Jerusalem

And now Michael Warren swings the hammer down through its foreordained arc onto the dented cylinder, a giant metal lung that flattens and expels its final withering breath into his face. The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum, this single act relived, resounding endlessly in a reverberant space-time and become an almost musical crescendo, a percussive storm that wells from thin air, a dramatic and hair-raising punctuation in the symphony: BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum and from its threaded throat it coughs a tightly-crinkled cloud of orange poison that expands, unwraps itself, unfolds to fill the world of Michael Warren’s breath and vision. A cascade of half-dimensions, the unfurling chaos of its shape contains, just for an instant, every fugitive and frail line from his sister’s future paintings. He inhales the imagery that he spits back across the table at her now, now in the Golden Lion’s Saturday-night limbo and she wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses, just like the ambulance-light and the rain upon the night when her Aunt Lou dies in the thunderstruck rear access-way. She wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses. The hammer falls upon the drum. I am a builder, and with each new course my swift trowel catches up the surplus flab of mortar squeezed from in-between the bricks. I build the centuries, I build the moments. I am following the diagram. All of the weight is carried at the centre.

I am sighting down my straight cue at a rounded life, precariously at rest on the world’s baize, and in its glaze the dancing highlight glint of soul. I knock the reason and the colour both from Ernest Vernall’s head. I squeeze May out into a gutter and send fever-carts to carry off her firstborn daughter. I cram Snowy’s mouth with flowers and I throw the poison dust in Michael’s eyes. I bank, roll into the high thermals. Majesty and rubble in the dive, the tailspin. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.

Of course we know pain. We know cowardice and spite and falsehood. We know everything. I call my brother Uriel a cunt. We punch and gouge each other in the town square and the wind raised by our feud alone blows ghosts halfway to Wales. The repercussions ring across the Earth. He blacks my eye and China’s great leap forward carries it into an economic abyss. I collapse his nose and Castro comes to power in Cuba. From my split lip dribbles structuralism, rock ’n’ roll, and hovercrafts. We pick the golden clots before they’re ready and the Belgian Congo blooms with severed heads.

Of course we stride among you, thigh-deep in your politics and your mythology. We wade through the pink map-scrap petals of your rapidly disintegrating commonwealth. We march in a black tide on Washington. We juggle satellites and Francis Bacon. We are builders. We build Allen Ginsberg, and Niemeyer’s cathedral in Brasilia. We slap up the Berlin Wall. Clouds pass across the sun. We’re with you now.

Of course we dance on pins and level cities. We deliver up the Jews from Pharaoh, unto Buchenwald. We flutter tender in the first kiss, flap in agony above the last row in a draughty kitchen. We know what fellatio tastes like and how childbirth feels. We climb upon each other’s backs in shower cubicles to flee the fumes. We are in the serene molecular indifference of the Zyklon and the dull heart of the man who turns the wheel to open up the ducts. We are forever standing on those bank steps in Hiroshima as the reality surrounding us collapses into an atomic hell. That moment when you reach your orgasm together and it is the sweetest, the most perfect instant that you ever live through, we are both of you. We keep slaves, and we write Amazing Grace.

Of course we shout. Of course we sing. Of course we kill and love. We cheat in business and we give our lives for others. We discover penicillin and we dump the children we have strangled in back alleys. We bomb Guernica just to create that painting, and the bursts of smoke and scream beneath us are our brush-marks. We are from the realms of Glory; we are from the nursery, the school, the abattoir, the brothel. How could we be otherwise? You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.

We are in every second of a billion trillion lives. We’re every ant, each microbe and leviathan. Of course we’re lonely.

Everything swirls in my eye. If I but blink, all of existence breaks down to an alphabet of particles and thence to only numbers, to an endless sea of values circling in radiant symmetry about their axis, which reside between the figures four and five. When multiplied with their resultant digits added, these reflect each other perfectly, as do the three and six, the nine and zero, ten and minus one, sixteen and minus seven, on to positive and negative infinity alike. There at the centre of the numerical hurricane I stand. Its eye is mine. I am between the four and five, where is the pivot of the universe. I am revolving slowly between mercy and severity, between the blue shift and the red. I breathe in and the stars tumble towards me, toppling back into a single white-hot quark, into the minus numbers. I breathe out, an aerosol of black, exotic matter, galaxies and magnetars: positive sums exploding from my lips unto the cold and dark extremities of time.

I am too often angry, cleaving more toward the five, the fingers in a clenched fist, than towards the four, the ones clasped in a handshake, those extended in a stroke or a caress. Too often am I inclined to severity, towards the red, rather than to the cyan of forgiveness. This, then, is the reason that we keep our cue-tips blue: as a reminder of compassion and its weak force, so that even as we smash the balls towards their predetermined pockets we bestow sky-coloured kisses of eternal grace and mercy, made from billiard chalk.

