Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Sonny’s frustration at not being able to take notes in the dark, and not knowing what the hell Imar was talking about, made him pathetically eager to escape our confinement. A smothering, claustrophobic sense of being ‘out of it’, beyond telephones – perhaps for ever – contributed to his unease. He was now quite certain that if we ever should re-emerge into the real world, there would be nothing left. The flats would be a cliff of termites, and the wasteland a robot-controlled industrial estate. Even his beloved Bow Quarter would have regressed to supplying matches to a phantom army of beggar girls. Surely, that was impossible. The Bow Quarter would never fail. But Imar’s voice had that quality: an undertow of mad humour that threatened to freeze into uncensored prophecy. He laughed aloud as he savaged Crosby’s demonology of bad faith.

  ‘How did you develop this concept of… lines of force?’ Sonny demanded, revealing, all too candidly, that his realpolitik was in tatters.

  ‘By watching randy molluscs. I was sitting on the wall in Island Gardens, sketching a snail (Helix aspersa), as it inched towards its mate: they can orgasm, you understand, for days at a time. It’s been suggested that the more advanced mesogastropods returned to the sea. I wondered if this couple – in their slow-motion ecstasy – were going to make a dash for the river.’ Imar smiled at the recollection. ‘I happened to notice, to my amazement, that the dome of the Royal Observatory, with its turreted brick body, suggested a perfect snail silhouette (Pomatias elegans?); and I had an immediate vision of these irradiating hoops surging across the entire country, knotting the globe in right-hand spirals. I saw a translucent shell of unexploited energies. The “lines of force”, as you call them, were created by the measured burn of mating snails, tracking each other down lucid paths of sticky seminal joy: a silver glide visible only to hermaphroditic life-forms. A condition to which I have always, subsequently, aspired.’

  Sonny snapped – sure now that Imar was taking the piss – and bolted for the escape hatch. Our submarine was sinking straight to the bottom. We followed. Sonny cursed as he splashed, ankle-deep, through the flooded outer chamber. Paint tins clattered in his wake. We let the trapdoor fall into place behind us, and covered it once more with earth.

  ‘I’ve been given permission to take casts of angelic forms in the Fitzwilliam; so I shall surround this square with twenty-four winged beings, their fingers reaching to make a connection,’ Imar said. ‘I don’t want frozen salutes, baptized warriors holding their sword-arms out of the river. I’d rather amputate every limb. I want polysexual transcendent bliss – like snails, male and female together, mutually fucking and being fucked. I’ll be ready if they ever try to build that monument, that Beelzebub nob. My work of defence has already begun in the bunker’s unopened fourth chamber. When the time comes, I’ll turn it loose.’

  I slurped through the mud on Sonny’s trail. The boundaries of his concept had burst, and the only solution was to wipe the slate, cut out, pick it up again in Silvertown. Another day, another notebook.

  V

  There comes a time in every successful meeting when the warring egos tire, and blanch towards the compromised satisfaction of having survived, intact, a potential trauma. The gathering at the London City Brasserie had mellowed through all the layers of port, stilton, champagne, strawberries, boredom, claret, gin and terror. Convulsing throats thirsted for silence. Inane fragments of conversation lay heaped on the floor like shattered saucers. The interminable afternoon had stretched into a star-bright evening. The Chairman, to general yawns of relief, had been stretchered out, choppered away to his next free meal. The atmosphere lightened up – to the extent that the Last British Film Producer tried to interest the fastidious Sh’aaki Twins in ‘doing a line’ of something. Professor Catling was stuffing his pockets with bottles of Armagnac and sniffing at bundles of cigars. Previously unstressed, but potently real ambitions were beginning to surface. Aware of his chamber reputation, as a ram among rose-spectacled bleaters, the Architect was pitching it strong at the Laureate’s Wife. He was quite indecently horny, his cream slacks bulging with overstated pistols. A gamy reek of hormonal secretions blended with the madeleine of meat-steam on the airport window: horse-radish, pestled garlic, basil, Gauloises Caporal.

