V
A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk, and Kish. You were obliged to superimpose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs. They were so heavily insured against disaster that they were almost obliged to justify the premiums by dropping dead before they overdrew another breath.
The woman kept dabbing her lipstick with a Kleenex, and flinching visibly from the sneering intimacies of the tour-guide; who last had his teeth investigated in celebration of the election of Clement Attlee and the coming Socialist Dawn. Harold Wilson’s white-hot technology of dentures, he ignored. The husband wondered how the same soft drink he used in Soquel could taste so strange in London, England. What did they do to it, for chrissakes? Maybe the dyes for the logo had some kind of freaky half-life? This frigging town was awash with terrorists brandishing poisoned umbrellas, crazy Irish bombers, Arabs spitting in your food, and fall-out from Russia stripping the trees. If you could find a train that was moving, it was sure to explode. They couldn’t even keep the beer cold. They sure as hell imported the formula, but were too dumb, or too greedy, to follow it. Ugly bunch of chicken-shit dick-heads! Skin like bath-scum. Fughh!
The guide was in spate, and lying outrageously. He appeared to be rehearsing for an occasional column in The Times Literary Supplement, that would get up everybody’s nose with its preening erudition. They swallowed what they wanted of it, and wondered if they could survive yet another evening in the National Theatre before cutting their losses and skipping to the Hemingway Conference in Venice.
‘Can you believe what those English critics wrote about Serious Money?’ the woman whined. ‘We just found it was totally without soul. It was so shallow. It didn’t confront the real issues. And the theatre! My God! No air-conditioning: you’re practically sitting in some guy’s lap. No wonder the English are all sex criminals. I felt so dirty. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to get those tickets. I’m sorry to say this, but we were conned. We won’t be back in a hurry, will we, Bob?’
‘You are standing,’ said the guide, a little wobbly himself; his arm thrown affectionately around the gibbet, ‘on the very site of the infamous “hanging dock” that saw the execution of so many pirates; including, of course, Captain Kidd. You probably recall the name from the cinematographic version – 1945 – with Mr Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland…’
‘Errol Flynn,’ said the Californian bookman. ‘Errol Flynn did all the pirates.’
‘I beg your pardon. No, sir. Flynn was a colonial, son of the Empire. Born Hobart, Tasmania, circa 1909. There is some debate about that, I grant you. Two schools of thought. Tedd Thomey suggests… But I won’t bore you with scholarship. Flynn played Captain Blood in 1935 for Michael Curtiz (or, Mihaly Kertesz, if you prefer it), an extrovert Hungarian gentleman, later acclaimed for the film Casablanca, made in…’
‘Randolph Scott only made Westerns,’ said Bob the bookman, grimly. ‘He was never in a pirate picture. I like Randolph Scott. I’ve got all his stuff on video.’
‘Indeed, sir, the performer in question is widely admired, particularly by our European cousins, for the mythopoeic Western films made with that fine amateur of the corrida, Budd Boetticher. Some critics laud the cycle for its moral austerity in the use of landscape – while others, more cynically, put the bleakness down to Harry Joe Brown’s tight control of the budget. For myself, I would have…’
‘Listen, jerkoff,’ screamed the Californian wife, edging ominously close to a full-blown attack of the vapours, ‘get your act together, or forget your gratuity.’ She wanted to be safely back in their own room at the Tower Hotel before she was forced to gamble on the facilities of the ‘Little Girl’s Room’ in a dockside public house selected, for the worst possible reasons, by their now discredited guide and mentor.
‘You will notice, recently restored,’ the guide continued, unabashed, ‘the actual gallows on which maritime offenders were stretched for the entertainment of the local populace. They were left dangling, bowels vacated…’ (He had the godalmighty nerve at this point, as the wife recalled later, to leer directly into her face) ‘…before being suspended in chains, from that post, to be washed over by three tides.’
‘Why three?’ said the woman. ‘Wasn’t that being a little excessive?’
