White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

by Iain Sinclair

  those who need worldly aid. I

  have tried too much, and

  failed; but yet perhaps in that,

  my failure, God is giving me

  more than I tried for.

  But, Howard, there is a

  wrong, an intense wrong, in

  to the Divine Cause. ‘What I

  see in nature,’ he said, ‘is the

  Divine power acting within

  an imposed limit. God, self-limited,

  is the universe. God is

  not the universe, but it flows

  from Him and becomes

  phenomenal by the laws of

  limitation.’

  I could not at the time but

  check him by quoting Goethe–

  laying severe stress upon hope,

  and urging on him that the poet

  did not seem to admit the likelihood

  that we should ever

  realise it by seeking truth as it is.

  Hinton would not, however,

  be brought back to our everyday

  views and imperfect ways

  of thinking, but insisted that

  we voluntarily hindered our

  vision by the mere scientific

  relation of facts as opposed to a

  true philosophy of them.

  Suppression and reappearance

  in a new and higher form was

  to him the fundamental law

  of physiology. Organisms in

  upward order, concoct, digest,

  assimilate, ‘and corporeal to

  incorporeal turn’.

  Hinton’s thoughts on moral

  subjects were of the same

  our society running all

  through our life, and it will be

  made righter some day. I

  dashed myself against it; but it

  is not one man’s strength that

  can move it. It was too much

  for my brain; but it is by the

  failure of some that others

  succeed, and through my very

  foolishness perhaps, there shall

  come a better success to

  others, perhaps more than any

  cleverness or wisdom of mine

  could have wrought. And I

  hope I have learnt, too, to be

  wiser. We have not come to

  the end; though I am so

  exhausted, that I seem scarcely

  able to believe in anything

  before me.

  I cover my eyes from the sun

  but my hands can no longer

  keep out the light. I can see

  through! Skin is glass. There is

  nothing. The darkness turns,

  turns, an eye on a pencil. It

  turns faster. And faster. I do

  not think now that it will ever

  stop.

  your loving father,

  James Hinton

  character as those on material.

  The miserable, despised, and

  abandoned outcasts of society,

  sacrificed to the selfishness of

  the well-to-do and respectable,

  was a glaring instance of the

  deception of the phenomenal.

  I think I am justified in saying,

  from my first intercourse

  with him, that he thought

  such facts illustrated the object

  of Christ’s work on earth, as

  showing us how contrary truth

  is to appearance.

  To descend to lower matters, I

  may say that Hinton’s physical

  energy always seemed to me as

  great and indomitable as that

  of his mind. Together they

  afforded an example of intellectual

  and bodily activity

  rarely surpassed. The work he

  did was well done, and by it he

  laid stepping-stones for others

  to advance upon.

  Hinton’s life was not so full

  of incident as it was full of

  thought. He was one of the

  pioneers of humanity through

  the obscure and dark ways of

  the senses to the region of

  truth.

  W. W. Gull

  24

  Ian Askead took us down to look into the fridges. He was a night porter at the Metropolitan, his fawn overall buttonless with rolled-up sleeves; wet-haired, constructing a smoke in his glass cubby-hole – the grim building itself frozen into a kind of malign silence. A mausoleum of impacted wasp-blocks.

  We were nervous, oppressed by the locale, which gave him a status he did not have on the street. He had that benevolent Glaswegian charm that goes all the way through mania into self-annihilation. And he did it with a grin. There was an innocence here that would have fed the gas ovens. As victim or as operative. Just as it fell out.

  It had been a quiet weekend and most of the fridges were empty. He found one that was tenanted and slid out the white bundle on its tray for our examination. A swaddled something, emitting traces of blue light. In a plastic bag like a Sainsbury’s chicken.

  Askead, amused by our interest, produces the instruments of pathology, the saws, calipers, head-sets. He plugged in an electric-kettle.

  On this stone slab with its sluices at the corners, like a slate billiard-table, the soul is cut free. The bird is sprung. Within this ring of false illumination and under this taint there is a bruised initiation. The conversations of the Indian doctors, the Irish students, are set into the greasy walls; uneradicated. As the skull splits, the words enter. As poison.

