Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Sinclair is standing beside me, nodding his agreement. His gouty white fingers too numb to slide open the lens cap of his camera. Our walk has degenerated into a series of poses in the teeth of the English scenery (the weather!): on to which we are determined to project some meaning, some significance we can achieve in no other way. The history of our day is expressed in a morbid checklist of roadside halts. And this is, Sinclair would blasphemously assert, also the history of England.

  VII

  The long march to the sea ends at Leysdown; or, as I keep calling it, Leytonstone. There is nothing more. The Leytonstone Keys: a scrofulous gathering of subhuman shacks, huddled together in order to limit the damage to a single location. We are entertained by the freakishness of Venice (California), without the carcinoma additives, and without the boringly self-justifying eccentricity of its inhabitants. Would it be ethical to make our discovery public? To endanger this time-warped reservation? Leysdown on Sea is the ancestral dreamsite of a Lost Tribe: all the aboriginal cockney characteristics, celebrated in fiction and in song, have migrated here – and have been buried alive in pitches of caravans, mobile homes, wooden sentry boxes (inner-city privies), and upturned tin boats, veterans of Dunkirk. The displaced dwarfs of Camberwell, the ex-stevedores of Millwall, the draymen of Whitechapel have drifted in on a mindless tide. This is the Last Redoubt, the final stand. Beyond the groined and squelching shore is the German Ocean: a cocktail of mud and filth and regurgitated burger-gristle too rich even for the grey-complexioned molluscs. The now almost extinct qualities plagiarized in hop-picking documentaries struggle for breath on this remote gulag. Walthamstow. Leyton High Road. Kingsland Waste. The dead villages gasp for air.

  A cloud of murderous buoyancy assaults us. Nuts us, headbutts our melancholy. We can smell the noise: winkles, whelks, chip fat, the onion sizzle of crematorium takeaways. We are storm-shaken ghost prospectors struggling into town, empty-handed, with no energy to look for the action. Everything is on a funfair scale. As ‘clock’is to ‘golf’, so Leysdown is to Leytonstone. We should have ingested shovel-loads of criminal substances to suffer this. Morally shriven, we can only gape at pubs the length of Brabazon hangers. You’d have to be a shrunken head to relish the atmosphere. Every discount warehouse on the North Circular would have to empty itself into these saloons to make them appear less deserted and terminally sad. Slot-machine brothels pull back from the main drag like professionally vandalized cathedrals: drills of sick light (redgreens), crippled bandits, junk symbols, wobbly fruit, shake-til-u-retch bikes, revolving drums of strawberry-blonde snot-corn.

  And what if all this is my true inheritance? Sinclair can enjoy it. It’s so vile he can hardly believe his luck. For him, Leysdown is just another ‘routine’, another paragraph. Break out the showboating similes, the patronizing travel rap. I have to accept the contagious hamlet as part of my story, give it equal weight to the graveyards of Minster. I have the shaming and inexplicable urge to search the local phonebook for traces of my mother’s family. I drag Sinclair, smirking complacently, into a waterfront dive.

  It’s a hundred yards long and hires out, in off-peak months (September to June), as a bowling alley. We’re the only bona fide customers. One old man in the corner has died. But nobody’s noticed. We share the space with a coy Rottweiler, who has an uninhibited pork-scratching and fag-packet habit. We stand in dripping puddles, pretending not to be Travellers, while we order our Pils beers with Irish whiskey chasers. The barmaid yawns. She couldn’t care less if we piss on the floor. No Irish. No call for it. Settle for Teacher’s. Our sheltered window on the ocean. Red-felt banquettes. Low, kneecapping tables. Women in dresses too small for their daughters, drenched to the skin, writhe and hobble across the wharf to the bingo hall. Formal hairstyles collapsing into turbans of boiled string. If any of my family are still living here… I’ll walk straight into the sea and finish it.

  Sinclair puffs on a cheap cigar and swabs his spectacles on the flowered curtains, while I circle all the possibilities in the phonebook, scratching the numbers into a wet Carlsberg beermat. Too stupid to escape, my abdicated name lives on in columns of strong black type. I’ll carry the beermat away, hidden in my wallet. And one starless night, when the world is on its edge, I’ll use it. The phone in one trembling hand, a loaded pistol in the other.

