Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Why didn’t the bodies float out from their pit, logs of leather? The rain was here to stay. It was apocalyptic rain. Washing the gravestones clean. They were propped open, a Book of the Dead. Stone pages. The language was impenetrable; it meant nothing.

  Lights burnt in the hospital tower. Birth. The knife. I forced myself back into the pain of my raw heels. I rubbed them, with steely purpose, against my stiff new boots. I provoked the pain to answer me: my only oracle. I was insanely determined to find endorsement in this drowned field. Or to die in the attempt. I had no idea how much further we had to walk. This was one of the great moments of my life. A true epiphany, without hope of reward.

  Sinclair (of course) has his camera out. Poking it in my face. Hoping that some meaning he can subvert will be returned to him in a flat packet from the chemist’s shop. He knows there are spots of rain on the lens, which he hopes – by an act of faith – to add to the truth of what he has captured. He shadows my movements, watching and frowning as I open myself to the experience: he exploits, annotates, measures, anticipates the final stages of the journey. There is never anything he needs to find: another one, one more, a new sentence.

  I had been wrong for so many years, living under an inhibiting illusion. I was not the orphan. My father might be anywhere. Here. From this damp hilltop, I felt his breath of freedom: the space, the scraggy fields running down to an ordinary sea. I felt his life: voyager at Sheerness, surgeon, mechanic, porter, imbecile – it didn’t matter. I was charged with a liberating rush of irresponsibility and courage. I could not be condemned to repeat a life that had never happened. What I had of my mother was her youth. And that lives on, that is what I retain. A girl of twenty-two walking towards the Court, arm in arm with her own mother, both dressed for a day in town. Now I was able to accept the image related to me as a family fable. I remembered (without seeing) the movement of it; lurching and knowing and wanting. An infant on my adopted mother’s shoulder, carried to the chamber where our relationship would be formalized. I was looking back, grinning – as in recognition. The involuntary exercise of my lips later interpreted as a smile. ‘He saw his real mother and he blessed her.’ In her youth. Then. She is fixed. I will leave her, leaving nothing; losing nothing, holding on to that strength. The blessing of a double parentage, of blood and of habit. The habit of love. Years of trust bringing me back, returning me to a new beginning.

  But my loss has to be exchanged: the wet green stones become mirrors of transformation. Sinclair (the watcher) is the true orphan. His father dead – and his mother, apparently, detached into a mental realm to which he is denied all access. A dream country where the landscape of childhood is trespassed by a son who is older than her father; a place where unavoidable damage occurs, heals, readies itself to strike once more. Familiar gardens are made awkward by the presence of a one-legged dog. There are afternoon encounters with condescending royalty. ‘I’m so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.’

  It is clear. He is the solitary. A deep black pool has spread out between himself and his ancestors. They are benevolent, remote; but they no longer see him. He does not interest them. He is alone. And yet – at the same time – because he led me here, my own sense of family and belonging is so intense that I can turn on my heel, walk away, and never again need to look back.

  V

  The vicar who had posted in the porch his ‘Seven Reasons Why Women Should Not be Ordained as Priests’ simply did not notice us. He cannoned into me, and recoiled with a leap of undisguised horror. The notion of anyone wanting to poke about in the building before banking hours was abhorrent to him. As always, the Church Commissioners had appointed a Harvard Business School jock to neutralize a site that could, however remotely, be connected to folk memories of ritual and mystery. Medieval shrines are invariably guarded by an unenthusiastic dogma; a plodding sense of responsibility towards the world at large, and nowhere in particular. The further Synod can remove their prayer-negotiable problem from any sanctified enclosure, the deeper their concern. Ethiopia, Mexico City? Always worth a poster. The church is a multinational octopus in the process of rationalizing UK branches that refuse to pay their own way. Our hypermetropic iconoclast obviously loathed every last legend-infested stone of his inefficiently designed and expensively lit workspace.

  I sat on a chair near the De Shurland tomb to excavate my feet, plaster over the showier blisters. It was difficult to adjust to this concentrated atmosphere. The light was dust. The church itself an ivory sepulchre. I steamed like a gun-dog brought in from the marshes. Shurland ignored me. He had worse problems to consider. He lay on his side, back to the world; his legs twisted in the rigours of an attack of acute appendicitis. He offered his cheesy skirts to the penknives of amateur calligraphers. At his feet, well within kicking distance, was the mantic skull of Grey Dolphin: his death, his familiar.