I see Marla Roberta Stiles, aged four, arranging daisy-heads on miniature pink plastic plates for a tea party to which she’ll invite her teddy and her mother, the two soft toys that she loves best in the world. She pours a cold infusion of fruit pastilles in tap-water into tiny cups and takes it both ends in a spit-roast with her pimp Keith and his mate Dave just thirteen years later. Marla asks her mother if she’d like a dried sultana as dessert and spits out semen; scolds the glassily impassive bear for falling off his chair as she sucks up the crystal smoke. She calls sultanas “tanas”, and a rosy-cheeked father of two punches her in the face and rapes her in the back of his Ford Escort, and I love her.

I see Freddy Allen stealing pints of milk and dying underneath a railway arch. I see him as a younger man, waiting in Katherine’s Gardens for the doctor’s daughter that he plans to sexually assault upon her way to work. I’m running with him, weeping with him as he flees the scene in horror at himself, the deed undone. I see him sleeping in the weeds, I see the grey trudge of his afterlife, all Freddy feels that he deserves. His guilt has turned to anger, resonating through his days so that he has no hope now of release. The loaves and bottles are all gone, with the doorsteps they stood upon. Nothing can ever be put right.

I see Aegburth who is called Peter with his sandal idly scuffing the Golgotha dirt, revealing a protruding corner of grey stone, too obviously chiselled to be natural, its angles right. He claws and scrabbles for an hour to finally unearth the ancient rood, holding it up two-handed in the sun to see it better. Soil rains on his sweaty brow, his slippery cheek, falls into the Sargasso of his beard. He tastes the crucifixion ground and he wears the cold shadow of the cross upon his face. His weak heart sounds a rhythmic blacksmith clang, BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! He totters, unaware, upon the precipice of his mortality. There at the brink he sees me and the meaning of the universe is altered evermore about him. In France, for his mighty perspiration, he is known as ‘le canal’, which means ‘the channel’.

I see Oatsie Chaplin in debate with Boysie Bristol, there outside the Palace of Varieties on Gold Street corner in the first years of the twentieth century. “But if they’re millionaires, why do they dress as tramps?” I see him come home to his native Lambeth following the First World War, a famous film star now, returning from America. The cockneys – former neighbours who’ve lost sons or brothers to the conflict while he batted his long lashes for the camera – dash pints of beer into his face. Rescued by his assistants and wiped down with borrowed towels in a nearby public convenience, he smells his past, he smells his father in the sodden jacket, the damp trousers.

I see Henry George, praying in barns when he no longer trusts the church. Pigeons are cooing in the rafters and the light falls in a twinkling shaft through breaches in the slates, the thatching. On his shoulder flares a brand that is my own design, that is his private shame, that is his holy burning glory: pallid violet lines on purple skin, the balance and the road. Road of the exodus from Tennessee to Kansas, drovers’ road from Wales to Sheep Street where he washes up into the Boroughs on a bleating tide of white, all paths are one. The lynch-ropes of his youth are now the tyres that speed him on his way, with the black champions and martyrs of Northampton striding in his wake.

I see Benedict Perrit, writing lines of painful beauty, laughing, drinking, arguing with ghosts. I see him sitting up alone save for the distant sirens, fingers hesitating over his typewriter’s dusty keys on the night prior to Alma Warren’s exhibition. He stares like a lost explorer at the Arctic whiteness of the empty page, waiting for inspiration, for the least brush of my wing. Three miles away, off in the yellow Whitehills lamplight filtering through the curtains, Michael Warren cannot sleep and thinks about Diana Spencer’s funeral procession, all the people on the footbridge as she came into Northampton. All the eyes and silence.

I see Thomas Ernest Warren, Michael’s father, digging holes or taking time off work with a bad back which doesn’t seem to bother him much after his retirement. Earlier, he’s in his twenties, learning how to throw grenades. He’s part of a long file of men who one by one leap up onto a platform with their sergeant, pull the stalk from their iron pineapple, count three, and hurl the death-egg over a high wall of sandbags to explode. Tommy is next in line, wanting to do it right. The chap in front of him pulls out the pin and starts to count. Tom, over-eager, has already jumped up on the platform right behind the nervous soldier, who counts u

p to three, then accidentally drops the lethal fir-cone at their feet. Sighting along my cue, I hit their sergeant so that he streaks forward, knocking Thomas and the other man to either side and simultaneously sweeping the grenade over the barrier; into the death’s-head pocket, and we builders at the table all throw up our hands. Iiiiiyyyesssssss!

I see the stipple and the hatch, the filigree and the fine shading. I see Doreen Warren carefully unwrap the cherry-menthol Tune and place it in her infant’s mouth. I see the councillor, Jim Cockie, in his bed full of bad dreams. I see the pavement artist Jackie Thimbles, and Tom Hall, the minstrel ghost. I see Fat Kenny Nolan as he contemplates the species of datura he has cultivated, and I smile to see it is an Angel’s Trumpet with the blossom’s white bell hanging down, all rueful. I see Roman Thompson sitting in a borrowed car, silently in the darkened mouth of Fish Street with a snooker cue at rest on the back seat behind him, cold blood coursing through his heart. I see John Newton after his unblinding. I see Thursa Vernall turning German bombers into her accompanists, and the heroic dream of Britton Johnson. I see Lucia Joyce and Samuel Beckett, see him chatting to her in the institution; by her graveside. I see miseries. I see redemptions.