  This is the end of the claims of civilization. The feeble encroachments of humanoid life-forms. From this point on, we are free. We have expunged all our tribal responsibilities. We have marched through the terrors of the morning. The rain relents. I begin to imagine a new light in the sky. And to consider the nature of the final act that Sinclair has prepared for us.

  He leans forward in his chair, innocently rubbing his eyelids. What does he want of me? A vitality lacking in his portrait of the island? An engagement he can never share? I am critically exposed. We are the only sentient beings left in the land. There is no protection in the slumbering benevolence of my nature against the warped and ruthless instincts of this man. I believe he would kill us both, without a qualm, if that was the most satisfying way to escape from the burden of the story. But he doesn’t know. Not yet. He doesn’t know how it ends.

  VIII

  ‘Is it still us that all this is about?’

  Gert Hofman,

  The Parable of the Blind

  The rain has indeed slackened to a light and refreshing drizzle. The horizon retreats, and is defined. The stalk towers of an offshore fort appear from the mist as an uncharted hazard. The beach is our private territory. None of the caravan people ventures beyond Leysdown. They are happy to curse the weather, and abuse the pinballs; to drink, smoke, gob, gab, break wind, snore, scratch, and – very occasionally – dangle a fishing line into the water. But the spatter of sewage pipes and the slobbering black-green gunge that rots the old wood pilings has no real appeal for them. Nothing can compare with the gloriously toxic rancour of the Limehouse Cut or the Hertford Union Canal. They have no enthusiasm for a space they cannot dominate. They are comfortable only when the path is sealed by hampers, umbrellas, transistors, dogs, and sandwich boxes bursting with maggot life. Our way is clear. No condoms squelch underfoot. The whole strand could be mined from Warden to Shell Ness. Amorous entanglements are consummated in bucking Cortinas, parked outside neon and roughcast concrete bar rooms.

  An heroically direct track leads to the island’s south-east tip. A puddled red dirt road, out of some grander tale, is caught between retreating telegraph poles and the deserted beach. We can share the fantastic Icarus flights of the pioneer aviators, high above luminous green fields and out over a blanket of grey sea. Smoke columns. Fires among the cabbages.

  Our two-man procession slowly absorbs, and celebrates, the energy of the curve: a wild sweep into open marshland. (The liberating spin, the tilted world!) We can follow the whims of a modest dyke path to the drowned fiefdom of Harty. Totemic birds shelter at a distance, nicely calculated, from the parking place of sharpshooters, the bicycles of fish-hook-casting juveniles. Crested, nodding lapwings hop over the quaggy ground, cackling at their own abundance. Let them remain what they are. Make no demand on them as symbols. The White Goddess is dead, and all of her triads.

  This is not what I expected. This is not the barnstorm finish. I can’t come back. I was prepared to confront another self, a double, a fetch. To be carried away, sucked like a prophet into the clouds. It’s all too easy. Saltmarshes, tidal flats, water meadows: a remote agitation of fat white sheep. A new vocabulary is required, creating a new mind. I am transformed by the previously unknown beings I am required to name. I whisper the terms like an invocation: ‘sward’, ‘fleet’, ‘sluice’, ‘raptor’, ‘passerine’. I begin to let go, to fade from the path; to lose my always fierce sense of individual identity.

  Small craft buck over the Swale in unaccustomed sunlight, dipping and chopping against a running tide. And yet the older boats at anchor barely stir. All movement seems unreal, made in defiance of this pastoral landscape, this pa
norama of recall.

  The long grass wraps my feet in a sodden poultice, giving them a fresh strength. I am renewed by an expectancy of healing. The path (a green serpent) doubles back on itself, hesitates between the slate modesty of the river and the promise of small fenced hills. Teal, shoveler, wigeon, pintail. We can expect them all. They are listed on a notice board. A short-eared owl breaks from cover and glides, wings spread, in confirmation of our track.

