Gary had a favourite bird of his, something called the great auk (also spearbird, littlewing, gairfowl; names in Inuit and Basque and old Norse), a flightless and penguin-like cousin of the guillemot and the razorbill. As a child, he had loved the illustrations of the bird in his books of natural history. No photographs, of course – it was gone too soon for that. He knew how its last egg was smashed and the final pair murdered in Iceland. And Gary understood that what makes a thing desirable is what will kill it. Could this happen to his London, to the places he loved? Could a place, a real physical space, become like the spearbird, or the sea-mink? Loved, romanticised, idealised, then forgotten. Gone.
Strange to think about the forgotten fauna accompanying forgotten human lives, all their fates jumbled up and intertwined. Gary realised the destroyer, that his brother had imagined as an idiot furred mastodon and was somehow linked to the judderman, would eventually invalidate himself once his enemy was annihilated. That was something Danny had not considered: the destroyer was on Doggerland, and was doomed to sink beneath the waves.
And as Gary walked, he ran through all the stories he and Danny had gathered over the years, of the fearsome golem of Stamford Hill and the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus; of Spring-Heeled Jack bouncing over Victorian terraces; the mischievous and malevolent water sprites that inhabited the River Lea ever-ready to drag down the unfortunate. All of Danny’s clippings and transcriptions of the accounts of bear sightings and the prehistoric crocodiles on the Hackney Marshes. The rumours of the judderman, a story transferred around the city via the guttural mutterings of drunks. The children lost to the obscene rituals of the powerful.
There were suggestions, gleaned from all the explorers of London Incognita, that there were weak spots in the outer areas of London, by the New River Path in Enfield and Turkey Brook where it cut through Forty Hall, where so-called fae folk could at times cross over to us, bringing their changelings and glamour with them.
All these stories. The days and weeks and huge chunks of his life spent searching for the hidden. It all had to mean something. Otherwise his life would be a total waste. Otherwise he was a sad drunk in the making like his cousin, ready to fuse with the bar in The Sovereign like Fen. Otherwise he was set to disappear, be forgotten, like his brother.
He was on his way to Yaxley and the men who traded obscure stories, forgotten nuggets of history, lost narratives they were desperate to resurrect. Gary’s hunger for meaning was inflamed by a chemical cocktail, all the more real for it and accompanied by an unspecified sense of loss.
He had spent hours talking with the men with long grey beards and twinkling eyes who sat decrepit behind stalls selling the junk and detritus of the city’s collective past. Yaxley, though, was something different.
Gary wandered the city, with a burning desire to know it from the inside out. At a parlour in the West End, he had had the tube map tattooed onto his left arm, thick lines of colour and evocative names that often didn’t match the broken-down realities of the streets he’d exit onto. Gary liked to imagine himself being skinned and spread out, his veins, arteries and capillaries forming a complete map of London’s streets, roads, and dark alleyways.
At the boot fairs and jumble sales and the markets in Ladbroke Grove, Gary would stop and sift through boxes of ephemera and the remains of other people’s lives, buying old photographs, postcards with personal inscriptions written in dead ink describing other times. Anything with a personal inscription or a dedication to Londoners long deceased caught his attention. Anything that could clue him in to what led to his brother’s disappearance. Anything that would lead him to the judderman.
It was in the land of the second-hand that Gary fattened his collection of books, buying everything he could find from Malachite Press and the New English Library, but also books of ornithology, London architecture, old books of folk tales, fairy tales, dead mythologies, obscure biographies. In a city so old, the past available to root through was almost endless. There was a thrill in that, and something sad too. He could never shake the nagging feeling that perhaps London’s best days were behind it. But his researches also told him that people had always felt that. The world, for somebody, somewhere, was always ending.
So he spent some pleasant time imagining the city in various previous incarnations, peopled by long-dead inhabitants:
I. Londinium. Romano-British. The place was razed to the ground by irate Celts, evidence of that act to be found in a burnt layer of subsoil often commented on by the city’s archaeological teams. Coins and eagles were still plucked from the mud to this day – Jenny Duro had a good stash. The London Mithraeum is still there on Walbrook, they found it back in the fifties. (Side note: did you know there’s a Mithraic shrine in a church on the Romney Marsh?)
