Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Sticking to the damp walls of this pest seminary were plagues without names, that would test the recall of even the most diligent antiquarians of medical science: fibrillations, lesions, scabs, lymphs, bubonoceles, swellings, welts, knots, discharges and seizures unidentified even in the holograph manuscripts of medieval Spanish apothecaries. This sad rump of nostalgic vagrancy, these stinking heritage ghosts, clung to life only to bleed the fundraisers; scratching their way into the casting directories of documentary film-makers, or whining their mendacious autobiographies from doorstep to doorstep through Bloomsbury. They were the ‘house guests’ of the developers until the Monster Doss House could make its appearance in the brochures as ‘an historical site’, and City-based newcomers could get their rocks off recolonizing a genuine Poor Law survival ward. They could make pets of the cockroaches. This fired-clay alp was built to last for ever by planners in the grip of dynastic certainties. Features of the original plumbing would be incorporated with no surcharge. Speculators, on the instant, were sweating to buy a piece of it. They were dumping wine bars in the Old Kent Road, like so many cat sacks, just to stay liquid. But – until the first ruched sorbet curtains dressed the portholes – the dead men had a role to play as walk-on ‘local colour’.

  The porthole, looking out to the west, was no longer a temptation for Arthur. His turret room, a literal crow’s nest, had once been a privilege the inmates had fought to achieve: wrestling through gutters, ambuscading the key holder with sand-filled stockings, biting and clawing to be first man at the evening window. They had to hobble Scotch Dave with a paraquat and British Sherry cocktail, when he took to protecting his claim by sleeping all afternoon on the Doss House steps. Joey the Jumper actually dug himself into the refuse bin of the London Hospital’s surgical ward, so that he could maintain a death-watch on the padlocked door. He was submerged, head on knees, in a canister of mustard slime, pus, and gungy dressings – but he couldn’t control the compulsive drumming of his heels, or gag his endlessly rotated mantra of early Christian martyrs. ‘Stephen, James the Apostle, James the Righteous, Paul and Peter, Symeon, Ignatius, Rufus and Zosimus, Telesphorus, Germanicus, Polycarp.’ One of the warty roundhead orange-boys put a lucifer to a trailing tongue of bandage that spilled from the bin’s lid, and Joey was deep-fried in his own fat.

  The mysterious attraction of the west window was no difficult matter to explain: the unashamed voyeurism of the incarcerated onanist. Monkeys in zoos, or lifers in strip-cell confinement, obey the same imperatives – without any visual stimulation. Before the ochre-brick ‘Espresso Mosque’ had been grafted on to Whitechapel Road it had been possible for these one-handed visionaries to stand unbuttoned at the grimy porthole, and to sweat cobs with the effort of focusing red eyes on the overnight lorry park beneath them. They stood through all the tedious hours of darkness, hammering against the sill, bruising strained flesh in an orgy of untargeted self-mutilation. They hung as if ‘on the rope’, suspended over the pulsing violet ghetto. They learnt to ‘see’ with their ears, to follow the subtlest shifts and arrangements of human commerce: tree-breath, water whispering under the paving stones. Their fathers rebuked them from the throats of birds.

  Then, as dawn broke, blooding the slate and the wet tarmac, they caught the first tremble in the curtained cabs of the longdistance hauliers. They saw the gay girls stretch out their legs, skirts riding high, risking the drop back on to firm ground. The girls were inevitably overweight, with make-up spattered like an autistic action painting; or scrawny, nerve-ticked, scratched, pimpled, and frantic to score – wriggling in satin, torn fish-net, split and smeared saddle-leather. But the vagrants were not disillusioned. These were their saints. The distant mechanisms of exchange became a portfolio of detached details: knees metamorphosed to skulls, tangled in rat fingers; black gearshifts; elbow joints; neck hair; segments of wheel fur. Laughter died in blows; threats, whispers. Lights flared along the windscreens in promiscuous delight. Cigarettes burnt cruelly through the hooded darkness. Thumbs agitated belt buckles. Hands swallowed stiff banknotes. The watchers were implicated, mumbling, taking sides; making their selection from a repertoire of pain and pleasure; wanking themselves into vacancy, letting their brains run from their sudorific noses in streams of unwiped silver.

