Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  II

  Anyone who has ever written anything about Whitechapel, or the Whitechapel Murders, will soon discover they have issued an open invitation to every conspiracy-freak who is not actually under lock and key (and who is able to raise the price of a phonecall). It starts even before your book is published, almost as soon as the typescript receives its ultimate correction: as you slide the drawer shut, the phone rings. It’s always late at night; the caller has no name – his manner is circuitous, a shade abrupt. The voice is a vibrating needle of glass: you sense the veins knotting, the controlled resentment, the white hand clenching and unclenching. There is no time for, or interest in, your evasions: a message has to be delivered.

  ‘Mr Sinclair? I am able to reveal to you that I am in possession of privileged information (hopefully, to be published before the year is out), comprehensively refuting all previous theories. All the books you have read, those manufactured bestsellers, have been nothing but a tissue of lies, illegitimate confessions sponsored by… by… The truth has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the Royal Family, the medical profession, or the Masons. I am the only one who has pieced together the entire story. It’s all going to come out. But, as yet, I can tell you… nothing.’

  Significant silences, painfully indrawn breath: all the inevitable grey-room warnings, whispered so loudly that they wake the children in their cots. Let it alone!

  Then, shortly after your book is launched (one copy on the reserved shelf in Camden Town, twelve ordered from Glasgow – author’s name sounding vaguely Scottish – returned on receipt, with request for refund against postage), the postman is knocking with the first bulky envelope; taped and double-sealed, stuffed with obscurely menacing news cuttings. ‘Has anybody official tried to dissuade you from publishing?’ (‘Only the publishers,’ I mumble.)

  Evidence accumulates in the form of photocopied accounts of spontaneous combustions: ‘MAN BURSTS INTO FLAMES. Paul Green, a 19-year-old computer operator, was walking along a quiet road in De Beauvoir Town, Hackney, around midnight when he suddenly burst into flames. He doesn’t smoke. He thinks the blaze might have been set off by a passing car but he doesn’t remember hearing any vehicle pass him. Police have spoken to Paul and examined the scene but are still puzzled by the fire. Paul is a holder of the Duke of Edinburgh’s bronze medal, and has two O levels.’

  Or, some local-history buff will point out, rather crossly, that ‘Nicholas Lane’, the seemingly innocuous name of one of my fictional characters, is also a respectable channel, severing King William Street, where a Hawksmoor church is lurking – and where, apparently, T. S. Eliot spent his days as a banker, buried beneath the pavements, peering at typists’ legs through squares of sea-green glass. More and more; madder and madder. ‘Elderly man critical after two-ton concrete and steel block plunged on to his car killing his wife. The couple were driving in heavy traffic along King William Street.’

  I am deluged in accounts of corrupt surgeons, victims sprayed with kerosene, amnesiac detectives croaking out incriminating details in south-coast retirement homes, death-bed confessions occurring simultaneously (and word-for-word) in Adelaide, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen; clairvoyants, quacks, syphilitic poetasters; cocktails of feline blood (granting invisibility), showers of bread loaves, transported cathedrals; Russian-Jewish anarchists, Helena Blavatsky, M. P. Shiel, Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria. As one of these documents – truthfully but inelegantly – concludes: ‘The only exit therefore eventually left would be access to the zoo.’

  To retain my sanity, it was necessary for me to cultivate the spittle-bibbed rudeness that is second nature to any antiquarian bookseller, to brush aside these twittering, but harmless obsessionists who cling to some personalized fragment of the past; determined, beyond reason, to wring every droplet of meaning from the soiled fabric. The events of nineteenth-century Whitechapel have been overtold to the point of erasure; confirming nothing beyond their eternal melancholy. The puffers, sniffers, scribblers and scratchers are determined to keep that small flame dancing in the circle of their sour breath.

  John Millom was, I thought, different from the others only in degree: he was the most extreme example, the ultimate ‘Ripper’ nut. There was something so fixated, so dementedly popeyed, in the stuttering urgency of his phonecall that I found myself agreeing, reluctantly, to meet him, to examine his long-accumulated store of documents. It would, he assured me, change my life. There was a manuscript, I would know as soon as I looked at it, would have to be published. I had the ear of paperback editors, didn’t I? I even had permission to call a few literary agents by their christian names.

