All these real-life luminaries coexist contentedly with things from outer space, broom-riding witches, talking animals, anthropomorphic objects and the supernatural denizens of ACG’s distinctive green-tinged afterlife. This occult region, carpeted in limeade-coloured clouds, is a Rod Serling version of Eternity that features intermittently across the outfit’s other books and is referred to as “The Unknown” on what looks like a hand-painted sign in its cumulus-strewn reception area. The place is an abode of sheet-clad ghosts, trolls, leprechauns and monsters cribbed from Universal Studios’ back catalogue, along with wingless, robed custodians who seem like biliously-hued Frank Capra angels, tubby and avuncular. It distantly occurs to Alma that she may well have been influenced in some way by this secular, fantastical and folksy view of paradise while realising Warry’s childhood vision in the paintings and the illustrations she’s been working on for this last year. Despite the lack of any similarity between their styles, Alma’s elaborate depiction of a higher Boroughs filled with dreams and fiends and phantoms probably owes a great deal to Ogden Whitney’s staid surrealism.
On the other hand she is aware that Whitney’s merits, many though they be, are merely camouflage to mask the actual nature of her interest in his work. This is entirely based on Alma’s extreme identification with the artist’s best-known character. She’d been a portly little lump herself before her frankly terrifying growth-spurt and, like Whitney’s hero, had endured a pudding-basin haircut. She had also shared Herbie’s conviction that the powers and forces of the universe should all know her by name and have the basic common sense to get out of her way. In the adventure that she’s holding in her red-nailed strangler’s hands, “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”, the omnipotent schoolboy scares away a full grown Frankenstein, a barrage of machine-gun bullets that have worried little faces and which swerve from their trajectory on recognising Herbie, lion-headed alien dinosaurs from the beleaguered planet Bertram, and even such astronomical phenomena as an aggressive comet, which veers from its course in panic at its first sight of the lollipop-addicted human bowling ball. As Alma sees it, this is no more than the same polite respect which she expects rampaging elephants, Cruise missiles, werewolves, corporations, bolts of lightning and invading spacemen to extend to her.
Another reason for her empathy is Herbie’s eyes, both for the heavy-lidded bored look that she knows from her own baby-photographs and for the ugly spectacles that he’s apparently compelled to wear. That’s how she could have ended up, what with the almost useless left eye that she has inherited from her mum, Doreen. She had only managed to avoid a pair of National Health face-deformers by the application of her seven-year-old ingenuity. When taken by her mother for a mandatory school eye-test, Alma had glanced at the chart in passing and had memorised it, top to bottom, utilising the extraordinary powers of recall that neither her school-friends nor family had noticed yet, and which she hadn’t been in any hurry to inform them of. The school optician had clamped Alma’s outsized head in Clockwork Orange goggles, then had pointed to the hovering grey blurs that floated in the fog while she reeled out a list of letters that she couldn’t see for toffee. This technique had kept her glasses-free until her teenage years, when the eye-test procedure had been altered unexpectedly and Alma had been caught out as a half-blind fraud with an almost vampiric sensitivity to light. She’d subsequently been made to endure two years of thin frames and blue-tinted lenses that had somehow managed to make her look even more pretentious than she was already. When one lens fell out and shattered, Alma’s colour-blind optician had replaced it with pink-tinted glass that made her look like someone from the audience of a 3D film. By then, she’d made her mind up that her vision without glasses was deteriorating, and this latest outrage had just piled insult on injury. She’d thrown the two-tone spectacles away, resolving that if she was going to go blind then she’d do it on her own terms, thank you very much. Later she’d learned that wearing no lenses at all produced what was known as a “negative lensing effect” within the muscles of the eye that actually improves the vision. Or is it a positive lensing effect? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that in Alma’s own estimation, she’s been proven right. It’s Alma one, opticians nil, as far as she’s concerned.
