Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  The walls of the lift shook and shuddered: snail-cracks ran through the glass, a system of veins, a fern garden. The crossed keys became the map of another place; a river defence, lines of fire. Earth jars crashed from the roof, and shattered. Rum and salt. Essences of the unborn. Dead sugars. Our nanosecond of resistance to the spin of time was aborted. The goat was dead; the knitted entrails steaming in the hands of Baron-Samedi. The grinning waiter in a cannibal restaurant. Cephas was crushing the shoulders of the only woman on the Island. His breath drawn so deep as to steal all the oxygen from the chamber. We were choking, cobalt-blue: our brains dying on the stem. She was webbed within a curtain of eyes. The hunsi were queueing inside Cephas’s hunger for a share of the sweetmeats: a singular gangbang.

  The woman pulled off her conical hood, shook out her hair. Cephas hesitated. He was looking at death. He was looking at a face without features, an empty mirror. The flesh was as blank, as uncontoured, as linen. Wild light from the south streamed through the pyramid, down the reopened ley, from Blackheath and Greenwich Hill, over the dark waters, cutting through the blasphemy of the architects. It rushed to meet itself. Imar’s heated snail-path silvered the coupled contraries in gummy radiance.

  We closed our eyes, gripping each other’s wrists, gasping for breath. We felt what we saw: grass. Moved our hands, brushed the steel floor. The springy, sharp resilience of grass breaking through the walls of the elevator. Tickling our shocked skins, dewy blades. A green cell, a wind from the river.

  We lifted our heads. We did not need to open our eyes, we saw. The pyramid was pulsing – a drop of sweated blood – far in the distance; reaffirmed at the summit of the black tower. Far, far away, above the terracotta roofs of this morning-fresh medieval city, this transported Siena. Beneath us, along the riverside, a parade of windmills: decent samurai. The first, the true, the unexploited Island. Marsh grass rustled by breezes from the Reach. The outline in the earth, the foundations of the Chapel House. Coarse fields split by a single urethra track.

  And we began to roll, to tumble, laughing, cheeks pressed in the cool damp grass, down the gentle slopes of Mudchute hill.

  VIII

  We had come through; but at what cost, we preferred not to consider. We touched our arms, patted ourselves, tenderly feeling for bruises and broken bones. We stood up. It was morning. Ridiculous. Soft white sheep bleating on toy hillocks. The stacked, angled roofs of some Italian city-state; some hill town celebrated in guidebooks. Bells. Church bells across the deep-water docks. There were even piglets with corkscrew tails churning up the mud. All the excavated silt from Millwall had created a token farm for the brochures of developers: a grass enclosure around which to heap their defiant fortresses. The edge too had been worked, planted with market gardens. Even the windmills had been restored. Only the uprooted trees, with their huge earth-bowl bases, witnessed the night of storms.

  ‘There’s something very strange about those windmills,’ Imar remarked, ‘even with a fresh river breeze, the sails are not turning.’

  ‘Obviously heritage fakes,’ said Davy, ‘carefully sited along the riverfront to hide whatever is going on behind them.’

  ‘Which, I suppose, we have to investigate,’ I groaned wearily, ‘before we consider some way of getting out of here.’

  ‘Unless,’ Davy persisted, with relish, ‘unless the freezing of time has had some darker consequence. You realize we may actually have been flung back into an ahistorical anomaly: a confirmation of Hawking’s absence of boundaries, a liquid matrix, a schizophrenic actuality that contains the fascinating possibility of finding ourselves placed in post-modern docklands and quattrocento Florence, at the same time. So that all those greedy pastiches have become the only available reality, “real fakes”, if you like. We arrived here by an act of will: was it our own? What if the inevitable return of our natural cynicism and disbelief has let slip Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, renegades from Dickens’s prison hulks, or any other composite monsters – including those from this fiction you are supposed to be writing? If the imagination is primary, then anything we can imagine must lie in wait to ambush us.’

  We strolled carelessly down through ancient overgrown apple orchards towards the windmills; passing among unconcerned sheep, ruminant philosophers, skull-faced Augustans, and their loose-bowelled lambs – urgently worrying at their mothers’ dugs. Our speculations were comfortable: the chalky prattle of tutors perambulating an enclosed quadrangle. We knew that the savage world was safely distanced on the other side of a high wall.

