But the horror tales – BLACK THUGS WITH HOME-MADE SPIKED BALL AND CHAIN RUN AMOK ON TERROR TRAIN – serve another, more sinister, purpose: they drive out the crumblies, the garden cultivators, to the forest clearings, to Loughton, to Ongar, or the poulticed mudflats of the Thames Estuary, the ultimate boneyards of Essex. More Victorian family homes, strong on ‘character’, and low on plumbing, are released on to a greedy market. Hard-boiled feminist crime writers, and stringers for City Limits, peddle across town, from Camden and Muswell Hill, to take up the slack. ‘Baroque realists’, and tame voyeurs fixated on entropy, tremble in paroxysms of excitement and distaste. There hasn’t been such hot material lying around in the streets since they nobbled public hangings and bear baiting. Suddenly, we’re all Henry Mayhew and Jack London. It’s – shudder – unbelievable, terrible. We rush to our word-processors, the hot line to Channel 4. We’re going to get the lead story, with photograph, in the London Review of Books.
Fredrik’s wife, a lady of great charm, wise enough to prepare herself for Hackney life with two or three Liberal Arts degrees, and a wicked sense of humour, was now a psychiatric consultant at the Hackney Hospital: this being the only kind they went in for. She had, Fredrik explained, recognized the snapshot of the nurse that accompanied the story of the railway vanishing act in The Gazette. The girl’s name was Edith. Edith Cordoba? Edith Drake? She couldn’t remember. But she wasn’t English. She was sure of that. East Coast American? Wore expensive shoes. Had worked in the hospital for almost a year, which constituted some kind of record. And she wasn’t even on Valium, with Noveril chasers.
Could it be? Edith Cadiz a nurse? It was time to visit this hospital, to trace the infected fantasy to its source. Fredrik knew where some of the bodies were buried. He had been working around here shooting standard-issue inner-city squalor, that could be assembled fast to provide a poverty-row back-up for a ‘major Statement’ that a ‘Very Important Personage’ wanted to deliver, at peak viewing time, to his future subjects. ‘One’ had been suffering lately from a rather disquieting sensation that ‘something ought to be done’. His uncle felt much the same way about South Wales. Much good had it done him. Or them. A lecture was even now being hammered out by half the unemployed architects in the country, who could – under the protection of the blue-blooded ecologist – safely savage the half who had managed to climb off the drawing board.
I left Fredrik to his task; blowing foam into the pub phone, while he sold a potential essay to Germany, analysing… the reformist uses of the very instrument he was now clutching in a stranglehold. ‘Discontinued alternatives,’ he was screaming, while he waited for a simultaneous translation. I would adopt my usual method, and circumnavigate the hospital walls; see what the stones had to say.
The hospital site covered ancient parkland, and might yet be profitably developed. It had, in the meantime, been designated the dumping ground for all the swamp-field crazies, the ranters, the ultimate referrals. Leave here, and there is only the river. The shakers were swept in – or delivered themselves, gibbering, at the gates: they were rapidly tranquillized, liquid-coshed, and given a painted door to contemplate. The only other ticket of admittance led, by way of the left-hand path, to the Drug Dependency Unit; which attempted, by methods traditional and experimental, to wean the helpless and the hopeless from their sugary addictions. The main thrust of this enterprise – stilling the inarticulate voice of rage – merely created a host of new, and more exploitable, addictions. Only the pharmacists and the Swiss turned a dollar. The wicked old days of brain-burning and skull-excavation (with soiled agricultural instruments) were a folk-memory. That machinery was too expensive to replace. A wimpish revulsion against water treatments led, logically, to the gradual suspension of all bath-house activities. Whole wings were simply abandoned to nature; eagerly exploited by rodents, squatters – and smack dealers who traded their scripts without quitting the sanctuary of the hospital enclave.
Looking up from the east end of Victoria Park, or out of a shuddering train, the hospital was minatory and impressive: a castle of doom. The endless circuit of its walls betrayed no secret entrances. Window slits flickered with nervous strip-lighting. Grimy muslin strips muted any forbidden glimpses of the interior: recycled bandages. The steep slate roofs were made ridiculous by a flock of iron curlicues.