  Sinclair waits for me. I feel the accusation. He is pushing so hard. He wants more than there is. His imposed silence is developing into a threat. I am no longer able to follow in his footsteps. His challenge is a shadow I must step across. He wants me to share his madness, to refuse my comfortable graph of success: to fail. Or am I taking my duties as storyteller too seriously? Am I reading motives into the silence of contentment? I’m probably being as literal-minded as the students of those early Russian montage experiments that cut a neutral close-up against images with different emotional values. He wants none of these things. A blow, a rest from words. He turns back to the path ahead. He is only pausing while I draw breath. He doesn’t want to lose me. Not now.

  I am the sole prosecutor. Should I have made myself a Kultur shaman of fire and ice, a lead-scratcher, another Anselm Kiefer? Should I bring all that Nordic apparatus, that clutter, into galleries? Lock myself in cages with wild beasts? Produce myself as the wooden tongue of wisdom, the articulate mask? The choice is mine alone. This has nothing to do with him. What happens, happens. The third man, the unacknowledged one, is joining us. The other: feeding on his grim and remorseless belief in the quest. I abdicate my reserved status, and enter the narrative. He conned me. That was his trap. Fictional puppets have all the freedom of action. They can deny their creator. They can refuse his manipulations. They can abandon him.

  Our own messenger floats down towards the rush-fringed fleet, disappears. This is an island that is not the world. It is removed, discrete; one of those transitory border zones, caught in uncertain weather, nudged, dislocated by a lurch in the intensity of the light. A special place where, I’d like to believe, ‘good persists in time’.

  These are not my thoughts. This is not what I want to say. ‘Good’, if it still survives, is sustained by its concubine, ‘evil’; its sullen dependant. There is only the will towards good asserted by these unnoticed landscapes. And the quality we discover in ourselves as we are drawn towards them. ‘Good’ is a retrospective title. To be used when it is all over.

  As I stare in mongoloid fascination at Sinclair’s heels, I realize I have accepted a new doctrine: there is no third person. There never was. The watcher and the watched are one. And that is just the first stage. My analeptic concentration on the rhythms of the walk drowns all lesser motives, restores me to myself, reinforces the visionary dynamic of the route we have chosen.

  Now anything is possible. I can see the ash-shaded body of the church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty: pebbled walls sinking into the soft ground. A low sun picking out the pinkness in the stones. Turf is rising to cover it entirely. I see the dark oak of the muniment chest with its jousting knights, as it was salvaged from the Swale. The building has no further use for its priest and congregation, no concern with pilgrims and baptism in black tidal waters. But a procession of penitents and plague-fearing believers resist this apathy. They rush, slithering and stumbling, on to the mud flats; edging narrowly ahead of the darkness. They renege on wicker fire-gods, pitch themselves into the cold white hands of the saint; bleating with terror, they beg for immersion.

  And I see the other side also. The architecture of repression: bunkers buried under protected lands, unlisted blockhouses sheltering beneath a promise of sanctuary. The preservation of wild life is seen as nothing more than a charter for the destruction of all other kinds. The long-range binoculars that log the coupling seabirds also warn of the approach of unauthorized witnesses. Bird wardens double as security guards. Under the boastful photographs of rural England are cells of elimination, torture, death. Romantic watercolours pipe and wash over broken bones. Modesty is an avatar of ignorance. Curiosity does well to hesitate at the perimeter of any open space. When there is nothing to offend the eye, beware. The green hill above Windmill Creek is the dome of a prison.

  I see into subterranean honeycomb laboratories where monkeys in suits are testing blasts of radiation. Their thin bones print the grey cloth like stripes of chalk. They look comic, but there is no relief from this joke. It goes on for ever. Fur falls out in scalded patches. They suffer shock and chemical assaults. They have the skinned foetal cast of veteran rock stars at society weddings. They are dressed up, traumatized, trembling. They are deaf. They lipread the lab assistants’ obscene banter.

  Addict monkeys. Researchers on their backs. ‘The sustained administration of maximum doses of morphine, heroin, and codeine on healthy monkeys (MACACUS RHESUS) in conditions more extreme than those to which humans could be safely exposed. These pictures were taken after the animal had been on morphine for seven and a half months.’

