Downriver (36 page)

Footsteps on the cobblestones, and a single knock at her door. The dream of a perfect murder fades.

VII

Beneath the odd, parchment-shaded lamp, a meniscus of pale light: the room quilted in bulky darkness. The bundle of blue papers has stuck to my hands in a single block, heavy as stained glass, interleaved with lead. Millom's face is bestial. He insinuates, whispers, rasps: fixes me with his sunken, chalk-rimed eyes. His fleshy lower lip shivers in a mime of humour. He is amused. He leans over; his buffed pike-teeth glinting voraciously. White hands break free of his cuffs, to flap around the lamp, as he signals his triumph. ‘Gotcha!' He has implicated me in horror, infected me with a small corruption from which there is no immunity.

‘You understand the nature of her triumph? Yes?' Millom preached, determined to poison the silence with a redundant afterword. ‘It was
indifference
: “surviving death through death”. The blind surgeon wanted something that excited him more than honour, more than sanity, more even than life. He wanted the one crystal absolute she denied him – yes, apathy; he wanted it so much he was prepared to pass over the borderline of identity, become her, and suffer her vengeance
within her flesh
.'

No. I didn't want to be drawn into giving mind to this fiction, but it seemed to me that Millom was wrong, completely wrong. As wrong as it is possible to be. I repudiated his terms: ‘vengeance', ‘apathy'. I could only read the crucial ‘exchanges' between the woman and the surgeon in terms of the madness of love-death – the ‘little deaths' of physical ecstasy. Within this tale, the woman exploits those out-of-the-body post-coital experiences, where both partners become the loved one and the lover: the metaphysical poets' mingling of souls. Through the
focus of repeated ritual acts the woman infiltrates the surgeon/father's consciousness – so that, when the inevitable moment comes, she takes responsibility for her own death; leaving him with nothing, an achieved emptiness.

‘The woman, the woman,' Millom twitched on. He was talking to himself. Without having ‘written' anything, he found himself an author. His performance was magisterial in its self-deceit. ‘The woman
allowed
the surgeon to enact the deed that was his inescapable destiny. She could not change the events of history, but only the meaning. In the freedom of death, she used her more potent memory, her older soul, to avenge herself by trapping the killer in the seductive mirror of her youthful skin. His sightless blunder damned him. His act of sacrificial slaughter, releasing her (as he thought) from an inherited taint, was, in fact, the very movement that brought him down, crushed his over-weening pride. You follow me now? He is the man, and he is still “alive”. He has no need of a name; his identity is transferable, so he's immortal. He wanders the city, seeking out the fatal woman, like a benign host desperate for the only satisfying plague bacterium – the one that is fatal. Hopelessly, in drinking clubs and hotel bedrooms, he feels the contours with his trembling hands, face after face after face, searching for his own earlier self, his woman soul. He is prepared to commit any crime to avoid the dreadful ceremonies that have
already taken place
.'

Millom brought his jerky moth-catching hands together in a clap of self-satisfaction: he sealed the circle of morbid light. ‘Am I wrong? Only the dead have the time adequately to revenge themselves. Their sense of honour is older than the sun; but the damage they inflict upon the dream of their lives is terrible. They die in obedience to some posthumous whim.'

It may have been the unconvinced nature of the light in this room, or some failure of nerve among my retinal fibres, but it now appeared that the manuscript sheets had lost their colour: the lines had faded and the blue escaped. Millom's double-spaced,
tightly controlled Italic script had narrowed, spidered, speeded into an over-familiar black scrawl; a sequence of Bic-incisions intended for decoding by the author alone.
The manuscript was in my own hand
. The writing of this tale had nothing to do with Millom, nor with the ‘Prima Donna of Spitalfields'. It is mine: lost or suppressed. But I have no memory of its composition. The risks were too great. I had sworn to finish with all this compulsive nightstuff. I locked the story away, and dropped the key into the canal. How then had it come into Millom's hands? If he was ‘communicating' with anyone it was not the dead. I discounted the possibility that he (or his agents) had simply broken into my house and stolen these papers, from among all the stacks of ruin. Could John Millom have evolved some psychic ‘fax' machine, the ability to invade my sleep? Was it possible that I functioned, in some ugly, involuntary way, as a scribe to the worst of the sites that I was foolish enough to visit?

I knew that,
whatever the price
, I would have to carry the bundle away from this place and destroy it. The thing was too volatile. It must never be published. The bargain it represented was no longer one I was prepared to honour. I clawed myself, frantically, out from the hissing leatherette chair.

Millom put his hand against my chest. I was relieved to find that it did not pass directly through the mantle of flesh. He signalled for me to follow him.

‘I have a gift already prepared for you. Take it when you go, but be sure not to open it until you are safely back indoors.'

