Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  He wedged a cellphone against the side of his head, like a malfunctioning electric razor. ‘Market’s jumpy, darling. Bit of a panic on. Shittin’ theirselves in the City. Don’t like the vibes I’m getting off of Tokyo. Resignations, sex scandals. Respectable blokes topping theirselves. They’re wading through blood out there. It’s the old knock-on effect, know what I mean? The Mexican Wave, that’s what you’ve got to look out for. I’m thinking of taking a bit of a poke at property. What d’you think? An option on a slaughterhouse in Poplar? Fancy a spin down there before it gets dark?’

  Saul Nickoll could forget the Fort. As of now, the script was Fort-less. ‘Nahh, take hours, hours, to light it. You’re looking at two days, darling, to nick your first shot. Always the same, innit? These poxy location jobs are a real fucker.’ Advised the electrician, the last mastodon of the studio system. He screwed in the bulbs, pulled the switch, and waited for his redundancy cheque. Meanwhile: there were free lunches, petrol, and telephone bills. Can’t be bad? The entire shoot revolved around the mood swings of this crusty mercenary.

  As we backed off, Sofya touched my arm. She had an apology to make. ‘Graphics’, it seemed, had lost the only illustration of the Vessels of Wrath. I had lent them the photocopy that Joblard made for me from a book of cabalistic ceremonies. They wanted to use these demonic forms to pep up the credits. Now the sheets had vanished into the corridors of the Corporation. And Joblard couldn’t remember the book’s full title. Was it published by Lackington & Allen? Was the author Francis Barrett? The London Library had no record of its existence. Mammon, Astaroth, Apaddon were cast upon the air. Magot, Katolin, Dulid and Kiligil skimmed over the surface of the waters. The princes, sub-princes, servitors and spirits were loose in the cutting rooms. Anything could happen.

  We heard the crackle, and felt the heat, of a great bonfire in the centre of the parade ground of the Fort. Through the slit of the open Watergate we saw the orange flames leap. The archives were being cleared. Barrows of paper, bundles roped like sacrificial sheep, were wheeled out from the chapel. Old uniforms, furniture, ledgers. Ancient corners of paper floated over our heads like scorched moths. Teasing fragments, inconclusive extracts. Climbing and twisting, as they drifted above the wall and across the landscape: a nuclear snow falling in yellow mud, riding on the river.

  Joblard stuck out his hand and caught a few of them: pressing them, without stopping to read or decipher, into the uncharted depths of his wallet.

  III

  ‘Were there two sides to Pocahontas?

  Did she have a fourth dimension?’

  Ernest Hemingway

  On the slipway beneath the gardens. We had crossed over. The fort slides from our sight behind its fortified wall. It might never have been built. A column of black smoke hangs in the still air like an Indian massacre. The comfortable Monopoly tokens of the Power Station, the Pub, and the Custom House dominate the riverline. But we are safely out of it. Put ashore. Gravesend. I’ve humped a couple of cans of petrol a mile back to the boat. Joblard has emptied the shelves of the off licence and the pie shop. And Jon Kay has secured two tiny plastic tubes from a car-accessory store to replace the broken oil pipes in the engine. Will he agree to push on around the bend – through the Lower Hope into the Sea Reach?

  Water slaps invitingly against the boardwalk. The Reunion rides the swell, almost as if she meant it. She was ready to sail on without us.

  Eight hundred yards is the distance at which Tilbury becomes an acceptable reality. The gaunt figure of Saul Nickoll strides along the battlements, arms swinging stiffly at his sides. Sofya follows, hands in coat pockets, blinking behind silted spectacles: a refugee. She is fleeing from the culture of talk into the terrors of night and storm. And then Nickoll actually performs that terrible director’s thing. A lenshead! I would never have believed it of him. He makes a frame of his fingers, glares at the gun emplacements, the sky, reads the light, blows on his fingers: soberly, shakes the brain oil, and waves the crew back to the cars.

  The Whitbread Best Bitter trickles down Joblard’s throat as the flogs the green cylinder to ease out the last brown droplets. He turns his attention to Jon Kay. ‘Where did you pick up the retread?’ he asks, direct as always; pinching a fold of the junkie’s loose skin between his finger and thumb. Joblard never meets a medical man without demanding a full and detailed account of his very worst experience: arms sucked into slow mincers, tongues amputated from freezer units, meat gangrene, internal organs cooked by microwave leaks.

