Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘The voices didn’t join in, this time, as she hadn’t spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus… Better say nothing at all’

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-glass (And What Alice Found There)

  I had chased the rumours from Highgate to Stratford, from Spitalfields Market to the Minories – but they eluded me, sliding feline around the next corner, spraying the cobblestones. I caught whispers in back-bars, sudden hunched-shoulder silences. Gnomic hints, clues masked in obscenity, had been inscribed, a foot from the pavings, on the locked doors of the Fournier Street mosque: Spring-Heeled Jack had returned.

  It began soon after they closed the market down and the methsmen infiltrated the catacombs. They had been driven from the ramps in Fieldgate Street, ferreted from their holes in the ground by the restoration of St-George-in-the-East; burnt or flooded from their skippers. The tides of benevolence outpaced them. Undeveloped bombsites were protected by razor-wire, trick paint that took the skin from your hands, chained wolves. The old trenches and bunkers were transformed by spectral floodlights into a pageant of futurist aesthetics: pecked and raked by overhead cameras. The jake-fanciers, blues boys, and cider-heads had gone under: burrowing into the earth, they renounced the light. Even their final sanctuary, the Monster Doss House, was sealed ‘for renovation’.

  But it wasn’t until the third of the Railway Murders – VAMPIRE AND BRIDE-TO-BE IN DOCKLANDS HORROR – that some ambitious nerd on the East London Advertiser, scenting a future ‘paperback original’, invoked Jack; and triggered the inevitable climate of compulsory mass hallucination. Letters poured in from a fools’ pilgrimage of state-sponsored zombies, table-tappers, and hoarders of ‘Old Boys’ Annuals’. Penny Dreadful buffs stumbled gibbering out of Leytonstone with a tale to tell on local radio.

  A man had been noticed on the platform at Hackney Wick by an Afro-Caribbean SRN, entrained for North Woolwich, ‘visiting the sister’. She was committed to a monologue concerning a recent wedding party, to which she had not been invited – when she distinctly saw, as she repeated to the Advertiser’s yawning hack, ‘a dirty, long-haired fellow, gypsy-looking, nicotine-coloured: like he needed a strong evacuant, man’. He was wearing a kind of fancy-dress voodoo cape, ‘Batman thing’, and pretending – so she believed – to wait for the Richmond train. She had travelled the borough in the course of her duties, and handled ‘all sorts’. This joker was a bad one. She remembers saying to her friend, ‘Some people are still, well, I got to say it, not entirely liberated from prejudice’; a movement caught her eye, she glanced out. The gypsy had reappeared on the opposite platform, and was staring straight in at them with his great red eyes, like a big savage dog. It was as if he had jumped right over their heads! There was no other way. No time to have gone around the train, or even under it. He couldn’t cross the line. But the way he was holding his finger up to his lips, and licking it – uggh, so suggestive! As the train began to move, she opened the window, to take his details: he had vanished. Gave her the shakes, just to talk about it.

  There had been another incident – reported in confidence at the muscat-sipping close of a dinner party – where a publisher, returning from a Götterdämmerung of a book-launch, emerged a little tentatively from the underground at Highbury Corner and started to tap his way across the Fields; taking plenty of ‘breathers’ while he steamed the bark from an avenue of lime trees. He was not surprised, and only slightly annoyed, when a figure he described as ‘a Hal Ellson punk, revamped by Clive Barker’ took to ‘posing’ repeatedly in front of him, ‘like an escaped Ballantine Books sensationalist wrapper’. The publisher admitted, to his cruelly sniggering audience, that he had probably not even noticed the freak the first two or three times: it was all he could do to prop up the trees as they threatened to fall and crush him. He assumed he was being solicited by one of the more short-sighted of the homeless predators who claimed the Fields for their habitat. And anyway, as he confessed, he was ‘weary of tongue, smoked raw, stimulated to the point of spontaneous detonation’; his neck creased into folds from nodding a reluctant agreement to the demands of total strangers, bearing contracts for signature.