Returning her attention to the story she is reading, Alma thinks again of Ogden Whitney, of his sad demise as detailed in Art out of Time, the lovely volume that Mike Moorcock sent her as a thank you for her cover illustration on a recently reissued Elric paperback. Within the wonderful collection of neglected and peculiar comic strips from bygone times, Alma had been delighted to see a characteristically demented Herbie offering included, with accompanying text about the artist. She’d been touched if unsurprised to learn that Herbie’s looks and general physique were based on those of Ogden Whitney as a child, and had filled up with tears to read how he had died, forgotten and insane from booze in an asylum. She imagines Herbie in his sixties, sitting in the day room at the home, white shirt a
nd blue pants traded in for a stained bathrobe and his differently-powered lollipops replaced by bottles. The time-travel bottle-pop would be the only one that worked. His sleepy eyes gazing unfocussed through thick beer-glass lenses and his paunch now drum-tight with the enlarged liver. Greying, bowl-cut head filled with his flat, precisely-drawn dementia, lion-dragons and Sneddiger’s Salad Oil, the many ghosts and featured creatures of a green Unknown.
Taking a last pull on the sepia-streaked stub she grinds it out and stands up with another creaking outcry at the dull ache in her back. She’s barely consciously aware she makes these noises anymore, so constant and repetitive have they become. Sorting amongst the notebooks, comics, pens and paperbacks Alma locates a hairbrush that has somehow managed to survive its daily skirmish with her head. This one, a sturdy wooden item that is capable of ‘MEGA Taming’ if one pays attention to the printed promise on its handle, has already lasted for over a year with no more than a dozen or so of its plastic teeth wrenched out. Its predecessors, that have snapped in two or have been otherwise dismantled by their first or second painful drag through Alma’s tangled locks, were simpering pansies by comparison.
She’s learned early in life that if she doesn’t brush her mane once every day it will develop knots that in a week will have turned to impacted rhino horn; bolls of mahogany that it will take tree-surgeons, chainsaws, ropes and ladders to remove. Closing her eyes she starts to pull the brush down from the crown, her face immediately concealed behind a grey-brown safety curtain as the bristles rake excruciatingly through the unyielding snarls. The sound of ripping follicles and snapping vinyl prongs, she has discovered, make the ritual far more upsetting for anyone forced to listen to it than it is for her. Her artist friend Melinda Gebbie, would sit covering her ears and whimpering if she were witness to a brushing, frightened that Alma would yank part of her skull away while Alma was herself apparently oblivious to this self-scalping. Her relationship with pain has largely been one of indifference since she realised that its actual physical component rarely hurt that much, and that it is the psychological and the emotional attached files that do all the harm. As far as she is able, therefore, she has disconnected hurtful physical sensations from accompanying mental reflexes of shock or fear or anger. As a minor by-product of this largely successful process, Alma is no longer even ticklish. She terrorizes those who are with absolute impunity.
The worst part of the ordeal is now over. Alma’s giant head is now concealed within a church bell made of hair, so that if they should view her from the shoulders upwards, onlookers would have no clue as to which way round she was standing. Lifting both hands, Alma scrabbles with her scarlet fingernails down what feels like the middle of her Rushmore cranium in order to create a centre parting, dragging back the faded auburn curtains to each side so that she can peer at the mirror hung above the fireplace and weigh up the result. Alma decides that she particularly likes the vagrant ash-and-copper strand that snakes across her almost-blind left eye, which is her scariest one, possibly because it’s governed by the mad pre-verbal basilisk of her right brain. Alma’s right eye is the humane and twinkling one which understands that it’s preferable if people – humans as she calls them – like her and aren’t frightened off by her appearance or behaviour. Conversely, Alma’s left eye clearly doesn’t give a fuck. It glowers, grey and yellow and unfocussed, from beneath an overhanging forehead that swells gently into noticeable bumps, as if she’s either growing horns or a new frontal lobe.
Hair sorted, Alma paints a face on in the style pioneered by Mr. Potato Head. Her eyelashes soon sag beneath the weight of the mascara and resemble the deleted giant spider scene from the original King Kong. Next, pouting like Mick Jagger before the embalmers got to him, she coats her lips in a bloody impasto of red lippy. She believes that this wards off potential rapists and the like by making her appear to be the more voracious sexual predator. Finally satisfied, she grins at her reflection. Every day is Halloween for Alma.
