Downriver (3 page)

His prospects changed with a small piece of theatre that became apocryphal in the trade. A literary graveyard, lurking between the Royal Academy and the Museum of Mankind, was ‘rationalizing' its stock, and adjusting to market forces (prior to becoming an airline office), by reshelving directly into a builder's skip. Iddo watched, hands on hips, as the nocturnal assistants
blinked into the brilliance of the street, carrying as many as three books each; which they dropped, with great precision, on to the growing heap.

Iddo removed his bowler, and mopped his brow. He examined a few items in this reserve collection. He nominated a dozen or so, on the grounds of weight and size; bounced the hernia-dodging juniors, like so many jackals, and made for the shop, three steps at a time. He attacked the counter and gavelled it ferociously with his fist, until the buyer appeared; yawning and pale with anguish. Iddo was not the most sought-after of ‘runners'. The buyer, fretful, and slightly hungover, inspected the current selection.

‘Um, yes. Better, Iddo.' He could hardly believe it. ‘Quite presentable. The best books you've ever located.' He prised open the jaws of the till, slipped Iddo the customary paper to sign, and let him get away with a fiver and three singles. Iddo was in the big time.

By now the skip was attracting the attention of a few lesser carrion; ‘outpatients' on bicycles, shuffling dead stock between Shepherd's Bush Green and the Charing Cross Road. Iddo palmed them aside and waded, waist-deep, into the unreconstructed dreck. A dredged armful and back to the counter.
Three
blue ones!

At the close of trade, Iddo staked himself to a lethally trashed set of wheels. His horizons detonated. No longer was he trapped within the confines of a fifty-pence bus ride. He could risk Penn, Brackley, Colchester, Guildford. He was one of us.

And here was I, once his patron, staggering into a docklands junk-shop, under a washing machine that was leaking what I hoped was water down the front of my trousers. There were two more machines waiting outside in the Traveller. And a brace of spin dryers on the roof-rack.

While the junkman and Iddo debated this lump of cargo-cult plunder, I subsided into the books. I rapidly cast aside the usual trenchfoot volumes of First War photographs. These are loved
only by antique dealers, sternly refusing to sell them to bookmen, who wouldn't give them house room if the dustwrappers were woven out of dollar bills. I spurned the damaged glitz of Edwardian decorative covers: the unreadable in the process of becoming the unsaleable. I was left with five hardcore targets to consider.

The Tilbury Catalogue. Spring, 1988. Codeword: Hopeless
.

(1) A defective first edition of Joseph Conrad's
Youth
, Blackwood, 1902. Pale green linen-grain cloth, with marginal tracery of cigarette burns (Craven A,
c
.1952). Endpapers somewhat nicotine-tanned. ‘The End of the Tether', pp. 313 – 17, torn away and used as spills. A distressed copy that has not quite given up the ghost.

(Verdict? Better have it. My friend Joblard, the sculptor, wants to sample
Heart of Darkness
.)

(2)
In Tropical Lands: Recent Travels to the Sources of the Amazon, the West Indian Islands, and Ceylon
. Published by Wyllie of Aberdeen in partnership with Ferguson of Ceylon, 1895. Despite a trivial dusting of mushroom mulch, a
nice
copy. Author's name suppressed under the imploded corpse of a potentially uncommon spider. The creature in question
might
have posed for the illustration on p. 103, giving this item the additional interest of being an association copy. We make no surcharge on this account.

(Verdict? Forget it. Anything with a map costs too much money. And Dryfeld is always saying that you can't sell S. America.)

(3–5) The final three volumes constitute an incomplete collection of the works of Patrick Hanbury, Director, Department of Medical Entomology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. We can offer a yard of research on
The Natural History of Tsetse Flies
; and a slim octavo volume, complete with the uncommon ash-grey dustwrapper, produced in a version
of the Fortune Press house style, and emphatically titled,
The Louse
.

