Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Davy was waiting outside the shell of a fire-gutted house. It was cold, a Siberian wind cutting across the marshes: he stamped, flicking away the liquid pearls that slid from his wide nostrils like lighter fuel. He wore a docker’s jacket (the docker didn’t need it), and groin-enhancing ballet tights. He had his arm around the inevitable racing cycle; the best tool for a fast getaway. His tight, knotted hair and formidable beak gave him the look of an exile, a Lithuanian, or a tranquillized Marx Brother. He had made the call from the kiosk on the corner. That had taken him most of the morning. (These new vandal-proof headsets have been commandeered throughout the East End by heroin dealers. They supply the perfect excuse for hanging around, doing nothing: and nobody can put his foot against the door to trap you.) The rat-scab character in possession had the phone off the hook, and was saying nothing. He was in no state to punch the buttons. The shivering lookouts were nodding off on their feet. The tom-tom (main man) was a twenty-stone black freezer, festooned in chains like a contraband Christmas tree (nothing works like role-dressing), who sat at the open window of a paint-trashed Cortina blowing empty pink speech bubbles. Nobody cared, or gave them a second glance. We were well off limits. Davy didn’t want to talk about it; he wanted to let me see for myself.

  The windows of this Grade 2 ‘listed’ husk (illegal post-1709 sash boxes, flush with façade) were boarded over, the door was padlocked: Davy had the key. As we passed into the hallway, he began preparing me for the room we were to visit. The smell was appalling, it met us at the foot of the stairs (painted softwood banister, whose knotty and ‘anaemic’ surface was hidden beneath many layers of cheap gloss): burnt feathers in a flooded executioner’s cellar. A friend of Davy’s, from the obscure anarcho-libertarian group of which he was the active element, had asked him to open up this attic chamber and make a series of slides to record exactly what he found. He would learn no more of the events that created this abused environment, until the slides were safely handed over.

  The room was low and dark, a loft for feral pigeons, high above the dim traces of a street market; odd shops doomed by the changing patterns of traffic. The sort of time-lagged patch in which to consummate minor drug deals or fence stolen radios. Orange peel stuck to the windows of defunct cobblers; magazine racks stank of libidinous tom cats. There was nothing to buy except cigarettes, condensed milk, and ostracized dog food.

  Davy pulled the boards from the windows and revealed the paint-covered walls. I had never seen anything quite like it. Or, rather, I had seen pale versions, bowdlerized segments: ink-blot tests, Pompeian bath houses, subway graffiti, Mayan codices (treated by William Burroughs). It was startling that an uninhabited room could carry such a cacophany of voices – protests, denunciations – and still stand. Every inch of the surface had been painted over, sprayed, scribbled with messages, invocations, pyramids, ankhs, oozing lingams and lightning strokes of despair. We had forcibly entered a book that now surrounded us. It was diary, shopping list, calculus, and anthology of quotations. ‘Love and man’s unconquerable mind.’ ‘Love is the law, love under will.’ ‘The Familiar Spirits are very prompt – it is well to occupy them.’

  Water had been flung on the walls in a crude attempt to eradicate these terrifying assertions – but they had returned, time after time; smeared, but firm in their outlines. ‘I ACCUSE…’.

  There followed the names and telephone numbers (where applicable) of local informers, bent coppers, Fallen Angels, Vessels of Iniquity, Vessels of Wrath, Incubi and Succubi. Footpaths and broken vein-tracks jolted across the mural from childlike hospitals to sparrows crucified upon hills. There were sailing boats and steam trains. The world had been recast, populated with bears, talking fish, horned gods: a true Mappa Mundi. Pages from pornographic novels were collaged with the faces of musicians and terrorists. Orton and Halliwell’s bedsitter in Noel Road was the Habitat version of this. The contents of a mind at the end of its tether had been spilled: a lurid spatter of brain grit.

  The floor was clogged with mounds of damp sawdust – as if the furniture had been eaten and, conically, excreted. Bas-relief torcs of blood were splashed over the skirting boards. ‘Dogfights,’ Davy explained.

