Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  VIII

  If the council had provided a litter bin anywhere between Calderon Road and the station I would certainly have dumped the whole loathsome parcel straight into it. It wasn’t an item to chuck in the street, or to jettison on an innocent doorstep, along with the milk bottles. (‘Must be the new telephone directory, dear.’) And so, when the train halted in the tunnel, between Stepney Green and Whitechapel, and the lights began to flicker and dim, I make the excuse that I needed some intricate task to occupy my still trembling fingers.

  I slashed the twine with my clasp knife (only slightly amputating my little finger), and unwound the stiff skirts of brown paper. I was left, after a short struggle, with nothing more alarming than a copy of my own novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (made ‘safe’ by the addition of a prophylactic glassine wrapper). By habit, I leafed through the opening salvo, taking a slightly guilty pleasure in the company of these refreshingly materialist monsters. The pages were virgin; mercifully untainted by Millom’s attentions. The Bodonia paper was fresh as when it came from the hands of Sig. Mardersteig in Verona. But, with the introduction of William Withey Gull, a chronic dementia of red-ink annotations spattered the margins: ‘NOT TRUE!!! Wordy evasions – grip the FACTS, boy. EVIDENCE? Stolen from other men’s books.’ Revisions breed in the white spaces, feverishly overwriting the original version, to clarify some imagined authorial intention. Millom worked the pages like a speed-crazed collaborator. He was the uninvited Ford to my sullen Conrad.

  The train labours, shivers, jerks; shudders a few yards forwards, stops. The lights go out. I am left in a comfortable darkness, polarized by those ever-active bulwarks of local history: the London Hospital and the Jewish Burial Ground. It is easy in this enforced silence to imagine the novel on my lap as a brick of impacted light: a freak reaction has converted the text into a pack of unrepressed images. They have a startling bacterial luminescence; giddy and dangerous. If I dared to turn the pages I know that I would reveal all the word-inhibited secrets: the steel engravings would begin to move, stone figures would shake off their shadows; white buildings would open their flaps to disperse the panicked basements. There would be a remission of violence.

  When the lights came back on the book in my hand was a square of black cloth: the dustwrapper had slipped on its glassine hinge to reveal Millom’s final critique; an effort coming as close as his nature would allow to a jest. He had pasted a reduced photocopy over the snapshot portrait my wife had taken for the rear flap: Tenniel’s illustration of Alice in the Train. The windows have been Tipp-Exed; Africa reduced to a phantom. The linear whirlwind of the railway carriage is now a radiant plaster skull – with Alice and the ‘gentleman in white’ clinging, pathetically, to the zygomatic arches. They are the handles of a drinking vessel, balanced in the symmetry of perpetual confrontation.

  Millom knew from the start that I would open his parcel as soon as I got on to the train. He had probably succeeded in ‘withdrawing’ enough electricity to hold us in the tunnel. That was his message, or his warning. But there is something else: book worms, I can accept, but Millom’s pun is grossly literalist. A slithering sightless string-inch breasts the fore-edge of the novel, like a Polish cartoon; wriggles free, drops on to the tartan-covered seat. The heart of the book has been hollowed out, cut away; scooped like melon-flesh. Millom has filled the wounded cavity with contraband earth. Moist pink and grey things are knotting on the carriage floor, covering my boots; multiplying. The shape of a key has been pressed into the miniature grave.

  IX

  The spiteful pulsing of the rods in their frozen canisters became the pulsing of Cec Whitenettle’s heart. His hand squeezed gently on the geared control. The power of the track travelled through him, so that his hair turned to fire. He was the messenger of the immortal ones. His softly lit cab did not move: it was the tunnel that rushed past him, a hood of black velvet. He was restored, revived; he outpaced the darkness. Rodents scuttled to escape his bladed monster. The slanting walls of the embankment washed over him in green waves. The train was a water snake; it twisted and burrowed beneath the sleeping streets. It absorbed the dream-jungles of all the sleepers. The streamlined observation window became the visor of a winged and wired helmet. Cec listened to a scatter-speak of voices, living and dead: the controllers. It had happened; he was himself the core of the fusion, the germinator of the force he was riding.

