Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  I cannot guess how many hours passed: we twisted and writhed in our harnesses, our savaged faces always into the wind. We could see no more than ten or twelve yards in any direction. There were no longer any buildings, no walls, no bridges, trees, birds, vehicles – no other people. We were microbes twitching pathetically on a lens of ice: we obeyed the laws of physics, responded blindly to forces we could not understand. A circle of visibility followed us, as if we were held, wherever we moved, within the spotlight beam of some perverse and experimental theatre.

  Now I began to sense the presence of other creatures on the ice, strange familiars whose articulate breath surrounded us: melted by human heat, the speech-mist released whispers of false doctrine, fatal advice. (‘But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you.’) They guided us between blue crevasses and snow-powdered obstacles: dumped motors, or inconvenient canisters that hissed when you brushed against them. Dog forms pressed on our legs, leaving them chilled and trembling. Snarls of meat savagery forbade us to turn our heads and look back.

  Suddenly the load increased; Milditch, leading us, held up an arm – Sonny had fallen on to his knees. We were dragging his dead weight. He was weeping, the hot tears cracking channels in his grotesque white mask. ‘Nobody can shoot in these conditions: we’ve got to negotiate for time and a half. Or I’m pulling out.’ Negotiate with whom? Out where? The dock, by my calculation, was not quite a mile long – maybe a little over two miles, if we had strayed through on to the Albert or the George. But they were not frozen! I suppose the machines could have gone ape, mindlessly responding to this atmosphere of trumpeting euphoria. Perhaps the sledges were slowing us to such an extent that we were hardly advancing at all. We had been marching for at least three hours by any real estimate; therefore, we should be out on the Thames itself, and heading for the North Sea, Spitsbergen, and the Arctic Ocean. I believe the Thames itself had magnified our mood by freezing up like some Baltic port: it had plunged into its own past, sealing plagues under a coarse skin of jollity, ox roasts, fire. A green-white membrane was creeping from Woolwich to Bermondsey. The tower of St Alfege would lift from some glacial tongue like the tusks of a trapped mastodon.

  Milditch snapped the spell. He had spotted a dark shape that he took to be an emergency cairn, hopefully containing food, medical supplies, and rum. Supporting Sonny between us, we stumbled towards it. There was something, a shape in the snow, a mound. We scraped with our gloved hands, scratching and tearing at the unpleasantly glutinous solution. It peeled back in strips, an obscene fruit; or an egg laid by something half-human. We were looking into the face of a woman drowned in air; flattened against the glass, puff-cheeked, rigid – her eyes open. We had unwrapped some casual crime of passion. Another victim entombed in a car. The kind of journey, begun in fever, which frequently ends in the River Lea: hauled out, dripping, white legs in a police net. The blue shirts smoking and sharing a thermos: ‘pacing’ the paperwork to enjoy a fine spring morning. But this woman was behind the wheel, clothed, undisturbed: she must have taken a seriously wrong turning and been swallowed alive in a web of soft white rubber; denied breath.

  Whatever it was that she saw, before she gave up the ghost, was still out there. She was still seeing it; it was in front of us. And as I became aware of this, at that very moment, a narrow crack, or passage, opened in the mantle of mist. We could see for miles – but only through a mean slit, a keyhole. Everything was sharp, brilliant. There were precise, elegant shadows. A radiant landscape; too clear to be true. There was grass again, all green things; and a firm cloud on the crest of a hill, getting slowly bigger, coming towards us. We did not dare to breathe: our fernlike exhalations turned to glass, chimed and shattered. The cloud grew into a forked human figure, or something more than that, an unfleshed diagram of veins, sinews, scarlet pulses: a walking tree, a giant.

  There was the ugly interference of a monogrammed helicopter overhead, a cone of lights to confuse us; the snow powder swirled and stung, the figure was lost. The Royal Personage was evidently making his appearance. Around us the ice began to creak and strain, to protest: our boots were surrounded by pools of water. It looked as if, very soon, we would have to start swimming; still chained to the weight of our sledges.

  We began to slide, to skid, to scramble for the dockwall. But which direction should we take? Away to our left we caught the orange glow of a fire and, irrationally, pulled towards it; towards a primitive source of comfort. We advanced on the patch of ice that would be first to give. Joblard’s cauldron of lead was about to be tipped, his liquid silver spilled. I feared for him. It was always the big men, the bulls, who went fastest: Petty Officer Evans, a legend, a tower of strength, ‘so confused as a result of a fall that he could not even do up his boots’. The culling had to start somewhere: we were too many in too small a place.

