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

Laugh. Get another round in. In the end the talk makes a complete lap of the circuit and ploughs back into the starting post.

‘So what’s this book about, then?’

It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable.

Instead, deliberate and gecko-eyed evasion: ‘Well, it’s difficult to say until it’s finished.’

Sup up. Jake stands grave and still while helped on with his winter coat, the robing of a midget cardinal. Outside, walking towards the station forecourt for a cab, he pauses by the repositioned postern gate, insists the placard there is read aloud. According to his dad, he shows worryingly early signs of a familial obsession with location and its antecedents. Town as a hereditary virus. Cancelled streets and ancient courtyards have become implicit in the blood.

A cab ride down St Andrew’s Road to the girlfriend’s. The Boroughs rise from here up to the Mayorhold, a triangular enclosure where the locals once held a yearly mock election and appointed some local drunk or Tom-of-Bedlam as the neighbourhood’s own mayor, an annual gesture of contempt directed at a civic process which excluded them. The Mayorhold now a stark and ugly traffic junction; the mayoral position has been vacant for some years, its tin-lid chain of office long since lost, forgotten. Only find it, and an older, truer town aflame with meaning would rise from these embers, from these lame parades.

Dropped off in Semilong, a kind of index to the Boroughs, compiled later. Rushed farewells to Mike and Jake before the cab continues with them to King’s Heath. The hill of Baker Street runs down towards the intermittent buzz of Andrew’s Road, to Paddy’s Meadow and the Nene, the freight yards ranged beyond. The meadow takes its name from Paddy Moore, ex-Army Irish lifeguard at the bathing place there in the slow faun river. Children, watersnakes and sometimes otters from upstream, he overlooked them all. Gave swimming lessons to crowds of naked boys, who were no doubt encouraged by the swagger-stick kept tucked beneath his arm and his occasional displays of corporal violence to the last chap out of the water. When they closed the baths and made him sweep the lanes instead it broke his heart and killed him. These enclosures are a patiently accreted coral of such days and lives.

Over the road down at the bottom of the street, is the spot where a remote acquaintance bled to death last year on someone’s doorstep, following a stabbing. Fiery Fred, who knew the victim better, was down here doing a loft conversion for the girlfriend and got pulled in by the Murder Squad, all anxious understudies for the next Lynda LaPlante production. Asked him if he was ‘The Amsterdam Connection’. Double Dutch to him: he’d just been somewhere near the killing ground the day it happened. Live here for long enough, you’ll end up round the corner from atrocity.

Here, at the furthest point inland, the navel of the nation, all the bad blood gathers, with eruptions not infrequent and more violent crime per capita than cities of far greater notoriety. These bloody sunspots of activity seem to be motivated only by the fluctuations of the town’s magnetic field: a sexual tourist fresh from Milton Keynes, his throat cut by a pair of rentboys. They drove him round for hours on the pretext of looking for a hospital while his identity leaked out on to the rear upholstery. The motive, robbery, according to the courts: a Ronson lighter, three pounds forty pence. A child found mutilated, burned and partly eaten in a garage, fifteen years ago. A retarded boy kept in a back shed, treated like a dog by his embarrassed mother till he killed her with a breadknife.

Darkness concealed behind net curtains. Madness. Harm. On even the most casual inspection of Northampton’s canvas, these hues dominate. Wonder and melancholy and a mordant humour are present, undeniably, but it is the blood that captures the attention. Why here? Why so much? Is there some primal episode lost in the county’s prehistoric past, a template for all such events to follow? ‘Murder Mecca of the Midlands’, Dave J calls it, Godfather of Goth living up by the town’s north gate among the heads of traitors and the ashes of burned women.

Meanwhile, back in Baker Street, the girlfriend is at home. Melinda Gebbie, underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California; former bondage model recently turned quarkweight boxer. Like so many others, sucked in by this urban black hole, utterly invisible to television, only made apparent as an absence by the way the light of media bends around it; by the devastation out at its perimeter. She strayed too close to this event horizon, where the lines of the A45 converge, and was absorbed. Though her perception of the world remains frenetic, to observers situated at a hypothetical location outside town, she would appear to be unmoving, frozen for all time upon the brink of this devouring singularity. Nothing gets out of here that is not pulled back in. The sheer escape velocity required is near impossible, a contravention of the special laws of relativity to which this place is subject.

It is a gravity to which Americans seem more than usually prone, perhaps responding to the atavistic tug of this, their birthmud. Washington and Franklin’s families were émigrés from Sulgrave and from the world’s end of Ecton, possibly escaping from the aftermath of Civil War. The Sulgrave village