Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Absolute madness! Sonny had no mandate from the Corporation. We were without cameras, crew, or recording equipment. We had no budget. We couldn’t raise a production number between us. Our epic looked certain to qualify as one of those masterpieces that exist only in the conversations of film buffs. The fewer people to see them, the fewer to contradict the legend. Eventually you have world rights on a cockney cut of Orson Welles’ It’s All True – and without exposing a single foot of film.

  I was drowning in the psychopathology of obsession: the harder I drove myself in composing this account, taking down the voices (the intrusions from ‘elsewhere’), the more exposed those around me became to repeated and meaningless mischiefs. My lacerated ego puffed and swelled to a critical state: I began to believe that, by some magical trope, unwittingly enacted, I had moved ahead of the events I was describing. Or even, and this is hardest to swallow, by committing these fictions to paper, I had ensured they would occur. I found myself, a sandpaper-pored Richard Burton, opening my newspaper with palsied hand to have the latest atrocity confirmed. Vessels of Wrath: ‘angels that failed’, revengers, river-inhabiting, tied to the earth (but not part of it), deluding with false divinations, whispering into the wires, toying with stop lights. Light bulbs exploded as I touched the switch. The typewriter cut out as I pressed the first key (I considered shunning the letters ‘j’ and ‘k’, but that was insufficient penance). I fell prey to the temptation to destroy everything I had done – as if that would revoke it; to pitch the whole mess into the fire. As soon as I completed my narrative of the Whitechapel train-fury, typed the final paragraph, I slumped in front of the television set to receive equally distant, but more compelling, versions: blood, carnage, suffering. I began to wrestle with the present tale of widowhood, memorials, monuments, and I was telephoned with the news of my father’s death. If I moved on, as I proposed, to crucifixions, cursed motor launches, Islands of the Dead – what could I look forward to?

  Walking away from it all – escaping – the house, the desk; a Saturday morning, down the Waste, for old time’s sake. And I found in a box on the floor a curious, awkward, Germanic engraving: ‘Descent from the Cross’ by A. H. Winter. It was very cheap. I bought it to resell, as I hoped, at the next Book Fair. But succumbed to temptation and held on to it, hung it on the wall. A slumped Christ; maimed, extinguished beyond all hope of resurrection. The peasant disciple, mongoloid with shock, fingers hooked beneath the lifeless shoulders, struggles with a dead beast-weight. The twisted neck, the veins of the kneeling woman. It was unutterably bleak.

  I recognized the cross, a monstrous concrete tree, as we turned off the motorway and down the private slip-road to the crematorium. Red furnaces against an overcast sky. Perimeter fences of the steelworks. Out of the window of the Silvertown train the whole reel was available, now, today, at this moment, the film of life: event by event, second by second, a procession of single frames. It is all there, all within reach; birth to grave – and beyond: it requires only the courage to stop everything and to look.

  I pushed the heel of my hand against my ear and succeeded in muffling the pulse of pain. Held firm by the gravity of sick pride, I remained exactly where I was – and nowhere else. There was no further expenditure of stolen time. The trauma was safely frozen.

  Sonny is nudging me, opening the door: Silvertown platform. It is as mauve, silky, stocking-filtered, fey, day-for-night as Delvaux’s ‘Nightwatchman’; used on the dustjacket of the American edition of Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Obscure, semi-official buildings. A snake’s nest of rail tracks. Hills in the distance – across the river? And the river itself, that self-renewing avenue of escape? Denied to us. I grant no credence to this preposterous set. If this is reality – pass me a paintbrush.

  We have to arrange, somehow, to re-enter our narrative, to advance; or stand for all eternity, shivering in this dogmatically transitional limbo. (I flashed to John Clute’s warning of my ‘not remarkably powerful grasp of narrative syntax’. But I am powerless to act. It is like being handed a plague card.) I allow myself to be dragged, club-footed, a storm anchor behind Sonny’s still bustling pilot boat.

