A River Called Time

by Courttia Newland

  Then he was back in the train carriage, glancing up and down at the blank faces of other commuters, oblivious to what he’d seen. The over-head advert said ‘The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be’. An office worker in slim black gloves and ankle heels gripped an Evening Standard bearing the headline ‘Hoffa Missing’. That threw him until he saw the black- and-white picture of Pacino’s face, realising it was another advert for the new Scorsese movie. The real headline above: ‘No Anti-Semitism Apology from Corbyn’. The seat beside him remained empty, even though they’d stopped at a busy station before that, and the remainder of seats were full and people were standing. He sighed, rubbing his chin. He needed a shave. The well-spoken, automated woman’s voice told their carriage the next stop was his. Doors opened. Time to leave.

  His second tube journey was mercifully without unbidden hallucinations. He rode the escalator upwards, rising into the stark vestibule, bright as waking daylight, where orange-jacketed TfL staff loitered, a man and a woman wearing expressions of slight annoyance, stiff barriers opening in welcome or to allow commuters to exit. Outside, light was failing. He might just make it. Head ducked, he fast-walked to the subway tunnels that ran beneath the roundabout and advertising lighthouse of the IMAX, a venue he’d never been to despite his deep love of cinema. Too commercial perhaps. Too overflowing with popcorn bags and difficult-to-negotiate hotdog buns. He surfaced on the opposite side of the road, amongst lanky teenaged parkour trainees who tested their skills against stubbed walls, bike-riders in glowing reflective wear preparing for the rush of madness that was evening traffic. And still, even as he walked northwards, the eternal call of the bell rang like a thousand voices humming in both ears. Not loud, or overpowering, only present like the sound of his breath, or the swish of clothing in response to hurried movements. Though it was strange, he imagined the sensation was common for people who’d taken what Keshni had called a gong bath. He didn’t wish the noise to end; if anything, Markriss found it a calming and pleasant addition to his walk.

  He passed between the white sheen of the BFI and smooth-hewn bulk of the National Theatre, avoiding oncoming pedestrians, trying to make his legs move faster, though they felt heavy. A notification pinged his phone; he ignored it. The shouts of people sitting on metal benches and the polished stone of crescent installations, eating sandwiches and talking on phones made him turn left at the edge of the cinema, breathing out. He slackened his pace, panic over. He manoeuvred himself amongst bunched figures perusing trestle tables stacked with books, scanning with half an eye, the other kept on the movements of others, careful not to bump anyone.

  The Southbank Centre Book Market had long been his respite. He wasn’t sure why, it was just as bustling as any place in the city, with the teeming BFI bar and restaurant opposite, crowds walking doggedly along the river path between the theatre and Tate Modern. Each crammed table was always heavily occupied and, on many occasions, his hand would reach for the same volume as another’s. Yet there was an air of quiet stillness about the place, of focus and commonality. Of studied contemplation by way of titles and authors he knew, just knew, could be found beneath the rain-cloud overhang of Waterloo Bridge. Perhaps it was the pacing walk up and down trestle pathways, a miniature labyrinth of literary accomplishment. Perhaps it was simply the sight of all those covers and names. Over the years he’d found a treasured Beryl Gilroy Black Teacher, a couple of decent Baldwins, a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four he’d bought as a birthday present for an ex-girlfriend, though most of the time he didn’t visit to purchase anything, just to be surrounded by fading light and words. He came after work on weekdays, or sometimes arrived on a Sunday evening to find the tables crowded by book lovers, all moving in remote silence. Twilight was his favourite hour. He liked to flick through pages in subdued winter light, never quite sure what purpose it served.

  And then, parallel to the book market, the river. Much as he loved the odour and feel of second-hand pages, he was drawn to the indifferent lap of tide, and he’d prolong his back-and-forth walk along stacks, moving closer to the water and then further, ebbing, awaiting that final moment of release: the moment he relented, called time, and he replaced the last poetry collection or yellowed, brittle comic where it belonged, blind-stepping from the confines of tables, crossing paving slabs until he was there by the cold wood railing, looking out at the Embankment on the northern side.

