Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  The dealer, of course, has nothing to do with this. A jest on their part. A warning against fantasy, tale-telling. The gathering of arcane information. Imaginative speculations of no concern to civilians.

  I know now that my friend, the over-inquisitive anarchist, Davy Locke, was the one who did not make it off the Island. He fell among Doges. He was worried by dogs. You are looking at what is left of him. I wish (with my life) that he could be reconstructed from that blood porridge exclamation. I know also that from here on in, I’m mute: a stone. A pebble on the beach.

  I spent a long week combing the bunkers and the waste-lot gardens before I found Imar O’Hagan, who accompanied us to the Island on that phantasmagoric adventure. He’d lost everything, except his enthusiasm. His hole in the ground had been mysteriously flooded and his flat burned out. He was fanning the ashes with court orders. The trays of frozen bats and snakes, the birds of prey were melting on the floor under a black and twisted fridge. Total extraction. Oral catastrophe. Pathetic lumps of flesh coal, feathers of tar. A death stink rising through the forensic acids. Imar’s still crazy, still grinning. He’s taking to the road. And he isn’t coming back. He swears he’s on the trail of an industrial tunnelling gimmick, pipes that eat their own way into the earth.

  When he dropped in at the pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, for a farewell drink, the night before I found him, the landlord had a package waiting under the bar – delivered by hand. Nothing for the studio. A pair of ears and a key, rusted with blood. The full matador’s tribute! Imar was being offered some friendly advice concerning ‘activities incompatible with his status’ as marginal artist, and supplicant on the tolerance of society at large. Our delight in exploring and exploiting the anomalies and perversions of the secret culture (islands, docks, stations, airports, churches) had waned: it was, frankly, detumescent, limp as lettuce. Which brings me to the favour I want to ask.

  My project, the grimoire of rivers and railways, is almost complete: its spiritual wellbeing is critical. I’ve gone over the top, invested too much. I’m sure it’s very close to the end, but it lacks a final tableau vivant, a magical getout. The one that lets the narrator melt from the narration. Can we make our escape while the witnesses (the readers) weigh the plausibility of some tricksy conclusion? I can’t carry on; or, rather, I can participate, provoke the action, but I cannot report it. For a whole dreary catalogue of reasons, this has become impossible. Anything I touch transforms itself into a fresh metaphor for pain and anguish, burns those around me, leaves me unharmed. I want to offer you the protection of the narrator’s role: I want you to keep the record of our trip to Sheppey.

  You know what this year has been like: a motor-neurone shuffle between surgical wards and crematoria, with the occasional day trip to the Magistrate’s Court or a bookfair thrown in for good behaviour. Now the ultimate blow has fallen and my typewriter, a senile heavyweight I have nursed for months, indulging all its petty-minded eccentricities, has decided to go ape. It’s had enough. It’s sick of the depressive muck and filth it’s been forced to process. I didn’t get my story done in time. My rental with fate was revoked.

  Apparently, nobody will touch a Silver-Reed. ‘Pity it’s not an IBM, John,’ they mutter, backing off. ‘Can’t get the parts. Not worth bothering, mate. Only go wrong again in three months, then where are you? Know what I mean?’

  Grimly, I started up Holloway Road (forty minutes at the wheel and five years beaten out of your ticker): to the place where I bought the thing. At least, they couldn’t deny that somebody used them. They didn’t have to. They had the perfect answer. The shop was gone. Decamped in the night, with all its booty of iffy keyboards and illicit phials of Tipp-Ex for primary-school sniffers. The site had been grabbed by yet another estate agent. They were staggering in with the palm trees, as I went for a death-or-glory U-turn.

  Next, on a tar-bubbling, three-shirt day, to Roman Road. The good old Roman. You can trust the Roman. ‘Bring ’er in,’ they said on the phone, ‘we’ll take a look.’ A blink was enough. I was bounced out of a side-door, a blanket over my head, like some terminal junkie, so far gone he hits the same chemist four times in a week with his pitifully forged paregoric script.

  Finally, in raging despair, I tracked down a mechanic, hiding out in an attic off the Bethnal Green Road, who said he’d try anything for cash in hand. I’d have to schlep the monster up three flights of stairs. He couldn’t collect it. His motor was temporarily ‘off the road’. I explained (personally taking on all the guilt, as for a defective child) that every W, every H repeated incontinently, turning my camera-ready sheet into a duff concrete poem.