  We didn’t need to come any closer to the windmills to see that Elgin MacDiarmuid’s living nightmare and his dying ambition had both been fulfilled. He had been crucified, in the Roman fashion, between a pair of tinkers. The windmills were all crucified men, staked, to face the river: a warning; or a boast.

  Our contemplation of this latest atrocity could not be prolonged. No aesthetic reveries; no measured comparisons with Mantegna or Grünewald. Late Gothic or early Expressionist? The unacceptable sound of skulls falling into a petrol drum. The wind returned: from the crown of the hill, in the shape of thundering hoofs that churned the soft brown earth. First, the scarlet pillbox hats, the buttoned tunics; then the rearing, foam-flecked horses, monsters of stone; the stretched hounds, the spears, running men, shouts of triumph. Uccello’s ‘Hunt by Night’ had come loose from its hoarding. We knew now what they were hunting.

  ‘Split up,’ screamed Davy, ‘run!’

  ‘The tunnel!’ Imar shouted, already ahead of us; tearing, with wild erratic strides, for his talismanic vision of Greenwich and the snail-domed observatory.

  ‘That’s no good, man,’ warned Davy. ‘They’ve flooded it. The foot-tunnel’s drowned.’

  Too late. Imar had vaulted into the goats’ pen, sprinted, stumbled, checked, fallen, lost a boot, gashed a leg, slithered through a yard of dozing sows, and out again, shit-plastered, on to the perimeter road.

  Davy yelled that he would double back towards Glass City, link up with the surviving tinkers; or, failing that, dive into the water: swim for it.

  I decided in an instant – what other choice was there? – the last human street on the Island, Coldharbour, was the place for which to aim. The ground beyond the Gun, a derelict terrace, was my target. Already future fictions were accumulating around those images of honest decay. We were divided, the power of the triad was broken; we lost sight of each other. We fled from our separate mounted demons; the sharp spears ripping our clothes, the teeth of the dogs tearing at our sinews. It is my fear alone that gives life to these chimeras of pursuit.

  At last, after so many words, the metaphor is workable: escape. Flight. Careering across an alien landscape, the unknowable vacancy of another man’s dream. Running, and putting the world behind you. Escaping from it, or letting it swallow you whole? Nothing remains. No trace of being. No history. No tools of language. Don’t look now. Try to confirm the reality of the final set. The dark barrel of the Gun. Then hide, vanish, become zero, a ripple on the tide: the crazed anchorite I am already supposed to be. Enjoy the luxury of silence, exile, cunning? Forget it. Posthumous sediment at the bottom of a bottle of yellow wine.

  The perspective of Uccello’s time-hurdling Hunt ordains a single, distant figure of prey. One victim only, but which of us should be the lucky man? It might prove interesting to find out.

  X

  The Guilty River

  (In Homage to Nicholas Moore, poet, who died in Orpington Hospital, 26 January 1986)

  ‘…Pocahontas histories

  Left trailing in the wind. O visionary…’

  Nicholas Moore, ‘Yesterday’s Sailors’

  Weak: weak rather than sick, I followed my sickness to the river, willingly anticipating its arrival – the tickle in the throat, the raw and bloody eyes. (Are we not all, more or less now, sick? Who cling so stubbornly to the cities? Sicker on some days than others. Noticeably sick. Unable to stand up, retching. Sick in the head. Wanting to inflict damage, editing th
ose encounters – or walking, head bowed, into the path of a car. The viruses, the newcomers, spread in a blush of shame, disguise themselves, return home; kissing the damp chicken-flesh. I remember in 1967 talking with R. D. Laing in a waste garden alongside the Roundhouse. A garden? The Roundhouse? R. D. Laing? He had this messianic intensity – which is relish, celebration – going on about an artist who chose to live in Manhattan, because he liked feeling his lungs grind to tissue, black lips, fevers; he took it on, the early version. How remote it sounded, how intriguing. In the sunlight, which was Belsize Park to Primrose Hill; the trees. The bloody minded-ness of hanging on, knowing: watching the tremble, the crazy runners racing after themselves, clutching at their hearts; the filth – the fatalism of an apocalypse clique. End of sermon.)

