borrowing his lighter; it was more the way she stood there with her palm out, as though he was nine and she was confiscating it.

“Here. Don’t forget to bring it back. You do know, Warry, don’t you, that these are just disconnected images with nothing tying them together, unless you count the crushed centipede you call a signature? And what has any of this got to do with how I nearly choked to death?”

Casually pocketing the half-filled plastic lozenge without comment or apparent gratitude, his sister scrutinized him from beneath drug-and-mascara-weighted lids, reluctant to let in too many photons of his philistine rebounded light.

“Well, Warry, for the exhibition’s climax, in an improvised performance piece I’m going to ram a five pound jar of cough-sweets down your throat, finish the job, and very likely cop the Turner. People like you are the reason why the working class can’t have nice things.”

He shook his head slowly and pityingly, a pessimistic vet.

“And people like you are the reason they can’t even find their shitty lighters, Warry.”

Alma gave him an elaborate triple V-sign that involved two hands and also forearms crossing at an acute angle from the elbow, which to Mick looked like a ritualized fit, before she flounced out of the open door to both take and pollute the air. He watched her through the nursery window, an immense dust bunny made of turquoise fluff that seemed to bowl in a contrary breeze across the threadbare mound outside as she paced back and forth, sparking a spliff only a little shorter than her usual blind-man’s cane but which his sister no doubt thought of as discreet and unobtrusive. Bloody women and their inbuilt inability to grasp spatial relationships. Of course, it might be that she’d chosen such an inappropriately tiny venue so that even if only two people and a dog showed up she’d still be playing to a heaving crowd. From out the slaughterhouse press of humanity immediately surrounding him he heard Bert Regan venture a not-unrelated diagnosis.

“Hur hur. Fuck my ass. What does she think this is, Agoraphobics fuckin’ Anonymous, or what? She’s never been on the same page as everybody else, has she, your kid?”

Mick turned and grinned at the preposterously sturdy-looking ne’er-do-well and chancer, somehow still glaringly ginger even now that his remaining hair was gray.

“Hey up, Bert. Tell the truth, I think she’s in a different book. It might even be in a different language, more than likely one that she’s made up. Here, is the lady that I saw you standing next to earlier your mom? I heard her talking. I’ve not heard a Boroughs accent like she’s got in years.”

The landlocked pirate bared his handful of surviving teeth, a sledgehammered piano keyboard, in a fond smile.

“Ah, yeah. She don’t look a bad old gal for eighty-six or whatever the fuck she is now, does she? Grew up around Compton Street just off Spring Lane. Me and me brother and me sister reckon she’ll outlive the lot of us, just from sheer Boroughs bloody-mindedness.”

Mick followed Bert’s eyes, azure chips of castoff china ditched below the oxidizing privet of his brow, and spotted the self-possessed pensioner in question on the far side of the makeshift gallery, in animated conversation with a captivated Lucy and Melinda. All he caught was, “Ooh, yiss, I remember ’ow we use ter git dressed up un’ goo dayn tayn”, but that was all he needed to submerge him in a recollected aural floodtide of genetically defective vowels or missing-and-presumed-dead consonants; of chip-shop queue confessions and school-gate soliloquies. To hear a Boroughs woman of that vintage talking was to feel beneath your fingertips the embossed lettering on oval Co-op milk checks, penny-colored and quietly dependable in value. Marveling, he returned his attention to the erstwhile gasfitter, knife crime early adapter and Dodge City plumber at his side.

“You’re lucky to still have her, Bert. Who were those women I saw with her when I turned up earlier? Are they two mates of hers?”

The rusting caterpillar eyebrows crept together for a puzzled face-off.

“You’re not talkin’ about Mel and Lucy?”

Shaking his head like a wet dog, Mick surveyed the cramped premises papered with his big sister’s hallucinations hoping he could point the pair out, but they’d either left already or had nipped outside to get away from all the noise and people, not that you could blame them.

“No, these were both older than your mom. They looked like they’d been living round here quite a while, how they were dressed.”

Bert pushed his lips out in an oral shrug.

“I never noticed ’em. I know that Rome, Rome Thompson, ’e was goin’ out ’round all the flats and sheltered housing yesterday to tell ’em about Alma’s exhibition, so most likely it was two old dears from this patch come to ’ave a butchers and see what was up.”

They both agreed that sounded about right and made a cast-iron aspiration to talk later before conversational convection currents dragged the genial urban ogre off into the grunt and mumble. Watching Regan borne away, Mick made a mental note to ask his sister how things were progressing with Bert’s hepatitis-C which, last he’d heard, had failed to budge even after two blackly suicidal interferon courses, last-chance remedies far uglier than the disease. Returning his attention to the copious vomit of ideas and colors tricking down the walls of the establishment, he picked his way through the next several pieces in disgruntled search of some tenuous thread connecting Alma’s peacock technical display with his own near-death episode, coming up empty-handed.

With Rough Sleepers, next of what appeared to be a largely arbitrary sequence, he found himself looking at the riotously hued gouache delineation of a pub’s front bar, conceivably the Old Black Lion, where luridly bright customers listed in an inebriate over-familiarity or threatened to unhinge their lower jaws in raucous laughter, both the fleshy sprawl of social drinkers and their color-saturated habitat distorted and exaggerated till they bordered on the abstract. Sat unnoticed and ignored amid the gem-like greens and purples of a braying modern clientele was an anachronistic 1950s tramp rendered entirely in warm stubble grays with lamp black in his creases, wet titanium on a rueful eyeball. Almost photographically realistic in comparison to the oblivious Weimar grotesques surrounding him, his newsprint tones contrasting starkly with their Technicolor, the itinerant clearly existed on a separate plane to all the other careless revelers represented and appeared to be invisible in their beer-goggled sight. The single figure present with no glass before him or in hand, alone among the garish throng to meet the viewer’s eye, he looked out from beneath his battered hat-brim and the picture’s depths with a sad, knowing smile, possibly aimed at the insensate horde about him, or the painting’s audience, or both. An oddly poignant scene that was, again, nothing to do with Mick.

Next up, X Marks the Spot, was realized as what he believed might be a lino-print, the solitary pilgrim it portrayed made out of fractured slabs of solid Indian red on heavy watercolor paper that was yellowed, flecked with age or tea. The monkish form was stooped beneath the burden of a heavy-looking and most likely allegorical sack hefted on one buckling shoulder, struggling up an incline recognizable from the intrusive quilt of modern block-cut signage in the background as halfway down Horseshoe Street. Frankly, Mick didn’t have a fucking clue, and item six was hardly more enlightening. On board roughly two feet by one was what appeared from a few paces off to be the grainy head-and-shoulders portrait of a hat-clad Charlie Chaplin, but which on approach dissolved into mixed media collage. A large industrial watch-part cog, perhaps clipped from a technical or scientific magazine, described the upper semi-circle of the silent star’s iconic bowler, while its band and brim were a rectangular munitions factory and a silhouetted barbed-wire fence respectively. The face beneath, pasted together from torn photo-scraps of carefully composed and graduated half-tone densities, was an incongruous carnival of Dior models, shell-shock victims, stockpiled gasmasks, Punch cartoons skewering contemporary art and what appeared to be a period street-plan of Lambeth. The left cheek was bleached-out poppy fields, one eye a face that Mick identified as the young Albert Einstein and the other one a lifebelt ring from the Titanic. The mustache, he thought, might be Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s notorious Sarajevo motor vehicle. He didn’t even bother looking at the hastily scrawled ballpoint afterthought that gave the gimmicky assemblage its no doubt clever title.

On it went, a steeply angled ladder of estrangement. Clearly only there for its shock-value, Mick decided, the next exhibit depicted the bare back of an adult black male, in an ingeniously-crafted frame precisely contoured to contain the muscled curvatures of the rich purple and mahogany expanse. Distressingly, the skin in question appeared lately flogged, possibly by a cat-o’-nine-tails that had left close-spaced red horizontal lines across the glistening shoulder-blades. It came to him belatedly that these marks were intended to suggest a terrible musical stave on which what had seemed random blots of gore revealed themselves as carefully placed notes in some appalling composition. Queasily, he cast an eye over the nearby makeshift label. Blind But Now I See, apparently, although Mick couldn’t for the life of him. Although entirely certain that his sister would not have intended any such thing, he thought this particular piece might well be construed as racist, or at least as racially insensitive. He wondered what Dave Daniels would make of it, and next wondered if wondering that might in itself be racist.

Then there was a pencil-crayon study of somebody who looked like Ben Perrit ambling disconsolately at the bottom of an ocean, clouds of sediment arisen from his heels and what seemed to be murky fragments of St. Peter’s Church protruding from the seabed in the background, weed in ribbons trailing from the gaping mouths of Saxon monsters in relief below the eaves. Next came a larger work accomplished in a medium which Mick distantly remembered was called scraperboard, a steeply-angled vista looking up towards a silhouetted figure standing straddling a roof-ridge with some kind of glass or crystal sphere held up aloft in either hand, and lower the black surface scratched away in random smudges to reveal prismatic tinfoil underneath. There followed not a pictorial work of any kind but rather a white apron, hand-embroidered at the hem with unexpectedly uplifting butterflies and bees. It looked as if a lot of effort had gone into it, but once again he found he’d no clear notion as to what, if anything, the crisp white linen was meant to be saying beyond “Everybody look at me. I can embroider.” Nor was item ten, identified by a desultory biro scrawl as Hark the Glad Sound, any more enlightening. Rendered, conceivably, in oil pastels it depicted a young woman clad in 1940s clothes, alone and sitting in a gas-lit parlor playing a piano. Only after several moments did he realize that Titanium White highlights on the figure’s cheeks evoked refracted tears. If anything it looked a little sentimental; chocolate-boxy even, like that bloke who did the picture with the singing waiter, Vettriano. Once again, no reference to Mick himself was anywhere in sight. Had all that been just one of Alma’s barely comprehensible or indeed noticeable jokes, only remotely funny to a somehow-sentient encyclopedia who’d never heard any good gags?

It was at this point that the object of his musings once again materialized at his side, ostensibly to give him back his borrowed lighter, though in actuality to see if she approved of his reactions to her paintings. This made him feel vaguely apprehensive, then annoyed that Alma should invert the usually understood relationship between art and its audience. Granted, he hadn’t been to many exhibitions, but he’d come away with the impression that at these gallery openings it was the artist who was nervous about being judged, not the attending public. Once he’d arm-wrestled his lighter from her lacquered talons he raised this point with his sister, although not as lucidly as he had managed in his head. Her flue-brush eyes regarded him with genuine puzzlement.

“Why, Warry, what a wonderful and otherworldly notion. Do you know, that honestly never occurred to me before? A piece of art is obviously pronouncing judgment upon everyone and everything that’s not the piece of art. Well, my art is, at any rate. Can’t speak for anybody else.”

Starting to notice his own critical deficiency of nicotine, Mick’s comment was perhaps more sharp in its delivery than he’d intended. Still, this didn’t matter, Alma being oblivious to rebuke.

“So it’s not art that’s judging everybody, Warry, is it? It’s just you, being judgmental.”

She stared at him for a moment and then, lowering her eyes, she sighed.

“Ah, Warry. Why is it always the wisdom of subnormal children that’s most humbling? But I’m not entirely certain why you raised the issue in the first place by suggesting I’d be critical of any negative reactions. What’s your own reaction so far, Warry, that’s caused all these troubling and unaccustomed thoughts?” Head cocked to one side, Alma eyed her brother both forensically and quizzically, a watchful poisoner alert for the first telltale symptoms of success. “It couldn’t be that … well, that you don’t like these pictures that I’ve taken great pains to create especially for you?”

It was exactly what he’d dreaded and he’d brought it on himself. Her drug-dilated pupils, nested in the pissed-on ashes of her irises, were welded to him and her eyelids seemed no longer to be functioning. His tongue had dried onto his palate and the punchline to a Roman Thompson joke across the cramped impromptu gallery became the raucous dinner-etiquette of crows. Alma still hadn’t blinked. There was no way to quit the field with honor, so reluctantly Mick struck what he hoped was a pugilistic stance as he went on the conversational offensive.

“But you’ve not, though, have you, Warry? How are these especially for me, particularly Charlie Chaplin made of World War One and watch-parts? What links me with Charlie Chaplin?”

Her seemingly lidless gaze swung to the ceiling as if in consideration, and then back to Mick.

“Well, you’re both much-loved symbols of a betrayed proletariat, and you both walk like people with explosive diarrhea. So there’s that. But Warry, really, what’s all this about, this truculence? It wouldn’t be that you’ve formed your opinion after seeing only the first six or seven pieces, would it?”

Widening her mill-wheel eyes enquiringly, Alma awaited his affirmative reply so that she could kick off at him and somehow make her random, disconnected paintings his fault. Fortunately, this time Mick was ready for her.

“Warry, you’ve completely underestimated me, as usual. I’ve seen the first eleven.”

Belatedly, it struck him that this sounded as though he’d watched a school cricket team. He could perhaps have phrased it better and yet felt the basic point was sound enough. The corners of his sister’s mouth, however, steadily migrated to the region where her ears were last reported.

“Oh, yeah, right. The first eleven. So you’ve not seen number twelve?”

That dreadful smirk. What did it mean? He said that no, he hadn’t, and the rictus became even broader, to the point where he feared that the top of Alma’s head would separate and slide off slowly, falling with a wet thud to the nursery floor. She aimed one blood-dipped fingernail towards a point behind him on his left, and with heart sinking he turned to confront the exhibition’s twelfth display.

