Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

Dead, extinguished, excused parade. The Judas kiss of cold marble. The ultimate camera call. Victoria R came up with the same solution when she was beginning to slide back in the ratings: a Memorial to her dear departed husband, her companion, her inspiration. Dead meat, a Consort could still be pressed into service. What are you waiting for? Put a call through on the blue line to the Sh’aaki Twins. A State Commission must be set up immediately. Yes, NOW! Of course, this morning. No planning permission is required. Flatten Greenwich if you have to. Next time they’ll think before they vote.

  II

  The Steering Committee convened at the London City Brasserie (Silvertown) had been democratically nominated. Eleven places were laid at a shimmering linen table, that was crowded with surgeries of Georgian silver, light-manipulating facets of crystal. It was possible, by peeping through a captive tobacco plantation, to cop a vision of the grey and choppy waters of the King George V Dock: a subdued and unmeditated absence. The Brasserie exploited one end of the upper deck of the City Airport; the other was reserved for perpetual trade exhibitions, maquettes of riverside apartments. A weekly flight hammered its way, too low to be tracked by radar, to the Channel Islands, weighed down by the lumpy packages of money-laundering service industries. Otherwise this was a showcase with nothing to show.

  Brendan (Clancy) Mahoun, a former dock labourer, perhaps ‘lifted’ by the booze (on the strength of his redundancy money), claimed to have seen Our Lady walk upon these waters. Otherwise cold-blooded and calculating investors are always eager to leap on any sign or portent; they grovel for the soothsayer’s blessing. They decided that pilgrims would very soon be rushing the turnstiles from every farflung corner of the Catholic empire. An airport must be constructed. The theory paid off (eventually) at Knock. The sheds were booming: not with alms-jangling shrine hoppers, but with country boys frantic to emigrate. And that was the only way this place was ever going to work.

  Ten of these complaisant diners had been nominated directly by the Widow herself, and the eleventh by a conga of ‘practising’ artists (sculptors, window dressers, creative book keepers and the like). The conga had been brought under starter’s orders, a month in advance, by the Widow’s Press Secretary, wearing his other hat as (the entire) ‘Council for Arts and Recreation’. It had been a tricky one, at first blush, finding the names to cloak the event in bogus respectability. In the end, the task devolved, quite satisfactorily, on those heavyweight players, the Sh’aaki Twins, who picked a few hungry faces from among their own holdings. A good lunch was better than the promise of a postal order.

  ‘I think it behoves us to tie this one up fast,’ announced the Chair, a banker, and director of thirty-two City companies; who was not keen to expend one second more than he was being paid for at table with the great unwashed. His own scowling portrait had been perpetrated by the late Oskar Kokoschka (one of his flashier efforts): to a background of bridges bursting from his waistcoat like exploding ribs. This shameful object was soon relegated to the boardroom, which the Chair never found the time to visit. ‘All agreed? A show of hands; no dissenters, no conchy abstainers – then we can address ourselves to the more complex and rewarding decisions demanded by an eight-course luncheon.’

  Professor Catling, the distinguished sculptor, had jumped the gun, and was washing down an indigestible knuckle of knobbly, over-boiled octopus with a thimble of salt-rimmed mezcal. His fingers dipped expertly into a side salad; stiff fronds of arctic lettuce, endive crinkly as well-oiled pubic hair. Catling had once been the leader of the ‘Walthamstow School’, now he was merely its last survivor. English Cinema, which Truffaut claims (with some justification) does not exist, is stuck with two festival-hogging tendencies – both are derived from Walthamstow, the legendary SW Essex Technical College and School of Art; training ground of Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway. For ‘Art Cinema’ we should read ‘Art School Cinema’. And remember Walthamstow.

  Catling’s work (when he practised it) was of the Third Kind: uncomfortably direct. (A man treated to a full spaghetti dinner is then given two or three pints of salted water to drink. The camera, unblinking, records the result.) No, Catling had been elevated to this company for three quite distinct reasons. He possessed a very presentable chalk-stripe suit, in something close to his own size. (It wouldn’t frighten the ladies.) His work was so obscure and recondite that it could not remotely come under consideration for the project-in-hand: it was years since anybody had set eyes on it. (No whispers of a fix.) But, most importantly, he had a pan-European reputation as a trencherman. He’d keep his snout in the trough with the best of them, and sing for his supper with gems from his repertoire of superbly timed and delivered smoking-room anecdotes. He’d be far too busy licking the grease from his fingers to question any realpolitik decisions with nitpicking aesthetic quibbles.