  The building had now – officially – closed down and sad clusters of under-employed aliens were dumped, long coats covering their uniforms, at the riverside; to wait on a gale-tossed pier for the shuttle to Wapping, Cherry Gardens, London Bridge, and Chelsea Harbour. The cartel of pigged-out gourmets were the only humans still conscious between the sugar factory and Barking Road. A royal box of candlelight flickering over the angry black waters.

  ‘And why not?’ She shrugged. ‘What the hell.’ This sort of boardroom grapple happened all the time (usually at the end of chapters) in her husband’s sweaty, screen-tested fiction. (If not in his private life; which she thought, on reflection, was not very probable.) She could never bring herself to try his stuff. She granted it all the credibility of a government-approved white paper, without any of the literary flair of the Wykehamist mandarins. His books, she assumed, were only purchased by smart young women on the promotional side of publishing, who wanted to create a sensation at dinner parties by boasting, to howls of derision, that they had actually bought one at Kennedy – and read it!

  Unashamed, she met his arrogant gaze. She stared back – her firm breasts rising and falling under the simple Ralph Lauren sweater – into those smoky, steel-blue orbs. The darkened picture window over the King George V dock was the screen of a word processor. Green sentences stuttered and rushed at her, syllable by syllable, line by line; bringing the hot blood to her cheeks. She must not give herself away. But she could hardly contain the mounting excitement she felt as she admired that sharp profile, the Roman brow, the consular authority. This was a man to command crucifixions. Those slender, cruel lips could compose passionate speeches, or soothe a high-blooded stallion. Cacharel, Eau de Toilette? She knew instinctively that his fierce mask hid a gentler and more sensitive aspect. The Katharine Hamnett storm-trooper jacket hung easily from his powerful shoulders. He was coolly, openly undressing her with his eyes. How lucky then that she had slipped into her sheer black Dior stockings and her peach-coloured Janet Reger underthings. She was unafraid. She wanted his hot maleness. She could wait no longer. Her fingers tore at the buttons of his collarless Calvin Klein shirt. How sweet and traditional he was! How unaffected by the dictates of quotidian (Cancel. Illegitimate. Type again. Substitute: ‘everyday’) fashion. ‘Take me, take me,’ she sobbed, as she fumbled to unbuckle his sadistic (Cancel. Illegitimate. Substitute: ‘snakeskin’) Benetton belt. ‘Take me here, now – make me yours.’

  The romantically enhanced appeal of this sensual and yielding creature was, for the moment, wasted upon the Architect. In his first, bug-eyed, response to her grab at his pleasure principle, he had inadvertently dropped one of his contact lenses into the sorbet – and was now impotent with fear, trying to convince himself that the crunching sensation in his mouth was caused by nothing more alarming than a shard of lemon-flavoured ice. Tiny slivers of deadly plastic were – he could feel them – targeting his intestine, eager to slash their way to freedom. And bugger the consequences. Was it not a fact that the post-mortem lens would carry the imprint of the unconscious assassin? Some swampland pathologist would tweezer up this curved miracle of micro-technology, and have a better idea of the woman’s looks than the disadvantaged Architect would ever enjoy. He didn’t want to check out while humping some blue-stocking turkey. But there was no time to validate her status (in the centrefold department): his trousers were around his ankles, and the life force was returning, in spasms, to his battle-scarred member.

  Dear God, had she noticed that his eyes were, quite suddenly, different colours? Maybe she was turned on by freaks. He breathed heavily on the back of a silver spoon, and polished it on the cloth to reassure himself, in this distorted mirror, that she had not spotted the tiny distinguishing mark – do not call i
t a wart – in the cleft of his chin. Ladies of a certain age apparently considered this trivial flaw leant a saturnine quality to his otherwise classical (Stewart Granger?) good looks. They also went for men who limped. But there was no opportunity to try that one. She was astride him and ripping the shirt from his back.

  A curious sensation rippled upwards from the soles of his feet, to break – in hair-raising confrontation – on the waves of involuntary surrender, spiralling blindly down the freeway of his spine. All six chakras were in critical overdrive. He licked his lips like a man drowning in sand. Was that a bowl of yogurt? What was she up to? ‘Eh? Eeee. I-I. Ohh, you-uuuuu!’ he vowelled his distress, rupturing in a single convulsion the elocutionary pretensions of a lifetime. She was, very slowly, devouring him. He couldn’t stand it. He was lifting from the runway, surging through railway tunnels, breaking over rocks, pounding the white buildings, waterfalling; with a singular greed to rewrite all previous definitions of ecstasy.

