Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro. A one-man militant tendency I took, at first horrified glance, for some hireling doppelgänger of Müller was storming between the colour-co-ordinated barriers; ploughing all before him with a chieftain among bicycles, varnished in radioactive puke. He was wearing a rough-weather set of golfing tweeds, in purple-and-lemon checks that would have brought Jeeves to the edge of apoplexy; and which now succeeded, where all else failed, in driving off the sightless dog. A modest morning’s work for my old comrade in adversity, the unchristened Dryfeld.

  ‘I have, sir, no desire to urinate on your property. I want a ticket for my bicycle.’ At the sound of his voice: families, climbing out of taxis, climbed straight back in again. The security men developed a pressing interest in railway timetables. Fathers hid their children’s faces in unsuitable magazines.

  A posse comitatus of minor uniformed officials were urgently striving to explain that their award-winning reproduction short-haul carriages – though mounted on metal frames with spring buffers, upholstered, horsehair-cushioned, smooth as a diligence in their flight over the city – had no corridors, no guard’s van, no toilet facilities, and no space reserved for bicycles. The journey was too short, too spectacular, to be of value to cyclists – who liked to keep their heads down, while they ground, masochistically, at the pedals. The line did not cater, and did not intend to cater, for that sort of person: the trouser-clipped, yellow-bandaged anarchist.

  ‘Well, it caters for me!’ the Magwitch-lookalike growled, immovable. ‘And I never pee.’

  This was true. He would not give the time to it. The daylight hours were for scavenging, not eating or pleasuring, or indulging the whims of a caffeine-twitchy bladder. In decent darkness he gorged himself to the boundaries of immobility on trays of innocent vegetables. He evacuated his bowels, massively, once every full moon; according to the opening hours of remote provincial bookshops, and the dictates of his personal lunar calendar.

  The lovingly re-created teak compartments of the Chalk Farm Special, shimmering in maroon and canary yellow, were intended to carry only human ballast. Cyclists cycled: for health, economy, the liberation of womankind, and shapely calf muscles. Dryfeld chose to disagree: firmly. The first railway murder of the new system was imminent.

  A compromise was finally arrived at – with the yelped assistance of half a hundred gun-jumping middle-management chickens who were trying to make a run from the city, before they let the advance wave of lager louts out of their software cages. Dryfeld would purchase an entire compartment, six broad seats, and progress in the dignity of a pasha; stabling his wheeled steed and book bags in unaccustomed splendour. I would travel with him, as confidant and betrayer.

  I hadn’t set eyes on the man for months, not since the advent of his overnight fame. Feeling, correctly, that the old sources, the clandestine bookshops, had been pillaged by book fairies and part-time dabblers, Dryfeld produced a vitriolic booklet listing them all in microscopic samizdat typeface: providing the only true and accurate portrait of their virtues (along with a wholly inaccurate stab at their phone numbers and opening hours). It read, to civilians, like some entrancing fiction: the Pilgrim’s Progress of the Enterprise Culture. The Guardian picked up on it at once, rolling out Richard Boston to retrieve the mysterious author from among the stacks. A three-second TV flash of man and bicycle – and the image was buried in the brain-pans of even the most submerged members of the trade. Dryfeld was now so successful that it was a matter of weeks before he found himself in the bankruptcy courts, hammered by lawsuits, lovingly embraced by creditors who had fallen for the optimistic rumours of his death. His inviolate lack of social identity was detonated. He existed: as a National Resource, an eccentric who had gone public. It took an extreme effort of will – and a few hefty bribes – to duck under and out, to reprogramme his ice-worn routes.

  Seeing me, he launched unprompted into the monologue he had broken off when I tipped him – chuckling over the strokes he had pulled in Mossy Noonmann’s pit – on to Steynford Station one cold December afternoon. I heard his remorseless and inelegant dissertation on male nipple piercing, all the way to the A1’s escape ramp, as I gunned the motor in celebration of my release from his overwhelming presence. The odour of electroconvulsed apricots followed me all the way to London.

  ‘Begging!’ he announced, spreading his newspapers across three seats, wedging the bicycle between us, and drawing down the tasselled blind to remove such feeble distractions as the external world. ‘I’ve decided to give it a real go.’

