Dryfeld and the Late Watson spot Nicholas Lane at the same moment, converge, each grabbing a bone elbow. They’re lucky to find him. He’s altogether too good a dealer for what this place has become. The generations of street dealers, like mayflies, can pass in weeks, days; a trip out of town, it’s gone, and it never comes back. When the Scufflers have found it, Nicholas Lane is no longer there. If you hear his name – it’s too late.
One last nostalgic circuit; he’s not even buying books, his amazing radar has homed on a photograph of T. S. Eliot presenting a Wyndham Lewis portrait to some Canadian academics who look as if they’ve fallen off a totem pole. It’s inscribed, of course. If Nicholas Lane is around, there’s something worth finding. He’s an alchemist, turning shit to gold, and gold straight back to shit again.
We can hear the Scufflers beating down some tattered Colin Wilsons from 20p to 5p: unsuccessfully. Overpriced at nothing.
The coffee in the grease caff is very slightly preferable to the tea: it hits like a hammer, a mild concussion, instead of permanent kidney damage. The dead egg slides off a damp white sheet of bread.
Nicholas Lane’s emaciation is extraordinary and active, like a cancer inherited from a centuries old act, now flowering. Some dead man’s crime shines in his face. He is high on enthusiasm, pinched with cold, shivering in his black, wild with speculations and futures. A Study in Scarlet was yesterday and the word is, ON.
The word with Dryfeld is murder. And now is too late. He wants a sale and he wants a share. The creditors of his creditors have grown old waiting, the machete blades are blunt that once had the ambition of kneecapping him, but the cry of neglected treasures in remote provincial bookshops is too piercing and insistent. He wants to get there: in a first-class compartment.
He’s coming to Lane’s place that night and he wants his money. Before his coffee cup shatters on the table the entire caff, who have been forcibly listening to him roar, can turn and see him cycle past the window, up West, to watch a daylong Abel Gance film, on three screens. Energy is also a form of possession.
Nicholas bags the Eliot snap, no craziness to sell, no desperation to hold. ‘I’m sure of one thing. It’s the end now. The cycle’s over. Nothing more. The end of the world. That’s definite. You can actually see the millennial tremble, man.’
Thin, stained, fingers dipping and twitching over the sugar bowl; fingers like a fist of noses, shredded fine on the strings of an acoustic guitar, ichorate ghost of a rock musician. Remember that this man was on the bill with Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight; was shortlisted to replace Brian Jones. It wasn’t his finger skills that blacked him, but the power of his nostrils. Their pepper ration was threatened.
He tilts the table with sudden fears. The colour runs out of his eyes. It’s true but you can’t see it. The end now. All over. Running into ourselves, running.
Old hippie, old monk. Nicholas Lane rises, to shake hands, an exquisite and natural courtesy; and leaves, through the crowd, faint shadow.
You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You’ve got the heater blowing out burnt air but you still don’t get warm. Your ankles are singed but your head’s in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.
Young Kernan was a rock gofer, wounds running back to the prehistory of the early 70s, a maimed generation, like survivors of the first war, smiling, divine lit, never the same again, damaged, twitchy but blessed with the face of a recently roger’d altarboy. He’d followed Nicholas Lane through the great times into the bad, the worse, the bottom of the pit, looking somehow as if he was just back from a birching at the sauna. His clothes were in rags but he still had it, the newborn optimism of a true disciple who couldn’t believe it was all over. Someone should have slapped a preservation order on him. But in the new world of deals there is no contact sex.
He poured, from a blackened pan, hot water onto yesterday’s grains. Small domestic epiphanies light the squalor. Postcards, tribal carvings, dead-dada, some children’s toys. Old stories, not yet evaporated. Carpet worn to the boards. Set of scales. It’s weigh-out time. Not top shelf shit, but it should cut seven ways. Six to sell and one to keep. Pay out £650 to make £50. It takes a lot of work to keep work at arm’s length, to carry on working.
The Late Watson waited, what else. There was no point in trying for any other business. The mirror, the razor, the scales. Just pick up a book and read.