  At this hour only the Sh’aaki Twins were not pissed out of their skulls: they were getting rather silly on lime-flavour carbonated water. They were playing the game of spinning an empty claret bottle: whoever it pointed at could choose an item from his brother’s collection of contemporary lithographs. Nobody was keeping score, but it appeared that the one remaining wine waiter (who slept on the premises) was now the proud possessor of forty-eight prime examples of Kitaj, Schnabel, Kieffer, Koberling, Penck, Bellany, Baselitz, Polke, Johns and Warhol. Indeed, the man was able, in a modest way, to set himself up as a respected dealer, and adviser to new investors in this notoriously high-risk field.

  The Film Producer, who had snuffed his way through his own supplies, was starting to ‘freebase’ the sugar basin. It was, as Professor Catling judged, the optimum moment to make his outrageous pitch. ‘We’ve dutifully rubber-stamped the shitty Bayreuth we were convened to bless, OK, fine; but now we have a chance to make our mark and – within the same budget – initiate another project, an original proposal that can slip through on the back of what the grey men require. We can recover our reputation for probity, hold our heads high among the community of artists. Let us act with stealth and in a way they will never suspect – until it is far too late.’ He let his balled fist drop on to the table, startling the recumbent Producer, and throwing the Sh’aaki Twins into a fit of the giggles. His rhetoric expired over a palpitating dunescape of naked buttocks that strained, diligently, to make the earth move. ‘We don’t want our names in lights,’ Catling said, ‘but neither will we allow them to be scribbled on the water.’

  He flicked open a scuffed sketchbook and gave his own interpretation of the defiant dogma of that utterly obscure sculptor, S. L. Joblard. He translated, with impressive fluency, these pages of frantic thaumaturgic doodling: the mineral metaphors, the pencilled ghosts, the chalky erasures, the leagues of angels.

  Professor Catling, prepared to travel in the quest of visionary stimulation, had ‘discovered’ Joblard’s work in a remote gallery on the edge of London Fields, Hackney. An old drovers’ patch of no consequence whatsoever that was notable only for lending its name to a spirited work of lowlife fiction by John Milne. Joblard, it seemed, had conceived the idiot-simple notion of borrowing the ice-making machine from the Lea Valley Skating Rink to freeze the western dock, the second eye of the Silvertown skull, to create a polar ocean. In the ice would be embedded the salvaged wrecks of several whaling vessels. Fram, Terra Nova, and Discovery would be represented, however dubiously, within sight of the North Woolwich railway. The rubble of demolished riverside terraces would be dumped, then layered in foam or polystyrene chippings, to suggest Mt Erebus. Tattered canvas tents, war surplus (Brick Lane), would be despatched to the most far-flung regions, to double for Scott’s camp sites. A dart-nibbled builders’ shed would stand in for the shore base. Expenses would be minimal. There might even be a small profit to be earned in clearing such unexploitable relics. Outdated tins of bully beef, prairie beans, dog food, and pemmican could be buried in flag-marked cairns. Wind machines could guarantee a force-ten blizzard. Brave spirits, at the flash of a Euro credit card, could relive the noblest failure of them all – the dash to the Pole. Junior executives, under compulsion, would build their characters, hone their cutting edges, in a race against a team of Russian sailors from Tilbury (prepared, for the price of a night among the Soho slot machines, to fake it as Amundsen’s hardy Norwegians).

  Joblard of course had other – darker – notions he would tack on behind this preposterous smokescreen: shamanistic ceremonies concerned with lunar eclipses, molten lead, horse skulls, brick ovens, ice spears, the invocation of animal ancestors. These, Professor Catling had the tact not to mention.

  The thing was put to the vote. The Sh’aaki twins sniggered, took out an option, and accepted. The Film Producer was already on his way home, via the Limehouse nick, in a canvas sack marked ‘DOA’. The couple under the table, locked into writhing (and interchangeable) combinations of hunger and tumescence, continued to heave like huskies: they rose to the occasion, offering up tacit moans of approval. And so, to the sounds of feeding time in the wolf pen, a ribbon of pure madness was innocuously inserted among the footnotes. Professor Catling signalled for the waiter to summon a taxi.

