Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  The Controller moved his office into the upper chamber of the Burdett-Coutts Tower; a structure that seemed to have evolved from an unlikely collaboration between Albert Speer and Rowland Emett. Hierarchic steps, and pillars of pink Peterhead granite, gave way to eccentric decoration; clocks, twirls, twists, stone fruits, and weather-damaged puns. The titular spirits were four seriously overweight cherubs: only one of whom had held on to his wings. Their eyes were debauched with red paint. Their pudgy feet rested on squirming fish. Unwillingly – and after an obvious struggle – they had been surgically initiated, made kosher: with full subincision rites. Their off-white pigeon bellies hosted the usual braggart scrawls: I ALWAYS FUCK MY MUM! BONGO + COLL + SPAM. Above their hydrocephalic heads, in Gothic Script, ran the sad legend, ‘For Love of God and Country’. Amen, Colonel, to that.

  From his crow-high porthole the Controller weighed the options, comparing, unfavourably, the visible reality of the broken-down lido with the optimistic and rhetorical plans that were spread out on a table at his elbow. The Four Horsemen romped across the paddy – and with them a hook on which he could surely hang his future. Plague! They should get it corralled fast, put their brand on it; make it pay.

  Within hours a crude conversion was under way that retained the original concentration-camp fencing and watchtowers, while shifting the pool itself into a ‘basically Neo-Templar ambience’: from hydro to hospice in fourteen days. The ironies implicit in this transaction were thrown away on its perpetrators: a primary source of infection should find itself recast as the ashram of its final flowering.

  The pool was submerged in drapes of lemon-and-white canvas, divided into individual cubicles. The surround was tiled, and saturated with fountains. The feel the architect wanted to go for was ‘non-denominational Moorish’. No disturbing images to invoke the past. Just the wind in the trees; reflections of clouds; plashing water falling on stone. The once-sordid changing sheds became ‘day rooms’, with low couches and the (piped) music of strings.

  On fine afternoons the living skeletons lay outside on recliners, gazing listlessly at the agitated sails of the trees; as they shifted and quivered, and breathed. There was something heroic and improvised about the whole affair. In the fullness of time, naturally, the baths could be ‘themed’ from diving boards to buffet, and a reasonable charge levied: payable in advance. The destitute could take out insurance, or make their own arrangements, under the sponsorship of caring libraries – if they could find any. This was a transitional phase. The developers were ready, on the nod, to ‘get into bed’ with the council. They were quite willing to sponsor the publication of leaflets, available on request, from all registered gyms, saunas, launderettes, and secondary schools: ‘Holy Communion – Is There a Safe Method of Using the Chalice?’ ‘AIDS and the Trade Unions’.

  The local authority that had once tolerated Roland Bowman’s T3 Classes (Therapy-through-Theatre) now transferred him to the lazaret. It was easier to turn the ‘outpatients’ loose than to have them poncing about on a stage, ‘expressing themselves’ and getting ideas. They’d had more than enough of Roland’s subversive readings of the minor classics: all-male, all-female; all paid for by the taxpayer. There was no percentage in it. Roland was a nuisance. One of these days a bored critic might leave Shaftesbury Avenue and review a play staged in a synagogue. They saw their chance and ‘invited’Roland to develop a scenario that had proved highly popular in San Francisco: ‘How to enjoy a fully satisfying relationship with a mortally-disadvantaged partner.’

  Does love end with death? The sunshine theory was that it did not; many spiritual climaxes lay ahead – if the groundwork was tactfully handled. The bones of the thing had been shamelessly lifted from the Natural Childbirth propagandists – ‘breathing’, stages, levels of pain: unashamed Tupperware Buddhism. The dying were to be taken, step by step, through death; which was, apparently, a kind of wind. They learned to sing their way out, to cut free from their old lives and their worn flesh. They joined with the wind. They moved among the leaves of the trees. They faced what lay ahead. They were instructed to fantasize a picture of the beloved one; then to strip the picture of all its physical attributes, reduce it to a flame; to step into that flame, burning away all memories, all regrets. Love curves around them, like a fault.

  As Roland instructed them, with disinterested affection, and with strength, they did indeed begin to taste smells, to hear colour. Their sensuous faculties had never been so acute, because they no longer had the will to oppose them. They were able, by their own volition, to enter a place of safety; a place of which Roland had no knowledge whatever.

