Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Jon Kay sat on the cabin roof, tailor-fashion, and watched us. The calm epicentre, the target. He was crossing the desert again. (Sand to water. Water to sand.) The rope stretched out. Joblard vanished, deep among canyons of rearing swell. Waves broke over his head. He roared. He shouted something we could not hear. For a moment, we glimpsed him again, clinging crazily to his staff: blowing and swallowing and gasping for breath. Broken spears of lightning pitched from the black skies. Antlers of white fire. Cracks in the glass. Sounds of rending and tearing; ripples of thunder. The night guns were all blazing, booming and echoing. Stereophonic shock waves tagged the mucoid dome: bringing to life the theoretical fire pattern of the shore defences. They fizzed and short-circuited in sprays of pinball madness.

  One of the horses, driven to risk everything, smashed free of its pen and plunged from the side of the pitching container ship. It was immediately lost in deep water: swimming or drowning. The elements were all assembled for a minor apocalypse. They posed, daring some fool to try and describe them.

  I left the Reunion and fought my way towards Joblard. The sea was now the darkness of ignorance. I saw Jon Kay in a sequence of flash frames, lit by strokes of lightning. Electrical anomalies played tricks with my vision. I saw two men in the boat. Kay was crouched in the stern, trying to coax the outboard into life, frantic to escape from the thing confronting him on the cabin roof: a second, and more convincing, portrayal of himself. This minatory being was cross-legged, webbed in a graft of inky shadows. His wet hair rose into stiffened peaks, horns. His finger pointed in accusation at the heavens. Kay saw himself as the Beast, the Other: the Stranger in the cutter, Okeus, John Smith, Spring-heeled Jack. The names meant nothing. He had run out of aliases.

  The stranger’s long arm hung over the side, obliterating the ‘E’in the boat’s title. Jon Kay had undisputed command of the motorized ashtray, Runion. He cowered like the sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap. From the Scottish play. He waited on the coming of the witches, the bearded women.

  Then the lightning found its target. The irritation of the matchbox television, still flickering its feeble interference, guided the jagged discharge towards Jon Kay’s trouser pocket. The Runion was a fireball. Cheap plastic wrinkled, and contracted like an anteater’s mouth. Kay was on his feet, naked, winged with flame. Wrestling his double. He was magnificent. He soliloquized defiance. Holding and damning. The scorched skin justified, at last, its pensioned deformity.

  ‘So there you have it,’ as Fredrik Hanbury would say on ‘The Last Show’, wrapping up some number on how water resists all attempts at privatization. Is provoked. To answer back. With an anti-commercial, in which we have a featured role. Bottomless budget. The camera becomes an industrial vacuum cleaner, sucking down the skies, draining the sea – and all its flotsam.

  I was holding a limp rope. I was attached to nothing. I called out for Joblard. I listened. I was standing in the middle of the estuary, neither in sea, nor on the river: somewhere uncharted between Canvey Island and St Mary’s Marshes. It was too far to walk, and too shallow to swim. The direction to follow was the erased track of a panicked horse. The guide whose whims no pilgrim could anticipate.

  XII

  The Sexing of Stones

  ‘I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs!’

  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  It’s so hot the Indians have dragged their mattresses on to the flat roof. Lloyd warned us never to set foot on it. ‘That roof’s as strong as a fistful of wet twin-ply toilet paper,’ he said. ‘Stroll out with your post-prandial cigar – and you’ll drop straight through into the supermarket.’

  This was probably no exaggeration. I’d witnessed one of them, in his best suit, during the last of the spring storms, pouring wet concrete feebly into a crack the size of the Californian fault. His best boy respectfully held a ladies’ plastic umbrella over his head. When torrents of rainwater (sky scum, washed dirt) gushed through the ceiling, fusing the strip-lights, the cashier had broken open a special offer of candles: then, when the shop was quiet, climbed to the roof and stuffed the holes (mine-shafts, UFO craters) with Pampers and sanitary pads.

  The Bengalis know I’m watching them (some of the time), but they don’t care. They noticed me at once. There are no curtains over our window. It means nothing to them. They are wholly absorbed in their own affairs. Video, jacket, cassette. Cassette, jacket, money. The shifts change, but the lights never dim. The noise of sewing machines, an infernal river, never falters. Day and night. Winter and summer. I think we’d miss it. This avian tide of chattering, fulfilled voices. Money, money, money, money.

