Over the last few years, Gary and Danny had made the effort to get friendly and swap knowledge with the river larks. Their interests intersected and intertwined (like a rat king, or a coil of emperor worms, thought Gary), and pooling the right information helped them all feed their obsessive addictions.
‘Together we are all stronger, and nobody has the final say,’ said Danny, frequently.
Since Danny disappeared, Gary was targeting anyone he knew with a competent working knowledge of London Incognita, asking them for signs of his brother, of course, but also about this thing called the judderman that was making whispered ripples through London. The larks, surely, would know something.
Leaning on the metal railings, lighting another cigarette and briefly examining a coiled fish sculpted in the metalwork of the lampposts, he shouted and waved down the river lark he’d come to see. Jenny Duro was one of the few female larks that he’d encountered in his years spent exploring with Danny. He didn’t know much about her life outside of her activities down here on the shore, nothing about her past or her future, but he liked the very fact she existed. Knowing more about her would only ever spoil things. The anomalous attracted him; he was an anomaly himself, he realised, and the knowledge that there was a solidarity among the freaks and weirdos, subtle but real, cheered him up at even the bleakest of times.
It took Jenny a while to notice him waving, her ears muffled, listening to the beeping frequencies from her detector. Jenny’s light brown hair was ragged, blown about by a rough wind gusting up the estuary, and she was dressed in shapeless and practical grey clothing. Gary had no idea if she had a job, or if this was it. Finally, she noticed him, removing her earmuffs and beckoning him over.
He took the stairs by the Oxo tower down onto the shore. Some teenagers had scrawled their love for each other into the damp sands, a saccharine declaration that was soon to be swept away with the incoming tide. That felt appropriate. Lisa was barely speaking to Gary now. He was too far gone, she said, a fucking nutjob. She didn’t understand when he told her he had to become London, to enter its arteries and dissolve into the bloodstream of the city. This, surely, was what Danny had done?
‘Alright Gary,’ said Jenny. She had a distinctly south London accent, from Bermondsey way. It suited her. ‘Up early aren’t we?’
‘Alright Jenny. I could say the same to you. Early bird, worm, and all that. Dug up anything decent lately?’ Gary flicked his spent cigarette onto the sand. Out on the grey waters of the river a tug chugged along, a slow churning wake behind it. Herring gulls followed.
‘Nothing much to write home about today Gal, if I’m honest with you. It’s swings and roundabouts, this game, you know? I hunt for fucking ages and nothing turns up, then I’ll find something that blows my mind. But I did dig this up the other day, something you might like. You’re a morbid bastard.’ Her face creased into a beaming grin and she laughed as she dug into her trouser pocket, fishing out a worn piece of dark metal.
‘I found this coin, a bit further east, out Wapping way. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m sure it’s the kind of thing you and Danny are into; Yaxley and his lot too.’ He looked at her intently for a second as she said that name. Yaxley, the mad bookseller in Notting Hill Gate, corrupt chronicler of London Incognita, charlatan and expert.
‘Have a look at this.’ She dropped the coin into Gary’s outstretched palm.
He held the coin up to the light. It was made from a kind of alloy, blackened and smoothed by the waters and the corrosion of years. A monstrous pastiche of a British monarch grinned on one side of the coin – a crowned being with the body of a fat worm and the head of a lion. The other side was imprinted with the image of a malevolent stick-figure man that also resembled a candelabra or menorah. The words that rimmed the circumference were indecipherable, not through erosion as he had expected, but because they were written in a language he could not understand. There was nothing too strange about that, this was London after all, but Gary couldn’t place this. It wasn’t anything he recognised as European. Not Cyrillic and not Hebrew. Not Latin. The worm-monarch’s feline face had teeth like knife-points. Gary shivered in the autumn air.
‘What the hell is this, Jenny?’ he asked her. A huge herring gull landed nearby, hunting for scraps of food.