  Neb and his inherited dog leapt joyously around the fringes of this mantra-chanting seminar, performing his own spinningdervish celebration. He took in marginal details that were of no value to any other human creature: blue plastic streamers caught on the wire, or the last red rays of sunlight picking out the jagged glass fragments in the windows, making them into maps, outlines of islands to be visited by the saints. The tranced neophytes swayed and moaned, while Neb muttered his dark imprecations to the older gods. His lips bubbled with white pellets. The shape of Roland’s dance had conjured a truce with time. His naked white-bone feet were scarcely touching the cool green tiles. The low drone ran out across the park, shadow-spokes through the dark grass: the angry courage of the dying men.

  V

  Sonny Jaques, the director, had learned by rote the rules that he now preached with all the fervour of a convert. The camera could never remain still for more than nine seconds. The camera may not move unless it is following some person on a legitimate quest. When in doubt: cross-cut. Somehow, half a dozen stock situations, visited briefly, in and out like a milkman, were assumed to be more interesting than any solitary sequence doomed to stand on its own feet. The validity of this argument was always endorsed by quoting the success of ‘EastEnders’. At which point, Fredrik swallowed hard, and thought of the kill fee.

  Sonny had to admit, after a night of agony, that he was ‘unhappy’ with Roland. (He had, at the last head count, been sufficiently unhappy with Dryfeld and Joblard to pogrom them from the script altogether. Poor Milditch never made it, even as a kitchen concept.) He liked Roland. Of course he did. He loved him. There was enormous ‘potential’ there, but… we didn’t quite have it in focus yet. I knew we were heading for trouble when I saw those pause bubbles (…) streaming from Sonny’s nostrils.

  When Sonny was in a state of doubt, his face gelled into a grin set in plaster of Paris. I wanted to tap him with a hammer, and watch it shatter. He kept an admonitory finger wagging, chopping steadily like a Sabatier blade against a herb-board. ‘Um, um, um. Ah, ah. Um. Ah.’ The tension ran out in rings. The coffee turned to mesozoic mud in our cups. I was all for resolving the matter, unilaterally, with a swift kick in the nuts; but Fredrik had a wonderful way of simply ignoring these local difficulties, cranking the scene on as if they had never occurred. He would suck in a long breath, swallow all the philosophical loose ends still lying on the table, and let rip with a twelve-minute speech, which totally anaesthetized all resistance, and caused the flies to drop dead from the ceiling.

  What Sonny wanted to know was: how could we write anything down before we knew what was going to happen? And, if we didn’t write it down, so that it could be approved by three producers and a finance watchdog, then nothing would happen… ever. These ephemeral and unreasonable ideas had to be stiffened up: our ghosts had to be solid, so that we could cut away from them. We had to appreciate the awkwardness of his dilemma.

  As he talked Sonny liked to pace, and also to eat; so that we were dutifully swivelling, backwards and forwards across the table, like the crowd in the Hitchcock tennis match, following him as he made his way to the refrigerator for another handful of black olives. (The family supper had dwindled by this time to a carton of leather-skinned yogurt and an anchovy that was waiting to be carbon-dated.) When Sonny had accumulated a dozen or so stones in his paw, he would arrive at the h
ead of the table and roll them emphatically towards us, like poker dice. ‘Ah, um. Ah.’

  The pitch that Sonny went for – the only concept with filmic possibilities – was the notion that Roland should act out some play, it didn’t matter what, in the deconsecrated synagogue at Princelet Street. We can light it with millions of candles, swing incense, wave flags: let’s go for it. Ivan the Terrible, part 3!

  ‘But hold up, boys, don’t get carried away too soon. If living actors are involved, we’re hung up on paying union rates, the budget is blown: we’ll have to lunch in some bug-infested Brick Lane rat hole. That’s serious stuff. The catering is not your department. Just give me seven and a half sheets of negotiable paper that I can take upstairs, without getting egg on my face.’

  VI

  I drank coffee with Roland Bowman in his basement kitchen. As we chatted, I searched for the photograph of the dancer, Edith Cadiz; but it was no longer on show. Secretly, this pleased me. I didn’t want to know if the photograph had changed: if it showed some fresh aspect of Edith’s disappearance that I would have to act upon. Any minor alteration in the image would mean an alteration in the account I had already written of it.

