White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

by Iain Sinclair

  The woman crawls over the field towards a plane tree where another woman and a man are sitting, disputing a bottle. Behind them is the ruin of a defiled sepulchre.

  Hinton will confess his penitents. Or flail the skin from their backs. He strides to them, seizing the wrists of the women; he whispers, he spits.

  ‘“And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.”’

  The unfortunates drop to their knees under the flaking tree. Hinton is terrible: Mosaic wrath. Old sins nail their palms to the earth. Hinton raves.

  ‘“And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.”’

  But his prophecy is barren; the clouds drift away, to be speared on the towers of another Jerusalem. Hinton, weeping, claws the topsoil, Enkidu, buries the three buttons. Matfellon must be destroyed in fire.

  A rim of old Fathers watch him. Stone beards. A spark. The tinder of the organ box.

  In one hour the church was gutted. Molten lead poured from the roof. The organ pipes twisted and whistled. Glass burst in the martyred windows. The cracking of saints.

  Hinton’s boat burnt. An ark of fire.

  He dug himself into the grass, to ravish the ground, painecstasy, sacrifice; shivering, gasping; hard clay, the spoiled field bleaching slowly to gold.

  On the following morning the watch committee, dignitaries, welfare, the charitable fathers walked over the ruin of Mary Matfellon. Lead in shining pools on the grass. Blood splinters from the windows. Calcined stone. Wood crumbling like skin to the touch.

  And in the wreck of the church roof they discover twelve sealed coffins that had been secretly lodged. The coffins were small, a few feet in length, black from the fire, but undamaged.

  They gave the order for the seals to be broken: and found within the perfectly preserved bodies of twelve very young children, tightly wrapped, their eyes now closed.

  19

  Dryfeld lived nowhere. He had a room, but could not allow it to be where it was. It was cancelled space. And he was caged in the middle of it. Nobody visited the room, so nothing was added. The blinds were down, the radio was on. He could feel hair, unstoppable, coming out of him; shoving out of his scalp, against gravity. Why wait?

  Nicholas Lane lay in the London Hospital in an empty bed; glucose dripping into his veins. The book was so much powder. He might as well snort it. You couldn’t kill him, he’d live for ever.

  But sometimes, these last days, the world left Dryfeld. He was in it, making for Sidcup, pumping along on the pedals, already calculating how he would sell what he had not yet bought. Then he wasn’t. Keeled over at the side of the road, blood on his shirt, a few bruises. Or back to himself with a mile or two missing. There were these gaps in his head. He was spotted with darkness.

  Why wait for a spectacular date to kill himself? Why not do it now? Get his retaliation in first. They say that people who talk about suicide never do it. They’re wrong.

  He found a plastic bag but it wouldn’t fit over his head. The bull! Even stretched it looked like a jester’s cap, an uncut caul of soapy skin.

  He’d studied all the how-to-do-it manuals. So what? The easiest thing was to dive in, get it done. He found another bag, with a book in it, The Two, the Story of the Original Siamese Twins. He stopped to flick through the pages, didn’t rub out the original price, never bothered, not worth more than a fiver – but the bag was big enough.

  Dragged it over his face, which wrinkled, drowning, squeezed in on itself. Bog sacrifice. Eyes hooded over, nose flattened. He didn’t even bother to lie down. Took a roll of brown tape and gave himself a collar. Sealed his head into the bag, an unreturnable offering.

  Red bands at the border: darkness beyond. His mouth opened. He started to swallow his tongue.

  The telephone rang, loud, but far away. Nothing to do with him anymore. It went on ringing. He wasn’t going to die to the sound of the telephone. He split the bag across his mouth.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Fancy an Indian? There’s something coming up, in Boston, I’d like to talk about.’

  ‘Right! Twenty minutes, Brick Lane.’

  His face, scarlet, the flaps of the bag hanging like torn ears. No mirror to watch him. Let’s go.

  20

  Summoned by telephone, licked in sweat, pale, a kind of recurring occult malaria: I tremble. Make shift through the last traces of the old streets; the hulks are crumbling to dust. We will never get back. The warren is detonated. They disguise it, cover it over with respect, modesty, forward planning: destroy it, utterly. You will never rebuild the city from these words. You would build a monster.