A by-this-point anticipated ballpoint tag announced the large acrylic work as Choking on a Tune. Mick’s own sandblasted features following his accident at work filled the enormous canvas top to bottom, edge to edge, a post-apocalyptic landscape with a peeling nose and a surprised expression. Watering eyes, wet blue and aggravated red, were aerial views of toxic puddles sunk in a corroded junkyard face. The vivid orange dust that the collapsed steel drum had breathed all over him submerged the portrait under swarming cayenne pinpricks, sore and fiery, carefully applied in pigment that he later learned was not only the earliest available source of the color but was also in itself fatally poisonous. Dots of fire-opal teemed on a ground-zero physiognomy in speckled rivulets, in rust swirls eddying around and in between pink discus blisters, dolly-mixture pustules ranging in size from full stops to bullet points erupting from the chemically abraded epidermis, each bump bulging from the surface and accentuated with a vanishingly minute fleck of highlight Chinese White on its meniscus. Understandably, Mick found the picture hard to look at, painful in all its painstakingly depicted paining pain. It was a shocking image, certainly, of striking technical proficiency, but it seemed heartless like the flayed black shoulders of exhibit seven. With a sick pang of familial disappointment he was almost ready to consign his sister to the same chill gulag of disdain where he had almost every other soulless and attention-seeking modern British artist already confined and on a diet of their own shoes, when his attention was seized unexpectedly by something in the constellated pimples fanned across the doppelganger’s cheeks and forehead. He leaned closer. It was almost certainly his pattern-finding faculties at work, like when you got those snarling leper-monkeys in mahogany, but there existed something tantalizing in the texture of the raw depicted skin with its precision reenacted burns. Annoyed now, he leaned closer still.

The painting opened, flowering with new planes and perspectives like a stupefying pop-up to enclose him. Nose perhaps ten inches from the picture it became apparent that the tiny cerise boils and intermingled motes of caustic tangerine hid pointillistic Seurat miniatures, entire scenes emerging from the inflamed dermal mist. Below the portrait’s horrified right eye, the back yard of his childhood home swam into mottled definition, where on the cracked checkering of the constrained enclosure’s upper level his mom Doreen sat in profile on her high-backed wooden chair, caught in the act of popping something small into the baby-bird mouth of the dressing gown-wrapped infant balanced on her lap. Spreading across the shaven area above the painted face’s upper lip, a russet-dusted bubble wrap of blistering resolved into a vista of almost ecclesiastical solemnity, with to the left his tearful mother passing the limp form of her dead-looking toddler to the worried worker leaning from his lorry’s cab there on the right, one of the lifeless bundle’s bare legs dangling poignant in the central philtrum. The visage’s jawline was from ear to ear a necessarily distorted overhead view of the makeshift ambulance’s route from Andrew’s Road to Grafton Street, with Regent Square now centered on the dimple of his chin, across the Mounts to York Road and the hospital, this last a reproduction on the left jowl detailed and complete down to the birdshit-crowned bust of Edward the Seventh which adorned the building’s northeast corner. It was for the brow with its receded hairline, though, the broadest unobstructed space in view, that the most striking vignette was reserved: the hot rose stipple and corrosive ginger peppering arranged into converging lines, perhaps the upper corner of a room where a firm-jawed girl of approximately ten wearing a fetid boa of dead rabbits was somehow suspended, reaching down with one hand to the viewer. Startled, Mick recoiled, pulling away, and everything immediately melted once more into boiling acne.

He was back, back in the room, back in his body and no longer with awareness part dissolved in an impressionistic rash of citrus polyvinyl. Backlogged sensory answerphone messages received during his absence flooded in like Virgin broadband offers, the olfactory grapefruit tingle of whatever Alma had used on her hair that morning and Bert Regan’s laughter, ugly as an airlocked drain. Bright afternoon light toppling through the west window sparked a fire of detail, bald spots, single earrings trembling on a lobe, or T-shirt slogans fading in the mind and cotton blend alike. Eyes blinking as if to expel the smarting residue of imagery he turned back to his sister, standing with one hip dropped and angora arms tangled together, clocking his reactions with the lead eyes of a Nazi lab assistant.

“So, then, Warry. Warts and all. Is that what you were going for?”

She sniggered, for once with him and not at him.

“It’s not like I had a lot of choice. You were a man made out of warts. But still, this could be a new trend in portraiture, capturing people when they’ve just had burning shit thrown in their face. Though actually, that might have been how Francis Bacon worked, now that I think about it.”

Fairly sure that Francis Bacon was the person some believed had really written all the works of Shakespeare, Mick was nonetheless unclear about the relevance of facial injuries and so said nothing. Fortunately, before Alma could interpret his enduring silence as a sign of ignorance regarding modern art, she was distracted by her thespian associate Robert Goodman, shouldering his way through the surrounding press of bodies to present Mick’s sibling with a sheaf of pages printed out from Wikipedia and a glower of generalized resentment which allowed no clue as to its origins. The strange old woman that his earlier childhood tormentor had become inclined her massive rained-off bonfire cranium in the direction of the plainly discontented actor, her blast-pattern eyes grown larger while at the same time somehow retracted, pulled back into crater sockets. He realized that he’d been saved by the arrival of a victim more mouthwatering, more in the way of Alma’s primary prey.

“Why, Bobby. We were just this moment talking about likely inspirations for the work of Francis Bacon, and now here you are. Is this random handful of litter you’re holding for me?”

The gorgon Gielgud’s mouth, badly lagged piping at the best of times, was briefly fishhooked sideways at one corner in contempt.

“This, for your information, is the stuff you asked me to find out at the last minute, about William Blake’s connection to the Boroughs. You said if I didn’t that you’d never speak to me again.”

Accepting the loose paper bundle, Alma showed the hurt performer method-school concern.

“Bobby, I’m sure I never said that. Was that what your voices told you?”

“I do not hear voices.”

“Voices? Bobby, no one said that you hear voices.”

“Yes they did! You did! You said it just now. I just heard you say it.”

“Oh. Oh, dear. The doctors were afraid that this might happen …”

By this time already inching imperceptibly away, Mick took the seasoned player’s speechless indignation as a natural break in which he could announce that he was popping outside for a cigarette. Granting permission with a nod, his sister only paused in her psy-ops maneuver to demand that he not run off with her lighter, which he promised not to do before remembering that it was in fact his.

He crabbed towards the open nursery doorway with its breeze-breath, squeezing once more past the front edge of the inconvenient table on which rested Alma’s shrink-rayed Boroughs, pressed uncomfortably against its western boundary. Irritating as this was, it did present a further opportunity to inspect details overlooked during that first jaw-dropping presentation, and he found himself examining afresh the scaled down area surrounding Doddridge Church. Just up from the anachronistic Chalk Lane turret with its witch’s hat, he found firstly the church itself and then his current whereabouts, the erstwhile Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dancing school down at the bottom end of Phenix Street. In keeping with the model landscape’s combinatory chronology, despite the old red-lettered sign above the door proclaiming the school’s terpsichorean tradition, the front windows were those of the later nursery, thin Rizla tissues with the scene within described on their faux glass in watercolor miniature. In this instance, Mick realized, you could actually make out the table upon which a tinier reproduction of this tiny reconstruction was just visible. Feeling a little nauseous he dragged himself away from the exhibit, as he did so noticing for the first time the scrappy note taped to the table’s forward edge. There was no number but the artist had at least made a half-hearted stab at titling the dollhouse slum, even if that was only with an unimaginative tag which read The Boroughs. Shaking his head ruefully, he made for the fresh air.

Outside, inhaling a too-sweet first quarter inch of cigarette, it struck him that all the surrounding flats and maisonettes, diminished by their distance from him, were almost exactly the same size as those inside the gallery, the bygone buildings caught in the wrong end of Alma’s telescope. Those unknown people briefly treading the far balconies, bag-burdened widows shuffling and stout men in premature string vests, were similarly dwindled to the scale of Airfix Royal Fusiliers – they’d never made a box with stems of huddling civilians – and he was surprised to note that the degree of personality which he attributed to these remote pedestrians was hardly more than he’d allow a plastic figure of equivalent size. Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.

Above, amid scudding vanilla floss on Cerulean Blue, a shifting and elastic flock of starlings momentarily assumed the outline of a single bird. It was a more ingenious effect than anything seen thus far at the exhibition, although he’d admit that the last item had both impressed and unnerved him. Glancing back across his shoulder at the nursery’s picture window, he construed the riotous jumble of attendees visibly contained within its bordering frame as an art statement in itself, perhaps a lurid study by one of those vicious Weimar stylists like George Grosz or somebody like that. He could see Alma as she stood attempting to console or further condescend to an offended-looking Robert Goodman and beyond her made out the malevolent old ladies, definitely sisters he decided, whom nobody seemed to know, both standing listening and nodding eagerly as Roman Thompson and Melinda Gebbie laughingly recounted something which involved extravagant gesticulation to the weathered anarchist’s unconvinced boyfriend. Taking a last few fugitive puffs on his greatly truncated cigarette, as though before the scaffold, he corkscrewed its stub into the damp grass at his feet, deciding that he should once more retire within since Alma’s effigies weren’t going to castigate themselves.

Through the propped-open entrance, window-lensed air slapped him with a warm, ethereal flannel. Tacking through the scrum along the forward edge of the obstructing table, essaying a path of tight diagonals that took him past Dave Daniels, late arrivals he identified as Ted Tripp and Tripp’s shrewd and saucy lass Jan Martin, plus a hangdog and trail-dusted figure who Mick thought might have been Alma’s dealer, he arrived eventually at the point where he’d left off, a little way along the nursery’s northern wall. Pointedly trying not to look at item twelve’s industrially scoured facial landscape, he turned his attentions to the largish landscape-ratio pencil crayon drawing on its right.

This time the scrawled, perfunctory label was taped to the plain frame’s lower spar and simply read Upstairs. More accurately it read Upstars, a tiny letter ‘i’ and a directional dart of blue biro added underneath the misspelled title as a hasty and corrective afterthought. All this untidiness, he realized, was beginning to upset him. Having previously had only limited experience of the phenomenon, he’d hoped for more from serious culture. More professionalism. Though it wasn’t actually his area of expertize he felt his sister must be showing Art up somehow, making it look more like fly-tipping than the prestigious social institution he’d assumed that it was meant to be. Already miffed with item thirteen after brief perusal of its messy caption, Mick lifted his gaze to the wide-angle piece itself and found it near infantilising in its wondrousness; in the proportions of its marvel.

The frankly celestial view presented was as if the viewer gazed along the length of a gargantuan boulevard or hallway, broad and high enough to lose a town in and appearing to run on forever, desperately pursuing an escaped vanishing point. His reeling spatial equilibrium recovering, he realized belatedly that he was looking at a monstrous and impossibly enlarged Emporium Arcade, with distant bounding walls that rose, tier upon tier, towards a glass train-station roof wide as the Amazon. Through this, replacing weather there were complex geometric figures, massive and irregular in dotted white lines against blue as though a manual for atmospheric origami. Other than this vertigo-inducing ceiling, the vast corridor appeared to be made out of wood. Pine planking of extravagant dimensions stretched away to the remote convergence of the background, with at intervals what looked like outsized horizontal picture-frames, a grid of bevel-bordered holes filling the staggering expanse from edge to edge. The closest of these apertures had one end of its oblong visible in close-up at the picture’s bottom center, the restricted glimpse down into it revealing only setting jelly, stained glass, or perhaps some novel combination of the two. Out from the roomier of these containing rectangles, a half-mile off along the indoor avenue, rose trees that were preposterously magnified, a silver birch scaled up to a sequoia with the badly drawn eyes of its bark now those of a leviathan. The work achieved immensity in the contrasting placement of almost microbial human figures to supply the necessary agoraphobic size and distance, sparsely strewn flea-circus individuals in dreamlike stances like the hybrid offspring of Delvaux and R.S. Lowry. Closest to the lower foreground and thus most discernible, two children stood on the raised wooden far edge of the nearest floor-hole, gazing off away from the observer and surveying an interior infinity. The smaller of the pair he recognized from the blond curls and tartan dressing gown as his own infant likeness, last seen via the medium of chronic dermatitis in the previous image, seated on his mother’s knee in their back yard. The taller urchin was the little forehead girl, also from item twelve, identifiable by her skinned-rabbit scarf. A far light wet and white drenched the extremities of the huge gallery in sloppy dazzle.

Almost every color was a layered glaze of others in a wordless palimpsest, with this fastidious technique swiped openly from the superior crayon work of Alma’s pal Melinda, as his sister had often attested. The depicted great hall, once seen, made the tiny nursery in which it was exhibited seem even more cramped and oppressive by comparison, with a typhoon of elbows and the aural carpet-fluff of conversation hyphenated by Ben Perrit’s tape-looped laugh, an Ancient Mariner on nitrous oxide. Taking a last glance at the bright landing and its liberating endlessness, he shuffled to his right between some fellow connoisseur sardines and scrutinized the next two offerings, both narrow portrait-aspect slats of polychrome hung one above the other. Uppermost was exhibit fourteen, and frowning at the exercise-book tag affixed beneath it, this time with the blue ballpoint fading to nothing mid-word before it resumed in red, revealed the title to be An As odeus Flight.

