Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Neb, at the first blow, transformed himself into an item of furniture; mute, uncomplaining, clasping his scrapbook to his heart. DeLeon completed his task with the aid of a few loose floorboards. And went below to find a bottle.

  Not for nothing had Neb studied the ways of the East. He could feed, for months, on his own karma. He withdrew: he retreated into a floating world of headlines; narrative collages that opened so many possible avenues. He would begin at once on an obituary notice.

  GAY ARISTO AND RENT BOY IN THIEVES’ KITCHEN SHOCK. IRISH ANGLE SUSPECTED. A delegation of notables, including the Standing Member, Meic Triscombe, and several faces from the cast of ‘EastEnders’, today broke into the attic room of a house in Well Street, claimed by its owner, Elgrun MacDonald (68), to be of ‘immense historical importance’. The delegation had intended making an award to a long-serving social worker, Nebuchadnezzar Spurgeon, whose selfless activities on behalf of the Grove Road Lazaret (plc) have won him universal acclaim. However, when the doors were broken down by sanitary operatives, it was revealed that the ‘artist’s garret’ was uninhabited. Obscure books on the occult by Colin Wilson, W. H. Hodgson and others were removed for forensic examination. A pile of brown dust was said by one of the actors to be ‘in the shape of a dog’. ‘This mystery will rival the Marie Celeste,’ claimed a Townhall Spokesperson. ‘It is straight out of Edger Allen Poe [sic].’

  Elgin MacDiarmuid, soul-crushed, sunk into a shameless candle-cupping pose: his skull was a parchment membrane. Nightmare shadows stretched and yawned against the walls. A capuchin monkey plucked at his sleeve. Beast faces winked in the panels of the windows. The slop bucket of his fears had been spilled, and the swamp dwellers were loose. There was now no barrier between past and future, between naked panic and its uglier manifestations. He saw DeLeon as he really was. And he called for a shotgun. DeLeon belonged in the trophy room.

  A fabulous smell, the spittling sweetness of roasting pork, filled the basement; drool seeped from Elgin’s snoring mouth: it stung the absurd, pre-pubertal pliancy of his skin. His skin was his memory: the retarded child held within this abused and rotting carcase. Elgin screamed aloud, woken by pain; and dropped the candle which was gently cooking his venus mounds. Hungry flames licked across his bare mattress, leaping deliriously from pools of congealed chicken fat to liquid rivulets of chip grease. Sportingly, the fire outlined Elgin’s shape in the bed: the man’s animal traces burnt like a sacrifice. The bog landlord looked down at where he should have been lying. It was a small conflagration: nothing in that. The walls were already black as a holocaust; and several windows were missing, where agitated lovers had done a header into the streets.

  Roars of torment from the bull-baited MacDiarmuid roused the pack of lodgers and associates, who tumbled into the night in various stages of undress, inebriation, and sexual attainment. Sheets of flame escaped gratefully into the clean air. The draggletails, their lice and their parasites, sprawled in the gutter on the far side of the street, to watch the show. There had been nothing like it since the Smithfield barbecues.

  From the dark safety of the coppice, Elgin saw the Big House. The brute laughter of the peasantry. He had been burnt out, driven from his inheritance: four hundred years of culture trampled in the mud. ‘Save the Rowlandsons,’ he howled. ‘Who will carry out Hogarth’s “Roast Beef of Old England!”? A gold sovereign for any brave lad who dares the flames.’ The fond tricks of the mind, that can promote one of the lesser insurrectionists to a chief among Wicker Men. Elgin the Torch heard the skirl of the pipes on the crown of the hill: the heavy smoke of the hospital incinerator. The road to the isles opened before him.

  All that remained of the sorry affair was to witness the figure of Neb, translated from grass gobbler to Blake’s Cain; his hair on fire, white hands tearing at his scalp. He was trapped in the mansard window, like a negative within a square of film. The heat would print his image into the glass. He lifted the blazing dog above his head, as if the animal were a flaming brand, or the true source of the fire; then he hurled it out in a frosted shatter of moth-sharp fragments. And the beast fell, an incandescent log, through the cold air, down and down, towards the distant street.