  The intended purpose of my trip on this (or any) railway was eliminated by Dryfeld’s ill-considered action. Before the viaducts were built the middle classes had no opportunity of spying on the lives and habits of the underclass, no chance of peeping into tenement cliffs for jolts of righteous horror. Nor was there any excuse for the card-carrying voyeur to swallow Rear Window snatches of brutalist sex in sauce-bottle kitchens: the aphrodisiac scent of burnt onions and damp armpits. The elevated railway provided the first cinema of poverty – open-city realism – as the trains cut through the otherwise impenetrable warrens of metropolitan squalor.

  ‘Begging has got to be the next great adventure for disaffiliated free-range capitalists like us,’ Dryfeld continued. ‘I had my virgin pop at it last week. Went to my favourite veggy restaurant with a woman I knew would give me trouble. I took no money, said I’d been mugged; didn’t tell her it was by the Revenue. The stupid bitch had more sense than I gave her credit for: she walked out before I’d finished my second bowl of soup.’ He smiled in remembrance of the incident.

  ‘Never feed them first,’ he advised. ‘And never feed them after. They eat too much.’ He stroked his hairy lapels – and sneaked a crafty glance at his reflection in the darkened window. He had the vanity of a craftsman among embalmers.

  The voice roared on. It had outlived its host. Dryfeld was free to admire his tweeds to the point of cerebral orgasm. ‘Found myself ejected into Greek Street,’ he said, ‘while the manager held on to the Katherine Mansfield I’d intended to flog to the lady. I quite fancied her, so I was only going to treble the price I first thought of. I soon discovered the first rule of scrumping for cash: don’t mutter something about “20p for a cup of tea” – demand a fiver for a taxi. They’ll think you’re one of them. Money talks to money. These vagrants are all amateurs. They stop as soon as they’ve got enough for a wet. And – worse – they share it!’ He shuddered at the notion. ‘I cleared the price of the meal in ten minutes. Had to celebrate. Went back and ate it all again. Begging’s a definite winner – as long as you’re not a beggar.’

  His alarmingly ruddy face glistened in beads of sweated blood; glowed like a respray. He scowled in complete self-absorption from beneath malignant caterpillar eyebrows. The bony ridges of his profile were shifting and sliding to reform, chameleon-like, in a simulacrum of the railway butcher, Franz Müller; whose sepia-tinted mugshot had been thoughtfully placed where the mirror should have been. I responded, tamely, by the defensive magic of fingering my imaginary watch chain, and accepting the damaged etheric identity of Thomas Briggs, the ill-fated Lombard Street clerk.

  My bullish companion had once more recognized a shift in the market, in time to work his ticket and move on – before the forty-quid-a-week small-business mob snapped at his heels, blaming their empty begging bowls on a failure to secure the best underground tunnels. By the time they steeled themselves to fork out for his guidebook on ‘How and Where to Make Your Poverty Pitch’, Dryfeld would be ankle-deep in his latest survival hijack. Keep stomping, stay alive.

  He even had word of the ‘Outpatients’. First the good news: they stumbled on a Publisher going through a sticky patch who was prepared to unload a few sacks of high-culture rejects for the OPs to flog on the streets at one-third of cover price. Or, if that was too tough to calculate, for anything they could get. The OPs set themselves up with a stall on a wi
ndswept patch of river frontage alongside the National Theatre. The initial miscalculation came when they attempted to sell the same titles – wafer-thin playscripts – that the theatre bookstall was unsuccessfully promoting a few yards beyond them. The second mistake was fatal: they acted on the enterprising notion of carrying back all the valuable books to the Publisher’s door, and claiming half the cover-price as ‘returns’. For a few months all went well, the world they had ripped off was in chaos, shuddering from the threats of corporate raiders: they lived high on the hog, purchasing new saddles for their bicycles, no longer scuffling through the dawn markets; pigging out on a pharmaceutical cornucopia. They floated, glazed and benign, over Camden Town and environs: envied among their scriptless peers.