  The lead hissed at our feet, a scimitar; a moon was cast, a delicate, rough-edged meniscus. THE MOON IS THE NUMBER 18, I flashed; how I’d puzzled over that title of Charles Olson’s, intrigued but uneasy, until I discovered the tarot, and its interpretation. ‘Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error.’ Is that all? It felt much worse; those were pinpricks available anywhere. A few pages deeper into Olson another title lurked: AS THE DEAD PREY UPON US. The purity of Joblard’s act under these extraordinary circumstances was post-human. What drove him to it? The preparations and the difficulties were everything. He worked best under pressure. He searched for someone to hold a harpoon to his throat. The object itself was redundant, self-erasing, an embarrassment. Joblard hunted the irritation of motive through blocks of inert fat. I can accept anything from these artists – except their justifications: the laboured, stuttering language-seizures forced upon them in their attempts to procure some pitiful dole of credit. ‘Take a bath, man. Don’t explain.’

  The smoke from the cauldron thickened, and resolved itself: a giant figure had entered our circle. It had shaken free from an antiquarian’s gazette, a Gentleman’s Almanac: a Wicker Man, tongued with fire, his lineaments blazing, a mane of crackling whips. We could see through him, and see ourselves; mesmerized, inadequate. Sonny had wet himself like a frightened child. The Wicker Man was helmeted like a poilu in a spiral of shell. His frame was warted with snails; they popped, and spat hot oil as he burnt. A Job, he was magnificent in a cloak of boils. His wooden ribs breathed fire, but were not themselves destroyed. Gladstone’s effigy had marched from Bow in stern rebuke: his arm stretched out, pointing beyond us. Frankenstein’s Adam come to his end, prophetic, goaded further than his capacity for forgiveness could bear: he was cast in pride. ‘I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.’

  The ice, with cracks like fired timber, was breaking up all around us; we were afloat. Clumsily, we twisted free of the sledge harnesses, and searched for something with which to paddle our floe for the shore. All of Joblard’s machines were sparking, smoking, failing. The wind dropped and the fog lifted. A sour lemon sun revealed the Boschian scope of all these Earthly Delights.

  The Consort’s Folly, the stepped pyramid (its lions, and friezes, and elevators) was a black torch. Flames tore at the sky. Sirens screamed. Masonry crumbled. The concealed steel joists, supporting the Heinkel, buckled; then gave way. The bomber nosedived into the dock, wrecking a rescue launch that was attempting to take the panicked official party to safety. The sound system pounded out anthems of rage. Crimson fire engines ineffectually jetted high streams from both banks: they crossed, married, fell short. Glistening liquid arches converted the dock into a cathedral, and the memorial stack into an altarpiece.

  The Wicker Man was stepping, with single strides, from barge to barge. The embalmed corpse of the Consort hung from his arms; leathery and fire-blackened, wood in its veins – a bog sacrifice, or Grünewald’s Isenheim Christ. The pair were expelled from the world of men, exiled in a co
llaboration at the heart of the flames: the sudden chill of the furnace’s fiercest cell.

  We had passed unconsciously through some warp, crossed the border, and were viewing gospels of the future; but we were frozen, trapped, floating helplessly – unvoiced witnesses. Like Mallory and Irvine (‘still climbing when last seen’) we had reached our summit, our Everest; but we could neither return, nor report. We were no longer required. We had all travelled far beyond the possibility of any useful participation in the resolution of these events. The fire erased us. Let somebody else interpret the preserved shadows, the thin prints of lead, the irradiated wafers of light.

  IX

  The Isle of Doges (Vat City plc)

  ‘I am not sure the bubble has burst, I would

  prefer to say there has been a realignment’

  Alan Selby (Estate Agent),

  Débâcle in Docklands

  ‘Hath a dog money?’

  Shylock, The Merchant of Venice (Act 1, Scene 3)

  Yes, we have no bananas. A nightmare then? How does one run a credible banana republic without them? Child’s play. The ingenuity of our fiscal cardinals, our thinktank of snapping turtles, is needlessly invoked. Sell what has already been stolen and let the victims of this sleight of hand believe that, in some miraculous fashion, their long sequestered property is being returned to them. The zebra-suited pirates, puffy pink faces innocent of all corruption, are rewarded in votes and adulation, in yen, Deutschmark, krugerrands, dollars – credit! ‘Interest’ is a distorting mirror, its own contrary. Let the plant wither on the vine, but the deal must go down.