  I wanted the smoothed tapeworm of the North Woolwich shuttle: the unlisted halts, the elevated views over frenzied sections of motorway, sun scars flashing on curved windshields. Only in the train could I step out of time and hear its brazen doors bang behind me. All notebook-twitching novelty had long been drained from this journey. I could use it like a contemplative retreat. A weekend visit to the Trappists – with the bonus of moving scenery.

  What is it with trains? The line of doors slam shut like a collapsing house of cards, or – seen from above – oars on a prison galley. Nailed into our juddering coffins, we slide down the rails towards the furnace: in fits and starts. That might be it. The train generates metaphors, similes. (And without much self-criticism: no revision capacity.) It’s ready (indecently eager) to be everything except itself. If I could hold my mind still, hold the compartment in one place. The only movement is in time; sideways. Parallel loops of film. The wheels of the train running backwards. Which train escapes the station? Jumps the line; an oblique reality, an unexpected angle. (Not angles, but angels.)

  I can’t forget that story Bruce Chatwin tells in The Songlines (one of the italicized fillers: captured ‘On the train, Frankfurt–Vienna’). It’s a clever piece of writing, its moral judgements slanted into this dark fairy story with no visible strain. A ‘pallid’, fleshy, airless youth is travelling to Vienna to meet his father. Chatwin opens the carriage window to breathe in ‘the smell of pines’. The inevitable fabulation awaits his return.

  The father, a rabbi, survives – but his story is a terrible one. In 1942 the Nazis painted a star upon the door of his house in Romania. He ‘shaved his beard and cut his ringlets. His Gentile servant fetched him a peasant costume… He took his first-born son in his arms’ and fled into the forest. Worse than Grimm. He left behind, with a final embrace, his wife, two daughters, and infant son. All died in Birkenau.

  The rabbi was sheltered by shepherds, fed on slaughtered sheep ‘that did not offend his principles’. The Turkish frontier. America. Time. Despair. Europe again. Vienna. And, late at night, the doorbell. An old woman with ‘bluish lips’, carrying a basket. His Gentile servant.

  ‘I have found you,’ she said. ‘Your house is safe. Your books are safe, your clothes even. For years I pretended it was now a Gentile house. I am dying. Here is the key.’

  The key returns, fate: a wrist tattoo. I am dying. Here is the key. Trains promote confessions, as cruising yawls promote the leisurely spinning of tales. I was wrong about Rodinsky. Now I can open the letter I received this morning from Mr Shames. I had written asking for his permission to quote from his original letter to Michael Jimack in my Spitalfields story.

  Stoke Newington

  Dear Mr Sinclair,

  Please forgive delay in reply to your letter for which I thank you.

  I herewith have your article dated Aug 1988 which was most interesting, but I must correct your assumption about David Rodinsky. Firstly, I knew him when young, a pasty-faced chappie who always looked under-nourished. He was not Polish, but born in London, he was a tenant together with his mother in two rooms let to them above the Princelet Synagogue, not a scholar, his sustenance was given to him and his mother from Jewish charities.

  Neither was he invisible. My daughter Lorna spoke to him many a time, & she remembers him well, it was I that named (pardon me) his mother ‘Ghandi’ & is mentioned by my sisters-in-law to this day.

  The Synagogue was cared for very well by Bella, even after her late father died, until she decided to move away & it was closed. All prayer books & Torah scrolls were returned to the Federation of Synagogues, together with their silver appurtenances, & thereby closed an era of East End Jewish history. As a member of the synagogue, I was Mr Reback’s son-in-law, having married in those premises. I can assure you that some of my contemporary members included Dr M. L. Barst, a most likeable practitioner, also some wealthy merchants, like the merchants who dealt with government clothing contracts, three brothers who were master bakers, the Rinkoffs, the Olives, wholesale & retail umbrella merchants, cloth merchants etc, their names have been forgotten in my memory.

  It was in 1948 I last saw & spoke to David, it was at a bar-mitzvah of my nephew, the son of Monty Fresco, the press photographer, & author of 50 years in Fleet St. It was then I related to him about my experiences in the Middle East, Egypt, India & Burma.

  At that occasion he told me he had learned, while resident in a home, Arabic. I spoke to him in Arabic, & his reply was understood by me, & I guessed his Arabic teacher was an Egyptian Jew. He was taught Arabic, like myself using English vowels & consonants; I too was taught Arabic & Urdu during my service in the canal zone.