  Roland was perfectly willing to discuss the director’s latest temporary enthusiasm. Previous experiences with the Corporation had resigned him to any twists of fate, however bizarre. He was excited to be involved, but knew in his heart nothing would come of it. He had been in the synagogue once before, with a Firbank adaptation, that had drawn the town, but passed unnoticed in Fleet Street. Now curiously, Fleet Street had marched – like Birnam Wood – to the Isle of Dogs, while Roland held, blindly, to his ground.

  It was happening again: the preternatural sensitivity of this ambiguous setting. Nothing was fixed in age, or in gender; only ‘place’ was constant. Roland anticipated the request I had not yet brought myself to make. He shot upstairs and returned with a large brown envelope containing Edith’s notes for the play she wanted him to stage. The play had been delivered, in a woeful state, by a wild-haired messenger, whose condition paralleled the package he was carrying. A dog kept him company. A dog that Roland recognized. The animal had been to Fournier Street before.

  The synagogue was now part of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre (by rumour, a front for storing Georgian plunder), so there should be no problem about using it for the performance. We’d take our spot in the queue, behind the primitive artists and the stockbroker wedding receptions. Roland made only one condition. He would not give us sight of his script until there had been a private ‘run through’, which Fredrik and I would attend: no lights, cameras, or crew were, at this stage, to be involved.

  VII

  The house in Well Street, Hackney, where Neb lodged was a curious one, but no more curious than its landlord. Elgin MacDiarmuid was a premature New Georgian: he might well have survived, under a preservation order, and several layers of black animal fat, from the era of the slobbering Hanoverians. He lived, and had for years, before cults or articles, in absolute squalor. He broke his fast, when he was ‘off the gargle’, on bottles of sweet South African sherry; dropping, painlessly, into an insulin-coma that necessitated long sandal-flapping treks out along the canal, and into the leafy suburbs: brooding on ancient glories, or the wives that were flown, along with his inheritance and his favourite four-poster bed. In these sere and yellowed years – he had now turned forty – the ‘black dog’ was much with him. He sulked in kitchens, he moaned; and sucked for comfort on loose strands of hair, thereby fulfilling most of his dietary requirements. He was amused, as a compensatory fantasy, to announce himself as the hereditary ‘Lord of the Isles’ – ‘dear boy’ – or, at the very least, his younger brother. He woke daily in the expectation of a piper at the door. He took to attending clan gatherings, sodden wakes, packed with embalming-fluidperfumed Canadians, and canny lowland advocates who charged these foreign puddocks a fierce price for two or three nights of rough-hewn crofter living.

  Elgin was running down the last of the family properties; hanging grimly on until the concept of ‘Docklands’ could be stretched to include Hackney. Or until they buried him under a motorway sliproad. The family had been traditionally ‘turncoat’; betrayers of Parnell, dinner guests of Black Tim Healy, friends of the Castle. They had thrived on it, to the extent of a brace of hotels in the Joyce Country, and a scatter of London hideaways for the drunks and the gamblers, too far gone to pick a decent American pocket.

  Elgin’s father’s frock coat, a skimpy thing, torn at the seams, and green as moss, barely covered a snuff-stained string vest, and a heaving gut, that would have bulged, if it had not long since collapsed utterly, to hang dead over his leather-belted moleskins: the only surviving legacy of too many nights of ‘great crack’ and inferior bottled Guinness.

  CRACK. The word proved something of a liability when Elgin bellowed it to the world at large: drawing DHSS snoops, vagrants, and outpatients on walkabout, down on his parlour. ‘Great crack, lads. You should have been there last night,’ he would cry, even to the fur-tongued companions who had stuck with him to the unforgiving steel of dawn. Now barrio-rats, and spike-skulled squatters from distressed chip vans, broke surface; to nail these rumours that worried them, like the smell of baking bread in a starving city. They turned the place over, ripped up the floors, slashed the mattresses, and sprayed the walls with libellous assertions. In their justifiable vexation, they set fire to crates of Elgin’s scrolled genealogies, his family portraits. He hardly noticed. Worse things, by far, waited every time he closed his eyelids.