  The Chair resumed, while his fellow freeloaders wet their lips in iced Perrier: he rapidly and succinctly outlined their brief, informing them of the conclusions they would reach in time for the circulation of the port. The Widow wanted a fitting memorial to her Consort. It would have to achieve an epic scale (Valhalla), soar above the docks – signifying her courage in the face of adversity, and also the courage of the nation, the ‘little people’, Britain-can-take-it, ‘Gor blimey, Guv’, it’s only one leg, ain’t it?’ A memorial to the spirit of the Blitz and a torch to Enterprise. It should make Prince Albert’s cheesy stack look like the heap of bat guano it would, in truth, soon become. No rivals were tolerated: Gilbert Scott’s ‘memorial of our Blameless Prince’ had already been condemned as a dangerous structure and would be demolished within the week; the Ross of Mull granite, the marble, the bronze figures, the Salviati mosaics redistributed to rusticate wine bars and industry parks in South Shields or Humberside, or wherever some discreet patronage was required. For too long there had been an elitist focal around the ‘Royal’ Colleges, the Museums, the Albert Hall, the under-exploited parklands, the subsidy-swallowing Palace. Our memorial rising above Silvertown would shift the whole axis downriver: not Canaletto, nor Turner – but William Blake! The horses of instruction feed in silver pastures. (‘Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?’)

  The Architectural Adviser (who was able to speak only while pressing his tongue with the ear-grip of his tortoiseshell spectacles) had visited his latest Rotherhithe development, and was ‘absolutely appalled’ to discover that so mean a site had claimed one of the city’s grandest viewing platforms. He was selling customized bijou residences in Cherry Gardens to half-solvent media lefties, who had to cash in their life-insurance policies to raise three hundred and fifty k! (It was a real drag dealing with social-climbing paupers.) We’re not having interviews with Shadow Cabinet ministers conducted directly opposite Georgein-the-East, with the whole curved bosom of the river spread to the eye from St Paul’s to St Anne’s, Limehouse; insinuating undeserved notions of imperial grandeur. History doesn’t come cheap. The word, therefore, is move out – lay down some action in swamplands. Bus the punters by water, or by chopper. Start the turnstiles clicking. Without a major feature, ‘focused on cultural excellence’, and spread through the supplements – OK? – you might as well shut up shop. It’s been costed, won’t top fifty million.

  ‘But, surely, Mr Chairman,’ piped the Laureate’s Wife, smiling a swift incision, appealing to Daddy, ‘we should, at least, be allowed to advise on the choice of artists to be involved in such a morally significant venture?’

  The Chairman, covert stag, flared his spidery nostrils in acknowledgement of that lady’s mythical fragrance and – with effortless condescension – soothed her ruffled sensibilities.

  ‘Plenty of time for the small print, my dear. You chaps can argue up and down the cheeseboard about the drapes and the colour co-ordinates. I’m booked on the three o’clock flight for Zurich.’ (Handled that rather well, he thought. They only want to be noticed. He debated a compliment. Would her earrings be too personal?)

  The Architectural Adviser, bronzed, beaked like a peregr
ine falcon, grinning the full zip, leant confidentially forward, gesturing expensively manicured hands in a spray of transatlantic eloquence.

  ‘My initial brief was to locate an adequately site-specific piece. It was felt that we must insist on a “language of symbols” and so, as a consequence, we took steps to eliminate from our discussions all the currently notorious practitioners of bricolage…’

  He leered significantly at the Twins, who had amassed uncatalogued tons of the stuff in their North London bunker.

  ‘What in God’s name is the man talking about?’ demanded the Chair, winking boyishly at the Laureate’s Wife, and sneaking a glance at his timepiece.

  ‘The scavengers, sir,’ returned the Architect, bravely, ‘the beachcombers. Cragg, Woodrow; those people. We could turn them loose down the defunct rail lines, or let them abseil among the cooling towers – but, we tended towards the notion that they might not be altogether… reliable. They have this bias towards unstable metaphors: “singularities” straining beyond their rational event-horizons.’ (He had been reading extracts of Stephen Hawking and was looking for the opportunity to unburden himself of some of this language, before he lost it.)

