Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Joblard was hunched in concentration, peering dimly through thick, spray-smeared spectacles. His pathetic orange lifejacket was strapped across the bulk of his shoulders like a dowager’s paisley. It wouldn’t keep him afloat for a second. He’d wallow face-down on the tide, a cetacean Quasimodo, vividly targeted for the harpoons of Japanese whalers.

  There’s something hideously familiar about Jon Kay’s face. You want to sneak away and check the illustrations in the latest Charles Manson biog. His whole persona is one that any sane civilian would take considerable trouble to avoid. The scab of some ancestral, suppressed trauma is waiting to be picked from his skin. He is a karmic experience of horror, buried alive in the psyche: a dodgy deal in the silver market, a newspaper-wrapped parcel oozing blood fat in the stall of a condemned urinal.

  Then he half-turns, he asks for the time – he’s fiddling with a toy TV set, a flat miniature offering random interference, mantic sunstorms – and I remember. Remember it all; the whole squalid story.

  Joblard and I, fifteen or so years before, were cutting the grass on the south side of St Anne, Limehouse, when we discovered the wreck of a boat (an Ark?) rising out of the jungle of a neighbouring yard. We sat on the wall. Took a blow. The thing was as unlikely as an helicopter gunship excavated from a Carthaginian amphitheatre. Joblard rolled a cigarette, while I fell to musing on images of flood, inundation, fire and lightning. I glanced up at the tower of the church. A man was swinging out of the octagonal lantern, attempting to lever the clock-face from its fixed position. He was loosely attached to the crumbling masonry by an umbilical length of rope. Old rope, frayed rope. Hangman’s twine. He was swaying nicely in the breeze: enjoying, simultaneously, nose-scraped close-ups of the fossils in the stone and wide-angle longshots of the river and the dying hamlets. His legs thrashed against the clock, predicting the hour of his self-destruction. We judged the distance to the ground, and we waited. ‘The things you see,’ commented Joblard, ‘when you haven’t got a camera.’

  It’s a pleasing thing to sit on an old brick wall in the early-spring sunshine – the grass cut, the sepulchres cleared of weeds – and watch a lunatic wrestle with a clock. His heels kicked among the Roman numerals, causing them to crash like shrapnel on to the path below. The man persisted, against all nature. What was left was now worthless. But that did not quell him. He was in a man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball duel with time. And he was losing every round. He aged with every swoop of the rope pendulum. The creature they would siphon from the shrubbery would be less than the dust in a beaker of impacted cockleshells. No joy here for the resurrectionists.

  Finally, the man snapped; put all his weight on to the minute-arm of the clock, and succeeded in forcing it out, horizontally – so that it pointed in accusation at the watchers on the wall. Time, which had been costive in Limehouse since the First War, now leapt into another dimension. It attacked. Smoking lines of longitude surged back towards the Greenwich meridian. The rulebook was shredded. The arm broke away. It plunged; embedding itself in the soft earth, like the lost Spear of Destiny. (Joblard had it wrapped in billiard-felt, and tied to his bicycle, before it stopped quivering.) But the defenestrated villain was left helpless, suspended by his ankles – an impatient suicide, a bungler – tangled in a web of sisal. He substituted for the missing clock-arm. He marked the scarcely perceptible passage of time for the citizens of the borough, the immortal community of vagrants. They studied him, furtively, through the dark glass of their liquid telescopes: brown apertures of serially emptied cider bottles.

  These were still the good old days when the vicar chose to spend his afternoons hearing confession in the Five Bells and Bladebone. We had, wisely, taken the precaution of getting the church keys copied. We had access. We were the unofficial sextons and celebrants. Unhurried, we climbed the tower and hauled our man in. Jon Kay (aka, Paul Pill; aka, Harry Whizz) was not especially grateful. He did not allude to the affair or to his failure in it. He had moved on. The clock was history. And not, therefore, to be trusted. Winners wrote the story. Losers lived on lies. He thought we might be interested in humping the great church bell into his van. He’d worked out a way to shift it, with fresh ropes and a beam: swing it at the tall west window – right? – shatter the opaque glass, the pigeon shelves, the whole bloody crust of feathers. The bell was strong enough to survive the fall. It would float through any holocaust, like an acorn cup. We had only to lift it and loop the rope around its skirts. He’d see us right. There was definitely a drink in it. No danger.

