White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

by Iain Sinclair

  In the preserved operating theatre the light is septic, wound squeezed. The power of pain is honoured: with shavings, hacksaw, table, straps. The solidity of the cutting bench set against the curvature of the ochre galleries, as in Joblard’s room. Above the head of the absent victim a tract is set: ‘Miseratione non mercede’, to face the audience, the distinguished visitors on their padded chairs.

  The floor has been raised three inches on joists to soak up the blood loss.

  A paschal lamp hangs, blackened with the concentration of amputees, consciousness screaming with shock, forcing themselves to climb out from the pain, into the tracery of metal, into the light itself.

  Long coated surgeons hack and cut, talking their virtuosity into the dry throats of the banked students. Splash the hands with water. A small looking-glass. Their own faces. Beards and teeth. The patients carried out. Performance concluded. The curtain of eyes.

  Young Keats, lips bitten, attending. Neophyte. ‘Implicated’ by these rituals in mysteries that made his heart too small to hold its blood. A torrent, that was not to be spoken, speeded by disease: witness.

  Pus-spattered high boots, sour veins opened. Men of Guy’s. Gull and Hinton; their private and secure theatre of gesture. Alchemy starts in the entrails of fear: birth-light in dung.

  Escape. Heads tip forward, shoulders bruise on the church border: down Cathedral Street, a segmentary glimpse of tower and overhead railway in fractured combination, an expressionist film-set. Pick our way among grape boxes, under the roof-tree of the Borough vegetable market. Choose your entry.

  If you can find a working market you’ll find a pub worth drinking in. When the workers are gone – a quiet one.

  We approach the Wheatsheaf, ‘TAKE COURAGE’, wheels rattle across the top of the market, a maze of cages; packed carriages run out from the dome of St Paul’s, shuddering.

  The bar has its own sense of what it should be: damp wood bowed like whalebone, cabin-close, engravings of the old city, its secret corners, obscure messages. This interior has a narrative quality, like the inside of a pulpit. We have to settle ourselves into a text; nothing is written, everything re-written. We are retrospective. Even the walls are soaked with earlier tales, aborted histories.

  Russian stout and blackthorn cider are secured. The rotten vegetable matter scraped from our boots. Sanctuary from the fury of event; discourse spills, like an emptied skull.

  But our barman has us in his modest eye, a dangerous fever, recognised, that must be given no opportunity to break out. He swallows the rim of his lips; smooth man, alarmingly smooth, pale glow on him of moths and aspirins, weak coffee; a cupboard golem. His crisp sleeves are pinched up in garter rings; contained smile, like a thirties sex criminal. Face filled with candle-white flesh, a brandy glass of respectable mania. Obsessional cuff twitch. There is no escape from it. He has heard us, he was waiting, we have qualified. Where two men are gathered, a third is always present. Without us he would not be here: without him we could not have come.

  I turned my back on the bar and hunched up; he spoke over me, to Joblard, who did not lift his eyes from the table.

  ‘You mentioned Keats, gentlemen, what do you think of Chatterton?’

  Joblard stood in front of him, in silence, hand stretched out for another pair of bottles.

  ‘Keats wasn’t frightened to borrow from Chatterton, not a bit. It’s not theft, you understand, an act of generosity; you lay yourself open to a form of occult possession. You complete the other man’s work, like one of those figurines the Egyptian priests used to leave in their tombs. The job doesn’t end with death. And neither does it belong to any individual.’

  Joblard’s hand, opening for a stout, receives a postcard.

  ‘You know the Wallis painting, of course. In the Tate, I believe. Never seen it myself; don’t choose to get my feet wet crossing the river. Would only spoil the illusion. I prefer the card. It stands in the same relation to the painting as the painting stands to Chatterton.

  ‘You see, it’s not Chatterton at all – it’s George Meredith. Isn’t that a hoot? Posing in purple breeches, shirt open to the waist, on a bed in Gray’s Inn. The silly tart.

  ‘That’s why the view from the window is completely wrong, St Paul’s? From Brook Street, Holborn? Alignment’s completely cocked up.

  ‘But what does it matter? This version is far more fun than the so-called truth. Why watch the wretched creature strain to perform when you can take home a pin-up?’