  A fortnight later the repaired machine was back on my desk. Feverishly, I whacked out the first sentences of the twelfth (now never to be written) tale. And was returned a few random lines of gibberish. The keys I hammered bore no resemblance to the symbols that defaced my page. For example: my attempt at ‘From this point, I’ll write by hand’ emerged as ‘Fff- thjy jfjttf Jjuu yfjtt hy hftu.’ ‘I’m going crazy’ was spat back as ‘Jf- -fjt uffty.’

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, and dropped the sick beast out of the window, narrowly missing next door’s neutered and basking tom cat. The ex-machine, a set of fat steel dentures, grinned back at me as it fell: hit the stones, and exploded, sending a long repressed spiral of mania sawing through the overgrown weeds, the lovingly transplanted hart’s-tongue ferns, the metal-green dust on unpicked raspberry warts.

  But my conscience – stabbed by the loss of a companion who had, whatever her faults, carried me so far – left me twitching and sleepless. I crawled out of bed, crept into the garden, and humped the disembowelled veteran on to my shoulder: to jog through the streets to London Bridge Station.

  ‘What crackpot therapy is this?’ you ask. ‘What primal agony fad?’(I know you lay the letter aside and walk across to the window to see if the pub has opened. It hasn’t. Carry on.)

  At five A.M. the early-morning punters were a heavy presence in the town. If they are not actually allowed to sleep at their consoles, they’re panicky to get back to them before the sun rises – like vampires to their coffins. There might be a flicker in the overnight price of peanut butter. These mercury-complexioned sleepwalkers ignored me. Anyone demented enough to hoist a wrecked Silver-Reed must be coming from the dark ages. A head case. A money hater. Unlucky to see, dangerous to approach. I loped in a lather of self-celebrating masochism along Bishopsgate, past Leadenhall Market. I was in pursuit of a fugitive image from a television documentary about South American Indians, road runners, who chew coca leaves and race (God knows why) in dusty, marathon relays, trundling monster tree stumps.

  The journey took two hours and involved three changes of train. (I had, by the way, chickened out of the notion of manhandling my burden all the way on foot. Life’s too short for absolutes. This was an instant penance.) My first taste of Sheppey. We were halted for twenty minutes on the bridge over the Swale, no man’s land, a limbo between the living and the living dead. Too much sky. Wide flat fields; maggoty sheep cropping the flame tongues of blast furnaces. Something evil and mean had insinuated its way into a minor Plantaganet tapestry: had poisoned the natural infusions of time.

  Later, in Sheerness, on the streets, I saw the inhabitants as wraiths, doubles, fetches, tricksters. They were bloodless, secretive. They were the humble dead going about their business. A colony of the dead (like the end of Jim Thompson’s novel, The Getaway). They could not touch me. I wasn’t there. My typewriter floated among them, a levitating soup tureen.

  I buried it at low tide, with a vision of Southend (that fault-cloned Miami) away across the water, rising from its archipelago of untreated sewage. A bone-white jewel in a bisto sea. I ate a lively breakfast (still squirming on the fork), and returned by the first available train – taking care to work my way through a pack of zany local history pamphlets. ‘The Legend of the Grey Dolphin Becomes Fact’. ‘The Minster Miracles’. ‘The Gatehouse Gallows’. ‘Minster’s Ston
ehenge’. ‘Pagan Gods in Minster Abbey’.

  I have to get out from under the burden of a narrative which includes my request to be released from the burden of a narrative. Which includes… Even this letter is part of it; the mess, the horror. The swamp that follows me around. And your response to my letter, the way you are rubbing your chin with your thumb; or the way – now – you are cleaning your spectacles with your shirt-tails. You will do it. I know you will. A few pages, that’s all. It’s a lot to ask, right? The barest report in any style you favour: a pastiche of what has gone before, some off-the-wall neologisms to catch the eye of Anthony Burgess. There is, I assure you, a measure of safety in being the one who holds the pen. ‘I’is the man in possession, but he is also possessed, untouchable. ‘I’is immortal. The title of the survivor. There has always to be one witness to legitimize a massacre. Aneirin at Catraeth. My best hope is to offer you that role.

