‘I can write. I can make a testament, like the Old.’
‘I also l-l-like to write,’ replied the man, ‘should you care to hear what I have w-w-written t-t-this morning?’
‘No,’ William answered, simply: he had seen his father and his brothers coming down the track from the cottage, coming to the quayside, to their quay. A cart could be heard, the other side of the trees, wheels creaking, well-loaded. There would be work. Sacks to carry. Barges to stack. Ropes to catch and make fast. His father would sail upon the sea.
‘I s-s-should l-l-like to talk w-w-with your father,’ the parson said, slipping his bag onto his shoulder, reaching for William’s hand, withdrawing, turning, nodding, and striding off along the shore-path towards the complacent and uncomplaining fauna, cloud life, water life, tree stumps that let themselves be observed, described, sketched. And made no charge. Save on his time. Of which he was fortunate enough to have an abundant supply.
‘That man has stripes on his forest,’ thought William, ‘I cannot teach him if he will not listen.’
Under the water the sisters are hiding. They will not climb into the sky until the huntsman has passed. But when it is the time to hunt then they will be hunted.
3
Under the grass stain, the altar. I dreamed a new dream, meadows of fire. Walking through a wood that is superimposed along the present line of Brick Lane. The force of the river taking me down, pulling me beyond the human heats, running out of time into the previous, ahead; nerved to a candle-flame consciousness.
There are figures carved upon the rocks, huge faces cut into the red mud of the bank: in the undergrowth, thread-like forms of star ancestors. The light is brown, a sluice of blood. Daring to pass the warning in the stone.
The movement now is south.
The field opens at the river’s source, a white stone chapel, travellers might pray, pilgrims pause, not itself a shrine, a cause: a cure. Warm light, from high slits, blades the floor. A white enclosure. The clouds are rolling in a seamless loop, darkly from some unshriven act. I fall to the ground.
‘One unknown, yet well known.’
I am on my knees, a penitent. I do not yet know what confession to make.
You allow yourself to become saturated with this solution of the past, involuntary, unwilled, until the place where you are has become another place; and then you can live it, and then it is.
Work takes us to strange places.
They examine my arms and legs for needle tracks. They whisper numbers. They hold up letters for me to recognise. I am taken on: my name is entered in the book.
The ullage cellar looks out on a broad and cobbled yard. We work under the sign of the Black Eagle, the plague year date, the number of the beast disguised in gothic script: to the sound of bells from the belltower, dividing the labours of the day.
As the carts draw into the yard we tumble out the eleven and twenty-two gallon barrels and kegs, shifting weights that might have seemed unmovable, by being expected to shift them. We are beyond ourselves, part of a team: the cellarman, the sculptor and I.
The kegs are then run on their rims, kicked and rolled, down the ramp into the cellar itself, out of the light, set into their lines. And here you run into risk. The caps that stand out from the keg-heads are unlocked so that the levels can be measured, the slops tested, the flat lager dipped, and one in four, or perhaps five, goes up, like a grenade, a great amusement to the cellarman with his clipboard and pencil, blasting the aluminium pipe high into the air, or the face of the novice tester.
After the third keg has been safely defused a pale reluctance comes over the operatives. Boot laces unravel, braces need adjusting, caps fall off. There is a shuffling and scratching, a lighting of cigarettes.
Up she goes! Better to shake her and force the issue, get it over. Then on into the darkest reaches of the cellar, splashing through ankle-high tides of unanalysed liquids, sharp animal movements, sensing the cracks and bung-holes.
The condemned returns are brought to an open pit and tipped away into a slate tank, into rumours of underground caverns, labyrinths, ancient cold-blood life forms: a stomach tightening rush of sourness. Measure of wheat for a penny and three measures of barley. Liquid voices.
What happens then is not our concern. The cellarman kicks out, savagely, splitting a rat’s belly with his metal-capped boot; then the broom handle. Another kick drops the body in the sluice, old beer washes it away in a flood. You drink it.
The workers sweat and pull, get stuck in, move through fear, boredom, exhaustion for a good hour, clearing the tank. And then the time is their own. Out to the drivers’ bar where the beer is free. Heavy gutted men, shoulder to shoulder, tank up for the road. With sweeteners to come, days of drinking, overtime nights. To the hot food counter and a 24 hour breakfast.
