Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Imar turned his back on us and took out his penny whistle. And as he played, something crawled out from under the container; something white and snail-slow, a Permian reject, a dead man returning.

  ‘Him’s better than any of your women.’ The tinker grinned. ‘Got a bung’ole like a glove filled with garlicky butter.’ He licked his broken teeth, and prodded the creature with a surgically-abbreviated shotgun.

  The gelded monster crawled agonizingly towards the fire, and Davy recognized, with dread, the former Well Street landlord, Elgin MacDiarmuid. His condition, once boastfully reprehensible, was now terminally forlorn: broken, trembling, unshelled. Two damp peaks of sweat-soaked hair suggested the horns of a snail. He was naked under a grease-stiff gaberdine. His feet useless in layers of flapping bandage. They pulled him into the light on the end of a sharp pin. He had the fatal softness of a grub and the self-justifying mean spirits of the reformed drunk. He had swallowed his heart.

  ‘Blessed Mother of God, help me. Jesus, Holy Lamb, help me. Sweet Babe of Heaven, bless my suffering. I’m not ready.’ Elgin supplicated, in tears; arms flailing like the flippers of a seal, sweeping sawdust in some ring of shame. ‘I beg you. Don’t let them crucify me. I ran away once before. You remember? I was younger, I had my strength then. I could tear in half the telephone directory for the city of Cork. I went back, oh mothering bitch. The nails! Do you understand? They drive them through the wrists, not the soft palms. Hang me bleeding like Medhbh’s pig? And for what? I was “pricked” once for the priesthood. Talk to the Christian Brothers. I could have been a Jesuit. Why do they allow this thing? I was at home, holding on; gathering my thoughts, getting ready to write – until they put the accursed television into every bar from Stillorgan to Finglas. Couldn’t get a drink for it. McDaid’s, Toner’s, the Pearl Lounge. “No no,” I screamed at them. The curate winked. “Right, sir, sure enough.” He switched the channel, thought I wanted the racing from Punchestown. I knew they were watching me out of that little spot that never goes away even when you switch it off. I needed a ticket out. Not too far gone to recognize the arch-blasphemer, Shamus Joys himself, sneaking in by the back door. On the steps of an aeroplane, with the pilgrims at Knock, sniffing good Irish air. The blackguard! Didn’t he try it before? With his cinematograph? His Galway whore? Brandishing the blackthorn like the devil’s own pizzle. Did he ape the Pole and put his lips to the sod? He did not. Come back, Elgin. They’ll have you. They want to nail me to a Jew’s tree.’

  Elgin tried to rise from his knees, but he couldn’t make it. Thick salt tears slid slowly down his gelid cheeks. Nothing could halt the flow of his keening lament. ‘One of us had to go. The country couldn’t hold the both of us. I bummed the boat fare from the uncle. They were glad to see the back of me. Mother weeping. “All for the best.” Plenty of honest work on the other side. Kilburn? Did they think I was a common labourer, a paddy from the bogs? I had a year’s heavy engineering behind me. UCD. Wasn’t it founded by Cardinal Manning himself? I had commendations, letters from Tony Cronin. Don’t lift me on to the golden throne. I don’t want the Pontiff’s crown. Can’t eat, not here. Intestinal problems. Negroes masturbate in kitchens. They make the soup from it. Put drugs in your coffee. You wake in the Papal apartments, breakfast tray served by the nuns of the Congregation of Maria Bambina. Orgies. Filth. And they’re measuring you for your shroud. They say it’s a portrait in oils. That’s a lie. The man’s the official mortician. Look, listen to me. I didn’t ask for any of it. All I wanted was an introduction to an intelligent middle-class woman. His wife, your wife. A graduate with a taste for theatre, a bit of spending money and a double bed. Was it too much to ask? The time to finish my monograph on Douglas Sirk?’

  The redhead jerked on the chain and Elgin fell into the mud; lay where he fell. We could not insult our hosts by asking for his release. He was almost as valuable as a crippled horse. They would rather kill us all; ‘found floating’.

  ‘There is a way.’ The tinker’s conspiratorial grin reminded me of someone, years before, a book thief on the markets, who had vanished overnight into rumour, or Amsterdam, run off with a nympho speed-freak. ‘For a price, I could get you in. For a reasonable consideration. Right to the top, the Holy of Holies: the Magnum Tower. I deliver you to the building – the rest is your own business. But don’t try and stop them, whatever you see. They’ll shred you and feed you to the crows. The equinox is closing on ’em, they won’t wait.’