  Somehow we hustled the maniac down the narrow bore of the tower, skating in linseed curls of pigeon dirt as he went. He couldn’t be hushed. I dragged him from in front, Joblard kicked him from behind. He yelled as he trotted. ‘A few organ pipes, boys. I’ve got a blowtorch in the van. One angel then. Let’s do a couple of sodding stained-glass windows. I’ll shift them down the Passage first thing Wednesday. Be realistic. A bible! Who’d miss it? I’ll tear the plates out without moving it from the lectern. Gimme a break, fellers.’

  As the most recent incumbent, the Rev. Christopher Idle, remarked to the Observer newspaper (5 June 1988): ‘Over the past twelve years we have suffered most when the church has been locked.’ Sneak thieves are the least of his problems. The Parish Magazine shudders with pulpit-thumping bulls denouncing pyramid-worshipping satanists, mendacious television producers (all television producers), occult tourists brandishing yellow-back Gothic Romances (in impenetrable verse), oil painters who think the church a fit place to exhibit twenty-foot snail portraits (waggling their horns like the legions of hell). All the dispossessed phantoms of lunacy are screaming at the windows. ‘Let us in. Give us a break, fellers. One angel. A piece of the action.’

  Jon Kay. How had this prohibited life-form survived? What miracle had preserved him to rebuke these dark days? Some deathbat brushed its wing against his face. He was too far gone to be affected by mere memory. Electrical connections twitched and sparked. Red cells perished as a septic tide rushed into his cheek. Memory, for him, was a form of sympathetic jaundice. Veins collapsed (like landslides) in his mollusc eyes. He poured with sweat and clawed at his palpitating belly. There was a cure. He scanned the horizon (to check that he was unobserved) and announced: ‘I’m just popping below to write up the ship’s log.’ He bolted the cabin door, and left it to Joblard to bounce us over the boiled milk skin of the sun-polished waters, exuberantly to search out the wash from larger and more powerful vessels.

  It’s curious how different people notice different things. ‘What a freak,’ Joblard said, as soon as Kay was out of sight. ‘Did you clock his arms?’ I hadn’t dared go that far. I was still in shock after dealing with his face. We couldn’t, either of us, dodge that: the missing eyelid, the permanent wink. (The story came later, but I might as well throw it in. How Kay had sat on his dark glasses while watching a live sex show in Barcelona. How he’d superglued them together again, along with his eyelid. How his mate had hacked him free with a stanley knife. He never felt a thing.)

  The narrow band of visible flesh above Kay’s wrist had, inevitably, been disfigured by the usual blue cartoons of flying fish and grinning skulls: epidermic graffiti too commonplace to merit Joblard’s attention. ‘The skin, eeeugh! Hanging in a nicotine flap. A wilted support-stocking. Bubbled up, percolated. He’s had it cooked. And the graft hasn’t taken.’ ‘Who could blame it?’ I thought; not caring to picture the events that lay behind this trivial deformity.

  Joblard, in his turn, paid no attention to the detail I’d picked up on: the overpowering blast of the weed seeping through the deck-boards like compulsory nostalgia. Our captain was a dope fiend, and he was making an ominously early start. He stayed below for about thirty minutes and emerged, red-eyed and tooting, to search for a pair of wraparound shades. (O Save us from that Lidless Stare!) He wanted another shot at raising the ghosts from the aether of his pocket TV, the faulty snuff set. He was hooked on some fantasy of pre-pubertal jailbait, squealing Saturday-morning t-shir
ts: a mail-order catalogue for the Bill Wyman tendency.

  We were drawn together now in what Conrad’s Marlow refers to, ambiguously, as ‘the fellowship of the craft’. The worst was surely over. We were Three Men in a Boat. ‘Three, I have always found, makes good company,’ remarked the jaunty Mr Jerome. But he was another J/K (JKJ), and not to be trusted. It struck me that we had embarked on a contrary statement of Jerome’s Thames journey. Our motives were not dissimilar. The trip was a rehearsal for the book that would follow. It was flawed therefore. Impure. Vulnerable. Upstream for Comedy, Downstream for… whatever it was we were involved with. We had wantonly chosen the wrong direction. We would never pull gently, at our own pace, back towards the river’s source; the spurting puddle in a Cotswold field. We sought dispersal, loss of identity: ‘moremens more… Lps. The Keys to.’ We were fleeing in desperation, in pieces, letting the water devils out of their sack. We could never implode through comic exaggeration into the mildest and most human of excursions. We would never be reprinted. Never repeated and abused on video. We had forgotten our striped blazers and our cricket caps. We were verminous, hounded from the society of men: a bottle of plagues, expelled like Lenin in his cattle car. We were escaping into an uncertain future.