  Kay is lying at the water’s edge: a missing engraving from the Princess Alice portfolio. His cheeks have hollowed, decompressed around an ice-lolly stick which has to double for the unlocated roach. All mortal expression has drained from him. The life-force has collapsed. His face is an old man’s sarcoidal nates, penetrated by a rectal thermometer. He gawps in disbelief at the lead-curtained sky: the brown wash of body liquors. A marbled bar slab wiped of its stout puddles. Light is being slowly crushed towards the waterline.

  ‘We were crossing the desert. No, wait. Hold up. It was Turkey, was it?’ All Kay’s yarns opened to the same formula. It steadied him. ‘Italy. Italy, man! We almost made it.’ He smiled at his own presumption. ‘We pulled into an olive grove to check out the grass. Got to know just what you’re selling, right? Before you monkey around with it. My mate’s a bit road-crazy. Off-beam. Heat shivers. Those mirror things? Mirages, right! Been at the vino all morning. He sits down on the reserve petrol can.’

  Kay laughs. An ugly sound. And we laugh with him. His foot, with a misplaced twitch of morphic resonance, drums against our red can: the one I lugged through all the recobbled walkways of Gravesend. The twin pictures begin to fit rather too neatly together. Gravesend, having no viable present, needs somewhere else to go. ‘The can’s like a primus, right? My mate’s wearing cutoff jeans. He’s scalded. Jumps in the air. The cap blows. The can hits the ground. Wow! I’m drenched. And he’s pissing himself, my mate. Drops his spliff. Ball of flame? Fried like a chicken, man. And I’m screaming; calling him every name in the book. Five months in some shitty clapshop in Naples. They peel my ass. The arms never took, did they? Stayed wet. But the tattoos came through. It wasn’t a total disaster.’

  After that, we drank in silence. A rusting container hulk, the Paul Kelver, Liberian-registered, ghosted like a phantom down the deepwater channel. Horses were penned in a makeshift corral on the deck: nervously, they sniffed the salt air. Dog food on the hoof. Gamey steaks for Belgian tables. Spavined ragoût, retired from the shafts of brewers’ floats.

  Pocahontas didn’t want to go ‘home’. This was where they carried her ashore. She knew there was no passage back down the river. No way to re-enter the womb, without dying. The first seal had been broken. The waters had burst. She could never be readmitted to the society of the forest. She was crossed, baptized in holy water. She was another. She was Rebecka, ‘daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan, Emperor of Attanoughkomouck’. It was her husband, John Rolfe, the established man, who was forcing her. She had become the prestige symbol of the Virginia Company: the silver band on a cigar, a cigar-store Indian. She was more potent as a symbol than as a living woman. Her husband was willing her death. He was colluding with darkness.

  Coming into a strange land, she was installed at the Belle Sauvage, Ludgate; where William Prynne the pamphleteer denounced the performance of the Tragical History of Dr Faustus, with its ‘visible apparition of the devil on the stage’. A time of freaks and harbingers. The Scottish showman, Banks, exhibited his silver-shod horse at the same inn: walked it up the short hill to old St Paul’s, where it succeeded in climbing to the top of the tower. (A horse with the eye of a crow? The river, once only, a horse map?)

  London was posthumous. She had dreamed it. A child in the forest. Trees became the pillars of a great court. Gods appeared, painted in gold-and-white lead; shining, buried in layers of stiff cloth until they could scarcely move. The sun, the moon, and the stars were trapped upon a ceiling of o
verhanging branches: dark, feathered arms.

  Twelfth Night, 1617. Pocahontas attended the court masque. Ben Jonson. She was accompanied by her stone-faced warriors, the Chickahominies: scornful, proud, holding to the costume of their tribe. The Indian Princess was modest; correct in manner and dress. She maintained an unsurprised dignity before these spectacles of savage transformation: she-monsters delivered of dancing puppets, clouds that spoke in rhyme. She was initiated into the mysteries of new and dangerous gods. It was the price of the bargain she made so many years before: when she reached out her hand to touch the apparition of a stranger.

  John Smith was the first. But not her husband. She had been eleven years old when she saw him. He would not live by what he was. He would not live by what she knew him to be. The memory of the forest is not a recent memory. Memory is recognition. The people know this. Fate is memory, memory fate.