  It all began when South Wales, from Caerleon to the cathedral city-hamlet of St David’s (the grail dreams of Arthur Machen to the seven cantrefi of Dyfed), was ‘leased’ to Onokora-Mishima Investments (Occidental); and a Shinto shrine was erected at the epicentre of the Bridgend Enterprise Park. A gold-crusted phallus was set in a rectangle of raked white sand (gathered from the radiated ruins), to frustrate the ambitions of corporate raiders and to abort the flight plans of locusts. Half-naked, male worker/slaves built up the ridges of their upper bodies, glistened and chanted: admired, from afar, by fluttering painted bird-boys in travesty. The Sun Dragon! The ancestor-worshipping rituals of rugby football were honoured by the people of both cultures – living on a pauper’s diet of bitter memories, and conquests celebrated only in song. The aboriginal Cymry, natural quislings, greased back their hair, shifting allegiance from Gene Vincent to Toshiru Mifune: finding solace in Germanic oratorios, and the seasonal slaughter by fire of innocent estate agents. Their racial pride, a sour thing, was made tame by a cargo cult of hi-tech toys, filling the cupboards of their immaculate hutches. They lived, gratefully, by a creed of strong bellies and limpid poetry.

  Norfolk, from Lakenheath to Sculthorpe, went to the Dallas Cowboys. The decision was close, requiring a plebiscite by male suffrage. The benefit-drawing underclass and the mentally disadvantaged (Liberals, Gays, Book Collectors) were rigorously excluded; which resulted, inevitably, in a low turnout of weekenders, east enders, and media gypsies. Who voted, after searching the darkest recesses of their psyches, over many a dinner party, to exclude the Washington Redskins. The pinks and the greens could not live with the word ‘Washington’, and the right-thinkers (sic) were not about to invite some ragtag of landless Blackfeet to camp in their lush back yard (despoiling the habitat of so many recently discovered toads, coypus and birds of passage). Lock up your daughters. The Dallas Cowboys it was: by a neck (size eighteen, ruffed in fat like prime beef in the stockyard).

  But all this was no more than making legitimate a contract which had been, de facto, in place for generations. The whole inheritance of abandoned tactical airstrike bases was up for grabs: a dying tundra of miniature golf courses, conifer screens, radiation-free bunkers (conversion-friendly as DIY hyperhypermarkets), baseball diamonds, and American Rules football pitches, complete with electronic scoring facilities (with Early Warning playback and 2,000 provocative sponsor’s messages from the Big Book). ‘The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed.’ (Deuteronomy, 28.35).

  The local dealers, car-boot traders and pensioned ‘wreckers’, swooped early to carry off the stacks of Gold Medal paperbacks, the snuff videos, porn aids, uppers, downers, heroin, crack, speed, Southern Comfort, deep-frozen grits, fetishist flying suits and helmets (beloved of skateboarders). It was Saigon revisited. The whole strip, from Grimes Graves to the Wash, was cropdusted with defoliants, bulldozed, burnt, cleared as a pre-season training camp for those genetic braggarts from Texas (bulls, bears, guards, fridges, fleetfoot blacks): the infertile steroid-pumping popeyed gladiators. Museum fodder! These games were a logistic embarrassment run for the benefit of the root-beer and popcorn franchises. Teams would soon confront each other – separated by thousands of miles of water – by shovelling strategies, game plans, meat statistics, favoured plays and form guides into the computer, and taking bets on the outcome. A potentially rich territory was opening up for baby-faced console jocks and goat-slaughtering snake-brained fixers. They were bending the future under the shame of bad money.

