Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Sileen had a guilty secret: he was gathering about him the works of Joseph Conrad. All of them; every envelope, every (certified) drop of ink. Why he was doing this was a thornier question. Let’s skip the psychology and call him a run-of-the-mill headbanger: the kind of pest who sleeps outside the post office to get his catalogue before you do. We were together because he had a use for me. He wanted me, in my capacity as a bona fide crook, to front him; to work the discounts, list the remnants, and speed the duplicates on their way to California.

  Whenever Sileen chose to leave this rancid backwater, it would be finished. He was the last human. Scandrett Street would never again be what it was, on this day, in this light, on this square of pavement.

  We entered the Cuckoo, Wapping Lane, in an elegiac mood, touching the tables to make sure they were solid; keeping a weather eye on the door, in immediate expectation of a demolition squad. When we had secured our pints and a bowl of depilated prawns, we reviewed our tactics. The public bar was empty; sunlight filtered through the frosted window, picking up the heraldic colours, to spill them, recklessly, over the floor. The moment was eternal: whoever spoke first was damned.

  It appeared that one mile downriver, in a studio apartment, Dr Adam Tenbrücke of Narrow Street was hoarding a shelf of Conrads he had painlessly amputated from the David Garnett Collection. Tenbrücke specialized in ‘Judaica’; with sidelines in Holocaust mementoes, the more saline Expressionists, and anything occult, involving ritual sacrifice – preferably human, young, and female. He had his own vineyards on the Rhine, and he always wintered in the Cape. He favoured cigars that might have been rolled in human skin, stitched over a morbid blend of camel dung. He smiled effortlessly, but without meaning.

  Tenbrücke had accepted the Conrads, with sighs and shrugs, as part-payment in a currency deal that had gone sour. ‘You cut off a head only once,’ he remarked, ‘the gonads you can always squeeze.’

  These books meant nothing to him. His price would therefore be impossible to meet. It was the best method of milking some pleasure from the affair. He would hold out until the sweat was rolling, in steel bearings, down Sileen’s neck; until his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. How Sileen knew this, ahead of the event, I could not begin to guess. He did his homework without leaving his fireside. He consulted the messages in the flames. He was inevitably putting the phone back on its cradle as you entered the room. He lived in whispers, behind closed blinds: at midnight, he took to the streets.

  Sileen never admitted to owning a car – it was my business to drive him – but now, as we passed one, parked with its nearside wheels on the pavement, he stopped and put a key in its lock. It could have been any car. He seemed to have picked this one simply because he was tired of walking. He was in second gear, and away, before I had worked out how to shut the door.

  II

  ‘This house once belonged to Francis Bacon: a painter.’ Tenbrücke brushed aside any formal introductions and began lecturing us, as if we shared exactly his sense of the cynicism and venality of the world: a vision he tried, with scrupulous politeness, to mirror in all his dealings. ‘Left nothing behind him. Not a tube of any description, nor a knife. What did he do here? He never lifted a brush. Sat quiet with his back to the window. The river-light modelled his head with an interesting syphilitic effect; the dying claret going green at the edges. He looked as if he had been flayed.’

  Sileen and I, side by side, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sat stiffly on the edge of a merciless Bauhaus shelf; polished leather thongs on an armature of brass. We were auditioning for something. Tenbrücke put a flame-thrower to his Brechtian cigar: with the relish of an interrogator.

  ‘You don’t smoke?’ he stated, between slow puffs.

  ‘Only cigars,’ I replied, hopefully.

  ‘Ah, good. Very good.’ Tenbrücke nodded, without passing the box. ‘You really should try these some time. A little shop in Amsterdam.’

  He wanted to show us everything: inscriptions, photographs, woodcuts of dockside crucifixions, autographed menus (authenticated with chicken fat), skulls in the rubble, sabre massacres, caricatures of vast hook-nosed profiteers fellating gold from the enslaved and mesmerized masses. He reared above these boxed and gilt-edged images. He caressed velvet; he fingered, he teased. He slid open drawers with well-rehearsed gestures. He oozed and glistened: his mouth melted with soft metals. He ran his hand inside a closely-buttoned suede waistcoat – a slash of hunting pink – to massage the heart of a slaughtered animal. Sugar-dusted lumps in a silver bowl were pressed on us. Rubber cubes disguising a kernel of pinewood.