  There were times when he would smile, as he did then. Struck by the frosted brilliance of Christmas lights on either bank and convivial radiance of street-food stalls, the river a glimmering universe, dark matter rippling with constant motion. The distant red light of cars, sluggish, moving in one direction. The riverboat transporting commuters to various destinations across the city, drawing to a stop at Embankment pier, picking up and depositing office workers.

  On a summer day six years previously, Markriss had walked this route and strayed further west, keeping close to the wood-topped railing until he noted an abstract vision poised on the very edge of Queen Elizabeth Hall. A life-sized boat, sitting proud on the roof, stranded like Noah atop Mount Ararat. His first sighting of it produced stunned laughter. He paced up and down, immune to the clatter and low-level roar of skateboarders, avoiding people, trying to see it from better angles. It was quite huge, the bow jutting into empty space as though it might tip at any minute, the hull made of wood and dim metal under the waterline. The boat was such an incongruous sight Markriss couldn’t get it out of his mind. Though he baulked at going inside the building to enquire why it had been constructed, his curiosity was tickled, and he began to talk of it with friends, a few of his colleagues at work.

  It was only during a lunch conversation with Chileshe and a group of fellow workmates that he learned the inspiration behind the boat. Part architectural project, part art installation, its tertiary purpose was to provide a one-room hotel-slash-creative space for artists of all disciplines. Up to two people at a time could pay to spend a night or more above the river, looking down on a vista usually witnessed only by the homeless, and then from a reduced, ground-level viewpoint. The South Bank and its environs in fixed night, when every tourist, worker, commuter, artist and skateboard enthusiast left for home.

  They talked about whether they would choose to stay there or not, who their companions might be if they did. Markriss, going through another of his regular single bouts, said he’d like to have the experience alone. Someone, he couldn’t remember who, pointed out the designers modelled their installation on the riverboat Joseph Conrad captained during his time in the Congo, fictionalised later in Heart of Darkness. The information had floored most of his colleagues.

  He’d first read the novel at university. While he engaged with the work as an artistic feat of great significance and prowess—particularly its end, which moved him so much its gravity remained with him for weeks—he’d been troubled by the book’s inability to escape the very racism it claimed to refute. Africans were kept on the periphery, reduced to inhabiting a darkness drawn from the author’s unjustified misunderstandings, Marlow exhibiting little or no understanding of their truth. Then there was the false, stark equivalence of the rivers Thames and Congo, created by Conrad, in the words of Chinua Achebe, to posit the waters as binary opposites, ‘one good, one bad’. More than anything for Markriss and his fallow reading mind was the pervasiveness of naked cruelty towards the continent and people of his heritage, the inability of the protagonist to adequately challenge his own prejudice, or even accept it as a simple epiphany gained. Maybe that had been the novel’s true aim, the charting of a racist mind changed by experience. He was never sure.

  Still it unsettled him, and when he returned to the novel after a time—and again, when discussions for and against the merits of the book raged—those feelings intensified. The unabashed hatred of the central protagonist and the world he came from was Markriss’s daily reality, an echo that assailed him each time he stepped from his home onto London streets. To read those words again, especially in
recent times, the product of such violent thought and deeds, brought a pressure to his heart he could not ignore.

  Whenever he came to the South Bank after that first sighting of the boat, Markriss had taken to looking up and left, unable to stop himself, immersed in the soundtrack of rolling skateboard wheels, that tense absent pause, the powerless thunder of safe landings. He would glance up at the boat and register pain caught in his body; it was like being tugged from inside. One summer night, after years had passed, following an evening at the cinema on a date with someone he later wouldn’t remember—and at that moment knew wouldn’t last beyond the night—he’d turned in that direction to find the Conrad boat gone. A hollow feeling settled in his gut as he stared into empty space. He wasn’t certain how he felt. A conversation had occurred. Concluded by others, moved on. The sky seemed even larger behind the solid block of the hall. The voices around him too loud, the skateboarders’ radio too obtrusive for him to fold inside himself, better to decipher the flavour and consistency of his emotions. His date tugged at his elbow, fast-talking up the merits of Yo! Sushi tempura rolls. He allowed himself to be led, and never forgot.