Somewhere, A Study in Scarlet: in his cabinet, that briefcase, or stashed? There’s a lot of night still unused.
In the street outside D/S Clark and Policewoman Dudley, on watch, revolve between the pub, which is the busiest brothel between Cable Street and Whitechapel, black guy running white women, disgusting, and the half-squat, a warren of garment outworkers, raincoat button-holers, kite dyers: all of them dealing. Where to start? Nothing worth kicking back.
‘See that Hessel Street. Worse than Calcutta. They’re butchering on the bloody pavements. Living in caves, the animals.’ And while he lays out his experience of local colour he makes a trial of his hand upon his subordinate’s black stocking’d thigh, fiercely muscled, meeting no resistance.
The staked heart of John Williams, the Ratcliff Highway Murderer, beats evenly at the quadrivium, at peace, from the shuntings of the work ethic, connected in a mysterious and unspoken thread to the recently scoured white stone blocks of St George in the East.
5
John Gull got his living from the water, shifting the fruits of the fields, by barge, from Hamford Water to the City of London, measures of wheat, measures of barley; and, in London, he got his death from water. It was always there and always with him. The comma-bacillus had not yet been named; unchristened, it was deadly.
The communal water-pump at Broad Street had been infected, sewage and water running together, harsh summer, the strings hanging from the boxes in Spitalfields Market were black with flies; Gull’s vegetables rotting in heaps; ants ran to the very steps of the church in such numbers that they could be taken up a handful at a time; the mad croaking of frogs.
The sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.
Gull’s blood boiled: and turned to water. His willed boundaries burst, he flooded into nothingness. Grit on the façade of lion-crusted buildings. Dust on the optimism.
Elizabeth, his wife, who had taken no firm stand on anything while John Gull lived, now that he was dead, insisted, was not to be shaken from the strangest, some said paganistic, cannibal island, demand. Grief had turned her, they said. But there was no outward show of grief. She was not what she had been. The bargemen, from respect, from a darker fear of John, that it should still be his voice speaking, obeyed her.
So it was that the longest, the blackest, the heaviest, the most imperial of John Gull’s barges came back to Landermere. The cholera victim, swaddled in white, bound close, unforgiving: his heat sealed. Came round the Naze and down Hamford Water, along Horsey, along Skipper’s Island; the birds of the estuary wheeling, a dull flat beaten-sun morning, early, the skin of water feverish, flinching from harm, breeze-shifting: a straggle of neighbours, obedient, subdued, Elizabeth and William, the boy, at the quay.
The bargemen, bareheaded, gave way; Elizabeth herself then leading the great horse, the Suffolk Punch, that dragged John Gull in his oversize floating coffin through close channels and cuts, among reeds; William following, a muzzled wolf.
They curved from sight of the line of solitary cottages. The bargemen, their wives, remaining, eyes on the imageless water, turned away: so many turnips on sticks.
In a place that was neither land nor water, in a field that had been cast adrift, unworked, the horse was freed from his harness. And the barge was fired.
John Gull’s back was to the sea when his bones broke from his flesh. His skull, lying in only inches of water, burst into flame, a lantern. He seemed to rise, to sit; bent, like a dry branch. His bird, a shard of black cloth, lifted, blaz
ed, was gone.
The woman and the boy stood through the long afternoon. That place was theirs: unknown, it was shunned.
William Withey Gull, his red eyes brilliant in a blackened face, his cropped hair ashed into age, an old man, screamed out over the reeds in savage laughter.
The parson’s ambition would never now be satisfied in full: he could talk to William’s father, but would get no reply. He could talk as well to a fence-post or to one of the stones marking the channel across the mud to Horsey Island. He had talked to them; incontinent, solitary of speech, uncontradicted, he ranted at crows, he flattered the hedges, he debated with maggots in a rabbit’s skull, he checked improprieties among the flints. Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.
John Gull’s defiant silence quickened, sharpened, enlarged his desire to open a conversation with his relict, Elizabeth.
The widow was a woman of moderate height, dark, full-figured. She smoothed her hair, but made no other gesture to vanity, before opening her door to the scratching of Mr Harrison, Rector of Beaumont.
