Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Interrupted by some marginal irritation, I broke from my meditation. I wanted a way out. It was boring; it was boring me, I almost understood what I was trying to say. This other voice was in the room: one of those snatches of TV dialogue from the supermarket below that come – with selective hindsight – to take on a prophetic gestalt. In truth, they are meaningless: sound pebbles. Monkeys hammering out, if not the plays of Shakespeare, the plays of Joe Orton. Eavesdropping on the eavesdropper. TV is an endless loop of self-cannibalizing drivel into which we can dive to discover anything we want, any soundbite applicable to our purposes. I’d seen the film before, a deathwatch special: Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen.

  ‘Orphans! What are they anyway? People without ancestors, nobodies!’

  I dug out my heaviest boots from a rubbish sack. I filled my tobacco pouch. I found the milk money. I put on my smoked glasses and folded half a dozen clean white handkerchiefs into my breast pocket. I was ready for the assaults of pollen. I was ready for Sinclair. I was ready for anything.

  IV

  ‘Much that lies dead in us is alive on an island of voices’

  Douglas Oliver, An Island that is All the World

  The first time on the island was a mistake. It came back to me as I plodded through the tunnel between the ticket barrier and the platform at London Bridge, I had been here, once before. In the train, years ago, basted in some unclarified domestic estrangement, I never noticed the crossing of the Swale. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment trips that attempt in their mimed spontaneity to lift a chronic depression, but which succeed only in confirming it, focusing it on an innocent location that is, for all time, cursed and banished from the memory.

  We jumped out at the first halt, Queensborough. Anything was better than the train; trapped in each other’s company, with nothing left to confess. The shadow of blast furnaces, smoking stacks, migraine hammers: black air. I choked for breath. The sea was hidden. We skulked around a few mean streets, not knowing what we were looking for, nor why we had bothered. I glanced, with dread, at derelicts, dribblers, dwarfish vacancies – there were plenty to choose from (the authorities culled anyone over five feet) – as if any of these gimps should touch me, my father. A man ruined by a single heated spasm, an alien penetration: one bliss shot. The jest soured. My wife flogged it, relentlessly. I felt no fellowship with these stunted, lightless zombies. These grey-necked turkey peckers. Who refused to cross the water.

  We took the first train back; I buried the horrors of that afternoon beyond harm’s reach – where they stayed, sleepers, until this moment.

  Now on a damp fresh, late June morning, there was a much more seductive (washed-over) edge to the town. Sheerness, a mile or so down the tracks from Queensborough, is another world. I sat in the grease caff and waited for Sinclair. I had armed myself with a notebook and the full breakfast. Which was superb: a karmic trembler swimming in bacon juices, pig sweat, pressed tomatoes, root gristle, salt-caked pressings of blood, essences of panic. I savoured, at my leisure, a heady blend of greed and guilt. I suicided, slowly. I licked the platter with bestial relish. (Is that close to the way he would see it?) Then I unfolded and reread Sinclair’s latest note, while I punished myself with a second cup of sweet-sick coffee. He was precise: Rendezvous, 7 A.M. He would be here. For a man who never seemed to know what century he was living in, he was a disciplined fetishist when it came to the niceties of time. He could never bear to be late for an appointment of his own making.

  I looked up at the brass ship’s clock, bolted to the wall above the proprietor’s smirking portrait: a sad self, twenty years younger, with the same criminal bow tie. Bottom-of-the-bill ventriloquist, professional child molester. The hands jerked obstinately towards the fatal hour. Sinclair sat down opposite me. He toted the inevitable camera.

  There has been a distinct, a difficult to describe sea-change in these last months. I’d be guessing, but I believe that after his father’s death he absorbed, or took on board, a share of the old man’s qualities. An immediate laying on of hands. They want you to look hard into the open coffin. It’s part of the ceremony. Something comes across that was not around before: a sense of calm, of slowing down? Ironic observation? But this is coupled with an acceleration in the fever of his old obsessions: desperate not to let time go, sand running helplessly through his fingers. He knows he’s the next man on the springboard.