  Davy listened with intent, while compulsively squeezing the bulb of his nose. The redhead fumbled through cavernous pockets, pulling out lengths of string, apple cores, biscuits, coins – before he located the three badges. They were stamped with the inevitable symbol (the lingam and the water crosses), and they bore the legend, in ‘Perpetua Italic’, NIHIL OBSTAT.

  ‘Of course,’ yelled Davy, ‘the conference! The Jesuits cobbled it together, to prove to the world how open-minded they’ve become. All the cameras will be there. The international correspondents. It will go out, via satellite, at the very moment the secret ceremony is enacted in the pyramid of glass: the one that is intended to halt time, wound its membrane, and give them access to unimagined powers. This is good, very good. The long lenses will be tight as warts, in a phallic cluster, on the face of Stephen Hawking, as he lectures the princes of the church on cosmology. A classic example of the “divine illumination of intellect”. What paternalism, what benevolence! A new era of enlightenment is upon us. Dogma challenged by revelations from the furthest stars.’

  ‘Hawking here?’ I gasped.

  ‘It’s not so shocking,’ Davy said. ‘They’ve already wheeled him in for an audience with the Capo di Capo; laid down the guidelines. “Anything you want, Professor – we’re men of the world – up to, but not including, the Big Bang. That alone is God’s affair. The instant of creation.” What do they think God is? A cosmic wind?’

  I wondered if Sonny Jaques was on the bus. He would have loved this. What a scene was in prospect! The TV boys, the hungans in red braces, wetting themselves in anticipation. Hat-chet-faced video directors (with millennial razor-trim hairstyles) leased from the ad agencies. The Professor, the brain of the universe, wired to his special-effects voice-box, as he faces the tiers of expectant ascetic faces; skull caps, crimson robes. El Greco! Ten full days to work on the lighting. Simultaneous translation into every known language. The lecture already previewed in the Listener, so that the media vermin can get their pieces written before the programme goes out. ‘Space-time is finite,’ Hawking states, ‘but has no boundaries.’ Wow! Beautiful! When that little bombshell hits the fan the pyramid alchemy will be activated: we’ll all be halfway to heaven.

  ‘No panic,’ said Davy. ‘Hawking knows where it’s coming from. He’s sharper than any of them. It’s not for nothing he was born exactly three hundred years after Galileo Galilei. He knows the risks he’s running. He’s well aware that they’ll spray him in images of reincarnation, heresy, old mistakes made good. He can carry it. And we’ll be right there with him. Three hard-boiled prime-time news hounds: collar and tie strictly optional. Let’s do it, let’s join the professionals!’

  V

  A bruised wind, frustrated, bounced the tall buildings, sibilating like a host of linkpersons struggling with the revised pronunciation of ‘Rushdie’. It chopped the slate waters of the dock into small waves, broken anvils. The light dropped to pewter, with glints of sick plum; martyr stains spreading an irrevocable wound. The evil silver-green hulks of decommissioned Polaris submarines rode the swell, converted to wine bars, the private dining facilities of Vat City news-laundering executives.

  With his lupine features set into what he proposed as a clerical sneer, the drooling redhead waved us on. His rickety legs were trapped in tourniquet trousers that finished six or seven inches shy of his sockless ankles. He stabbled at the dirt with blade-sharp shoes. Mycosis fungoides erupted from the grassy duffle coat that enveloped him; conferring, he imagined, a miraculous respectability. W
e stalked his heels, indian file, cockily flashing our Nihil Obstat badges at the shuttered glasshouses.

  Sticking to the dockside, lashed by icy droplets flicked into our faces by an increasingly sullen wind; we crept beneath towering tributes to the service industries: excess information, sky-trawling disks (humming with morbid radiation), self-cancelling messages from the stars. Anything could happen, as long as it happened fast. Nothing was made – except the deal. Immaculate telephone consummations. Fax machines mindlessly reproducing themselves in pin-sharp detail. High-profile offices, lit to be photographed, were unsullied by human occupation.