‘Reasons of arcane ritual, Madame, difficult for visitors from an infant culture to comprehend. The three tides symbolized the three branches of the awful machinery of state. First, there was the Executive. Next, the Legislature. And, finally… to make sure they had bloody snuffed it. Same thing up the road, wasn’t it? They staked the heart of the Ratcliffe Highway vampire. Simple insurance, lady. No snivelling about miscarriages of justice after three good black Thames tides. Bring it back, I say. The corpses looked like cuttlefish. And had about as much to say for themselves.’
The Californian temptress turned her back on him, for a reviving snort of duty-free, Chanel No. 19, Eau De Toilette spray. She was beginning to hyperventilate; and was trying to regain control by essaying a sequence of prescribed facial exercises – leaving onlookers to assume she was about to suffer a quite interesting epileptiform seizure.
The gibbet itself, now being quizzically tapped by the man from Soquel, was no more than an effete sample of contemporary piracy on behalf of the Town of Ramsgate public house. In season, for a couple of weeks in June, it was much snapped, taped, and committed to polaroid. It was located near enough to the true site of the Hanging Dock to provide a Hammer-film frisson for twilight drinkers in the walled garden.
The Californians did not care, at this time, to venture down the steep ramp and on to the foreshore of the Thames for a view of Tower Bridge with the tide out: the curious rocks, sacks, and spokes revealed in the slurping mud. They passed back down a narrow alleyway to their valet-serviced gondola, slotted, so inconspicuously, alongside a clutch of showroom-quality Porsches, Range Rovers, and Jaguars. The guide, following closely on their heels, in case they made a run for it, decided on the instant to scrub around his usual Ratcliffe Highway number: the patron of the Crown and Dolphin had been less than generous with his little ‘drink’ on the last visit.
The guide turned his script, seamlessly, towards Rotherhithe, which was becoming a notably tasty shrine to the Fictitious Past. They could start at the Picture Research Library, where they could admire the utterly authentic accumulation of detail that went into making the utterly inauthentic Little Dorrit. And, if they were lucky, they might get to share a demi-tasse with the lady-director herself. (‘Do we call her Christine or Christina?’ ‘Well, it’s spelled… but her husband. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. She’s a lovely person. She’s got absolutely no side.’) Then there’s the Heritage Museum, the Glass Works, the Knot Garden, and the site of Edward III’s Manor House, presently indistinguishable from a six-hundred-year-old midden.
‘Right, that’s favourite,’ the enterprising nebbish thought. ‘Straight down the tunnel, drinks on the deck of the Mayflower pub, swift shuffle around Prince Lee Boo’s sepulchre – and it’s three fish platters, guv’ nor, and a bottle of Chablis at the Famous Angel.’
Dr Adam Tenbrücke, only yards from the gibbet, went unnoticed by the fact-grubbing tourists. He had decided to take his violet suicide note as a ‘performance-text’ and to give it the full treatment. He slithered down the scummy steps, and hobbled across the sharp stones of the over-welcoming septic beach. His red brogues were licked with green-grey mu
d. A heavy chain dangled from the mesozoic timbers of the wharfside; part of the décor of an otherwise uninspired set.
Tenbrücke sank down gratefully beside it. He took out the handcuffs and – well practised in these matters – secured his wrists behind his back. He fumbled, blindly, for the large ring on the wall. He was safe. No more decisions to be made. He was bait to the furies: a maggot of chance. There was just enough play in the chain for him to pitch forward. He could kneel, his head on his chest, in the damp slurry. And wait.
VI
I remember Joblard telling me once that as a child he had stayed with relatives in Rotherhithe, among the Surrey Commercial Docks. He had woken on the first morning, wiped the misted window with his pyjama sleeve, and seen through the porthole a great liner of ice – as he thought – sliding, with tragic inevitability, down the street; pressing close between the curtained blocks. Not sure if he was asleep, the boy rubbed his face against the cold glass – until he felt a vein in his cheek beating inside this new and frozen skin. The tenement itself had become a vessel; they were voyaging out, unpiloted, into desolate wastes. He tried, without success, to force open the window. Icebergs were locking on the tide; clanking together, smoking in collision: advancing on the city in a blue-lipped armada of destruction. The Pleistocene was revived. It was welcomed. Bison would herd together in lumber yards. Antlered shamans would carve the marks of power on the walls of the Underground; would initiate fires in long-deleted stations.