Dear God, the thing was all in colored biro, all one foot by three of it, and quite a disconcerting thing it was. Mick had an inkling he remembered Alma telling him about this piece when she was working on it sometime around last September, saying that she’d managed to track down a source of the immensely satisfying multi-colored biros that had been her chosen medium during childhood. She’d complained that these days anything in colored biro would most likely be considered as Outsider Art, although she thought this term a middle-class evasion to avoid having to speak of Nutcase Art which, meant admiringly, was her preferred description of the genre. In the case of item fourteen, Mick thought that she definitely had a point. The person who’d laboriously tinted this imposing image, graded scribble over graded scribble, burnished until every hue became a sucked-sweet sticky gemstone, shouldn’t be allowed to go outside. The most disturbing thing about it was that it resembled an accomplished illustration from a nineteenth-century children’s book, albeit one conceived and executed in some maximum security environment of either Hell or Bedlam. From the glass roof in the exquisitely doodled upper background to the pale wood floorboards in the lower, Mick deduced that this scene was apparently occurring in the same unlimited interior space as the preceding panorama, as though the whole numbered sequence of seemingly unrelated pieces had decided to resolve themselves into a linear story of a sort, a ludicrously grandiose wordless comic strip albeit one with precious little in the way of continuity between its monster panels. At least this one had an actual monster in. Down at the bottom a small group of people, mostly children, stood about what looked to be one of the old-style workmen’s braziers that Mick could not recall with any accuracy when he’d ceased to see around. Two of the kids, he thought, were his own toddler avatar and the mysterious girl with the necrotic necklace from the last two pictures, although these were very small and, as in item thirteen, faced away from the percipient. Four other children were in view, all unidentifiable, accompanied by a more somber and ever so slightly bigger figure which appeared to be that of a strange old woman in a bonnet and black apron. Like him and the rabbit-wrapped girl, all these had their backs turned, gazing both up and away towards the unbelievable monstrosity that all but filled the picture’s further reaches. Mountainous in its incomprehensible dimensions, this was a grotesque three-headed horror sat astride a low-slung dragon creature only slightly less appalling than its hideous rider. One head was that of a picador-crazed bull, while balancing it on the other shoulder was a snorting ram with curled horns like black ammonites, if ammonites could outgrow whales. The central cranium belonged to a crowned man of startling ugliness and apoplectic rage, the overall proportions of this triple-headed dragon-jockey having something of the dwarfish to them. Naked, in one fist the furious abomination clutched a lance on which streamed rivulets of filth, a sharpened barber’s pole of shit and blood that scratched the cloud-high ceiling glass with its appalling tip. Mick thought that there seemed something biblical about the tableau, albeit a bible where the schizophrenia was unambiguous. He shuddered inwardly and moved on to the piece beneath.

It was another one in portrait ratio if the portrait’s subject were a lamppost, a long plunging slot of fruit-gum colors in tart sherbet light. Almost predictably by this point a close view revealed the medium as cut or powdered glass, a palette that Mick recognized from the upmarket mineral water bottles in his big sister’s recycling bin. A sugaring of tinted crystal had apparently been glued to what he thought must be some sort of paint-by-numbers outline on the board or canvas underneath, with clear glass over painted colors where presumably hues were required for which no readily available commercial match existed. After some few seconds of adjustment to a grainier focus he became aware that he was looking at a steeply-angled Spring Lane as seen from its lower end, a waterfall of grimy and unrinsed milk-bottle gray with vivid Perrier weeds between its paving slabs, below a scintillant and flame-blue sky of smashed Ty Nant. Placed in the middle ground approximately halfway up the archery-slit composition was a pride, a murder or a parliament of children dressed in glittering real ale browns, too tiny for identifying detail but most probably the same grubby ensemble that had featured in the piece above. Crouched nervous in the foreground, in their number and essential coloration matching that of the kids further up the hill, was a sextet of rabbits with crushed bicycle reflector lights for eyes. Indeed, a glance at the perfunctory blood-biro scrawl beneath the work confirmed that Rabbits was its title. Mick quite liked it. He thought that for once he could discern the picture’s meaning and intention: Alma had removed a slice of their neglected neighborhood and turned it into a church window, a poor man’s church window made from fight-dashed empties and yet no less a receptacle for saints. Or possibly she’d just meant that the district had a lot of bottle.

Exhibits sixteen and seventeen were both in black and white, which he found came as a relief after the battering his rods and cones had taken from the previous pieces. Both were relatively small, perhaps A4 if that was the same paper-size he thought it was, not quite so gangly as foolscap nor yet quite so squat as quarto. High up on the nursery wall and side by side above a large and sumptuous scene in oils immediately beneath, Mick had to go up on his toes to see them properly, considerably more work than he felt should be expected of the public at an exhibition. The first, on the left side, was a pen and ink-wash halftone illustration, something from a children’s annual that had been hallucinated by a child running a temperature, its amateurish subtitle declaring it to be The Scarlet Well. Down in its lower reaches, sheltering below a low brick wall in what appeared to be someone’s back yard, were the by now familiar half a dozen ragamuffins, closer to the viewer here and thus more easily deciphered. Other than his infant self and the kid with the roadkill garland there was a small girl with glasses and a serious demeanor, a tough looking older boy with freckles and a bowler hat, a little roughneck having features not dissimilar to the young lady with the rabbit salad, and a tall and decent-looking kid who had the bearing of the sensible one from the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. The entire group were crouched, all peering up with understandable alarm into the blind white heavens visible beyond their brick wall’s capstones where a nightmarish array of forms seemed to be tumbling through the sky, streaming a vapor of gray after-images behind them. At the top, eye-damagingly small and far away, a horse-drawn milk-cart somersaulted through some eight of nine reiterations, while below a hurricane of multiple-exposure dogs, cats, hymnbooks, fishwives, gasmasks, cigarette cards, teddy boys, prescription glasses, dentist’s chairs and cutlery cascaded inexplicably through empty space, a weather of postwar ephemera. Something about the presence of the children made the vista seem more wondrous than unnerving, an excited sense that this would be a sight to see.

Immediately to the right was item seventeen, identified by its toe-tag as Flatland and comprising what Mick thought to be a mezzotint, pressed from a copper plate with lines scraped on its uniformly textured surface to reveal a realm of smoky, granulated masses held in place by startling blanks; by shell-bursts of chalk white. A trio of the juvenile delinquents from the previous picture stood near-silhouetted at the center front, two of them small with one of these most likely his own infant likeness, and the central figure there between them that of the much loftier and more Dickensian youth in trailing overcoat and bowler hat. Beyond them, smoldering malignantly against a background that he realized was a view down Bath Street at the block of maisonettes on Crispin Street, was a dispiritingly massive fuming vortex, a slow and appalling gear in the movement of purgatory which intersected, as though insubstantial, with both the dark buildings that it nested in among and their unwitting residents revealed by cutaway within. Seemingly caught in this nocturnal maelstrom were what first looked to be dismal scraps of rag that on examination proved to be instead the husks or emptied skins of hapless individuals, punctured humanoid inflatables with all their bone and tissue filling gone, forgotten washing left there to disintegrate on an infernal spinner. The three children under a black firmament had something of spectators at a bonfire in their manner, although none of that exuberance. An air of desolation hung about the image, as if rather than a guy everything good was burning, going up in delicately stippled smoke.

Separate voices leaped and dived like flying fish in the acoustic swim around him, the room’s colors more intense for a few moments’ concentration on a world of monochrome. While he was still attempting to reorient himself, Rome Thompson’s feller Dean materialized beside him as if poured into such empty space as was available.

“Mick, look, you know your sister? Mick, it’s not me saying this, it’s her, you know that don’t you? Well, she says you better not have lost her fucking lighter, ’cause she wants it back. She says if you’ve not got it then she’s going to plasti … what’s it called, that thing the German in a hat does to dead bodies? It’s not spasticate, it’s …”

“Plastinate?”

Dean looked delighted. “Plastinate, that’s it! She’s going to plastinate you and make you exhibit thirty-six, but that’s just if you’ve lost her lighter. She’s a cow, your sister, isn’t she? I bet that it was fucking horrible when you were growing up. So, have you got it, like, her lighter?”

Mick could only get as far as “It’s not …” before giving up beneath the weight of several decades’ psychological abuse and simply handing over the requisite object. With a sweet and pitying smile, Dean pocketed what was now pretty obviously Alma’s property and drained himself from the coordinates he’d occupied, a clockwise bias to his motion in accordance with the Coriolis Effect. Unable to even manage a disgruntled sigh, Mick focused his attentions on the large and lavishly-framed color-field of piece eighteen, directly underneath the brace of black and white works.

Mental Fights, the label said.

“Oh, fuck me,” Mick said in reply, beneath his breath.

In oil paint and gold leaf, with an esthetic probably on loan from Klimt, two giants clad in robes of dazzling light-on-water white were dueling, in a vast arena that was still somehow the Mayorhold, with titanic snooker cues big as the channel tunnel. Hair white as his raiment, one of the enormous figures stood contorted, caught in motion with his blue-tipped weapon on the backswing and behind one brawny shoulder. His colossal adversary stumbled back from the projected point of impact, an arterial spray of golden ore suspended in the air to trace the crumpling trajectory. On teeming balconies of a Mayorhold inflated to a stack of Coliseums, stadium multitudes of tiny cowboys, roundheads, chimney sweeps and medieval friars cheered on the immense contestants and loaned their depicted bout its sense of crushing scale, the monumental thunder of its violence. The brawl’s grandeur, undercut by its brutality, was that of a bare knuckle contest between monoliths in a pub yard. Shaking his head admiringly at the eight-carat gore staining the garments of the combatants, he realized belatedly that these were two of the peculiar gowned carpenters from Work in Progress, with which Alma’s exhibition had commenced. Was this whole show, despite the lack of any clear association between its willfully disparate components, meant to tell some sort of story? One where characters’ appearances were spaced so widely in the narrative that this made any sense of cause, effect, or continuity impossible to grasp without a roadmap much too large to ever be unfolded? Furthermore, if this story was his, as Alma claimed, why did he recognize just intermittent bits of it?

His perusal of the exhibition thus far had arrived now at another of the concentration-gallery’s corners where continuing necessitated a right quarter-turn before commencing his traverse of the day-nursery’s east face, a modernistic climbing wall on which his sister’s works were untrustworthy handholds standing between mental equilibrium and intellectual freefall from a dizzy height. Touching the void he launched on the next leg of his precarious expedition into culture, with the first protrusion being item nineteen, Sleepless Swords. Relatively simple, a line-drawing in what might well have been lithographic crayon, it recalled the Daily Mirror editorial cartoons by David Low he just about remembered from his childhood, with stark moral points conveyed in easily deciphered symbols and the robust, unassuming style of a boy’s picture weekly. Alma’s version, neither topical nor unambiguous, portrayed a dark and saturnine man fast asleep in his four poster bed there at the hectic, bloody center of a battlefield. From the proliferation of pikes and peaked helmets in the carnage circling the sleeper it appeared to be a conflict from the Civil War, which made the slumbering figure – clad, on close inspection, in black armor rather than pajamas – very probably Oliver Cromwell. All around him frantic men impaled each other in the musket smoke and horses stumbled in their own intestines, sketched with soot and limned with gunpowder, while through it all the Lord Protector snored and snuggled. Mick was unsure if the scene implied that Cromwell was unconscious to the suffering of which he himself was the epicenter, or if, rather, all of this relentless butchery and these blood fountains were his dream.

Beneath this modestly sized composition, both the scale and stylings of exhibit twenty made it seem a mantelpiece upon which item nineteen merely rested. Much more complex than preceding offerings, the central image in fixed charcoal with bright orange accents was completely overwhelmed by an illustrative trim of Delft tiles, an area of carbon black and spitting flame contained within an ornamental fireplace. The picture at the heart of the arrangement was a landscape of stone chimneys and thatched rooftops, ruggedly evoked in crumbling strokes and all ablaze with licking tongues of nectarine, whereon two burning naked women danced ecstatically, long hair curling above them on the choking updraft. Striking as this pyrotechnic vista was with its restricted palette, it bore no perceptible relation to the seemingly far less incendiary continuity delineated on its tiled surround. Here, in dilutions of rich cobalt, was a linear progression of illuminated moments that commenced at the top center with a square of solid midnight ink, as if to represent the darkness of the womb before the detailed childbirth of the scene thereafter. This was followed, clearly with an eye to its own cleverness, by a vignette of the now-infant boy sprawled on his mother’s lap beside a fireplace that was itself decorated with Delft tiling, chronicling events in the life of a ludicrously tiny Christ. The next depiction showed a sickly youth sat on a church pew between older men in eighteenth-century dress, eyes fixed on a lace handkerchief which hung suspended as if fluttering down from heaven. Tile by tile the illustrated life progressed, with here a mounted young man in a foggy grove confronted by a ragged girl with great luminous eyes, there the same man somewhat older as he led his steed across rough, snowy ground to an inviting hall that waited in the winter dark, its outline hauntingly familiar. After a few moments’ furrowed bafflement Mick recognized the edifice as Doddridge Church and realized that the serial drama he was following must be the life of Philip Doddridge. He read on through marriage, children and bereavement to a final view, just to the left of the frame’s upper middle, of a fragile man and woman as they lay together in a room with foreign furnishings, both ill, the man perhaps already dead as indicated by the unrelieved blue night of the next tile, its darkness now that of interment rather than conception. Only when he peered at the appended label in red biro which revealed the title of the piece to be Malignant, Refractory Spirits did he start to fathom a connection between its account of a dissenting clergyman and the two gleefully incendiary females, pirouetting on parched thatching and only constrained by their elaborate biographic border.

Starting to experience a mild conceptual concussion, Mick migrated a pace further south along the gallery’s east wall until he reached exhibit twenty-one. Identified in steadily deteriorating crimson as The Trees Don’t Need to Know, to his relief this was a single image, once more in a spindly portrait ratio and rendered in acrylics, blacks and whites and a glum rainbow of minutely differentiated grays. Flanked by some of the by now familiar anachronistically attired children, though he noticed that his own infantile semblance was not among them, loomed another of his sister’s horrors. Terrifying travesties of nature previously inconceivable were, he acknowledged, for some reason something which she’d always been particularly good at since she’d made her reputation one tentacle at a time, adorning all those S.F., fantasy and horror paperbacks during the 1980s. This particular grotesque appeared to be a really horrible variety of sea-serpent, disastrously released into a winding urban river very similar to the Nene, where there was clearly insufficient room for it. Rearing from slow and murky waters into the nocturnal black, atop a wavering neck thick as a water main, an elongated skull like a Gestapo staff-car sprang the bonnet of its upper jaw to bare appalling shipwreck teeth, snapping in bellicose frustration at the jubilant quintet of ruffians who for some reason levitated in the narrow picture’s upper reaches, each accompanied by several fainter copies of themselves. The creature’s face, with a coiffure of stinking waterweed and snail-flesh eyes that gleamed from sockets deep as wells, was the distorted countenance of an embittered and malign old woman, bellowing her hate and rage and loneliness into the night. It was another wildly inappropriate Enid Blyton illustration, as was item twenty-two just to the right of it.