  Some of them, young boys, male with male – even solemn married couples – are spirited enough. If the roof can stand their devotional humping, it can stand anything. Straight off shift and on to a very recently occupied, still steaming mattress: hot for it. Uncovered acts of love, without emotion. Graciously conducted. Few words, fewer blows. Other men – solitaries – lie there among the chaos (the heaving, the groaning), staring up at a narrow rectangle of sky. An older man, a grandfather, drops at once into bottomless slumber. His territory will be claimed soon enough. He does not enjoy the luxury of dreaming his own dreams. He shares whatever is left in the horsehair: laughter, delight, the music of the gods. Inky leather jackets (welded and creaking), polished skirts (in scarlet nail varnish), cattle coats: they pour from the building in a perpetual haemorrhage. A blood circuit, a wound path. Down the twist of stairs, into the open-mouthed vans: away. Up West. Gone.

  I always knew I’d come in the end to this place. I’ve no more connection with it than any other. I passed the house so many times in the course of my ramblings, looked up at the windows, making statements I trusted would never have to be justified. But the change in my life has been a magical one. I have to believe that. I do believe it. I have never been so vulnerable, so content. It’s risky: I am finally getting the things I said I wanted.

  There’s not much furniture: a settee under a dust sheet (better left that way), a draughtsman’s desk that runs the length of the room. A desk for a team of draughtsmen. Lloyd left this behind, but will almost certainly get around to claiming it back for one of his other properties. You might even recognize the thing. Lloyd featured it in several of his staged photographs. (What do they go for now? What’s the swap? A car? A year’s water rates? Another house?) What else? The usual cardboard boxes and black polythene rubbish sacks. Odd glasses, half-empty bottles, a pram. Bits and pieces scavenged from old performances and reinvented for domestic purposes: an illuminated globe, an oil lamp from the operating theatre in Southwark. And projects. On the desk, pillows of white paper. Sketches, notes, clean thefts. The time to work it all out. That’s what I’ll never have.

  The proportions of our room are peculiar, but satisfying. I relish the knowledge that this was once the living quarters of a Rabbi and his family. I welcome the tradition, without the obligations. The synagogue beneath our feet has been converted into a storeroom for sides of salted fish, brightly labelled tins, hot spices. The Ladies’ balcony is heaped with sacks of Patna rice. The last recorded sighting of David Rodinsky, so Sinclair tells me, was in this room: a party of some kind, a ceremony, bar-mitzvah, Kiddush. ‘It was as if he had become another man,’ Sinclair wrote. He found some letters about it in Princelet Street. ‘The familiar self-consciousness left him. He was fluent in Middle Eastern tongues. What had once appeared a caul of sullen idiocy, stood proud: a performance of wisdom that touched on arrogance. He shone. He seemed to know his own fate.’

  I’m convinced: the agent of transformation is still active within these walls. I recognized, but did not fear it. I avoided mirrors. I breathed slowly, with comical deliberation. I knew I would have to come back, sooner or later, to this trap. All those years picking at the scabs of Whitechapel, fondling safe (confessed) images, visiting the butchered sites as if they were shrines: paddling in mysteries. I held off the frenzy, stayed out of it, within rigidly define
d margins of safety: a well-informed tourist. I faked it, molten orgasms of righteous indignation. There was always another house to return to, a home, locked within never-revealed systems of protection. It’s terrifying how quickly all that can change. A few abrupt twists of fate. A phonecall extended beyond the demands of courtesy. A third drink. I’ve paid my dues to the furies. And here we are, on set, in the long room, looking affectionately down on the business of the streets; or back, the hidden courtyards, the sleepers on the roof. Shameless. I live here. I belong.

  I tasted my coffee. The jiffy bag lay unopened on the desk. I had no desire to break this moment and unstaple the honey-crusted package. Sinclair’s runic scribble: it gets smaller all the time. He has to write now. The phone’s been cut off, and he daren’t set foot in Whitechapel. With his bald dome and spectacles, his notebook, he might be mistaken for Salman Rushdie. They’d hack him to pieces on the cobbles of the brewery. The atmosphere has been fouled up for ever. Gang fights. Banners. Burnings. Aggravation. We all feel guilty, guilt as a constant, a hangover of guilt: even if we haven’t read a word of it. There are no sides to take.