  ‘Saturday afternoons, do you ever visit the Porchester Hall Turkish Baths?’ Tenbrücke wasn’t ready to give Sileen an opening. ‘It helps to steam Farringdon Road out of the pores, I find. I’m not fit for anything else. I’m too old for Bell Street and Portobello. They’re all there.’ He laughed. ‘All the faces. Property, Television, Boxing, Snooker. All the agents, the brokers, Tin Pan Alley. Terence Stamp? Of course. Rolex watches? Oysters? Half-price, and better for cash!’ He bared his wrist.

  Sileen made for the window. He gave up on the shelves of black fetishes. There wasn’t a book in the place.

  ‘Shoes?’ Tenbrücke gestured, pleased that he was finally getting to his man. ‘Brogues? You want a nice pair of Church’s? Straight from the box. Any size you fancy – as long as it’s a ten.’ He heaved up a trouser-leg and flashed something bloody and well-bulled at us. I hoped, fervently, we were not moving on to the underwear.

  ‘A Burberry for the wife? I’m serious.’ Tenbrücke mistook Sileen’s snarl of rage for a smile. ‘Guess how much? Go on. As new, never worn. On my life, we’re not talking “seconds”. A hundred notes? A hundred and fifty? Forget it. Sixty. Sixty pounds, and I’m down to the garage to open the boot. Did you clock the Merc, on your way up? Nipped over to Germany in the spring. Business and pleasure. Only twelve thou on the dial, and she runs like quicksilver.’

  I was beginning to enjoy this, wondering how long Tenbrücke could keep the Sidney Tafler routine going. He was well over the Race Relations limit, and drifting into pure pastiche. But it served its purpose. It turned Sileen into a wolf-man. He was ready to bite.

  ‘Some advice, boys.’ Tenbrücke had nailed his victim to the floor. He was ready to wind up the sideshow. ‘Never buy anything but the best, the brand-leaders. I’m robbing myself, but I’m going to let you walk away with the pair of Burberrys for a oncer. Keep the girlfriend happy, and save the other for your wedding anniversary. This is vital: make sure the ladies in your life take the same size. It stands to reason. Your slag will pay her way in discounts.’

  Tenbrücke yawned. And, for a moment, his eyes went dead. Then he took a small ivory box from his desk, and threw back a handful of pills, which he chewed noisily. The box was the real thing. It had cost some narwhal a tusk.

  ‘Every Saturday, Porchester Row. We hear everything before it begins to happen.’ He spoke automatically, like a dying tape. His spirits always sank with the sun, but he was incapable of making a move to bring light to the room. Sileen had won. He had to wait a few moments more: stolid, immovable, but unwilling to be the one to broach the business that was the sole purpose of our visit. Waiting was what Sileen did best. The Thames would freeze before he would be diverted from his self-imposed quest.

  Now the combatants battled into the night in a monumental drinking bout. Tenbrücke fought his ‘black dog’ mood with cases of sweet yellow German wine. Sileen threw back whatever was put in front of him, grim-jawed, expressionless: the experience seemed, if anything, to sober the man. But, as bottle succeeded bottle, Tenbrücke’s coarse humour was activated. He frisked again. He unlocked cupboards; he fiddled with wall-safes. He laid tissue-leafed folders in Sileen’s lap; gently, like virgin brides. Nobody spoke. The world retreated. Remote sounds drifted from the river, as from another empire; muffled by glass and heavy drapes. Sileen could be neither shocked, nor provoked. The etchings were spread on the table in front of
him: a dangerous challenge to an already replete gourmet. Men, women, children; freaks and beasts – in every possible combination. A terrible grimoire of possibilities, taken to its logical conclusion. The living savaged the dead. The unborn were mutilated.

  Tenbrücke’s mouth was liquid with excitement. His pink thyroidal eyes bulged in a net of broken veins. His cigar butt was black with gingivitic drool.

