Downriver
Page 53
I was beyond shock, but the landlord registered my self-doubt. The lack of trust in my eyes. ‘The day of the match,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? The cricket on Horse Sands. Been happening this day since time immoral.’
Sinclair came back to life. He rubbed his hands. And worse: he took from his coat pocket a varnished, red leather ball and began to pick at the seam. I bet he knew all about this, the evil sod. I hate cricket. I despise the hours of contentless boredom, punctuated by threats of occult violence (too far away to be interesting). And I abhor the nagging danger of sudden grievous harm, perpetrated against even the entirely innocent spectator, who is trying to sip a glass of cold Rhinish wine, and dip into a novel of urban mayhem, until it all goes away. ‘The classic art of hurling hard balls at soft ones’ is his friend Dryfeld’s terse but accurate definition. I’ll have nothing whatever to do with this. It will certainly end in tears.
Horse Sands was a shark-shaped islet of river mud that emerged at low tide from the Swale. Apparently, once a year (on the anniversary of some repulsed Viking raid), an eccentric cricket match took place on the sandbar; lasting just long enough for the already inebriated participants to get their feet wet, lose a few balls in the river, and work up a raging thirst. Nobody kept the score. They made up the rules as they went along. They turned out in absurd and unsuitable costumes. And took it all, in the English fashion, with the utmost seriousness.
The walk out to the wicket could be the trickiest part of the game. But the batsman waiting to receive his first delivery in the middle of all that water – wondering if the ball will be flung at his head, or drop at his feet in the mud – has nothing of topographical interest to contemplate beyond a botched prospect of Faversham. The cultivated cricketer (the Fry, the Brearley, the Raffles, the Roebuck) will think of murder. Black Will and Shakebog hired by Mistress Arden to assassinate her husband. Apocryphal ghosts in an unperformable drama. He will also recall, with guilty affection, all those tearjerking John Ford set pieces. Monument Valley. Huddles of wind-whipped repertory faces gathered, yet again, at the river: to praise some arrow-punctured corpse. John Wayne, Ward Bond, the other Ben Johnson.
I don’t want it. I’m not going down there. Enough is enough. I’ll nurse my Guinness on the terrace, and watch. I’m not falling for that wide-angle sentimentality. The rhetorical assumption of a man (shot low from behind) striding out from a square of darkness into an over-exposed furnace of action. This time I’ll wet my lips, keep my notebook open on my lap, and make the report. The narrator cuts the cord.
The boat arrives to carry them over. A low flat-bottomed skiff, paddled from the stern. The cricketers wait at the slipway in an awkward huddle: they nudge and josh, or fiddle obsessively with their laces. A choir of rejected Spy cartoons. There is a bull-necked, waistcoat-bursting man, who has not quite decided whether he will impersonate Dr Grace or Sir William Withey Gull. His chin juts aggressively, but his beard is patently false. A Herculean bat swings from his hand. There is a woman dressed like a Red Indian. Or a Red Indian dressed like a woman. A dead one. Her clothes and skin are the colour of oxidized copper: a drowned and ugly green. She moves towards the water, her arms stiff, raised: as if to encourage the other fielders to close in for the final over before the tea interval. A circus dwarf in a light-brown derby is flicking and catching a boomerang. His face shines with white lead, his huge eyes are outlined in black. He is pushed aside by a limping, cursing man – who struggles to unravel himself from an umpire’s floor-length dust coat. A fantasy nurse, in breathless costume-hire uniform, pushes a heavy bicycle. Sinclair helps to manoeuvre the vulgarly exaggerated telescope of a Pacific islander with a bone through his nose. All we need – and I think we are about to get it – is the arrival of the Reunion, with her griddled pilot still chained to the wheel.
Something very strange is happening. I grip the arms of my chair, tighten my fingers around the slats of the table. I want no part of this. There is a remission in the gravity of time, a period of involuntary ‘feedback’. Our script is in turnaround. If I do not resist – I will be written out. It’ll take over, write itself. Uncensored. On this day the river disgorges its dead. I swear that one man, his pockets bulging, crawled from the water on the far side of the sands. He pulled himself upright, feeling his way like a blind man, tapping, and resting on an antique bat. A faded pink cap, tipped forward over his eyes, made him look both clownish and bald.
The stumps are unevenly set. They sink at different levels into the mud, so that the bails will not sit across them. Neither will the ball bounce. They’ve been playing for hours, and nothing has reached the batsman. He is patient, lifting his weapon, and then lowering it again, as each attempted delivery falls far short of the crease. The dead balls are left, buried in the sand like infertile eggs. The players are all so solemn. There is no sense of competition, only of collaboration in an eternally recurring ceremony.