  Night rushed through his door as he turned the key and pushed inside his flat. Under Chuck Taylors, a welcome mat of spindling autumn leaves and glossy campaign leaflets. One red, one yellow. No blue.

  He dumped his paper bag of leftover ramen in the small fridge. The one-bed was a Notting Hill Housing Association flat he’d rented since his mid-twenties; he’d probably never have the money to buy. Cosy as Keshni and Chileshe’s home, even if a little more compact, he kept the place minimal, secretly proud of his achievement. A sofa beneath the sole window near the front door, another against the right-hand wall, and on the left his music system and bookshelf. Behind him, a robust headmaster’s desk he’d bought from a Portobello Road antique store, on which he kept his laptop. In an alcove beyond that wall, the kitchenette. Beside that lurked the bedroom, though it was actually more of a semi-enclosed space with just enough room for his double bed. The bathroom hid at the rear of the flat, an afterthought.

  When he first moved in, Markriss hooked up his stereo and cleansed the space by playing J Hus loudly to help him unpack. On his second day, the front door knocked. He opened it to see a tall, aging Rastafarian, white locks emerging from his skull like tree roots, reaching his ankles. He squinted into the flat, which was a little intimidating. Months later, Markriss came to realise the elder was partially sighted.

  ‘Me nuh love that bangarang music yuh play,’ he told him, dark eyes settling. ‘Yuh must vex me spirit wid all the noise?’

  Markriss apologised, and said he’d turn it down. The Rasta frowned. It was as though he’d been expecting more of a fight. He raised a clenched fist, held towards Markriss.

  ‘Give tanks,’ he said. ‘Call I Sirus.’

  From then on, he and Sirus became good neighbours. The old man invited Markriss to his upstairs flat for a rum and smoke on many occasions. After a time, no further invites were needed.

  Markriss collapsed onto his bed, lights off. Felt his way around the mattress until he found the remote. Switched on the TV. Took idle glances at his phone: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. In his eagerness to visit the South Bank, he’d forgotten to text Nesta. He rolled onto his belly, sending a message about hooking up after his lectures the following day. Nothing came back, although he expected that. Nesta was always busy with something or the other. Unlike himself.

  He flicked through channels for something to watch, settling on Fight Club. It was his first time seeing the movie, and he’d always harboured a vague interest, especially since it employed actors he loved in the leads. Though the story was compelling and the performances entranced him, by the halfway mark, residues of his insomnia began to kick in. His eyelids fell, beginning to burn, even though he wouldn’t actually sleep later. He was wired, and supposed he should take his melatonin, yet if he was honest the tablets hadn’t worked for a while. By the movie’s conclusion, Brad Pitt standing at a panoramic window as buildings went up in flames around him, Markriss couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if it had featured Black male protagonists, rather than Norton and Pitt. That week’s news was swamped with the furore over Blue Story, a film about young gang members’ involvement with postcode wars that had been pulled from a number of major cinemas after reports of gang violence up and down the country. Although the film was eventually reinstated, Markriss guessed he had his answer. Back in 2012, when a Colorado premiere of The Dark Knight Rises was stormed by a gunman in tactical clothing, killing twelve and injuring seventy others, no one had dared suggest a movie about a masked vigilante at war with a homicidal maniac was even slightly to blame.

  Credits rolled. Markriss lay in darkness staring at the white ceiling, unable to think of much else. The rumble of a passing night bus shuddered beneath the continuous tone of Keshni’s bell reverberating, on the very edge of hearing, like a sound from a distant past.

  2

  Insomnia woke him just after 4 a.m. He decided that, instead of staring into nothingness or curling into a ball in hope of returning to sleep, he might as well get up and work on the project. Two slices of buttered hard-dough toast and a cup of milky tea later, Markriss was ready for the morning. He flipped the switch on his desk lamp. Outside his lone window, night was viscous and murky. He opened up his laptop, typed his password, and while he waited for the document to load, he turned to his small wooden box.