Titled Forbidden Worlds in scrawl that paled to an unpleasant serum pink the further to the right it got, this, like its predecessor, was a study in acrylics with a silent movie color scheme, albeit this time in landscape proportions. It portrayed a barroom scene as told to Hogarth or Doré by a mid-bender Edgar Allen Pe, a world of screaming abdabs where he was obscurely pleased to find his toddler self had made a reappearance. Still in his plaid dressing gown he cowered with the other small boy from the earlier paintings at the picture’s front, behind a massively rotund and gaudy form which, even from the rear, could only be the late, lamented local troubadour Tom Hall. The bar beyond, transparently what the two little lads were sheltering from, was populated by a temperance campaigner’s nightmare, an inebriate demonology. To one side a distraught and weeping man apparently made out of boards had deep runes gouged into his arm by the belligerent knife-wielding female holding him, while nearby yet another wooden man writhed half-emerged from the room’s floor, trodden back down by jeering hobnailed drunks. The ghastliest of the assembled barflies wore a toothless mouth across his forehead, mucous bubbling up in the inverted nose beneath and dazed eyes blinking from his jowls. A purgatory with an extended license, an eternal lock-in or an hour never ending that was anything save happy: could this really be the way that his teetotal sister thought of public houses, as menageries of horrid cruelty and impossible deformity? Although when he considered the pubs Alma had frequented he conceded that she had a point. He took another short step to his right and almost toppled headlong into the obliterating depths of item twenty-three.

The babble of the room withdrew, was drained away in a retreating surf. Mick stood stock still before the picture like a man paused at the mouth of a wind tunnel and afraid to move. He knew what this was; knew before consulting the identifying label where the pink ink ran out halfway through the second word before resuming in green. This was the Destructor. Seen from overhead, a curving arc down to the lower left was all that told onlookers they were witness to a mercifully incomplete view of a dreadful chimney, limitlessly vast so that no canvas, no imagination, could enclose it. Smoldering impasto streamers of sienna and burnt umber, so thick that they teetered on the brink of sculpture, spiraled out from the industrial crater’s rim towards its unseen center, the immense vaporous masses turning slowly, an annihilating nebula of shit. As dismal as the curling bands of encrustation were, it was in the gouged chasms trapped between these rills where dread resided. Here were ribbons of flat detail, cringing under towering oil-paint tsunamis as they swirled away to off-screen immolation, brown oblivion. Here were sweetshops, schoolyards and Salvation Army trombones sliding inexorably into a hell of nothing, horse-drawn coal carts with their load on fire and dancehall couples plunged, still bunny-hopping, into an asphyxiating midnight. Hopscotched paving slabs and starched white barbers, monkeys and their organ-grinders, drunks and monks among the smashed debris at the perimeter of this relentless junkyard singularity in its attempt to drink the world, or at least that part of the world within its economic reach. In the smog-maelstrom people, animals and their splintered environments were circling detritus, unintelligible suds locked into the decaying orbit of a sink-trap abyss. Pram armadas and pools coupons black with optimistic kisses, florid union banners, cinema seats flensed or pissed on, swans and singlets in a rubble waterfall down cancellation’s smokestack throat. It was the past; a reservoir of fleeting incident, a mode of living that had been made abject and was now cremated, irrecoverably lost to ash in a bonfire of the humiliations. This, then, was the toilet everything had gone down.

It was too big, too unanswerable. It would require another cigarette, as much for punctuation as anything else, which would mean prizing back the lighter from his sister. Turning round to look for her he found himself once more confronted by the scaled down district on its tabletop, an ant farm scraping by on aphid subsidies. This prospect from the east yielded a gambler’s fan of miniaturized rooftops, breaking waves of slate descending vanished Silver Street and Bearward Street, emptied into the placid tide-pool of a Mayorhold sleeping off its lunchtime ale through the eternal painted afternoon. A quarter-inch-high Vesper scooter with one wheel off stood in Bullhead Lane propped by a yard-brush, and old men in shirts and braces sat on doorsteps scowling like demoted gargoyles. For all of its manufacturer’s uncertainties, Mick was approaching the conclusion that this was the exhibition’s most compelling and straightforward artifact, ship-in-a-bottle streets which captured and preserved the near-evaporated neighborhood more perfectly than all of the oblique surrounding canvases. It certainly evoked the air of psychological serenity, the secret, lazy, golden idyll that had been peculiar to places with no status left to lose. It left him with a feeling that the world he could remember was still safe somewhere, the polar opposite of the sensation inculcated in him by the terrible mephitic vortex he now had his back to. Spotting Alma over in the nursery’s northwest corner near the caustic blister painting he was just about to see if he could get his lighter back, perhaps by offering one of his offspring as security, when his glance settled on the strip of paper fastened to the diorama’s edge, approximately opposite the similar tag that he’d noticed on the platform’s further, western side. Whereas that had The Boroughs written on it, which he’d thought to be the model’s title, this scrap was marked with the single word Mansoul. The odd name rang a distant bell, somewhere in the next diesis of remembrance, but otherwise was unfamiliar. Had Alma been unable to decide between two designations and so hedged her bets? Or had she just forgotten she’d already titled it? He’d have to ask her, if only to demonstrate that he was paying close attention.

By the time he’d inched his way back past the last ten or eleven exhibits to where she stood in conversation with Dave Daniels, he’d decided to combine his mention of the reconstructed barrio’s conflicting nomenclature with his crack at getting back the lighter, an unlikely gambit which to his surprise worked like a charm. Far better, even, given that charms never worked at all.

“Look, Warry, there’s a sign on one side of your model where it says The Boroughs. May I have my lighter back? And on the other side it says Mansoul. Perhaps you could explain.”

She grinned and said “Of course I can”, then handed him the lighter and continued talking to Dave Daniels. Making for the door before she realized what she’d done, Mick was delighted. He felt that he’d reached a new level of understanding in his dealings with his sister: when you forced her to be arsey over two things at the same time, her aggression systems couldn’t handle the extended load and would short circuit. If through radioactive accident she should ever become gigantic and embark on a civilization-threatening rampage, he’d be sure to tell the government and military so that they could bring her down. Still chuckling inappropriately at the thought of his own sister, seventy feet tall and blundering into power cables, he went out triumphant to the bright blue afternoon.

Thumbing the wheel and sparking up he sucked his cigarette’s far end to sullen scarlet life, tipping his head back to expel a Chinese chimera of writhing gray towards the Willow Pattern duotone above. After confinement with so many laudanum-infused interpretations of the locale, its reality of peeling window-frame and unkempt verge, no matter how impoverished in brick or memory, sang with a bruised and toothless joy. He breathed the postcode’s dandelion-clock atmosphere, the rolled-sleeve license of a spot in forced retirement from geography, the consolations of exclusion in the certain knowledge you were no longer expected to do or be anything. Dust too was a mantle of privilege. Across the way his gaze rolled down the incline of the car-park entrance to where forty years before had stood an alienating Cubist playground and, a decade earlier still, the traffic-free paved entry into justifiably defensive-sounding Fort and Moat streets, under siege by an aggressively forgetful 1960s. That was where his mad great-granddad and his cheerily barbaric Naan had started out, before she’d moved to Green Street after losing her first baby to diphtheria. It would have been down roughly the same passage that the fever-cart had rumbled like bad weather when it called to pick up its slight burden. Sticky strands of his genetic history were still there under several eras’ tarmac skims, pink and black licorice allsorts strata. That was history, a series of ill-judged resurfacings and random superimpositions. Narrowing his eyes against the sun he flattened different layers of time to an incongruous composite, in which reprieved infant mortalities rode a Picasso concrete horse between the pre-loved autos sleeping in their bays.

Behind him he heard the faint emphysemic wheeze of the day nursery’s door and turned to note Ben Perrit and Bob Goodman, evidently previously acquainted, simultaneously fleeing the externalized interior of Alma’s head. Both men were laughing, probably because the bleary poet had made a cold start from nowhere and the club-faced actor had been unable to keep from joining in. Mick raised a hand in greeting but the gesture fell uncomfortably between the retrospectively racist buffoonery of How! and Hitler’s prototype high five, so halfway through he turned it into smoothing back a lock of hair which hadn’t been there for some time. Still chortling, the most upsetting children’s party double act imaginable made its way across the alopecia turf towards him.

“Alright, Benedict. Alright, Bob. Had enough?”

Ben Perrit’s rolled eyes were those of a bolting horse.

“Aha! If that’s the kind o’ things you see when you stop drinkin’, I don’t fancy it. Ahahaha!”

His thespian companion’s countenance appeared to be attempting to throw itself to the ground from off a stubbly chin, too vexed by human disagreeability to carry on.

“Do you know what she had me do, your fucking sister? She made me go out and dig up all this stuff that she already knew about, just so she’d have a reason to put an insulting picture of me in her show. I tell you, we’re as flies to wanton boys where she’s concerned.”

Nudged out of school for truancy before he’d really got to grips with Shakespeare, Mick was unsure how boys and their flies were relevant to this and merely nodded, as a safety shot. The ambient mania of Ben Perrit, fortunately, flooded in to fill any resultant voids left in the conversation.

“Ahahaha! She’s done me in crayon, at the bottom of the sea. I dunno if she’s saying that I’m not even washed up, or if she means I’m in the drink. Ahaha! ’Ere, Mick, I was going to give ’er this but never got the chance. Will you see as she gets it?”

The frequently barred bard held out a sheet of folded typescript, which Mick solemnly accepted without having any idea what it represented. Poetry stuff, art stuff, something of that nature.

“ ’Course I will, Ben. And don’t be offended, how she drew you. You ask me, you got off light. You saw that one of me where I was just a bag of pimples?”

The disgruntled actor curled a lip that everyone had thought was curled already, shaking his anti-Semitic cartoon of a head in sympathetic disapproval.

“Why d’you think she does the things she does? Is she just trying to start a fight, or what? She can’t be doing it because she needs the money.”

Mick considered this, absently staring at the daycare center’s window. He could see the two old ladies that he’d noticed earlier, both standing cackling and nudging one another by the picture with the tiles around it. Dragging his attention back to Alma’s motives, he said the first thing that came into his head.

“Perhaps she’s hoping for a dame-hood.”

Goodman scoffed incredulously.

“What, by doing paintings? Dame-hoods, they’re for stage professionals, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Diana Rigg. What, so now Alma thinks that she’s an actress, does she?”

“Actually, Bob, I think they’re for women in the arts? There’s Nellie Melba, Edith Sitwell, Vera Lynn; there’s Vivienne Westwood, Barry Humphries. It’s not just for actresses.”

The veteran thug-impersonator, ever the professional, performed the first real double-take that Mick had ever seen and after that stayed silent as if processing this unexpected information. There followed an awkward interlude wherein Ben Perrit asked if Edith Sitwell had invented toast, then laughed uproariously, then said that he’d meant Nellie Melba. It seemed like a natural break, and Mick shook the men by the hand while reassuring Perrit that he’d not forget the folded sheet for Alma. The pair sauntered off past Doddridge Church in the direction of Marefair, the poet laughing and the actor audibly remarking, “Dames! Just when you think you’ve got ’em figured out …” before their outlines came to bits in Chalk Lane’s poppy camouflage.

Experiencing an upsurge of baffled affection, Mick concluded that the area’s nonsense was as vital a component as its love, its drink, its violence. Distant traffic vied with a crow altercation further along Castle Street. Stifling a momentary sense of trespass he unfolded the page that Ben Perrit had entrusted to him, and began to read.

This is a kingdom built from absences

The spaces between buildings, empty air

Where different birds sing now

Its landmarks prominent if nothing’s there

This is the principality of gone

With boundaries mapped in ink that disappears

A history of gaps

And peopled by names unpronounced for years

This is my page that the blank margins ate

Till only the eraser scars remained

An empty bag of holes

A silence by quotation marks contained

Mick felt even less qualified in having an opinion with regard to poetry than he did with regard to art, but he quite liked the shape and gait of it, a limping buffalo with one leg shorter than the others and a dignity especial to its stumbles. He refolded the sparse document and slid it into a hip pocket where it wouldn’t crumple, then, extinguishing his cigarette, turned once more to the nursery’s open door. It was a shame. He might have warmed up more to culture if it didn’t act quite so compulsory. Ah, well. There couldn’t be a lot more of this maddening exhibition left to see. Sighing resignedly he went inside to face the turpentine-thinned music.

This time, re-immersion wasn’t such a shock. The atmosphere appeared to be unwinding as the afternoon wound on, the crowd unclenching to become more navigable. As before, he was resolved to pick up from the point where he’d left off, and so retraced his clockwise path around the mirage-cluttered toddler corral. He could have gone the other way, gone widdershins, although that wouldn’t have seemed right: you didn’t find your place in books by flipping back through from the end, and Mick was already convinced that Alma’s barrage of illustrative non-sequiturs was meant to represent some sort of story, perhaps one so big and complicated it required an extra mathematical dimension to narrate it in. Or possibly her magnum opus had gone critical and he was looking here at the ballistic aftermath, at the blast distribution pattern of his sister’s weaponised and fissile head. In either case there was a tale being told, if only to the bomb squad analysts. Negotiating speed-date social interactions with a dozen people he’d already greeted, like distant acquaintances repeatedly encountered in successive supermarket aisles, he made his way around the central tableau-laden trestle to a station just beyond exhibit twenty-three, about three-quarters of the way along the pretend gallery’s east wall. With the infernal gob of the Destructor drooling sparks and toxic vapor-trails at the peripheries of vision to his left he did his best to concentrate on item twenty-four, the cryptic watercolor abstract that was directly in front of him. Its crank-green marque read Clouds Unfold. Perfectly circular, there was a saucer-sized disc of Byzantine hue and ornament placed just off center in a large quadrangle of off-white stained by parabolas of ghostly dove-gray, strokes and blotches so translucent they were hardly there at all, visually weightless to a point where they could scarcely be called masses. In the corner at the bottom left a scalloped triangle of thin dishwater had collected, while a mackerel feathering of dusty floss intruded from the upper center. Just beneath this, mounted vertically, was hung a torn-off owl’s wing or perhaps a wavering finger-tower of interstellar gas. At intervals, against the trackless ivory expanse there clustered flecks of darker neutrals, microscopic meteor shoals lost in a bleached or color-reversed cosmos, while around the ball of blue-gold filigree were traced sperm-pale elliptical trajectories that … oh. It was an eye. It wasn’t abstract after all. Filling the area from edge to edge it was a Luis Buñuel close-up of an eye, but not one set in flesh. This was an orbit tooled from Portland stone, with a faint down of graven eyebrow creeping into view above and an abbreviated sweep of cheekbone to the left below. It was the nonfunctioning optical equipment of a statue and the satellite-ellipses were unblinking lids, those of a witness to catastrophe who could not look away. The barely-visible fanned plumage to the right fell into resolution as the shadow-trap to one side of the nose’s bridge, a chiseled bluff that dropped away into the dustbowl socket. Arbitrary specks revealed themselves as texture, a stone epidermis weathered and eroded by two hundred years of rain and airborne grit. And at the picture’s focus, in the gilded iris was a medieval planetary orrery picked out by auric threads against nocturnal indigo, the flight of moon or comet plotted with sun-colored lines, projected through fixed sapphire time. It was the watch movement of a known universe, caught in an opaque and forever awestruck gaze. Mick noticed as an afterthought that the work’s basic composition was almost identical to that of the preceding shot, the dying bird’s eye view of an incinerator’s maw that simmered with particulates. He wondered if this elevating latter piece was placed in close proximity to the distressing former as a kind of ready antidote, the way it often worked out with dock leaves and stinging nettles. Feeling, at least, that the painting had gone some way to restoring his own equilibrium he sidled right into the canton of exhibits twenty-five and twenty-six, hung one above the other in the northeast corner.