  Then the roof fell in; they were rumbled by accountants, denied, cut off without even a fire-damaged copy of Kenneth Baker’s Little Britain anthology. Their prelapsarian tip of a stall was glimpsed in the corner of the frame during one of Prince Charles’s documentary attempts to announce Himself as the latest Martian poet. He was drifting downstream, confidently stacking the similes, ready to dive out of the sun and strafe this architectural abomination (carbuncle/ashtray/training centre for thought-police), when the transfixed management noticed a troop of scarf-dangling renegades touting for trade – like refugees from some unsponsored touring version of the Marat-Sade. They screamed for ‘Security’, and bulldozed what was left into a skip. The contract for ‘unofficial remainders’ passed on to a discreet and respectable dealer – Henry Milditch – who marketed his salvaged pulp with such skill that he was soon able to retire, as something resembling a gentleman, to the Suffolk littoral. And the Publishers were free to trawl once more for designer casualties from the rock industry, Irish poets whose rhetorical flourishes could be tamed to suit the requirements of English examination boards, and ‘one-off’ vagrants with a story to tell.

  Crushed, spurned, spiritually overdrawn, the OPs didn’t have the bottle for another assault on the frontline jumbles; which were now, in any case, the territory of much friskier locusts. They simply vanished, gave up the ghost, blankly wandered the precincts, skate tracks, and concrete walkways. Lepers, bell ringers: they hid themselves behind sob-story placards. They were culled. One of them was fished from the river, swollen and unidentified; the others were beyond tracing. Old enemies might recognize them by an ineradicable vacancy, a born-again naïveté that was almost criminal.

  The train had, randomly, stopped and started a dozen times; obedient to the stutter of the Docklands Lightrailway force-field. (Lightrailway or Railway of Light? The only illuminated path over the Plains of Outer Darkness.) While Dryfeld was preoccupied with the arrangement of buttons on his waistcoat, I released the blind and leant from the window to look at the lumpy and shimmering moonscape. We had halted on an embankment that afforded an unrestricted vision of a graveyard, or untended corner of parkland. The branches of deformed trees brushed the damp ground, living ghosts ready to move in greeting towards the stalled carriages of the dead. (I remembered Joblard’s tales of the white ‘mourning’ train shuttling the stiffs to Nunhead: white curtains, white upholstery, white-suited conductors carrying white toppers. The train must have slid silently through suburban halts, like an avatar of death itself.)

  The railway had casually amputated a dream site (caterpillar dreaming), encroached on gardens I now recognized as the burial place of the Aboriginal cricketer, King Cole. The dream was maimed, but not destroyed: disregarded. Inside our padded compartment the restored gaslight hissed and spat: we were trapped in a blasphemous parody of the confessional. Dryfeld was a mad, potato-picking axeman, ready to dribble out some tale of mutilation and necrophilia. The great wheels of his bicycle stood between us like a cage, webbing his raw-skinned face in faults and veins. I began to understand something of the terrible conspiracy between victim and murderer.

  Through the square of open window, the night – salted with corruptions – pressed on our thoughts, dictating all the lies buried beneath us: forcing us to speak. I was overwhelmed by a sense of the Lombard Street clerk’s hysterical conformity. His life was as bizarre and desperate as that of the unemployed German gunsmith. His fancy took him inwards, tighter and tighter, soliciting the blow that would set him free. The decoration of gold chains was an invitation: he wanted a postal suicide. But Müller’s will was weaker: he was seduced by movement, America, diamond hills, rings, hats, walking sticks. He would be kneeling in scarlet restaurants before women, the wives of merchants – who would, without breaking off their brittle playhouse conversations, lift up their heavy skirts to allow him passage. The scent, the slithering silks, the tan of laced hides! They would roll, laughing, on to their strong bellies; while their complacent husbands, licking on sea-green Havanas, initiated him into the cabala of the stock market. Measure wealth in squares on a map of the city. Herds of red beef, defecating, slid towards the primed bolts; drift on an escalator of hooks, like levitating cardinals. Buy them! Buy them all!

  The box shrank on us, sweating out the uncensored instincts. It was unreal: the train was somebody else’s nightmare. The station announcer did not name the proposed destinations. It was necessary at peak hours to discourage passengers: villages went into limbo, were struck from the charts. But for Thomas Briggs the train is a clock. The structure of his life is regular. He has only his possessions to protect him. He demands, in his terror of loss, the death-blow that Müller is forced to deliver: an act so abrupt and unconsidered as to appear a preliminary to self-murder. The nerves of this mirror-divided couple could not survive the artificial confrontation.