  But Jerome did not set out to provide raw material for institutional whimsy: books at bedtime, television pastiche, fat cats in Portobello blazers too boyishly enjoying themselves. He meditated a grander concept, The Story of the Thames (no less): a journey, limited in duration, which would cunningly open itself to episodic seizures by the son et lumière of history. He would be possessed by guidebooks, architectural jottings, myths gathered from waterside inns. But, as always, the fiction achieved an independent existence that overwhelmed him, tearing the publisher’s advance treatment to shreds. The feeble (premature heritagist) pageant collapsed. The vigour of the past ambushed him at every turn in the river. It was alive, unexorcized. And not hiring out for exploitation.

  The Victorian boatmen were ‘real’ characters: George Win-grave (a bank manager), Carl Hentschel (who worked in his father’s photography business), and Jerome K. Jerome (an author?). It was once possible to visit them, to interrogate them on the degree of accuracy in the report of their adventures. Only the dog was a lie. He was the conscience of the quest. Without him, it was all meaningless. Our beast was alive – but we had betrayed him, left him imprisoned within the black Cadillac. Even now he was measuring its air, panting against the sealed windows. He had to survive. This was his story. The rest of us were wraiths, unsound fictions, diseased figments of the dog’s (oxygen-rationed) imagination. If the tale belonged anywhere… it was in his mouth.

  Jon Kay felt our panic: my terror that our fate remained a prisoner on the Isle of Dogs. ‘That fucking animal!’he roared. ‘He’ll tear the seats to ribbons. He’ll throw up on the fur rug. He’ll piss into my restored leather upholstery.’ And he made this the excuse for another heavy session below decks, chainsawing the ship’s log into kindling. Now you could hear him draw the smoke to his lungs with hungry bronchial gasps. He was drowning in his own breath – mimicking the dog’s plight. Even Joblard, gripping the wheel like a length of chicken-neck, careering wildly over the river, realized something inadmissible was going on. Six inches beyond the reach of his sea boots.

  The cabin door burst from its hinges. Kay was too far ‘out of it’ to work the bolt. He reeled towards us, holding the door in front of him like a barman’s tray. He was in the wrong script. He was looking for the head of John the Baptist. He pitched the door over the side and collapsed in a boneless heap; sprawled, face-down, in a puddle of what might once – at the kindest estimate – have been water from the bilges. We watched him closely, ready for anything.

  He was silent for a few moments (the mercury tension leaping at the thermometer): he stared morosely into the ever-shifting depths. The surface was perilously smooth. The glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

  Clinically, Jon Kay could be diagnosed as suffering, in one hit, all the symptoms of cannabis misuse/overdose/withdrawal. He was euphoric, relaxed, talkative, disorientated/fatigued, paranoid, irrational/hyperactive and crazy as a tick. A loose-tongued compulsion took him – a returning fever – and he began to rap.

  ‘We were bringing a couple of keys across the desert. No, Turkey. Was it? Istanbul. Early evening. I had the wheel. Really loose. Handle it with my eyes shut. Sheeew! Don’t ever go off the road there, man! Stay in town. Two wrong turnings and they’ve got you penned in a concrete pit, a ramp. Streets with no names. Dead ends. No way out. And hundreds, hundreds of these little kids… wow… out from the ground… skulls with rats’ teeth… climbing on the Land Rover. No, man! Smashing the lamps. Bending the mirrors. Slicing the canvas. I tell you, we were beating them off with tent poles. Give us cigarette. Fickyfucky. Suck your dick? I’m trying to reverse. Can’t see. Faces. Windscreen covered like a blanket. Termites. And then, then… the worst thing…the very worst…’

  It was all too much, too far away. He aborted it. What did it matter? He ducked under; rattled around, searching helplessly for his misplaced stash. ‘Got to get some speed on, man,’ he burbled, on his return, ‘or we’ll never make Tilbury. I’ve handled real boats, boats with balls, boats that jumped from wave to wave. They had to, man. Give the horse his head, or get blasted out of the water.’ He swivelled, arms outstretched, demonstrating the Wall of Death aerodynamics he demanded. ‘Skidded, planed. Right? Sharp curve down the moving wall of noise? Dropping a cargo for the Aldeburgh fishermen. Then – whoooooosh! – away… before we’re even registered on the radar. Yeah!’