This last item, a cornerstone in any library, is illustrated, in line, with an exceptionally delicate study of
Phthirus Pubis
(female), from above. An alarmingly vivid section throws a new light on ‘Methods of Rearing' – by means of lice boxes attached to the skin, in a garter beneath the sock. ‘
The louse feeds only on man, and must do so frequently; it has to be reared on human beings and it should be kept on the skin for long periods every day. The most convenient method of rearing the insect was developed by Nuttall
…'

Increased costs of publication do not allow us to do justice to the ultimate volume:
Researches in Polynesia and Melanesia, An Account of Investigations in Samoa, Tonga, the Ellice Group and the New Hebrides
. The author's sensitive use of the plate-camera presents extreme forms of physical deformity in the guise of decorative art. Disease-ripe flesh bursts and fruits, escaping from the stunned dignity of gracious native specimens. Never before, in our opinion, has Surrealism courted the analytical eye of Science to such effect. Disbelief wrestles with pathos. The gross excitements of the Freak Show are enclosed within the discretion of the ethnologist's cabinet.

(Verdict? Irresistible!)

Iddo and the junkman had not wasted their time. While I have been browsing among the beached detritus of the Imperial Dream, they have slapped hands to celebrate the resolution of their infamous deal. Iddo alternately squeezed and pommelled the junkman, until he swallowed his still-burning fag. The junkman, in revenge, pelted Iddo with banknotes, and worried him in the general direction of the river.

Any offer for my fancied books is redundant to the thrust of the moment. Iddo's motor – with fresh detonations, smoke clouds, the singe of chicken feathers – buffets him back to his self-inflicted Apocalypse. Normality creeps awkwardly on to the
set. The junkman resumes his brave attempt to cook himself between two fires. Money does not interest him. A hip-flask does. He brews up; growing weary of the exercise long before the water boils. Condensed milk, Camp coffee, sewage water, whisky. We achieve a kind of bleak, post-bellum fellowship. And he is happy to elucidate the nature of the scam.

He has cornered the market in the unloved. The streets are awash with non-functioning electrical hardware. He gives it shelter. He operates an unsung Battersea Dogs' Home for Zanussi, Hoover, Indesit, Electra, Hotpoint, Bosch, Bendix, Creda, Electrolux, Philips. All the tribes of brutalized and deserted dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and tumble dryers. They were never turned from his door. He has a backer, a deal-maker; some local publican with media connections, contacts on the Ivory Coast. They wait until they can cram a dozen containers, then set keel from what's left of the docks, to Lagos. Top dollar!

‘We're webbed up, squire,' the junkman smirked. ‘All the way to the Generals. There's a nobbled Russian geezer with the Third World Aid delegation who loves to bilk the “sooties”. We sweetened him with a nicked Harrods charge card and enough small change to play the slot-machines for a fortnight.'

Apparently, the dosh has to be laundered through a government-funded education programme: heavyweight Industrial Training Films. A category that has fallen into sad disfavour since the days of Lindsay Anderson and ‘Free Cinema'. Now a few bearded Dutchmen, cut off in their prime by the Civil War, rush around with U-boat cameras and outdated stock trying to incite their students, who are interested only in wearing bow ties and driving around in air-conditioned Cadillacs, to recapture the fire of John Grierson's social visionaries. They project, in furtive cellars, romantic images of steel furnaces, backlit assembly lines, and naked sweating workers. But the students want only to be Game Show anchormen, with travel allowances to Bangkok. The Dutch instructors have to deal in black-market primitive art to survive. They are almost always caught. The police are tipped
off by the traders, who buy back their own goods at a ‘special' price. The film-makers pay their way out of prison, or die in chains.

None of this concerns the junkman. A few modest currency fiddles on the side, and he's in clover. A detached residence that backs on to the railway track at East Tilbury; heated swimming pool, cocktail lounge, pebble-dash portico, closed-circuit security system, Mercedes: and a panoramic view across the biggest rubbish dump in Essex to the Romano-British settlements now tactfully concealed beneath river mud. As Glyn H. Morgan remarks in his seminal work,
Forgotten Thameside
(sic), Letchworth, 1966: ‘In spite of the recent disappearance of the hut circles the scene is still well worth a visit.'

Wade in, traveller, and stick fast. Try to imagine, as you go under, Claudius bringing his legions over from the Kent shore. This is where it happened. This was the place.

Look on these new men: Princes of Ruin, Lords of Squalor.

