Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  This sense of innocent eroticism was not shared with her husband (nor indeed with the Minister – who had not enjoyed his compulsory charity match: either under siege, and in danger of voiding his bowels, or banished to the mindboggling inertia of the outfield). Did nobody share her dream? A wide bed, her lover helping her to change the sheets. Christopher Martin-Jenkins on the radio. Describing, let us say, Imran Khan’s flight to the wicket. The leap. The delivery. Her lover in white. She is in lacy black underwear. Neither one touching the other, separated by the bed. And he is dressing to leave. As she undresses, a warm afternoon, to lie back, listening to the cricket. The curtains flap. He hesitates. He cannot bear to turn away. Apple blossom in the orchard.

  ‘Did you score, Minister?’ She blushed, as the Chair put his toadying question. ‘Pick up any wickets?’

  The flustered youth ignored him. (He hadn’t; but that was nobody’s business.) ‘Your deliberations are complete, Mr Chair.’ It was not a question. The youth lisped in a still small voice; implying that if he did not get his way he was quite capable of ‘screaming and screaming and screaming until he was thick’. He was under visible pressure. One of those who feel they should be somewhere much more important; and who keep glancing down to check the zip of their flies. He squeaked, like a cheeky cartoon mouse being dubbed by a seventy-year-old actor who has not yet been told that the polyps in his sinuses are malignant.

  Closer inspection, in the hush that followed this incursion, revealed no youth, but a shrink-wrapped young man – who had forgotten to climb out of his lightweight suit before sending it to the cleaners. Or some kind of quantum leap in the field of headshrinking. The Minister looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy – which, in a sense, he was: the latex exception that proves the rule. The rest of the Widow’s gang split neatly into the Uglies (shifty, weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven-week embryos) and the Bunters: smooth, fleshy, near-identical, bum-faced nonentities in Savile Row suits and bulletproof spectacles. Apocalypse-resistant unflappables. The Uglies had lost ground recently, the time for cracking skulls was past. They were ennobled, sent to the city like feral cats. No longer the nights of broken glass, lycanthropes and zoo-rejects with burning brands: it was the mid-term era of soft sell, Brylcreem condomed, safe-handed boys, and public men of conscience (and private fortune). We gloried in the exploits of the agitated one (nicknamed ‘The Albatross’), the Sumerian fish-totem, whose role it was to be seen wandering, gape-mouthed in pin-stripes and hard hat, from one disaster to the next, blinking like a nocturnal animal caught in the harsh lights of the rescue services; lips trembling, ready to blub out his patent sincerity. A scapegoat begging for slaughter.

  This boy, the Minister, had been picked because he smelt like a political virgin: he was fresh, oven-ready, blatant with coal tar and Old Spice; bubbling, enthusiastic, popping up everywhere with endorsements that kept him spinning dizzily around the outer circle; never quite ‘one of us’, but very useful as a fag and disposable messenger. He had been rewarded, as Minister of Sport and Recreation, by being given in addition the very minor Arts portfolio. (In his spare moments he was supposed to sort out the weather.) But he remained, basically, a whipping boy: buoyant enough, and stupid enough, to deflect heat-seeking missiles from such entrenched citadels of the left as the Church of England, the Royal Opera House, and the Sunday Telegraph.

  ‘Your decision, gentlemen – and, excuse me, Madame,’ (he smacked his lips in a dingy-inflating pout) ‘if you please,’ the Minister trilled, grinning bravely about the placard-sized identity card pinned to his lapel, as if he was still an evacuee. (Without it, civil servants kept ‘losing’ him. And he wasn’t allowed in to the premières of grown-up films.) ‘I’m obliged to show my face at the First Round Losers’ Cup Second Replay at Plough Lane. Now we’ve got rid of those beastly beer-swilling spectators they expect a few celebs to make the broadcast a bit sexier.’

  A show of hands was called for: all reached dutifully in high salute – except Professor Catling who was fully occupied with the cheese cutter and a brace of ripe walnuts.

  ‘Of course, Minister, we give our unqualified support to the scheme as outlined.’ The Chair ritualized the verdict.

  ‘But no scheme has, actually, ever been outlined, has it?’ said the Laureate’s Wife, to subdued titters.