One of the stokers, up on the deck, leaning on the rails, noticed the boy watching from the circle within the opaque window. He waved. In that terrible moment, Joblard realized his own mortality. He also could be seen; his existence was no longer a secret, and never would be again.
Later that morning, with his two cousins, he made the discovery of a ventilation shaft leading down into the Rotherhithe Tunnel. They spent the day scouring the streets for old nails and bolts, lockjaw-inducing lumps of rust; until they had stuffed to the brim several large brown-paper bags. They climbed up on to the grille that covered the mouth of the shaft, and skilfully aimed their missiles on to the huge fan-blades beneath them. The noise, in that enclosed space, was most gratifying. It was the Sands of Iwo Jima, Hamburg, the Graf Spee rolled into one. The scavenged shrapnel was hurtled into the tunnel; devastating the traffic, and maiming a solitary cyclist. The satisfaction they derived was that of the disinterested artist: it was wholly imagined. There were no curtain calls. The perpetrators were already out of Brunel Road and halfway up Clack Street; their socks around their ankles, chortling and punching, distrusting the shrill vehemence of their own laughter.
VII
From that moment, Tenbrücke felt better. He tilted the burden of his head. There was so much sky. Passengers on the river, glancing back at him, thought he had made a discovery: he was excavating a shard of Roman pottery from the shallows – with his teeth. While he looked over at the far bank, he forgot why he had come to this place. He had stopped trembling, and he felt light and, for the first time, a little frivolous. The river plashed, a soup of mud, swooshing the immortal rubbish, backwards and forwards, in a lullaby motion. He heard voices above him.
‘Down there, girl. Just look at it. Fucking filth! Ignorant bleedin’ bastards. What happens? The tide shifts it off of ’ere. So they build a Thames fucking Barrier to stop it getting away. All right? Next morning it’s all bleedin’ back again. Fucking ridiculous.’
This premature ecologist, sickened by the perfidy of the planners (and all the other ‘thems’ who never have to answer to the people for their actions), let his obsolete fag packet float from his hand to freshen the collage of neap-wrack. Uncertain footsteps in retreat: the wheeze of the pub door.
Tenbrücke set himself to assess the riverscape on the far side of the choppy water; to fix the limits of his vision, and to make them final. Rotherhithe was not a place to which he had previously given much consideration. It looked foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself. The significance of this apparently random assembly of buildings awed him. He became aware of patterns, meanings, distributions of unexpended energy. His sense of colour was overwhelmingly personal. It hurt. It hurt his blood. The horrifyingly soft green spire of the Norsk Kirke flooded his throat with bile: of exactly the same concentration. Cheese-whey oozed from beneath his fingernails. The Famous Angel, the tower of St James’s, Bermondsey, were ancient offences that only he could redeem. Pubs and churches, derelict and decaying wharfs. A solitary odd thin building; a slab of something left behind from a previous incarnation. Tenbrücke thought he remembered a woman at a drinks party telling him Lord Snowdon had once lived there: before he was inducted into ‘The Family’, of course. Bachelor days. Clubs. Paragraphs in ‘William Hickey’. Demobbed photographers, models, gangsters, characters from the Rag Trade. All the big hooters and the weak chins: horse mouths, taffeta, fag smoke, suicide.
He heard the muffled and distorted voices of pleasure-boat spielers, identifying the notable stones. They were talking under the water. They made no sense. Silver Marlin, Captain James Cook. Fins of sour lace froth followed in their wake. They tore the fabric of the river: pushing a false tide towards Tenbrücke’s inlet. The water was on him.
Occasionally, a tourist waved to him from a boat, and was disappointed to be ignored – poncy Cockneys. But, as the light started to go, Tenbrücke had a moment of curious intensity. He had what amounted to an involuntary close-up of a golden dragon; its claws hooked to a polished globe. This was the weather-vane of St James’s church, more than a mile away – but now so near him, he could see the paint flaking from the dragon’s scales. He was drowning in physical detail: breathless, aroused. They sang out: the chips of blue-painted ceramic tile, the sharp knuckles knocked from coffee mugs, the wounded bricks. He felt their history, felt the warm hands of their owners, felt the energy of their decay. It was all pouring into him. The light was unopposed. He was swept out of himself, strung on a chain of shimmering beads that absorbed each and every particle of his private anchorage. Gulliver Agonistes: he could not turn Wapping to account. Number the crystals. Unknot the threads that kept the water from the air. Hekinah degul!