  ‘Bury the beast,’ said the girl from Sag Harbor. Her husband had floated it; friend of the trees. Bury Christ Church, Spitalfields, in earth. Incarcerate its hieratic bulk. Lift up a new mountain. To oversee a New Age. Seal its power. Stop its mouth.

  Even the brewery is encased, is sheeted in glass, false reflections; disguised with vines and shrubs. The Eagle is hooded. Sell off the portraits.

  Bury the bell!

  Hold concerts in the belly of the church. Summon the musicians, tame the doctors. Banish the phantoms, the vagrants. Feed them into submission. Bandage the lunatic. Stack cars above the sweating room. Spray it with concrete.

  I am shaking, beside myself. Old breath of poison. Flesh of the albatross. Tremor of cold excitement; estranged from any recognition of time and place.

  It is a moment of Manichaean necessity – the split one meets, merges, dissolves: reintegrates? On the future’s sharpest edge. Holmes and Moriarty plunge together into the torrent, but only Holmes returns, diminished. Without the dark double, the contrary, his own power is lost.

  Walking again, turning, it’s still the first time, into the Seven Stars.

  Who is that sitting in my corner? What’s happened to the wall-paper, the ships, castles, the river? A man is waiting for me. My drink is already on the table. I don’t need this, I need brandy.

  The man is scented with patchouli, his hair, a buoyant ash-grey; it’s not Gull, it’s not my father. Who is this? He’s got earphones, he’s connected to a red plastic box. Broad, full-chested. Not one of the workers.

  The Brides. The dance of the Pleiades. Not Orion: O’Ryan, the Huntsman. He’s transcribing arcs of pure motion. He’s smoking. The speed of nerve gives him an amphetamine stutter.

  It’s Joblard.

  And again he has worked a transformation. He has got out of himself, folded back all the inessentials, all the human tentacles, packed them – so that his form is dense. The shell is hard, but more brittle.

  Drink runs through the skin of my head, never gets inside me. He calls for more. The glass is taller; I roll it across my brow.

  Joblard is making some kind of confession. I can’t take it in. Trust is fractured and will have to be remade. He has mutilated the previous, the creature that he has impersonated for so long: by choice become a new man and, yes, there is a new woman.

  The orphan is, again, his own father. And because of this is an orphan once more. He is cutting himself loose. Mad with pain. And mad with new pleasures. Unshaven, drinking it, the long weekend.

  Unwilling; I am implicated. Soon and sudden. Behind the thin walls, an inhuman voice: ‘Don’t break the ring!’

  ‘It is remarkable that the skin of the penis and scrotum was perfectly normal in every respect.’

  Merrick allows the room to perform its cellular function. The long evening slides over his window; brick dust, the shadows of birds. A nurse, crisp scratch of her skirts, pokes at the coals in his grate. The moment holds breath, like a studio oil, darkens into its frame.

  His sitting room. A doll’s house. Silver tongs. Ornaments, pictures. Volumes in fine bindings; quite a respectable collection. Hair stroked across his wrist, sensitised. No mirror: the doorspace filled, su
ddenly, by his protector.

  ‘A little excursion.’

  Curtains shutter low theatre lights that lift the eyebrows. Demonic masks of glittering, scale-like paint. Hell poses. Slow dancer struggling to lift their dead limbs.

  The coach summoned.

  Joblard is pursuing the invisible.

  ‘I want to make tracings of unseen acts. To flood locked rooms with chemicals that trap the slightest movements of light. To cover all the marks of my own complicity. I want erasures. Weak illumination of ink. Shaded bulbs hung over parchment. The word “whisper” in some unknown language. I want the acts to repeat. I want to measure the force of decay in bread, the glow in the bones of mackerel. To erase time and to bend its direction of flow.’

  I don’t know if he is saying this to me, or hearing it on his headset: or if I am making him speak. My fever rubs out the connections. The defences are all down and the shift is on.

  I know there is nothing to be written: all writing is rewriting. That old dream: completed books that will never be transcribed, made redundant by their own conception.