  VIII

  We sat on either side of the Ladies’ Gallery in the Princelet Street Synagogue: I took the East, and Fredrik took the West. The keys were in my pocket. We had locked ourselves into the building. The candle holders, hanging in front of us, were eggs of brass, from which writhed serpentine tendrils. They swayed perilously, revolving in a breeze that had no obvious source. They were muted in a thick dust of bone, masonry, cloth, and prayer; and were crowned by strange double-headed birds, Hapsburg eagles, whose necks twisted against threat from any quarter of the compass. Lamps had been lit on the floor beneath us: necessary oils sputtered. The chamber was dim and anxious. This first stage involved an attempt to stop-down the rush of time, to chill this event, to allow the setting to absorb, and swallow, our invading presences.

  Roland concentrated solely on the management of his own performance; following closely the guidelines he recovered from Edith’s frantic and inelegant script. The hints Roland dropped suggested that Edith had not written anything in the form of a play. There were, for example, no speeches or stage instructions. No, what she had done was to ensure that anyone who read her notes with attention would be led to ‘re-enact’ the sequential prophetic curve that any play has to be. The script was a series of physical proposals for a séance that would deliver the event Edith was imagining. Wisely, Roland allowed the ritual site to look after itself. His only ‘theatrical’ contribution was to drape the expressionist backcloth from his Oscar Wilde drawing room over the raised bimah; making a tent from which we assumed he would, in his own time, emerge.

  I don’t know how long we waited. Light died in the sloped glass roof over our heads: it grew strong again, illuminating the cracks, the broken webs of long neglect. I’m sure that neither of us slept, or lost consciousness for more than a few seconds. Very slowly, the shaking and the rolling of past worshippers faded: the silver bells, the pomegranates; the stiffened yolks of eggs, unpeeled from dead faces; the steam from the bath house melted away. And we heard the low whining of a solitary dog. It seemed to come, not from the floor of the synagogue, but from beneath it: a melancholy and inhuman kaddish of loss. The hair rose on our necks. We heard the claws of the dog scratching on tile: turning, circling; faster, faster, from end to end of the cellar that enclosed him. Our sense of the animal developed: a lion-headed, tail-thrashing, back-arched revenger, bumping against the floor that could no longer contain it. The beast was growing. It would burst through the feeble bricks.

  Our veins closed, stopping the surge of blood to spasms of pain. The room was filled with suspended heat. We flinched from the rails on which we were leaning. We dug our nails into the palms of our hands.

  Now there was a cooler sound, metallic; a length of chain dropping into a dry well. A small gridiron in the floor of the main chamber was lifting itself, falling back into place; lifting again. A stutter of untraceable images flooded in behind the sound. A cloaked sleeper, living or dead. A peasant-priest stalking the circumference, barefoot; drawing his own breath from a glass-flute, in which locusts are imprisoned. Horizontal confessions. Crimes of passion. The supplicant lies, face down, upon the synagogue floor, and whispers his (her) guilt through the grille to an unseen confessor; or into a pool of accumulated evil. The priest is standing on a chair in the inundated cellar, neck twisted, lifting his mouth to catch her (his) spit. The penance involves cleaning with the tongue these loops of cold iron. And it is shared between priest and victim.

  With a wild rush of yellow, of thorn and sand, the lion-thing was at the door: it thundered, its breath was rage. We did not want to see it, but we could not move.

  Roland Bowman was naked, red, on all fours; crawling like some obsolete chess piece, across the worn boards towards a restored pool of decorated tiles. His movements were precise, but they did not ap
pear to be premeditated. He was the inherited dog, burnt of its fur; birth-shivering, as it aligned itself to enter once more the geography of its ordained narrative. Scalded, raw, vulnerable; Roland pushed himself pitifully along the floor, until we felt the waves of displaced pain enter our own knees and wrists. His muscular control was astonishing.

  I gave no credence to what I was seeing. I was the right eye, Fredrik was the left eye: we had both to concentrate to bring this vision into focus. I could not judge its distance from my own amorphous fears and desires. I could not guess what part of this scene Fredrik was censoring with his intelligence. But what I saw shocked me. The dog’s swollen pizzle, emerging like a piston of peeled, pink flesh from its holster of fur. Nothing of Roland was left. He was overwhelmed by this assertion of the animal’s unthinking maleness. I did not believe Roland would ever break free from the creature whose spirit he had so convincingly summoned.