  Replacing the Flour Mills (the Rope Works, Chandlers, Ship Repairers) were faceless dung-beetle enterprises, with designer stationery, offering fast food / muscle tone / wet bikes / hire car / personalized chemicals / Galleria / wine vaults / lingerie / roses / blowjobs at your console. ‘Selling’ was too important, too rarefied a skill, to be tied any longer to mere products. It was an autonomous artform, practised for its own sake, creating insatiable hungers even among the most resistant of all targets, the other salesmen.

  A narrow alley between boarded-up lots returns us to the central boulevard. The path towards the Palace is before us, lined with hierarchies of guards. First, the gendarmeria pontifica in dark glasses, leather corsets, belts, holsters, jaundice cigarettes, submachine pistols; then the guardia palatina, leaning on ceremonial halberds. We fall silent and bunch together, close in on other groups of media wannabetheres, as they scramble unenthusiastically from the car-park crypt with their video cameras, furry soundsticks, cellular telephones; their unshakable cynicism. But something in nature has been affronted: the wind tears at them, flicking back the tails of their trenchcoats, unshuffling the sculpted layers of their hair. Revenge is imminent. Tangled balls of razor-wire roll down the avenue like tumbleweed. The glamorous cladding on the architectural anthology of the towers starts to unpeel, to flap and clatter: an unserviced facelift. A dustbowl of semaphoring scarecrows, we are tossed against the plinths of the Anubic guardians; offered as unworthy sacrifices to the jackal-headed gods. We abase ourselves, scrape our foreheads in the dirt. And crawl up the slippery marble steps into the Temple.

  We were swiftly assigned to the care of a certain Father Healy, an insignificant other, a vertical worm. Contempt poured from him. He sweated his distaste: a heady mixture of onion soup, eau de Cologne, and Sweet Afton cigarettes. (Could this be one of the Galway Healys? The traditional collectors of customs? A relative of Nora Barnacle?) He slid us from trophy to trophy, in the company of a gang of handrubbing frotteurs; spoiled priests, rotten with sanctity. Healy gestured, with supreme arrogance, at the dazzling concourse of Popes hanging on the walls: ‘Innocent X’ by Velázquez, ‘Julius II’ by Raphael: even Francis Bacon, it appeared, was now an acceptable investment. All fakes, of course, more lustrous than the originals.

  The shrine at the heart of the Papal Palace was kosher. The great black ecclesiastical fortress had been constructed around the ruins of the medieval hermitage and chapel of St Mary, lost for so many years to the citizens of the Island. It was shrouded in a climbing frame of girders; wafers of cladding that suggested Nicholas Hawksmoor’s white fossil-filled blocks of Portland stone. The simplicity of the shrine was overlaid by mandalic diagrams, defended against all known heresies. The vaulted ceiling came alive (at a signal from Healy) in a stunning fresco of light, a laser-constructed version of Michelangelo’s Sistine masterpiece. Only the ‘Creation of Woman’ was missing, expurgated and cast into outer darkness on the advice of a committee of responsible aesthetes, recently ‘let go’ by our Museums of State. Even the spoiled priests hushed their chattering, the programmed responses, as Father Healy – with a tremendous salute – flung his arm aloft, to release, in an ascending cloud, the soapy odours of excessive self-mortification. The Sistine vision bent around the available wall space in convincing deceit: all the iron-pumped carnival of gesture and counter-gesture; expulsion, ecstasy, pride. A Cinecittà pleasure-beach supervised by Vittorio Cottafavi; complete with time-cracked varnish, correctly insinuating the final vulnerability of flesh.

  ‘Gentlemen, Brothers in Christ,’ intoned Fr Healy in a lucid gargle, ‘you have before you the cinema of the gods, ab avo usque ad mala. Its upkeep is no trivial matter. Your cheques will therefore be gratefully received; earning you respect among your peers, and probable remission in Purgatory.’

  The lard-faced penitents scrummaged forward to drop their folded promises, their plastic tickets, into Fr Healy’s open briefcase. They froze momentarily in the act, like politicians casting a public vote for the benefit of the newsreel cameras. The Celtic Father blessed them with a limp wave. They filed out, heads down, ignoring the triumphant murals (for which there might well have been an additional cover charge). It was left to the three pagans, the fifth columnists from the Bow Bunker, to acknowledge the magnificent walls of this chamber. We made our private choices between ‘The Miraculous Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple’, ‘Attila Repulsed from Rome by Leo I’, and ‘The Symbolic Marriage of John Paul II with the Church of Poland’, consummated before a backdrop of the Gdansk shipyards.