  He barged Joblard from his perch and guided the Reunion, with unexpected delicacy, in alongside a rotting red hulk. The old ‘Powder Magazine’, he called her. And he made us fast to her chains, while he tinkered once more with the Evinrude.

  Joblard pierced another can; and shut his eyes, wedging the glossy green-and-red spout between nose and lower lip – while he glugged in naked satisfaction. We relaxed and enjoyed the morning. It had been, so far, one of the best. Suspended time. The hours on the river are never held against you. We drifted back and forth, cradled between memory and forgetfulness. Superb clouds, menacing and charged with iron, squadroned in from the sea: continents of cloud, shaping and parting, overlaying the last brave peepholes of blue. The scene was pure narrative, a conversation piece: horizon to horizon, unchecked, a revelation of ‘England’s End’.

  We had not yet escaped Woolwich Reach. We pitched and bumped against the Powder Magazine which might, for all we knew, be still active. Nobody had anything to say. We were submerged in the sounds of the tide rushing past our captive craft, and the steady trickle of beer, flushed in choking gulps, down Joblard’s capacious throat. But it was coming back on me. After-images of unredeemed pain. The fixed present was slipping, getting away: under siege from the combined forces of the poisoned light, the solidity of the water, and the low-lying, feverish marshground. We were ephemeral to the singular quality of this scene.

  I saw a tier of chained hulks, as they had once been – or perhaps as they were about to become. I saw them as prisons. (‘What’s Hulks?’ said I. ‘Answer him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right cross th’meshes.’). The prison service was collapsing, overwhelmed with technical offenders, swollen with the evicted mad, the helpless, the demented. Market forces suggested privatization on the American model. But we had our own well-tried methods. We had thousands of years of dark history to draw on. The hulks had been pressed back into service. I could not believe what I told myself I was seeing.

  Men-of-war, old Indiamen, burnt-out relics of the Falklands campaign were chained together, another Thames barrier, a malign thunderhead. We lay among them. They were low in the water, patched with canvas, rotten, decayed. The pollution of the river met all the diseases of timber in an illicit and riotous embrace. No name but ‘hulks’ would satisfy this graveyard fleet. The deck planks w
ere cemented by grey-green mosses: spores migrated on to the raw skins of the sleeping bilboe-shod convicts. They scratched, they tore at themselves – sunk too deep in exhaustion to wake for such minor annoyances. Blackened fingernails opened wounds in which bred a pomp of maggots. Woolwich was swiftly returning to its former glory. (A red-white-and-blue illustration on the lid of a matchbox.)

  Dissenters and criminals (marginal to the needs and legitimate desires of the state) were once spilled into the wilderness of an unmapped world; where they fought for breath with savage aboriginals. The hulks provided a neutral zone, removed from the land’s heat. To live here was to lose your memory. You could not vote or speak. But the outbreak of the American War of Independence made it impractical to transport these brutalized slaves. They were held in perpetual transit: a floating Gatwick, without the duty-frees. The only destination was death. Which was also the only product of their labours. Dame Cholera. Work was the only freedom. ‘Punished by being kept on Board Ships or Vessels properly accommodated for the Security, Employment, and Health of the Persons to be confined therein, and by being employed in Hard Labour in the raising of Sand, Soil, and Gravel from, and cleansing, the River Thames…’

  Now the hulks were occupied once more, under the co-sponsorship of English Heritage, who had lovingly restored them to the last detail of authenticated squalor. This daringly simple solution had been unveiled by the Widow in her keynote Marshalsea Speech (subsequently recognized by commentators as the moment when the perceived identity of Britain changed from Orwell’s colonial airstrip on the fringes of the civilized world to a land which had, successfully, made a reservation of its own history).

  ‘From this day forward,’ the Widow began, with a defiant twist of the head, a lift of the nut-crusher chin, ‘let it be known that We are no longer to be considered the prisoners of history. We have forced open the great iron doors of mystification, self-doubt, self-critical inertia. We have walked, unafraid, into the sunlight. History has been conquered. Rejoice! We have summoned up the courage to recognize – after decades of misrule, lip-service to alien gods – that anything is possible. If We will it. If it is the mandate of the people. The future is whatever We believe it to be!’