  This was certainly a curious object, uncontoured by generations of hot hands – like the buttocks of a much-loved public lady. The relic had been fondled into a high-definition sheen: irradiated. It could have served as a lantern for primitive amputations. It gave off a talkative, smoky-grey light which had the capability of penetrating flesh and all of its shadows. But it was mutilated. The spiked ears were gone: enforcing silence, releasing other attributes. The long skull was a bandaged hammer. It reminded me of something I once made, based on a study of Siberian horse sacrifices: but which had subsequently disappeared. And was therefore a special favourite. The Minster carving looked more like a sick crocodile than a horse. A crocodile imagined by someone who had only read of such creatures. A blind craftsman working from distantly relayed messages must have made it. A mail-order croc. The rictus of its fat-lipped mouth had been most unnaturally extended by the Swiss Army knives of boy scouts, frustrated by an annoying scarcity of stones in the hoof. This was a talking horse; a wiseacre, bridled into silence. If I gazed long enough at the skull I would find myself stuck with transcribing and interpreting its miserable monologue. (I knew it would sound like a choric wail of poets, blathering about the Arts Council, the metropolitan critical nexus, the iniquity of publishers’ readers.) I avoided the dead eyes; pebbles hammered into sockets too tight to hold them. The head was spooked, triggered. It was open for consultation.

  Worse was to follow. I glanced from my exposed and swollen foot to the leering equine skull: the connection was unavoidable. There was a close family resemblance. My foot, neatly severed and dipped in plaster of Paris, could stand in – sorry! – for Grey Dolphin, when he takes a sabbatical to roam the shingle. And there is something else: the wretched caput is a three-dimensional map of the Isle of Sheppey. The split of the mouth is the Long Reach of the Swale. The right eye is the hill of Minster. The left eye, distorted by the angle from which I view it, marks the still sacred church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty; once a separate island. And now the last refuge of the light. A blinding flash from Sinclair’s camera scorches the dim recess. The skull winks.

  I’m catching his madness. I’m starting to believe what I see; or – more accurately – I’m starting to see what I believe. The three-dimensional map is a conceit. The head is no more than a topographical model of what the island should be. A model to which every pilgrim has contributed by scratching his rune into the chill flesh, or cutting his initials into a ploughed field. Mutilate the horse’s stone skull and you mutilate the living earth. The land is forbidden to respond.

  Sinclair is lurking behind me, somewhere in the shadows. I am articulating his vision: that is the effect of his silence. I am forced to remember another map, so detailed we could have dug it out of the ground and used it for navigation.

  It was the first anniversary of the planting of the eucalyptus tree in memory of the Aboriginal cricketer, King Cole. Sinclair insisted on dragging me all the way along the line of the railway track from Shoreditch to Meath Gardens, dodging among industrial propert
ies, schoolyards, gaunt estates: we held firm to our elevated ladder of sparks, as to a great tribal river, an uncompleted folk song. I told him it was pointless. We were wasting time better spent in the Roebuck. The tree would be uprooted, torn to ribbons, scattered to the winds. This did not matter to him. Once he had adopted (‘written in’) a site, he was bound, in honour, to revisit it: that site had become a repository of meaning, a place of consultation. A blood relative.

  A soft rain was falling as we passed under the arch and into the old burial ground. Strange atmosphere. The earth furrowed, twisted, shaken; lashed by some trapped dream-demon. (A caterpillar released from physical laws? A lizard quicker than light?) This slowing of time gave a momentary illusion of calm, soon replaced by a genuine fear of vast serpentine energies held in reserve.

  Sinclair felt that we had been readmitted to the day of the original ceremony. Which itself rehearsed earlier ceremonies. Respected future acknowledgements. The trees were a dominant gathering, a parliament of presences: shaped, trained, set free to find their own forms. They ventriloquized the wind. Malign cartoon spirits shuddered among the agitated leaf scales. A priapic mouse-head was grafted on to the torso of a bear.