  But, even to this cerebrum-abusing inkbug, the visionary pest on his path was unavoidable: as he managed to navigate around the subhuman entity, so the creature somehow contrived to ‘manifest’ itself six or eight yards further towards the east, his shelter and destination. There was a tedious sweat-handed familiarity about all this. We were back in the halcyon days of mirror-trips, bad acid; meals that re-formed from the traces of vomit on your desert boots. The threat of mugging did not disturb the publisher. He would have welcomed it as a pragmatic solution. It would excuse the present condition of his head. He had been polished by the dry cheek-busses of fluttering PR parrakeets, breathed on by garlic-chewing agents, assaulted by demented authors with saga proposals longer than their own doorstopper scripts. He snapped: lowered his naked scalp and charged, blind, at the sneering phantom. Nothing! A breeze of soft fire: like singeing the hairs on your hands, when you are too drunk to notice. Gone, disparu. A slightly chilled column of air.

  The publisher, call him Alex Roe, dined out so often on this fable that he began, in the end, to think of it affectionately as another over-seductive synopsis; a blockbuster, commissioned but never delivered. The one that got away.

  The only other report of spring-heeled weirdness that I managed to trace brought me back, once again, to Princelet Street. A persistent film student, going under the name of Davy Locke, had been working on a project suggested by my account – published in the Guardian – of the apparent mystery of Rodinsky’s room. Using the contacts Davy developed, we were able to spend several days sifting the files, documents, and notebooks discovered among the promiscuous chaos of the Heritage Centre office. As always, we operated against the encroachments of cartels, and deal-makers who were sharp enough to sense that something was about to happen in this place, and to demand a piece of it: any piece. The narrow synagogue hallway filled with multicolour turbans bobbling, like weevils in a pail, as they huddled together to whisper their propositions; before being shunted aside by a buffalo-gang of Hasidic hitmen in black, ankle-length coats and bullet-catching beards. The tumbling shadows, the muffled collisions of these debates fell across the doorway to the office, where Davy Locke had shaken the dust from yet another ‘last surviving’ Letts Schoolgirls’ Diary. It was prefaced by Rodinsky’s translations of the most effective curses and warnings he could dredge from all his collected Books of the Dead.

  After weeks of deliberation, lengthy discussions in the poolroom of the Seven Stars, Davy decided to risk his four hundred feet of 16mm film over one autumn weekend: go for bust. He invited me to perform a single take in which I would mumble inconclusively: feeling most fervently that the moment when the shutters were removed from the window, to allow this shot, was the moment when the last vestiges of ‘mystery’ would dissolve. The light held among the chosen objects and specimens would fuse with the world.

  We pushed our way through the stacks of newspaper, along Rodinsky’s ghost-corridor, and out on to the parapet; to sit and watch the sun move behind the Portland dagger of Christ Church, and on to illuminate the Babylonian advance of the City’s jagged towers. We were unnecessary. Under the slats of weather-boarded garrets, machinists pedalled furiously; oblivious of the alternative realities that would soon envelop them. The street beneath us was poised, finely balanced, between its own time and our projection of it. It remained uncaptured, immune.

  The shoot was over. Boxes of film-making equipment, used by the professionals only for sitting on, were manhandled down the springy and unlit stairs. I touched palms with the cameraman and the two girls, sound and continuity, who waited with the boxes while Davy went to retrieve their van. I was eager to return to my typewriter; and the unresolved peculiarities of Woolf Haince’s Grundig.

  A few weeks later, when I went to St Martin’s to view the rough-cut, I took the opportunity of
questioning the members of the crew, separately, about what they claimed had happened after I left them outside the synagogue. This was not easy. Davy couldn’t let up: he had become so involved with the nature and quality of Princelet Street that he had been returning obsessively, spending days poring over the diaries. He even read some prophetic significance into the tattered ‘Angelus’ calendar. He cited Dali’s painting of 1933, ‘Gala et l’Angélus de Millet précédant l’arrivée imminente des anamorphes coniques’. The calendar was a magician’s ‘window’; the figures of the man and woman, the rake and the cart were runic letters forging some motive word of power. By his lingering close-ups Davy had incubated the Angelus, and speeded the arrival of the ‘anamorphes coniques’. We could expect to encounter, at any moment, a lobster-crowned revenger out of Arcimboldi: the figure lurking at Dali’s open door.