  I realized that if I, as the disinterested party, did not act fast, we would be condemned to stay here for ever; witnessing this obscene and absolute self-exposure. Tenbrücke was a sick soul, begging us to forgive him – by sharing in his sickness. He was describing himself by showing us each and every object that he had collected. I attempted to pull him back from the brink, by the magical act of naming. ‘Teodor Korzeniowski,’ I said, ‘otherwise, Joseph Conrad.’

  It was enough. The very sound of it bored him. ‘A dreary fellow, this Old Man of the Sea. A bourgeois mandarin. I never deal in Poles. I don’t want herrings. I don’t want promises. I want gold bars, furs, fine art. Sell these books, if you can, to the pug in the Holy See. Life’s too short to haggle with silk-knickered wops.’

  But we have to understand that, naturally, the items in question cannot be given away. Without respect, a deal has no meaning; it would not be binding. Tenbrücke’s hand swallows Sileen’s cheque, only to drop it with a pained shrug. Sileen had dated it ‘1888’. ‘A final drink, gentlemen. And away.’

  I carry the boxes out to the car. The one-legged man, kicking out his customized limb, swivels, grinning, down the spiral staircase.

  III

  Todd Sileen had captured, for this era, a couple of council properties, tucked away between blocks of undeveloped industrial warehouses and a spate of wild gardens. His sense of when to strike, and when to move on, was unmatched – and would have made him a rich man in some purer sphere of speculation: land, drugs, literary brokerage. Sileen didn’t need wages. Without apparent income or occupation, he moved freely over the country and the continent, just as the seasons took him. And all the time, the body of Joseph Conrad – as it could be excavated from documents, letters, and sketches – was re-forming around him. He was nailing himself inside another man’s shroud. He was willing Conrad’s physical immortality; turning this Wapping hutch into an immaculate death-barque. When the very last item in the bibliography was secured, Sileen would cease to exist; and the thing he had made would be there through all the lives of the unsuspecting speculators, rushing to their doom on the river.

  He was also working hard at taking over the redundant public library – the rest of the public having obediently decamped – to make it his own. To this end, he brandished his deformity as a credential; crawling into the Borough Housing Office on his hands and knee. But points on that waiting list were an unnecessary luxury. The council had taken power by offering an ear to every Valium-gobbling fanatic. They put themselves forward as the shock-absorbers of disenfranchised anguish; then dutifully dissipated the pain by identifying the most popular scapegoats. And passing out the brickbats. Renegade socialists muttered in pubs that these scoundrels were the barely acceptable face of skinhead fascism in ‘liberal’ drag. The party championed ‘local’ issues; when, in truth, there was no locality left. Employment was a sentimental memory: the whole corridor from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Dogs was in limbo. It was waiting to be called up. A cold wind ruffled the drowning pools, the labyrinthine walkways, the dumping pits. A few sponsored artists kept a window on the riverfront polished for the developers. There were lofts of hand-made paper waiting for the best offer.

  Sileen was in clover. One of these days they would buy him out. If today’s councillors were caught with their fingers in the till, there were plenty more to replace them. Meanwhile, he cultivated his balcony: an explosion of green life, lovingly watered by his amiable provincial girlfriend. She tolerated all his foibles, and cooked with such natural artistry that loungers hung about on the street corner soliciting a dinner invitation. Her life, shared only in certain areas, remained robustly independent in all others. Her presence in the flat humanized the unmannered bluntness of Sileen’s dogma.

  I watched, awed, as Sileen sank, puffing out his coarse sporran-moustache, into the swamp of an old armchair. He savoured these newest treasures: books to be slotted into place on the shelves that ran out from his shoulders like a benevolent crucifixion. I knew he did not have to read these things, or even handle them. The particular arrangement, by colour and texture of cloth, conferred power. Their touch was stunning to the skin.