I see Audrey Vernall on the dance-hall stage, her fingers trickling on the keys of her accordion, tossing back her hair, with one small blue shoe keeping time on the worn boards, skirt swinging, “When The Saints Go Marching In”. Her tight smile falters in the spotlight and her eyes keeping darting sideways to the wings where her dad Johnny, the band’s manager, gives her the thumbs-up, nods encouragingly at her, and then, later on, he’s taking off his loud checked jacket, hanging it up on the hook for dressing gowns behind her bedroom door.

I see Thomas á Becket, and I see the brown-skinned woman with the scar who works from the St. Peter’s Annexe up in two thousand and twenty-five. I see the saints go marching in.

I see the dog turd on the central walk of Bath Street flats, unbroken on the Friday afternoon, stepped in by midday Saturday when Michael Warren notices it on his way to Alma’s exhibition.

I step back before the canvas, reeling in its splendour.

At the very start there are a thousand planets racketing about the solar system, ricocheting and rebounding, pulverising one another in a pinball free-for-all, and this is where we get the idea for our trilliard table. Something hits the fledgling world, with debris from both bodies settling at the edges of Earth’s field of gravity, coagulating to a moon, a lucky opening break.

Some short while later a less sizeable projectile makes its impact, and also its contribution to the culling of the thunder-lizards. In the aftermath, amoebic creatures called agglutinated foraminifera clothe themselves within protective tests of meteoric nickel and space-cobalt; plate their unicellular forms in peacock displays of microscopic diamond dust. The ornaments of their miniature cosmos, clad with jewellery from the void they scintillate there in the Late Cretaceous silence, in the very dusk of life. They neither know about nor have concern for the extinctions of the macrocosm. They remain oblivious to the trees and monsters toppling and dying overhead, in the long night that follows the extra-terrestrial collision. In their multitudes they are as various as snowflakes and yet I know each one intimately, know them by their individual coruscations, their signature sparkle. They move with the moon’s pull, with the magnet-tides, as do the generations that come after them, migrating on lunar meridians to feed the underwater bugs that feed the fish, that feed the birds and bears and crouching monkey-men.

You will appreciate that our game involves a great deal of strategy.

Sometimes we’re on the ball. Sometimes we get distracted, miss the easy shot, but only when we’re meant to. I give Solomon the holy torus and he wears it on his index finger when he subjugates the howling djinns that have rampaged through Egypt and the Middle East as an infernal weather-pattern, as a hornet swarm. When he elects that they should build his temple I try to prevent it with a safety shot but I misjudge; I miss.

The binding of the fiends is going well enough until the sorcerer-king gets to the thirty-second spirit, at which point the King is obviously out of his depth. He has failed to anticipate the unbelievable ferocity that senior devils like Asmodeus will resort to if you have them in a corner. The thing takes shape in the pentacle, three-headed and no bigger than a doll astride the cat-sized dragon form that is its steed. The bull’s-head lows, the ram’s-head bleats, and the crowned human dwarf’s-head in the centre lets forth both a flood of terrifying threats and its vile breath alike, to fill the room. It stamps the pommel of its gory lance upon the flagstones and the magus panics, flinching back so that the lamen hung about his neck comes untied at one end and clatters to the floor. By then the chamber is aflame with flickering spider-salamanders and the operation has become a screaming pandemonium, a catastrophe. I close my marbled eyes and turn away.

In consequence of this I do not know what next occurred. It may be that the founder of the temple was possessed by the efreet, or it may be as rabbinical scholars claim, with Solomon flung far away into a desert land and driven from his wits while the triumphant demon steals his shape. It may be that Asmoday merely takes advantage of the King’s discomfiture to plant destructive notions in his mind, or it may well be that the thirty-second spirit does nothing at all, and all of the calamities to come are Solomon’s alone. I only know that when I look back, the First Temple is completed, with the malice of the seventy-two tempters, flatterers and devastators coded in its columns and its lines. A focus for the world’s three most belligerent religions, I see crusade, jihad and retaliatory air-strike circling the pillars of the structure’s round. I see a foul and fruity pulp of tortured men, raped women and pulverised children sliding down its ancient walls.

King Solomon. What a colossal idiot.

Derek James Warner, 42, works as a driver for one of the big private security providers. Derek’s looking forward to the Friday night ahead of him, out scouting for a bit of skirt and confident he’ll be successful, even though he’s greying at the temples, even though he’s put on a few pounds just recently and even though he’s married with two children, Jennifer and Carl.