  It is agreed. We will go with Askead to meet the Victor Haldin Death Cadre, an unlocated splinter of the Angry Brigade, meditating action.

  *

  Askead, then, sitting in what remains of his underpants, tactically black, on the edge of his mattress, his son, robust and nordic, like the product of an Aryan babyfarm, hands on bars of cot, pisses out a curve of clear gold water onto the matting. New morning. Askead lights the stub of last night’s cigarette.

  As with old dopers, it’s difficult to get him moving. Our brief is insecure; we are potential film-makers, lacking only cameras and film-stock. We are invited neither to participate nor to witness. And Askead is only in this for the ruck. Theoretical Anarchy holds no charms for him. A good night out is going over Kilburn to trade insults in the Shamrock Lounge and wake up bleeding on alien pavements. On very good nights he wakes up authentically paralysed in the gutter. And comes home free in an ambulance.

  One great night he will wake up in his own fridge.

  His wife, who has some kind of position in the household, as child-minder, winning them the use of the basement, is ‘involved’ with a minor technocrat who dresses in Burton’s leisurewear. This pleases Askead – who sees it as a context for violence.

  ‘You’re a slimy little globe of damaged frog crap,’ he spits, gleefully, on sight of the lover, tearing all the buttons from his shirt, before his wife fells him with a cast-iron saucepan. Strong skulled, chipped, not shattered: not even a headache in the morning. The lover goes off to the office, his shirt-front held together with large pink nappy pins.

  Stoke Newington is the neck of a killing bottle, wearing its entropy without guilt. Cinema-mosques disappearing under a generation of papers, groups, dates, meetings.

  Brilliant brickwork of the blacks beating against the shaded Hassidic fringe. Scufflers working the gaps: a gentility that will bring it all down. Everything centred on the police barracks and its boastful spread of wanted posters.

  At Abney Park we turn away, break from the pastiched New Kingdom glamour, into a wide leafy avenue. They are waiting, behind the curtains of an upper room.

  Multiple locks and chains: everything but a password.

  They’ve got the bottles, but not the petrol. Threats and handbooks and the insides of alarm-clocks. Present ang
er focuses on Redbridge. Barbed wire squat. Neo-fascist bootboys licensed to poleaxe, to sledgehammer, to evacuate. The wolf is at the door. They persuade with crowbars, rip out the plumbing. And this rhetoric is countered by fire-buckets, ball-bearings, paint pots. It is a frontier zone of demented doctrine. Everything’s boiling but the recipe’s been lost.

  Denis is savagely bearded in a style that owes something to the cover of the Pan Books edition of The Dharma Bums. He wears a black vest, takes up threatening martial arts poses, moving sharply backwards and forwards across the window, compulsively checking out the empty street. His wife, Pearl, is, of course, pregnant again. And the credit for this seems to be awarded to Denis alone.

  ‘Hit back! Situation. Forced. They. Them. Those. Got to watch out. No room. Manoeuvre. Context. Precipitate action. BURN!’

  Pearl is doing her breathing. Askead puts his son down among the bottles and looks for one with something in it. He’s unlucky. The room is, in fact, obsessively clean. And could, under other circumstances, be accused of complacent and trivialising petty bourgeois tendencies. Flowered cushions. And a hint of south-coast cargo culting. The coffee mugs are polished. And they have names on them!

  Nothing can be done until the contact arrives. We remain under suspicion. Denis works out with a squash-ball in his fist, as if squeezing the nuts of the Rt Hon (Leonard) Robert Carr.

  ‘Nowhere to turn. Can’t let them impose. Conspiracy state. Planted! Trapped. Watched. No room. Landlord. FIRE BOMB!’

  The shutter stops-down to a benevolent twilight, but the windows cannot be opened. The phone cannot be touched. They are listening, they hear what we whisper. So we wait. Denis counting as he gives Pearl’s thigh a chinese burn and she breathes at the second level.