Mr Harrison lived with the sand running through his fingers, the grains gushing from his spine, time was his fear: gone, gone, gone. Night sweats. The yawning grave. For ever. Clay on his eyes.
Each morning he felt the bones of his face, probed for a weakness, a sagging of the skin. He needed to be about, to be moving, doing: man of air and fire, fierce, high conceits. He plucked and tore at the vine around the cottage doorway; stooped, twisted his thin neck, as if to peer through the cracks in the wood.
‘Ah, M-M-Madame, M-Mrs Gull, I… Dear L-Lady, umm…’
William Gull had preceded his mother and now his head, a solid one, came into contact with Mr Harrison’s nervously tensed and contracted stomach.
‘Y-Yes… I… M-Madame…’
The widow’s hair was backlit, he stumbled among correspondences drawn from the masters of The School of Venice. Her hand, on William’s shoulder, was strong, not delicate, a plain gold band married to her finger.
‘Sir?’
‘If I m-might…?’ Mr Harrison stepped back, gesturing wildly; William following him out and countering his intention of coming forward once more towards the door.
‘Would you care to come into my house, sir?’
He would, he did: manoeuvred, standing, falling, half-bowing, colouring, gesturing, starting up, staggering, uninvited, to a seat at the fireside.
‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do…’
What Mr Harrison wished to do, he could not; what Mr Harrison might, in good christian conscience, do – he did. William Gull should attend at Beaumont Rectory each evening, on his return from the village school, and would be tutored, in the Classics, in the revealed word of our Lord, in the observation and description of flora and fauna, both local and general, in the peregrinations of heavenly bodies. There might even be the opportunity, under the closest supervision, of course, of sampling the choicest effusions of the finest poets of the day, such as Sir Walter Scott.
This was satisfactory to Mrs Gull, it was satisfactory to Mr Harrison, and would, in the fullness of time, the rector was confident, be quite satisfactory to Mr Benjamin Harrison, an uncle, who was the Treasurer, no less, of Guy’s Hospital, South-wark, London. The hospital already being William’s landlord, would, in the person of Mr Benjamin Harrison, God willing, William fulfilling his evident, and inherited, promise, and working with all his given abilities, also be his patron. A path was open, winding from the waterside, circuitously, to Beaumont, through many trials and dangers, both moral and physical, many tests of will, to the great world. He should… serve.
Mr Harrison allowed himself, with this torrent of benevolence, to clamp Mrs Gull’s hand between two of his own. To draw her hand up a little way towards his lips, then drop it, so that it fell, palm upwards, on the table: a dead white fern, prophetically engraved, creased with the awful future.
6
Mr Eves had the victims’ names printed in red on brittle vinegar-coloured cards, black bordered. The first letter of each name had been capitalised and enlarged, illuminated in a densely ornamented block. He took the cards out of a shoebox and held them against his chest, uncertain what to bid.
Joblard and Sinclair leant back from the table, eager, respectful of Eves’ time; feigning a calm they did not feel. Sharing a jug of porter, heavy headed, slopped into china mugs. Eves waved aside their offer.
‘Diabetic. Won’t see New Year. Bugger the injections. Go when I’m ready and go in my own way. Won’t play the yogi, no.’
His skin was waxy and fibrous, unset parchment, cheeks hollow; refined by disease, eaten away to a great delicacy of gesture and movement. Skipping on inessentials.
Dealt out the name cards, a kind of tarot, across the green baize table. His cork-like head nodding across the panes of the small leaded windows. Dark wood behind him. Afternoon tutorial in an Oxford College. The world at a distance.
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Marie Jeanette Kelly.
‘No more.’ He anticipated us. ‘Your Tabrams, your Myletts, not part of this. The chapel could have swallowed them at any time. They wobbled over. Not willed. But look at my names – what do you see?’
We saw names, we knew the names. There were other versions of them, the victims might have rendered themselves in a dozen ways, so did Shakespeare – did they remember who they were? These were the names of the victims and they were locked together like a famous football team: they were inseparable. Part of the doctrine.