II. Lundenwic. Anglo-Saxons, the people who would become, basically, us, before the Normans came. They understood the concept of wyrd, and the interconnectedness of all things, before Christ was brought to these shores (and ruined everything, but life seemed pretty grim back then too).
III. Lundenburh. Was this not the same place as Lundenwic? The size of the city in the nineteen-seventies distorted Gary’s perspective on distance and geography.
IV. The London frost fair, held on the thick ice of the Thames. What a celebration that must have been! Only possible during a miniature ice-age, in a climate that mammoths would enjoy.
V. Spring-Heeled Jack, bounding over the rooftops of the Imperial city, nicking ladies’ knickers (Gary imagined).
VI. Whitechapel, 1888. The Juwes will not be blamed for nothing, etc. Surgeon’s knives and an unending mystery that obviously was fascinating, it was not to denigrate the people who died or turn suffering into lurid entertainment, but how could you not be interested in such a thing?
VII. Jimi Hendrix unleashing green parakeets into the air. Their screech would become so memorable in the plane trees of London. What a twat.
VIII. The Blitz, a city on fire, the reflection of flame seen in the eyes of a young girl watching her local school burn to the ground (was she happy as well as scared?).
IX. The shrieking, gibbering, salivating inmates of Bedlam. Illness as entertainment (imagine what they endured at the hands of the guards, it’s bad enough now). Hell indeed.
X. A petty crook swinging from a noose at Tyburn. People would turn out to watch the hangings. Gary presumes he would have attended, possibly jeered, along with the rest of them.
XI. Suffragettes, bombing the orchid house at Kew (the symbolism is clear, and potent), slicing up paintings in the National Portrait Gallery. You had to have some respect for that especially when you knew about the torture and the force-feeding tubes like they were fattening up geese for foie gras.
Gary loved the Malachite Press books when he could find them. The more lurid and trashy the cover the better, acting as a smokescreen for some of the heavyweight and esoteric ideas inside. Gary stockpiled his Malachite novels next to his Richard Allens and other New English Library stuff and it looked okay to his mates, to his old man and his mum. Not that they would have minded (or indeed cared) but he wanted to keep certain things to himself. He didn’t want people to think he was getting ideas above his station; or maybe he was just scared of being thought of as effeminate, an oddball, one of the freaks. Either way, it was generally better to not advertise your interests on the streets of London; as the saying went, it was hard to keep your chin up and your head down.
* * *
He entered Yaxley’s shop. A tinkly metal thing sprang into action as Gary pushed open the door, leaving the bustle of Notting Hill Gate behind him. A few faces snapped up to look at the newcomer, peering at Gary in the dusty gloom, before gradually resuming their browsing positions. The place stank with a mingled reek of white sage incense, old books, joss sticks, sweet marijuana, yellowing paper, and old body odour long dried and never washed away. These were Yaxley’s smells, the smell of London’s lonely and obsessed underground. Gary found it comforting.
A few oth
er men, serious and scruffy like himself, were flicking through piles of old occult and topographic magazines, browsing the rows of paperbacks and hardbacks, sifting through the arcane ephemera and pop-cultural detritus that Yaxley had made his speciality. He quickly scanned the shelf of books – Maureen Duffy’s Wounds, a book about the West Indians called The Lonely Londoners, some Pan editions of Alexander Baron’s novels. All piqued his interest, but he wasn’t here to shop for new reading material.
Stacks of back issues of short-lived zines like Magnesium Burns, Forgotten Fauna and Thunder Perfect Mind dotted the shop unevenly. Gary picked up a crumpled copy of a magazine that promised, ‘Fear not, for you are now entering Gandalf’s Garden’. Adrian Mitchell was one of the contributors, Gary noted. But Gary wasn’t really into that weirdy-beardy wizard stuff. He felt that something harder-edged was needed and must be coming. He would help will it into existence if he could.