  Don’t you find the world is an increasingly mirthless hallucination? Fredrik Hanbury was waiting on the doorstep when I arrived back from Sheerness. The Guardian had been on to him, could he deliver a message? Did I dream about the Widow? Would I care to describe those dreams in no more than two hundred words? This whole book is a sleep of revenge. But the logic is hers: the dreamlife of a woman who never sleeps. Isn’t it bad enough to be forced to share (to co-author) her bleak fantasies, without having to talk about them to the Guardian? So this is their latest shot: boredom. This is what they have come up with. To hobble her. A perpetual-motion machine, a non-sleeper: a mantis that does not stop to pray.

  But possibly, just possibly, at long last, the omens offer a favourable reading: the rats are gnawing through the skirting board. Can you hear it? A noise like a bonfire of banknotes, like newspaper being trampled underfoot, like the biting of lightbulbs. They’ve caught the first (unidentified) whiff of fear: salty, sweating, chill. The electroplated daemon of the air waves is beginning to tremble. The colour control is bending blue into scarlet: watch those pupils flare to bubbles of blood! It’s putting a blush of shame among the radiant silver scales. Why do they talk about ‘the Widow’s Britain’? It should be ‘Britain’s Widow’. We made her in our own image. She is the worst of us. But once the masses (we, you, all) sense they’ve been conned into worshipping nothing better than the synthesis (stolen hate sleep, stains, tabloid news smear) of their defects, it’s over. They’ll tear her to pieces like a rag doll.

  The trouble is I will have to go down with this particular ship. I’ve hooked my credibility on to a pantomime of horror. I’ve exploited the darkest of times for comic routines that only flatter and fatten the monster: give it a tongue job. All any self-respecting demonic entity needs is attention: criticism, vilification, and ridicule are its life-blood.

  I feel utterly submerged and powerless. There is no interest anywhere in texts written under my own name, but I’ve had an offer I can’t refuse to knock out a sequel to William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. The fact that the book winds up with the end of the Universe (Multiverse!) – time, life, hope (all those fat magazines) – is a mere detail. I can grasp it. I see a small career opportunity in necrovestism: impersonating the dead, spook-speaking. There’s a definite gap in the market. All I have to do is forget who I am. To snip the memory connections. Is that a problem?

  The TV film at Tilbury was, so I hear, something of a disaster. That’s what Dryfeld tells me. And he didn’t even watch it. That’s what the boys on the street tell him. Yentob rang from his limo on the way home to congratulate the producer, dynastic son of some cardinal of comedy, for sponsoring such a sharp spoof on the avant-garde. He’s convinced, despite rumours to the contrary, that I’m a figment of Patrick Wright’s imagination. Some arcane, London Review of Books-type joke. He doesn’t see the point, but he’ll back his minions all the way. I return the compliment. Yentob? You can’t be serious. The name has to be some sort of anagram gimmick. Zen Yob, Yob Tab. Whatever.

  So that’s about the size of it. Either you (S. L. Joblard) become ‘I’, or the story ends here. In petulant recrimination. I & I can only wish you luck.

  Sincerely, S

  III

  Is Sinclair completely gonzo? Has he screwed himself so deeply into his paranoid fantasies that he’s imploded in a shatter of mutating icons. Does he mean it?

  I don’t, of course, have to accept his spiked commission. Why should I strap myself to this improbable fictional double? Sinclair has exploited – exclusively – the burlesque aspects of the role I have performed to gain acceptance in the world; and now he wants me to collude in this cheap trickery (this dreary post-modernist fraud) by writing as if I truly were that person he has chosen to exploit. My first difficulty. Which I intend sharply to counter by writing my account of the Sheppey journey as if he were imagining me writing it. In other words, I will write my version of him writing as me.

  That’s fine as far as it goes. But there is also a much richer deposit, a territory I can reach by using this ‘fixed’expedition as a cover. I have been dogged for years, from as far back as I care to remember, by the impulse to return to a place where I have never been: to Sheppey, an imaginary and an actual island. Sometimes the shore shines, and is bright with miraculous potentialities. Sometimes it is the manifestation of all my most secret fears.