  Sileen opened a goatskin volume and, without needing to search for the place, tapped out a letter from Henry James. ‘The news of Conrad’s collaboration with Hueffer is to me like a bad dream which one relates before breakfast, their traditions are so dissimilar. It is inconceivable…’

  The letter was plucked from my hands. And replaced by a late photograph, executed by Boris Conrad: his father, leaning back, eyes firmly closed in a transport of exquisitely simulated agony. He offered me an autographed schooner, waiting on the tide. I admired, in turn, postcards of rivers, forts, crocodiles, ivory poachers. I slowed to the asthmatic breath of this Edwardian domesticity. Salvaged chairs emitted comfortable tobacco-replays; released from their depths carelessly incarcerated farts.

  Now Sileen, madly by lamplight, checked the oversize photocopied sheets of Conrad’s bibliographer, Smith; cackling as he ticked off his recent purchases. He had made an authentic capture I could not understand or evaluate. But I knew that I was incontinently eager to escape from it.

  IV

  With no view from his window – no vision to accuse him – Sileen survived. Tenbrücke was made miserable by the presence of the river. He could do nothing with it. Yet he could never bring himself to pull the drapes and blank the world out. It would still be there. And he would see it. He covered his eyes with his hands. He felt his brain drowning in occult semen; pearly slime dripping slowly on to sawdust; cold honey leaking from the sharp lip of a teaspoon.

  His residence was a controlled environment. Each object smirked in self-justification. It knew its value. It had the advantage. It ‘appreciated’ as fast as its curator, Tenbrücke, was dying, decaying, sweating himself away. Even the wooden blocks of the floor shone in aggressively shifting patterns: arrowheads pointing the path to extinction.

  Tenbrücke willed himself quite deliberately to let the knuckle of dead cigar ash drop on to the white Afghan rug – but he could not do it. Terror beaded the stubble of his skull. Angry boils erupted on his neck. Tubercles insinuated in his oxters. His stomach spasmed convulsively. But the Waterford-crystal glasses on the silver tray remained unsmeared, brittle. The seals on the bottles were unbroken. The lemons were unblemished anchorites: worthy of Zurbaran. Tenbrücke, like Sileen, was a man who spent much of his time alone in his chosen space. He had married late – and too wisely – a much younger woman; an innocent who hoped, one day, to inherit most of Caithness. For now, she was safely occupied in the city. She satisfied his lack of desire. They ate out.

  Tenbrücke fiddled with the knobs of the shower unit. He left the perfectly adjusted stream of water running, but he did not undress. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeding the black coverlet through his fingers. He was melting. He could smell animal-death on his body: a beast hunted to climax. He tasted ash mixed with rain. Something was wrong. One of the floor tiles was – of its own volition – lifting, coming away. A light was hidden beneath, and a light was lifting it. There must be a hole in the ceiling of the flat below. Tenbrücke would have to ring the agents with a formal complaint: or, better, instruct his lawyers to hit them for a completely new floor. He was tired of tiles. He wanted weathered marble, inset with birds, branches, flames; lapis-lazuli, veins of silver. The light was so strong: what were they doing? There must be an unlicensed photographic session in progress. The riverside apartments were very popular with New Wave pornographers.

  He found that, without moving, he was able to look directly into t
he hole and – although this defied the laws of physics – he could see everything they were doing. It was just as if he was in the room with them. He was in the room with them. He joined them in their circle of salt: a circle of names he knew had been stolen from the Kabbalah, the Book of Spirits. Now he breathed as they breathed, faster and faster; choking, a claw at his throat. His eyes watered from the smoke of burning incense. He heard the repeated whispering of the name: Belial. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. It was his own voice. A polished dish was in his hands. And he saw in it a distorted face, a face of fire: bearded Falstaff; laughing, high-eared, red. He bared his teeth. And bit through the flesh of his cheeks, until the blood ran out from his mouth.

  The pain brought him back. It was over. He slid open a drawer. Customized handcuffs, thongs, and a leather mask lay on top of two neat stacks of folded and ironed pyjamas. He tore off his shirt, losing buttons; mopped his malarial torso with a pyjama jacket, which he then put on.

  He wanted to write something down, to leave a note for his wife. He needed to imagine her, still in her scarf and Barbour, searching for him, calling his name: the square of blue paper, unread, in her hand. But it was impossible. He was trembling too much to hold a pen. He pulled on a camelhair coat, stuffed the handcuffs into his pocket, and ran out of the flat for the last time.