Descending further there are Jungian catacombs of alchemy, kabbalah, numerology and tarot, paranormal residues resulting from her still-current preoccupation with the occult. She decodes the day around her in accordance with the correspondence-tables of Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Dee, Aleister Crowley, all the other occult heavyweights. Today’s a Friday, Freitag, Vendredi, day of the planet Venus and the number seven, a good female day in all. Its colours are three shades of green with amber as a complement. Its perfume is attar of rose, its metal copper. This specific zone of Alma’s consciousness allows itse
lf to be productively distracted by the tangential idea of roses, following a fragile thread of free-association starting with Diana Spencer, “Goodbye, England’s Rose”, Taupin and John’s camp Monroe eulogy refitted for another blonde girl dead of cameras, misplaced ambition, and betrayal. The funeral cortège that Alma’s brother Mick had watched, bringing the body home along the summer motorway, thrown blossoms wilting on the bonnet, vivid on the dull gunmetal of the casket. Utter silence from the crowds beside the road. Northamptonshire, Rose of the Shires. The rose originates in Turkey, only red or white varieties available, and it is introduced in Europe by returned crusaders, many of these coming back here to the town where their crusades had started. Proving popular, the flower, in its two distinct shades, is eventually adopted as a symbol by the Houses of both Lancaster and York, with their subsequent conflict settled at the Battle of Cow Meadow, between Beckett’s Park and Delapré across the river. Blood and roses, a repetitive motif across the printed fabric of Northampton’s muddy skirt.
A little further down are Alma’s feelings, her emotional component, a far sunnier and less nightmarish pasture than appearances might lead one to suppose. In this enclosure, all of Alma’s friends and pets and family, alive or dead, frolic amidst enactments of her treasured moments. These might represent a dream, a first kiss, or that funny afternoon when she’d been nine, taking a long-cut home through Greyfriars flats down Scarletwell Street, noticing the bush, the single dangling caterpillar. All of Alma’s positive experiences are rerouted here for long-term storage. All her negative experiences are fed to an appalling thing with turquoise eyes, kept in a pen behind the recreation area and only taken out for walks upon special occasions.
Under all of this is Alma’s soul, the Real of her that cannot be expressed, which is a lovely and ingeniously fashioned artefact, if possibly a little showy and impractical. Essentially, it is that of a serious-minded yet imaginative and very clever seven-year-old girl, and at the moment is dissolving blissfully into the jasmine-scented, sapphire-dusted currents of a scalding hot bath.
When she starts experiencing pangs of proletarian guilt at her minor-celebrity indulgence, which takes only a few minutes in a tub of this preposterous size, she sits up suddenly and pulls the plug out. Leaping from the bath, she tries to dry herself and get her clothes on before all the water has drained gurgling away, a habit that she used to think of as simple efficiency but has since realised is just part of her quite ordinary individual madness. Finally, triumphantly, having completed dressing while the last few nebulae of foam and glitter are still circling the plug’s black hole by the simple expedient of not bothering with any underwear, she slings her robe over the banister and thunders down the stairs. It’s half-past seven in the morning and time to commence her hectic and demanding schedule of attempting to intimidate the planet’s other occupants. It’s not that Alma finds this wholly self-imposed task difficult, especially. It’s just that there’s so many of them, and so little time.
Downstairs, amidst a clutter of rare book and uncompleted canvas that is only reassuring to Alma herself, she fills her space-age kettle-jug and switches on its eerie blue light before settling into her armchair and beginning the construction of her first jazz cigarette. These ostentatiously long items, accurately labelled as “nine-inch Gauloise dick-compensators” by her one-time visitor Alexei Sayle, are a leftover from her younger days when she still went to parties and contrived a reefer long enough to still have something left for herself after it had circumnavigated a room full of people. When her partial deafness and increasing weariness with alcohol led to Alma foregoing parties and most often smoking on her own while working, she simply forgot to modify the length, that’s all. It’s not that she’s a drug-glutton or anything.
When all ten Rizla papers have been glued into a white flag of surrender and the filling of tobacco added, Alma cooks the blunt end of a bar of hash over her Zippo lighter. This current variety, which as a teenager she would have recognised as coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, has more than likely been renamed Taliban Black to suit the present situation. She reflects upon this as she crumbles the still-smouldering resin into the tobacco, burning her almost entirely nerveless left thumb and forefinger in the process. Next there comes a scrabbling carpet-rolling motion and a swift pass of the gummed edge across Alma’s tongue, a twist at one end and a neat insertion of rolled cardboard at the other, all before her blue-lit orgone-kettle in the kitchen has stopped bubbling. She pours the boiling water, spattering, into a horribly discoloured BEST AT EVERYTHING mug, guides the sizzling torrent so that it falls on the centre of the circular grey teabag and inflates it satisfyingly into a pillow of trapped heat. Mashing it up against the cup’s side with her spoon to squeeze the last drop of its vital juices out, she flips the spent and steaming carcass into her conveniently open pedal bin. Foregoing milk and sugar – she prefers her beverages “black and bitter, how I like my men” – Alma transports the brimming mug back to her living room, her armchair and her waiting contraband cheroot.
