The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  Deed done when it was done, and the awful consequences coming slowly into focus, the progress of the bloody-handed butcher is tracked through a tissue of stitched together, low-resolution CCTV images from the local cab firm. Soap opera to freak show: a précis of cultural shifts in terrestrial broadcasting. The heavy, dripping bag is swung into the opened boot, when Tony McCluskie summons the nearest firm, for a short ride to the canal. He must have repeated the excursion several times. He will serve, the judge says, at least twenty years in prison.

  Shortly before Boris Johnson stepped down to lend his well-rehearsed charisma to the Brexit campaign, a story by Adam Lusher was flagged up in the new tabloid version of The Independent. BORIS PLANS TO PAVE UK CANALS FOR BIKE PATHS. A shameless lift from a Hackney Gazette scare story had come to pass. There was a headshot of Mr Johnson, glossed as ‘a keen cyclist’, in a helmet spattered in Oyster branding. And it did look as if he’d managed to ram his golden mop into a giant mollusc. The story was hung on the inevitability of the Mayor’s ascent to Cameron’s throne. As prime minister, Boris would tarmac a Euro-severed England, land and water, in a network of true-blue bike tracks.

  Building the multimillion-pound ‘great British cycle superhighway’ would involve filling in all 2,000 miles of Britain’s canal network… One branch would link with ‘Boris Island’, a new airport in the Thames estuary. He plans to open the network jointly with Sir Bradley Wiggins in a ceremony involving ‘semi-naked women’ playing beach volleyball in the middle of the old Grand Union Canal, glistening like wet otters.

  The piece attracted little attention when it appeared on April 1st, 2016. But like all the best jokes, it was close to reality. In the post-truth era of Johnson and Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, asserting and denying with the flick of a thumb, the wilder the statement the more effective its carry. Olympicopolis happened. And it will happen again.

  AFTER SEBALD

  ‘Popinga was still walking. This had become half his life, wandering through the streets, across the light cast by shop windows, mingling with the crowd.’

  Georges Simenon

  Elbows spread wide, hooked to the rail at the edge of things. This view. Breath held. As motionless and drained of animal warmth as the man on the bench in Haggerston Park. And thinking about the DVD of the film I have dropped off in Shoreditch, on my way down here, the study of a catatonic patient released from hospital and escaping, who knows where, for a lost week never to be documented, before he surfaces again. Escaping from the questions, the voices.

  They want him to watch two men, actors, having sex on a bed. They shine intrusive lights in his face. He was dressed by his brother in clothes that did not belong to him. A soiled grey raincoat. Speech was far away. But they spoke at him: relations, psychiatrists, social workers and camera crew

  Far enough out and there is nothing left to be said. Listen to the fear. They are looking at you. They are reading your lips. You repeat their questions with sufficient delicacy to spare them shame. Midnight. A railway station. A bus station. Stations of the cross. Listen to the beat of a telltale heart. Listen to London light remembering the ocean.

  Look down into the nave of the great railway cathedral from a high walkway punctuated by sealed doors, fantastic war memorials and tin receptacles for pre-trash newspapers, bins waiting to be emptied. Take care to avoid the bronzed Kindertransport models, dwarfish aliens with empty suitcases. Sentiment betrays memory. Contemplate the scuttling dance of inky figures on a ballroom floor: the retail concourse of Liverpool Street Station.

  How do they avoid collisions? Heads down, eyes in their hands. Every one of them pokes and prods, making it seem that the devices are malfunctioning. They do not trust what they are seeing. Mass addiction. They barge across one another. Always late, they panic along predestined diagonals towards numbered platforms. They never appreciate in their neurotic haste that they are a lowly manifestation of the human soup, something akin to the viral democracy of the public swimming pool painted by Leon Kossoff.

  The master artist of this neighbourhood – Arnold Circus, Spitalfields – Kossoff was shipped out in wartime, evacuated with other pupils from Hackney Downs School, sent into Norfolk. He never forgot the scene from the train window: sheds, canals, allotments, gasholders. An elasticated landscape witnessed in transit, he knew better than most, is never the same as walked ground.