  Physically, he’s not much changed. A flannelled Lord Longford: on sulphate. His scalp gleams, wrinkles in a secondary grin above a crown of shocked wool. Tipp-Exed couch grass tufts out of every available fissure: he looks like a fire-bombed sofa. His deep-set eyes, bloody with concentration, roll alarmingly, in contrary directions, as he tries to relate anything to everything. And back again. His abrupt movements threaten the crockery. The other gourmets rush to the bar, fling down their coins, and escape. Blunt (socially inept) colours come and go, using his cheeks as a transit lounge. His temples are bruised, hollowed, marked by the forceps that dragged him into the world. He twitches, undergoing – at irregular intervals – pulses of electro-convulsive therapy. His skull’s too heavy, surfacing slowly from the dredge of sympathetic autism. He’s moody, submerged; longing to spittle his victims with the dubious wisdom of an idiot. Self-condemned. Speechless.

  Has he walked here? Or have they fished him out of the river? He’s mute. Stone dumb. He explained in the letter. It’s not a zen challenge, a spiritual discipline, nor even a protest against the moral turpitude of the nation. (He did float some bravado subtext about considering his book a failure if the Widow clung on to power one year after its publication; but this was, I assume, a joke of sorts.) No: he is simply, at this time, unable to speak. He can’t do it. A condition of benevolent trauma, post-operative shock. It doesn’t matter. It might make things easier. He knows where to go, and what he is after. He’s searching for those curious, unique details that confirm his hunch, and lend a superficial credibility to our version of the Quest. The details that boast: we were there, we did it.

  I’m not sure why I’m here. (If I was, I wouldn’t be.) I feared the worst: that the whole island was a taint, just another riverside wilderness, and that the ‘mysteries’ (such as they are) of my birth would be an arbitrarily imposed fiction. But already we have gone too far for that. This time it’s real. Fiction would have copped out with Sinclair’s letter. Fiction would have said, ‘Pull the other one. Send on the heavies. Where’s the flesh interest? The suspense? What’s the hook?’ Sinclair has brought me to a place from which we cannot both return. And I have the whiphand, I’m the narrator. I think he wants me to kill him.

  He rises without warning, and I follow him out. We strike towards the shore, passing through the skeleton traces of a Jurassic pleasure park, an insurance write-off. We fall rapidly into our invariable order of battle. We have tramped the chalk from Winchester to Salisbury, and on – via the UFO-haunted declivities of Warminster – to the serpentine water levels of Glastonbury. We have bumbled over the Black Mountains in wet mist, seeking out bogus abbeys or remote pulpits where Giraldus Cambrensis preached the Third Crusade. We have cruised the South Downs on Blakean awaydays, and crawled on our hands and knees over the sharpened limestone combs of Gower. The routine never changes. He strides ahead: I plod, drawn into the vortex, stumbling, blistered, taking the time to observe the land across which we scorch our skid-tracks. I poke among pebbles, gather the bones of sheep.

  He told me once that his solitary walks were a rehearsal for eternity. He’s practising, getting warmed up, finding his rhythm. He’s certain he’ll be walking for ever through a blasted landscape, a smoking lava desert. Humping a knapsack, the weight of a four-year-old child. I think he’s looking forward to it.

  The Sheppey sky is low, moulting, shifty. Container ships wait on the tide, hobbled and without enthusiasm. The water is glass-green, unusually clear. Sheerness responds to my mood. Its rain-washed roofs glisten and gleam. Despite myself, I am drawn to the place: solid mari
ne architecture, gracefully proportioned Victorian pubs on the corners of terraced streets. The best day of the summer. The first pint you drank. The dizzy search for a wall to piss against. Tame fields are floating behind the houses. I hang out my tongue to taste the clean bright air. Movement is luxury. The town streams back in a sequence of painted, emblematic banners. Red walls. Salt-dulled brass. Bow windows, weather-smudged, opaque. The angular frame of a missing child’s black swing, with chains and seat never replaced. And as a constant, keeping company with us, the short steep beach. Its shells and stones have been scrubbed by a fierce tide, polished, individually nominated. The beach is numbered like a geological chart. An illustration. The dominant colour is a fugitive pink: pubic coral. Fragments, sea-brick, corners of Dutch tile – sharp enough to perform a mastectomy. I imagine a table laid with these strange, tide-scoured china rejects: half a cup, the open mouth of a blue saucer, the handle from a soup tureen (like a porcelain moustache). A dozen separate shards go into the construction of a meat dish. I picture the compressed cubist family who might have partaken of this fractured feast. The single yellow (dog) eye of the father. Grandma’s chocolate-crusted teeth. Mother’s smoothly pumiced shoulder. The two fat white hands of the alabaster child, gripping the unsupported bar of a lipstick chair.