  The house had been torched so many times that the landlord had given up and gone back to Ireland (where a grant had been found for him to make a start on his memoirs: fictions of the unlitigious dead, Flann O’Brien, Behan, Paddy Kavanagh, Julian Maclaren-Ross, the Two Roberts). Squatters moved in, and the girl followed them. Davy didn’t know her name. But she was the tenant whose work he had catalogued. A weekend job for a friend that would last him a lifetime.

  There were incidents with the local constabulary. The girl imagined she was being watched: bricks shifted in the wall. Pencil beams winked in the darkness. (Peepholes were cut between railway compartments in the wake of the Thomas Briggs murder. They were known as ‘Müller’s Lights’. But customers, valuing their privacy, complained loudly: the scheme was abandoned.) She would not remove her clothes. Astral messages were being transmitted into her head from Atlantis; which was, apparently, located beneath Horse Sands, off the Isle of Sheppey. She took down what she heard. Atlantis was a pirate radio station: an offshore fort where they babbled of sacrifices, dream lovers, and the coming birth of the light.

  It had all been too much for her boyfriend, who had moved out: gone back north. Left alone, the girl fed the demons with smack. Paid her way with shaming services. She was visited by agents with skins made of glass. Her visionary exultation increased. Once she talked for seven hours at a stretch to a complete stranger, leaning against the exterior wall of the Hackney Hospital. He said nothing. She left him there. It was raining heavily: wet hair masked his face, he was splashed by the traffic. Deep stains blotted through his baggy poplin suit. He rocked his head, helplessly – a blinkered stallion.

  She was listed as a suicide. Nobody took much interest. It didn’t rate a mention in the Hackney Gazette. She had been cremated – bones spun and crushed, mixed with strangers – before her boyfriend heard a whisper. He would not accept the coroner’s verdict: wanted images to project and study, commissioned Davy.

  ‘I found out,’ Davy said, ‘the Hoxton Mob ran dogfights here. That’s the blood. They had sacks of sawdust for the pit, boarded the windows; heavy metal on the turntable, and muscle on the door. Plenty of interested punters; both sides of the river, both sides of the law. Anyone with a wad. Bare-knuckle boys. Low boredom threshold. Had to start blinding the animals.’

  His informant was a garrulous old lag who had leeched on to Davy’s congenital innocence, eager to fill him in on the activities of an agent provocateur, operating out of Heroin House. This phthirus on the unsullied polis of Hoxton was denounced, with all the pressurized moral fervour available to a man who had spent most of his adult life commuting, in high-security vans, between Wandsworth and Durham. Hoxton was dead ground: botched social experiments, beyond the wildest fantasies of developers. The perfect territory for breeding pit-bulls and grading hooky electrical goods for Club Row. The shelter of con-men, junkies, sneak thieves: every known degree of villain.

  Davy learned they were going a bit green at the Eagle Road nick; recycling all the confiscated drug hauls. They also massaged the arrest statistics by pulling in a few of the slow payers, rapping the odd knuckle, and snipping the tendons of the lippy minority. They doubled the car pound as a freelance export warehouse: villains – who knew how to show their appreciation – picked the cream of the crop (the Mercs and the Jags) for Italy or Nigeria: the old Tilbury run.

  Davy traced the curvature of the girl’s river with his finger; dodging the demons, snakes, and voodoo masks. The paint was still wet enough to stick to him. He would never sell these walls at Sotheby Parke Benet.

  It was probably time to disappear, I told him. The slides had been handed over and he had his money. None of this story, he could be certain, would ever see the light of day – even in the agit-prop columns of City Limits. Certain risks were naked masochism. On
your bike, son. There is nothing left to exploit.

  IV

  ‘Blot out the landscape and destroy the train’

  Mary Butts

  There was once a woman whose job it was to entrain daily for Greenwich to capture and fetch back the ‘right time’, so that the watchmakers of Clerkenwell could make a show of precision, repair their damaged stock with transfusions of the real. I like to imagine her gold-cased instrument wrapped securely in folds of green felt (billiard cloth), carried, egglike, in a wicker basket: a Romantic icon. There is an almost disgracefully sexual charge in this solitary figure; long-skirted, widow-veiled, standing unhurried on the rural platform. Beyond her are the fields; woods, masts, the white tower of St Alfege. And the useless masculine impatience of the city; waiting, primed, for her return.