  To conclude, I had pity on David, he kept himself interesting during his short life, but unfortunately attained nothing, this was due to his low IQ. With people like him, they know not of having an ambition nor the initiative to get somewhere in life. David invisible? Definitely NO! My daughter Lorna, also the Reback family living at the Synagogue always treated him well. He had a sister Bessie, she paid occasional visits to Princelet St, but she too had a mental illness & was a patient in Clayberry mental home, from my deduction she may be there still.

  A word about myself. In my travels I returned with many ‘objet d’ art’, I possess a collection of gold sovereigns from George III to the present day, as well as a fine collection of Israeli proof coins.

  Today, in my garden I have two vines, black grapes growing on one wall, white grapes growing on the opposite wall – this year’s crop is a record due to the long summer. From the grapes I make a black portlike wine, the white grapes make a fine dessert wine. So at the age of seventy-six, I’m still pretty active.

  To close, I sincerely hope this finds you well, if you have an hour to spare you are always welcome to see some of my collections.

  Best wishes,

  I. Shames

  The speeding train leaves no visible wash. The uncertain past is erased by its passage. My early tales vanish behind me; they are not to be trusted. But each new version of the Rodinsky legend only increases its interest for me. Was his life so ‘short’, if Mr Shames met him, capable of conversing in Arabic, in 1948? Were his attainments so negligible? How could a man scratching by on doles of chicken-broth charity have left fifty-three cases of books worth removing to the Museum of London?

  I was standing once more on the banks of the river. Deleting the dead versions only cleared the track ahead – on! Throw off the rattling tin cans, the barnacled anchors. The river is time: breathless, cyclic, unstoppable. It offers immersion, blindness: a poultice of dark clay to seal our eyes for ever from the fear and agony of life. Events, and the voices of events, slurp and slap, whisper their liquid lies: false histories in mud and sediment; passions reduced to silt.

  I let my sickness lead me where it would, to discover its specific ‘spot’ on this dull ribbon of shore. The Telecom saucers were lanced skywards: the harm was there to be imagined. No immediate lacerations were available, no blistering, hair loss, no cankers or amputations. Future damage would be required, at the insistence of the courts, to invent a more distinguished parentage. The silver funnels of the Sugar Factory gleamed in the Reach: a death-kit, a plug on its back, blunt
prongs wounding the sluggish puffball clouds.

  Yard after yard, step by step, I dragged myself past the Royal Pavilion (its red, river-facing sign: COURAGE); and on into the pleasure gardens. Downstream once more to bear witness to the sinking of the Alice in Gallions Reach. As if, by staring into the leaden waters, I could clear the shame of my obsession, could see the jaws of the paddle steamer rise from the depths – healed – band playing, smoothing its circuit of water, reversing on to the pier; its white-faced voyagers stepping ashore to join the perambulation of other ghosts on these geometric paths. A whelk-stall Marienbad!

  The gardens were an extension of my pre-emptive convalescence. I would get that out of the way before the blow actually fell and fever boiled my blood to water. Shrubs remained unshakeably calm in their pools of shadow. Willowy transplants (willows?) from more exotic regions drew me in among their yellow-gold skirts of sunlight. The bark tasted of freedom. Even the tennis courts were painted amulets, untroubled by the dance of ball-punishing fanatics.

  But there is always a territory beyond the gardens (there has to be), a wilderness that makes the tentative notion of a garden possible. Beyond music (gossip, ease, assignations, French kisses, sticky fingers, cigar smoke, sweet Muscat) is a concrete balcony, a fierce ramp aimed at the suck of the river: an unshaven wall of threat, sprayed with curses, among which I notice the delicate invocation, ‘Acker’. The tide is teasing the rug away from under the usual catalogue of broken bottles, pieces of chain, grievous bodily weapons that failed their audition, lukewarm motors escaping the net of insurance investigators. Yellow river-sick plasters the hubcabs. This is where you will find (should you so desire) whatever is spat out when all the meat has been picked from the bone. A last run of wild ground which heavy plant instruments are obscurely, but inevitably, eliminating. A brief no man’s land. An Edenic flash in an atrocity album. A truce between the mental gardens and the Creekmouth Sewage Works. I can go no further.