Behind her chair there is an arching stained-glass panel where gold stars mark the positions of the kabbalistic spheres against a deep royal blue grading into aquamarine. The low sun through the room’s rear window falls through this and drenches Alma in cobalt and yellow radiance as she lights up the cigarette. The painted stars break eggs onto the cyan glaze of her wet hair. She holds the smoke in for a moment and then sits back and exhales into the gathering indigo, luxuriating in her own identity, in the incessant fun and mostly-pleasant strain of simply being her.
As the cloud-chamber of her consciousness begins to warm up, turbines whirring into life as it approaches normal operating speed, she reaches for the nearest page of print to give her rapidly engaging mental processes a point of focus. This turns out to be the latest issue of New Scientist, dated May 4th, open at an intriguing article concerning Alma’s favourite science philosopher, the beautifully-named Gerard ’t Hooft, whose criticisms of string theory she’d been so impressed by. It seems that ’t Hooft has formulated a hypothesis which would, if proven, finally resolve the quandaries of quantum indeterminacy; would resolve them right out of existence, if Alma is reading it correctly. The philosopher apparently suggests that there’s a deeper and more fundamental level, as yet undiscovered, underlying the mysterious quantum world. ’T Hooft predicts that once we have developed tunnelling microscopes that can reveal this previously unsuspected layer of reality we’ll find that Heisenberg’s idea of particles existing in a wide variety of states until observed is an illusion based upon misunderstanding.
Reading all this between alternating sips of tea and smoke, Alma allows herself the guttural chortle of an ogre who’s just realised where the schoolchildren are hiding. She can spot a well-constructed dangerous idea when she sees one, and ’t Hooft’s proposal strikes her as one of the most ingenious conceptual land mines that she’s ever heard of. The idea’s attractions are immediately apparent. Quantum indeterminacy is the stumbling block preventing any easy resolution of the vast discrepancies between the quantum world-view and the classically-constructed universe of Einstein, Newton and the rest. If tiny subatomic particles behave according to the Lewis Carroll laws that govern quantum physics, then why do entirely different laws govern the stars and planets? The attempts thus far to reconcile the quantum microcosm with the classic macrocosm have led to such mind-wrenching extravagances as string theory, notions that require extra dimensions, ranging between ten and twenty-six, before the mathematics will make sense.
That’s not to say that the string theorists might not be correct, Alma observes, but simply to suggest that to her ear it all sounds rather messy and unnecessary. If ’t Hooft is right, however, and there is no quantum indeterminacy, then the problem vanishes to leave a unified field theory which accounts for everything without resorting to exotic explanations that can often raise more questions than they answer. She can see how many scientists would find ’t Hooft’s hypothesis hard to resist, but t
hen there is that other shoe to fall: if there’s no quantum indeterminacy, then there’s no free will. That, right there, is the problem, and in Alma’s estimation it has the potential to make all the other current disputes between Christianity and science pale by comparison.
That’s why she’s laughing as she reads. It’s all this free will business and the way that everybody gets so jittery about it, even thinkers that she has the greatest of respect for. Alma, having worked all year upon her brother Warry’s near-death vision, has grown very comfortable with predetermination, with the idea of life as a great recurrence that we re-experience, unvaryingly and eternally. During this time, though, she’s learned that both Nietzsche and one of her idols, the Brixton-based artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, have previously formulated almost the same concept but then shied away from it because of the implied negation of free will.
Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?
Stubbing out the joint she puts the magazine aside and starts to roll another one. The mug of iron-black tea, only three-quarters finished, has grown cold with small tan platelets formed upon its surface like a skin. She’ll make a fresh cup before she gets down to work in a few minutes, now her hair’s not dripping anymore.
Still musing on the subject of Gerard ’t Hooft she drifts through the next slice of time to find herself stood at her easel by the window, with a newly-filled and steaming mug upon the high table beside her, near the ashtray and the as-yet-unlit second joint propped on its lip. She holds a double-zero brush in her right hand, dead still and horizontal like the raised spear of a patient jungle hunter, unblinking and confident her prey will make a movement before she does. It will give itself away, the image or the line that she is looking for, and then her short dart will stab forward, tipped with poison colour.