  But that view was gone for ever. The Garden of Earthly Delights was strictly off limits. The muezzin who wailed his exotic arias over the pantiled roofs, the sprouting chimneys, and the glistening gutters, had captured the townscape. It was his: to curse, to anathematize, to hurl fire and brimstone on to the sublimely indifferent heads of sinners, as they gurgled like hogs, shoving their lips into the triangular wounds on cans of export lager. The gun turret of this Disneyland mosque, behind its bullet-proof glass, was empty. The summons, bringing the devout traders to their knees, was pre-recorded. Mercifully, the holy man was spared even a glimpse of these unamputated follies.

  No need for Arthur to waste precious minutes on his toilet. He rolled from his mattress, fully dressed, in waistcoat, collar and cuffs, fingerless gloves: he reached for the once-white dustercoat that served as a blanket. He was lost without it; a disbarred hairdresser. The coat was his comforter, and his calendar. One pocket, when he inherited the garment, contained six limestone pebbles. Therefore, Arthur lived by a six-day week: the day of rest was an option he rarely needed to invoke. His existence was perfectly adjustable to the symmetrical paradigm of cricket. His philosophy discovered, in the end-to-end, turn-and-turn-about duality of the game, a Manichaean implication. The strictly regimented numerology satisfied him in a way that was too deep to articulate.

  Each morning, buttoned into his overall, Arthur shifted one stone. ‘Another night gone,’ he would mutter, grimly. But when all the stones were disposed of, safely lodged in the originally barren pocket, it was necessary to begin the cycle again; using the untainted hand to trundle the heated pebbles back, one by one, to their starting place. Any small calculation (in the way of purchasing bread or a newspaper) that might require the aid of the stones had to be entered into only as a last resort: or the crucial mensuration of passing time was thrown into chaos. Midweek saw Arthur at his most balanced. By the end, he sagged; weighed down by the bias of a full pouch. A severe strain was placed on an area already disputed between ilium, ischium, and pubis. He walked like a man conscious of the fact that his trousers are held up by faith alone. He rattled: enemies were warned, friends scattered.

  Nauseous, and light-headed with fasting, Arthur manoeuvred around the sharp spiral of stairs towards the street door. His coat-tails spun out; the pebbles striking the wall a muffled blow at each revolution. Once outside there was no return until dusk fell: the heavy door, operated by a cunningly weighted device, locked behind him.

  He did not have far to travel: jobbed on to the Palace of Dossers was a parasitical structure (which may, in fact, have preceded it), the Spear of Destiny; an inn distinguished by several entrances, close passages, and the dubious suggestion that a way might be found into the saloon bar from the cellars of the adjoining pesthouse. Unfortunately this dream, though much discussed, had never been realized. The bones of the searchers lay buried beneath a mass of ugly bricks, licked white by indigenous rodents.

  Hands sunk in deep pockets, tolling on his rosary of pebbles, Arthur waited: exiled indefinitely at ‘square leg’. Two hours passed before the window above the pub sign opened – and a wicker basket was lowered on a rope. A swift inspection revealed four lonely coins, but no written instruction. No instruction was necessary. No word or glance was ever exchanged between Arthur and the invisible donor.

  The Bangladeshi grocer who had inherited, along with the business, the title of ‘Mickser’ (the aka of a shady and excessively mobile Dubliner from the North Side), parked his Rover Vitesse on the kerb, set its alarms, and scuttled across Fieldgate Street to unchain his plate-glass door, before it was terminally violated by Arthur’s palsied fist. Mickser was genial, even at this ungoldy hour, smooth-skinned, balding more gracef
ully than Frank Sinatra: an incipient pot belly damaged the clean lines of his stylish shirt. The customer who took the till’s hymen demanded a certain deference. ‘What’s wrong with your bed, Arthur? Too much rub-a-dub, mate. No good at your age, you old bastard.’ Mickser was enjoying himself so much he didn’t bother to ‘adjust’ the change. Slowly, Arthur filled his basket: eggs you could see through, red-top milk, pilchards, sour cream, Mail on Sunday, sliced white loaf. It was calculated to the penny. Arthur pocketed the coins that were returned to him; his most regular income. The hooked rope was waiting, dangling from the pub window; the basket was rapidly pulled from his sight. His brief glory as a discerning consumer was over.