  Returned to his own country, Smith delayed his visit. There was an awkward interview at Brentwood. ‘You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason, so must I do you. Were you not afraid to come into my father’s Country? Did you not cause fear in him, and all his people? And fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then, I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other.’

  Betrayal. What is spoken cannot be unsaid. ‘Your countrymen will lie much.’ But when their word is given in the way of business, they believe, it can be taken back. It will not stand. They look for interest, returns. Circumstances alter cases, they say. Each day is new. We wake to a different sun.

  For Pocahontas, all this is heresy. A promise is a contract honoured to the final breath. Her beauty was in strength. The firm set of her mouth. The broad nose. Her features held no appeal for the courtiers, the men of affairs. Rebecka. Eleven years old, looking on John Smith (nameless name): divorced at once from her father’s gods. Smith was her father. ‘Okeus, who appeareth to them out of the air. Thence coming into the house, and walking up and down with his strange words and gestures.’ His presence revealed by freak winds, or ‘other awful tokens’. Her desire for him gave him a human shape, an outline she could bear. He came to the forest. He sat at the strings of the death-cutter with Purcell and Mullins. He spoke whatever it was they feared most to hear.

  John Rolfe carried her aboard the George, in enforcement of duty. Along with their young son, Thomas. She was his to command. She knew she would die of it. Rolfe brought a dead woman on to the vessel. The houses of the city were grey, limed, huddled: a graveyard. Downriver: the fortified places, the church at Erith. The bleak marshlands, treeless, offered no cover for the spirits.

  She was sinking. Lifted ashore in great pain at this hithe. We step aside, make room; we watch. She passes us: carried to the Inn on a seaplank, by four sturdy sailors. Another corpse, beached and scrubbed. Another narrative claimant.

  The shadow of the statue in St George’s church fell across her window. A replica of William Ordway Partridge’s Jamestown monument. More Hiawatha than daughter of Powhatan. Single feather, arms open, palms spread: making entrance in some lumberjack operetta. She was divorced from herself. There were two of her.

  She opened her hand on the flowered bedspread. Stone entered her heart. What she was offering could not be accepted. The city was half-born, unmade. A plague dish. Let her become a charm against fever. Let her preach a quiet ruin upon the dockyards, the timbers. Soon the forest will march back to claim her. The sap to varnish her cheek. Her breath is wood smoke.

  Our fuel tanks were topped and ready. We were invaded by waves of shame and courage, fear and anger: an inhuman desperation. (Like reading a letter from one of those unloved poets who turn rejection into full-blown martyrdom by way of the correspondence columns of the TLS.) ‘Let’s do it,’ said Joblard. ‘Let’s try for Sheerness.’

  Together we dragged Jon Kay aboard. If necessary, we would lash him to his own wheel: like Dracula’s helmsman. We no longer needed a pilot. We were hot to quit this final landfall. The taint was choking us. There was no more protection in wood and plaster. No tax shelter in memory, in other men’s tales. Out then, out on a running tide. Eastwards.

  The engine fired at the first touch of the rope. The Reunion, with previously suppressed reserves of omphh, surged gratefully off the chart. There were no maps for where we were going.

  IV

  The ductile spread of the waters cooled, in a moment’s narrowing of the diaphragm, into a blanket of unrelieved latex. The pluck and suck that gives fair warning, but does not slow our progress.

  Now there were only container ships, hugging the Essex shore, blocking out the oil refineries: Mucking Flats, Lower Horse, Deadman’s Point, Canvey. ‘Cowards!’ howled the resurrected Kay. The tide was with us. The wind. The light. We were expelled, cut loose. Good riddance, said the stones. There was nothing to go back for: the world disappeared in our wash. We skated on the edge of an abyss. Jon Kay had his hands on the wheel. He spat in the face of the Furies. He’d already taken off his dark glasses and flung them over the side. With his winking lidless eye, he looked a thousand years old. His flapping tent-show skin. He was something carried in a cardboard box from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields. He grinned like a mummy. His teeth were black wood. He haemorrhaged sawdust from every seam. He had locked himself totally into some older journey. Outfoxing the coastguard: Harry Morgan off the Florida Keys. GOPHER IT! We had run beyond our permissions. We were bouncing towards the mystery of Sheerness. It was written. Fate.

