“Warry, seriously, everywhere’s Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein’s right, then space and time are all one thing and it’s, I dunno, it’s a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they’re there forever. Nothing’s moving. Nothing’s changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl. And when our films, our lives, when they come to an end I don’t see that there’s anywhere for consciousness to go but back to the beginning. Everybody is on endless replay. Every moment is forever, and if that’s true every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city. You know, if I’d thought to put that in a program or a booklet at the exhibition, I suppose that people might have had more chance of working out what I was on about. Ah, well. It’s too late now. What’s done is done, and done just one way for all time, over and over.”
Cue the chubby councillor. This thought had just occurred to Mick, by now slack jawed and reeling with recurrence, when the white-haired and white-bearded Christmas bauble rumbled back down Chalk Lane and once more into their field of view. From his outraged expression and the faint wisps of charred papier-mâché smog which wafted their malodorous tendrils after him, it was apparent that he’d witnessed the evacuated nursery and had very probably gone in to see the burned-out model Boroughs at first hand. All of a sudden, Mick knew down to the last syllable exactly what would transpire next and how Pablo Picasso had a part in it. It was that anecdote, the funny story he’d heard Alma tell at least a half a dozen times, about when Nazis visited the artist’s Paris studio during the occupation and came, with some dismay, on Guernica. The huffy councillor was going to say the same thing that the German officers had said on that occasion, and Mick’s sister would then shamelessly appropriate the Cubist sex-gnome’s spirited and memorable reply. And then the dog would bark again, four times. Scalp tingling, Mick took another turn round on the ghost train.
Stubbing her illicit fag out on the slab where she was sitting, Alma raised her less-than-interested grey and yellow gaze in time to notice the rotund former official for the first time. Near to apoplexy he raised his left arm, a trembling finger pointing back towards the daycare centre where the smoke alarms still sounded, and unwittingly delivered the Gestapo dialogue regarding Guernica.
“Did you do that?”
It was the perfect set up. Beaming beatifically, his sister offered up her plagiarised reply.
“No. You did.”
Blinking dazedly and without an articulate response the erstwhile council leader trundled off in the direction of Marefair, a haywire snowball that got smaller as it rolled downhill instead of bigger. From St. Mary’s Street came the predicted canine outburst: woof, woof, woof and then a faint pause. Woof.
Despite the clockwork eeriness, Mick found that he was chortling. Kicking her heels beside him, never one afraid to laugh at her own stolen jokes, Alma joined in. Somewhere upslope behind and right on schedule, sirens were approaching through the stopped streets of a broken heaven.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Where to start, and where to finish?
Firstly I must thank my wife, the artist and writer Melinda Gebbie, who’s been almost as intimately involved with this book as I have since its beginnings. I think I proposed to her just before commencing the project, and she’s had almost every chapter since read out aloud to her, whether she wanted it or not. It was her technical advice that fleshed out the tools of Ernest Vernall’s trade in chapter one and Alma Warren’s craft through the remainder of the novel, and most of all it was her belief that this work was important and her almost-ten-years of encouragement to that effect that helped give me the stamina to complete it. Thank you so much, darling. Without you, I doubt very much there’d be a book requiring these acknowledgements.
Almost as importantly, I must offer my deepest gratitude to Steve Moore, even though he’s no longer around to receive it. Steve completed his invaluable initial edit of Jerusalem’s first third — memorably including the stylistic critique “Ugghh” in red pen in the margins; mercifully, I forget just where — and brought his dazzling intellect to all our formative discussions of the view of time which we later discovered to be called Eternalism, by which point we’d both long since converted to that doctrine. If this book’s central idea is correct (and given physicist Fay Dowker’s current researches into an alternative hypothesis, it’s at least falsifiable and testable) then Steve is currently approaching his second birthday in a leafy close on Shooters Hill in 1951. Thanks again for everything, mate, and all being well I’ll run into you again in roughly nineteen years, your time.
Steve’s abrupt decision to put our theory to the test in March 2014 (some people — you pay them an advance to edit your gigantic novel, and then you never see them again) meant that I had to find a selection of other editors and proofreaders who weren’t scared of me. First and foremost among these was the poet, author, editor and comedian Bond, Donna Bond. Donna edited the whole book, took me to task several times for my misuse of the word ‘careen’ — apparently it’s a term specific to the practice of overturning a ship in order to scrape the barnacles from its hull, but who could have known? — and even somehow noticed a couple of typos in the impenetrably made-up mess of chapter twenty-five. Thanks, Donna, for doing such a meticulous job of
something that I didn’t have the nerve, focus or knowledge of obscure naval terminology to face on my own. The next pass at the editing fell to my friends, the writers John Higgs and Ali Fruish. John spotted a few things, but was mostly invaluable in giving me his typically illuminating reaction to the book as a whole, and for writing an appreciation that made Jerusalem sound like something I might actually want to read. Ali, in between his numerous spells in prison (he’s a writer in residence, though I enjoy making him sound like a murderous drifter), not only gave me some useful pointers on crack etiquette but had, throughout my writing of the book, been digging up gems of research that turned out to be the novel’s making: he alerted me to James Hervey’s local provenance, and provided the final, necessary revelations about the Gas Street origins of free-market capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. To both of these gentlemen, scholars and acrobats I am greatly indebted.
Likewise being of immense assistance in the production of this behemoth, my thanks are also due to my comrade, henchman and hired goon, the omni-competent Joe Brown. Joe put me in touch with Donna Bond, served up sheaves of obscure reference material at my every delirious whim and, most of all, burned down a month of his life in colouring and making intelligible my smudged grey bedlam of a cover illustration. And, if you hold your ear close enough to the page, he also wrote the music to the song audible during the closing scenes of chapter twenty-five. Joe, I don’t know what I would do without you, but I’m confident I’d be doing it much more slowly and displaying a far higher level of ignorance. While on the subject of production, I’d also like to thank Tony Bennett at Knockabout — for his support, his warm enthusiasm and his occasional bouts of being pressed into service as werewolf-wrangler if I’ve had to deal with anything too early in the morning — and the fine people at Liveright Publishing for bringing their usual impeccable polish and discrimination to bear upon the finished article. And, of course, anybody along the way that I’ve left out. There have been a multitude of people responsible for building Jerusalem, and I’m grateful to every one of them.