Panoramic landscape over lofty portrait, the paired images were in a T-formation though were not apparently connected other than by nearness of location. On the narrow slice of wall between the two a single piece of notepaper was taped. It had dual titles written on it in erratic emerald, with both ascending and descending directional arrows indicating which was which. To say that it looked casual was to understate the point. Rather, it looked like an inscription on the inside of a public toilet door, and Mick hoped Alma could get through the final ten or so descriptive jottings without adding a big cock and its obligatory three crocodile tears of liquid genetics. The slim letterbox proportions of the topmost rectangle of art appeared to contain still a further minimalist abstract, although having just been misdirected by a sculpture’s eyeball Mick elected to look closer before he came to a verdict. Following the label’s raised green spear back to its point of origin he learned that this piece had been called A Cold and Frosty Morning, though the reasoning behind this choice was far from obvious. The picture was a Cinemascope view of mottled fog, a cobweb field that might have been achieved by taking a dark background tone comprised of black and brown and dark viridian and then applying overprinted fibers in a bleached and tangled fuzz, possibly with a sponge. Nose nearer to the cloudy marbling he could make out that the shade visible between the matted strands was actually a hyper-realistic study in acrylics which detailed an undergrowth of intertwining stems and branches, curling leaves reduced to nibbled fractals at their edges, all of this fastidious work concealed by the obscuring steam of down. It struck him that he might be looking at a bush or shrub horrifically enveloped in the spun threads of some huge arachnid, an albino strain if one went by the color of its fine suspension bridge secretions. Was it one of Alma’s monster paintings but without the monster? Only when he noticed a small, pearly slug of pigment raised up a few millimeters from the canvas and connected to the budding twig above it by the slenderest of white lines did he realize that the architect of this fibrous enigma was not some mutated spider but, instead, a minute toothpaste-squeeze of silkworm. Having noticed this unusually industrious individual it was still almost a minute before Mick was made aware that there were dozens, hundreds of the dangling, glinting casts standing out from the surface, an infinitesimal and boneless multitude become a grain, a patterning of wet and glistening corrugations. It was marvelous and, at the same time, made his skin crawl. It encapsulated one of those electrifying moments when nature revealed itself in all its alien and appalling splendor, all its bio-shock. Realizing that the foliage barely noticeable under the occluding fluff must be a mulberry bush, he felt a modest pang of crossword-puzzle satisfaction at deciphering at least the title of the work, despite having no clue how it related to the exhibition’s overall direction, or indeed to anything.

Stooping a little, hands on knees, he transferred his attention to exhibit twenty-six, immediately beneath. Instantly recognizable as figurative illustration with the straightforward appeal of a classic children’s book delineator, perhaps Arthur Rackham, this was more Mick’s cup of dormouse tea. Tracing the drooping arrow upward to its source he learned that this one was called Round the Bend. In soft and faded pastels, pinks and purples, greens and grays, an outdoor scene was conjured with a wall of towering conifers in the far background, underneath a churning and rain-bloated sky which nonetheless seemed color-pregnant, immanent with spectra. Unkempt grass rolled undulant between the tree line and a rush-fringed river, slowly winding like some tranquilized constrictor through the bottom of the picture nearest to the viewer. Here, standing with great composure on the bank and almost to her waist in the sharp reeds, was a bird-boned old lady in a cerise cardigan and navy skirt, her lustrous brunet tresses now an ash-slide. Though it clung more tightly to the skull beneath than in her youth, her face still had a loveliness; was wry and clever, luminous with fearless curiosity. Mick noticed that his sister had made a mistake, a stumble with the aquarelle that made it seem as if the woman had crossed eyes, but this did not detract from the hushed, church-like atmospherics of the drawing. There the old girl waited, relatively small down to the picture’s lower right, head cocked politely like the listener in a doorstep discourse, a means-tested Alice pensioned to a fallow wonderland. Emerging from near stagnant waters to the left and reaching almost to the picture’s upper border, patently the reason for the tall and vertical proportions of the frame, was the deformed river-leviathan from item twenty-one. The stalk of its distended throat surged up and up out from a rippled lace of pond-scum, robed in slime, thick as a redwood with the railway-carriage head precariously mounted at its top end, tilting in a compensatory drift like a cane balancing on someone’s palm. Deep in their sockets, whelks lodged in both barrels of a shotgun, the monstrosity’s malicious little eyes were fixed enquiringly upon its human interlocutor. Unnoticed in the earlier representation, Mick could now determine that the thing had hands, or fins, or something: splayed and spidery dactyls with discolored webbing stretched between them, predatory umbrellas raised in front of the freshwater basilisk and gesturing as though in trivial conversation. Tugboat-grinding jaws hung open in mid anecdote and there appeared to be the rusted carcass of a child’s perambulator, snagged on a three-foot bicuspid by its handle, in among the dripping pelt of waterweed. The carefully penciled depiction, blotted here and there by artfully positioned teardrop-damage, floating bubble-globes in which the soluble crayon details bled like spectrographs, glowed with an ambiance that was hauntingly familiar and which Mick eventually identified from his few Alma-instigated juvenile experiments with L.S.D. The tingling lysergic apprehension of a morning world about to start, beaded with Eden, was as he remembered. So was the exciting and uncomfortable sensation that this was the opalescent anteroom of madness, granting access only to whispering corridors, sedative monologues and a cumulative estrangement from the ordinary, the familiar, and the dear. The still, prismatic scene insinuated that unearthly worlds and inconceivable experience might lie behind more faces in the crowd than were suspected, and that the agreed-on family-friendly Milton Keynes of mass contemporary reality may not be privileged. The frozen moment was a violet-tinted window on the overgrown margins of being, the outlying wilderness of phantoms and hallucinations that encroached, a mind or two more every day, on reason’s street-grid.

Having reached the east side of the nursery’s southerly extreme, Mick found another ninety degree swivel was required before he could continue. At his back the multitrack surround-sound of distinct and differentiated voices mixed down to one single unseen individual possessed by a demonic legion, a slurred chorus of phased glossolalia swirling in and out of audibility behind him as though on a shifting wind. He was beginning to find Alma’s show disorienting, a relentless fusillade of rarefied and unfamiliar feelings, an unhinging blown-fuze opposite of sensory deprivation tanks more like a psychiatric particle collider, his opinions and reactions decay products of esthetic atom-smashing. Bracing himself, fearful of some new strain of highbrow malaria, he embarked on the penultimate walkabout stretch of his brain safari by examining the paired works furthest to his left of the south wall. Landscape-proportioned pieces big as family-sized cereal boxes and once more hung one above the other, twenty-seven over twenty-eight, while these were perhaps less imposing than the efforts that had come before, they were certainly no less enigmatic.

Item twenty-seven, labeled Burning Gold by its green scribbled afterthought, was not a new idea – Mick thought he could remember Alma telling him of an American named Boggs that she admired who’d first done something very similar – although the details of its execution were markedly different. A ridiculously enlarged (or perhaps inflated) reproduction of a banknote, straddling the fine-to-non-existent line dividing art from forgery and rendered in authentic-looking pen and ink, it seemed to be accumulating more absurdist details as he studied it. It was a twenty, with a copyright line at the bottom stating this year, 2006, to be its date of issue. Details of typography and serial numbers were identical to standard currency, as was the coloration and the general composition of the counterfeit’s elaborate illustration. Certain elements of content, though, had been transposed or altered. To the note’s left, as on normal money, a vaguely amphibious-looking Adam Smith faced right in profile, wrought from mauve engraving with a face of gentian dust, a topcoat and peruke of thumbprint whorls. The capitalist visionary, however, now found himself in a staring contest with a matching profile over on the right, where a comparably meticulous lavender bust of Alma’s pop-terrorist K-Foundation mate Bill Drummond had been added. Simultaneously serious and satirical, the Corby-reared Scot’s resolute gaze drilled into the architect of boom and bust’s bland salamander stare of self-assurance. There was clearly no hope of negotiation. In the center-ground between the men, the customary diagram detailing eighteenth-century pin manufacture had been skillfully replaced by a rendition of what Mick knew from his sister’s testimony to be Drummond’s celebrated burning of a million quid up on the remote Hebridean isle of Jura, where George Orwell went to finish 1984. Against a sphere of Spirograph complexity and finely hatched in tones that strayed from sepia to strawberry were four men in a ruined cottage. Three of them – Drummond himself, his K-Foundation partner Jimmy Cauty and their witness, the TV producer Jim Reid – shoveled crisp fifty-pound notes into a central conflagration, while the fourth, ex-army cinematic auteur Gimpo, captured the resultant cash-to-ashes alchemy on film. Superimposed in purple lettering above where it said “Bank of England” was the altered legend: “The division of opinion in slave manufacturing: (and the great decrease in the quantity of slaves that results).”

Moving on to item twenty-eight, just underneath, Mick thought that the idea of slavery might well be what connected the two juxtaposed exhibits to each other. With a title-note that read The Rafters and the Beams, the lower work was a brightly-embellished reproduction of an eighteenth-century sea-chart that had three-dimensional inclusions. Hanging slack across the canvas, linking the west coast of Africa to Britain and America, were heavy lengths of dirty and encrusted iron chain attached by rusted fastenings to the picture’s surface. He looked carefully for hidden ironies or meanings, perhaps subtleties concealed within the map’s antique background calligraphy, but there was nothing. The mixed-media piece’s statement was apparently as stark and simple as it seemed on first sight. The tea-stained cartography with its quaint flukes of spelling and its guesswork coastlines was a Western view of history, the map and not the territory, a construct that was never real except on paper, which would be revised, forgotten, superseded, lost, a mind-set that would crumble and disperse more quickly than the parchment it was written on. The chains, though, they were real. Chains of event that could not be undone, they would endure forever and have solid consequence long after all the plans and paperwork and trade routes that had forged them had been rendered obsolete; long after every other element in this specific image had returned to mulch and dust.

The next inclusion, twenty-nine, was hung alone and mostly executed as a choppy sea of riotous gouache. It had all the roughneck jostle of the music halls that Mick had seen, as recreated by the nineteenth-century English moderns. In the false night of a matinee, the viewer looked up from among a cheap-seat audience of jeering drunks towards the stage, the painting’s focal area, contained within the second frame of a theatrical proscenium arch. Against a threadbare backcloth with a crudely-handled copy of the front of All Saints Church smeared on it, funny-looking actors postured on a platform between balsa pillars or sat huddled on the short flight of broad wooden steps knocked up in front of this, painted to look like stone. The seated couple on the foreground stairs, an angry woman and a man clad in a garish yellow plaid, possessed a seaside Punch and Judy air in their exaggerated spousal animosity, squatting at opposite extremes of the same cone of spotlight. On the raised-up boards behind them, seemingly unnoticed, several figures dressed in period costumes that were all a uniform chalk white but otherwise historically mismatched struck attitudes of indignation or surprise with over-emphasized expressions on their floured-up features. Was this meant to be a supernatural tragedy, a Macbeth or a Hamlet with too many ghosts? Meanwhile, close to the onlooker, a herd of lewd and catcalling spectators looked on in ribald amusement, rage, or lechery. There was a messy proletarian energy that could get out of hand in the daubed light and beery gloom. The picture’s hurried green appendage, with its sticky tape detaching at one corner and a consequent diagonal tilt making it even more difficult to fathom, read, unhelpfully, The Steps of All Saints. Mick was unsure what to make of it. The seated pair, dressed for the 1940s, did not look that different from the rough-and-ready crowd that heckled them. Their anguish and discomfort, then, seemed somehow both contemporary and more real, rather than merely acted. If that were the case, though, the pretended specters strutting and gesticulating from behind them bordered on the inappropriately comical. The picture was disturbing in its weirdness and its incongruity, the sense of something very personal between the duo on the steps that had become a melodrama, a performance, exposed to the disapproval of a ticket-buying public, squirming in the limelight and mocked even by the special-effect spooks. It was a private moment in the open air that had been brought inside, into a rowdy auditorium to entertain an undiscriminating mob, displacement as unsettling as an indoor crow. Making a show of themselves, was that what the piece was saying?