  ‘What about David Mach?’ said the Last British Film Producer, brightly: he had been watching too many late-night arts programmes, and it was beginning to show. He clawed at his pepper-and-salt beard, grooming compulsively, as he had done while playing for time in so many interviews. He had been persuaded, against all his baser instincts (the ones that bought the place), to instal a Mach folly at the Mill House: a tumbling waterfall of never-distributed histories of the National Trust, in which a wild hunt of pink jackets, pikes, cuirasses, and drumsticks were drowning, soundlessly.

  The Architect sucked the wax sheen on the arm of his spectacles. He was enjoying this. The illusion of authority. Not a critic in sight. ‘Too visible, too impermanent. The Widow, it has to be admitted, does not enjoy humour. Doesn’t understand it – or approve of those who do.’

  The Producer, a dues-paying conservationist, paled, cruelly reminded of the ‘biographical details’ he had skittishly allowed his secretary to forward for inclusion in the project’s Official Brochure: ‘Tottenham Hotspur Supporter, bicyclist, knitter of Shetland sweaters, patron of David Mach, and occasional filmmaker’. The Widow was probably looking at the thing at this very moment, asking somebody to explain what it meant. He could forget the peerage. A crippling spasm of yellow pain shook him: he clutched his gut and made a rush for the Gents, where he pounded the digits of his cellphone, trying to reach his Artbroker before the close of trade for the Holy Hour.

  ‘Sell Mach! Take a loss, anything – get shot. I need weight, formalism. Get me into marble, or forget your percentage, baby. I want work that takes a crane to lift it.’

  ‘I must admit,’ the Laureate’s Wife elevated her bone-handled fork in the direction of the Chair, ‘to rather a soft spot for Gormley’s “Brick Man”. ’

  ‘Over my dead body!’ screamed the Architect, who was involved in a running battle with an unpronounceable critic who had written of the figure with trenchant enthusiasm. The Architect wouldn’t lift a finger to support anything his Hackney-based rival might (for want of a better idea) editorially endorse.

  ‘Put up a thing like that,’ said the extrovert Twin, ‘and you’ll frighten the aeroplanes.’

  ‘What aeroplanes?’ retorted the Chair, waving an empty glass towards the deserted runway: a gesture the hovering Cypriot waiter read, correctly, as a request for a ‘top up’. More sycophantic laughter. ‘You don’t seriously imagine anyone in their right minds would risk flying out of this cut-price lagoon – a hundred yards of couch grass in the middle of nowhere? The original notion, fatuous as it now appears, was that the terminal itself would be the big attraction – pulling in charabancs of manipulated imbeciles eager to gape at their own reflection, then stagger home with a trolleyful of gimcrack souvenirs. Now the taxi drivers won’t touch the place. They tell their fares it’s been closed down, run them to Stanstead.’

  The Architect, fearing the conversation was drifting away from those areas in which he could decisively demonstrate his erudition and understated humanity, slid a sketch of Anthony Gormley’s brick giant across the table. It was instantly skewered by a flash of the Chairman’s steak knife.

  ‘Damned thing’s got no willy.’ His euphemism was tactfully pitched at a level suited to mixed company. ‘The creature’s a eunuch, sexless as a gilded Oscar. Dickie Attenborough’ll blub if he comes within a mile of it. Ugh! An impractical dildo: won’t be up a week before the Paddys have the bricks away to front some King’s Cross sauna. Jumping Jesus, can you imagine what the Widow would do if her husband’s sacred memorial was shanghaied into the retaining wall of a wankers’ bath house?’

  ‘Couldn’t we talk about Barry Flanagan?’ The Laureate’s Wife ached to shift into a more life-affirming territory. ‘His dancing hares have got such animal spirit, such dawn-fresh vitality. He’s a true shaman; his drawings come alive before your eyes.’

  ‘Flanagan?’ snorted the Chair, ‘feller in a trilby? Looks like a bookie’s runner? He’s a potato basher. Quite out of the question.’ (The Producer was relieved. He had shifted swiftly out of Flanagan when the soft furnishings started to cost more than a year’s subscription to Country Life or a modest assignation at the White Tower.)

  ‘Just so. The gestalt is now most definitely “on the floor”. We have to prepare ourselves for an assault on new forms of reality.’ The Architect clawed back; causing Professor Catling to raise the tablecloth, fearful he had missed out on some notable side dish. ‘Flanagan’s latest proposal excitingly combines a performance element with his always scrupulous truth to materials. He wants us to validate – bear witness to – the construction of a hole in the water. This would have such a miraculously transitional quality, a metamorphosis of liquid into air… an anomaly, I believe, of enormous resonance.’