  Joblard emitted a sound, between a groan and a curse, unable to wait any longer, trying to uncap the bottle with his teeth.

  ‘I suppose you’d like the vomit and the venereal sores; he’d caught a bad dose. I’d always go for suggestion. The window behind him open just a crack. Nothing blatant.

  ‘Wallis went off with Meredith’s wife. Stupid cow. He soon got shot of her. It was Chatterton he was after. He should have bought her a red wig.

  ‘Once Chatterton got to Spitalfields he should never have left. Better not to have gone at all, I agree. Should have stayed home with mother. He had the perfect set-up: plagiarising the unwritten. If it worked he could take the credit and if it failed, well, it wasn’t his anyway. We’ve all got to find ways to distance ourselves from our own inventions.

  ‘That was the purpose of the poison. To split himself from his work, so that he could outlive it. He became a presence, manifesting himself in other men’s plays and novels; spooking Francis Thompson. Dangerous ground in which to get lost.

  ‘When I first moved down here a friend of mine used to buy all his vegetables from the oldest and most decrepit men in the market. When I asked him why he said that it gave him a strange feeling to think that one of them might have known Oscar Wilde.

  ‘Load of bollocks, if you ask me.’

  I am out of the door. The terror. Now they are all writers; all rewriting the past, all being rewritten by selves as yet unborn.

  I can hear the barman’s voice, calling after me, ‘What’s your hurry? Do you want to put me in a book?’

  We have to escape, swept along, no conscious decision taken; Joblard, for a man of his weight and substance, in pinstripe Bunter trousers, celluloid collar, black coat, sets out at an inhuman pace; down Tooley Street, vintners, signs, the rim of St John, Horselydown, supporting a bureaucratic glaze, over Tower Bridge, The Minories; it is not planned, we are there again.

  ‘Come up and be dead!’

  Matfellon, Hanbury, Durward. Winding it in. The heart’s stomach. There is no breaking away from it. It describes us. Leaning into the magnetism, back into the belly of the secret. But we are within our limits, we are still bound by the circumference of reason; our energies, inflamed, fall back into themselves.

  8

  In spite of his best efforts Dryfeld was an interesting man, a man of interests: but there were dozens of other men who would have liked nothing better than to cleave that interest, to slash into it, like a blade through a melon. He was also a man possessed, a materialist. He was never there in front of you; he was always driving, forcing, rigid brow, battling on.

  If you could trap him for a few hours – let us say in a car, going towards a goal he approved, the rumour of a virgin bookshop – his deeper concerns or interests would surface in a world-view that seemed, at worst, his own and, at the shallowest level, alive, vivid, cast in sharply practical language, hot, the syntax spat like rivets.

  If you wanted to talk about prisons, asylums, containments – he could give you facts, anecdotes. If you wanted to split envy from jealousy, he was your man. If you wanted to talk the culture, he had seen it, swallowed it. His greed for all this was the greed of a man who has, at some point, been denied access, wholly, to these things. Who has decided to invent himself, but is not committed to the result of this brutal caesarean section.

  Prognathous, he set himself to provoke the tremulous and corrupt, but essentially trivial, sub-continent of bookselling. He made it a life. Other parts of him paid for it, were subdued.
He was not without his supporters, and the nature of his charm, invisible to the untutored eye, was not lost on a succession of otherwise dementedly respectable ladies. Married women were a particular target: a form of emotional prophylactic.

  He was able to recognise unique qualities in the most unlikely members of the trade, but unable to give a true value to Nicholas Lane who was his Contrary, more liquid, borderless, but rigorously exact in his attention to detail. Nicholas Lane was uninventing himself, removing himself, he was there less and less. He was generously shifting out of the human into a force of nature. Lichen under the fingernail. Coming through mere addiction until he was addiction. The ache without the head. The line without the shadow. Absolute damage, the critical state. A need without a source: disembodied, and of great delicacy.

  Though they appeared to have so much that was common, taking the same world metaphor, the buying and selling of books, feeding the same denials, refusing meat, cooked or raw, they were the poles between which the living current ran.

  The two best scalpers of their generation: cornered, poke gone, skinned, frenzy’d out. Dead kites. Rubber cheques. Sweat telephone withdrawal. Unhoused.