  And I was, as usual, quite wrong. The eucalyptus survived. But the plaque, which Sinclair told me had been screwed into a wooden block beneath the tree, had vanished. He showed me the photograph when we went back to his house: ‘In memory of King Cole, Aboriginal cricketer, who died on the 24th June 1868.’ This might be the only surviving record; slightly out of focus, the pious blessing lost in dreamtime. No casual stroller will know the origin or meaning of this alien tree. The park itself is remote, shunned, hidden behind the mean energies of Roman Road.

  The theft of the plaque had caused a dark stain to form in the varnished pine; the now untitled volume. A distinct shape was caught within a rectangle of screw-holes: the outline of the Isle of Sheppey, every creek and headland. (Sinclair had photographed this too. And set the Ordnance Survey 178 version, successfully, inside it.) King Cole, whose fate was obscure, whose legend was nailed to this place, was free once more. His dream had published a tobacco-spit path, and our walk would attempt to complete (retrace) its circuit.

  I had to break out of this trap. Turn away from the sick magnetism of the De Shurland tomb and the knight’s spear, which ran along the edge of it: an object I coveted above all others. This was the weapon I had never yet forged to my own satisfaction. Its soiled, putty-coloured mantle had been rubbed away, enamel from a dead molar, revealing a stick of black tar: iron within stone, a liquid vein. With the wounded lance, Robert had worried the margins of the sea, asserting his rights of salvage; stamping (on Grey Dolphin) through all the treacherous shallows. I saw the heated metal hissing in cold winter tides, turning the feudal ocean to a lake of fire. The sleeping knight had turned away from this ritual implement, which was also his spine, his staff of memory: he twisted in agonized slumber. But the challenge was explicit: to drag the spear from the lid of the tomb and bring down the shamed building. Reduce it to rubble. I was not ready. Not this time. I censored the impulse, and moved across the body of the church to admire its lesser curiosities.

  The parson trusted us with the key to the side-door, while he stepped through the garden to the vicarage for a late breakfast. This was a symbol of power, too large for any pocket. Sinclair held it in his hand like a policeman’s torch. The parson had pointedly switched off all the church lights, except the one above the table of souvenir mugs and dishcloths, the postcards and collecting boxes. We drifted without shadows, ghosts among the sepulchres. Craftsmen had laboured long to hold the Minster notables within their deep plaster trunks, confounding them in an excess of heraldic detail. We became the nightmare inflicted on the noble dead. We were the future horror tormenting their slumber. The revenging peasants, the pilgrimage of lunatics.

  The effigy of the supposed Duke of Clarence has been devoured beyond recognition by the spirochaetes of time. He is chiselled out of rancid wax. He exploited the privilege of blood to nominate his method of execution. And was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. ‘So far so good,’he thought, sampling the first sweet quarts. But 126 gallons is a long pull for the thirstiest toper. He surely came to regret the sugar-retching sickliness of his chosen vintage, and longed for the dry bite of a Canary sack.

  Now Clarence floats over a stone tank that contains all his brown body liquor: a subtle blend of blood and wine in constant and heretical transubstantiation. High-collared, sour in breath, he waits to be released by some brave spirit who summons up the courage to tap the flood, and drink.

  Hidden in an eclipsed alcove, beyond Clarence, is another knight; excommunicated among the reserve collection of loose and nameless rubble: broken stone tusks, tiles, calcified toads. This sleeper frames, between praying hands, a carved scarab, a stone mirror, on which it is just possible to identify a shrunken version of himself: a miniature (shabti) to share his experience of decay. I lean over, letting my breath moisten the cold skin. I strain to interpret the blunted detail. I notice that the homuncular double is also holding, between his praying hands, a scarab; on which – I have to accept – there is another knight. And another knight. And another. And another.

  The trap has been baited, and sprung. The watcher is telescoped backwards through an infinite progression of fears. Oval cards click in a reductive tarot. My features lose all their hard-earned flaws, their history. I vanish into the thing I am seeing. This is one of those places where it would be all too easy to lose your balance, to topple, to give entry to the cold damp air: to halt and never move again, while exhausted flesh finds repose in a condition of alabaster. To cease.

  Sinclair has the key in the door. We have indulged our tame speculations. We are rested and dried. We are almost comfortable. It’s time to step back out into the storm. To find out which one of us is not coming back.