‘Not sure, Gal. You know I turn up a lot of weird shit here, and I’ll admit this is one of the weirdest. I stopped passing this sort of stuff onto the museums and the professionals a while back, you know? It never seemed to surface in the exhibitions. This kind of stuff just vanished. The stuff they can’t categorise… well they don’t categorise it. It disappears into archives, for a few dusty Oxbridge types to look at occasionally and shake their heads over. So, if the stuff is going to disappear anyway, I figured I’d sell it onto the dealers. Keep a few choice bits for myself. You know the faces, Gary, you know who’s selling right now. But I figured I’d give it to you and you could show it to Yaxley? That thing on the back, that looks like that judder man thing the alkies are going on about? That’s what Danny was looking for and I know he’d gone to Yaxley for help. And you’re after it too, right?’
Yaxley. Dealer, chronicler of, and self-declared expert on London Incognita, a fucking hairy weirdo holed up in that pit he called a shop in Notting Hill Gate. Yaxley gave Gary the creeps. For a man who spent his life seeking out the weird and the outré, this was saying a lot.
‘Fuck Yaxley,’ Gary hissed.
‘Yeah, well, the guy knows his stuff. And you’re still looking for Danny, right?’ Jenny looked at Gary intently, like she was noticing him properly for the first time in the conversation. She saw his bloodshot eyes. The bags beneath them. He smelled of old sweat, too many cigarettes, boozy, eyes wired from three months of amphetamine use.
Gary nodded, looking out at the waters of the Thames. He lit another cigarette, and offered one from his pack to her. She took it and he sparked her up.
‘Yeah. Three months now. A quarter of a year.’
‘I’m sorry mate,’ she said. And she was. ‘But it does look like the–’
‘I know what it looks like, Jenny. The judderman.’
‘Yeah. And your brother was researching it right?’ Smoke leaked ragged from her mouth, gusting over the river.
‘Yeah. Yeah he was.’ Gary kicked away the herring gull that was getting uncomfortably close to them.
‘I’ve seen the graffiti too. I’ve read the same books as you two, you know. Us river larks and you lot, we’re not that different. Ashman was writing about it in the Harrier books. The old boozers and druggies have seen it. The acid heads and space cadets and speed freaks in the squats. Those sad burned-out hippies, all those guys hanging out in Ladbroke Grove listening to their Trees and Fairport and Shirley Collins records. Isn’t there one of those old folk songs called “The Jaddar Men of Camden Town”?’
‘There is, yes. It’s a London song going back centuries they reckon.’
‘Well now we can assume Ashman was putting something real into his stories, something really here in London. What do you call it again?’
‘London Incognita. Where you and I live.’ Gary grimaced and coughed.
‘Yeah that’s it. The city we choose to live in.’ Jenny Duro crushed her cigarette beneath a mud-caked boot. ‘Take the thing to Yaxley.’
‘Fuck. Alright. Yaxley it is.’
And then Jenny Duro shook Gary’s hand, picked up her detector, and walked back towards the lapping waters of the great river. Gary saw her trade words with a few of the other larks as he headed back up the steps and onto the south bank.
A few couples, arm-in-arm, strolled along the south bank. Already, tourists with Polaroid cameras hung round their necks were out, urging family members to stand in position with the Thames in shot behind them. The brutalist concrete of the National Film Theatre seemed to shine obscenely in the bright morning light. It was showing a film called Savage Messiah. Something to do with Ken Russell and Christopher Logue; facts able to interest Gary
despite his addled mental state.
The day was still just beginning. He had Jenny Duro’s coin to take to Yaxley. He decided he would walk to Notting Hill Gate. After all, he told himself, walking was the only way to map the streets of London Incognita.
From Daniel Eider’s Journal
I dreamed a dream last night.
I had been drinking in The Sovereign with Gary and my cousin. Too much lager and stout as I petted the Barghest and listened to the old men and their long meandering stories. My lungs were scorched with tar and nicotine and my stomach was an empty ocean of alcohol.