‘Gary, my lad! I thought you’d be making an appearance sooner or later. Good to see you sunshine.’
Yaxley. He was standing behind the counter, for all the world the image of a London desert ascetic, a self-styled mystic, a wise-man, a hippy guru, a raconteur, a word spiv. You could imagine him trying to wow young university girls at Ladbroke Grove parties with his knowledge of Mary Butts’s mystical fiction and Arthur Machen’s uncollected London journalism. He could expound on the virtues of Sarban’s more obscure works, claimed to know Michael Ashman and the poet Hecate Shrike, and could talk in a way that was compelling even as it made you feel grubby, sexualised in a way you couldn’t quite grasp. He could talk about the theories of London Incognita, French situationism, Gnosticism, the myriad sects and belief systems spawned by the English Civil War. It was from Yaxley that Danny had learned about the Muggletonians, the Jezereel sect in Gillingham and their strange tower, patripassianism (and now did he imagine Danny, alone on Earth and suffering in oblivion for eternity?) and so much more.
Yaxley fished for a pouch of loose tobacco from somewhere inside his baggy clothing. Gary watched his yellow fingers with the tips bitten as he rolled. He fished his own pack from his jacket pocket. He lit Yaxley up with a cheap lighter he’d bought from one of the tourist shops on Oxford Street a few weeks back. The lighter’s image of Tower Bridge was slowly fading, eroding in his pocket.
Gary considered the strange solidarity between smokers, even the ones who disliked and distrusted each other. The shop filled with tobacco smoke.
‘I saw Jenny Duro this morning. She’s dug something up and told me you might be able to help explain what it is. I think it’s to do with my brother. Something to do with what he was looking for.’
Yaxley clicked his tongue. ‘Your brother, yes, yes, hmmm. Daniel Eider, strange boy, bit like yourself, but a smart one. Smelled of alcohol. I was sorry to hear about him. His disappearance. He had come to see me a lot before he went, you know?’
‘I know,’ said Gary. He handed the coin to Yaxley.
Yaxley held it up to what light filtered through into the shop, closing one eye as he examined it. ‘Where did the lark find this?’
‘Out Wapping way’
‘Well as you most likely already know, or have at least guessed, this is something that shouldn’t exist. And yet here it is. Quite the conundrum, wouldn’t you say?’
Yaxley dragged on his cigarette, and continued. ‘This coin is a coin of the true god of London. The blind creator, the mad god that thought it was all powerful but in the end, was just a failed experiment itself. We are the failed creation of a failed experiment. I hope you know that?’
‘Of course. You’re not that smart Yaxley. It is the only explanation for the world we live in,’ said Gary flatly. ‘All of this.’ And at that he waved his hand vaguely around his head as if to indicate all of London, all the world, all that ever was or would be. ‘And the judderman?’
‘Again: you know already. But I will tell you, if you need to hear it, and I think you do. When the city’s subconscious weakens, becomes stressed or ill or corrupted, Londoners, or at least some of us, will start to see what you call the judderman. The stories of London Incognita, all the dark narratives we suppress, they come back and coalesce in his form. A revenant of sorts. A symptom. Clearly, right now, the city is sick again. You don’t have to be a fucking genius to work that one out though, do you Gary?’
‘And it took Danny?’
‘It doesn’t take anyone. Those who want him find him, and they go to him willingly. They lust after the shadows and want to live in London Incognita permanently. “A permanent vacation” as the yanks say, right? They want to join the troglodytes down in the tunnels. They don’t want to change the story of London – they just want to revel in the obscure and nasty parts of it. Wallow in the filth. I’m sorry to say, that is what your brother wanted. It makes sense now, him disappearing. He couldn’t hack it could he; this dreary reality, these cracked streets and the grey skies. That darkness is so much sweeter, isn’t it? Daniel Eider, the cop-out.’
‘Fuck you, Yaxley.’
‘You wanted my opinions, right? Well there they are.’
He flicked the coin back to Gary, who left the shop without a word.
Harlequin
That night, Gary slept badly.