  Silvertown, sadly, makes little attempt to live up to the glory of its name. It would have to be acknowledged even in the most optimistic auctioneer’s catalogue as ‘distressed’. Subdued by the deconsecrated ziggurat of the Sugar Factory, the thin main street – once active in the field of nautical exploitation – now reluctantly let chaos greet chaos; it tumbled into more and more boisterous characterizations of squalor and decay. The once fire-stormed hamlet was now a glittering beach of sugar. The air was thick with a viscid sweetness; inspissated droplets fell, without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia. As you smiled, charmed by this version of the picturesque, the enamel of your teeth was stripped to the nerve roots; the periodontal membrane dissolving into black lace.

  We crossed and recrossed deleted railway bridges, trying to find our way to the City Airport, the Royal Docks, the site of the almost completed memorial to the Widow’s Consort (known locally as ‘Dirty Den’s Knob’). The tracks always petered out among the same tangles of wire, giant wheels of extinct machines, columns of treadless tyres.

  A mustard-plaster Victorian Gothic church, St Mark’s, primed with a terrifying bestiary of gargoyles, oversaw and dominated this principality of unemployed apparitions. S. S. Teulon’s masterpiece, with its hollow ceramic blocks, was caged in wire and no longer approachable. Soon it would be returned to the populace, the eager communicants, with a new identity – as a storage shed for the local history collection of the Passmore Edwards Museum. An unneccessary conceit: the entire canton should have been under a bell jar, with a neatly engraved sans-serif label. Even the inevitable First War cross was beyond our reach. I pressed against the fence, striping my cheek: a refugee from the razor gangs. The words (Courage, Remembrance, Honour) exulted the dead ‘whose names shall live for ever’; but not here, where the sugar-smog has already eaten the gilt from the sandstone, and erased the lost squadron of claimants on our sympathy.

  It was long past the time to look for a drink.

  VII

  The kids leant in wonder on the antlers of their BMX bicycles, as Imar O’ Hagan walked inside the wicker head across the Bow wastes. He disappeared into a shallow pit and – for a few minutes – they saw nothing but the crown of the great head itself, the shell-crusted eyes, floating towards them. They mounted up, cowboy fashion, standing on the pedals to race back to a safe distance. The Wicker Man and his double were within a breath of life.

  Lacking honest, friable Dorset chalk, Imar had whitewashed the x-ray of the Cerne giant on to one of his lesser mounds. The creature’s arm was stretched out in a gesture of reconciliation; not grasping a warrior’s club, but a shamanistic twig that resembled nothing so much as a favourite niblick. The face was decorated with a pair of Rotarian-approved spectacles. His vertical manhood fell short (by several yards) of the generative potency of his two-thousand-year-old rival.

  When the wicker head was lifted into place, the revenging Twin, the basket case, stood ready on his scaled-down Silbury. He stared fiercely across an empire of compressed slurry towards the southern horizon and the coronation of his Silvertown rival: this false sibling with its feet set in concrete.

  With a hoe Imar raked up the living grass, the mud and the worms; he stuffed his creation (his Adam, his angel) as he would a cushion. Balls of old newspaper (carolling wars, disasters, corporate raids, rape, surveillance, child abuse) were fed through the cage of his curved white ribs. He kissed the head full upon its lips. He aimed a sharp blow at its paper heart. The physical work was done.

  Sitting at the foot of the mound – with slowed breath – Imar opened his sandwich box and gently lifted the twelve snails from their leaf. He was prepared to follow their instruction. Their silver threads would set the destiny of the monster.

  VIII

  Our search finally yielded, among wine bars f
retful to parasite upon the flanks of the City Airport, an old dockers’ pub, an unrestored end-of-terrace barrack. The ham rolls were reassuringly authentic: crusted in oven-tanned plaster of Paris, concealing a pink slick of reconstituted animal fat. The Guinness was warm and slightly soapy. The wallpaper had not been pasted to the wall: it had grown like a fungus. And was growing still.

  The only other customer, sitting under a photograph of the wreck of the Albion, was Henry Milditch. They fitted so well together, these blatant props, that they might have been artfully posed by the management in a patriotic tableau; an advertisement for extra-strong cough drops. Milditch was dressed like a seafaring man. He was bearded, grizzled, red. I could have sworn he was suffering from frostbite. He blew on clenched hands: his eyes narrowed to menacing slits against the glare of sunlight on pack-ice.