  The room has filled, but the dance is unbroken. The dancer slips off a black gauze shirt; her body is young, younger than the last time. I can only watch the reflection in the mirror behind her. A shudder of rhythm through her back, slowed convulsion, as she sways her shoulders. She is detached from what she does and detached from her audience. The act is ritualised. Curse and blessing of Enkidu. The pearl. The shed of feathers. She gleams; her hands lifting and covering her breasts.

  *

  Now Treves was beginning to take a positive relish in introducing Joseph to new experiences: subtle pleasures could be derived from watching.

  Joseph was bathed; fussed over by nurses, tub dragged before the fire, thick warm towels. Treves hovering, always, hand on hip, fingering the links of his watchchain. Escorted into the evening, not knowing if he would ever return: the purpose of his journey a mystery. To make it a routine: that each day should be a rehearsal for the next.

  Out on his stick, the coachman’s arm about his shoulders; across Bedstead Square, the herb garden, to the street. Lifted into a sealed cab. A flick at the horses. Treves, arms folded, smiling; blocks the window.

  Those first autumn evenings: mildness, death. Hay on the pavements. Bales brought on carts to market. Horsedung. Groups in the doorways of public houses. Political meetings.

  The route was varied but the duration, seemingly, fixed. No conversation. Tense, rapt. The interval between these excursions was not to be anticipated.

  He walked the labyrinth for fifteen years, never encountering the minotaur. The minotaur is outside. We only plunge deeper into our own confusions: turn away and the maze unravels. It is a ghost trap. Walk its length out into the countryside. The path drops through barley fields to Landermere, the estuary. And is repeated in a meander of ditches.

  Open the gates of the heart. We force ourselves against the valve. The seals are there to be broken. Upon the door of a decayed greengrocer’s shop, Virginia Road, is painted the map of the labyrinth.

  The artist has ‘gone away’, associate of villainy: his grievous body, harmed. His oils dumped among potato sacks. Violent panels. Brawling heads scratched among pint pots. Palette dipped in industrial slurry. He has located the fear and nailed it to his door.

  His wife has gone. Tear it down. He is betrayed. The names of birds mark the entrance-gates: from Birdcage to Spread Eagle. Beasts guard the exits: avatars of the Black Bull. Blast them with red light, shatter them in a furnace of sound.

  She is twisting, on her back: the floor. As if sacrificed. They close in, tight, to cover her with coins. Naked to the pelt. They are cattled by an ambiguity of need. What is and is not offered.

  Joseph’s fear was caged. Another time; a fairy tale, a Penny Story. Private box, the nurses in evening gowns, scented, hair dressed; they shade him from the eyes of the curious. Erase his attendance.

  He was awed. He was enthralled. The spectacle left him speechless, so that if he was spoken to he took no heed. He often seemed to be panting for breath, thrilled by a vision that was almost beyond contemplation.

  As the dancer walks among us the body of Joblard’s attention is bound to her, as with a cord. His confession has made necessary some further act. The confession is not singular; it deletes the past, recasting casual acquaintance into a darker intimacy.

  She has wrapped a lizardskin coat around her shoulders, naked otherwise, the scorch of the dance contained: perfume, spiked heels. He folds paper into her cup. Gives the word; whispers. I watch the collar of this coat, glittering, in the long mirror. A snake-rope. She will come with us. They are eating Indian.

  ‘My dear, come along, you will be comfortable.’

  ‘Shit or bust,’ says Joblard, gripping his right forearm with his left hand. On the square. Dynamic tension. And another barley wine.

  ‘All or nothing.’

  Now it is random, it is anything. My fever has cooled to a clammy chill, shirt soaked from blue to black. ‘Hinton cops out. These restraints. Whips it, fans the fire, then refuses to follow his reasoning to the death. Dementia of the monk, the self-flagellant. Vision of the snail. Unless we can exactly repeat the past, we will never make it repent; it will escape us. Nothing is exorcised. It goes on for ever.’

  New weather shifts the colour of time. Concentration breaks with close thunder. A torrent. Melting skies. Bones greasy with fright. We run across the Lane. The dancer, squealing, her gleaming skin pulled tight; wobbling on absurd heels.

  We are occulted: seeing the future by flashes of lightning, seeing the present from underneath.