  Dryfeld was ready to tear up the floorboards to get his cash: Nicholas Lane was ready to watch the evolution of dust in air, to wait for manclay to reform on the dry bone floor of lunar valleys.

  One scalper propelled by what he had made himself, rushing into his own death mask and the other escaping, ducking behind what he truly was.

  The space between them is infinite.

  The narrator, seeking failure, and obscurity, as the only condition spiritually adequate to his self-esteem, is glass; he watches them, not watching, being. And can only live in them and feeding from them. Which is a state of being as full and as empty as they themselves are.

  It’s one of those short nights that go on for ever; slatted blinds sealing the cage, the dealers staring into their naked obsessions, the telescoped barrel of a gun. The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio. Waiting for apocalypse announcements with fatalistic calm. Reactions slowed: it’s like having to tell some other body what to do, and without moving your lips; like lifting a dead man underwater.

  We can all hear the scratching and tapping at the window and we all believe it – but so what, it couldn’t matter less. We’re cancelling each other out.

  The window is so loose, the frame so rotten, that it cannot be locked: it is slowly being lifted, the blinds give a death-rattle, bones on string. White fingers tangle themselves in the slats, worms in a chinese lantern. A sick head appears; the chalky scalp, with its wet fleece, crowns, haloed in sodium, fuzzy, lemurian. Dirty hands grope for something solid. Howard Omega.

  ‘Hey!’

  No movement from his lips: he speaks out of his nose.

  ‘Yeah!’

  Nods, bleary. Whistles.

  ‘Hey, OK. OK, man? Ha!’

  Without invitation Howard starts to pull books out of the bookcase, glance at the covers, without opening any of them, crams them back, fiercely, scoring the edges, the torn lips of trout.

  ‘Shit! Got any decent stuff?’

  Howard is like a horrible shrunken doppelgänger of Nicholas Lane; something culled from a mindless masturbatory emission. He wears a lapel badge that announces, unnecessarily, ‘BEAT DEATH’. Howard shelters within that pun.

  Nicholas Lane is visibly damaged by being confronted with this mannerless futurist madman. Who considers it normal behaviour to manifest himself, unannounced, in the middle of the night for an obscure shakedown.

  He is gone deep into cellular time: so vividly living the present moment that he erases history, yesterday’s books, parcels, deals no longer exist. He looks clean through Howard and the Howard behind Howard and the Howard behind that.

  ‘Pulled a few decent numbers, man. Elmore Leonards. You wanna come down the shop? Work something out?’

  Howard’s nose is running, in anticipation. Good trade. Fix, score, shift: commodity exchange, contra usuram, let’s keep currency out of this.

  ‘Where he goes – I go,’ Dryfeld grunts. ‘Until we get this money split, I’m his shadow.’

  Unholy twins. Waiting for surgery.

  On the street they try to summon a cab. Would you take them? Two gaunt scarecrows with wild tails of rat hair; one of them bounding along, the other shuffling, as if his laces were tied; and the manic cropped Dryfeld, in despair, feeling his hair growing, actually sensing the stubble climbing out of his skull, shaking himself into a storm of bone dandruff.

  The shop, in a narrow court once favoured by purveyors of curiosa, is, naturally, shut: no problem, Howard kicks the lock and the door breaks open. There’s no light, that’s been cut, but beyond the counter are two unemployable Outpatients defying their limits by the glow of a hurricane lamp.

  One of them is working with sandpaper to erase the inhibiting announcement, ‘damaged stock’, from the fore-edges of a pile of bought-in publishers’ successes of last month. There’s nothing ‘damaged’ about them, except the stamp: and that is being swiftly remedied. The Outpatient’s knees are white with the flakes of falling paper. He coughs.

  The second Outpatient is hunched over a kettle steaming the labels out of a collection of oversized fine art library books. If there are easier ways to earn your breakfast, he is incapable of imagining them.

  The shelves in the shop, as illuminated by Dryfeld’s torch in a tunnel of unbelieving light, are rich with the direst dreck, condemned tea-chest gloom, most of the books covered in a layer of tea grains, brown, lumpy, inert. Strictly for the captive student market, yards of instant grant-bleeders.