As I fell asleep to the sounds of London, I saw alien creatures that resembled polar bears, and these things perched motionless on the stomachs of prostrate little girls. They were made of smooth lines, and had the quality of myths half-remembered and badly translated into a new language.
Then I stood on an icy plain with my friends and family, though they chatted amicably among themselves and seemed unable to see what I could see or hear my pleas for them to look. Gary was there and Lisa too, Mum and Dad, my limping cousin Charlie, and the river lark Jenny Duro. Why wouldn’t they look? I figured if they chose to truly see, then they may have to do something. To act, and to change.
And then I saw another figure conversing with them, a figure who was neither friend nor family and he seemed terribly familiar to me, a jagged figure composed of thin lines and deep shadows. I knew him. He had infiltrated, found his way even into the wintry landscapes of my dreams. There was a strange comfort in that.
I realised I was somewhere on Doggerland, standing on the frozen earth that filled in the gaps between what would one day be Britain and Norway. My friends and my family murmured obliviously, the soft trickle of their conversation indecipherable. We all wore modern clothing even though I knew that Doggerland had sunk beneath the waves long before the arrival of the nineteen-seventies.
I had read about the lost landmass, of course I had, the land that connected us to the rest of the continent. In second-hand books I’d found on the stalls and waste markets of London I read about the sunken country. Yaxley, who I could now see chatting amicably with my mother, had pressed a Malachite Press novel concerning Doggerland on me. What I Found in the Drowned Land by Michael Ashman, a barbed pair of Irish elk antlers, like the ones dredged from the North Sea, its cover.
Through binoculars normally reserved for birdwatching on the marshes of north east London, I observed a herd of mammoth, their fur resembling expensive, soiled rugs. The herd were out on the tundra, rooting the earth beneath with the tusks that would be the envy of any poacher. One of the animals stood apart and loomed larger than its fellows.
I couldn’t take my eyes from this mammoth. It was a distended child’s rendering of a furred elephant; a grotesque mastodon. Its proportions were all wrong, the features bent and out of shape, like a drunken Picasso had interpreted the face of an ancient elephant. The deformed mastodon noticed my gaze and as I looked through my binoculars into its idiot eyes I knew, somehow, that this thing was a destroyer, a destroyer of worlds, though it would do its job without any malice or even forethought and anyway, destruction is just another form of change, isn’t it?
My friends and family, close to me but oblivious, crowded around the man of shadow, the juddering man who haunts my city, listening to one of his anecdotes. They laughed without constraint, hysterically, as the snow began to come down heavily, and they refused to notice the destroyer.
This idiot crippled mastodon began to shuffle towards us, the shuffle breaking into a trot, and the trot into a charge, and I could see this thing, the destroyer of worlds with its innocent child eyes and twisted features, approaching fast and I shouted and shouted to my family and friends to move, get out of the way, can you not see this thing, this destroyer, in front of you?
But they couldn’t hear me. The snow muted my screams.
The judderman laughed, his teeth like junkies’ needles, like torturers’ knives, and I woke drenched in an alcoholic sweat. My bed was a swamp, my heart thudded painfully, and I knew then that even sleep would give me no solace.
Yaxley
The streets of west London were becoming crowded, the city’s veins thickening as the orange sun hauled itself into the sky. Gary walked, remembering the Norse myths and stories he and his brother had loved as kids; the orb’s endless movement as it ran from a cosmic wolf that would one day swallow the sun and plunge us all into darkness.
Gary had left Jenny Duro sifting through the mud on the exposed shore of the Thames. He wondered if she viewed the encroaching high tide sweeping up the estuary with a sense of disappointment or took joy in the continual ebb and flow of London’s waters; there were new histories always with a chance of being disturbed among the silt.