  Late-travelling gentlemen, the loungers, obviously speculate upon her identity, and the purpose of her journey. Some of them doubtless involve her in their fantasy lives, make a mistress of her – savagely, or with self-hating tenderness. Poets nibble at her presence. None of them begins to approach the elegance of her secret. It is like an unconfessed pregnancy.

  The railways pre-emptively ‘privatized’ time, put it to work on a grid system; an exploitable resource, they branded it with their own copyright: ‘railway time’. Before passengers demanded the printing of timetables, time could be a local affair – whatever the village clock said that it should be. Time died at its own pace, suiting its transit to its location. But now, by decree, anywhere and everywhere had to come over, check in, attach themselves to the machine (heart) locked within the dome on Greenwich Hill. The telephone conspired against them. Each station down the line had to conform with Lewisham, ‘clock in’; slaves to this unbending fiction. And, if time spent fishing is not deducted from the allotted span of your life, then time spent on the telephone counts double: beware!

  A few remote and bloody-minded hamlets (disciples of Chesterton) refused to play the game and surrender their defective versions: take us as you find us, or leave us alone. They remained out of synch with the system; those five or seven minutes were their own – kidnapped, unaccounted for. Trains smoked out of the city, upholstered in comfortable certainties, removed from the rush of dirt and commerce. The passengers dined, took port, cut their cigars and consulted their pocket watches. But they would never arrive at a destination that was unable to accept their account of the journey. They disappeared into a void – dim light in a tunnel, a suspension, an entropy, where the lost minutes mounted into lost lives. The competing descriptions of time peeled away from each other, until a single carriage could contain travellers from many eras: not quite seeing each other, and always seven minutes away from the world.

  The myriad routes and branches that followed on the unrestricted planning permission granted to the railway companies meant that time was also deregulated, released from its bureaucratic prison: now anybody with voting shares could call the shots. We were recklessly plunged into a lake of temporal Esperanto; and with no Stephen Hawking to guide us. We shook loose the spectres trapped in unopened Baedekers. We beat coprophagous adulteries from the smoking rails. Heavy secretions from elbow rests clouded the windows with crows’ feet. I came to believe that the railways could be operated mediumistically to unravel all their own mysteries. The sightings of Spring-heeled Jack were no more than the first exhibitionist raid on the warp, a showy example – a mild preview of the horrors to come, clubbed from the trees by the sightless charge of capital.

  It was for this reason I paced the platform at Homerton, ready to attempt my experiment on the North Woolwich train. I walked along until I found an empty compartment. There was no point in dragging bemused civilians into a potentially morbid temporal anomaly. I sat beside the window, with my back to our potential destination. I took out my grandfather’s presentation chronograph (‘by his patients on his leaving MAESTEG in appreciation of his services, Xmas 1898’), the work of ‘H. White of Manchester’; inserted my fingernail into the necessary slit and began to wind the hands ‘backwards’. But back to where? Back only in the sense of defying the tidal advance of the clock’s crafted mechanism. The shuddering movement of the train on this lost nocturnal route might be tuned by the intention I expressed in my physical actions: the deed itself had no other meaning.

  I heard her voice before I saw her face. ‘Love and man’s unconquerable mind.’ The Voice was light, steady, uninflected, quoting more than extemporizing: the voice of an actress at the final run-through. Mocking? Ironic? The accent was one I couldn’t pin down – either shore of the Great Lakes. Detroit? Toronto? The train was moving now, gaining speed, but we were ‘going’ nowhere. What I saw beyond the window did not change. This is difficult to explain. It was much more than basic back-projection, or travelling matte: when I forced the window open – cold air rushed against my face. I could taste the usual cinders. The perspective was quite normal; we were devouring a diminishing ladder of track. The escarpment leant away from us; stacked with institutional blocks, whose outlines remained defensive and sharp. The carriage shuddered over sleepers with a soothingly regular ration of clicks and clacks. If you tried to lift a coffee cup to your lips, you would deposit the contents in your lap: everything was normal. Yet the ground beyond the tracks remained fixed. However fast the wheels churned, the landscape was static. Lights shifted through the windows of the Hackney Hospital – like a self-propelling lantern of mercy. Trees lost their leaves. Black clouds revolved like a diorama, unwound to plunge headlong into the silver smokestack. ‘Here’ could not shift: it was incorruptible. We slid sideways, backwards, ahead – futile as wasps animated by the false sun of autumn.