Pulling on an ancient leather jacket, its lapels hung with a fat crop of outdated causes thick as August blackberries, she’s almost ready to confront the yammering planet and stare down reality again, but first she has to put her rings and finger-armour on. A splendidly malevolent array of jointed metal talons, sculpted scorpions and rearing silver snakes alongside a selection of big, colourful and bruising gemstones, these lethal adornments probably contribute more than the carnivorous lipstick to her rape-proofing, she realises upon the rare occasions when she thinks realistically. One slap and an assailant’s features would be hanging off in strips of soggy wallpaper. She’d do it, too. She’d once informed her brother Warry that although she almost thought of him as family, she’d open him without a second’s hesitation like a tin of Hula Hoops.
Making sure she’s got her chequebook and her key, she hurls herself along a cluttered hallway that has swathes of gold stars licking up its walls, out through a specially-carved front door with twin snakes in a caduceus design, down her front path onto East Park Parade. Its York stone paving slabs are bathed in clear blonde sunlight, a presentiment of summer, with the lovely trilobite erosions of an ancient riverbed picked out in sharp relief. Across the busy Kettering Road are the tall trees that edge the Racecourse, a green fringe around the immense parkland’s mile-wide lampshade sky. People walk on the broad grey paths in ones and twos or cut an independent course across the rolling sea of grass. Someone is trying to fly a kite, perhaps in an attempt to recreate some cherished illustration from a 1950s kids’ encyclopaedia, the washed-out yellow diamond faltering against a faded blue. Suspiciously enormous crows patrol the rippling turf, a bigger and more confident crowd of them every year, too many to be called collectively a murder these days. This is more a Harold Shipman of the fucking things.
Her indoor lungs adjusting rapidly to the cold draughts of breath that she sucks down, Alma turns left as she commences her walk into town. Her Dr. Martens scuff against the pavement’s fossil fronds and her mind floods with random ideas and associations, words and pictures snagging on the shop-front scenery that rattles by the other way as Alma hits her stride. She thinks about the flagstones vanishing beneath her tread, the only view afforded to the downcast, irrespective of which century they happen to be in. The old stones, obviously, remain unchanged since the nineteenth, but there are nuances to the discerning eye: deficiencies of dog-shit; chocolate wrappers that have been rebranded so as not to further mystify touring Americans; unfathomable particle-collider tags in whorls and spirals of white spray. Across the road a distant man attempts to steer some kind of sail-powered car across the Racecourse but the wind has dropped and he’s becalmed amongst the strutting crows and the abruptly plunging kites. If there’s no wind before it gets dark she supposes that the meadow-mariner is doomed. Despite the extra lighting that the vast and, by night, absolutely black expanse has relatively recently acquired, it’s still referred to as “The Rapecourse” by a healthy number of the town’s inhabitants.
She crosses from East Park Parade over Abington Avenue’s tail-end and carries on down Kettering Road. George Woodcock – Alma’s Arts Lab crony from her teenage years – had written a long, neon-lighted poem on this crumbling thoroughfare, a jewelled urban lament entitled Main Street, just before he’d jacked in all the literary bollocks and become a trucker. She can still see lines and phrases from the since-lost epic, smeared and tangled in the cobbled gutters; on the replaced plastic drainpipes. She can still see all the vanished incidents and nights and people that the lines referred to, former selves from several bygone decades striding up and down the shabby avenue, a noisy nineteen-year-old drunk girl in a posse of small-town bohemians, an angry-looking Gas Board office worker stamping her way home through drizzle on another Friday afternoon, a forty-something mad witch in a black cloak with a horde of Alcopop-emboldened simpletons calling her “Grotbags”, “lez” or “minger” from the safety of their passing vehicles if she goes out to do a bit of shopping. The town’s streets are like a living palimpsest to Alma, all the layers still intact, everyone still alive and everything still going on, the misguided romances and the rows, the shimmering acid trips, the hasty fucks in doorways.