He drifted towards the stalls and junk shops where he felt he might find some answers; to the second-hand stores of Notting Hill Gate and Ladbroke Grove. London was a city adept at recycling itself and at profiting from its own past. Gary thought of the city as a feedback loop of self-mythologising. Or, like Jörmungandr in the tales he and Danny had thrilled at as children. A serpent devouring its own tail.
The past itself was of value, a commodity of sorts, to be bought and sold like anything else. Gary considered that the things he took for granted now, right now in the banal and terrifying year of 1972, could one day be fetishised, recontextualised into the backward-looking fashions of a future generation. Or perhaps they would be forgotten except by the few, and hoarded by collectors, searched for at the bottom of dusty boxes and crates in shops in these very streets decades from now. Gary knew this because he did something similar himself. Already the magazines and fag-ends of the nineteen-sixties hippy culture was becoming the stuff of history, collectible, tradable, forgettable. He pored over mouldering papers from the nineteenth century, thrilled at the Malachite first editions he had managed to secure, and salivated at the stack of London novels from the twenties and thirties he’d found in the Spastics Society. And paper decayed in a way the Roman coins fished from the Thames by Jenny Duro did not.
Danny had liked to come and visit the markets on Portobello Road. He collected old photographs; anything that featured London’s architecture and preferably the posed smiles of families long gone or dissolved by time. Mouldy or water damaged Polaroids, or sepia-toned and slightly out of focus prints, these were the qualities Danny craved. His journals, ordered into a semblance of order, began each ‘chapter’ with one of these inscrutable photographs from London’s past. They were stuck to the page with a strong adhesive. As he walked, Gary imagined his brother himself in the act of imagining, picturing one of these salvaged photographs used as part of a cover for a book that would now never be completed. You could almost see the Malachite edition, thought Gary with a smile. London Incognita, he would call it.
In the months since Danny’s disappearance, Gary had spent many evenings sifting through his brother’s possessions, rifling through his boxes of accumulated London photographs and poring over his journal. The night previous, Gary had plucked out an undated picture that he assumed must have been taken during the war, or very shortly after. It reminded him of a scene from one of his beloved Vincent Harrier novels, with piles of blitz rubble and figures indistinct in a murky haze. There were small children in the background, and a large silhouette of a tall and slender man. Journal entries had scribbled titles like ‘Blitz cats’, ‘The bear’, ‘On what I found at Enfield Lock’, ‘Of ruine or some blazing starre’, ‘A London Tamblin’, and ‘Beggar stories of the juddar men’.
As Gary walked into west London, he went over in his head the journal entries he had been reading. Danny had this idea of a ‘supporting caste’, all the forgotten life and sacrifice that went into the foundations of our societies. The animals ground into history that were slaughtered, or simply tipped accidentally into extinction, by earlier generations. It was hard not to think, then, about the auroch herds that had padded patiently through Kent and Sussex, Middlese
x and London, and Doggerland too; their skulls were fished from the Thames to this day and were a mighty sight. Gary liked to imagine Jenny Duro hanging one of these majestic skulls on the wall of her Bermondsey flat, before standing back in satisfaction, regarding the size and the epic sweep of the animal’s horns. She deserved such a thing.
He thought about Irish elk immortalised in pigment at the Lascaux caves. Atlas bears, cats with fearsome teeth. Furred and icy elephants, destroyers, with the minds of children.
And human beings too. Those gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, hunting the sea mink, that his brother had written about. The animal’s extinction some obscure fault of the English. And how could he not think of all the immigrants and refugees and people desiring something else who landed somehow in the city. Jews fleeing pogroms. Huguenots running from Catholics. The West Indians still refused housing by racist landlords, spat on by old ladies on the bus, terrorised by boys with shaved heads. The children disappeared for the sexual pleasure of sadistic Conservatives. Working class girls of every colour servicing the depravities and lusts of the men who ran things; the men who beat them and sometimes killed them without ceremony. The supporting caste.
Judderman Page 4