  VI

  Devouring a set of cold-meat pasties (folded marble, stuffed with varicose bandages), we process down the spine of the island towards Eastchurch. A plague penance. Cars lurch out of blind bends to scrape our knees, or drown us in their wash. I have to make a loud noise to avoid being flung into the crunching mechanism of a refuse truck by a gang of white-eyed zombies: a dismissed mercenary troop roaming the highways in flapping layers of rope-tied fertilizer sacks. The road is a slick river for panic-crazy millennialists, racing to escape from whatever lay ahead of us. Only the black siren-vans move in our direction; hooting from behind, as they hurtle towards a secret prison complex, dug out of a distant hill. Domes and bunkers. Cruel shapes suggesting freelance experiments in social and chemical control. (In happier days, Joe Orton holidayed here. Took a six-month body-building course at our expense. For collaging library books.)

  My Achilles tendons have gone (both of them) and my knees are beinning to lock. I’m walking like a bad (taste) Douglas Bader impression. Sinclair, a man possessed, is flinging himself into the eye of the hurricane. I know the bastard is enjoying this. Pellets of hail are soloing like Max Roach on his bald crown, a rattle of drumsticks. The landscape, within this storm bell, is transformed by the strangest underwater light. I have to hang on to Sinclair’s faint blue-grey outline, as he hauls me, yard by painful yard, into the parasitical prison-hamlet of Eastchurch.

  Only one window, down the dreary length of the village street, is lit: a wacky lesbian mini-cab outfit, obviously targeted at carrying wives and girl friends out to the prison. An uneasy ride made tolerable by freedom from (male) sexual harassment. The office is dominated by an alsatian-draped sofa and a cage of parrots, most of whom are wearing lipstick. I press my face longingly against the glass; but nothing halts the solitary stalker, the headcase. If anything, he speeds up. He wants to shake free from the taint of this nest of collaborators, to get back to the shoreline, the fretting sea. He barely pauses to register the shrine (school of Michael Sandle) to the pioneer aviators. Dynastic porcine heads strapped into fetishist flying helmets. Old war is new porn. Cloudy whit
e stone. Primitive Magdalenian aeroplanes rising in relief from the columns of dead names. Aeroplanes as imagined by wrecked, rape-surfeited Danish raiders. Zero visibility over the marshlands. Threat vapours. Fear-induced thunder. I know Sinclair can’t resist sampling the monument; but rapidly in a portfolio of off-beat snapshots. He logs the anomalies, to work (somewhere) into the final mosaic. The spiralling connections. Not now. His head jerks, a clockwork owl. Yes yes yes. Got it. Let’s go.

  We double through a predatory scatter of breakfast bars, clocked by the android eyes of warders, gobstruck with their dripping meat forks halfway towards their faces. They can’t believe we’ve avoided captivity. Any society that allows the likes of us to roam unmolested down the public highway is sick. Terminal. Finished. Order another breakfast. Nobody on the island eats any other meal. A twenty-four-hour morning. A perpetual hangman’s dawn.

  Sinclair’s map is useless. It has regressed to pulp in his sodden pockets. Damp blots have rearranged all the salient features. He abandons its untrustworthy guidance and leads us, by will alone, to Shurland Manor. Or what remains of it.

  This is another of those moments I enter reluctantly, only to find myself overcome: breathless in dumb recognition. We slither down a private road, made anxious with warnings, and are greeted – across an authentic duck pond – by the sight of a red-brick manor house: lifting the unprepared onlooker straight back in to… what? A time that never existed, but which instantly activates all the simpering ducts of sentiment. I find myself transfixed: staring through the rain-curtain, over luxuriant chlorophyll meadows, at the preserved façade; the ancient black-wood door, the asymmetrical arrangement of windows. It works superbly as a backdrop, but it has no substance. The stone-dressed hide is stretched on a framework of scaffolding: a nomad’s tent. The body of the house has gone. We are left with an exploitable exterior for costume drama: a photogenic sweep of wall to disguise the empty gardens. I have no business with this place. Yet I am both grinning and weeping. My response to the dangerous combination of colours in this wind-thrashed circuit of trees is as unexpected as it is absolute.