This perception of a simultaneous eternity, while she’s had intimations of it on and off throughout her life, has only flared up into vivid actuality since she’s been working on these paintings. The idea, once fully formulated, was so dazzlingly obvious that she remains amazed at having reached the age of fifty-something without clearly understanding it: time as an everlasting solid in which nothing changes, nothing dies. It had been right before her eyes for all those years, and she’d not known what she was looking at until that moment with her brother in the Golden Lion when the penny finally dropped. The moment of apocalypse and revelation, almost like that time in Greyfriars’ flats when she’d been dawdling home from Spring Lane School at dinnertime. Down in the little patch of shrubbery at the bottom of the washing-line enclosure there’d been a single translucent grub or caterpillar hanging by a thread from one leaf of a bush that Alma didn’t know the name of. She had stood there staring at it for perhaps a minute, and then something strange had happened –
A black cab growls past and honks its horn. Unable to see clearly who the driver is, Alma lifts one metallic claw and waves convivially to his rear-view mirror. She gets on with all the local cabbies and they sometimes give her free rides into town if they should see her walking that way in inclement weather. To be honest she gets on with nearly everyone, which somewhat undermines the petrifying gorgon image that she’s worked so long and hard to put together. If this situation should persist she’ll have to chop up some Girl Guides in order to regain her rep.
Across the street, the mutable and transient hoardings flicker past. Charity outlets with batty proprietors and racks of cardigans that someone’s died in, Caribbean grocer-shops all facing north with no sun for the crated yams that languish in pink shadow. Alma sniggers at the name of one establishment, Butt Savouries, although at her age you’d hope she’d be more mature. A little further down the road is a kebab-house, Embers, that makes her feel wistful for the days when it had been Rick’s Golden Fish Bar. Not that she had ever been a customer, but she had often entertained the fantasy of going in and being served with mushy peas and chips by Humphrey Bogart, who would eye her ruefully and drawl “Of all the golden fish bars in the world, she has
to walk into mine.” Somewhere behind her, the rapid staccato beep of the Pelican crossing slides subliminally into her awareness, prompting her to hum the fast bit of “The Donkey Serenade” without having any clue why she is doing so. There is another crossing, back along the Kettering Road in Kingsley, with an even more up-tempo rhythm that can leave her whistling “The Sabre Dance”. Susceptible as an eight-month-old baby and invulnerable as a pterodactyl made of diamonds, she continues into town.
A skinny boy in modern hair and spectacles stops in his tracks and gapes at her incredulously, face contorting in a rubbery cartoon expression which, if he were not so youthful, might be taken for a paralysing stroke. Remembering she hasn’t bothered putting on her knickers, Alma glances down to make sure that the zipper on her jeans is still intact then realises that the thunderstruck young man is an admirer. He tells her she’s Alma Warren, which she’s always grateful for. One of these days, when she’s gone wandering from the home, she’ll need that information. As he lists his favourite album sleeves, dust-jackets and comic-book covers Alma smiles, attempting to convey a girlish modesty but actually delivering the lipstick rictus and unblinking gaze of Conrad Veidt in a lost outtake from The Man Who Laughs. She shakes her stage-door Johnny’s nerveless mitt and thanks him for his kind words before carrying on down the Kettering Road, privately noting that his handshake had been far less manly than her own. Mind you, he more than likely hadn’t practised since the age of ten like she had, red-faced as she squeezed a set of bathroom scales until she could exert her own substantial weight with just the pressure of her thumbs. Before she’d left Spring Lane she’d given two boys a good strangling for picking, ill-advisedly, on her or little Warry. One of them had been left with appalling bruises round his throat like a jet necklace and his mother had come to the school and yelled at Alma. This would seem to have been largely ineffectual in that to this day she hasn’t properly absorbed the concept of a measured and proportionate response to anything.
She trots over another crossing, this one with the slow beep of a faltering heart-monitor that doesn’t provoke any musical accompaniment on her part, to the street’s far side. After a few more grocers’ shops with enigmatic individual atmospheres and an outlet for decent-looking Hip Hop clothing she is crossing Grove Road, with the once-majestic bulk of the Essoldo cinema just up the way. As far as Alma can remember, it was in Grove Road during the 1970s that people had their windows blown out by an IRA bomb at the RAF club that was somewhere in the neighbourhood. The government back then had been reluctant to describe the mess that everybody was involved in as a war of any kind, much less a war on terror. This had been before the war on drugs, of course, when launching military campaigns against abstract emotions or inanimate materials would have been seen as the behaviour of highly-strung and over-reaching Daleks.
On the corner with the Kettering Road is Queensgrove Methodist Church, an impressive nineteenth-century red brick edifice that is today without the posse of nice-looking black guys who in slightly warmer weather decorate its steps. Less than a dozen paces further on Alma walks past the open-plan contemporary phone booth that has played host to a fatal stabbing only a few nights before. What a way to go out, she thinks, in a glass coffin that’s been shrink-wrapped with an ad for season two of Prison Break. It’s good to talk.