When the tide was at his throat, he almost changed his mind. Came to a consciousness of where he was. Tore his flesh; putting weight and strength against the cuffs and the ring. Then he softened, settled himself; his back against the wharf. A cloud of midges drifted from the slime-covered stone blocks of the Old Stairs. He could see straight through them. They had abandoned him, the familiar desires. There was no fret left in them. And he noticed now another set of steps leading upwards, leading nowhere, ending in a wooden fence. He opened his mouth and swallowed everything that was coming.
VIII
When I returned to Wapping after the agreed three months – to collect my share of the divvy – everything had changed; it was Kristallnacht. There were roadblocks, searchlights, dogs on chains. Chanting hysteria breathed a new life into the poisoned varnish of the walls. Riot-shields, flaming milk bottles, horses.
I dodged, and weaved, among the scarlet snakes, the video-contrails; ignoring contradictory orders howled through megaphones that converted the human voice to a form of millennial robot-speak. I had to abandon my car on Cannon Street Road and walk back, clambering over fences, and slithering down heaps of rubble; wary of rats and fanatics. The riverside acres were a battleground, a no man’s land; barricaded, fought to the point of inertia, by private armies and absentee War Lords; protected by beam-operated grilles. The contractors had parcelled up the docks and were trawling for names that would mist the eyes, suspend disbelief, and sell the proud owner a share in our maritime heritage: the Anchorage, Silver Walk, Sir Thomas More Court, Pageant Steps, Tobacco Dock. Paid researchers burrowed in the files; they plated nostalgia.
There were deck-planks nailed across Sileen’s window. The greenery was dead and the flower pots smashed. Repeated knocks drew a pensioner from the balcony above – sole tenant of the ant heap – who assured me,
from a safe distance, while pacifying a monstrous hound, that Sileen had gone: ‘him and his boxes’. A taxi, early one morning. Nobody had seen him since: you could hear the phone ringing behind the padlocked door. His girlfriend, receiving no word from him, had moved out; crossed the river.
And so it ended, an unremarkable incident. I had mislaid plenty of other customers and potential benefactors – ‘not known at this address’ – before and since; dozens of promised postal orders never quite materialized. But there remained a disturbing niggle of curiosity: that Sileen should quit what appeared, to outside eyes, as such a grove of benevolence. The plants, the spices, the charm of his companion, the calmed space between the walls of books. Had his quest been brought so close to completion? There is no entrance to another man’s life. Why should we expect one? What is presented to us is often the most disposable of assets: the motor is elsewhere, an impenetrable secret. Sileen had upset me only by opting out of the fictional curve I had prepared for him. He had ceased to exist. He was written out of the story.
A few years later I thought I saw the girl, or someone very like her – with the sort of coat she favoured draped about her shoulders – sitting in the corner of an obscure Southwark pub. The man with her had an African drum in his lap, which he was obsessively mapping with be-ringed, prehensile fingers. I left the bar, on the instant, by a side-door; without attempting to speak to her. I had no desire to confirm or deny the reality of her presence.
IX
Joblard rang me to ‘discuss the likelihood’ of my driving him to Norwich to collect a vanload of scrap; and, in passing, as a sweetener, he mentioned the discovery of Adam Tenbrücke’s swollen body, by a couple of metal-detecting beachcombers. This low-key event had been nudged from the local news coverage by the Wapping Riots. Then, for some reason I have still to discover, I flashed to an earlier episode that had definitively blighted my faith in this ill-defined zone. It was all to do with the Rotherhithe Tunnel: a most unnatural feature. It had a ‘bad karma’ – holding together the irreconcilable differences of the two shores in an evil marriage. The children were deformed and ugly, always seeking for a way to strike back.
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