  Coming down stairs that move for you, move as you stand still, and avoiding clipboard missionaries, beggars, dispensers of promotional leaflets, you are in it, part of the soup. I walked straight over to Platform 12, where the Norwich train was about to depart: with the notion of identifying a WG Sebald type, a literary phantom freed from the labyrinth of text. Scurrying businessmen. White raincoat women with lidded beakers. Two Chinese postgraduates, with cameras and laptops, in excited conversation. Not an authentic rucksack in sight. Not a grey moustache.

  I was early at Platform 8, where Stephen had suggested we meet. The held train was advertised as EMPTY TO DEPOT. PLEASE DO NOT BOARD. The station, considerably revamped and draped with screens of advertisements and rolling news, still accommodates that solemn forest of branching cast-iron columns with palmate capitals. The nave is endstopped by high walls of religiose (but non-denominational) windows, through which shafts of city light are projected, bouncing from the panels of new towers, to illuminate saints and sinners alike. Liverpool Street references an era of tropical hothouses, refuges for drippingly fecund vegetation. Trees that might flower, magnificently and defiantly, once in a hundred years.

  I worked in the old carbon-coated station, at night, from a hut where seasonal postmen rested, read their tired science-fiction paperbacks, and kept warm between sessions loading and unloading mailbags, to be shuttled to other metropolitan termini in a period of parcel bombs, utility strikes and blackout conditions that invoked the remote heroism of the 1939–1945 war. My recollections of that smoky, male-fetid bothy, where wool-capped figures in fingerless gloves scooped cold baked beans from the tin, are patchy. And probably based on the prison-camp escape films I saw as a schoolboy. The Colditz Story. The Wooden Horse. One student mistook me for a face in an obscure vinyl band, and took my absolute denial as a wink, to put off the uninitiated, those who didn’t trawl through the long night in a cannabis fug. ‘OK, right, man.’ His unshakable conviction made me doubt my own biography. Could it be true?

  I used the downtime to patrol empty platforms, mesh-protected caves and cobwebby offices. Sebald’s description in Austerlitz, his 2001 novel, of the abandoned Ladies’ Waiting Room, may have been embroidered but it caught the atmosphere of the pre-development Liverpool Street with preternatural accuracy: a Bluebeard’s castle of locked doors, ramps without function, cancelled corridors; spaces in which the lost souls of the city took up residence on hard benches. Drinkers trembled and lifted damp collars against the hour when the first bar would open. A television actor from Last of the Summer Wine, a man specialising in stuttering incapacity, wandered in, alone, after midnight, to rest with an attaché case for a pillow, until the morning commuters allowed him to vanish, once again, into the faceless crowd.

  When I could, if there was a predicted interval of a couple of hours between trains, I cycled home through clammy streets to Hackney, where my chill return to the marital bed, fully clothed, was not especially welcome. It might trigger a disturbance for a pair of lightly sleeping infants. And another challenge as I tried to close the door.

  In those days it was necessary to keep three jobs in play: private gardening around Finchley and Golders Green, a bookstall at Camden Passage in Islington, and nights on the station. A casual lodger in our house, a young woman from a family of established Marxists, asked me to drive her, with numerous bags and cases, to the station, where she intended to take a train for Harwich, and on, without much in the way of tickets or papers, to Moscow. She dressed for travel in a fur hat and a balding fur coat, worn over a thin nightdress and a pair of black rubber boots. The van of state-employed watcher
s, parked across the road from our house, at a period when there were few privately owned vehicles in the area, broke away as we reached Shoreditch and the silver dragons with red eyes who mark the boundary with the City of London. When the telephone crackled, we assumed that it was tapped, but it was still possible to walk in and out of the station without appearing on a dozen monitor screens. Surveillance was personal. Watcher and watched formed a bond. To be one of the observed, or to claim it, offered a certain status.

  As the crowd thinned, after 9.30am, Stephen Watts appeared from the direction of Bishopsgate. I didn’t spot him on the moving stairs, even though I was staring, expectantly, in that direction. He manifested, quite suddenly, very much in the manner I encountered him over the years as we wandered Whitechapel and the riverside reaches on our quite separate projects. If I were talking to a German or Dutch documentarist, say, in Fieldgate Street, close to Tower House (the ‘Monster Doss House’ from Jack London’s People of the Abyss), Stephen would be attending, keeping his distance, paused in his own trajectory – just close enough, with a friendly but undeceived smile, to make me acknowledge the crude theatricality of the pitch I was offering. You can be in a place and of a place, Stephen implied, and you can even visit, for a day at a time like Professor Sebald, but you cannot asset-strip locality. It is permitted, as Max often did, to smooth over facts, change names. But you must not insult your readers or exploit the integrity of a sacred terrain. White Chapel: exile. Enclosed burial grounds with their bridled ghosts.