Still turning the painting over in his forebrain, gingerly like a grenade or hedgehog, Mick moved on towards exhibit thirty. As he did so it occurred to him that, from above, he and his fellow gallery-goers must resemble tokens as they inched around the oblong room’s edge to avoid the table in its center, pieces on an outsized board game of the kind that had tiled his insomnia of the previous night. He glanced around the room, attempting to determine which among the other patrons was the Scotty dog and which was the top hat. Over in the far corner, near the frightful shot of Mick’s scoured features, Alma was apparently receiving some kind of a telling-off from Lucy and Melinda, very possibly about the cruel and yet ingenious portrait they were standing next to. Good. It was no more than she deserved. The captive population of the nursery had thinned a little in the hour, hour-and-a-half since the doors opened, although not enough to make his progress on the maddening Monopoly path any easier. By the wedged-open door Bert Regan looked to be wiping the floor with both Ted Tripp and Roman Thompson in a raucous laughter match, a less cerebral version of thrashing two chess opponents at the same time. Elsewhere Rome’s boyfriend Dean stood with Dave Daniels, looking at the brawling giants as they laid about them with their ore-splashed snooker cues. Dogs were arguing offstage, out in the Saturday-slumped Boroughs. Shifting his attentions back to item thirty, he moved to the next square of the circuit to receive his forfeit or establish a hotel. He didn’t pass Go or collect two hundred pounds.

The thirtieth work, in landscape aspect and enclosed by a slim silver frame, a glassy watercolor on smooth-surfaced white board, was called Eating Flowers. More than any other single piece it harkened back to Alma’s earliest employment as a science fiction cover-illustrator and was in its way breathtaking, if you liked that kind of thing. The setting, a colossal arcade that appeared to be the one from exhibit thirteen although in an advanced state of dilapidation, had tropical vegetation growing through its mossy flooring, this domestic jungle reaching for a collapsed ceiling open to unprecedented constellations, at once an interior and exterior view. Mile-long lianas, twined into electrical flex, trailed from what corroded spars remained of the remote and devastated roofing, chromed by unfamiliar stars. Moths of prodigious size flapped damply through the astral twilight, warping planks caught fire with orchids and this terminal Elysium was only backdrop for the startling apparition thundering across the lower foreground. His physique spare as an anatomic diagram, his skin with the translucency of greaseproof paper, an old man without a stitch on and hair foam-white like a cresting wave raced down the overgrown parade in pounding Muybridge strides. Eyes bulging with the strain of his velocity, his cheeks distended, brilliant petals spilled from his crammed mouth to stream away behind him in a tulip contrail. On the sprightly ancient’s shoulders, riding him, a luminously perfect baby girl was saddled, molten blond curls smearing to a comet’s bridal train as she and her feverish steed traversed that final forest. Their extremes of age made allegorical interpretations unavoidable, a freshly born world carried on the back of its exhausted predecessor or the old year and the new both late for an appointment with an as yet unforeseen millennium. It was some sort of race, perhaps the human one, projected through the fourth dimension, through the continent-colliding and empire-erasing medium of time. It looked like an unbearable amount of sweat and effort, this compulsory and rushed migration for the porous borders of a foreign future where nobody spoke the language. While it may well have been Mick’s own art-fatigue which colored the perception, he thought that the old boy and the species that he represented looked like they were dying for a good sit down. He was himself about to hasten that eventuality by hurrying to the next presentation in the sequence, when a voice beside him asked “ ’Ere, ent you Alma’s brother?”

From Mick’s right, standing in front of item thirty-one with something in the quizzical tilt to her dust-gray hairdo reminiscent of a wading bird, Bert Regan’s mom looked at him sideways. He found himself liking her immediately based solely on the gristle harp twang of her accent and the way she held her handbag like a skating-judge’s score. She’d had him from the first dropped aspirant.

“That’s right. I’m Mick. I know who you are. I was talking to your pride and joy a little while ago, so that’s where I got all the details from.”

She pulled a face.

“Me pride un joy? That’s me best crockery. What did you wanner talk tuh that for?”

Mick’s laugh came from somewhere deeper in his stomach than his laughter generally issued, from a microscopic Boroughs in his biome where the intestinal fauna transposed vowels and had an inconsistent policy on consonants. His instantly familiar new acquaintance joined in with her own accordion burst of kippered cackle, shooting a long-suffering glance towards her tattooed and guffawing ginger offspring as he bantered by the nursery door with Tripp and Thompson, a reunion with former shipmates from a pirate decade that had gone down with all hands some time before.

“Ooh, ’im. Well, take no notice o’ what ’e sez. Iz arf sharp, or else iz up ter summat. ’Ere, but what abayt yer sister, all these pictures? She’s not right, your Alma, is she? I see that big one she’d done o’ you, made ayt o’ pimples. And that’s yer own sister what’s done that, not someone what don’t like yer. Shockin’. No, a lot of what she does, well, it’s a marvel, ennit? Just not very flatterin’.”

He was enchanted by her, thin and gray and local like the twist of smoke curled from a chimney’s sunset brickwork, charmed by her affectionately raucous corvid squawk so much like Doreen’s, full of coal and comedy. She’d been a looker, you could tell, and not so many years before.

He found himself obscurely wishing that he could have known her then. Perhaps he had, or had at least caught sight of her when she was younger, something to account for the extreme sense of familiarity that he was currently experiencing, based on more than her iconic status as a Boroughs woman, he felt sure.

“No. Flattery is one of the few things you can’t accuse her of. Here, that’s a Boroughs accent you’ve got, ain’t it? Did you used to live round here? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere.”

She allowed her jaw to sag until her lips were pursed reproachfully, regarding him from under lids half lowered as if he were intellectually unworthy of whole eyeballs. It was the expression which his mom had used so often when addressing him or Alma that he had to forcibly remind himself she didn’t always look like that. Bert’s mother tutted, more in pity than contempt.

“Well, ’course I’m frum the Burrers. Did yer think that I wuz frum the moon, yer gret soft ayputh? We lived up the top o’ Spring Lane, so I never got the slipper bein’ late fer school.”

When was the last time he’d been called a great soft ha’p’orth? A halfpenny-worth. He basked in the obscure abuse. It harkened back to a more civilized age where the harshest epithet was a comparison with recalled currency. Launched on a reminiscent torrent by the mention of her childhood home she carried on regardless.

“Ooh, it were a lovely place, the Burrers. That one o’ Spring Lane your Alma done, all ayt o’ glass, I think that one’s me fayvrit. An’ yuv got no cause for complaint, ’ow she’s done you. Not after the way she’s done me. No, a lovely place. Ayr dad lived down there, in Monk’s Pond Street, after we’d moved up tuh Kingsley. I remember when ayr William wuz only just walkin’, ’ow I’d take ’im dayn there, so as ’e could see where I’d bin brung up.”

Mick found himself stumbling in his attempt to follow her account. He thought she’d said there was a likeness of her somewhere in the exhibition, and had been upon the point of asking her about it when she’d thrown him with her mention of an unfamiliar name. His forehead corrugated.

“William …?”

Appling her cheeks she shook her head, correcting herself.

“Do you know, I never can remember, you lot, yer dunt call ’im that. Bert, what you call him. ’E once ’ad a teacher call ’im that at school, an’ ’e got stuck with it. Round ayrs, ’e’s Bill or William.”

Oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah, he remembered Alma saying something now, something to that effect: a football match at school; a teacher with a momentary lapse of memory who’d shouted the first working-class name he could think of and doomed William to a life of Bert. And there was something else about that story, wasn’t there? Some complementary detail to the anecdote that for a moment now found scrabbling purchase on the waste pipe of Mick’s memory. Something about … Bert, Bill, something about … no. No, it was gone, dislodged to fall away into the canceled black of the forgotten, irretrievable. He was about to ask Bert’s mom, his newfound poster-girl for fortitude in deprivation, if she could recall his lost component of the tale, but at that moment their delightful conversation was truncated by the unselfconscious bellow of her son, acoustically equivalent to a wild pig loose at a wedding.

“Come on, Phyllis, ’e’s a married man, and yer not on Boot’s Corner now. Let’s get you ’ome, before yer show us up.” Bert’s luncheon-meat complexioned features split into a gap-toothed laugh, lecherous and suggestive even if discussing double glazing, a Sid James cascade of gurgling innuendo without object. His mother’s head wheeled like an antique Spitfire, nippy and surprisingly maneuverable, eyes looking bullets up and down her offspring’s fuselage.

“Me show you up? Yuh’ve bin embarrassin’ me ever since I ’ad yer. Since yer first drew breath yuh’ve saynded like a busted lav, and yer that ugly that they ’ad a job to tell yer frum the afterbirth. We’d got it ’ome and christened it before we realized. Show us up? I’ll gi’ you show us up, yer dibby bugger …”

Turning back to Mick she cut off fire from her machine-gums, offering him a radiant and endearing National Health smile.

“I’m gotter goo, it saynds like. It’s bin lovely meetin’ yer. I ’ope tuh see yer agen sometime.”

And with that she banked away into a sparking, chattering dove, closing the distance between her and her doomed but still chortling quarry, rubicund with giggles, a Red Baron.

“You wait till I get my ’ands on you, yer useless load o’ rubbish. Don’t think you’re too big for me to dash yer brains in with a brick while yer asleep!”

A whirling dust-storm of ferocious energy and neutral tones she rushed out through the open nursery door past the respectful cower of Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp, ball lightning following a draft, driving her errant son before her out into the disappearing neighborhood. Mick shook his head in wondering admiration at this sighting of a genus thought extinct, this social-housing coelacanth. Watching her go, he found himself awash in poignancy from out of nowhere, ludicrously inappropriate for someone that he’d only managed a three-minute conversation with. It had felt more like meeting with a crush from junior school, that meaningless vestigial flutter of the heart, the sweet and pointless sadness for alternate universes that would never happen.

Mystified not for the first time by his own internal workings, he returned his commandeered attentions to the task of getting through the five remaining pictures in his sister’s gantlet of enigmas. Picking up where he had so engagingly left off, he occupied the space vacated by Bert Regan’s mom – Phyllis, he thought that was what Bert had called her – just in front of item thirty-one. Cornered, apparently, according to its dangling viridian afterthought. A gouache work, it occupied a canvas roughly two foot square and seemed in many ways to be a partner to exhibit four, Rough Sleepers, even down to their almost symmetrical positions close to either end of the long sequence. Both works were contemporary pub scenes and achieved their major visual effect by juxtaposing grimy monochrome with color, though whereas the earlier piece contained one area of black and white amid a field of riotous hue, the painting he was gazing at effected the exact reverse. An overhead view looking down upon a crowded front bar that Mick didn’t recognize, down in the bottom left a solitary figure had been rendered in bright naturalistic shades, a tubby little man with curly white hair seated at a corner table, while the beery mob that filled the scene around him, wall to wall and edge to edge, were executed in a palette of charred fag-end and urinal porcelain, fingernail grays. The colorless inebriate jostle, cheery even in their drabness, nonetheless seemed drained of life and of contemporaneity as though they were the happy dead, the Woodbine wraiths of a persisting past. The figure at the bottom corner in his modern tints and fabrics seemed excluded by the heaving press of ghosts, if they weren’t all entirely in his mind; if this were not a picture of a haunted man, sat in an empty bar, surrounded by a magic lantern pageant of the disappeared. If that were so, then the whole throng became a thick, guilty miasma somehow emanating from the single flesh-toned individual at his table, cornered by a horde of zombie social issues, by the past, by memory.

He inched a little further to his right, progressing westward in excruciating increments, a wagon-train with palomino snails in harness or a one man continental drift. This brought him up against the nursery’s west wall at its most southerly extreme. Just half of one side of the building to complete and then he could with honor make good his escape into a comfortingly artless world. Exhibit thirty-two, apparently entitled The Rood in the Wall, was similar in its proportions to the previous piece and proved to be the image which had prompted the irate departure of Bob Goodman earlier, or at least that was Mick’s assumption. Though the great majority of painters mentioned by his sister were obscure to him, he had at least across the years achieved familiarity at second hand with the peculiar work of William Blake, and recognized the piece before him as a kind of composite, a modified amalgam of the Lambeth visionary’s cryptic images. Predominating blackness, conjuring a subterranean and funereal ambiance, was punctuated in the watercolor’s upper reaches by illuminated alcoves in which labeled likenesses presided like memorial statuary in a mausoleum. Leaning closer, he perused the names on tattered paper scrolls like Gilray dialogue-balloons: James Hervey, Philip Doddridge, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, William Blake and a few others, somber and reflective, candlelit with color in the cemetery dark. Their pious, downcast glances seemed to be directed, more in pity than contempt, towards the crouching, naked giant at the bottom of the painting, crawling wretched on his hands and knees along a stunted, lightless tunnel, bowed head weighted by a heavy golden crown. Mick recognized the figure, although only through the agency of an Atomic Rooster album cover he remembered, as Blake’s penitent Nebuchadnezzar. The damnation-shadowed features of the fallen Babylonian regent were herein replaced, however, by the asymmetric physiognomy of his sister’s much put-on actor friend, whom Alma seemed to employ as a stress-relieving executive squeeze-ball, a receptacle for her interminable gusher of abuse if Mick himself were poorly or on holiday. The only other element of the arrangement, something he did not specifically recall from Blake, was the rough-chiseled cross set into crumbling stonework at the painting’s center, just above the groveling monster but beneath the sympathetic audience of Gothic saints above. It didn’t seem to have that much to do with his own brief encounter with infant mortality, or even with the Boroughs, but then you could say that about the majority of the supposed works of art included in the heavily confined yet sprawling exhibition.