  Millom would be waiting on the platform at Leyton from eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 December. He would be wearing a dark ‘business’ suit and a tie with the insignia of the local Round Table. I, in my turn, would hold aloft a carrier bag issued by the Forbidden Planet bookshop, with their logo prominently displayed. I couldn’t say what I would be wearing. I didn’t know what I was wearing now.

  My attitude was inexcusable: I needed Millom more than he needed me. I had no intention of doing anything with his offer, other than pressganging him (as a prime freak) into my book of tales – which was in a critical condition; and likely, without a speedy transfusion, to collapse under its own density, like a dead star. This compulsive scavenging took me to many places better left unvisited: Leyton was the worst of them.

  III

  Whitechapel Station comes more nearly to resemble a Berlin checkpoint every time I use it. There are barriers, scanners, plexiglass enclosures, money-eating slits. Remote-control uniforms (that may or may not be inhabited) demand tickets and passes. How would you recognize your own face as it flattened and bent across the visor of a helmet? Travellers are required to submit to a primitive body-search before passing into the tunnels. They are groped by buzzing hoops, pulled from the line, questioned against white tile walls.

  ‘Fucking surfers, mate,’ ‘Tiresias’ the newspaper seller (so named because he had ‘foresuffered all’, and never ceased to speak of it) told me, as he struggled, disapprovingly, to heft a copy of the Guardian, ‘still shovellin’ ’em orf of the track. Took ’em in buckets dahn the ’ors-pital, dint they?’

  I nodded, meaningfully, as if I knew what he was talking about; he was spitting doom at the next customer, so I didn’t hang about. I was already late: I’d planned to visit the Whitechapel Gallery on my way – to pick up a Yiddish phrasebook. I should have known better, the place doesn’t open until eleven o’clock (culture breakfasts late in these islands): two or three mitching schoolkids and a solitary vagrant were mooning about outside, eager to get into the refurbished snack bar. I had to satisfy myself with sampling the blue Wedgwood plaque polyfilled to the Library wall in celebration of Isaac Rosenberg. Then a speedy browse through the repro maps and the tables of redundant stock, now offered for sale. (I selected a well-worn salmon cloth 2nd imp. of G. Scott-Moncrieff’s Café Bar, July 1932: ‘A Novel without Hero or Plot’. Joey the Jumper had once recommended it.) Soon there will be more texts outside in the 10p bins than on the library shelves.

  Another odd thing about the station entrance is that any space not dominated by badge-flashing muscle has been colonized by an indiscreet hullabaloo of male whores, rent boys, and tasty runaways; most of them favouring the style known as ‘Goth’ (or ‘Vandaloon’) – sooty-black rags, white faces, chicken crowns. The undead in lethargic rehearsal. This seemed to confirm one of Millom’s more off-the-wall pronouncements. He claimed the police were refusing to make public the fact that the victims of the most recent spate of railway murders were all male. (Some of his best chums, so he said, were on the force. And they were ‘sickened’ by what was going on. They feared a backlash. Lynch mobs. Homophobia. And feared it to the extent that they were busy formulating a policy of pre-emptive strikes. Hang a few ‘cornholers’ by the testicles. Décourager les autres.) The authorities were gravely concerned about a ‘wave of panic’ hitting the balance sheets of
the New Companies; commuters shifting their always fickle allegiance to the collapsing road system. It was true: cars were, at this moment, honking swinishly in bumper-tobumper jams that stretched all the way back to the Bow Flyover; tempers fraying into clinical psychopathy. There were ‘incidents’, fights, screaming women: panicking ‘weekenders’ trying to fight their way out of Timber Wharves Village in heavily provisioned Range Rovers were terrified by the very real threat from marauding Highway Gangs – who were ready to strip them to the springs, and add another bushel of hysteria to the telescoping zone of chaos.

  Millom had ranted about plague, enforced sodomy, pyorrhoeal kisses, neck bites, genital stalks bitten off in Dionysiac ecstasy: the victims, in their turn, becoming predators – the entire railway network rife with plasma-drooling vampires. He warned of maniacs with endemic viral erections, flesh dripping from their bone faces like cooking fat, never stepping ashore, sleeping with their eyes open, ever vigilant in the quest for new victims. An eternity of travel, with no destination, no memory of life in the settlement: restlessness, hunger, hatred. The system was racing to a standstill: blocked by ghost trains, cruising for clean meat. Millom wouldn’t step outside his door, he claimed, without his swordstick. He would make rashers out of the first gay who so much as asked him for a light for his cigarette.