  There is nothing of the appearance of the philosopher Wittgenstein, as we know it from photographs, in Stephen. That challenging impersonality of gaze is not to be found in the owlish stance the poet adopts, as he rocks, in measured and arduously constructed conversation, in the midst of the traffic, side-swiped by stampeding city workers. Was this another of Sebald’s fictive smokescreens? He casts his Austerlitz station-haunting character as an eidolon of Stephen Watts, but dresses him with another mask. ‘I had been thinking at some length about his personal similarity to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the horror-stricken expressions on both their faces. I believe it was mainly the rucksack.’ And then, helpfully, Sebald provides a snapshot portrait of that same rucksack, ‘bought for ten shillings from Swedish stock in an army surplus store in the Charing Cross Road’.

  It is a rucksack of character; canvas, womb-shaped, and glamorised with an assortment of straps and buckles, book-bulging from a naked hook. The photographic capture, cropped tight, takes on the romance of Vincent Van Gogh’s flapping hobnailed boots. Here, among the lines of Sebald’s generously spaced text, is a poignant insert, a signifier. The author’s own rucksack, we assume, retrieved from European trains and platforms, from his tramp out of Norwich to the house of Michael Hamburger. Did Max carry home a cache of the poet’s windfall apples? Drowsy country wasps burrowed into an intoxicating interior. The sepia mulch of alcohol and printed paper. The stalking cameras of Tacita Dean.

  The Charing Cross Road shop was right, Stephen said, but the price was wrong. More like a fiver. It was his rucksack. Sebald rang, late in the day, the finished typescript of Austerlitz on the point of being shipped to the printer. He would come to London, meet Stephen, as usual, at Liverpool Street, walk through to the library cave among the studios of Toynbee Hall, and take a portrait of the rucksack. It had precisely the character Sebald required. I had never noticed this bag on Stephen’s shoulder, as he made his compulsive drifts down favoured alleys, through the courtyards of flats, to the Thames and across the river, by foot tunnel, to Greenwich. Doubtless it accompanied him on reading tours and holidays among the villages of his forefathers in the Swiss Alps on the Italian border.

  He arrived in Whitechapel from the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, emerging from the underground into a shock of dusty sunlight in 1974. He was overwhelmed, at once, by a sense of molecular recognition that never faded and which now conferred on him the impression of a man a beat removed from mundane reality. Clocks, iPhones, driving licences, credit cards: they were no part of his discourse. When you needed him, he was there. Most often at poetry readings and unheralded presentations; his own and those of others he chose to support.

  ‘I walk along the pavements carrying with me words / spoken by tired schizophrenic old men,’ he wrote in the title poem of his book Ancient Sunlight. ‘I walk the streets of Whitechapel with the blue bag / of language slung across my breast.’

  Stephen struck north out of the station, through the agitated pavements of Bishopsgate. Free of his rucksack, prophetic hair swirling, he explained how Sebald, perhaps with a sense of mischief, or because such details are of no account, wrote of advancing on the river by way of Shoreditch: the wrong direction entirely. ‘I can never be sure,’ Stephen said, ‘if Max is quoting me or if I am quoting him, some remark from one of the books.’ Sebald came to Spitalfields for the first time to visit a female colleague from the University of East Anglia who lived in Princelet Street. Max was always scribbling in his notebook, Stephen said. He wrote poetry, steadily, with no particular fuss, from the Sixties. And he published, as we all did, in small magazines.

  We decided to head east, in the muffled footsteps of the numerous expeditions on which Stephen had led the professor – or allowed himself to be gently prodded by one of Sebald’s critical but unexplained quests. Our pace picked up. Recent developments, abrupt road closures and suspended permissions, had Stephen struggling for breath. The new city tasted of iron: bitter shavings left at the bottom of a dirty cup. Without obvious enthusiasm – and Sebald was a person in whom rising levels of enthusiasm were well concealed – the Austerlitz author would trawl through shoeboxes of postcards in plastic envelopes offered for sale in Spitalfields Market. Stephen, fresh from his North Uist hut, brought a scavenging instinct to London. He swooped on broken packing cases, chairs without legs. There were richer pickings, Sebald hinted, in Norwich junkshops and the somnolent villages of Norfolk. ‘Woodsmoke in the city,’ Stephen said, ‘there is nothing like it.’