  ‘What’ll you have, boys?’ Milditch offered, with unprecedented generosity. ‘I’ve landed a beauty here. Polar trek across the Royal Victoria: two hours a day, three days a week. Five hundred notes in the hand. Can’t be bad. And a possible “voice over” if the “South Bank Show” bites on Joblard. Catling’s been dropped, or there’d be a clash of chalk-stripes with Melvyn that would devastate the horizontal hold. It was no contest, I walked the audition. I still had the costume I’d liberated from the tele in Greenland; I thought it would come in handy for winter mornings down the Lane. It’s promotion for Milditch, boys. I’ve made it from base-camp gopher to Captain Oates. I was the only applicant with his own gear. So it’s hard tack and horsemeat all the way to Christmas.’

  It made me shiver talking to him. We dosed the shakes with remedial tots of rum. Milditch had even taken to a pipe. He poked and scraped, puffed out contemplative streams of blue smoke; hummed the odd Music Hall chorus. He offered to take us with him on to the Great Ice Barrier. We could participate in the ultimate bulldog fantasy.

  The broken-backed Albion hung above us, trapped and framed (a crocodile trophy), as we killed another bottle – holding our wake while we were still around to enjoy it. Royalty fanciers on overcrowded and inadequate piers had been swept away in the tidal wash of the Albion’s launch. Respectfully dressed to the nines, they drowned where they waved. Their sacrifice authenticating the loss of the vessel. They were ‘justified’ when their small tragedy afforded the opportunity for some strikingly purple cadenzas in the national press.

  Arm in arm, wrapped in a shaggy cloak of spirits, we staggered up the slope towards the City Airport; battling through a whiteout of sugar-fires, the darkness at noon, the huskies howling in their quarantine cages.

  IX

  The naked hubris of the Consort’s Monument was startling: a scaffolded Colossus, an Ozymandias touting for copy from a gossip-column Shelly. The stack, knitted in coloured searchlight beams, could achieve its apotheosis only as a ruin, a Planet of the Apes arm, lofted from future sands for the gimcrack inspiration of stoned romantic poets.

  Chained barges were linked across the King George V dock. Choppers worried and swooped. Marksmen crouched on roof tops. Dogs sniffed for plastic explosives and cannabis. (That Janus-headed horror of drug-crazed bombers!) A babble-speak of spooks licking their own gloves. Then the Widow herself clattered on sawn-off stilts into a hail of exploding flashbulbs. She was padded like a Dallas Cowboy; smoke-blue, she chicken-danced towards a nest of microphones. Her head was unnaturally tilted (as if it had been wrongly assembled after a motorway pile-up), but her hair was obedient. A swift, over-rehearsed smile preceded the ankle-stamping homily. ‘And you know… you know you know you know.’ The blade-shredded acoustics fed her catchphrases back into the prompt machines, to blare in frantic reverb from speakers which had been hung (like so many skulls) around the perimeter fence for the benefit of the uninvited masses.

  ‘I can only echo the words… the words the words the words,’ she uncurled a fleshy white arm, like Gypsy Rose Lee about to peel a long black evening glove, ‘of Captain Robert… Robert… Falcon Scott. “For God’s sake look after… after after… our people… people people.” That has always been… been… and remains remains… our first principle. Looking after our own people.’

  Over at the Victoria Dock they were testing the strength of the ice by airlifting the Royal Vegan. The Widow had timed her oration to the second, the recorded applause would steal his thunder, and neutralize any potential whingeing about ‘traditional values’ and amateur heroics, the boy-scout stuff. Anyway, why dig up that polar fiasco? Didn’t the bloody man fail, beaten by a gang of Viking lager louts? And what had we salvaged of the fabulous mineral wealth of the continent, to say nothing of the buried occult deposits, the blue hollows guarding the Spear of Destiny? Sod all, that’s what. Enough ground for a five-a-side football pitch.

  A sad knot of anorak-draped proles had been bussed in from outlying geriatric hospitals and day centres to stand at the dock-side, waving-by-numbers at the overalled maintenance workers; while being deafened by the thud of ice-making machinery, the sinister hum of Joblard’s privately generated magnetic field, and the low-level raids of helicopter gunships. A day to remember. Or so they were told.