We stared at the cards. Mr Eves turned from us, reaching for a thermos of tea, poured it, unsteaming, cooled, elbow-dipping temperature, ladled in a few inches of sugar, cup of old dandruff, stirred, sucked rather than drunk; pushed his white lips into the film-surfaced liquid. A smile, stumps of teeth, broken pencils, rabbit mouthed. He had successfully posed a riddle: we had to solve it. He was going nowhere. Retired, for ever, to his scriptorium. The work was done.
‘Take ’em,’ he said, tapping the cards with an uncut fingernail, ‘they don’t mean anything to me anymore.’
He swivelled a desktop magnifying glass, put his thumb against it, a tongue in a window. The whorl forensically enlarged.
‘This is the true spiral,’ he said, ‘the first map of the labyrinth.’
But most through wintry streets I hear
How the midnight harlot’s curse
Blasts the new born infant’s tear
And smites with plague the marriage hearse…
Drumming Blake, Blake drumming like a madness, one of those sugar-hook addictions that get into your head, a spasm, won’t be shifted: set against local pain, pulsing against bodily exhaustion.
The sign of the Pleiades hangs, stars joined into a pint pot, over a public house on the west side of Brick Lane: The Seven Stars. Brides of the Pleiades. ‘Brides’ being the familiar name in this quarter for whores. Star-brides, servants of Orion. Lit corruptions. Do what you will shall be all of the law.
We settle in an oblique corner, bar still empty, sun puddle; the stripper not due on stage for another thirty minutes. Joblard rolls a smoke between large, acid-stained, fingers. A changeling, his face unset. Young man with ash in his hair; mask of power submerged in pleasantries. Performs himself with such practised application that this presented self is become a true self: beneath it a larger mystery. He appeared full-grown, with no luggage, and a palaeolithic past. Marking the bone: nervous of paper.
The wall behind us repeats a scene of disembarkation; masts, castles, dancing. And suddenly I recognise the sentence that Eves has given us.
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Marie Jeanette Kelly. MANACESCEMJK. MANAC. ES. CEM. JK. MANAC ES CEM, JK.
The cold truth of that fiction is between us. Inrush of Sumerian breath. The bar, without transition, is filled: men coming in from the brewery, already half-cut, to jape and patronise the Sikh publican, cramming a
wall, shoulder to shoulder, from street-door to Gents, enclosing the half stage in fetid attention.
Joblard takes from his jacket pocket a paperback account of the Moors Murders. Flicks through the text, inscribing, on a beermat, the names of the victims; John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, Edward Evans. Arriving at the dreadful statement: JK, LADEE.
Wall of glass, a board stage. None of it matters. There is her time and our time. There are the workers, who have always been workers. For them it is time out. Manac. ‘What doth the Lord require?’
The girl is not, like many who work this pitch, deformed. She is notable in the clear skin of her self-knowledge. A black gauze shirt; sitting, ignoring the pens of hot faced draymen, plumbers, cutters, steaming, shirts soaked at the armpits, held back to the occasional bellowed obscenity.
She starts with her back to them, herself in the long mirror, a film, the shadow of herself; unconnected, slowly stripping away everything, revealing nothing, Inanna through the seven gates of Ereshkigal’s Temple. They fasten upon her their eyes of death, she hangs against the stalks of their desire. The ritual sours and dries.
She walks, naked, among them, high heel’d, dirty scarlet shoes, spangled with dull sequin stars, leper shoes, collects her tithe, smoking, clink of coins in a pewter pot.
They are on the street and the heat of the old story begins to work with them. The Nazrul again, gobbling spiced meats, saffron rice, mummia. Coupled men lazy at tables, sweet sweet cakes, condensed milk-sick pastries. A single white girl, painted like a fairground horse, nostrils flaring, outlined in scarlet varnish, dead confectionery eyes, sitting on the table edge. The men fondle and ignore her. She creaks back out to the street, leather skirt, gladiator.
A voice from the table behind them, ‘Well, you made a killing,’ from an empty booth; their nerves heightened, overtuned, dictating messages. ‘You made a killing.’
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 4