  The stamina, such as it is, of these weary Vandaloons is carelessly expended on subdued attempts at begging (that would have provoked Dryfeld’s undying scorn). They risk no more than the exhibition of an unwashed hand: the full chart of their ferrous deficiencies. Many have sunk on to the ground, doing nothing and knowing nothing. Their interest in life is minimal, and does not stretch far beyond the recognition of this station as a worthy place to haunt.

  And so it is: an off-balance, unplanned assembly of tunnels, spidery stairwells, bridges going nowhere. The station appeared to be linked, by undiscovered passages, to the London Hospital, and a gaunt warehouse on Durward Street (overlooking the Jewish Burial Ground and the cobblestones where the body of the Ripper’s first victim was discovered). Dust-licked windows bell out over the track; swollen curves of Flemish bonded yellow marl bricks are shored up with proscribed medieval timber. There are watchers everywhere.

  I descend, pass along deserted platforms, climb stairs that float in space, unattached and shifty. I glimpse apertures of remote light, occulted details of the hospital, slogan-plastered walls, a narrow footbridge surreptitiously edging over the track, from sealed attic to sealed attic. I am almost ready to abandon my rendezvous with Millom; to give my allegiance to the derelicts, go no further, find a hole, a forgotten office, and dig in.

  The sun has exploited a fault in the leaden skies above this labyrinth of unfulfilled ambitions: the mist begins to shift, to infiltrate the smoke from a fire some workmen have lit beside the track. A man, a hunched solitary, is standing at the far end of the long platform, beneath a bank of television screens that play back an idealized version of this necropolis junction: pearly, dim, soft. These pictures have the quality of transmissions from a diving bell in the deepest ocean trench. Eel-grass fronds of morbid light flare from the black hole of the tunnel: an extinct monster’s last breath.

  It is probably not worth the effort of asking this man if he knows the place for the Mile End train – but something about the epidural rigidity of his stance, the bulging pockets of his white coat, the incongruous pink cap, makes me think he could justify a line or two in the notebook. He has absorbed events, without participating in them. They have stuck to him like a quilt of burs.

  ‘Is this right for Mile End?’ No response. It would be as useful to question the angels on their green plinth at the station entrance. But the television sets, in a reprise of some primitive short by Lumière, were now featuring that twin-screen classic, The Arrival of the Train. I could even make out the word – UPMINSTER – advancing like a special-effects title. I was about to turn away when I noticed one mildly disconcerting detail. I was quite alone on the slippery silver dish: my co-star had taken personal modesty to the extreme degree of remaining invisible. His etheric double was not there.

  The train in dutiful longshot slid across the frame, hit its mark with the precision of an old pro, and disgorged a few flower-bearing tourists, determined visitors of the sick. I could still see, and admit to, an ill-performed parody of my lean and noble figure, sullen cap pulled over eyes, carrier bag in hand: but there was nobody beside me. I wheeled towards the old man on the platform (that time-warped Gerontion): he had not moved. He stared remorselessly at the screen; he must have penetrated to a deeper channel. He gawped like an addict, untouched, but unwilling to break free. I did not poke him, test his reality with my fingers. The smell was overpoweringly authentic: it is only his ghost that does not register. He slips, unharmed, through the electronic net; ergo, he is not allowed to exist.

  IV

  ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel

  That questions the distempered part’

  T. S. Eliot, East Coker

  Nothing interrupted the complacent ruralist calm of Leyton. The journey through the tunnel and out into the wide-sky spaces of Stratford had been uneventful: no rapes, no violations, nothing to write home about at all. A warty red sun pitched over the rumpled post-bellum savannah, dissolving the bluegrey mist, and flashing across stagnant pools, car dumps, and portakabins.

  The only action to be found on this platform was a low-intensity assault on a Reebok-sporting street-cred black by a mean cartel of uniforms. They were encrusted with enough badges to subdue a college of semiologists.