An increasingly anorexic budget was dissipated in child-sex questionnaires, plague warnings, and reports (in six languages) justifying the cleaning and catering contracts. The nurses, to survive, established their own private kingdoms. The doctors kept their heads down, writing papers for the Lancet, that might catch the eye of some multinational talent scout. Better Saudi, or Houston, than this besieged stockade. They sampled, with reckless courage, bumper cocktails from their own stock cupboards.
My circuit was complete. I was back where I had started: in Homerton High Street. I had discovered nothing. My notebook was scrawled with gnomic doodles that might, at some future date, be worked into a jaunty polemic. Of the dancer, there was no trace. I would return. And I would be armed with a camera. Without a blush of shame, I was starting to enjoy myself.
III
Edith Cadiz had never felt so much at her ease. She found herself, for the first time in her life, ‘disappearing into the present’. There was a physical lift of pleasure each morning, as she climbed the sharply tilted street from Homerton Station. The day was not long enough. She ran the palms of her hands against the warmth trapped in the bricks: she grazed them, lightly. She held her breath, relishing to the full the rashers of moist cloud in the broken windows of the East Wing. Often she stayed on her feet for twelve hours; not taking the meal breaks that were her due. She was absorbed in the horrors that confronted her. No human effort could combat them. Ambulances clanged up the High Street: security barriers lifting and falling, like a starved guillotine. This was a world that Edith had previously known as a persistent, but remote, vision: a microcosm city. There was nothing like it in her reclaimed Canadian wilderness: an impenetrable heart, with its broken cogs, shattered wheels, and stuttering drive-belts. Her dispersed mosaic of dreams allowed these damaged machine-parts to escape from ‘place’ and into time. The victims, vanished within the hospital walls, grew smooth with loss. They dribbled, or voided themselves in distraction, staring at, but not out of, narrow pillbox windows. They were all – the tired metaphor came to her – in the same boat: drifting, orphaned by circumstance, unable to justify the continuing futility of their existence.
And it was endless: floor after floor, deck after deck – unfenced suffering. There was no pause in her labour; nothing to achieve. It could never satisfy her. Faces above sheets: amputated from the social body. They did not know what they were asking. They took all her gifts, and put no name to them. The shape of her hands around a glass of water held no meaning.
Each nurse laid claim to some part of the building as territory that she could control: imposing her own rules, her own fantasies. It might be a special chair dragged into a broom cupboard. It might be a cup and saucer, instead of the institutional mug. It might be a favoured cushion, or a colour photograph cut from a magazine, presenting some immaculate white linen table on a terrace overlooking a vineyard: Provence, Samos, Gozo, the Algarve.
Edith made her decision. She rescued all the children she found lost within the inferno of the wards. They were not always easy to recognize. Some pensioners had discovered the secret of eternal youth. They shone: without blame. They remembered events, and believed they were happening for the first time. They entered chambers of memory from which no shock could move them. They were small and unscratched: they learnt to make themselves insignificant. But some children were fit to pass directly into the senile wards; never having experienced puberty or adult life. They were overcome, shrunken, shrivelled; hidden behind unblinking porcelain eyes. Most did not speak. They should not have been there. They were waiting to be moved on, ‘relocated’. Their papers were lost. Some were uncontrolled, hurtling against th
e walls, on a hawser of wild electricity. They would leap and tear and shout, spit obscenities. They would punch her. Or cling, and stick against her skirts, burrs: huge heads pressed painfully against her thighs. One child would lie for hours at her feet, and be dead. Another barked like an abused dog.
The room that Edith commandeered in a remote, and now shunned, south-facing tower gamely aped one of those seaside hotels, built in the 1930s, to pastiche the glamour of a blue-ribbon ocean liner. There were wooden handrails, and a salty curved window overlooking the sparkling tributary of the railway, that ran from Hackney, through Homerton, to the cancelled village of Hackney Wick – and on, in the imagination of the idlers, across the marshes to Stratford, to Silvertown, to the graveyard of steam engines at North Woolwich. Another more stable vision was also there for the taking: security systems, tenement blocks, pubs, breakers’ yards, a Catholic outstation with albino saints and blackberry-lipped virgins, and the green-rim sanctuary of Victoria Park.