  The Minister, superbly, without a trace of self-consciousness, performed his smiling-at-the-ladies smile. He snapped open the steel skin of his attaché case and produced packs of hi-tech brochures. They had the heavy paper and the gloss finish of the best international art magazines. There were photographs, half-tones, tints, bleeds, elevations, concertinaed maps, detachable numbered etchings: all the tricks that disguise the thinnest dribble of text. The margins were so generous that modernists might have imagined themselves holding a set of one-word columns from Tom Raworth.

  ‘We’re going to take off from the defunct Crosby/Sandle “Battle of Britain Monument” projection. That’s been our inspiration. It’s a definite mover. It’s got all the elements – in fossil form, naturally. But the bottom line is that we, as a Government, have the guts to sink our dosh in an uninhabited swamp. We must summon up the courage of the Dutch, when they built their polders against chaos, or helped us design the great fortress at Tilbury, repulsing the Spaniards and extinguishing for ever the fires of the Inquisition.’

  He bowed, held his breath for the statutory forty seconds, waiting for applause – while the committee members scrambled frantically through the brochures, attempting to convey, by coughs and significant nods, the impression that they had heard of (and wholeheartedly approved) this cracker-barrel pitch.

  ‘Crosby has grasped the salient point: the first duty of any decent monument is to pay its own way, and not to simply stand around for a few hundred years waiting for history to kiss its ass.’ He had the grace to blush, most becomingly. ‘You art wallahs can sort out all the retrospective justifications. I can promise you prime-time television and the best crews available (none of that hand-held stuff, straight from the ad agencies). Make this clear: Crosby’s underlying theme is absolutely spot on – celebration! It can’t be shameful to rejoice in our God-given victories; and our joy will take the specific form of a stepped pyramid, bathed in banks of coloured light. The very beams that once swept our London skies, seeking out pirates and invaders, will now illuminate a transfixed block of time; in which a Heinkel bomber plunges to its doom beneath a brave little Spitfire. Gentlemen, we’re going to top the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Colossus of Rhodes in one hit.’

  ‘And where would this monument be sited, sir – exactly?’ enquired the Architect, with lapping khaki tongue.

  ‘Here! Where else?’ The Minister allowed his impatience to show by tapping his black brochure on the tabletop. Someone had not done his homework.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he continued, uncreasing a disfiguring scowl, ‘our friend from the cinematograph can help us to stress the value of a professional presentation. Wall-to-wall sound systems, the right choice of themes… Chariots of Fire, Dam Busters, Kwai, Elgar, Paul McCartney. Nothing too sophisticated, nothing rabble-rousing. No German melancholy.’

  The Producer nervously groomed his beard, searching for his mouth, which had dried and contracted to a useless ring of gristle. ‘Yankee names above the titles, home-grown technical facilities, plus Jap finance (with maybe a Colombian top-up). Am I close? Logos from brand-leaders tactfully showcased in positions of maximum visibility – right?’

  ‘Right? You’re in Disneyland, baby. We’re not pitching for a Cola franchise, or a sweetener from Virgin Atlantic. Think Armada, Festival of Britain, Churchill’s funeral. We’re talking heavy ritual here. Leo Von Klenze, the Egyptians, the Mayans. What does Crosby call it? “A place of pilgrimage… a viable commercial investment… with side-effects which are unpredictable.”’ He rapped imperiously at the window, causing three of his goons to flash for their shoulder holsters. ‘The monument will be
sunk in that dock. Work to commence immediately, contracts tendered and awarded.’

  A modest smile crossed the Chairman’s face: as a director of both the firms involved he could not lose. He had ruthlessly undercut himself, juggling the tax concessions and the Enterprise Zone allowances.

  The Minister was inspired: a vision appeared to him on the face of the waters. He saw things as they ought to be, he believed. ‘Visitors will enter through a maze of submarine pens, based on Sandle’s preliminary drawings. They will be “mood-graded” by a discreet soundtrack, quoting from those wonderful films of our boyhood, Above Us the Waves, Sink the Bismarck… Johnny Mills, Jack Hawkins, John Gregson, Ordinary Seaman Bryan Forbes… all that bleep-bleep, glug-glug, Up Periscope stuff. On through glass-walled tunnels, from which the humbled punters glimpse phantom U-boats, white sharks, limpet mines – maybe a hologram Belgrano. Gotcha!’

  He whacked his hands together. The lady screamed. And the chief goon shot himself in the foot. And was carried, bleeding, to the chopper.