  Our train has been released, is moving; jerks, shudders. The rails glisten in the night, a frosty ladder. Dryfeld closes the window.

  ‘An alky before I was sixteen, I was arrested twice on suspicion of being a child molester. Lies! But they believed them. Did time on the liquid cosh for GBH. “Yours or mine?” I shouted. They hacked out a piece of my brain without local anaesthetic. “Make your own, smart ass, out of fear-secretions.” I use the truth as a last resort.’

  Was that his voice – or something squeezed from the headrest? His lips were trapped in a sullen pout: photographed for the files of Special Branch. I wanted to drive my face against his fist. To throw open the door: snap it like the spine of a book. Plunge into the air. How could Briggs have been discovered so carefully positioned between the lines – like a bog sacrifice, cut from the peat, placed on a hurdle to be carried to the village? Why didn’t he bounce, skid, tear – a parcel of meat – tumble down the embankment?

  I could feel the blood running from my ear. Tongue thickening in my mouth. Eyes milking to pebbles. Briggs’s hand flinched from the first rung on the ladder of steel. Cinders frayed the lacquer from his scrabbling boots. He climbed through the dirt, face down, towards Hackney and the stars: this wild, inhuman persistence of the victim, the dead man.

  No prisoner of the past, Dryfeld noticed nothing. His case-hardened ego saved us. To him, this day was already scrubbed from the record. He began to hum, tuning himself to ravish the most recent of Hackney’s ‘early-retirement-from-secondary-education’ bookshops. It was cruel to watch. They always opened in a frenzy of unjustified optimism: fresh paint, cut flowers, and lovingly hung prints of ‘Defoe’s House’, or ‘The Country Residence of the Prior St John of Jerusalem in Well-Street’. Nothing could be less like the classroom: to be surrounded by books, with no grubby kids allowed over the threshold. First-day visitations from Dryfeld and Milditch, and a couple of tentative raids by the Stoke Newington scufflers, stripped the few genuine assets. Then the interminable, dreary years of nerve-strung boredom – with nothing to look forward to but another collection tin dangled by rampant gangs of ethnic ‘steamers’: the revenge of the pupils.

  Franz Müller was confessed, hooded, taken out to meet his public. He had been seduced, as Mr Baron Martin remarked in passing sentence, ‘by the devil in the shape of Mr Briggs’s watch and albert chain’. Like Dryfeld he could not give h
imself over to ‘railway time’. His madness was firmly anchored in the realities of movement, dealing, seizing, holding: intelligence without imagination. All transactions with fate were politely declined.

  III

  Another victim had been found: in the scrub woods near the Springfield Park Marina – by a party of nature ramblers. The trademark that allowed the police to identify the killings as being ‘the work of one man’ had not been made public (not yet invented?). The bodies had all been discovered within half a mile of a railway station. Which didn’t mean much: after the ‘privatization’ that description covered most of London. The same could be said of burger bars, mini-cab firms, video-rental libraries, and (at least three) estate agents. But the presumption remained: the killer used the railway as a means of prospecting for victims, then vanished down the line into some rival system. These tributaries were often absorbed, or adapted to another leisure pursuit, before they were even listed. The tabloids were on heat; dusting off the usual rumours of martial-arts loners, civil servants steeped in the black arts, ‘butchers, Yids, and foreign skippers’. They purchased dubious polaroids that seemed – from the moral high ground – to rebuke the victims for levity in the face of death. They were unworthy of the circulation-boosting role for which they had been definitively nominated. The dead girls laughed over wine glasses, or wrinkled their noses on sun-blasted poolsides: PARTY GIRL SHOCK. THE PURSER’S STORY. EXCLUSIVE.

  The phone rang. Davy Locke wanted to fix a meet in Well Street. He sounded flaky; speaking so slowly and deliberately that I was forced to imagine an attic of eavesdropping spooks: paranoid shadows straining, with uncertain shorthand, to transcribe every last word.