  It was only with the switch to the branch line, the plunge into the Whitechapel burrow, that the old fears returned. Every night, without fail, a red beast, a kind of deer, stood waiting for him on the curve. He did not touch the brake, but always drove straight on – at it and through it. He would not allow the creature’s presence (or its meaning) to trouble him. His cab was monitored: if the central computer showed him slowing, anywhere, he would be surrounded in seconds by balaclava’d security-men, armed snatch-squads eager to redefine the ‘rules of engagement’. He would be rapidly converted to an unemployment statistic – waiting for his number to be called in some linoleum-carpeted retirement home; doped to the eyeballs, nodding through a remorseless procession of soap operas and advertisements; wetting himself.

  Cec knew there was no living deer: no animal had been reported going over the fence from Victoria Park. The animal was a two-dimensional cartoon; lurid, sticky with varnish. It was the Roebuck of Brady Street, moonlighting from its pub-sign pasture. Now, apparently, even this mild territorial guardian was infected with panic, and obliged to understudy its own apocalypse. One of these days, Cec decided, he would confront his fear – go down the Roebuck, order a drink, sit with the Irish and the Maltese, talk about car auctions.

  What did the quacks know anyway? Giving him placebos, coloured smarties, like some kid – pretending that would cure him. ‘See how you go. Come back in a month, Mr Whitenettle. We can adjust the prescription.’ Was it reasonable? Who would want to achieve marital intimacy when the whole world was dying? Do apes hump in their cages? Not bleeding likely: they wank themselves stupid. Cec had read all the relevant stuff himself, down the library. Transient Global Amnesia, Automatism, Psycho-motor Epilepsy: your hands can never break free from the controls because they are part of a circuit. A single fracture will destroy it all, lay waste the landscape. The power is in the machine. We have only to hang on, put all our trust in its deeper wisdom.

  The roebuck is waiting for him. ‘Hold up, you fucking Bambi. I’ll have you.’ The creature, for the first time, faces the train – head on: gone rogue, its eyes full of blood. Cec cannot break his grip. The harder he strains, the more power he releases. The engine bucks, leaps, rears. The track hisses like a punctured hose, heats to orange-white: the rails open like the ribs of a clattered Buddha. They are liquid spears of rage. Cec starts to laugh. It hurts his stiffened face. He is a jockey, a monkey mounted on a mad dog. It is no longer his affair. Let the train jump its brook; let it tumble down the perilous chasm between the banked windows of the hospital, with all its revenging monsters, and the eternally poisoned site of the first sacrificial murder.

  Rattles the crossing: nothing now will halt the fire lizard. It will bury itself, beyond sight, on the far side of the buffers, the sand traps, in a dead-end tunnel: a drain for anguish. Excused by the formal density of madness, Cec lies on his back, smiling: the stones of London are his heaven, and they move. They slide. He will excavate remote sources of darkness. He is redundant, the train needs him no further: it will travel on, through yellow clay and blue rock, ferrying the solemn dead in search of incorruptible rivers.

  X

  Tattered and exhausted, Arthur Singleton, haunter of stations, prisoner of White Chappell, planned his escape from the treadmill of time. The field of his ‘life force’ was too weak to interest the cameras: undetected, he hooked his rope over the crossbar of the gantry that supported this spy system. Like a first-plunge swimmer, he lay groaning; then edged forward, ready to lower himself into the shallow abyss. One foot clung to the platform, the other searched for the neck of t
he roebuck. It was foretold: only the Triple Death of Llew Llaw Gyffes could release him.

  From the deep pocket of his moss-stained overall Arthur drew out Count Jerzy’s massive service revolver, stolen this night from behind the bar of The Spear of Destiny. Its cold barrel, greased and foreign, was inserted in a toothless mouth. He would pull the trigger at the moment of impact. As the train tossed him into the air, so would the rope from the gantry snap his neck; flying, he would squeeze his finger, in a come-hither reflex, spilling his brains into the night – like stars. The unwitnessed silence of his act would stand in place of Llew Llaw’s ‘terrible scream’. The falling gunge and the smoking pink cap would be one; an eagle in the dark. Arthur would, at last, get out from under the responsibility of myth. He would be nothing, nameless; unrequired.