Feeling like an athlete superstitious about looking at the finishing line until they were right on top of it, he essayed an inexpert version of the military right-turn he’d learned at Boy’s Brigade and saw to his immense relief that there were only three more decorative hurdles between him and the propped-open doorway, between him and freedom. Better still, the first of these, which he was currently confronted by, was small and simple. On an insubstantial sheet of what looked very much like typing paper, tin-tacked to the nursery wall as if it were the work of a precocious child on parents’ day, there was a fluid and expressive pencil drawing with a wandering line as natural as April weeds. Not even bothering on this occasion to attach a separate label, Alma had just scrawled The Jolly Smokers at the top left corner of the piece itself, in chlorophyll. The drawing was a spindly and fragile detail of St. Peter’s Church, the front porch of the disused building with its honeyed stone and the black wooden ribcage of its roof, a strand of wheatgrass straggling from between the slabs outside its open entrance. In the shadowed recess a recumbent figure slumbered, trainer-soles towards the viewer and all other indicators of the person’s body-type, age, gender or ethnicity concealed beneath the slippery tucks and undulations of the unzipped sleeping-bag spread over them. Silvery graphite traceries uncoiled and trickled lovingly across the quilted contours, the implied form motionless beneath, digressing to investigate the intricate topography of each plump fold. The more Mick studied the deceptively spare composition, the more he found himself questioning his first assumption that this was a study of a homeless person, merely sleeping. With the bag pulled up and covering the face there was a mortuary aspect to the imagery which could not be ignored. In its veiled stillness, that of dream or of demise, the slumping shape inhabited a hesitating and ambiguous borderland between those states, much like the one suggested by that physicist who’d either gassed his cat or hadn’t. Mick could come to no conclusion other than an observation that, in disagreement with its title, the depicted scene was far from jolly and appeared to be nonsmoking.

Moving northwards once more he progressed to the next picture, which he realized with a leaping heart was the penultimate exhibit. A square work in oils as spacious and resplendent as its predecessor had been meager and without assumption, the attendant taped-on tag revealed its title as Go See Now This Cursed Woman. What at first appeared to be a maddeningly regular and even geometric abstract, the imagining of Milton Keynes by a despairing Mondrian, resolved on close inspection to an intricately-realized reproduction of a game-board, a generic layout on the Snakes-and-Ladders model of a lavishly embellished grid, each box emblazoned with a decorated number or iconographic miniature. He realized with a minor start that the game’s focus seemed to be the mink misfortunes of Diana Spencer, the familiar tabloid Stations of the Cross – sun through a thin skirt showing off her legs; posed at the gate with Charles; a coy glance up at Martin Bashir or her final public smile before the rear doors of the Paris Ritz – reduced to outsized postage stamps. The game-board layout, with its numbered spaces, loaned these incidental moments the uneasy sense of a relentless, hurtling linear progression to a predetermined outcome: an arrival at that final square, sooner or later, irrespective of the falling die, an outcome obvious from the commence of play or, indeed, from the opening of the cellophane-sealed box on Christmas morning. What had startled Mick was the unlikely coupling of board games and Diana Spencer, just as in his sleepless ruminations of the night before. It was quite clearly no more than coincidence and, now he thought about it, not particularly memorable at that. The idea of the blond from Althorp’s life as a bizarre and fatalistic form of Cluedo was not that much of a reach, all things considered. Still, it had him going for a moment there.

Stealthily, he began to move toward the final lurid obstacle that stood between him and the gaping nursery door. Internally, he played a game where he and all the other gallery-goers were a surly crowd of culture-convicts, shuffling around the exercise yard, wondering if wives and sweethearts would still be there waiting for them on the outside after all this time. Unnoticed, hopefully, by the imaginary machine-gun towers that he’d by then positioned at the corners of the room, he inched towards the unlocked prison gate and genuinely gasped to feel the warder’s heavy hand fall on his shoulder from behind.

“Here, Warry? Have you got the lighter?”

Mick turned to face the dipped glare of his big sister’s headlight gaze, that of a sulky and uninterested basilisk who couldn’t be assed turning people into anything except stone cladding. Alma seemed preoccupied and, worryingly, too distracted to insult him. Even in her mention of “the” lighter she appeared to have reclassified it as their mutual property and not an object that belonged to her alone, which in itself seemed to suggest a softening of policy. Was Alma ill? He fished inside a pocket of his jeans for the requested artifact. Handing it over, he felt duty-bound to ask.

“Warry? Is everything okay? You don’t seem quite your usual self. You’re being reasonable.”

Taking the lighter from him without any kind of thank you, which at least was more her style, his sister shook her hanging-garden head in the direction of the table-mounted model of the Boroughs, like one of the district’s rodents in that, famously, you never got more than six feet away from it.

“It’s this. It’s still not right. It isn’t saying what I want it to. It’s saying ‘Ooh, look at the Boroughs. Wasn’t it a lovely place, with all that history and character?’ All of the local photo-books I based it on are saying that already, aren’t they? This needs something else. Cheers for the lighter, anyway. I’ll bring it back soon as I’m done with it.”

Once more, there was that weird politeness and consideration. Alma drifted off, presumably to elevate her mood and smoke her way towards a resolution of her quandary. Drawing a deep breath in anticipation Mick turned his attentions to exhibit thirty-five, the show’s final inclusion, dubbed by its torn-paper tag as Chain of Office. Portrait aspect, once again in gouache, a full-length appraisal of a single figure on a ground of marvelous cascading green – the picture’s bare facts crowded in to fill Mick’s field of vision and prevented him from viewing its totality. Alone, the single-color backcloth with its seethe of nettle, lime and peridot was overwhelming, an experiential bouillon taste of knee-high fairground, fumbling adolescent meadow, boneyard moss. The painting’s subject, standing with both arms raised in greeting or benediction, had a mayoral air in part bestowed by the work’s title and in part by the eponymous medallion hung about their neck. On close inspection this gunmetal gong appeared to be a saucepan lid, with its supporting chain having seen previous service dangling from the cistern of a lavatory. The multitude of references in the pieces thus far, whizzing past above Mick’s head, had made him feel like he was being strafed by Melvyn Bragg but this, at last, was one he caught; was one he recognized. The dented lid, he knew, was an allusion to the bygone Boroughs custom of appointing some disreputable individual as the neighborhood’s own mayor, a pointed satire staged there on the Mayorhold at the site of the Gilhalda, the original town hall, to mock the processes of government from which Northampton’s earliest population was by then excluded. The self-deprecating nature of the tin-pot talisman itself was undercut, however, by the sumptuous robes in which that central form was draped, more gloriously decorated than those worn by any real-world civic dignitary. Around the hem there ran a border of meticulously rendered paving slabs, graying and cracked with jade grass in the seams, while up around the collar …

It was him.

The person in the painting, it was Mick. It had Mick’s face, perfectly captured even down to the smeared glaze of highlight up by his receded hairline, although after a few moments’ scrutiny it came to him that this ingenious verisimilitude was actually occasioned by the paint still being wet. The likeness, even so, was unmistakable and, truth be told, atypically flattering. From the sincere blue eyes to the engaging smile Alma had made him look quite handsome, at least in comparison with all his earlier appearances throughout this showing, whether as a simpering toddler or as a burns ward admission with his features more eroded than the sphinx. If he’d known sooner that the entire exhibition would be leading up to this, he wouldn’t have been half so grumpy or ill-humored in his earlier appraisals. Now, though, he felt guilty and uncomfortable, which almost certainly was the effect his sister had been hoping for, if he knew Alma. Otherwise she would have said something when she waltzed up to pinch his lighter a few minutes back, with him stood right here by the painting which mythologized him, which absolved her of all her foregoing cruelties. Since he was standing facing the west wall of the day nursery, the only one with windows, he looked up from Chain of Office and out through the smeared glass for a sighting of her, pacing, puffing, wearing even more tracks through the patchy turf outside, but she was nowhere to be seen. His first thought was that she’d been so distressed about whatever she believed was wrong with her miniature Boroughs that she’d had a breakdown and absconded: a faked death, a changed appearance, a disguising limp, a ticket to another town. No one would ever again meet with Alma Warren, the failed model-maker. While he was almost entirely certain this was what had happened, he felt that he should at least take a quick shufty at the gallery behind his back before he bothered to alert the media.

His sister, it turned out, hadn’t even made it as far as the nursery door before being waylaid by her adoring or deploring public. She was further off from it, in fact, than Mick himself, leaning against the table’s further, eastern side and glowering at her handiwork like a displeased Jehovah, albeit one who’d swapped his beard for lipstick, though each to their own, of course, and nothing wrong with that. More disconcertingly, she was flanked by the two elderly ladies Mick had noticed earlier and who’d been slipping in and out of view throughout the afternoon. One stood to either side of Alma as she loomed over the papier-mâché district, hunching like a monstrous slagheap with more slag to it than usual, ready to engulf the shrunken Boroughs in a devastating avalanche of turquoise fluff and bitterness. The old girls, spider-webbed with wrinkles and their exposed flesh the mud of a dried reservoir, seemed to be taking turns to stoop and mutter their opinions into alternating ears of the preoccupied and frowning artist, though Mick doubted that the advice of whichever woman was engaging Alma’s deaf side would be implemented. With her wrecker’s-lantern eyes fixed irremovably on the diminished alleys of her reconstructed world his sister didn’t look at either of the women while they spoke to her, encouragingly by the look of things, but would acknowledge their remarks with grave nods of the head. Incredibly, it seemed that not only was Alma for once listening to somebody’s opinion of her work, but that she also appeared to agree with them. The two were evidently loving every minute of their audience with the subdued and uncharacteristically compliant artisan. From deep within their creased papyrus sockets their eyes gleamed and sparked, hobnails on cobbles, as their wizened heads dipped one after the other to their whispering, well-mannered vultures pecking at Prometheus’s liver. Though what they were saying to his sibling was impossible to hear above the hubbub of the gallery, Mick thought it looked as though they were administering an excited pep-talk, urging Alma to stick with her vision and to take it further, carrying it onwards. Something like that, anyway. The biddies pointed jabbing crab-leg fingers at the model on the table, with the one on Alma’s deaf right side repetitively mouthing something that looked like “keep on” or “go on”, something with two syllables like that. And Alma nodded as if she were heeding counsel that was irrefutable, taking career instruction from two dotty-looking termagants who ninety minutes previously she hadn’t known existed. Still no closer to an understanding of his sister than he’d been, aged seven, when she’d shot him with that blowpipe, Mick turned back to Chain of Office to continue his inspection.

Having now recovered from the shock of realizing that he was this ultimate exhibit’s subject, he was able to take in the painting’s other content, notably the splendid robe in which his sister had seen fit to deck her central figure. Hanging folds of heavy velvet were embroidered with exquisite threads of gold, a gilded crazing that resolved at a few inches from the picture’s surface into a meandering treasure-map of the terrain that Mick was born from. It was one of those charts that had three-dimensional bits bulging out from it, of which he was always unable to recall the name. He could see overhead delineations of St. Andrew’s Road and Freeschool Street, Spring Lane and Scarletwell as plunging pleats in parallel and Doddridge Church a decoration on the bias, burial ground compressing as it gathered to the pinch-points. It occurred to him that in the raised-up buildings and projections of a vanishing cartography, a bit like Alma’s problematic Boroughs diorama, she’d contrived this last piece to reprise all of the exhibition’s other works in small. He eyed the piece, squinted the gaud, and saw that his ennobled likeness sported tiny glued-on snail shells as links, one mottled spiral badging either cuff. He was absorbed in these calciferous adornments, trying to establish if they still housed mollusk occupants, when he heard the distinct Pacific cadences of Alma’s pal Melinda Gebbie raised above the background susurrus, and everything kicked off.

“Alma, you fucking asshole, don’t you fucking dare!”

Mick turned, from only idle curiosity, and found himself confronted by the single image from this viewing that he’d take away with him, the solitary tableau that was genuinely unforgettable. His sister, with a blankness of expression that was either innocent or guilty to a point past caring, saint or serial murderer, leaned forward over Marefair and Saint Mary’s Street, reaching past Castle Street and across Peter’s House to Bath Street. The old ladies huddling behind her hugged each other and performed a clumsy, hopping little dance. Lucy Lisowiec’s enormous eyes prepared to fire themselves across the room, accompanying her rising siren wail.

“Almaaaaaaa!”

Pressing a wavering tongue of blue and yellow from the flint-wheel of Mick’s lighter, Alma let it taste the simulated birdshit caked around the rim of her scaled-down Destructor. More-ish, evidently. Dribbling incendiary frills of indigo poured down the lampblacked chimney tower to its base with startling rapidity, sending up acrid and authentic billows of particulate towards the ceiling-mounted sensors as they did so. It all burned so fast, being constructed wholly from materials designed to do just that, and in his sister’s dawning look of apprehension it appeared that even she was unprepared for the appalling pace of the toy-town calamity she’d just unleashed.

A spreading gorse of conflagration engulfed Bristol Street and its environs, with the bijoux fever-cart and centimeter-high mare towing it into the mouth of Fort Street parched to curling smuts and gone upon the instant. Arson reflux scorched the narrow gullet of Chalk Lane and spewed annihilating riot-bile down Marefair, the anachronistic witch-hat turret on Black Lion Hill shriveling unrepentant at the stake and twisted round with shifting scarves of gold. Infernal tributaries sluiced from long-gone Bearward Street to flood the Mayorhold with combusting vapor, tromp l’oeil sweetshop windows disappearing into light before the flickering translucence climbed the razor-cut of Bullhead Lane to Sheep Street, where ignition moved like scrapie through the paper flock. Hot orange devils swarmed on the crusader church, unraveling its steeple into sparks and leveling the thick-walled round down to a howling mouth red as a branding-iron, a blazing torus, pinkie ring of an apocalyptic angel. Mercy, bright and cauterizing, stroked the wounded neighborhood. In Marefair, Cromwell’s bunk at Hazelrigg House was made immolate among the millenarian tinder, shaved skulls you could strike a match on, cavalier plumes smoldering on pinpricked cornices. From the charred stump of Bath Street’s smokestack, searing ripples spread through the flea-circus district in dilating sapphire hoops, as from a shooting star fallen into a petrol pond. Incineration danced on Broad Street and Bellbarn, flash-vanishing Salvation Army forts and suffering no barber’s pole that it remain unlit. The Rizla laundry flapped like phenix wings in Greyfriars’ central courtyard, damp with drizzled flames, while all along the crisping terraces six dozen public houses called last orders and submitted to a harsher temperance. Saint Elmo flirted with the upper reaches of Saint Katherine’s high-rise, jumped between laboriously fashioned television aerials on Mary’s Street in a peak-time transmission, sentimentally retracing the trajectories of a Restoration predecessor, and the martyring Niagara spilled down Horsemarket dragging a bridal gauze of choking fume behind. Cremating fancywork writhed briefly on Saint Peter’s architraves. Zero-gage holocaust accomplished in mere seconds an erasure over which the Borough Council had deliberated for just shy a century, deleting cobbled histories in its sheathing Catherine-wheel spray, no west wind this time to ensure that only the torched gloveries and milliners of Mercers’ Row or thereabouts would ever be regenerated. The short reach of houses on St. Andrew’s Road from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane became an ashen Rothko bad day, by some fluke of thermal whimsy sparing only the Monopoly-sized premises at the line’s south extremity. Boys’ clubs and bookmakers, cottaging-friendly lavatories and corner dives were caught up in a pyroclastic flow from Regent Square down to the foot of Grafton Street, and Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dance-school on the current site of Alma’s exhibition spouted rolling white clouds from its open door in microcosm of the building it was modeled on and situated in. Sharp to the sinuses and tear-ducts, these at least elicited a lachrymosity that the more gradual demolitions of some several decades had failed to provoke. Fast-forwarded there on the tabletop a precinct of the heart was firestormed to oblivion in facsimile, its final music the repeated shrill of panicking detectors.