  The ice floe was breaking. Mother London herself was splitting into segments, the overlicked shell of a chocolate tortoise. Piggy hands grabbed the numbered counters from the table. The occult logic of ‘market forces’ dictated a new geography. Banglatown, as it was vulgarly known, replaced the perished dream of Spitalfields. The ‘born-again’ Huguenots dumped their Adam fireplaces, and ran. The stern fathers of the One True Faith sent columns of black smoke twisting skywards as they redressed the violations of the culture of drunkards and apostates that surrounded them. Vulture priests, percolating hatred beneath their turbans, bearded in a nest of absolutes, spittled their chanting congregation with infallible accusations. It is spoken. Fundamentalist guards patrolled the border tracks (Cable Street to Cannon Street Road, to Bethnal Green, to Commercial Street); white-eyed, reciting the scriptures, AK-47s dangling from their shoulders. Children stoned adulterers, unbelievers, and White Hart Lane heretics. A time of angels and visitations: angels of revelation, angels of death, trumpeters of the resurrection. Now the censors alone have the melancholy duty of reading books. And condemning them to the flames. The marketplace blazes to a life unequalled since the Marian barbecues. The Brewery, indecently eager to confess its blasphemy, sold its holdings; and was smoothly translated into a prison for theological dissidents, common criminals, and journalists.

  We had lost the capacity for experiencing surprise. We were immodest. Nothing Davy Locke told us could bring the blood to our cheeks. The Book of Revelation was as familiar as the Hackney Gazette, but tamer. We knew that the Isle of Dogs had been sold to the Vatican State, and we did not care. It was a natural consequence of Runcie’s merger. One of the shakier assets that had to be stripped. The peg of uncircumcised land was known to the outlying squatters of Blackwall and Silvertown as ‘The Isle of Doges’, and to the cynics of Riverside as ‘Vat City’. This deregulated isthmus of Enterprise was a new Venice, slimy with canals, barnacled palazzi, pillaged art, lagoons, leper hulks: a Venice overwhelmed by Gotham City, a raked grid of canyons and stuttering aerial railways. A Venice run by secret tribunals of bagmen, too slippery for Vegas; by relic-worshipping hoodlums, the gold-mouthed heads of Colombian cocaine dynasties.

  A temporary alliance of Milanese industrialists and pro-Albanian social purists had made things too hot for the established Papal Mafia; a move from the homeland to some more relaxed set of mercantile codes was advisable: and soon! A few hours ahead of the sequestrator’s pantechnicon. Nowhere, no rum-crazy atoll, was looser than Docklands. They’ve torn up the rulebook. Open City, Scum Town. If you can imagine it, then it’s been done.

  The Princes of the Church threw a few Raphaels into an overnight bag, crated a nightclub of tight-buttocked boy gods, a spare set of silks – and did a runner.

  The Isle had passed from the hands of the simple bullion thieves who f
irst correctly identified its present malaise, its untapped potential, bought the wharves cheap, and laundered their grubby millions (to make a far greater fortune than their under-exercised imaginations could encompass). The indisposed loot became rapidly critical. It reproduced itself in an orgy of self-love. It went off the scale of human greed, and into some borderland of wallowing swine demons. The cartel of Deptford clubowners (company directors and bloody-knuckled bouncers) took the advice of their bent brief and evaporated.

  Now serious predators with multinational connections moved in, grabbed their percentage, and let the place collapse: skins tore from the buildings, radiation-sick lizard flesh. Many were never completed. Only a much-photographed frontage existed: colonies of rats multiplied behind exhibitionist façades. The cosmetic dentistry of the project was revealed. Sour smells crept west from the unrepentant swamps. Nervous settlers formed themselves into wagon trains, hired native guides, and galloped for the causeway. Tinkers crept out from under railway bridges, out from inoperative building sites, out from holes in the ground. They stripped the portable fittings, the scrap, the engines and tyres: they trashed the software, left cold turds floating in disconnected bidets. They cruised in unlicensed vans, with hooks and chains. Speed-freaks incubating sawn-off shotguns sprawled in pickup trucks, blasting the heads from inquisitive rodents, setting them free to find a higher plane of existence. Even the lowlife, blood descendants of river vampires and cannibal buccaneers, were uneasy. There were no cargoes left to pilfer, no household goods unofficially to pawn. It was a time to let it all go.

  Armed guards, in a rehearsed manoeuvre, synchronize their multifunctional watches, and pull out from the fortresses. Pearl of the East, Dogtown. Screams. Sirens. Panic in the unpaved streets. Gold-card boatpeople stammer aphasically as they trundle their suddenly ridiculous rowing machines, their Pierre Cardin business suits in zipped bags, down to the water’s edge. The bleeping of half a hundred hyperventilating paging devices: cicadas in a fire-storm. Khaki-complexioned tremblers in designer jogging suits are waving frantically on rotten jetties for river taxis to carry them back to civilization. They see it now. It was all the most ghastly mistake.