Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

neolithic track of the Jurassic Way that stretched from Glastonbury to Lincoln crossed the River Nene. Simon de Senlis’ castle stood here once beside the bridge, where Becket came to trial and was condemned, the castle itself suffering a similar fate not long after. Now Castle Station stands here, with the relocated postern gate a sole remaining fragment of the former structure like a dead man’s ear saved by his murderer as a memento.

On the corner sits the Railway Club, this evening’s destination. Since Mum’s death four months ago it has become the venue for a weekly meeting with the brother; point of contact now that the maternal Sunday dinner table is no more. Beyond the double airlock doors that grant admission from the street there is a single large, low-ceilinged hall that’s lit as though for neuro-surgery. A low stage at the far end where sometimes the bingo caller sits, charged with the arcane glamour and authority of his profession, audience hanging breathless on each syllable as on the utterance of a divine, or numerologist.

Other than children, it’s unusual to discover anybody here that’s under fifty. The collective ambience is overcast, abruptly lit by static discharge from a kippered laugh. This atmosphere is stable, soothing and familiar. These are people who have always been here, by the vanished castle, by the bridge. The words have changed but not the voice, nor yet the greater part of their complaint.

The brother’s here already, at the usual table with his son Jake, six years old, already either self-possessed or just possessed. The drinks are ordered and the conversation, easy as old shoes, turns to the week’s events. Mike, after five years, has discovered where Dad’s ashes ended up; where Mum’s will follow. Not that nobody’s been looking during all that time, of course. Simply that no one at the crematorium appeared to have the first idea of how to find Rose Garden B; had recently declared albeit wrongly that Rose Garden B did not exist. This had given rise to a brief flurry of unsettling suspicions: Soylent Green is people. Luckily, the matter was resolved and the parental plaque discovered quite by chance among the lanes of roses, ranks of men and women wondrously transformed to petal, scent and thorn.

Having concluded his account the brother sips, wiping antipodean surf from upper lip before he speaks again. ‘So what have you been doing?’

‘Just the book.’

‘That’s the Northampton book?’

Nod of assent, followed by a cursory description of the work, before professional imperatives assert themselves and the inevitable panning for material begins; the strip mining of every conversation for a word, a stolen fact or phrase. Mike is subjected to a wearying rag-picker’s litany: how old, now, is the Railway Club? Who built it? Any anecdotes? Any old murders, old celebrities, old iron? One eye on his eldest son, across the club’s far side and busy organizing other children into cadres of Power Ranger-Jugend, he considers.

‘Uncle Chick once had a crate of ale away from out the keg room where it opens on to Andrew’s Road. Dragged it along St Peter’s Way to Nan’s house up in Green Street. This was Christmas night. Snow everywhere. If he’d not been so pissed he would have thought. The coppers only had to follow back the trail to his front door. That was the only time they ever had the law down Green Street over Chick. He was more careful after that.’

The reference to Green Street strums a tripwire of association. Home of the paternal grandmother, the Nan, her house that smelled of damp and human age and withered apples. Mum’s side started out there, too, before the council shifted them to Andrew’s Road. The green sloped down behind St Peter’s church towards the bounding terrace at the bottom, a barricade against the industry and asphalt that encroached beyond. The houses are all gone now. Nothing stands between the dwindling, naked patch of grass and the encroaching office blocks that quietly and politely shuffle ever closer, buzzards on their very best behaviour.

Thirty years ago, Jeremy Seabrook wrote his influential work on poverty in Britain, called The Unprivileged, and focused sensibly on nothing more than an articulation of what Green Street was and what it meant: that aggregate of lives and incidents and want. Green Street was made the emblem of a disenfranchised class; of an impassioned plea that street and people both should be restored. The answer, demolition in both instances.

It would be near impossible even to formulate that plea today, the emblems and the archetypes long since worn down to cliché and self-parody. How shall we speak, straight-faced, about the local whore who turned a trick so Nan could buy a jar of Marmite for the kids? Maudlin Northampton shite, all tarts with hearts and we-were-so-poor-rickets-was-a-luxury. And yet a girl whose name has not survived would take a stranger up her in a back yard for her neighbour’s children, and how is it we no longer have a language to contain such things?

Back in the Railway Club, the conversation settles in a holding pattern orbiting the Jupiterian mass of Uncle Chick, a gravity that lack of corporate substance has not diminished. Mike recalls the first drink that he had with Chick after the leg was off. They’d been with Dad and Uncle Gord up to the Silver Cornet, stopping on the way back for a Sunday paper at the newsagent’s. Mike stayed there in the car with Chick, uncomfortably wondering how to broach the subject of his uncle’s missing leg, the stump propped up beside the gear-stick.

While they waited there in silence, they became aware of a lone figure that approached them with a painful slowness from the street’s far end, resolving as it neared into a wretched, downcast man afflicted both by a club foot and by a prominent hunched back. Chick watched the man limp past, eyes narrowed in the underdone puff-pastry of their sockets, finally dispensing with his silence to address the brother: ‘’Ere,