  The wiring in Elgin’s den burst from the walls in a shower of sparks; vines or snake trophies, inadequately disguised by layers of paper that rivalled a definitive V & A catalogue. The plumbing was authentically Georgian (i.e. there wasn’t any); and what substitutes Elgin contrived, he also spilled as he struggled in terror from his bed, to place his foot straight in it, or to retrieve a floating sandal from an overloaded receptacle. His sheets… but there are limits beyond which even the hardened ‘Baroque Realist’ falters.

  To maintain the stable character of the household Elgin picked his lodgers from among a Johnsonian gathering of riffraff, not yet barred from an Islington hostelry much patronized by antique dealers (or, more accurately, ‘runners’ to antique dealers): most of whom vanished like quicksilver at close of trade, to Golders Green, Muswell Hill, or Seven Kings; or dived into back rooms to whisper with furtive connections. Some of Elgin’s boys threatened to become actors. Some ‘restored’ prints. Some fronted expense-account restaurants. All were prepared to drink. And most were, with no wild enthusiasm, homosexual in persuasion.

  Neb, oddly, had not drifted in by this route. He didn’t drink: which made him immediately suspect. ‘The creature’s a soot-smeared, melon-headed Ulsterman; a horse-fucker,’ growled Elgin. ‘You’d better lock up the candles.’ But, despite the landlord’s primitive caveat, Neb had been successfully smuggled in, and established, by a props man from Sadler’s Wells; who later survived an attempted self-crucifixion on Hampstead Heath, and dined out on it through half the green rooms in Europe. Neb contrived not to be noticed. He stuck to his attic like a tame crow. He paid his rent, and he went out early. If, by some evil chance, Elgin met him on the stairs, the landlord crossed himself, spat twice on his hands, and prayed he’d be gone in the morning.

  Most nights there was a party. Elgin would not allow his tenants to escape so lightly to bed: dues must be paid. ‘Did I ever tell you, dear boy, about the time my grandfather, Lord Cloghal, killed a pig with a polo mallet?’ Bed was, in truth, all that was left to him. The wives, English and high-born, had cleaned out the rest; abandoning him to the ‘crack’ and the incendiary levees. These became so common that the fire brigade refused to turn up to bear witness. A blackened residue of ‘slipper stew’ was what held the pans together. Heavy curtains danced seductively in the candle-light. Orange-crowned fags dropped from tired hands on to pillows of straw.

  One of Elgin’s fly-by-night gu
ests, a not very resourceful book thief – who simply removed plate-books from the London Library, gutted, and sold them; watermarks, stamps, and library labels – was in a flat panic to obtain a tube of sufficiently unctuous ointment. Elgin MacDiarmuid, being asked for ‘jelly’, pictured calves’ feet, nursery tea, nanny’s starched apron; and he fell, with an almost audible crash, into a brown study. ‘Gone for ever, dear boy. All gone.’

  The pederast, who went under the name of David DeLeon, was bent double, scarcely able to walk, quite ruptured with urgency: suppressing a pitiful sob, he begged from door to door. His catamite lay waiting, with few visible signs of impatience; picking his pimples and squirting the result over a yellowback Sapper novel, that a previous tenant had tried forlornly to collect.

  The heat was on. The thief knew the net was closing around him. Even the dim and gentlemanly bookmen like to see the odd knuckle cracked, to witness the uppity bender take a public caning. DeLeon’s shirt melted; he smelt of cages. The hideous sounds of Elgin’s subterranean melancholy – clinking bottles, bog songs, tears – only reinforced his sense of inevitable confinement. Tonight might be his last chance to feast with panthers.

  The thief pounded at Neb’s door: without success. He had reduced the grandeur of his demands from vaseline to baby lotion; or butter, polyunsaturated margarine, linseed oil, mayonnaise, louse shampoo. Anything. This wasn’t the moment to count calories. His mouth was far too dry simply to spit on the snake, and hope for the best. He knew Neb was in there. He could hear the inherited dog scratching at the far side of the bolted door. He snapped: converting the imps of lust to demons of wrath. He snatched up a hammer, and a mouthful of nails from the frame-maker’s cupboard, and proceeded, with yelps of rage, to seal Neb into his mansard garret.