  Sinclair has, I suspect, already identified this stone slide as the section of beach where Robert de Shurland’s mythic horse, Grey Dolphin, swam ashore after they had both battled more than a mile out to sea, to reach the king’s ship. Seeing the rogue knight as the survivor of a trial by ordeal, Edward II offered him a pardon for his capital crimes of treason and heresy. Robert stood accused of killing a priest, by burying him alive in the open grave of an unknown sailor recovered from the channel. Dragging himself ashore in triumph, Shurland met a demented woman, weird or devil-possessed, who warned that the horse would be the death of him. Robert slaughtered the beast, and covered him with shingle. Years later the knight, walking in penance along the circuit of the island, pierced his foot on a needle of bone from Grey Dolphin’s skull, and – dying – fulfilled the prophecy. That’s the gimmick, that’s how it works. Death is like stabbing your finger at random into an open book. It’s an anthology of doom quotes, waiting to be justified.

  My pockets are bulging with pebbles. I feel like Monty Druitt; an over-obliging Masonic sacrifice, a voluntary redundancy from a Suicide Partnership. I can’t resist the unique quality of these stones: the colours they have drained from sky and sea. Alchemical essences. I fondle them. I weigh them in my hand: eggs. I sniff. I lick. I listen for the pulse of life. I have also to carry away a lump of rusted iron in the shape of a pike’s head: a flaking battle helmet, a shamanistic blood-tool out of John Bellany. I arm myself against ease. The weighted awkwardness rubs against my thigh, chaffs at every step; satisfying my demand for discomfort. The hair shirt that wards off annihilation.

  We leave the shore and Sinclair begins to open out his stride pattern. I thought at first that he was limping. No such luck. There is some peculiar hereditary disease lurking among the males of his family, some cold-water Jacobite slash of guilt, some inbred sinew-eating fetish, cargo-culted from the tropics: a sex wound. He is waiting impatiently for it to announce itself. While he can walk on his heels, he is safe. He does not fear the arrival of this flaw. He has convinced himself it is an honourable one. But now, as we climb through all the seafront development scams that died in the mixer, he decides to put his weakness to the test. He increases his pace to a steeplechaser’s lope. He seems to feel personally responsible for all this speculative dross.

  The exotic bungalows are obviously staging posts en route to the Costa del Crime. Somewhere to wait for that dream plot you have reserved within barking distance of Ronnie Knight and the Hoxton Mob. Florid inventions: customized with picture windows, Moorish arches, car ports, security cameras, fretwork signatures. Salvador Dali retirement homes for poodles. They boast a cabin cruiser on every lawn; hooded in tarpaulin, like a bullion stash. Rest and recreation for bent security guards, long firm operatives, video pirates. The only visible occupants are hung-over designer dogs, tanned and lacquered like cocktail sausages.

  As we suffer the steady pull of the gradient between Scrapsgate and the Minster, it is clear that the flog-a-gaff clusters have been confined to the lowlying swamplands: a ghetto of carrier-bag cash, the actual stuff, the grubby fifties. Now, uphill, the stained-glass arcady of sunrise suburbia mixes unself-consciously with captured farmhouses. We are cutting through social and temporal distinctions as precise as geological strata. My blisters are the size of spring onions. The worse my surroundings, the more I suffer. Perhaps Sinclair senses this; he pauses. There is a heart-stopping vision, back down a tributary street, to the sea. One of the container ships is floating into the liquefied sky, a signature, an ephemeral plague transport. Cloud under it, and cloud above. Masts have grown from the telegraph poles. A portent, a death ship; a black galleon moving, with the inevitability of a Jamesian paragraph, into a darkened stadium of rainclouds.