On the easel is the final piece to be completed before Alma’s exhibition opens up its playschool doors tomorrow morning. The last-minute nature of the painting is due to the fact that Alma didn’t make her mind up to include it until fairly recently. Entitled Chain of Office, it’s an afterthought, a kind of visual epilogue to the preceding works. It shows a single figure, standing posed as though for an official mayoral portrait, on an indistinct and drifting field of almost drinkable green pointillism, a deep emerald smoulder. The imposing subject, features still unfinished, stands draped in a strange and ornate ceremonial robe that hides the contours of its body, which could just as easily be male or female. Lacking a completed face to rest upon, the eye is drawn to the exotic and cascading fabric of the gown, which, upon close examination, seems to be what the whole picture is about. The intricate design of detailed scenes set in irregularly contoured panels, linked by a gold filigree of branching lines, turns out to be a lavishly illuminated map of Alma’s former neighbourhood, from Sheep Street to Saint Andrew’s Road, from Grafton Street to Marefair. On the decorated hem is a motif of paving stones, each individually cracked and weathered, fringed with seams of bright viridian moss. The cuff-buttons are glued-on snail-shells. Isomorphic images of Doddridge Church, bulging with ranting puritans, seem to be painted or embroidered on the garment’s folds, with Spring Lane School and Scarletwell Street sliding from a hanging pleat into the crease’s umber.
The imposing figure stands with both hands raised in welcome or in benediction, draped in its astounding coat of maps. Hung round the neck, in a dull grey that stands out strikingly against the riotous surrounding colour of the vestments, is the dented gong of an old saucepan lid attached to what appears to be a length of lavatory chain.
Alma’s one problem with the piece is that she can’t decide whose face this splendid Boroughs totem should be wearing. Philip Doddridge’s, perhaps? Black Charley’s? What about the sweet owl roundness of Alma’s beloved and deceased Aunt Lou, lost in a lightning storm? No. No, that will look wrong, perched on an already-completed body that is differently proportioned. She puts down her hovering brush and picks the joint up, lighting the touch-paper twist. After a pull or two, she sets the fuming column back down in the ashtray and retrieves her brush, having arrived at a decision.
For the next two hours she works upon the face until she’s satisfied, then spends a further half hour gazing love-struck at the finished painting, basking in her own magnificence. Finally, her vanity starts to exhaust her. Alma feels she’s earned a break.
She stands, with a theatrical sciatic groan, and slouches out into the kitchen where she fries up sliced halloumi while a brace of pitta pockets puff and fatten in the oven. When the thick-cut steaks of cheese have taken on a leathery autumnal mottle she retrieves them from the pan; slips them inside the pouches of warm bread with an accompanying spill of mixed leaf salad and some guillotined tomatoes. She can never eat halloumi without feeling a misguided sense of vegetarian guilt. This is because her first taste of the fibrous and salt Greek delicacy, decades earlier, had led her to assume that the halloumi was a possibly-endangered species of Cypriot fish. Even though she knows better now, she still can’t shake the frisson of forbidden and delicious flesh that comes with every carefully-chewed mouthful, and in fact she rather likes it that way.
After she’s devoured whichever meal her hasty fry-up was supposed to represent – elevenses or brunch or lunkfast (her own coinage) – Alma gets rid of the plate and rolls another smoke. Having completed Chain of Office an hour earlier than she’d anticipated she has time to pick over a couple of her other projects, maybe make laborious, autistic-looking jottings in block capitals across whatever unmarked pages she can find in one of several workbooks. She has never mastered joined-up handwriting. Along with tying shoelaces the ordinary way, it is a skill that she experienced initial problems with and instantly gave up on, stubbornly resolving that she’d come up with her own approach to things and stick with it, even if it was obviously wrong. This is the formative decision, made when she was seven, that has shaped her entire subsequent existence. In a recent interview, when asked if the political upheaval of the 1960s had caused Alma’s fiercely individual approach to life, her puzzling response of, “No, it was those fucking shoelaces” apparently became the subject of much speculation on the message boards she never saw but only heard about.
Settling back into her chair, her nest of curling vapour ribbons, she picks up the nearest blank-paged and hard-covered exercise book from the cluttered coffee table on her left, scooping up a blue ballpoint pen that still looks viable while doing so. She makes a few notes on the possible autobiography that she’s considered writing, which at present isn’t much more than a paragraph or two about her nan, May, and a working title, We Was Poor But We Was Cannibals. Alma composes a few dozen chapter headings, phrases that seem funny, resonant or smugly clever to her, and makes tiny notes beside each one suggesting what ideas or episodes that chapter might include. The details and the actual meat of things can all be worked out later, on the hoof, on wings and prayers.