  ‘Then it’s into the pyramid itself, a Cave of Remembrance. Sober. Solemn music. On the walls could be carved elevating sentiments from the great philosophers and leaders. We considered using that Scotsman who is, apparently, something of a whiz with a chisel (to show we don’t harbour grudges and also to do our bit for unemployment north of the border). But now we’re informed the chappy is an over-sensitive, litigious blighter. The frogs are quite convinced he’s a card-carrying Nazi.’

  ‘That’s a cross we all have to bear,’ murmured the Chairman.

  The Minister was not to be diverted. ‘A continuous frieze of speeches by Winston and Margaret will remind us of our duties as citizens, prepare us for the tapes of ack-ack guns over Dagenham, cones of concentrated fire, tracer shells. White parachute discs over the Isle of Grain. A distant thunder from the Thames Estuary. Stamping jackboots. Criss-crossing searchlights wind-milling above the dome of St Paul’s. Vast processions. Boy scouts, landgirls, aviators. Cheering. Travelling camera. Flashing bulbs. Cheering and clapping to the rhythm of a beating heart; clapping and stamping; cheering building to a soul-purging climax. Yes! All the razzamatazz of Nuremberg, without any of the chthonic excesses. The showbiz side, if you like. They certainly knew how to throw a party!’

  ‘Right!’ enthused the Producer, his eyes moist with the possibilities. ‘Those production values! Technically speaking, Triumph of the Will stands up; it’s a hell of a movie. Give me extras from the old school who’ll really go for it, give me a monster-monster budget – and anything is possible.’

  ‘We ascend,’ the Minister dropped his voice to a cathedral whisper, ‘in an open-fronted elevator (“a vertical ghost-train”, it has been called); climbing silently through all the strata of wartime desolation: fire-raids, rubble, water jets, Mass Observers, nigger bands in smoky cellars. We re-experience the primal energies of conflict – so cruelly denied to many of us in this comfortable world, where all our enemies have been defeated. Then, at the summit, in the hush of the final chamber, we come upon a still-life tableau of striking simplicity. A sunken pit ringed with plain wooden stools, and a table on which the waxen corpse of the Consort has been laid out, among all his ribbons and honours; his favourite golf clubs bound like a bundle of rods (fasces): the symbol of a lictor’s authority. We back away in awe. From the portholes, we kneel to look down over the battleground of the city, the sun-capturing towers of Canary Wharf, the silver helmets of the crusaders of the Thames Barrier.’

  ‘I see it, I see it!’ the Architect cried out, with all the agony of a convert. ‘You’re reviving Speer. I’ve thought for some time – though one has been reluctant to admit it – he’s quite a respectable figure, once you remove him from the sleazy milieu in which he operated. In fact, he seems to have more genuine “bottom” than many of his fellow Neo-Classicists working not a mile from here in the deregulated sector. Acting as muse to a carpet-chewing dictator may, in the long view, prove a worthier calling than fudging some pastiched Byzantine cladding for a cartel of grinning orientals. Isn’t Speer’s the very stuff that HRH has been advocating all along? (More havoc from the socialist planners than the Luftwaffe?) Speer had that unifying vision, the epic sense of scale, without which there is no polis. In time he may very well be recognized as a minor master, and given a retrospective at the Hayward.’

  ‘The overriding object,’ the Minister had clamped his case, and was preparing to depart, ‘is to shift the river axis. The City of the Future must be a phoenix rising out of the ruin of docklands. Abort the flattering urbanities of Canaletto, the pastoral fancies of Turner: we must assert the primacy of William Blake and his “Hiding of Moses” (page twenty-four in the brochure). Twin pyramids honouring the swamp, a curve of water guarded by a lioness; the precise hieratic steps of material progress. I leave it with you.’

  And he bounced from his perch. His perfectly pink head, level with the tabletop, passed among the peaches and pineapples like a runaway sweetmeat, an exotic blancmange. Professor Catling, spoon in hand, stared longingly after his rapidly diminishing form; a trickle of drool starting from the corner of his mouth.

  III

  The move into the Bow Quarter hit Sonny Jaques like a jolt of mainline adrenaline. Here he was – in the heartland – aligned with the feral energies of the heroic and legendary East End. Scrap the ear-stud (lose that Kit Marlowe boy-prince image), shave the skull, climb into Chagall’s bleached blue jacket, and an aircrew cap. Look at me, Ma: worker/artist, Constructivist poet articulating the inchoate scream of the masses.