  The dog salt-licked the blue pigment from the dutch tiles. He put his shoulder, in turn, to each of the six pillars. He acknowledged the amud, and bent his head before the Ark. Now the vigour drained from him. He was beaten. He dragged on broken legs. His spine was twisted, his head lolled. The crushed beast slunk from our sight under the painted cloth of the tent – and re-emerged, on the instant, by some conjuring effect; erect, strutting, arms thrown wide, parading the cloak of maps. The dog was Edith Cadiz. Or a switch had been made. Roland had volunteered to vanish in her place from this story. He was robed once more in the cardboard streets that surrounded his house. He was dressed in the tale he had told us at his kitchen table, the woman’s life.

  Roland’s body – hairless, pale, disciplined – had the miraculous capability of allowing any other life to be ‘projected’ over his own. He was neutral; the dream actor. A man, a woman, an animal: he could be a cardinal or a horse, a prostitute or a surgeon. The watchers would witness whatever transformations they dared to conceive.

  For this role Roland’s make-up was predatory and exulting. He laughed, and he licked his white teeth. He ran a finger teasingly over his lips. He shook out the red-gold hair that flowed down his back. Edith was producing a wicked pastiche of the Roland who laid claim to her identity, by making himself the sole curator of her legend. There is no salvation in dumb reverence. Loving admiration metamorphoses to soul-theft. The glamour of the risks that Edith provoked had been peeled like a mask from the bone of Roland’s skull. Neither party could break from this terrible contract: the telling and the showing, the being and the dying. The mirror had frozen hard about them.

  There was only the sound of bare feet sliding on the boards. Roland spun to face the Four Quarters of the World: he stretched out his arms. He was passing down a track already flattened in the wet grass, under the arch, and out of Meath Gardens: rain in his face, he brushed against the drooping purple heads of buddleia. Eyes shut, following the wind; he crossed Roman Road towards the corroded green effigy of a blind man tethered to a stone dog. He could go no further. He was enclosed by a crescent of water; which he drew, at once, into the unsuspecting air. Faith kept the shining column in balance on his hand, a liquid wand.

  Fredrik, coughing fiercely, stood up, a handkerchief clutched to his lips: he loomed alarmingly over the balcony rail. Shadows from the swinging lamp aged him; grew a dark judicial beard. He challenged the woman who stood beneath us on the floor of the synagogue. He spoke, but the voice was not his own: it was chalky and base. He rose to defuse the gathering tension of the moment: only to discover that he was now the dominant part of the act. He was implicated: the necessary articulator of a written voice.

  ‘Who is he who gives you this authority?’ Fredrik choked out the words he was hearing for the first time. He fingers closed on his throat, so that he could feel them, and assess their truth.

  Edith countered his assault with movement, the steps of a dance: she glissaded, turned, showed her back. She ripped the sleeve from her cloak, and let it float into the unlit margin of the stage.

  ‘What business do you have with Hebrew ceremonies, the taint of idolatry, and the like?’ Fredrik continued his cabalistic interrogation.

  With a sound like dry flame rushing over a tinder-trail, Edith split open her costume of maps: it hung loose from her shoulders, drowned wings. A sudden leap obscured her: she was hidden behind one of the red pillars.

  ‘By the power of the four princes I require your submission.’ Fredrik slumped back into his seat. He was stripped of his borrowed dignity. He did not speak again.

  But Edith Cadiz was instructed by her angel and would suffer no governance. Roland, naked once more, had the body of a woman.

  IX

  We returned to the house in Fournier Street: it was a clean, fresh morning. Vagrants were already standing around their perpetual oil-drum fires. Nobody ever saw one of these fires being started. Forklifts were shuttling the vegetable market; odd, single trays of exotic fruits were carried to taxis. It was still quiet enough to enjoy the agitated cicada-hum of the sewing machines. We waited for Roland in his mother’s sitting room. But there was no clear space into which our turbulent imaginings could skulk, searching for respite. The room was crowded with so many gathered mosaic-fragments of the old woman’s previous lives. It was one floor higher, but the same shape as Roland’s Wildean chamber: it seemed smaller, packed as it was with occasional tables, mementoes, knick-knacks, votive offerings.