Conveniently satisfied with her half-hour’s work just as she is starting to get bored with it, she puts the workbook down and reaches for whichever paperback or magazine or comic is closest to hand. As it transpires, this is a polythene-bagged copy of Forbidden Worlds, seemingly issue 110, dated March-April 1963 and published by the long-since vanished ACG, or American Comics Group. Being both sick and tired of the protracted adolescence typifying the contemporary comic business, publications of this vintage are almost the only ones that Alma will allow into the house.
Removing the frail pamphlet gently from the elderly and wilting plastic of its envelope, Alma examines the admittedly completely crappy covers, front and back. The rear is an advertisement, in black and white, for an impressive catalogue of novelties from Honor House Productions, boldly labelled as a “TREASURE CHEST OF FUN”. The fun seems to involve confusing adults with ventriloquism, frightening them with a cigarette-dispensing lighter that “looks like a Browning automatic”, or increasing their nuclear anxiety with an Atomic Smoke Bomb: “Just light one and watch the column of white smoke rise to the ceiling, mushrooming into a dense cloud like an A-Bomb.” These cost twenty cents. Also available are silent dog-whistles, Ju-Jitsu lessons promising that YOU, TOO, CAN BE TOUGH, a deck of marked cards and the snappily-described SEE BEHIND GLASSES that “enable you to see behind you without anyone knowing you’re watching. Really comes in handy at times.” Struggling to imagine on precisely which occasions these wing-mirrored spectacles would “really come in handy”, other than if she should be compelled to back her massive head out of a cul-de-sac, she turns instead to the front cover, all in citrus colour with its oversized seal of approval from the once-important Comics Code Authority and the black “9d” imprint of a British newsagent stamped on the planet-decorated logo.
The front image, by an artist Alma doesn’t recognise, is clearly a generic piece of cover artwork pulled from the inventory. It shows a thuggish-looking monk clad in green robe and hood grimacing from within a fortune-telle
r’s crystal ball. A blue-tinged cover blurb appended to the illustration tries to justify it by pretending that the sulky-looking figure in the snow-globe is “just ONE” of various menaces that the anthology’s single continuing character, Herbie, would meet inside. Flicking through two or three nondescript tales of strange adventure to the Herbie story at the back, the only reason that she’s kept the tattered comic-book, Alma discovers that this is the ruse she had suspected. The green monk is nowhere to be seen throughout the ten-page yarn, a favourite of Alma’s called “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”.
Herbie had been created several issues previously in what may have been intended as a one-off tale. Readers, however, were intrigued by its protagonist, a spherical and solemn schoolboy with a bowl-cut hairdo, horn-rimmed glasses, unexpected supernatural powers and an unusual obsession with fruit-flavoured lollipops. Due to this favourable response the character appeared more frequently from then on, clad in his trademark attire of weirdly scaled-down adult clothing with blue pants, white shirt and a black tie. While obviously not a look that everyone could get away with, Herbie would have bailed out of Forbidden Worlds within a year of issue 110 and be established as the title character in his own comic, of which Alma owns a very-near complete collection.
The main reason for this singular compulsion is Alma’s infatuation with the strip’s distinctively obsessive artist, Ogden Whitney. Whitney, working in the business since the 1940s, had a drawing style that somehow managed to take smothering suburban blandness to extremes which should have been the envy of the avant-garde. His tidily-coiffured cast of generic middle-class Americans might have stepped from a magazine ad for soap-powder, cars or coffee were it not for a conspicuous lack of grinning toothy confidence. Instead, his characters wear tight expressions of barely-suppressed anxiety as they stand hesitating in the kitchens of their uniform white-painted homes or loiter upon bright green lawns so neatly-shorn as to be utterly devoid of texture, mere outlines left for the colourist to fill. And then, amidst this twitchy Cold War landscape with its populace of clenched neurotics, there is the still, planetary mass of Herbie Popnecker.
According to the legend, ACG house-writer Richard Hughes, writing under the pseudonym of Shane O’Shea, had become fascinated by the way in which the literal-minded Whitney would draw anything the script required of him in the same blandly realistic style. Possibly to amuse himself, the writer’s scripts become more comically surreal as the series progresses, treating the already baffled readership to strange encounters between the impassive levitating dumpling-child and a selection of then-current film-stars and world leaders like the Kennedys, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Queen Elizabeth the Second, or the Burtons. Typically, female celebrities are smitten with the spherical and enigmatic ten-year-old. Ladybird Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor and Her Majesty the Queen all sigh and heave their bosoms as he walks away into the sky with an expression of supreme indifference, an unlikely fanny-magnet sucking jadedly upon a lollipop as round as he is.