  ‘What I did not reveal to you,’ the woman’s voice continued; floating across the carriage, sometimes overhead, sometimes breathing on my cheek, ‘when you began to fictionalize my story – to follow up clues I left, to quote my friends, and visit places where I had never been, forcing me to give them mind – was something of great importance: a link confirming the strength of my solitude. It happened when I was searching the glass-powdered decks of the hospital for a room to use for the children. I saw a light burning on the upper floor of a wing that I knew had been abandoned. They were closing down more and more of the outlying units, allowing them to fall into disrepair – so that the debts would be impossible and it would be easier to hand the site over to the developers. When there is nothing else to sell, you sell yourself.’

  A band of cheesy, orange light excited the empty carriage, transforming the headrest into a face without features. The white cloth was printed with charcoal shadows that I could interpret or ignore.

  ‘Later that evening, when I was travelling home, on this line, wearily drowning myself in a Virago reissue of Stella Bowen’s Drawn from Life…’ The Voice, having engaged my full attention, dropped dramatically. It was becoming almost flirtatious. ‘…I recognized the very words that came into my head as I walked, exhausted, along the corridor to the room with the solitary light. Everything depends on these connections. Serendipity, don’t you agree? What does Eliot say? “We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree / Are of equal duration.” Everything we say parrots words that have already been spoken. We speak in quotations. And what we struggle to bring into focus has certainly inspired some other woman, years before we were born. We are at the mercy of our grandchildren. I wanted no more than to repeat the words I felt I had caused Stella Bowen to write.

  ‘“Homerton was a nightmare. I wish I could say that my social conscience was born from that moment, but it wasn’t. I wanted to run away from it all…”

  ‘I grew impatient with Stella. She was too reasonable, phlegmatic, too much of a colonial – putting her own abilities into storage, while she created unstressed domestic enclosures for her man, the artist, the talker. She fed on such modest resentments; indulging this walrus while he “agonized” over meaningless infidelities. He didn’t have th
e courage of his own corruptions. Why didn’t she poison him? But, despite my antipathy, our selfless careers moved in tandem. In this place, of all places – in Homerton – Stella met the person I myself discovered still trapped in a forgotten hospital wing. She felt the same dangerous, involving excitement, and the fear that I felt. She described that person in my words. “A flaming object… with her scarlet hair and white skin and sudden, deep-set eyes.” The woman who had been called Mary Butts.’

  Now it was my turn to vanish. The Voice required no supporting actor. Unheard, it existed. The story had outlived the storyteller.

  ‘In Mary Butts,’ the Voice said, ‘I came into my own time. In her aggression, I let myself slip the leash. It was like one of those dreams in which we are able to interrogate the famous dead. We find the teachers we need. And they are so reasonable, so amused.

  ‘From outside the hospital window I watched myself taking her hand. She smiled, but her eyes were always moving away, across the room, deeper into the darkness. She never spoke. But I understood, instinctively, what she was saying: the words never stopped. Sometimes I turned, as I was making my way back to the wards, looked at her. The small white face would be shining, her lips painted, a great gash of red – but the wide-brimmed hat was already eaten with shadows, it was fading: I was frightened that she would fade with it.

  ‘Gradually, I came to piece together her story. I didn’t need to read about her, the footnotes in Parisian memoirs, the sketches by Cocteau. She was a woman unable to contain the energy she generated. She made men uneasy, aggressive. Her social work meant nothing to her. She was stretching beyond it, sustaining herself with retrieved images of a sensual and eternal past: the house, the woods, the paintings, the sea. She was locked in a battle for survival with her mother: a single self-devouring organism. This conflict was more important than these broken-down urban wraiths in their desolation and anguish. She wanted to confront Whitechapel in quite another way – through John Rodker. She would challenge, possess and destroy it: the anarchy and the ugliness.