  Davy witnessed the moment when Rodinsky’s books were brought back from the vaults of the Museum of London; fifty uniform cases, prayers, primers, fold-out plates of inscriptions and king-lists. But the event that excited him most occurred when he replaced the shutters on the windows of the attic room. A beam of light shafted from a fault in the boards on to the dusty surface of an open drawer in the bedside cupboard. A white ring, or disk, played speculatively across the enclosed tray: ‘a camera obscura’. The drawer became a miniature theatre in which light itself was the prime mover, articulating this drama of reduced and abandoned objects. Davy was still worrying at this epiphany – which, he felt, proved the inadequacy of his attempt to capture the essence of the mystery on film – as he walked away to loop the projector, and to dim the lights. I was able, at last, to probe the witnesses I had come to see.

  The little Scots girl said she hadn’t really noticed anything. She was so pleased to get away from the awful chill of that room, and the dust – which she was starting to think of as Rodinsky’s disintegrated body. He had not vanished: he had come apart, haemorrhaging motes of unspoken language, ancestral slights, persecutions. She felt the crew were trespassing: the relief of being on the pavements overwhelmed her. She screwed up her eyes to cancel that invaded space. She may have dozed off, nodded out on her feet: a strange lethargy came over her. She remembers being in the van driving away; when, suddenly, they all wanted to talk at once.

  Her friend, the dark handsome one, was more specific. A man ‘appeared’ at the far, west end of the street. The sun was setting behind him. It was, she swears, like Nosferatu or Der Golem: long tumbledown houses tilting, windows on fire, and this guy, ‘quite good-looking, in a lizardy way’, standing absolutely still, and casting no shadow. He definitely hadn’t stepped out of a doorway, or up from a basement. She’d been thinking of making a sketch of the view towards Wilkes Street – ‘it was amazing, a time shift’ – then there he was. A red-bronze colour, with shoulder-length hair. He was naked, and prodigious. ‘You know, built.’ The girls giggled. Enormous, ‘hung like a stallion’.

  ‘Bollocks!’ The cameraman took off his beret. He knew the dude had abseiled down from the church tower. And he was wearing some kind of parachute-harness.

  Three solid days of walking, circling, doubling back on my tracks, buying drinks for the endemically loquacious – those who have seen almost everything, and remembered nothing – took me no further into the tale. My cash-flow was critical. I was ready to jack it in and hump a few crates of my best stock to John Adrian’s shop in Cecil Court (where he is always available for Fagin impersonations), when I noticed the dog. It had been there from the first morning, but it kept its distance. Now it was ahead of me; when I grew tired, it waited: shough, water-rug, demi-wolf; a skulking black mat; stump-tailed, dripping, a flat-snout cur. Head tilted grimly forward, it led me through a maze of obscure streets, and windowless warehouses; beyond the Aldgate boundary and deep into the Minories.

  As I climbed wearily up the steps towards Fenchurch Street Station, the dog turned – and I recognized it. The beast had somehow earned remission from beneath the hoofs of the Knight’s horse: uncelebrated, it guided the trail from Southwark in William Blake’s engraving of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. While the other pilgrims look fondly back on the arches and spires of the city, talk among themselves, flirt or boast, the wretched animal stares straight ahead: beyond the illusion of achievement, he plods; collared, unable to deviate from a course for which he has no relish, no hope of salvation. The pilgrimage offers sixty miles of agony, and the constant possibility of being trampled into an undignified pulp.

  Things had improved; my guardian, and familiar, had lost his collar – but not the weals that reminded him of its once-irritant presence. The cur waited at the head of the stairs, hieratic, dribbling in the dirt, posed for me to appreciate its startling defect: it had no eyes. I do not mean that it was blind, or that its eyes had been gouged out by handlers preparing it for some specialized dogfight. Coarse hair covered the place where the sockets should have been. The skull was smooth as wood. The animal had never possessed eyes, and did not appear to miss them.

  An answer – the wrong one – came to me, in response to Sabella Milditch’s oracular riddle. ‘What is the opposite of a dog?’ ‘An Andalusian dog’: the ‘encounter between two dreams’.

  II

  The privatization of the railways carried us straight back into all the original excitements – and most of the chaos – that attended the birth of the system. Unchallenged social changes generated their own hubris: anything was possible. Demons slipped the leash. We were lords of creation. We could tear down and reshape cities; send iron ladders steepling out over the unregistered landscape. Holding Companies were cobbled together in wine bars, floated on breakfast telephones, sealed with a snort or a massage: new lines were recklessly launched and abandoned – to fail in Ongar, or out among the mudflats of Sheppey. Viaducts sauntered elegantly across watersport docklands; then waited, in shivering embarrassment, for the ring of Dynasty XXI fortresses they would service to be completed.