  His tribute paid, and his crust earned, Arthur moved south, down Romford Street – a tight chasm between refurbished tenements – shuffling towards the Commercial Road, testing the cracks in the paving stones with an imaginary willow. He kept to his own warren, did not stray from the force-field of the gentle aliens, the brown faces and the unrequired artists: a plantation of sorrows. He had his routes, his benches; but they were fast cutting them down around him, nibbling at the violated brain-stem. The map by which Arthur navigated had been refined to a network of razor strokes on the palm of his hand: scarlet traces scabbing the ingrained dirt. His apparently unmotivated perambulations gave him the leisure to preach a recital of Jesuit sins, to muddy the skirts of the Whore of Rome. He pleaded his innocence to the skies, and caressed the rope burns on his neck: water, he shunned. In the window of a knife shop, he caught his own mocking reflection: how could he remain suspended in time, unaging, and soft as cheese? What was the nature of his crime? He spat a dry pellet of venom at the lying portrait. And cancelled it with a smeared circuit of his arm.

  The river, guilty as ever, glimpsed between warehouses, stalled him: his heart went out, he spun on his heel, tramped back, head down, plodding in his extinguished footsteps; demanding sanctuary of The Spear of Destiny. He arrived just as the exanimous sun fell behind the Mosque, innocently emphasizing the glory of its bilious brickwork – against which lurched the lengthening shadows of the unquenched vagrants.

  The immense hands – flashy with senile lentigo, trellised with hard blue veins – that Arthur had last seen gathering up the wicker basket, now lay, without threat, on the polished mahogany surface of the bar. This horizontal mirror of ancient wood played back the transaction as a sepia-tinted reverse-angle shot. A signet ring, the size of a Klondike nugget, stood out from the publican’s paw like a supplementary knuckle. Its owner seemed simply to have allowed it to grow, in situ: it was worth more than the pub’s freehold. The man himself was composed equally of bone and metal. His shoulders were Detroit fenders, and his bullneck would have blunted any chainsaw. He was formidable, long-skulled, spike-haired, with calcitic eyes and brows like cutlass slashes. He commanded the deck of the pub by the slightest twitch of his nostrils. He offered Arthur no greeting. A bottle of barley wine was opened and slid towards him. No payment was exacted, and no glass was produced.

  Arthur retreated to his corner in the snug, to watch over the tables and to empty the ashtrays (usually, into his own pockets). If anyone else had been occupying Arthur’s favoured chair he would have thought nothing to plonking himself down directly in their lap: the social gaff was never repeated. But ‘The Boy’ – this decrepit and weather-stained adolescent – was not regarded by his peers as a serious drinking man. Half a dozen barley wines, and any dregs left in the pots, saw him through a single session. The Irish considered him, for all practical purposes, a teetotaller; a snivelling chapel-haunting bogtrotter who wouldn’t stand his round; a sheep-tickling gombeen eejit suckled on rainwater dripping from the arse-hairs of a spavined donkey. And that was when they were in a conciliatory mood, badgering Arthur to slip them a bottle of lavatory cleaner to give ‘a bit of body’ to the Hanger Lane stout.

  The Paddies shared the front bar, in an uneasy truce, with a school of choleric and pop-eyed Jocks, who were ready, after a dozen Youngers, cut with blue, to let fly at anything that moved. These amiable exiles were easily recognized by their pinched and blistered lower lips; eaten away by spitting a perpetual stream of f-sounds, ‘Jimmie’, from behind what was left of their upper teeth. Rabid and posthumous men, without social identity, they had followed William Hare, the resurrectionist, on the long road south. ‘Hang Burke, banish Hare, / Burn Knox in Surgeon’s Square.’ Hare, having narrowly escaped the gallows – where Burke dangled for almost an hour – was released from gaol on 5 February 1829, and ‘put on a train south’. He travelled under the name of ‘Mr Black’; to vanish for ever into the streets of Whitechapel. Another blind beggar, another silent volume.

  By day, the Micks worked Euston; not having the imagination to travel further afield than the spot where they fell off the Liverpool train. The younger lads walked about with their hands out, waiting for some philanthropist to stick a shovel in them. They mingled awkwardly with the wall-whores; drinking anything that was put in front of them, and stripping to the bone the first man to drop, or take a fit. Only the strongest warriors begged a path back to the safety of the Doss House. The unfortunate, and the sick, received abrupt cosmetic surgery on the end of a broken bottle, or were brutally culled by the refuse departments of the state – tumbling to their deaths from visionary staircases that appeared before them in solitary cells; gibbering-out in controlled pharmaceutical experiments.