  The padded envelope, with its franked red exhortation, is obviously a communication from Sinclair’s publishers, used for the second time. KEEP COLLINS INDEPENDENT. ‘Colin’s what?’ I ad-libbed compulsively. Sinclair thinks I can’t punctuate or spell, that my lips move when I read. I don’t disillusion him. That’s one of the least offensive of his fictions. This portrait of me as a genial drunkard (lowlifer, mutant, dabbler in the black arts) is all nonsense: a shorthand convenience. I’m no Jonsonian ‘Humour’, ready for my knockabout interlude when the narrative drive is flagging. But I go along with it. It leaves me free to pursue my own much fiercer self-interrogation. It’s too comfortable to present ourselves through our flaws, to play them up, become clown, dupe, holy fool. Like a type in a medieval passion play, you finish by impersonating a single quality. ‘The Man Who Stutters’or ‘The Man with One Leg’. You are gulled into wearing a mask that somebody else has selected for you from the literary prop basket. You are the failure of another man’s inspiration. I want to fail in a grander cause.

  It amuses Sinclair, after three or four Russian stouts, to pretend to believe my name is really Jobard, the French for ‘ninny’, ‘simpleton’. Joblard (sic) is how he has addressed the jiffy bag.

  It might be a book. I’ll have to open it. I’ll risk a squeeze. At least, it won’t be a bill. The electricity can’t be cut off. We haven’t got any. We live by the natural rhythms of the day. Even among all this chaos – especially among this chaos – everything is slow and calm. Dust motes spiralling in trumpets of sunlight. The persistent drip of water wearing away the basin. We are waiting on the unhurried dictation of an unborn child.

  The large jiffy bag contains a smaller one, too small to hold a book. It is addressed to Sinclair in a hand I do not know. What could this second bag have contained? Sinclair has nothing but books. He eats books. He pays with books. He sleeps on them. He’d probably sleep with them if he could. He begets books. There’s also a letter. I’ll save the letter. One thing at a time. Heat more water in the pan. We still have gas – until the end of the month. Another filter paper, another mug of coffee. Getting weaker with each infusion: no more than an aide-mémoire, recalling the sensation of previous cups; and – by way of that sensation – the cluster of thoughts and images, the day dreams, floating to the surface as I sipped before, and as I sip now; my eyes firmly closed in creative indolence. Somewhere, there is half a Gozitan cigar to be found: marking my place in a notebook, shredded by the opening and closing of the hinges, perfuming the creamy paper with dark and oily resins.

  I dig out the staples from the fat lip of the envelope – one by one, with a fork; lay them around the circumference of my plate. The hooped silver bones of a centipede. I study the arrangement. Pick up one of the staples and lick it. Uninteresting, flavourless. I shake the packet. Something wriggles out, falls reluctantly on to the table. This is much better, the colour is superb. A bruised purple, infected with carmine: that must have been the original state. Soutine’s impasto. Colour that’s hung on a hook until it’s ready to declare itself. It shifts. It prevaricates. It broadcasts its history. Dies, regresses into a morbid, flagellant blue. A slate licker’s punishment. I lift it on my fork, bring it close to my lips – as a rasher of dead veal. A grey corpse cut. Waggling. Six inches of meat fallen from a hanged man’s mouth.

  What am I dealing with, exactly? The pith of a skinned lizard? Too dark; too much blood in it. The tannin-dyed cock of a Tibetan priest, beaten out flat on a stone? I don’t want to think of this sample as what it actually is, or was. Or what it is now intended to be. What does it want – of me? It’s altogether less painful to stall, to speculate, construct post-Martian similes. The thing has been savagely divorced from its natural setting, the purse of wet meat, the talk box. A human tongue is, at the best of times, an obscenity. A naked muscle, slithering with bacteria-marinated mucus, food memories; its papillae travestying lime-white kettle fur. And this tongue has not been decently amputated; it has been torn, uprooted, ripped from the throat. It lies on the desk like a silent scream. As I poke it reflectively with the tines of my fork, it twitches. It persists: it has something to say. It is still eager to rap, to taste, to forewarm of pleasures as yet unrisked. Scorpic to the end, it arches to the touch. It spits defiance.