  Gull redeemed his time. When it was the hour of action, he acted. There were no instructions or whispers from secret masters: no sealed orders. A plot of ground in St Patrick’s Cemetery, Leytonstone, was unfulfilled. There were shadows: in the mortuary glass he saw the shape of the burial party. He looked across the estuary and saw the white men rising from the water: the unclaimed dead.

  It was the time of the Ghost Dance. Mahdi. Messianic spasms. He saw the verges. John Wilson, Moonhead: God’s Son returns to us, coming out from old man Coyote. The trodden circle of the dance. Swallows itself. The dream. He put on a white shirt. The man returns from death, with gifts; towards this city. Heart stopped.

  They questioned the Plains Indians that Colonel Cody brought over to the Tenter Ground for his Wild West Show. They were implicated, suspect; sitting on their heels outside the flapping hill of canvas, smoking.

  The great synthesis travels in a sealed cab. Stars move across the pitched ceiling. A coracle. They tell of a love that is beyond heat. Jupiter combined with darkness and a piece of the moon.

  But ours is the restaurant that is shunned: it is tainted by journalism. Hot lies creep onto the plate. Cockroaches slither down the flock. Let us eat the spiced meats, the saffron rice. Let us take wine. Corrupted music emerges through the distortion of fault as something new.

  The girl is persuaded to dance for us, privately; the doors are locked, the shutters drawn.

  By carriage across Whitechapel Road and into Brady Street, west, between the Jews’ Burial Ground and the Station; skirt the Workhouse; Bakers Row and into Hanbury Street, south now: the moon cuckolded on the great church tower.

  In the room Treves holds consultation, mixing authority with humour. Merrick is carried up and placed in a heavily cushioned, rug covered, cane-chair. Treves: his back to the window. The coachman, settled in the frame of the door, ushers in the women: the old one and the girl.

  Merrick half-rises; the left hand, gloved, held out. A bubble of address gobs his throat: mucoid leer. Is he here as witness or participant? Oilcloth across the window. Cobbles in the street. Men wrestling over a bottle, a mud dance; keeping it, delicately, between them, keeping their balance; over the kerb, into the gutter. A head wound opens slowly into a mouth: blood-soaked hair. Fire in the market.

  Around the brazier, vegetable refuse is burnt; torn with palsied
hands, crammed in the mouth. Teeth stumps champing and gumming the shells. Waste-water boiling in the can. The bottle passing between the window and the moon.

  ‘I was awakened by a kitten walking across my neck, and just then I heard screams of murder about two or three times in a female voice.’

  From above it is a feast: of feathers, wounds, feet on earth. The century snake dying. White clouds boiling slow, a cauliflower scum. Ragstone watching its history evaporate under a gun of steam. The doctor with a womb in his bag. Two men and a woman crossing the Lane towards the lights of a restaurant.

  Gloved hand sealing the window. The howl of a dog in an empty courtyard. Her linsey skirt unbells. The banner of bleeding meat. The moment of the sweating room. I heard a voice singing. Widows and unfortunates. No light; all’s quiet.

  It is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, written by Stevenson, after a series of hideous nightmares; received and transmitted by those tuned to accept the scalding stream of images that both mask and reveal his appalling message.

  Treves was determined to reverse this process. He had found his Caliban, his Hyde, his natural man: needed now to absorb him, to give fire to his own nature, to the hidden being within – swimming back out of the mirror of deformity into the urbane and politic surgeon. To reclaim the aboriginal, the green; the skin of fruits and scales, the mineral cloak. To manifest his true consciousness. To script that journey within the boundaries of expectation.

  When she is naked and glistens, rubbed with oil, garlanded, her skin now darker, they bring out the mask, the great Elephant’s Head of Ganesa. So she sways, she lifts her arms, so she rolls the massive helmet of wood. She threatens the moon with her tusk: the tusk that was broken off to take the dictation of the gods. Now it spears Joblard’s side.

  ‘Bugger your Sufi dancing – I’ll learn the tango!’

  We are in an upper room; the moon, the brewery clock, the tower of the church. His face shone. He rubbed down the matted hair of his body, he rubbed himself with oil. He appeared like a bridegroom.