  The Quarter also promised a kidney-shaped pool, an indoor jogging facility, and a panelled library, stacked to its girder-enforced fake ceiling with all the latest blood ’n’ boobs videos. Sonny pumped iron. It kept Kathy Acker looking good – and he was ten years younger! There she was in Time Out. But he was going to make the cover. (He hadn’t decided yet if a tattoo would be construed as bourgeois narcissism, proletarian solidarity, or a brand of brotherhood with the primitives of the Third World. Would it help to pull the chicks?)

  The buzzword was realpolitik; clear-eyed, stand-up-and-be-counted, a streetgang of warriors. For less than £150,000 you could purchase a few cubic feet of the old Bryant & May match factory, a kiosk tricked out in the style of a blue-ribbon transatlantic liner (tourist class, natch). Or, more accurately, as if the set for such a vessel had been tastefully vamped in plasterboard, chrome, and plastic mouldings for a Noël Coward revival (Sail Away?) This former cathedral of industry was now partitioned into a series of mock-deco hutches: waiting rooms for some futurist dentist. And everywhere the gaunt spectres of the sulphur-jawed skivvies were invoked in sepia-tinted prints. The Bow Quarter was a shrine to the authentic. Volunteer inmates were barricaded against the outside world, eager to turn a blind eye to the railway, and the ramps of petrol-burning lemmings who dirt-tracked within yards of the perimeter fence. (If this is the Bow Quarter, who needs the other three-quarters?)

  Sonny paced between fridge and window; where he gazed, olive carton in hand, ruminating, upon the squadron of builders’ skips that packed the inner courtyard. It was time to put a flame under a few dozing projects. Obviously, Spitalfields was burnt out (caned by the supplements) – but Bow was effervescently marginal, a desert crying aloud for re-enchantment.

  ‘I think we’ve got a genuine lever here,’ Sonny lectured. I had agreed to meet him, not because I had any expectation that our film project could be resurrected, but because I felt that the Bow Quarter itself would stand a little research. It was a fortress for New Money, not for the seriously wealthy river-spivs. These proper people, the traditionally liquid, had staked out Wapping, years ago, while the here-today-gone-tomorrow boys ravished the Isle of Dogs, laundering their blagswag: leaving such previously despised outposts as Bow to small-change tobacconists, hairdressers, media hustlers, and oral-hygiene mechanics.

  ‘Francis Smart has flitted – the producer who once met your mate, Eric Whatsisname – so Hanbury’s scr
ipt is on the spike. It’s in limbo. It won’t be cancelled, but it won’t be cleared either. Forget the kill fee. There’s no fizz left. They’re putting Hanbury out to grass in Dorset, Open University rap, the Valium beat. Smart has cashed in his credits. Now – this is strictly off the record – I don’t want to read it in Private Eye, you must promise…’

  ‘Oh, naturally,’ I replied, smirking with insincerity, ‘I know the rules.’

  ‘Well, what happened was – the old fart let some Oxford chum run a graveyard series on “The Chivalry of War”; twenty episodes, bottle-necking Sunday nights. Hours of dreadful stock footage, voice over, rostrum trawls across The Rout of Ran Romano; flutes and drums, talking heads; purple, cabbage-skinned passed-over brigadiers thumping maps – and young Lochinvar poncing about in tailored sour-cream fatigues around every battlefield he could think of from Carthage to Marathon, Bull Run to Saigon. The expense sheet’s been framed: it’s a legend. And in exchange, quid pro quo, Smart gets a sabbatical year, recharging the batteries among the dreaming spires. He’ll shuffle back at the end of the cricket season to see if there’s anything on the boil at the Palace: tread water until the knighthood comes through. Might put in for Controller of Channel 4, or cop the Arts Council as a consolation prize. Then there’s always The Times. And the antiquarian bookshop.’

  He yawned, bored with the inevitability of it all. ‘The fat cats,’ he continued, ‘the boys in the red braces have packed away their cellular phones and departed. You can’t make a deal anywhere in the Corporation. It’s all accountable. I’m trying to get a hook on “The Last Show”, our latest attempt to put insomniacs on a culture drip. The rolling credits look hugely impressive – until you read the christian names. Strictly, “son of”. Kindergarten Athenaeum. But they do need plenty of fillers (they don’t use anything else). We can change the title of your treatment and resubmit. Take a few more snapshots, find some new faces. Pop in the odd cutting from the glossies. You’ll be on for a research fee. Your agent cops his percentage. Everybody’s happy.’