  The gelt is elsewhere.

  Behind one of the stacks is a roped-off stairway that lets us down into the basement. And here the best of the Outpatients, a man whose abilities almost lift him to the rank of Scuffler, sits beside a candle, two handed, signing, with mantra-like automatism, a stack of newly minted first editions. Who would have thought that John Fowles needed to moonlight? Or that John Fowles and Dick Francis were one and the same: the left hand and the right hand.

  The Ian Fleming presentations have already been taken away; to weather, overnight, under a desk lamp.

  The Near-Scuffler, a former Newdigate Prize Winner, ignores us. He has seen worse things. And did not believe them either.

  Dr Suk, mysterious man of business, lecturer, pornographer, liked to employ poets. He was a one man Arts Council. Liked the sense of having a court about him, the formerly great in straitened circumstances only increased his prestige: he pinched them tighter than ever, until they couldn’t move at all. Hooked them to him in talons of need; bored with themselves, blank with fear. A comfortable pond filled with the lamest of ducks. A septic tank. Each inmate able to function: but only just. Excess of energy or imagination could only harm them. Gracious Suk, the Duvalier of Shit Street.

  We waited, again, a slow tongue of light, pale through the overhead grille; the fat wheels of Suk’s Mercedes block it out.

  Suk looks about fifteen years old in sunshine, ninety by candle. His moonfaced benevolence, coupled with bun-sized spectacles, gave him his start: posing as the adopted child of an English Missionary to China. It was a good scam – for a while. And he played it beautifully, no hurry, easy pace.

  ‘Excuse me, Sir, I see that you trade in Antiquarian Literature…’ (This to a gentleman guarding a table of tattered remnants, street sweepings.) ‘Might I have a word? Perhaps you have the time to take a cup of tea?’

  Put it into print and the story screams stinking fish: but to hear him give it, the dull uninflected tones spike you, a narcoleptic nodding trance.

  ‘Orphan sent to Theological College in the north of England’… (just look at the long black coat, the damp mournful face)… ‘Dear father’s books in store in the East End’… (where?)… ‘Mostly theology and church history’… (groan, boredom, go away)… ‘But he did also collect; er, I am not sure of the word; er-otica; very old, Sir, Japanese.
How do you call them? Scrolls?’… (the punter is drooling)… ‘You understand, I cannot myself sell such things’… (oh no, of course, we’d look after that for you)… ‘A percentage; we could share?’… (of course, we could; very fair; 90 per cent for us, 10 per cent for you)…

  And when the hook goes in, cast according to the pretensions and potential of the punter; £30 on the street to £200 at the top…

  ‘To get the books out of storage now.’

  It always worked. Beautiful.

  The taxi eased away with one sombre bowl-faced missionary orphan.

  It took about two hours per hit. He could only work an area once. Morning, Camden Passage; afternoon, Kensington Church Street; Brighton, tomorrow.

  It took months to put together a reasonable roll; so he claimed a degree in Accountancy and started lecturing at night school to overseas students, who knew less than he did, but who were desperate to pick up the certificates which would allow them, in their turn, to work the game in their native lands. Awarding himself a doctorate in survival studies was easy.

  Smutty videos, car repair kits, fast food, student hostels, a bookshop: with plenty of flash remaindered stock, remaindered, it must be said, without the publisher’s knowledge; an easy move from a conglomerate warehouse in the sticks. They didn’t have the remotest idea what they were holding: the computer wasn’t interested in that kind of detail.

  He’d peaked: the white Mercedes, designer jeans, pigskin jacket, his own coke dealer who’d take payment in books; which would be rapidly converted back into weasel-sugar.

  The stuff doesn’t come in neat plastic packets, like Miami Vice; it comes, in fast-food foil, out of the spine of a book by J. B. Priestley. A gross text, too dull for anyone to ever open. Dug out like a suppository: often it is a suppository.

  Nicholas Lane takes a carrier bag and fills it with tradables, that would never now see daylight. Stored beneath the pavement, sold at night by telephone, joined to the rest of a major collection, boxed in a bank vault. Buying just enough time to sell the big one, Study in Scarlet.