For a week Edith swept and scrubbed, polished and painted. She stole food and begged for toys and books. She was determined to impose a formal regime; to re-create a High Victorian Dame School. She wanted canvas maps, sailing boats, new yellow pencils, wide bowls of exotic fruit. She wanted music. Their strange thin voices drifting out over the hidden yards and storehouses. Her stolen children, playing at something, came – by degrees – to accept its reality. They were boarders, sent from distant colonies, to learn ‘the English way’. They were no longer solitary: they were a troop. They even, covertly, took exercise. They left the hospital: walking down the Hill in a mad, mutually-clinging crocodile, over the Rec to the Marshes. They were too frightened to breathe: not deviating, by one inch, from the white lines on the football pitches – climbing over obstacles, cracking corner-flags, tramping through dog shit. They huddled, a lost tribe, under massive skies. The rubble of pre-war London was beneath their feet. They walked over streets whose names had been obliterated. They could have dived down through the grass into escarpments of medieval brickwork; corner shops, tin churches, prisons, markets, tiled swimming pools. On the horizon were the bright-orange tents of the summer visitors; the Dutch and the Germans who processed in a remorseless circuit between the shower-block and their VW campers.
Over the months, Edith coaxed the children towards language. Or shocked it from them: in tears, and in fits of laughter. The railway passengers noticed this single window, blazing with light.
Other unlocated souls made themselves known to her. Orwin Fairchilde, cushion-cheeked, chemically castrated, had been turned out of the ward as ‘insufficiently disturbed’: he could not escape its pull. He pretended to be part of the queue of outpatients that formed early at the gates: a queue from which never more than one or two highly-strung potential travellers hauled themselves aboard any vehicle foolish enough to slow down. Cars kept their doors and windows locked. The other loiterers remained – until dusk fell – leaning against the hospital wall; picking up sheets of old newspaper, greeting unknown friends, or screaming challenges at imaginary enemies. The queue was perpetual and self-generating: an unfunded ‘halfway house’ between the hospital and the insanity of the world at large. The people who mattered offered a loud ‘Yo!’ to Orwin’s oracular question: ‘Are you in the queue, man?’
Orwin polished his bottle-glass spectacles on his shirt-tails. Then he set up his elaborate, but eccentric, sound system. He Scotch-taped his sheet music to the side of a bus shelter, and dived, scowling, into ‘Greensleeves’. He plucked at the strings of an Aria-Pro (II) electric guitar – as if he was extracting porcupine-spines from his bulging thigh. The noise was hellish. He sealed his eyes, and entered some dim cave of absolute concentration.
It became a ritual of Edith’s to take Orwin for a drink in the Spread Eagle on her way to the station. He would roll a cigarette and offer it to her. She would refuse, and offer him a drink: which he, in his turn, declined – on religious grounds. He spoke about the Ethiopian Saints who had lost themselves in this City of Sin; but who would certainly acknowledge Orwin as a fellow spirit, by spotting the coded note-sequences in his music. The Saints left messages for him in books. But, of course, the libraries would not let him get his hands on them: claiming that he could not read. The teachers had all been bribed to keep him in ignorance.
Dr Adam Tenbrücke also spent time as a temporary guest of the hospital. He had been found, weeping and shaking, running his head at the door of a warehouse-gallery on the perimeter of London Fields; which featured, at the time, a chamber flooded with sump oil. This was instantly optioned by the Saatchis. The owner, a claque of tame critics, and a few jealous hangers-on rushed outside, squawking, ‘Did Doris ring?’ – bursting to break the news to any passing drifters. They tumbled, in a heap, over Tenbrücke, who was rocking back on his heels, imitating a blind monkey. Smelling the weirdness of ‘real’ money, the owner dragged him inside.