  A pregnancy of pain; conditioned nightmares. I see the blueprinted textbooks emerge from shelves of morbid dust. Sheets of heavy gloss paper (bedsheets) fall open, part, with a noise that is almost sexual. Cool analytic prose undermines the hideous static poses. We finger the fore-edge, flicking the illustrations into a parody of life. Monkeys gibber and shriek on stoneblock altars: damaged, senile children.

  Hastily convened families of the unclaimed dead ‘volunteer’ to sample the force of controlled detonations. They are arranged, by the Widow’s sponsorship of Mrs Beeton’s domestic virtues, around tables spread with contaminated food. Wooden cutlery is wrapped in silver foil. They consume. They are glutted with possessions. The unmortgaged dead. They can boast of fridges made from paper and cardboard televisions. Flesh linen dissolves into gangrene and mutton, soot, carbon, corpse-cheese. They are photographed, described, measured, recorded; buried in earth. How deep can we go? How much clay does it take to smother these sights?

  Enough. I don’t have to write about this. I see Sinclair forging ahead once more. I don’t know how long we have been walking or what distance we have covered. He has seen the things I have described. I have accepted the things he has seen. Our track is undisturbed. We turn from the Swale, uphill. Climb a stile, and are welcomed by a tumble of abandoned tractors, broken pallet boards, rotting turnip heaps. The safety of unfarmed farmland.

  A red car was parked on the road alongside a tyre cemetery. The kind of chaotic, labyrinthine (high-risk) dump kids are instantly attracted by. I needed a rest. Badly. I searched out a dry tyre on which to collapse.

  ‘Wouldn’t sit there, boy,’ said a conversational mangel-wurzel, ‘not if you’m courting. Some nice ol’ rats live in them tyres. Biggest fucking beasts I ever seen.’

  A character in a greasy cowboy hat stuck his head from the car window, and followed it with some kind of high-velocity combat rifle. ‘Farmer don’ mind,’he said. He was waiting for twilight. ‘Best sport to be ’ad on the island. Blow them fuckers’ heads off, watch ’em run for it. Twenty, thirty yards down the road.’ He drooled, and spat. A copycat redneck with a six-pack and a box of cartridges.

  What does this oaf think about as he sits fondling the safety catch and keying himself up for the moment when the mutant rats make their suicide dash from Tyre City to the pyramids of mouldering potatoes? He seemed calm enough, and well-adjusted – by Sheppey standards. He may just have been drunk, or waiting for the pills to wear off. He didn’t even take a friendly potshot at us. The man probably voted Green, and worked as an accountant. He was certainly the tallest male we’d encountered. He must have been almost five foot two, without the hump. A potential relative, a kissing cousin.

  I led Sinclair up the yellow road by a dozen paces. I didn’t break my stride until I could see the bell tower of St Thomas the Apostle. And so we came at last to an enclosure on which I had absolutely no claim. A building I could respond to openly, without hope of reward –
or fear of punishment. A circuit of grass that shone in the afternoon sun, that existed without my description of it; that was suspended from the narrative.

  Pale, uncontaminated land. Fields of peas were pressing on the path; dripping from the recent showers, brushing against our coats. I picked a pod and split it with my fingernail. The peas were blunted, squarish and very sweet upon the tongue. The density of ‘green’ that now surrounded us was almost unbearable. Light recovered from the storm, charged light. It called for blood; axe splashes, unmotivated crimes. This was the perfect frame, the correct exposure: the meadow of death. But not for me; it was not my story. Sinclair did not turn in at the church gate. He wanted to see what was on the other side.

  IX

  ‘I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and long to go and seek there for the key of all mysteries…’

  (Prince Muishkin) Fedor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

  The landlord of the Ferry House Inn was waiting for us. ‘You’ll have to get a move on, lads. Or you’ll miss it.’ The track swerved away from the flagged terrace of the pub, and down to the old river crossing; where a fancy-dress group stood stubbornly around, as if they expected – against all the odds – that the discontinued ferry service would operate one last time. Perhaps, lacking the imagination for any other occupation, they had simply refused to budge when the ancient boatman retired. They looked ridiculous: sub-actors, professional extras forgotten by the crew – somewhere out of reach of the railways.