I sat out in the doorway, mopping my neck with a handkerchief, taking the sun with old Dick Brandon, risking haemorrhoids upon a black stone bollard. Dick tipped, from a tin jug, his first pint of porter; drank, thin neck convulsing. He could have my jug as well: on this base our relationship was founded.
I wanted to listen and absorb, he talked. He did not need any audience, or prompting. He didn’t tell the stories, they told him. Stooped old man, veins bumping in transparent skin, the flawed smoothness of something left too long in water: voice from an uninhabited shell. Everything extraneous to the story had been eaten away, fed now only by the drink that he himself brewed. Unnoticed; his words ignored by the other workmen, busy notching up the overtime, playing the angles, polishing the hub caps of their bile-coloured Rovers, carving out those little necessary extras.
‘Used to watch fires (sniff): seen wards of the city go up like when they burn the stubble; seen clocks melt (sniff); seen horses on fire break out of them stables, down Woodseer cross Deal, up on the railway, seen ’em, manes flaming, run straight (bang) into a train. (Sniff) Seen fires starting when there wasn’t not nobody to start ’em.
‘Nights all up in that tower room, windows blinded, looking out all across the roofs; not nobody on the streets, was there? Little drink, fag, like, if I wanted, go out on the parapets, I do; go where I like, walk, Flower and Dean, Thrawl, Heneage, Chicksand, walk cross the river if I wanted, nobody else, not never touched the ground. Like a goat then, weren’t I? Didn’t ’ave no weight. Knew every bleeding stone on it and still do. Look there, that church, been all through it; like a bird, mate, nothing changed.
‘’Nother time, wasn’t it (sniff)? I hear the siren, but I never shifts. Bethnal Green Station. Thousands, mate! Pouring your river into a piss bottle. On the stairs, a woman with a kid, she fell. And more of ’em, then, wouldn’t hold back. Wall of bodies, all joined up, that’s what they said. Breath sucked all out. Pushing in from behind. A hundred and seventy bleeding three. Dead. Closed it up, bury’t ’em where they was.
‘Best morning, mate, best morning, armband, bicycle, Autumn it was, bit of mist, warm. Called out (sniff) to the Jews’ Burial Ground, weren’t I? Down Brady Street; never go before, never wanted. Great big bleeding wall up all round. Durward Street, cottages then, a bomb, they said, in the night, a whistle, two or three in the morning.
‘Made an old Jew feller let me in; wouldn’t say nothing, would he? Little door in the wall, slow with ’is key, long pockets. Not nobody goes in there till the barber’s ’ad ’is ring for ’is watchchain. Bottled walls. What’s the matter, mate? I says to him, ’fraid they’ll climb out?
‘All them graves faces one way, black, sod-ugly tongues, waiting on a sermon. Wheels the bike in, don’t I? Quiet, he’s got me at it; no birds in ’em trees, earth’s dead, mud; wouldn’t see a wasp in there. Not the same for those bastards, is it? Burnt stones, all black; was looking for the bleeding methos. Can’t see no bomb neither. All mist, mate; trousers sopping, could ’ave pissed meself.
‘And then, I don’t know, push my bike in an ’ole, not nearly. Urns all smashed, tipped on over, stones; got to report it, ain’t I? ’Ave a blow, old mat
e, a light, just five. Blimey, the roof! Springfield Park? I’m telling you. Protocols of Zion, what! These Jews, Fathers, sitting on the roof of this little ’ouse, they’ve got, office, what you call it? Black ’ats down on their faces, beards. Looking, pointing. Not me, mate. Starting to laugh. Blimey! Ever seen ’em laugh? Day of bleeding Judgment. Bits of ’em all over that roof. Just bits. ’Anging to it, falling off of. Laughing! Never seen nothing like it nowhere. The men that will not be blamed for nothing. No, mate!’
*
As I cultivated Dick Brandon so the sculptor, S. L. Joblard, cultivated Mr Eves of the Publicity Department. Mr Eves had a collection of photographic plates taken, by long exposure, at the sites of the Jack the Ripper murders; all the courtyards, doorways, factory gates. Some of which he would show, some of which he would not. He was rumoured to have other things also.