Tenbrücke pointedly refused to sign his name in the Visitors’ Book, and would speak only in German. The Gallery Man, now suspecting the devious hand of the encamped ‘travellers’, rang for the snatch-squad – who were only too happy to tranquillize the gibbering doctor with their truncheons. He was delivered – a knot of terror – to the reception cages. He would talk of nothing but suicide. ‘I’m drowning in filth,’ he whispered. In other words, he was depressingly normal. He sounded like a politician. They frisked him, hit him with enough stuff to stop a runaway horse, and turned him loose. He tore off his clothes and – howling Aryan marching songs – stumbled down Marsh Hill. He walked back to Limehouse Basin along the River Lea: white, and fat, and stark-naked. But he went unmolested; just another long-distance health freak jogging into obscurity.
It was still quite possible to survive on a nurse’s salary; but not to eat, to travel, to take decisions over your own life. Therefore, most of the nurses moonlighted as cleaners, or as barmaids. Even their uniforms were rented – warmed by their bodies – to a drinking club on the Stoke Newington borders; where they were worn, with minimal adjustments, by hostesses who catered to a certifiably specialist clientele.
But it was the opening of the Dalston/Kingsland to Whitechapel rail link that granted Edith’s continued presence at the hospital and economic viability. Now, at the end of her working day, she could take the North London line to Dalston, change, and step out within half an hour on Whitechapel High Street. Time to read, once again, her faded pink copy of The Four Quartets. ‘And so each venture/Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate…’ The generous arches and lamps of the London Hospital penetrated the gloom like a Viennese opera house. Edith slipped Mr Eliot back into her raincoat pocket.
The balance was achieved. Edith Cadiz could nurse by day, and supplement her earnings by unselective prostitution at night; ‘blowing’ the priapic hauliers, who were working out the last days of the Spitalfields Vegetable Market. It would be simplistic to suggest that Edith’s was a mechanical response to circumstantial poverty. The twist was more complex: if she was unable to live as a nurse, she was also unable to live as a prostitute. The attractions of these twinned survival-modes were quite different. They were separate, but equal. In both theatres of risk, Edith was involved with external demand-systems that gave her unexpected courage, and fed her dramatic sense of self. The risks she took brought to life a scenario, in which she could not quite believe that she participated. She maintained, to the end, an inviolate sense of silence. The emissions of the lorry drivers, she trusted, would somehow engender language for the mute children, safely secreted in their ruined tower.
Edith was an unusual person.
IV
The great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime is its failure to procure a decent opposition. Never have there been so many complacent dinner parties, from Highbury to Wandsworth Common, rehearsing their despair: a wilderness of quotations and anecdotes. ‘My dear,’ a Camden Passage ‘screamer’smirked, as I cleared a few boxes of inherited books from his cellar, ‘we never get asked to
Mayfair any more – it’s always Hackney. Wherever that is.’ Writers were glutted on hard-edged images of blight. They gobbled and spat, in their race to be first to preview the quips that would surface in next week’s Statesman; or to steal, from some Town Hall booby, statistics to lend credence to a Guardian profile. Literary bounty-hunters – bounced publishers, and the like – scouted out-of-print anthologies for any Eastern European poets, in wretched health, who had not yet been ‘targeted’ for an obituary. They fell over each other to finger these deservedly-forgotten scribblers at thirty pounds a hit.
And if the Spitalfields weaver’s loft, or the country house, wistfully rendered in a mouthwash of Piper twilight, staggered on as icons of a vanquished civilization, then the fire-blackened cityscape of the Blitz was the setting increasingly invoked by the barbarians of the free market. Exquisitely made-up young ladies tottered out on Saturday mornings to hawk the Socialist Worker, for an hour, outside Sainsbury’s. Duty done, they nipped inside to stock up on pâté, gruyère, olives, French bread, and Frascati for an alfresco committee meeting. The worse things got, the more we rubbed our hands. We were safely removed from any possibility of power: blind rhetoric without responsibility. Essays, spiked with venom, were the talk of the common rooms. Meddlesome clerics fought for the pulpit. The most savage (and the wittiest) practitioners were never free from the telephone. Review copies clattered on to the mat, obsequiously eager to face the treatment. TV lunches were grim as public floggings. Government narks listened at every door. Nobody wanted it to end. Jerome Bosch art-directed the steaming imagery. It was positively Spanish: Index, Inquisition, Auto-da-Fé. Nobody wanted to be the one to hammer the first stake through this absence of a heart. We’d have nothing to write about, except ley lines and unexplained circles among the crops.
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