  ‘Surfers,’ Millom glossed, ‘we’re pretty hot on them in Leyton. These new trains can get up to fifty or sixty miles per on the clear stretch after Stratford: the drivers call it a “running road”, gave it the bullet, then hit the brakes – late. Always shake a few woolly-heads out of the trees: we hand out a bit of a pasting, confiscate their footwear – they hate that – and turn ’em loose to limp back to their six-in-the-bed drug dens. They never learn, born ignorant, it’s in the blood. Myself, I’d wire the train roof, turn up the juice, make ’em hop a bit. It’s what they’re good at. Am I wrong?’

  The ‘surfing’ craze was a Brazilian import, that was taking a lot faster than Mirandinha in Newcastle. A real smack substitute: you mounted in Ongar or Woodford, caught the wave for the long skate to Snaresbrook; felt the ripple in your spine, heard the wind talk – all the way to Leytonstone. You are out there, balancing on the lid of the snake, the power under your feet; swaying, jolting, snorting the colour, staying with it.

  There were never more than three or four deaths a week: a few losers bottled out and grabbed for the overhead wires. They fried to a crisp; or suffered the harsher option – a disability ticket on the minibus.

  It didn’t take a detective to notice that Millom disapproved of most human activities, especially those involving more than one party, and the requirement of conversing in anything above a whisper. He had the soapy skin, the trembling handshake, and the averted eyes of an inveterate self-starting wrangler of picture books. Yet something told me that this was not the case. There was nothing wrong with Millom’s sight; he examined me like a magistrate. No; he was way beyond the reach of any form of orgasm. His sex life, if we must consider it, resembled that of an unmutated cephalopod.

  He scrutinized me, rapidly, missing no peculiarity of the scuffed boots, the rancid cords, the failed-its-first-autopsy jacket. He visibly flinched; decided he could expect nothing better from a writer; snorted, and limped off, flourishing what I took to be his swordstick.

  The station stood on a mound that afforded a superb view of an enormous burial ground, a vision: thickets of white crosses, gardens of bone-trees, winged angels anchored to granite plinths. A mute army of the Catholic dead waited to be summoned; a snow harvest blazed to the borders of Wanstead.

  ‘My digs,’ Millom acknowledged, pointing to a window smothered in wedding-dress net, above an Indian pharmacy on the corner of Calderon Road. But t
hat was not where we were going. I trailed in his wake, taking breath by admiring the clusters of lilac, lime, and virgin pink that riotously fruited around the doorways: the nuts, pines, and grapes. ‘Personalized’ flourishes burst from the closet in a scream of genetically-risky varnishes. The dim terrace sung out loud against the morbid oppressiveness of its fixed location.

  ‘Ever read him yourself?’ Millom’s tight-lipped sneer came back at me, like smoke from a crematorium. ‘Calderon? The Surgeon of Honour? Tell you why later, and you’ll understand. Honour, my friend, is something I set my stall by. Am I wrong? It may have gone out of fashion, but this Calderon person knew all about it. When I saw his play – down Walthamstow, at the College – I got that very special feeling, you follow me? I knew what was coming: I could have written the thing myself, take away the language.’

  I could not believe what I was hearing. It was like eavesdropping on Charles Manson, and catching a dissertation on the troubadour poets. (Indeed, it was even more spooky. Sooner or later someone in San Quentin is bound to turn Manson on to Ezra Pound. The rest follows.)

  ‘A Spanish Duke of some kind, a nob, discovers that the King’s brother has taken a shine to his wife, right?’ Millom hadn’t finished yet. His statements were cast as questions: the stunned silence of his audience was interpreted as a tacit collaboration. ‘Honour must be preserved, right? Say what you like about the wops, they know about honour. There’s your Mafia, your Falangists, your Inquisition: omerta, silence. Am I wrong?’

  Millom pinned me against a privet hedge, pumping with his finger, as if he was chopping cabbages. I was forced to nod, disguising a yawn as a gasp of admiration.

  ‘Anyway, see, this Duke, Don Gutierre, follow me? You’re a writer, a literary man – what am I telling you? Falklands War? Yes? I don’t have to spell it out. You’re getting the picture. The Duke speaks to the woman, his wife – but in the voice of the bloke who wants to give her one, the King’s own brother. He’s got her. Am I wrong? Traps the cow. Not her fault? And some! If she’s been had, even in mind, if an illegitimate party has imagined himself doing it – you with me? – she’s soiled, damaged, ruined. She’s no good to him any more. His honour is tainted. Right? Know what he does?’