  But the landlord, Jerzy the Count, could call the whole pack to order by the simple act of heaving himself down the length of the bar, snapping open his personal cigar box, withdrawing a Cuban dynamite-stick, which he rammed between his lips, primed like a blowpipe, to spatter defaulters with high-velocity dumdums. He thumped the lid shut, causing the unboiled teeth, in the confectioner’s glass jar on the shelf behind him, to rattle. Jerzy acted as unofficial dentist to the Doss House; knotting a red handkerchief around the fangs of any swollen-cheeked supplicant mad enough to moan over his drink; he swiftly extracted the decayed stump. Then cleaned out the bone fragments with a pair of pliers. Many halfway-healthy canines, incisors, premolars, and molars had also been recklessly sacrificed for the free tot of neat Polish spirits that concluded the operation. The raw shock of the first gulp numbed the tongue, froze the eyeballs in tent-peg horror, and even, momentarily, silenced the Glaswegians. Some of Jerzy’s trophies, enamelled veterans, were capped in gold, souvenirs of plumier days; most were yellow pebbles, cabbagecoloured drachma.

  All this Hogarthian stuff was beneath the notice of the Count’s wife, the Lady Eleanor, who kept to the burgundy-flock cave of the snug, standing guard over her inscribed portraits of Bobby Moore, Archie Moore, Kenny Lynch, Charlie Magri, ‘Babs’ Windsor, and assorted bracelet-waving gangsters. She perched, a silver-dipped cockatoo, on her high stool; scarlet of claw, dragging deep on menthol-flavoured fags, and tossing back thimbles of obscure but highly-scented liqueurs.

  Joblard and his camarade were among the familiars of Eleanor’s bosky covert. They were, once again, in temporary retreat from the slings and arrows of bailiffs and bankers, estranged families, over-eager disciples and equally impoverished friends. They were potless, and squatting in a borrowed cell among shelves of authenticated nouveaux proles: dope dealers, outworkers, arts administrators and the like. But, while they lived within the shadow of the Doss House, it had not yet become a final reality, a fixed abode. The old vision Joblard suffered – of destitution, memory loss, vagrancy, wine – merely simmered on the back burner: his face returned to him from the scabs and rags of some passing mendicant. They were welcomed to the pub as friends, and courtiers, with no interrogation as to their past or their future. The Spear was gradually revealed, over the months of leisurely intoxication, as an independent principality – with its own laws, health service, banishments and forfeits.

  One evening, two of the ‘potato-heads’ began to fight; ineffectively, a solid table between them – but with sufficient spunk to attract the sporting instincts of the assembled Jocks, who w
ere so bored that they were watching a foam-flecked nutter spit out segments of his own tongue. Luckily for the amateur combatants, Jerzy was not in the bar. Occasionally he would withdraw – fingering a swiss roll of crisp new banknotes – to conduct a ‘bit of business’ upstairs with dark-suited associates, who arrived in the alleyway, bearing heavy suitcases and well-wrapped packages. And who left, unsteadily, without them. Bursts of strident martial music may have been timed to baffle obscure blood rituals, or overheated currency debates – but they led to rumours, never more, of planned coups: Knights of the Rosy Cross, Timber Wolves, worshippers at the flame of racial purity.

  The Lady Eleanor had been left alone to cope with any dramas, short of a visitation from the angel with the key to the bottomless pit. Unable to lever herself from the adhesive surface of the stool, or to show her face in the retort of the street bar, she essayed a rising sequence of hysterical fit-inducing hisses and whistles. Joblard, ever the gent, was constrained to stagger forward; partly from a nice sense of social obligation, but mostly in quest of serviceable lowlife anecdotes, should it prove necessary – as it so often did – to sing for his supper around the dinner tables of such recently humanized investment opportunities as Finsbury Park or South-west Hackney.

  The first Paddy, late of County Offaly – a sullen, custard-pallor student of Aquinas – made skilful use of a well-seasoned crutch; jabbing with dogmatic insistence at his opponent’s sauce-stained waistcoat, while mumbling a succession of discredited Latin tags. The cumulative effect of these guerrilla raids was to enrage his elderly adversary to the point of a massive sunrise apoplexy. The man’s spectacles – more decorative than functional – sported only to sustain the gravitas of a former ‘boy curate’ at Mooney’s House, Pearse Street, shattered when the sharpened crutch-tip caught him a spiteful blow behind the ear; bringing his misshapen blackberry-crusted nose into sudden and violent contact with the formica.