  We hear the taxi pull up, the slow heart of its motor. Denis tries to fit a kitchen-knife into the pocket of his jeans. There is some dispute over the fare, points of order to be made. In a guttural Bronx accent. Mixed expletives.

  The Invisible Insurrection is postponed. It is the contact.

  Skulking into the room with dark glasses and a brief-case, long coat, an abortionist’s runner. No names are given, that’s understood. Breathing like he’s got a slow puncture: the contact is unabashed.

  ‘Hi; I’m Mossy Noonmann. Anyone wanta score?’

  In this endless night only the locations change. A low-ceilinged basement now in Petherton Road. It’s hot, uncomfortable, hands around knees, bundles of laundry.

  The dialectic falters. The wrongs can be catalogued interminably, but the action remains opaque.

  The meeting had been going since the middle of the afternoon. Dryfeld, in an earlier incarnation, under another name, you can try to identify him in Richard Neville’s Playpower, was present; but he’d quit, early, deciding to form a one-man splinter group, a new form of Anarchy, by inventing a scam that would rip-off enough loot from the Post Office to get him to America.

  Noonmann sidles along the fringes with his salesman’s briefcase. His credentials are excellent: he’s been thrown out of America and half of Europe, he’s borrowed money, he’s lied, stolen, cheated and escaped with no moral convictions. The only law is survival. And he’s not wholly convinced that he’ll obey that. The afterlife of Lazarus, half decayed. I’ll stand in the shit if you let me stand on your shoulders. Worthy of Dante.

  It is a Dutchman who kicks aside the torpid rhetoric of the merely disappointed. He spins off a dozen ploys in as many minutes.

  ‘You want somewhere to sleep? Go sleep on the steps of the Town Hall. OK? You camp in London Fields. What’s the problem? Do it. Just do it. Let them worry. Use the guilt. The only law is what works.’

  As I have the use of a car, I’m the one to drive him. It’s my part of town, but he directs me. The man is solid, older than the others. He’s bearded, is he? The face won’t stick. You can’t describe it; it’s gone. A beret? Sometimes. Or was it a grey trilby?

  I don’t know how we got there, I’m listening to him talk.

  ‘They won’t do anything. I give them a few pokes but nothing comes of it. OK? It’s already finished, I think.

  ‘In ten years half of these will be begging for jobs in the local government and the other half will be junkies. Or both. OK?’

  We park and he leads us down a narrow alleyway. I look at the name in the brick, Angel Alley. It’s Whitechapel. It is alongside the Whitechapel Gallery but I’ve never really noticed it before, one of those slender secrets.

  In a room on the left, off the courtyard, there are people standing around a table. They are being given cups of soup and rounds of bread. An oil lamp. Long-headed shadows. They sign a book, pay nothing. Are fed. No questions, no psalms.

  On the other side of the court there is a glow from the top-floor windows.

  ‘Come,’ said the Dutchman, ‘see it.’

  Up the stone steps, a long warehouse floor. Dozens of sleeping figures, shapes in bags. So many? Candles at the windows.

  ‘It’s easy,’ said the Dutchman, ‘it’s nothing. When you can – you do it. When you can’t – move on. OK?’

  This is the room. The windows now are filthy, smeared, webbed over. The city is industrial again. Thudding of elephant generators: prophetic smoke. The Masque of Anarchy is cancelled. The dust on the floor is undisturbed. The season has shifted to chill. Joblard is to stage a performance, a Chemical Theatre, an Act of Initiation.

  We walk through the locked Gallery; the raven is on the north wall, the owl, the skull of a sheep. The shields, maps, drawings, the burnt wood. We are alone in the building. And a voice. ‘Don’t break the ring!’ Disembodied, behind us, uninflected. Bare walls, polished floors. Once only.

  As the scalp pricks, the phone at the front-desk cuts through with its immediate and insistent hysteria. A friend, urgently, for Joblard. He must get hold of today’s SUN.