I look down at my glass. I’ve been pulling steadily, all this time, at the gravy-coloured froth; but to no effect. The level of liquid is unchanged. My Leysdown cigar remains half-smoked. The blue ring I puffed into the still air hangs exactly where I launched it years before.
Before what? How long have I been here? How long has here been here? Long enough to unspool twelve parallel wheels of fate, twelve concurrent dreams? The remote white figures are unburdened. I cannot dismiss them, call them in. A crackle of wraparound noise: wind mischief, a territoriality of birds, unsounded bells; silent bell towers directing the circuit of cooling air. Spasms of gunfire from across the darkened fields. My cousin, the humpbacked ratter, has lived to see the twilight. The tide insinuates itself over the tongue of sand. The outfield has already been squatted by an extended family of diving ducks. An oil-feathered pun, an English score card floating from sight.
I’m weary, burnt-out, blown. I’m sick, I’m tired of sweeping up the parrot droppings from the floor of his mind, but there’s time for one more. One final crackpot theory. I’ll fake the soliloquy, talk for the ghost. Sinclair proposes that a cricket match is essentially a trial of psychic health. He finds he performs most effectively when he is run-down, exhausted, or injured in some way. It is only then that the conditioned reflexes relent; they are inhibited, and his modest will towards failure grows weak. The act of bowling, or striking the ball, fulfils itself without his egoic interference. Writing this book has been a Wagnerian roller-coaster: tree-felling drives, followed by legless first-ball gropes. I don’t know if this proves his thesis or destroys it. But the conclusion must be: the sickest team wins. Wait until this gets out! They’ll be pressganging the terminal wards, digging up plague pits, injecting our South African mercenaries with wet beriberi, malaria, trypanosomiasis. We’ll be a power again. We’ll be contenders.
The Grace/Gull impersonator throws Sinclair the ball. ‘Get rid of it, chuck it in the river,’ I want to scream. It’s his turn to inflict some damage. He counts out his twelve paces and scratches a mark with his (sick) heel in the sand. He checks his grip, shuffles, jogs on the spot, runs in close to the stumps, and lets it go.
For a moment I think nothing has happened. The batsman plays no shot. The fielders are lifeless. A freelance wound, a lengthening suture of red advances from the West, from Fowley Island. The ball – if it was ever delivered – passed through, and on, without harming man or wicket. It connects with, and disappears into, the long rays of the setting sun.
Now there is a quality of yolky golden light revolving in a benign cartwheel along the course that the ball should have taken. Something calm and bright and inexhaustible. A spinning nimbus of maize and bees and song. A bowling hoop of sticky radiance: wasps, wax, feathers, corndust. An Egypt, a linen sail. A spiral of white sand. A waterfall turning back on itself. A rush, a dart, a hymn. And as this pulsing yellow trawl, this phenomenon, bounced across the estuary towards the cancelled land, an umprompted description came into my head. A set of alien words. ‘The opposite of a dog.’ I have not the slightest idea what that means.
X
The oppressive closeness clears. A sudden violent storm had left the streets of Whitechapel fresh and wet. Sofya Court walked home. She had given the swollen jiffy bag into the hands of the cashier at the Indian supermarket in Heneage Street. To be delivered to Joblard on his return. Her duty was discharged.
‘HERE AT LAST IS THE GRIMOIRE,’ she had written, ‘WHICH WE SO CARELESSLY MISLAID. I HOPE IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO CONSTITUTE A HAPPY ENDING?’
November 1989, London
Acknowledgements and Confessions
My thanks to Mr Shames (of Stoke Newington) for granting me permission to quote from his letters. And also to Peter Riley (of Cambridge) for time and hospitality; as he recounted his memories of the poet, Nicholas Moore.
The rest of the book is not so reliable. Much, I’m afraid, is mere fiction (i.e. it hasn’t happened yet). My journalistic accounts of verifiable newspaper incidents, such as the planting of the eucalyptus in honour of King Cole, live down to the ethical standards of that trade. (You can’t believe a word of them. I was there; but Meic Triscombe, Edith Cadiz and the rest were floating in the aether.)
Professor Stephen Hawking, as far as I am aware, has never set foot in the Isle of Dogs; nor yet the Isle of Doges. The words I have entrusted to him are derived from his published works. (The interested reader will know that Professor Hawking did ‘attend a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican’.) His appearance in my narrative is a (desperate?) quotation of virtue.
I can’t go so far as to claim that ‘this version of history is my own invention’. It would be more truthful to suggest that these inventions are versions of my own history.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to those twelve (unknowing) souls who accompanied me through my grimoire of rivers and railways. They deserve to remain anonymous.