  The eye of the rapidly approaching monster filled the tunnel: it was scarlet, a steppewolf dribbling fire. It pawed the ground. Arthur knew that the engine was no machine, but a living thing. It was cloaked in vegetation, it was alive; rich with green leaves and secret veins. It was fruiting, streams of clear water ran from its side. The engine had transcended speed, arriving before it was understood: a torrent of fruitfulness, challenging wrath, carrying life and birth, deserts, storms; the jaguar and the stone. The ancient rubbled fields were scorched by a path of new light.

  Arthur, in that instant, glimpsed his vanished river: it was unchanged. He did what never can be done, he stepped into it for the second time.

  VIII

  Art of the State (The Silvertown Memorial)

  ‘A lustreless protrusive eye

  Stares from the protozoic slime

  At a perspective of Canaletto.

  The smoky candle end of time’

  T. S. Eliot,

  Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

  One morning… the newspapers loud with her praise, the Sun in its heaven, banked television monitors floating a cerulean image-wash, soothing and silent, streamlets of broken Wedgwood crockery, satellite bin lids flinging back some small reflection of the blue virtue she had copyrighted, filmy underwear of sky goddesses, clouds of unknowing… the Widow rose from her stiff pillows – bald as Mussolini – and felt the twitch start in her left eyelid. She ordained the immediate extermination of this muscular anarchy, this palace revolt: but without success. She buzzed for the valet of the bedchamber, a smiler in hornrims. He entered the presence with a deferential smirk, hands behind back (like a defeated Argie conscript), bowing from the hip: he was half a stone overweight, creaking with starch, and greedy for preferment. He disconnected the ‘sleep-learning’ gizmo, the tapes that fed the Widow her Japanese humour, taught the finer points of cheating at stud poker, and provided an adequate form forecast to the current camel-racing season. She was a brand leader, she did not sleep. ‘A’ brand leader? The leader, the longest serving politico-spiritual Papa Boss not yet given the wax treatment, and planted in a glass box to receive the mercifully filtered kisses of a grateful populace.

  The golden curls were sprung and twisted, lacquered into their proper place. The valet held up the wig for her approval. She made her choice from a cabinet of warriors’ teeth, toying between the chew-’em-up-and-spit-out-the-pips version and the infinitely more alarming smile-them-to-death set that the boffins never quite managed to synchronize with her eye-language. The Widow was a praise-fed avatar of the robot-Maria from Metropolis; she looked like herself, but too much so. The ‘blend of Wagner and Krupp’ (in Siegfried Kracauer’s memorable phrase) had suffered a meltdown: it was gonzo, dangerous to its living soul and the souls of all other life-forms. She was a prisoner of the rituals she alone had initiated. If she ever appeared in her original skin the underclass would riot and tear her to pieces. And so she suffered the stinking baths of electrified Ganges mud (bubbling like Malcolm Lowry’s breakfast), the horse-sized ‘hormone replacement’ shots. Even now the lab boys were grinding a fresh consignment of monkey testicles in the mixer. The eyedrops, the powder, the paint: she censored the morning radio bulletins. Not a breath of criticism, nor a whisper of forbidden names: all was analgesic ‘balance’, the cancellation of energy. Muzak for the hospitalized, garden notes for the dying. Jollity was unconfined; house-broken ‘rogues with a brogue’ winked and blarneyed, and sold. But something was not right.

  She was a couple of years into her fifth term in what was now effectively a one-party state and a one-woman party – what could be wrong? True, there hadn’t been a photogenic disaster for several weeks, a crash, a bombing, some dark débris-scattered location she could avoid – only to appear, phosphorescent with concern, a Marian blue manifestation, primed, lit from her good side, serene and comforting among the bedpans, eager to press the wound with a white-gloved hand: or again, severe with grief in tailored black, stilting on four-inch heels, at some well-guarded memorial service. Never, never (she had been advised), at the graveside: there must be no subliminal associations with mere mortality. ‘Rejoice then!’ she quoted the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh with unironic relish. Ambulance chasing was a thing of the past. (There were no ambulancemen left to drive them.)