The way she heard it, both the victim and the perpetrators had been black, and Alma doesn’t care much for the U.S. cop-show ring that has about it. That isn’t the way she likes to think about Northampton being stacked. The town’s relationship with racial issues is a subtle and a complicated thing that goes back centuries, and simplifying it all down into a criminal profiler’s class-skewed vision of society seems both disastrous and highly probable to Alma. She thinks about Black Charley – Henry George – one of the first black faces to be seen about the county and, in 1897, a tremendous novelty. That sense of novelty had lasted up until at least the 1960s, when her mate Dave Daniels had been the first non-white pupil at the Grammar School on Billing Road. They’d run a full-page article about it in the Chronicle & Echo at the time, including a large photograph of David looking apprehensive, just in case he wasn’t feeling singled out enough already.
Back during the 70s and 80s, all the rudeys and the rastas had set up a club in the magnificent Salvation Army fort that used to stand on Sheep Street, just across the road from where Phil Doddridge founded his academy. Three floors of people with impeccably cool names like Elvis, Junior or Pedro, coming, going, children playing round their ankles and always a pot of bean stew simmering somewhere upstairs, that was the old Matta Fancanta club. Its antique boards had quaked in time with U-Roy or Lee Perry on the sound system, dub beats she’d been convinced were deep enough to make her womb fall out. As she remembers, it had been when vehicles that should have only been affordable to whites began to manifest in the adjoining car park that local authorities began to take an adverse interest in the place. The fort – which should have been, surely to God, a listed property – had been demolished, as if it had proven easier to pull it down than shut it down. There’s only the ubiquitous bare grass there now where it once stood, just down from the arse-backwards gargoyle mass of Greyfriars bus station, built wrong way round to start with and more recently voted to rank amongst the most disgusting buildings in the country. That had been that for the public face of genuine black culture in Northampton, or at least until comparatively recently. Now there is a Northamptonshire Black History Association that is setting all the records straight, and Alma has been hanging out with a determined, racially-diverse young bunch of rappers from the Boroughs that are trading under the collective name of Streetlaw, which she thinks is at the very least a cute coincidence. Justice above the street and all that. No, it isn’t all gloom for the black community by any means, assuming that it can resist the dead-end role that Hollywood’s casting departments and the major record labels are apparently considering it for: let’s make the underclass a glamorous and edgy place to be, then people won’t mind being stuck there quite so much and we can craft dramatically-lit and well-mastered versions of their struggle to sell back to them for the few quid they’ve not already spent on scratch cards. Everybody wins.
Alma walks on, past the arched entrance to a cobbled yard, an unmistakeably Victorian construction that has “Dickens Brothers, Ltd” hand-lettered up above the archway. She suspects that elsewhere in the town there stands a black-beamed Tudor premises called “Shakespeare’s” and perhaps a “Chaucer & Sons” half-thatched cottage out near Hardingstone. Northampton, after all, is a well-labelled town. Once, from her window, she saw two vans pass each other, travelling in opposite directions on East Park Parade. One, possibly belonging to a mattress company, had the word DREAM stencilled upon its side. The other one, perhaps a television or computer retailer, was blazoned with the word REALITY. She’d noted that REALITY was heading for town centre, which was unsurprising, while DREAM followed a trajectory that would eventually lead it to Kettering. She thought that it was more than likely going there to die.
Picking the pace up, on her right the storefronts melt into her slipstream, into one long smear of shop where you can get a Chinese meal, a drum-kit, a peyote cactus, a tattoo or a tattoo removed. She veers around a quorum of rough-looking blokes with beer-cans, who all nonetheless grin toothlessly and growl a cheerful “Hello, Alma” as she passes. Thirty seconds later a young policewoman in a Day-Glo lemon waistcoat beams and nods in recognition at the former menace to society turned local institution. She’s the queen of Kettering Road.