VII

A few weeks later I was back. It wasn't going to be easy to shake free of this place. I needed to investigate without the frenzied rush of hunting for negotiable books. I walked from Tilbury to Tilbury Riverside. I wanted to take a longer look at the station concourse, the Custom House, the Fort, the Gravesend Ferry – and I invited Joblard to accompany me. We would identify the stretch of water where the
Princess Alice
went down with the loss of six hundred and forty lives: salvaged bodies exhibited on three piers. Our motives were, as always, opaque and spiritually unsound.

Pensioned trading hulks rusted in the docks: fantastic voyages that would never be consummated. The cranes had become another forest to be culled for their scrap value, another location for ‘Dempsey and Makepeace'. The rampant dereliction of the
present site was as much an open invitation to the manipulators of venture capital as the original marshlands had been to the speculators and promoters who dug out the deepwater basins, and laid thirty miles of railway track in 1886. When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out', fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps. And when the first gay squatters arrive, bearing futons… the agents smile, and reach for their chequebooks. The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only to present it, framed in perspex, to the Docklands Development Board.

Cowboy hauliers, chancers with transport, trade the freight that is still worth bringing in as a cover story: tractors that metamorphose into rocket launchers, heroin-impregnated madonnas, all the miraculous shape-shifting cargoes.

We broke into a ghost-hut masquerading as a Seaman's Hostel; a spectacular and previously unrecorded brochure of photo opportunities. The roof had been bombed. Curtains of red dust fell through the chilled air. Voices of departed voyagers. Quarrels, drink. Tall tales, unfinished reminiscences. Shards of mirror glass sanded the stone floor: a lake of dangerous powder, from which you might reassemble a version of the past – by sweeping this snowstorm backwards into the projector.

The station itself is a mausoleum built to house the absence of Empire; Empire as a way of escape, of plundering the exotic, defrauding our impossible dream of some remote garden of paradise. A cantilevered shed, epic in scale, runs away to piers, Custom Houses, platforms that might once have connected with the city. But now you will have to conjure from your grandfather's memory the oak-panelled saloons, upholstered in tapestry, the floors covered with Turkey felt.

The place is shrill with the traffic of the dead: furs, cabin trunks, porters. There are mesmerizing patches of sunlight on the bald stone flags that it is impossible not to acknowledge. We move slowly, talk in whispers: a cathedral of evictions.

We followed the tunnel down to the Gravesend Ferry, the
TSS
Edith
. Everybody wants to get away. The officers from Tilbury Fort chose to live on the other side, among the decayed Regency splendour, where there was some remnant of life and society. Their ‘pressed' men were either invalid, or had to be locked at night into their barracks to prevent them from deserting.

No time, on this excursion, for the World's End; a low tumble-down weather-boarded building, once the baggage store where troops crossing the river left their equipment. Tables for stripping the drowned. We skirt the pub and its stunted orchard, reluctantly; passing on, to enter the Fort by the ashlar-faced Water Gate.

Immediately the shades press on you. The lack of any ordinary human presence makes the survival of this enclosure remarkable, and daunting. The tourist feels responsible for the silence. The cobbles of the parade are beaten fears. Bone faces crowd the upper windows of the Officers' Quarters. Sand spills from the water pump. Someone has placed a dead bird in the mouth of the ceremonial cannon. In the chapel the caretaker inscribes the names of the Jacobite prisoners who died at the Fort, hidden from sight in the tunnels of the powder magazine. Spent weapons, hostages. Highlanders brought by sea from Inverness, for eventual transportation. A museum of madness and suffering set into a vicious – but disguised – pentagon. Redoubts and ravelins spike the surrounding swamplands: the Water Gate can empty the moat and inundate these outlying paddy fields.

There is a scratching mockery in the movement of the caretaker's quill, as he columns his pastiche ledger with real names.
Cameron, Macfie
,
MacGillivray, MacGregor
. The east wind courses through brick-work passageways, caponiers, and ramps; outflanking the petrified weaponry.

Among the cabinets of gas masks, mortars, knives, and bandage boxes is a map that illustrates the lines of fire between Tilbury and Gravesend, as proposed by Thomas Hyde Page in 1778. The river at its narrowest point, eight hundred yards, shore to shore, is tightly laced by invisible threads: a stitched vulva. The only
entrance to the heat of the city is denied. A pattern is woven over the waters; which remains unactivated to this day. And, therefore, most hazardous.