There were so many unrecorded rooms hidden in the secret architecture of the brewery, chambers under the roof, passageways blocked by pipes, vaults beneath the cold store, condemned stables, locked cupboards. The old ones, Brandon and Eves, went where they wanted: unreachable and free to follow their own obsessions. So that afternoon would find Dick Brandon asleep in a hammock of his own contriving, slung between two warm pipes, a nest of wild cats beneath him; would find Mr Eves, hands in white cotton gloves, carding his collection or, cyclops-eyed, viewing his photographs through an ivory-handled magnifying glass, waiting for the first trace of movement somewhere among the grey background detail; would find Joblard and Sinclair out on the streets.
The zone was gradually defined, the labyrinth penetrated. It was given limits by the victims of the Ripper: the Roebuck and Brady Street to the East, Mitre Square to the West, the Minories to the South, the North largely unvisited. Circling and doubling back, seeing the same sites from different angles, ferns breaking the stones, horses tethered on wastelots, convolvulus swallowing the walls, shadowed by tall tenements, chickens’ feet in damp cardboard boxes, entrails of radio sets, slogans on the railway bridge, decayed synagogues, the flash and flutter, cardamom seeding, of the coming bazaar culture, the first whispers of a new Messiah.
We wilfully lost the time, and ourselves: from the Nazrul, a surfeit of cockroaches, to the Seven Stars, by way of the Betting Shop. Trying the resilience of previously-unpunished digestions.
When two men meet a third is always present, a stranger to both.
4
It hit Dryfeld more slowly than it hit the narrator but the spikehead reacted with sharper despatch. Left his room, oilskin blinds drawn, strip-lighting dripping its sick and erratic pulse, radio jabbering World Service to a deserted floor of books, skulls, overcoats: took his bicycle from against the wall and went east.
This might be the morning when he found the second volume of Meyerstein’s Chatterton biography and rounded off the suicide collection. If all the books were netted there would be no reason to hang about: he could top himself.
The Late Watson was lying in bed and the thought of twenty thousand pounds seemed suddenly like a workable slab of time; he realised, sweating, that a piece of it could be his. The agreement stood: Nicholas Lane took the 19th century fiction, he took the 20th, Dryfeld took everything else – unless anything turned up with a selling price of more than a grand; then they split it three ways. Jamie was out, couldn’t handle the kind of arrangement that struck him as being tantamount to communism. He understood auctions. You just turned up. Didn’t bid. Agreed to keep your hands in your pocket, with his problems, no great hardship. You picked up the divy.
A slice of twenty thou was out there: it didn’t feel like his, unearned, and the chances of getting it unless he acted – NOW…
The warmth of his wife, asleep, moving against his side; he could hear Dryfeld’s voice. ‘Part-timers!’ The ultimate insult.
Dryfeld padlocked his wheels, winding a heavily-guaranteed chain in and out of the spokes, round the crossbar, over the rail that fronted a strip of wasteground to the side of the Carpenters Arms; holdall extracted from the wooden box he’d had made to carry a few of his purchases; spun on his heel, no glimpse at the masonic symbols cut into the glass of the pub door, no thought for the owners, Ron and Reg, languishing in exile, without even a decent publisher for their verses.
Things were dead, just after midnight, and only the first two or three vans had pulled in to the Vallance Road end of Cheshire Street. Men in jackets like aircraft fitters stood around the vans doing their best to look as if these vehicles had nothing to do with them – until anyone moved in to take a look, when they suddenly reappeared, inside the tailboards, looking very much as if it was everything to do with them and that any citizen who disputed it would get a toecap up his adam’s apple.
These were the legendary backs of lorries that things fell off of, John. Including torch-holders, with yard long torches, demonstrating their success with vicious cigars, their expertise by economy of language, all of it foul. Conversation is not a requirement, neither is a cheque book. American Excess cards can be bought by the fistful, but not used, except for forcing locks. Books, naturally, do not feature high on the list of desiderata for this fraternity. They won’t make a show until a couple of hours before first light, along with the pocket-torch dealers, with a poke no bigger than a couple of hundred, who are permanently scuffling around trying to borrow, or sell what they have already found, to buy-in the real stuff which has just surfaced, in rumour, on the next corner. The general junkmen don’t buy books but are, grudgingly, prepared to take them for free. And start them at fifty. By the time the punters appear at half-eight they’re down to a tenner. Take ’em away for a dollar by opening time.