  ‘If you think the Widow wants her saintly husband remembered by a hole in the water, you must have a hole in the head,’ snapped the Chair, muttering something further to an attentive aide, who instantly passed the message on to a pocket tape-recorder. (The Architect was on his way back to the Masonic one-night stands.) ‘Look here, haven’t we got a couple of these johnnies on the payroll? They should do something to earn their gravy. The Civil List’s not a gentleman’s club for bloody civilians.’

  ‘Sir Eduardo,’ said the Architect, eager to stay on the ball, ‘is occupied in laying out an Aztec mosaic somewhere beneath the Elephant and Castle. Sir Anthony, it was felt, had done such sterling service at Millbank that he should be considered for compassionate leave – before he suffered the debilitating effects of front-line trauma. He’s an artist, first and last; not an administrator.’

  ‘I think,’ said the irrepressible fenland châtelaine, ‘we are all in danger of forgetting the true purpose of this gathering.’ Her remarks were floated in such soft but narcoleptic tones that the disadvantaged drinkers (male) froze in mid-hoist. An unconvinced frog’s leg jerked spastically from the Architect’s open mouth, as if deciding to make one last pathetic leap for freedom. ‘Our brief is to commemorate the aviators who died protecting these factories, deepwater docks, and mean streets.’ She dangled a bloodless hand (so white it seemed to have been kept in a bath of milk) in vague benediction towards the shapeless mounds of masonry that hid the river from their privileged viewing station.

  ‘We are required,’ she continued, with all the confidence of one who has received absolution from the highest court in the land, ‘to offer our suggestions for the erection of a National Shrine; a place of quiet and meditation, a place fondly to recall those who have gone before, an inspiration to those who will follow.’

  ‘What did the old boy do in the last show?’ enquired the Chair, ‘apart from blasting out a few craters on the golf courses of the Cinque ports?’

  ‘Not known,’ the Architect, subdued, whispered into his hand, ‘stricken from the r
ecord. “Mentioned in despatches”, certainly. Something biological. And intelligent. Very hush-hush.’

  Flash frames of shredded files. Laser-enhanced index cards. Chemically-inspired memory transfusions. They swept over the gob-struck assembly like a hazchem plague. Take your pick: droplets of blood beading the windows, dead fish pelting from the clouds, black and gungy smoke belching in spasms from the fluted stacks of the Silvertown Sugar Mills. And now, operatically, as if orchestrated by Leni Riefenstahl, at this moment when all the secret nightfears of the heart lay exposed on the linen table, a silver chopper skimmed in over the dock, ruffling the hide-thick surface, to land within sight of the petrified diners, on the uncropped grass of the man-made isthmus. Goons, too highly strung to wait for ladders, leapt to the deck, wheeling as they fell, scanning dim horizons, shrugging and twitching inside their Burberrys; patting themselves for the reassurance that they weren’t toting an empty holster. A child, scrubbed and pink, backlit, emerged from the open door of the Sikorski, as if for his first day at prep school, clutching an executive-size briefcase (from which the price ticket was clearly visible) to his bosom. He was dressed in unbruised cricket flannels. A wet bob faking it for the parents’ match.

  ‘The Minister,’ announced the Chair, ‘early as usual. Come to take our soundings back upstairs.’ Surreptitiously, he slid a magnum Havana back into its pigskin case.

  Before the guilty reflex was complete, the praetorian guard were hustling their juvenile lead into the open-plan dining area, were taking up crouched positions among the rubber plants, and gibbering killspeak into faulty handsets.

  The Chair was not alone in his guilt. The Lady from the Fens had a distinct ‘thing’ about men in cricket gear. It began when she’d been dragged along to Lord’s, because her husband, after some characteristic reverse, needed to maintain a high profile, show himself, rub shoulders with the nabobs, share the banter and the chocolate cake of the radio box. She had been bored out of her skull, until she had taken up the fieldglasses to watch this beautiful black fellow (Michael Holding?) walk back to bowl, rubbing the ball in the most intimate way on the side of his thigh. There was an awful, addictive languor about the whole performance. The slow build-up. The springy stride into the wicket. The ball fired like a bullet. The cringing batsman. Ahh!