  There’s a vendor at the underground entrance. Centre spread: Friday, March 8, 1974. ‘HORROR’ FIND IN DEATH CASE.

  A man accused of murdering his wayward wife had a book which made ‘appalling’ references to Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a jury heard yesterday.

  The book, by ‘performance-artist’ S. L. Joblard, called Necropathia, dealt with dead things, said Mr Gilbert Gray, QC, prosecuting at Leeds Crown Court. ‘There were pictures of bodies, naked and bound, and references in the most appalling print,’ he said.

  The book was found by police at the home of Gilbert Friend, who denies murdering his attractive wife, Pat.

  Mr Gray claimed that Friend, a labourer, strangled his wife with a blouse and electric flex after discovering she had made love with a neighbour in his Dormobile.

  It is alleged that Friend hid the body in a cupboard at her mother’s home and later telephoned his own mother asking her to tell the police where to find the body. He also wrote an alleged confession to his mother. It read: ‘She wanted sex so she took it. I want her and now I have got her. No one else can have her now.

  ‘She asked for a last kiss, but I couldn’t.

  ‘She raised her face to me and we kissed. I put my hands on her throat. As she died I said, “I love you.” I am sorry, mother. I love you. I am going now to wait for the end, maybe I will meet her there.’

  The trial continues today.

  Evening. The room above the courtyard.

  Not the thing itself but its receptacle. The shadow preceding its source. Dark sentences. The true performance occurs when the audience has left. Wax moulded around electric lightbulbs drips slowly onto the open books, erasing and patterning the text.

  From the rooftops the shadows move into cimmerian windows. Now the red is gone: the tincture of mercury. It is the escape of dead light. An act of blindness, hooded figures between lines of repressed fire. The supplicant has heard the question, but no answer is expected. He passes, without lifting his eyes, along the walls; his stick drags in the dust. Gradually, his acts cancel the text. The performance absorbs all of its own potential, folds back in on itself. Nothing i
s written, everything repeats. Whispering the future down gummed tubes of hide. The voice is the throat.

  Joblard’s hesitation shudders breath. The ghost escapes. A singe of wax. Memory leaking, unconnected to any past. The empty room. Candle-flames leaving black ferns on the glass. The performance is what happens afterwards. The cup of soft wax takes the print of an unknown key.

  But squatting in a corner, they have all gone, is an American girl, with cropped hair and set jaw, resolved, her own game. Intoning the list, playing back the names of victims and variants, within the range of an identified threat; her own compilation, set against the slow ceremony. Nobody listens. Recording a loop, followed by an immediate chorus; her own voice, unrecognised, as it moves, imperceptibly ahead, as it leads her into what she does not know.

  Victims and variants, murdering martyrs.

  A tide of ash-textured light climbs against the custodial windows. Her head sunk onto her knees. The tape-recorder, an alien presence, detaches itself from her dim intention. The names have escaped. They tremble and manifest in the dawn air, lifted, a shield raised, not in protection, but to strike, the blue signature of a guillotine.

  25

  The bare chamber; a half-circle of smoothed stones around a long table. The table is stone also, is pure white. A cut cube. One man, ash-haired, dressed in black, at the head of the corner. The light from the dome is circumspect, veiled. House of the Hammer. Hidden among gardens, fountains, courts, rooms, stairways, double-doors. Unrecorded secrets. Place of power. Where history is remade. Decisions are taken in soft voices.

  Gull waits on the twelve. Ready, willed, to apply the compasses. Breath held; the room slowed, stopped. Gull rolls his eye to white glaze. Tongue in his throat. Hands folded over the belly. Dropping the temperature. Redeeming his time.

  He is ready to preside over his own dissolution.

  They enter, separate, from twelve unmarked doors. Hooded. In white. White gulls of heresy. Incongruous cowls over uniforms of anonymous power; greys, chalks, lime. The instruments are set upon the surface of the table.

  ‘I am glad you were able to come to this place,’ Gull begins, ‘you necessary twelve. And now the game is on. Twelve London physicals with not a name between them to call their own.’