  VI

  In that refurbished cattle truck, shuddering on some embankment ledge, above fenced mud fields, over paludal wastes into which sacks of paper credit had been tipped as ballast; in that rattling, enclosed space, pressed hard against the smeared, cold window – I began to understand the concept of breakdown. Complete, absolute despair. The ego extinguished. The power of the centre, the unviolated heart of my being, was tattered and frayed. I tasted vomit on my lips. And felt my angel shiver to be free. Sonny spoke aloud, but his voice was untrustworthy. It was my mother’s voice, calling out in the darkest hour of the night, addressing me with my dead father’s name.

  The quality of the desolation outside the carriage’s window-screen altered; it shifted and shook, as I drove my knuckle against the ball of my eye, feebly opposing this accumulation of evidence with mere pain. I pulled my cheek from the dirty glass, leaving behind a negative frame: the portrait of a ghost, a man without moral substance. I had never confessed to being anything but a jaunty witness, a paddler in the narrative shallows. Now there was nothing else to look at. There was no ‘story’. The landscape had withdrawn its labour: an unsettled greyness. This heat-printed trace, this copied man, stared back into the train with an unfocused, autistic gaze; and saw Sonny sitting with some straw-stuffed bundle of laundry. Borrowed clothes, borrowed skin; the inevitable carrier bag of other men’s books.

  The catastrophic rump of Stratford and Plaistow, Canning Town and Custom House became, as the train moved, the blast furnaces of Margam, the rolling mills, the fire-tongued stacks belching their gritty deposits on to the salt breeze; creeping over low hills, to strip ancient damp oaks, or gift the valley folk with lush cancers and squamous growths; dying among the inhuman lightless depths of conifer plantations, in which foxes hid from squadrons of shotgun-toting foresters. I was back in Wales, being driven down the coast road, west, following the coffin. Pieces of that journey lodge, and overwhelm my lack of interest in yet another East London railway adventure. Salient flashes of the Thames, between wrecking yards and stiff-necked cranes, burn into the persistence of the broad flat Severn. I saw the shell of Margam Abbey, and the roofless chapel on the hill above the maze; while, all the time, we continued to jolt towards the business of Silvertown.

  Sonny still danced to a self-inflicted cattle-prod tango. ‘If we can borrow a standby crew from “Local News” or “Blue Peter”,’ he said, ‘we’ll simply compose with their tired utilitarian footage. Exploit banal images that have no resonance, no sense of being inhibited by meaning. The method has distinct possibilities. Found art, construction by selection: editing is the really constructive stage anyway. Give us your raw material – formulaic establishing shots, over-emphatic close-ups – and we’ll electrify the
air waves.’ He broke off to hammer at the walls of our designer-vandalized compartment. ‘An Art Train! Dziga Vertov! Kino-Eye! Montage is the true engine of the lyric. We’ll plunder those reservoirs of unconscious aspiration. Take whatever we are given, and cut/cut/cut to the heartbeat, to the rhythms of the breath: engines, wheels, statues falling, racing clouds, the quaking towers of the city. Futurists of a New Reality!’

  Sonny’s lips were moving but the sound, mercifully, escaped from me; ran out into the overhead wires, leapt towards Canvey Island and Shoebury Ness, bearing false messages of revolution and hope. His gestures were wilder and faster. His teeth dazzled like Mexican bone dice. It was like watching a madhouse charade in which some flesh-scorched depressive mimes his remembered account of the Book of Deuteronomy. Without warning, I experienced an excruciating pain in my ear (how crude are the body’s metaphors!); as if Sonny’s irrepressible torrent of enthusiasm was splitting the incus, the anvil, with a tiny (and blunt) cold-chisel. Each blow projected a scarlet flash on to the ceiling of the carriage: cooling towers, the moulded angel on the side of the Custom House, the black and silted canal. I tipped forward to rest my head in my hands. Sonny was pouring the landscape, in the form of an ointment of honey and melted film stock, into my external auditory meatus. It was slipping, sticking, soothing; inwardly sealing my father’s voice, which prompted me towards actions I could not begin to understand.