  He opened it with a key kept in his desk drawer, retrieved his fake black Moleskine—bought as a pack of three from Ryman’s—and laid it flat, caressing the soft cover. Something about its smooth surface always beguiled him, although he treasured the rough corners and broken, exposed spine equally. Others, if they’d noticed its dishevelled state, might have seen the notebook as a type of condemnation, a confession of work unfinished. The eight years he’d spent filling its pages were totally worthwhile, every day and every sentence he’d written, every character he created and spirited thought he’d had. A year after buying the notebook, he’d had a small tattoo inked into his upper arm at Camden Market: TboTA, 25.8.11—The Book of the Ark, and the date he’d started the novel. A space for the second, finishing date left vacant.

  He’d formed the idea for the novel during his time at Brunel, though his degree had been in journalism. He refused to take creative writing because what were the odds of being an author versus the odds of finding work for a mainstream paper? Exactly. Even so, stories and characters flooded him, and while they never steered him towards writing the book itself, he always gave them space, made them welcome. Markriss began separating notebooks, one for articles and non-fiction, the other for poetry and prose. When he learned he was inept at poetry, he concentrated further on fiction. He would write anything that came to mind, from one-line ideas to fully formed outlines. He’d cut pictures and quotes from magazines, pressing them tight against lined paper with Pritt Stick, smoothing down bumps.

  As his studies went on, however, his imaginative bent lessened. And then around that time, stemming from nothing more than an uncomfortable bout of sleep paralysis, where he woke feeling that he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move his body, couldn’t even scream for help even though no one was there to hear him, he’d felt the odd sensation of being lifted from his body so he could view himself from above. It first happened in a tiny hostel room he’d managed to worm his way into on the recommendation of an ex-girlfriend, Raymeda. Although she’d kicked him out of her own hostel room after they split, she’d taken him to her housing project and had him put on their books. Markriss could never thank her enough, though it was years since they’d last spoken. His hostel had a single bed, a narrow white wardrobe, a chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, one chair, and that was it. In that first episode of paralysis, from his ceiling-high vantage point, he’d seen a figure perched on the chair edge, leaning over the bed as if whispering into his ear. Hooded from head to ankles, he couldn’t make out their face. The
figure spoke in a clogged, guttural language that sounded like choking.

  His vision frightened the paralysis from him, and he awoke.

  Markriss didn’t believe what he’d dreamt was real, and yet the image remained in his memory. He’d torn the plastic cover from a fresh note-book and wrote the experience down before he had fully woken up. For the following seven years, he was visited by regular dream fragments and episodes of a story that unfortunately never quite formulated into a whole. The oddest thing about it was—unlike when he normally wrote—he didn’t really care if he finished the novel or not. It was the enjoyment of his self-imagined world that was the pleasure, not the idea of writing, or even completing a serious work. When the time was right, he told himself, the book would come. And so he wrote his visions as they arrived, whenever that was—an alternate world, a city composed of a building that housed a population of millions within its walls. Gateways and terraces, the poor and rich separated by clearly defined zones, his character names stolen from actual people he knew. It was gratifying, a means of easing the tension at his shoulders, and he wrote for hours at a time, as he had that morning, head down, teeth biting lower lip, striving to put images that danced beyond mental reach onto the page. He searched the net for stimuli, Blu-Tacked findings onto the wall above his desk. Schwimbeck’s My Dream, My Bad Dream was most prominent, although he couldn’t let his eyes rest on the painting often, as it was too close a representation of what he’d experienced, and he avoided it as much as he could.

  This morning, Markriss felt compelled to write the outline of a scene he’d dreamt, set outside the barriers of a huge gateway to his imaginary world. Where it went, he didn’t know. Markriss hadn’t imagined that far. He only saw five friends, hands joined, all facing down an armed militia. He wrote of a black dog, struggling with a maddening sense of déjà vu that made him unable to separate whether the animal had haunted his dreams, or existed in a reality that had taken place at some earlier point of his life. By the time he finished his notes, Markriss felt good about what he’d done. It was 6 a.m. He needed a shower. Within the hour, he would leave for work.