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 traumatized. 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 Phenix 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 vermilion 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. Focusing 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 mom 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 mom, 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 inquiry, 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 Phenix 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 mustache 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 arbor 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, Erné” perhaps. Assaying branches overdressed in pink like gypsy bridesmaids, blackbird Schuberts hung their fleeting compositions on the gray staves that still raveled 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 aging asses on the slab-topped wall bounding the chapel’s southern face.

It was a lulling bee-drone of an afternoon despite persistent 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 license, 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 plow 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, molded 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 neighborhood’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 Naan used to live. According to what Rome said, back in the twelfth century it used to be a corn-mill called ‘the Marvelous Mill’. If you go down by the river, underneath the bridge with all the beer cans and syringes and disemboweled 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 employes 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 laboring 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 councilor 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.

“Then – and listen, this is brilliant. Adam Smith, the bloke who’s on the twenties, the economist, he either comes and sees the mill or hears about it, with its looms all working nineteen to the dozen and its shuttles whizzing back and forth and no one there, as though it were a factory being run by ghosts. He thinks it’s wonderful, tells everybody that he knows how it’s as though a massive unseen hand were guiding all this furious mechanical activity, some manner of industrial Zeus rather than basic principles of engineering. It’s what always happens with new science in a religious age, like all of these holistic fizzy water manufacturers who babble about quantum physics.”

Mick, who found both quantum physics and expensive fizzy water equally unlikely concepts, watched the fat man waddle by them on their right, seemingly headed for the lightly smoldering day nursery. Behind his lenses customarily complacent eyes regarded the pair sitting on the church wall with suspicion as he barreled past, particularly Alma whom he more than likely recognized. Either unbothered by his presence or else unaware she pressed on with her tale excitedly.

“So Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idiot-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Reagan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone that we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.”

A dog barked, away on their left in the vicinity of Mary’s Street, one bark, then three, then silence. Not for the first time since getting up that morning, Mick felt an encroaching air of strangeness. There was something going on, something unsettlingly precise in its familiarity. Had this happened before? Not something like this but this exact situation, with his buttocks going dead from the stone wall’s chill striking through thin trousers. First one bark, then three, then silence. Wasn’t there something about Picasso, or had that not happened yet? Floundering in the déjà vu, he had a feeling Alma was about to mention a glass football.

“Warry, seriously, everywhere’s Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein’s right, then space and time are all one thing and it’s, I dunno, it’s a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they’re there forever. Nothing’s moving. Nothing’s changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl. And when our films, our lives, when they come to an end I don’t see that there’s anywhere for consciousness to go but back to the beginning. Everybody is on endless replay. Every moment is forever, and if that’s true every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city. You know, if I’d thought to put that in a program or a booklet at the exhibition, I suppose that people might have had more chance of working out what I was on about. Ah, well. It’s too late now. What’s done is done, and done just one way for all time, over and over.”

Cue the chubby councilor. This thought had just occurred to Mick, by now slack jawed and reeling with recurrence, when the white-haired and white-bearded Christmas bauble rumbled back down Chalk Lane and once more into their field of view. From his outraged expression and the faint wisps of charred papier-mâché smog which wafted their malodorous tendrils after him, it was apparent that he’d witnessed the evacuated nursery and had very probably gone in to see the burned-out model Boroughs at first hand. All of a sudden, Mick knew down to the last syllable exactly what would transpire next and how Pablo Picasso had a part in it. It was that anecdote, the funny story he’d heard Alma tell at least a half a dozen times, about when Nazis visited the artist’s Paris studio during the occupation and came, with some dismay, on Guernica. The huffy councilor was going to say the same thing that the German officers had said on that occasion, and Mick’s sister would then shamelessly appropriate the Cubist sex-gnome’s spirited and memorable reply. And then the dog would bark again, four times. Scalp tingling, Mick took another turn round on the ghost train.

Stubbing her illicit fag out on the slab where she was sitting, Alma raised her less-than-interested gray and yellow gaze in time to notice the rotund former official for the first time. Near to apoplexy he raised his left arm, a trembling finger pointing back towards the daycare center where the smoke alarms still sounded, and unwittingly delivered the Gestapo dialogue regarding Guernica.

“Did you do that?”

It was the perfect set up. Beaming beatifically, his sister offered up her plagiarized reply.

“No. You did.”

Blinking dazedly and without an articulate response the erstwhile council leader trundled off in the direction of Marefair, a haywire snowball that got smaller as it rolled downhill instead of bigger. From St. Mary’s Street came the predicted canine outburst: woof, woof, woof and then a faint pause. Woof.

Despite the clockwork eeriness, Mick found that he was chortling. Kicking her heels beside him, never one afraid to laugh at her own stolen jokes, Alma joined in. Somewhere upslope behind and right on schedule, sirens were approaching through the stopped streets of a broken heaven.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Where to start, and where to finish?

Firstly I must thank my wife, the artist and writer Melinda Gebbie, who’s been almost as intimately involved with this book as I have since its beginnings. I think I proposed to her just before commencing the project, and she’s had almost every chapter since read out aloud to her, whether she wanted it or not. It was her technical advice that fleshed out the tools of Ernest Vernall’s trade in chapter one and Alma Warren’s craft through the remainder of the novel, and most of all it was her belief that this work was important and her almost-ten-years of encouragement to that effect that helped give me the stamina to complete it. Thank you so much, darling. Without you, I doubt very much there’d be a book requiring these acknowledgments.

Almost as importantly, I must offer my deepest gratitude to Steve Moore, even though he’s no longer around to receive it. Steve completed his invaluable initial edit of Jerusalem’s first third – memorably including the stylistic critique “Ugghh” in red pen in the margins; mercifully, I forget just where – and brought his dazzling intellect to all our formative discussions of the view of time which we later discovered to be called Eternalism, by which point we’d both long since converted to that doctrine. If this book’s central idea is correct (and given physicist Fay Dowker’s current researches into an alternative hypothesis, it’s at least falsifiable and testable) then Steve is currently approaching his second birthday in a leafy close on Shooters Hill in 1951. Thanks again for everything, mate, and all being well I’ll run into you again in roughly nineteen years, your time.

Steve’s abrupt decision to put our theory to the test in March 2014 (some people – you pay them an advance to edit your gigantic novel, and then you never see them again) meant that I had to find a selection of other editors and proofreaders who weren’t scared of me. First and foremost among these was the poet, author, editor and comedian Bond, Donna Bond. Donna edited the whole book, took me to task several times for my misuse of the word ‘careen’ – apparently it’s a term specific to the practice of overturning a ship in order to scrape the barnacles from its hull, but who could have known? – and even somehow noticed a couple of typos in the impenetrably made-up mess of chapter twenty-five. Thanks, Donna, for doing such a meticulous job of
something that I didn’t have the nerve, focus or knowledge of obscure naval terminology to face on my own. The next pass at the editing fell to my friends, the writers John Higgs and Ali Fruish. John spotted a few things, but was mostly invaluable in giving me his typically illuminating reaction to the book as a whole, and for writing an appreciation that made Jerusalem sound like something I might actually want to read. Ali, in between his numerous spells in prison (he’s a writer in residence, though I enjoy making him sound like a murderous drifter), not only gave me some useful pointers on crack etiquette but had, throughout my writing of the book, been digging up gems of research that turned out to be the novel’s making: he alerted me to James Hervey’s local provenance, and provided the final, necessary revelations about the Gas Street origins of free-market capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. To both of these gentlemen, scholars and acrobats I am greatly indebted.

Likewise being of immense assistance in the production of this behemoth, my thanks are also due to my comrade, henchman and hired goon, the omni-competent Joe Brown. Joe put me in touch with Donna Bond, served up sheaves of obscure reference material at my every delirious whim and, most of all, burned down a month of his life in coloring and making intelligible my smudged gray bedlam of a cover illustration. And, if you hold your ear close enough to the page, he also wrote the music to the song audible during the closing scenes of chapter twenty-five. Joe, I don’t know what I would do without you, but I’m confident I’d be doing it much more slowly and displaying a far higher level of ignorance. While on the subject of production, I’d also like to thank Tony Bennett at Knockabout – for his support, his warm enthusiasm and his occasional bouts of being pressed into service as werewolf-wrangler if I’ve had to deal with anything too early in the morning – and the fine people at Liveright Publishing for bringing their usual impeccable polish and discrimination to bear upon the finished article. And, of course, anybody along the way that I’ve left out. There have been a multitude of people responsible for building Jerusalem, and I’m grateful to every one of them.

A special shout-out is due to my pal the sublime John Coulthart for his mesmerizing multi-period isomorphic map of the Boroughs, for doing all that loving and painstaking research, and for being the only person I could talk to about the mind-and-eye-destroying obsessive madness that comes with drawing hundreds of eccentrically-angled rooftops and chimneypots. Thanks, John, and I hope that you’re recuperating in a world of scintillant color that is wrought from nothing save organic shapes and psychedelic arabesques. For the photographs heading the book’s three movements, I have once again to thank Joe Brown for his image manipulation skills in the montage of the Destructor looming over Bristol Street (no clear available images existed of the local chimneystack, necessitating the import of an identical model from, appropriately enough, Blackburn), and my colleague the diamond-eyed Mitch Jenkins for his photographs of the Archangel Michael with snooker-cue (some modern anti-pigeon spikes were airbrushed out, in accordance with the book’s generally pro-pigeon sensibilities), and of that door halfway up the wall of Doddridge Church with its inexplicable bolt on the outside. Your evidence that not all of this is invented was gratefully received.

I should also like to thank Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock for their continuing friendship, inspiration and encouragement – or eloquent nagging – regarding this novel, and apologize to them and anyone else who’s been called upon to abandon their families and read it, which I know includes my vastly knowledgeable but physically frail pal Robin Ince, who reports that he and his postman are both now disastrously ruptured. I must also mention my old friend and accomplice Richard Foreman, one of the coauthors of the excellent Northampton Arts Development publication In Living Memory, where I found some exotic details of Boroughs life that had managed to escape my attention during my upbringing, and without which Jerusalem would be missing some of its best stories and characters. A sweep of the sombrero in your direction, gents.

With everyone acknowledged who has been part of the creating of this novel (I think), I must now turn to those people who have had their lives and identities plundered and distorted to provide its contents. Foremost among these, obviously, is my younger, supposedly better looking, but far, far shallower brother Mike, so lacking in depth that he signed his soul away to me, aged twelve, during a game of Monopoly that was going badly for him. I still have it. I thank him for the memorable industrial accidents and near-death experiences that have made this book so much fun, and also thank my sister-in-law Carol and my nephews Jake and Joe (one of whose names I changed and one of whose I didn’t, for no explicable reason) for their supporting cameos. And to all the rest of my far-flung family members, living and dead, thank you for providing me with such rich substance, and also for any chromosomes you may have contributed. Particular thanks go to my cousin Jacquie Mahout (the arty, bohemian one who married a French communist) for all of the most startling fragments of family history included here, though even she had no idea where I’d got Mad Aunt Thursa from.

Huge acknowledgments and perhaps apologies go to all of the non-relatives who have been travestied herein, usually without their permission or knowledge, especially those whom I’ve grossly misrepresented without even going to the trouble of changing their names. The actor Robert Goodman, who in real life is beautiful in mind, body and soul, probably tops the list here, although Melinda Gebbie and Lucy Lisowiec may also wish to consult their lawyers. The same gratitude, and the same squirming disclaimers, go to my friends Donald Davies; Norman Adams and Neil; Dominic Allard (and his late mother Audrey); the late, great Tom Hall and all who sailed in him; Stephen “Ferd” Ryan, who I hope hangs on long enough to read this, and his late mother Phyllis Ryan, née Denton, who served me tea and biscuits and gave me the entirety of Phyllis Painter from her boa of decomposing rabbits to the Compton Street Girls marching song. These are all lovely people, and any perceived flaws to their characters as presented here are entirely those of the author.

Otherwise unmentioned in Jerusalem, for providing a major part of this novel’s motivation, I should like to thank my wonderful daughters, Leah and Amber (along with their equally wonderful partners, John and Robo), and particularly my astonishing grandsons Eddie, James, Joseph and Rowan. Your nana Melinda called this book “a genetic mythology”, and for better or worse it’s part of yours, too. While I’m sure that the future you’re running into the breakers of will be as strange as anything in this book, remember that this is the peculiar landscape a bit of you came from, and that along with everybody and everything you’ve ever cared about, we’re all still there in Jerusalem.

I thank the deaf, mute stones of what is left of the Boroughs for all of the work that they have done across the centuries, and all that they have borne. When they at last slump, exhausted, into the dusty sleep of rubble, I hope that this may serve them as an entertaining, vindicating dream.

And lastly I thank both the Meaningful Concept of Death and the English Novel for having been such thoroughly good sports about all this. You guys are the greatest.