  Milditch ushered us towards the Customs Sheds where my old friend the sculptor, S. L. Joblard, was mumbling his final instructions to his regular wild bunch of razor-cropped assassins. These were revealed, on closer acquaintance, as a trio of mild-mannered, obediently impoverished art students, who happened to look like warders from a Hogarthian asylum. Joblard would lead us in our push on the Pole. There was no difficulty about our joining the team. We were winched into sets of bloodstained and stinking parkas, balaclavas, vast gloves on which the fur was still growing. Then we were given a swift onceover by Make-up.

  ‘We’ll have to do something about the suntan, lovey,’ Make-up trilled, patting Sonny down with arsenic powder and a copydex laminate. ‘Very persistent, isn’t it?’ Stone-faced, we received our quota of lip sores, blains, blisters, tissue trauma, and rime-spiked dogfur fringes. We staggered out on to the rink like tipsy rejects from a VD clinic. Milditch, the old pro, leant contentedly on a stick; puffing at his pipe, absorbed in a suitably jaunty leitmotif from his headset: Blood on the Tracks. The familiar sage-spiced odour of the herb calmed us.

  Joblard had retreated into himself: his social persona had shifted to something unformed and private. It was like watching a detailed reflection drain from a mirror. Joblard no longer reacted to external stimuli. He was quite alone. The polar pantomime meant nothing to him: a convenient method of funding some arcane and potentially unstable ritual. His motives were also opaque. They were not satiric, nor political. He flattered nobody and wanted nothing in return for his efforts. He made no boasts. He listened intently for the return of some sound he had initiated in a previous existence.

  It struck me that Joblard had reversed Stevenson’s polarity: Hyde had succeeded in manufacturing his own doctor, in the form of Professor Catling. This mask of respectability granted him leave to slip the bear from its chain.

  We were undistinguished extras. Joblard would soon break away from our plodding troop of bogus adventurers and strike into the solitary distance, bent against the storm of shredded asbestos that his assistants tipped over the propellers of the wind machine. He would ‘tap’ the ice floor, searching for a spirit hidden within a secret hermetic chamber, a presence of ‘concerned agile violence’. He would cast the moon in lead; deliberately inverting the process and meaning of alchemy. He would make a necessary sacrifice. I only hoped that we were not a part of it.

  We followed Milditch out; and were ourselves followed by a pre-recorded cacophony of sledge dogs. It felt as if we were about to be hunted to the death. Awkward as underwater divers in our stiff and cumbersome gear, we slid and shambled down a short ramp and on to the ice. Drooling exemplars of Hurler’s syndrome gaped at us from the windows of a rank of lime-green minibuses: so many selenotropic vacancies. Helpers jollied them into twitching their miniature union jacks. An orange flare curved against the darkening sky; the wind machines
began to clatter and grind. It was impossible to stand upright: we tumbled, a heap of rags, against the dockwall.

  Crouching, with gritted teeth, cursing; we were strapped to our sledges. Roped together, unable to speak, or hear the word of command, locked in our individual hells, we manhauled our ballast (of undistributed Crosby/Sandle brochures) over the thunder of a ground sea – somewhere in the general direction of Southend.

  The Customs Sheds and the Airport buildings vanished in a total wipe of stinging plastic pellets. The creaking icebound vessel, the Terra Nova, fell behind us: our last icon of escape. A lingering look at its frost-webbed rigging and we were alone in a wilderness of negatives: all the dark shades whose power we had invoked (and insulted) were out there, and they were waiting for us.

  ‘Stone-crazed lunacy!’ Sonny screamed. ‘I only hope someone somewhere is shooting this. We might be doing the stuff for no reason at all. What if we get back to the cutting room without an inch of film?’ he gibbered. ‘Maybe, yes, wait. What if, ah, yes yes. We’ll scratch the film like those Brakhage freaks, like Norman McClaren, Len Lye. We’ll scrape storms out from the emulsion. Cave-painters. Get at the elemental force. Flood it with raw sound. Uncover the primal images. Yes, great. What a breakthrough!’

  Henry Milditch remained at ease, comfortable, ganja-loose, marching with steady rhythmic strides; not exerting himself, modest in courage. Oates had joined him, or so it appeared; giving us all the strength to follow. He was, as he told me later, quietly running over the list of junk shops he hadn’t checked out in the last month, between Billericay and Westcliff-on-Sea. He was rehearsing the mantra of phone numbers he would need on his return to the terminal.