  While Fredrik gossiped happily with Mrs Bowman about Canada – where he had spent a few fugitive years finding out that he was not an academic, and that Black Mountain poets, individually or en masse, would never produce anything but aggravation – I picked up the photograph of Edith Cadiz which I had excitedly rediscovered among the ranked portraits of husbands, ballet masters, loved enemies, and lost friends. I suppose I was expecting, or projecting, the ultimate Dorian Gray transformation: that the silver print would now represent Roland Bowman in Edith’s skin. Our night in the synagogue had to clarify the insane ambiguities that infected this house (and all its visitors). I was, by temperament, much happier analysing glass slides with finite examples of captured time, than scrambling across the living face of Whitechapel. The story, in all decency, should end here. I revolved the frame in my hands. I tried every angle. There was no change. That elegiac aggression was as strong as it had ever been: the pearly smoothness of light on her body. The gesture of the arms that refused a definitive interpretation. It was undoubtedly the same woman.

  Mrs Bowman, bird-eyed, caught me at my investigations. ‘Quite pretty, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’m very fond of that frame: cost me thirty-five pounds in Bermondsey. I couldn’t get Alfie to shift on the price. Girl’s quite attractive too. Absolutely the right period. That’s why I’ve never bothered to change her. I felt she went so well with the frame. And, when you’ve only a son left, well, you do tend to collect another little family to keep you company.’ She laughed. ‘I think of them as quite real. I make up all sorts of stories about them. But only for friends, of course. Yes, I do find myself wondering, from time to time, who she was; and if her life was anything like the one I have saddled her with.’

  I could only stare at her, with ill-mannered bluntness, and will some saving breath of ‘Bates Motel’ transvestite shape-shifting slaughter. Roland would surely emerge from behind the wig, a carving knife in his upraised arm. But, no, sadly; this was a small, voluble, and wholly convincing woman. Then I heard a key turn in the lock of the street door, and light fast footsteps, that could only be Roland’s, raced towards us, up the long flights of stairs.

  V

  The Solemn Mystery of the Disappearing Room

  ‘Then to the tower to watch’

  William Hope Hodgson,

  The House on the Borderland

  Arthur, who was also, obscurely, known as ‘Monty’ or ‘The Boy’, opened his sticky seropic eyes in a room that had bent around him in the night; that had contracted to a necklace of tyres. He could not draw breath in it. There were no corners to the walls. He was
alone, abandoned, far from ground, amputated from memory: a trustee with a black ribbon sewn to his sleeve. He no longer had to suffer the linoleum wards, or the dormitories with their milky puddles of disinfectant, their anguish, sprayed threats and sudden, random blows. He did not need to twist on his mattress at the mercy of some communal nightmare; or to wake, on this fine morning, to the bite of another man’s parasites, inherited from a foam pillow, still saturated with unshriven dreams.

  But at this altitude there was no purchase; Arthur’s mind slipped, forcing him to bury his face in a pink and threadbare cricket cap. All night he had been remembering his teeth, seeing himself wrap them in soft purloined lavatory paper: then the discovery of his secret hiding place by some dark and stalking double. Shame. Anger. His breakfast extended over the entire day, as he sucked his string of rind towards a slow and salty dissolution. No, he had been too cunning for that. They were gone. His teeth were the past, a squandered inheritance, wilfully forfeited.

  Once the twin towers of the Monster Doss House had been decorated with flags: the pride of the fleet, a red-brick leviathan, studded with portholes. An Imperial fantasy: Wembley Stadium set in a grassless desert. It had been photographed, part of the social record, for the first, October 1903, edition of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss – where it can still be found, sheltering between page 240 and page 241. In its pomp the Doss House had shaken to the snores of a thousand men, snorting and gobbing the choked filth of their lungs. But now the half-dozen tolerated vagrants were forced to hide themselves – even from each other – somewhere in its telary vastness; camped in locked corridors, they fought for the remaining blankets with patients too bizarrely infected to be accepted, even as charity-appeal posters, by the London Hospital. They were not ‘star material’, and would never get a call from Mel Brooks, or be played on Broadway by David Bowie. They died, slowly, in unrecorded cupboards.