  We stood silent, hands knotted together over the organs of generation, while Fr Healy gloatingly evaluated the pillaged treasures. He clucked. His Clara Bow lips pouted, as if closing around the nipple of a peculiarly sharp lemon. They were discreetly glossed. His malachite-green cheeks had received the faintest blush of powder.

  It was time for us to enter the Sala Rotonda for the conference on Cosmology. We assimilated our final instructions with impatience. We were asked to maintain a dignified and responsible silence, and to remember, always, where we were.

  ‘Our mode of discipline anticipates the performance of the crime, and requires no vulgar enforcement. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,’ Fr Healy warned with a smirk. ‘Do not forget for one moment this is not only a place of worship but also the home of the Holy Father, the lineal descendent of St Peter. He, in his infinite wisdom, has invited you here for a purpose; a purpose not to be revealed to his handservant. He has pronounced, ex cathedra: it is so. His will be done. Execution is tautologous.’

  Allergic to cant, Davy sneezed. A tiny goaf of sputum elapsed down the halva-textured marble: a sea-green snail. Suspending all disbelief, it crawled – under Imar’s benevolent patronage – towards the exit. The portent was not difficult to interpret.

  VI

  Professor Hawking leant forward in his customized wheelchair, tieless, large-eared, a fruit bat quivering with intelligence, smiling the huge smile of the enthusiast, absolutely at one with his discourse. He was flanked by MIT-certified gophers, Mormon types, corn-fed hulks in sleeveless shirts who operated the Japanese speak-your-weight voicebox: an unborn mid-Atlantic bass interpreting some dim shade of the great man’s argument, dipping the diamond clarity of his equations in bursts of silicon language. The machine spat Hawking’s wild truths into the lap of the hogs. The physicist’s speculative leaps were calmed by the necessary hesitation between authorial grunts and filtered translation. It all sounded so perfectly reasonable. ‘Space-time has no beginning, no end. There was no moment of Creation. The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The Jesuit fathers, wordly and toxic, nodded in unison: dangerous, inherited smiles. They were already rehearsing the destructive brilliance of their inquisition. Their scalps shone, shelfed pebbles of bone. They were eager to audition before this captive audience of television producers. Always room for another housebroken ‘talking head’ from across the Irish Sea.

  From our insignificant position in a cage at the rear of the hall (with representatives of technical journals and footnote puffers from giveaway property sheets), we edged towards the door. We had done our homework and clocked the glass-fronted elevators, with their ornate jackal-embellished thrones (presumably designated to facilitate a quickfire Papal Audience, in transit to the skies). The elevator was our only route to the secret seminar in the heavenly pyr
amid. The wide Carrara staircase was nothing but decoration, an inflated metaphor for ‘time made subservient to form’. It was guarded by a regiment of Palatines, who increased in stature at each turn, thereby fostering an illusory and disturbing perspective. Each step was as sterile and polished as a cutting bench. The supreme tribunal, the segnatura, was elsewhere.

  We were unchallenged. The long corridors were deserted. The guards were statues. Distortions of Hawking’s speech blared from disguised speakers. ‘Imag mag mag inary time is sss real ti ti time.’ We watched our own ghosts hesitantly approaching the doors of the lift. Our shallow breath left no trace on the glass. Imar pressed the button. Nothing happened. We waited anxiously: Davy fingering the embossed symbol of Vat City, the silver and gold crossed keys.

  As he touched the key, the heavy doors slid open with a surprised hiss. ‘Everything in this building is contrary,’ he muttered. ‘The key should always be the symbol of a closed system. That’s what I discovered about Princelet Street. The synagogue was open to all. Every man who used the place had his own key. And so the ancient rusted thing in Rodinsky’s drawer was not the clue to some hermetic secret, but a badge of conformity. His membership of the shul. He belonged. The key hung on a string around his neck. The string rotted away, its flax devoured by rodents; the key survives within its oxidized shadow. Its continued presence in the drawer grants Rodinsky a family and a living place.’

  The ascent began as soon as Davy spoke the word ‘key’: our stomachs turned, and we shot irreversibly up towards the sanctum sanctorum. We drifted past open-plan terraces on which scarlet cardinals sat at their consoles, revising history, tapping Index-approved lies into the everlasting files, wiping all unauthorized versions. They translated agency reports into dog latin, sensually airbrushing the rogue images.