  The Widow scuttled, lurched, towards the full-length mirror; a mother hen who has recognized a significant lump of her first born in the feeding tray – an eye perhaps, or a tine of red comb. She lifted her plump arms in a vague, archetypal gesture; flashing hazardous sharply jewelled knuckles, while the valet swooped with the Ladyshave and the environment-friendly roll-on. Her survivalist instincts, which some commentators felt were preternaturally acute, nagged: a nerve surfacing in a diseased molar. A fresh initiative was called for, a grander set of photo opportunities, a rallying cry: a lift from lethargy.

  Perhaps she should summon a team of ‘our’ boys from Hereford to take out a few Paddys or stungun a Bedouin tent-show? But who was left with the clout to carry the front pages? It was counter-productive to sanction too many ‘natural’ disasters, to whistle up winds she could not bring to heel. The relatives tended to behave so badly, wailing and protesting, asking nanny for ‘compensation’: let them buy a share in the sewage racket. Palliative tele-prompts only muted the whingeing proles until the next share issue. There had even been whispers, brave and foolish (from the submerged wine bars of Stoke Newington), that she was not altogether innocent – how dare they think it – of her beloved Consort’s death. He ‘passed over’, it is true, at a particularly flaky moment: the Widow’s stock had dropped a couple of points in the wake of a Sophoclean chain of takeover scandals, buggers bursting from the closet, call girls with carrier bags of banknotes at railway terminals, episcopal suicides and low-level resignations – Defence Secretaries and the like. But that was a trick that couldn’t be repeated. She was married to the nation now, divorce was out of the question.

  Another impassioned bull on matters ecological? She’d already worked her way yards deep into the lectures of Gregory Bateson (as delivered to the Fellows of Lindisfarne). Time has, she discovered, this marvellous facility for civilizing the most recalcitrant material. Stuff that would have put you at the head of the Prevention of Terrorism Index in the 1960s, when it was still prophetic and active, could now be broadcast from St Anne’s Cathedral, Limehouse, in a safely retrospective form. Let us keep a tidy house and sing loud – with William Blake – for vanished green glories. Let the Prince have his Palladian toy town around St Paul’s. Let him bleat about planning, proportion, rustification, the piano nobile. It was a sideshow, a box for chocolate soldiers – popular as Bourton-on-the-Water (and with about as much clout); serviceable for Royal Weddings, which could be timed to coincide with unconvinced by-elections. She’d outmanoeuvred him, shifted the axis downstream: stuffing Wren’s overloaded Roman bauble by rededicating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s unfrocked riverside monster, that ‘masterpiece of the baroque’, as her personal shrine. She could float by barge, in viceregal splendour, turn with the tide, disembark at dawn, or make a progress, a torchlit procession, with heraldic beasts, courtiers, cameramen, brownsnouts, to be g
reeted on the steps with a lick of the hand from her faithful gauleiter, the mad-eyed Doctor. (Another refugee from Metropolis, visionary social architect, crazed as Mabuse himself, planning a world-assault in Baum’s asylum.) The whole gaudy epic (a pastiched version of Rubens’s ‘Arrival of the Queen at Marseilles’, made suitable for family viewing) would be slapped down on previously primed canvas, by an official War Artist, and hung in the National Gallery before she had swallowed her second gin and french. Get your heritage in first. Build your museum while you still have the muscle to control it. There were still a few dodges she was not too proud to steal from Ambassador at Large, Richard Milhous Nixon.

  Acknowledging the crowds she saw as a featureless throb of pre-coital discomfort with a limply dropped wrist, she remained tormented by unease: there was an unidentified splinter lurking beneath her perfectly manicured fingernails. ‘You’d have to be a stiff to get better coverage,’ she muttered. She was ‘prime time’ with all the majors and most of the disk cowboys who cared about their franchises. That was it! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? What were her so-called ‘advisers’ playing at? Those brilliantined lounge lizards, those neutered toms who fed at her table. What on earth was going on at the Agency, for goodness’ sake? Off with the velvet glove (and the velvet hand inside it!). Were there any lard-haunched half-Brits left to bounce? That was always so popular with the back-bench lynch mobs.