  The light was infected, a bead curtain of airborne droplets. It was bad light. Bugs burning up. You could smell it. The peculiar intensity of a sunstream revealing a circle of jungle floor better left in dampened shadow. Things crawled. White eyes flashed beneath the wavelets. The clouds were at war, split by the beams of heavy searchlights. Smoke solid skies, bone smoke. Foreclosing this petty adventure. The river became all rivers. The James, the Congo, the Amazon. Eliot’s Mississippi. Let the green vegetation creep down the banks. Let it smother the storage tanks. It will not yield. The river is the agent of transformation.

  ‘Is that the Isle of Grain?’ I pointed to a headland that shone on the distant Kent shore. Nobody knew. It was unreal, a promise. It could be the beacon at Egypt Bay. It could be Allhallows. The light played with our expectations; offering a visible destination at which to aim our craft. It was all too easy.

  Against all mythic prohibitions, I looked back. Black gouts of engine oil were gushing from the outboard into the water. A torn shark. Surely, I thought, this is not right. This shouldn’t be happening. I nudged Joblard. We were bumping against something. Jon Kay had fulfilled his potential. He had run us aground.

  ‘But this is impossible,’ he bleated. ‘I don’t believe it. The river is three miles wide.’ He gunned the motor to a scream: churning us deeper and deeper into the quaggy filth. With a groan of hurt, and a radical crunch, the propeller-shaft parted from its blades. Kay had done it. Give him his due. He had put us on to the notorious Blythe Sands.

  We were not the first. We fought for space in these temperamental paddies, these bury-yourself swamps, with the wrecks of East Indiamen: colonists, convicts, merchants, brides, and rum-soaked soldiery. We hardly merited an entry in the log of nautical disasters. We had nothing to leave in the sands except our bones. Many vessels waited for months at Gravesend: commissioned, provisioned, crewed – needing clearance, a letter from the owners. They came so soon to grief.

  An old acquaintance, the Paul Kelver, had anchored on the borders of the sandbank, to wait her turn for the pilot boat. We could see the condemned horses, as they fretted and stamped. Joblard rubbed his hands. Nothing made him happier than the arrival of a long-anticipated trauma. Now it could only get worse. He unzipped a Jacobean gash of teeth.

  The fates were in the mood to indulge him. The skies darkened, los
t all muscle tone, and fell. They pressed on the horizon, leaving us with nothing to admire but a thin mercury column. We were imprisoned in a radiation helmet, a black chimney of soot. We were blinking at what was left of the world through the slit of a visor. A wind of hate rushed past us, spitting and gobbing, kicking green water over our bows. A sheet of rain (a rain hoarding), solid as steel, swept towards us from the open sea.

  ‘Can’t we pull ourselves out of here?’ I asked, bright-eyed as a Rover Scout. ‘Isn’t there a rope?’ Kay cackled until he shook. His eyes were rolling like lubricated bearings. His single lid shorted and twitched. He drooled. He knew it was all over. This was the image he had spent his life searching for; driving through deserts, begging for mayhem. This was IT! To run aground with two blustering inadequates in the middle of the widest stretch of the Thames, the tide on the turn, head-on to a gathering storm. A storm? A storm among storms. The storm.

  The winds were the Vessels of Wrath, named vortices of bad will – self-inflicted, and gaining in strength. Rushing (fleeing) into the vacuum of our fear. They did not hesitate to expose all our defects: greed, violence, jealousy, hatred. We had left behind the safe harbour of boredom and complacency, we were defenceless. We saw, in this personalized weather, all the things we had never quite dared to imagine.

  Rain stripped us in a hail of blades. Our shirts were rags. Joblard’s orange (distress flare) jacket stuck to him like an acid-attack skin. We were drowning where we stood. But I didn’t want Jon Kay for company on that journey. I decided to go over the side. I pulled off my sodden corduroys, and jumped.

  The water came halfway up my things, and the sand was firm. Joblard, lurching like King Kong with a migraine, followed me. He had lost his spectacles and was blind to the horrors that surrounded him. He could have gone under and never noticed it. He grabbed a boat hook, wrapped the tow rope around his shoulder and took off in the general direction of Norway: a deleted icon of St Christopher as a sumo wrestler. I shoved at the stern. The boat had taken plenty of water: rain was filling it like a moulded birdbath. But it moved. It shifted.