  The poet reckoned that he made contact with Max Sebald around 1990 or ’91. He was contemplating a dictionary of European poets in translation. The professor was sympathetic. There were meetings, grants for research, invitations to conferences. Stephen was charmed by a story Max told: how, maybe ten years earlier, driving back from the university to his house in a village five miles to the south of Norwich, Sebald had caught, with shocked appreciation, a prize-winning poem the Whitechapel wanderer was reading aloud on Radio 3. Reception was uncertain. The Norfolk air was busy with white noise from US bunkers and masts, hissing interference from listening stations among coastal dunes and gravel spits, acoustic debris from the beginning of time. This poem, beautifully voiced, soared above the chaos. It was Stephen’s seizure by place, his original Spitalfields epiphany. He floated above the gravity of the houses. A sensation, impossible to repeat or recover, stayed with him. And with Professor Sebald too. As they arranged to meet on the station platform and to set off in search of Jewish burial grounds and galvanising postcards.

  ‘We never drank in the Great Eastern hotel, as they do in Austerlitz,’ Stephen said. The hotel was one of my own places and much as Sebald describes it: involuntary stasis, submersion in a tank of furniture rescued from the Titanic. A museum of loneliness, as the film-essayist Chris Petit saw it, between flights to Berlin. There would be twilight conversations, when a poet and sculptor of my acquaintance, recently removed to Oxford, returned to the memory grounds of our earlier adventures and poverty, to sip whisky, and watch the stiff-shirted City Boys and Bishopsgate detectives shuffling through to their secure Freemasons’ temple. Sebald invents a Portuguese business manager to give him the architectural tour. ‘A vaulted ceiling with a single golden star at the centre emitting its rays into the dark clouds all around it.’ I tried, after three or four doubles, to tempt the Oxford poet towards prose. He was a natural storyteller and he had fed on London’s museums since childhood, the further out the better. What I was groping
towards was the conviction that different writers, laying down different maps of the same place, enlarge the potentialties of the city. Geography shifts. Individuals dissolve. Place is burnished and confirmed.

  At the back of the former brewery, a Bangladeshi man in a white shirt with flapping cuffs engaged Stephen in polite chat. Old acquaintances. We were in that half-hidden corridor, moving in parallel to busy traffic ditches and approved highways; we channelled tenter grounds, rough meadows seen from commuter trains, where shaggy ponies cropped alongside scrapmetal caves and arches of unwanted furniture. The achieved balance between private islands of public housing, closed in against the outside world, and small parks shaded by peeling plane trees, proved how one version of the city sustained its ancient self-belief.

  ‘Stencl sat on that bench for hours. He liked to talk to vagrants, street people.’

  Stephen was conjuring up the Yiddish poet, Avram Nachum Stencl. Stencl, according to rumour, was one of the good things to come out of the Olympics of 1936. Born into an ultra-orthodox Hasidic community in Poland, he migrated to Berlin, where his work was praised by Thomas Mann, and where he formed an attachment to Dora Diamant, mistress of Kafka. Lovely stuff for East London heritage buffs to savour, such tales enriched our threatened turf. Rachel Lichtenstein, whose grandparents had welcomed Stencl to their house in Westcliff-on-Sea, wrote about how the poet had been smuggled out of Germany in a coffin, with the help of an athlete returning from the Berlin Olympic Games.

  Now on our Sebald walk, Stephen employed the name of Stencl as a quotation of legitimacy, a way of conferring virtue on the ground, of confirming that our blindfolded drift was a proper passage through Whitechapel. The flat where Stencl lived and died, in Greatorex House, was pointed out. But the slender alley, carrying pilgrims through the tenement complex without recourse to public highways, was gated and padlocked. Stephen flinched, turned up his collar against the cold, and seemed, when we stopped to talk, to be massaging his heart in an attempt to fire the vanishing daemon of place.