  One curious thing: the condition of my feet deteriorates catastrophically but my spirits, perversely, rise. I am sufficiently uncomfortable to encroach upon the borders of ecstasy. Move over St John of the Cross, I’m levitating. This is a homecoming. I cannot walk, I can hardly crawl; I slide, weightlessly, over hedges and neat envelopes of lawn. The long bend at the crest of the hill – before we turn to the business of the Minster and the Abbey – shelters a cottage hospital. We have to investigate. My mother was a nurse. This is (what’s left of it) the only hospital on the island. So much I know. I have never before wanted to push matters any further. To any revelation.

  Dead on cue, Special Effects sends a raft of rain in from the sea to blind us. Soft, persistent; streaming. We were soon drenched to the bone: a slow soak, layer by layer, through jackets, undershirts, trousers, pants, socks. Garments, dulled by familiarity, clung in a promiscuous embrace; a new skin, a hybrid of cold rubber and wet fleece. We steamed where we stood: a pair of drunks, not sure whose leg it was we had just pissed down. But the discovery (the hillcamp) was worth it.

  From the street the hospital was unexceptional, a white-flag victim of the cuts in the health service. Empty offices flickered with faulty, epilepsy-inducing light tubes. Everything portable had been wheeled away to the nearest junk dealer. We were not discouraged. We penetrated the standard semiotic confusion of contradictory notices, warning the radically infirm, the malingerers, to seek help elsewhere. Treatment was off. Wounds would have to be self-stapled, while traumatized casualties swam to the mainland. Impressive boards listed all the services that the hospital did not operate. Temporary wartime huts offered the reward of physiotherapy to anyone fit enough to reach them: without the effete assistance of a discontinued bus service.

  Beyond all these mist-shrouded props, we found it: the site we did not know, until now, that we were searching for. The enclosed garden. It was overlooked by an ivy-contaminated tower that rose from the main barrack block of the hospital. But it remained hidden in an overgrown hedge of thorns. Its shape was a bruised oval; a drained swimming pool, innocent of flowering plants and frivolous decoration. I was gripped by an excitement that scarcely related to the modest attributes of this exhausted patch. I led the way down a dim tunnel of arched and dripping greenery, and in through the concealed gateway.

  I don’t know what I expected to find. This was a place defined largely by what it lacked: twisted stirrups of iron suggested that something had recently been torn from the ground, which was gouged and ripped in the struggle. The purpose of the garden was to provoke images of absence, elimination. The people, the plants, the objects that had gone. How should we read the scars? Orthopaedic benches? Meditation platforms for the terminally ill? Floats for the performance of death chants? Classical statuary? Hothouses? Furnaces? The primitive chapel of a fever sect?

  Then I noticed the gravestones, and my madness had a focus. This was so much the scene I should have expected that I wa
s shocked; shamed, gobstruck. It was quite unreal. In the fictional twin of this event, which was playing simultaneously in my mind (as Sinclair intended it should), I would now uncover a startling and significant secret. My mother’s name, or some other scrap of family history, would be chiselled on to one of these fire-blackened, moulting placards.

  I leant forward to examine the weathered markings on the ring of a recumbent stone figure. The hand moved. It clawed at my throat. ‘I knew that one day you would come. Now I can die in peace. Kiss me, son.’ The old gardener sat up, reaching out his arms. The disgraced surgeon who had stayed on, anonymously, to tend this bleak sanctuary.

  That would be the conventional ending. The curtain call. The bullshit. I laughed aloud at the inadequacy of my invention. I’m no Edgar Poe. I can’t stack the adjectives like H. P. Lovecraft. There was nothing, nobody. No message. A graveyard had been cleared, tidied away, to create this lachrymose and unvisited park. The bones of the dead must have gone into some communal pit. The larger memorial slabs rested – a convocation of umbrellas – against the thorn hedge. Lichen invaded the powdery whiteness, the death cosmetic. I stared hopelessly at forgotten names. Nothing. Let them go. I smiled at the discovery of a ‘Julius Caesar’, whose pretensions ended here, smothered in poison ivy.

  I moved from stone to stone, running my fingers into the trenches of meaningless letters, tracing the words, mouthing them like a convict with reading difficulties. The quest could have ended on the instant. I had no urge to continue. I was ready to join the stones. The trenchcoat I had bought in Holland, a respectable field-green, was transformed by the remorseless panels of soft, seafret rain. It petrified. It was spotted, blotched, soaked with grey earth: flecked like an apple leprosy. I was drip-fed on stone. Meltwater ran down the channels of my spine.