  It has been comfortable, and it still seems true, to remember my childhood as a series of rooms, buildings that no longer exist, streets that have been erased. I have not made any of this up. But these places, worn grooves, are no more real than what remains. They cannot be verified. They’ve gone. They breathed – as in a page of prose by Arthur Morrison. I ‘narrate’ my childhood by the simple act of thinking about it. The tones become warmer, more conversational; golden-brown at the edges. I walk to school. Wood shavings and strong glue. The furniture factory. Juvenile gangs roaming the baked mud banks of the Surrey canal with slingshots and air pistols.

  Myself in photographs: a serious stranger, awkward in shorts and National Health spectacles. The expression the child has is the terror of what he will become. This solid ghost in the grey garden, caught among relatives, is older than I am. The boy stares back at his future self, a pretender, fondling the bent photograph in his huge, acid-scorched hands.

  I am walking alongside my dad to East Street Market. Tired fruit. Linoleum. Sunday roast. The war? India. Visits to museums, as to cathedrals of a disestablished religion. We are the last of our kind. Nose pressed against the cold window of the bus. Smooth chin rubbing the greasy silver rail.

  There was nothing missing in this sketch. I felt no absence, no shortfall. I did not need to know who – or what – my blood parents were. If the woman who gave birth to me came, once upon a time, from Sheerness… let that remain a curious, but unurgent fact. Relegate it to the margin. My mother might have been a day-tripper. She might, just as well, have stepped ashore from Whitby or Aberdeen, Hamburg or Tromso. I did not need to act on the little I knew. To plunge into some corny Citizen Kane quest. I’m not propositioning a mini-saga.

  I have never felt half-born, unfinished – though I suppose, considering it, that is precisely my state. Incomplete. An old soul, unconnected to the embarrassing accident of parentage: the spasm in the car park, the shudder on the shingle. There is an exhilarating sense of freedom (of risk) in the absence of this banal information: my father’s father’s father, rising and falling fortunes, a sentimental procession. I hate those novels that begin with grandfather catching a glimpse of grandmother at some bucolic hop. Who cares? They are imposters. Why are they dressed like children? They have nothing to do with the case. They insist on telling us things we do not need to know. The orphan is special; touched, chosen. He can be useful. He completes, for some otherwise unsatisfied couple, the illusion of a family. He gives form to something that is missing. He is desired, but without obligation. He can become whatever he wants to become: warrior, coward, poisoner, priest. He is without guilt. He can even refuse to join the game at all. He can lock himself aw
ay; troubled, shivering, never quite in focus.

  The chance has come to return to this shunned island, and I will take it, only because… it is no longer my story. But this time you have to accept my version: I am the sole recorder. Sinclair is pursuing the trail I have laid for him. His brute persistence is extraordinary – but predictable. He simply cannot resist my casually deployed hints. He has no independent imagination. No capacity for invention. He recognizes. He begs me to do the thing which can only be attempted in this very peculiar context. It’s a one-off. It is written. It must be. I am writing it. I am scratching away at a tablet of slimy slate to recover what I always knew was there: the text I have yet to formulate.

  My life had entered a new seven-year cycle. A lot of clutter, human and otherwise, had been left behind. I was beginning to realize it was not quite as simple as that: I would soon have to accumulate some more. We are defined by our possessions – even when they are invisible. But I felt confident the years of physical lumber (things, memory-hooks) were done with for ever.

  I could risk suspending my absolute faith in my own instincts, my treaty with the irrational. Let the past, if it would, do its worst. Let it bury its claws in my heart. If we will not listen to the babble of the dead, how can we defend ourselves against the tragic inquisitions of our children?

  I was quite ready to cut loose from my oldest fears, the ones I had fondled so affectionately that they became a kind of masturbatory totem: vagrancy, Whitechapel, alcoholic despair. He has gone, he’s faded, split: the projected figure in the solitary dosser’s room, clutching a tattered photograph of the son from whom he is helplessly parted. Tears running down his grizzled cheeks into a salty beard. Bollocks! I wasn’t going to play the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green to satisfy anybody’s mythology.

  My early separation, from the couple whose far-reaching instant of pleasure got me, was neither an accident, nor an act of deliberate carelessness. Why make more of it? It had no deeper significance than my childhood in an unspecified district of South London, my temporary tenancy of an unfrocked synagogue. The only necessity is to stay sharp, stay open, refuse nothing. I was determined neither to remain a prisoner of some fantastical version of my past, nor to dodge the suspect, stomach-churning advances of my future.