Tacking due west now, Alma executes a smooth curve opposite a shop-soiled Unitarian church and banks into Abington Square, past the unoccupied new properties which have replaced a scruffy row of shops that used to stand upon this rounded corner. She remembers her and David Daniels hiking round the newsagents and second-hand shops on Saturday mornings when they were thirteen, looking for comics or science fiction paperbacks, often paying a visit to the murky enterprise that hung on h
ere, in the perpetual umbra of the church across the street. The owner had been an old lady with a bad cough who was always in her dressing gown and slippers, flecking ragged copies of Amazing Adult Fantasy and yellow-jacketed pornography alike with inadvertent sputum.
Alma feels protective of these vanished people, insufficiently noteworthy or attractive for the sepia retrospectives; these anonymous dust-bunnies who got lost forever underneath the huge, immobile wardrobe of the twentieth century. She wants to fill the crowd scenes in her paintings with them, wants to think of them suspended with their hours and habitats in time’s huge starry jelly, hanging there forever with their feuds and frailties intact, notes on the stave of a stupendous music.
On her right now is the Jaguar dealership, Guy Salmon, a name that has since become Alma’s pet euphemism with which to refer to male ejaculate. Abington Square unfolds around her. Up ahead, Charles Bradlaugh’s statue stands upon its traffic-island plinth, facing away from her towards Abington Street. Nice arse. She’s always rather fancied Bradlaugh, although more for his moral ferocity than for his physical allure if truth be told. Dishing out contraceptive literature with Annie Besant, knocking round with Swinburne, standing up for subjugated India so vocally that youthful devotee Mohandas Ghandi turned up at his funeral. A riot-precipitating atheist teetotaller and champion of the poor, Bradlaugh is Alma’s dream-date. Curiously, whenever she attempts to picture this she always sees herself arriving at the school dance with an animated statue, white stone splinters flaking from its joints with every step. During the slower numbers at the evening’s end they’d leave a swirling chalk-dust trail on the gymnasium floor behind them as they clung together for Wichita Lineman, and then afterwards he’d conscientiously discuss the need for contraception before trying to feel her up on the way home. She looks up at the chiselled figure with its finger pointing ever westward and can hear him bragging to his mates at the pub afterwards: “Here, Algernon, smell this.”
She’s giggling to herself as she strides on towards the junction with the Mounts and York Road, where the snarling, swearing horsepower of the trucks and Chelsea tractors is constrained by pretty lights. A small boy towed behind his carrier-laden mother stares at Alma disbelievingly. A man nudges his wife and mutters “Here, that’s Alma Warren” as she lollops past them, and outside the Bantam Cock three young lads produce copies of the Moorcock Elric book for her to sign. They don’t seem to be frightened of her, joking amiably as she scrawls her lazy autograph, and Alma finds she rather likes them. They inform her that they share a private fantasy about her, in which Alma lives on top of the Express Lifts tower and overlooks Northampton from a throne of human skulls. It’s an arresting image, and she’s beaming fondly as she waves goodbye to them. Before she’s reached the traffic lights two pretty girls who look like art students have smiled and nodded at her, she has made another three-year-old look haunted and another cab has chirped its horn as it purrs by, prompting another clueless raising of the silver talons and another jingling rattle of the finger-armour. She reflects that she is fortunate to have been blessed by an inflated self-image since infancy. Anyone else subjected to this much attention would most probably start acting strangely, she concludes while searching for a kabbalistic insight in the sequence of red-amber-green.
Her personality is a long-running radio drama that is broadcast chiefly for her own amusement, much as she suspects is true of many people. Obviously some prefer personas that are tuned into light comedy, while judged by their expressions the few individuals waiting at the lights with her have modelled their essential natures on the weather forecast. Or perhaps Religious Affairs, Alma reasons after a consideration of the Deco edifice that looms behind her while she stands there by the crossing. Opened in the 1930s as the Savoy Cinema and operating as the ABC throughout her back-row dating years, hosting the Beatles once, the place is now amongst the growing number of town properties owned by the Jesus Army, an expanding horde of sometimes-strident evangelicals that had begun recruiting from Northampton’s pool of derelicts or drunks back in the early 1970s, whisking them from park benches off to Army headquarters in nearby Bugbrook. She recalls an incident from a few years ago when the group had been censured after traumatising children with an unannounced alfresco re-enactment of the Crucifixion, but apart from that they seemed to be permitted to do what they wanted, pretty much.