He sat in the garden of his childhood home. A garden where he and Danny came of age and ran in circles shouting and played their early games of London Incognita. But in this garden, whispering reeds grow from the boggy earth, and honking v-shapes of Canada geese fly overhead en route to Scandinavia. It is winter; as cold as the winter a decade ago when he was young and the lakes and rivers of England froze, in the nineteen-sixties when London felt it may become something other than the grey and bomb-scarred place it is now. Yes, it is the winter of 1962 and that feels correct; he knows he is in an altered past, mining his own history. Memory is a raw material here.
He can hear the lap of the sea. Impossible of course, here in London, but he gets up and follows the sound, through the garden of his mother’s house along a path leading directly down to the water’s edge, winding through a lawn that gives way to reed and marsh and finally a shore. He crunches through snow and over freezing pebbles, down to lapping waves that sigh and mutter like the alcoholics under the railway bridge.
And he knows that this is not the sea, not an ocean, but it is the Thames from aeons ago when it was wider, thicker, stronger than it is now. In the distance, out on the river, are icebergs. Glaucous gulls and arctic terns float in the air. The river’s surface is breached by leopard seals that bark and hiss in laughter.
There is a narwhal pod out in the open water of the Thames. He sees them, their tusks breaking the surface, and fine mist gusting through their blowholes. Their backs are shiny with brine and glisten in the bright winter sunlight. Gary feels an unspecified sense of loss, then indescribable joy.
His mother calls him, come back to the house, she has made tea, come out of the cold Son, come out of the cold. I’ve made tea for you and brother.
But my brother is gone, Mum.
He turns back to look at the house, that building that contains and constrains his childhood. But it is invisible, obscured by encroaching Thames mists that gallop in at frightening speed, a freezing fog in which the judderman himself can be spotted enticing the souls of the city’s damned. Damn, it’s cold.
He notices another figure on the shingle. Looking out toward the narwhal pod is a harlequin. His pale face is marred by scar tissue and his right eye weeps continually from old injuries that never fully healed. His multi-coloured clothing is ragged and threadbare. He is old but familiar, his eyes betraying a wisdom that stretches back decades if not centuries. He sits upon a mound of albino bones.
They share poitin from the harlequin’s rusted hip-flask. It burns Gary’s throat. The narwhal pod swims in an endless loop out at sea – a loop that reminds Gary of a serpent devouring its own tail – their tusks harpooning the surface as they spar with the laughing leopard seals. An arctic tern dives into
the river hunting for sprats; a sound like a freshly minted coin dropped in clear water.
Squalls form and clouds gather over the river. The mists thicken.
Gary sits with the harlequin by the banks of the prehistoric Thames, as freezing droplets begin to fall from the sky. Poitin burning their throats.
‘Magnesium burns,’ says the harlequin, pointing at the scars that ruin his face, as if explanation were required.
Boys, your tea is ready. His mother’s voice, floating out there in the mist.
Suddenly, there is commotion out at sea, a leopard seal taking down a narwhal in a burst of blood. Then the screech of a glaucous gull.
Gary wishes he were a winged navigator, flying high over the ancient river, gazing down on the proto-settlements that would one day become London, the herds of auroch, the seal people, Jenny Duro sifting the mud for trinkets and bone. He needs a boat, not a crippled and sad jester who drowns himself in bootleg liquor.
He turns to find his way back to his mother, away from the fogged banks of the river.
But the mist is everywhere. He can’t get back.
The harlequin laughs, his breath carcinogenic.
The harlequin Gary now recognises as a man of darkness and angles; the judderman.
‘Your brother’s with the judder,’ the harlequin states flatly.
In the mist, he hears the bellow of a crippled mastodon, idiot mammoth, the great destroyer.
‘It’s all over now?’ asks Gary.
‘It’s all over now,’ replies the harlequin, not without kindness, and sips his liquor.
The mammoth screams.
An extract from Your Architect is Degenerate
(The Malachite Press, 1964), by Michael Ashman
Harrier chased his quarry down, weaving between the piles of rubble and coughing on the dust that seemed everywhere in the heat of this London night. His chest was heaving. Sweat flowed from him.
Judderman Page 5