  When the line was projected from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1834, St Thomas’s Hospital was uprooted (leaving the Surgical Tower as an amputated stump), rookeries were flattened, graveyards were excavated to support the piers. ‘Deregulated’ energies frolic like Vikings, boast and ravish: paperwork is retrospective. A gang of Irish navvies, sixty strong, appear on your doorstep, grinning, with picks and shovels. Your house comes down that morning. The letter from the council remains ‘in the post’. The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford; recouping some of the capital investment by graciously allowing the punters to use the edge of the track as a rusticated esplanade, catching glimpses of the mothering river – beyond the hedgerows and the mounds of rubble.

  Nothing is wasted. The nice idea was ‘what-if’d’ of rehousing the traumatized and homeless tenants in model dwellings constructed in the arches of the viaducts: cave-squatters in Rotherhithe, awaiting a visitation from Ansel Adams. And, meanwhile, engravings were commissioned, replete with idealized gardens – bell jars, bee hives, pedestrians in a narcoleptic trance. A church spire lifts from the domesticated woodlands.

  The reality, sadly, was a lesser thing. The constant passage of steam trains overhead fouled the laundry, choked the kitchens, rattled the stone ‘sleepers’, and brought down plaster from the ceiling. Cracks formed, like emergent river systems; water streamed down the curved walls, stimulating moulds and previously unrecorded mosses. The inhabitants fled; black-faced, white-eyed, trembling. The caverns among the arches were translated overnight into brothels and grog shops: they shuddered to other, self-induced, rhythms. The unbroken revelry was drowned by the clattering of the rails. Street traders, and unlicensed hawkers, weaseled the now unrented spaces. Animals were bartered. A tunnel of covert merchandise burrowed its way through the orchards; giving entrance to rats, phlegm taints, cholera. Amateur sportsmen peppered with buckshot anything that moved among the saplings. Indigenous labour mobs disputed points of etiquette with the Irish navvies, invoking the aid of crowbars and shovels still hea
vy with graveyard clay.

  The advantage of this new wave of millennial railway promoters – visionaries in pin-stripe suits and hard hats – is that they are prepared to take a flier on all the eccentric early-Victorian routes: so wantonly trimmed by pragmatists and penny-pinching mandarins. These muzzled sharks burnt to reactivate such fantasies as the mad curve from Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm: the scenic route, by way of Bow, Victoria Park (or Hackney Wick), Hackney and Highbury. They didn’t care where the trains went; the attraction lay in tying up the station concourse. The slower and more complicated the service, the better for business: a captive scatter of sullen consumers bored into stockpiling reserve sets of dollar-signed boxer shorts, croissants, paperbacks, gasmasks, ties to hang themselves… the potential yield had them drooling. Soon there were more stations than railways. Shopping malls, from Peterborough to Portsmouth, were designed to look as if you needed an ‘away day’ ticket to ride the elevators. Combat-fatigued office vets found themselves reserving a seat in some burger bar, and asking to be put off at Colchester. Others set out as usual for the city and were never seen again.

  Committed to the black dog’s – potentially lethal – offer of Fenchurch Street, I elbowed an opening towards the ticket office, shoving through this demented set of fancy-dress vagrants, muffin men, and wenches whose wobbling chests were displayed on trays decorated by orange-segment chocolates. A pair of security men with commendations from the Scrubs were bouncing a genuine wino, who had wandered in looking for small change, down the length of the pink marble staircase. Everywhere there were posters in celebration of the first ‘railway murder’, authenticated by H. B. Irving, actor and author. This assassin, Franz Müller, was depicted as a moody passed-over curate, swallowed in a miasma of pew-guilt and self-abuse. ‘Ja, ich habe es gethan.’

  A contemporary account revealed that the victim, Thomas Briggs, was discovered on the tracks, ‘his feet towards London – his head towards Hackney’. The object of the crime, a gold albert chain, was traded in the Cheapside shop of a jeweller called Death. Müller fled to America, attempting to subsidize his voyage by devouring, as a wager, five pounds of German sausages at a sitting. He failed: his dry mouth refusing the slippery and uncooked cargo.