  I swear this is not my affair. I don’t know the tongue. The tongue does not know me. The smaller jiffy bag is clearly addressed to Sinclair (or ‘St Clair’, as they have it). It’s his business, his mess. Now I will have to read his bloody letter. The usual see-through copier paper, crammed to the margins; but – this is rather remarkable – it’s written in his own hand, his holograph. No typewriter. He must be serious. Desperate. He’s cracking up. I’ll throw the thing away. I’ll try another coffee transfusion. Kill the taste of the water. The taste in my mouth.

  II

  Haggerston, 198–

  Joblard:

  a favour. You will by now have opened the mysterious package and performed your own autopsy on the small gift that arrived for me this morning, innocently lurking among the usual clutch of threats, begging letters, final demands – and poems written in red Biro on lined paper, postmarked HALIFAX, and emanating, without a doubt, from Hebden Bridge.

  That’s the time of day to live through. From then on it’s a quiet slog to survival. I squeeze my heart back into my chest. I start to shake as I listen for the postman’s footsteps. I’m crouched behind the door, sweating. I’ve been there for hours. All night? Possibly. I’ve forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed. The rattle of the brass flap, the aggressive slither of envelopes cascading on to the mat, has become – for months now – something of an ordeal. My hands tremble. I can’t decide whether to smash what’s left of the furniture, or to break into tears. Often, I’m done in for the day. Another one gone, shot. Dealers are ruthless in setting up meetings, for which they never show. Poets? Poets are the worst. Don’t ever get involved with poets. Stick with the pulp boys, the rippers and gougers. They’re pussy cats. Edit the belly-bursters, the revolving head merchants. All delightful conversationalists. Poets? The sound of the word and my knuckles are turning white. They are rabid correspondents, openly psychotic, proud of it, proud of their galloping paranoia. They issue threats by the hour, polemics, circulars of hate. You take your life in your hands if you reply to one of their mad spiels. Carry heavy life insurance before you offer veiled criticism of a stanza. Reject one? You’re dead. Accept one? Worse, they want to sit on your shoulder and watch you love every last syllable.

  It’s cruel. My creditors are pressing cheques on me, but they return like homing pigeons. Tax assessments, all different, all massive, double by the week; invoking punitive penalties. Publishers sue me for work I have no recollection of taking on. I’ve promised ‘afterwords’ for books that have not yet been written. I won’t bore you with the domestic traumas: death, disease, c
ash-pleas. The usual lightweight stuff. I can taste madness, see it from the window. It would be a relief to let go, to gibber like all the other blanked cancellations; wander off down the middle of the road, looking for the right bone-crusher. So what’s new? Nothing. There’s just more of it. And my ability to climb out, to watch it happening, is going, going, gone. How long can I stave off the onset of stone craziness by the trick of writing about it?

  By now you will certainly have smoked the second half of your mandrake root cigar, and you will have succumbed to another cup of coffee before turning, reluctantly, to my note. That’s good. (Do you feel that you’re playing a part in a spiked fiction? I used to. It was OK. When it’s scriptless, that’s much tougher.) The slippery hint you are poking around on your plate is not a subtle one; though, you might consider, not without its own bleak humour. Don’t worry: I can identify the source of the tongue (ugh!) The pathology, with which we have been confronted, has been squeezed like tomato paste in a Mafia video. But I’m afraid it’s more serious than that. The thinking behind this gesture is coolly pragmatic. In other words, they know exactly what they’re doing.

  ‘They?’ you ask. They. Here we go. The old conspiracy circuit. Bear with me. Please. The object itself, the glossa, was stapled to a portion of card torn from a bookdealer’s catalogue. There’s a man I know in Upper Tooting who trades under the flag of convenience of ‘Ferret Fantasy’, and who habitually fills in any space left at the end of his price list with a few lines of domestic intelligence or biblio-banter; before, cordially, signing off. His name is Locke. The torn corner of lemon-coloured catalogue which formed the base for the uninviting open sandwich I received in the post had the single word, Locke, ringed in felt-tipped pen.