Dryfeld growls through the vans, pokes into sacks, storms among the sheds of rag pickers, elbows over terminal wastelots, where old bones have been spread out to dry, more for exhibition than with any serious expectation of a sale. He snarls back at the caged animals, bird yelp, rancid fish tanks, heavy-jaw’d fighting beasts dealt, as they have been for over a hundred years, under the railway arches. The sentiment of the local inhabitants flattered by having some creature whose existence is even worse than their own. There is no sighting of Nicholas Lane. He’s gone underground so deep he’ll come up with mud on his nose.
The narrator locks his car in Palissy Street; wail of high pipe mountain music, with sewing machine percussion, from single lit window in the block of minatory tenements. They put up these dreadnought hulks to replace the dustheaps of the Nova Scotia rookery. Arnold Circus a-twitter with bird frenzy, the stones limed with droppings.
Stop off for onion rolls and croissants, then down the Lane, cut into the first left turn, wall painting faded, an historic quotation, ‘I’m going home / to my / BACON STREET / radio’; merest glance over a drain of paperbacks, records, amputee dolls, single shoes. It’s too late, the Outpatients are already twitching into every crevice.
Seasonal plague. Spring surprises them: they emerge, pale, clutching their giros, rucksacks at the ready, to deal paper. They scavenge the scabby lots and burn down the charities. Buy at the bottom and polish the prices, always rubbing, scratching out the originals; cycle back to Camden Passage and Camden Lock with ever-growing bags, cases, sacks of half-respectable waste, the Penguin Classics: strictly for penguins. Who waddle up to the stalls with numbers to check in their notebooks. Books for bingo callers.
At high summer the mania speeds: the valium stash is running low. They shift to amphetamine mania. Bug-eyed, they shovel through the diseased end of Portobello Road on a Friday, competing with a triad of moon-faced Hong Kong hustlers, ready to deal anything, quantity is what they’re after: the dealers at the bottom get more and more and more stock, meaning that they can’t or won’t sell it, while the dealers moving up have less and less, which gets progressively more expensive, until they’ve got nothing but a chair, a telephone, and a West Coast phone-number. Saturday, Bell Street, plus ten jumble sales, Fulham to Finchley, more and more territory, faster and faster, to find less and less, no time to
look, grab anything, fill the bag, until you can hardly walk, dipped shoulder: by Thursday the stress has really begun to bite. They’ve been known to crack wide open, slap the face of some innocent walking down Essex Road to catch a bus to work. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Oh Jesus, oh God! My Waterland’s been stolen; oh no, oh Christ!’ Sobbing on the floor, tearing fingernails in a shriek down the glass walls of Mr Carrier’s Restaurant. Holiday’s over, back to the funny farm.
The Outpatients, also referred to as Neck-Breathers, angry, puffed with thyroidal angst, love Brick Lane, but they’re not to be confused with the Scufflers or the Stoke Newington austerity freaks, the glums. The Scufflers have their pretensions: have seen books change hands for money, have hoarded catalogues, from which they never order (not realising that the catalogued books are the ones that the big boys can’t sell, sour stock). They want top dollar.
The Scufflers attach themselves, if they can, to radical charities. It’s a great scam, collecting first editions for the Sandinistas, wheedling letters of support from John le Carré, town hall courtesy of Nuclear Free Islington: flog it all off, top wack.
The Scufflers mainly like to fight over tables. To hell with books. They’ve got to get the best pitch and the most tables. If something doesn’t sell it’s because the table isn’t big enough. They’ll kill for the longest stall.
They fan out through the market like a commando unit: booted, combat gear, hands like hooks, despising the old street-traders and loudly arguing over every price. The panic doesn’t set in until they do actually find something; then comes the terror, they might have to sell it and GET THE PRICE WRONG! Better to bury or burn it.
They’ve come wholly into their own in the bleak days of enterprise zone capitalism, lame dogs, mad dogs, and the weak to the wall. All the floating street literature has been trawled-in and priced out of the range of any remaining students who might like to sample it. A cultural condom has been neatly slipped over the active, the errant and beautiful tide of rubbish.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 3