I agreed eagerly, intending to drop whatever it was, sight unseen, into the nearest bin. Millom blocked my path and – swivelling on his heels – opened a door which led into what might have been a bedroom. He scratched at the walls, looking for a light switch. Nothing had prepared me for this.

I would not cross the threshold. I remained outside, staring into a chamber of blasphemy, from which escaped bands of stifling air, the low smoke of wet leaves burning. Millom, in a palsied dance of celebration, waved the corset-spring key in my
face. This, I realized, was the heart of the matter, the revelation he was desperate to share.

‘Shaped,' he whispered, ‘like the Egyptian character for
neter
, the one supreme God; this insignificant metal tool activates the entire operation. Its outline describes the passage through which we travel to communicate with the world of spirits.'

The only spirits I was interested in, at that moment, were in a bottle. I needed a stiff pull before I could take another step. But nothing of the sort was on offer. The floor of the room was divided into lettered squares; in its centre was a circular raised platform, a table masquerading as a bed. Placed, obviously, at the four cardinal points were narrow-lipped jars, filled with something dark, earth or ashes. Millom now reached into his jacket pocket and – ceremoniously – added the latest graveyard transfusion to the eastern jar. Silver wires ran from these earth-batteries, across the canopy of the bed, to a gilded ring, a serpent swallowing its own tail; on which Millom laid the key. The canopy itself was a grey and lumpy conglomerate: rags of faded cloth, ribbons, dried flowers, hair curls, maggoty earth-meat.
A body had been shaped
from pillaged clay, dressed in wisps of net; wigged, laced, booted. Sufficient space had been left on this necrophile altar for the unthinkable implication that Millom himself would lie beside his mud-bride in a form of vermicular marriage.

‘With this key,' Millom said, ‘the dead man, whose rituals ensured both his invisibility, and his immortality, escaped from the asylum. Without memory, or a past, he paddled over the marshes, to pass unremarked among the houses and the traffic of East London. He left behind his pentacle of victims – not as a barrier warding off future evils, but as an achieved act of occult geometry, sealing the secrets of that room for ever.'

The burial place had been physically shifted, cup by cup, from the cemetery into Millom's chamber. He had dug his nails into corruption: listening attentively while his mind split, and branched into previously untested chapters of madness. This
self-recording conjurer was trapped, under a carapace of hysterical conformity, in degradation. He personified all the furtive impulses of his time and his city. Like a ruthless bibliophile, he collected dead whispers. He walled himself in bad faith, in fantasies of decay. He attempted to demonstrate with his septic wax tableau, the ultimate extension of horror. He had earned the right of becoming, in his own words, ‘one of us'.

VIII

If the council had provided a litter bin anywhere between Calderon Road and the station I would certainly have dumped the whole loathsome parcel straight into it. It wasn't an item to chuck in the street, or to jettison on an innocent doorstep, along with the milk bottles. (‘Must be the new telephone directory, dear.') And so, when the train halted in the tunnel, between Stepney Green and Whitechapel, and the lights began to flicker and dim, I make the excuse that I needed some intricate task to occupy my still trembling fingers.

I slashed the twine with my clasp knife (only slightly amputating my little finger), and unwound the stiff skirts of brown paper. I was left, after a short struggle, with nothing more alarming than a copy of my own novel,
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
(made ‘safe' by the addition of a prophylactic glassine wrapper). By habit, I leafed through the opening salvo, taking a slightly guilty pleasure in the company of these refreshingly materialist monsters. The pages were virgin; mercifully untainted by Millom's attentions. The Bodonia paper was fresh as when it came from the hands of Sig. Mardersteig in Verona. But, with the introduction of William Withey Gull, a chronic dementia of red-ink annotations spattered the margins: ‘
NOT TRUE
!!!
Wordy evasions
–
grip the FACTS
,
boy
.
EVIDENCE
?
Stolen from other men's books
.' Revisions breed in the white spaces, feverishly overwriting the original version, to clarify some imagined
authorial intention. Millom worked the pages like a speed-crazed collaborator. He was the uninvited Ford to my sullen Conrad.

The train labours, shivers, jerks; shudders a few yards forwards, stops. The lights go out. I am left in a comfortable darkness, polarized by those ever-active bulwarks of local history: the London Hospital and the Jewish Burial Ground. It is easy in this enforced silence to imagine the novel on my lap as a brick of impacted light: a freak reaction has converted the text into a pack of unrepressed images. They have a startling
bacterial
luminescence; giddy and dangerous. If I dared to turn the pages I know that I would reveal all the word-inhibited secrets: the steel engravings would begin to move, stone figures would shake off their shadows; white buildings would open their flaps to disperse the panicked basements. There would be a remission of violence.

When the lights came back on the book in my hand was a square of black cloth: the dustwrapper had slipped on its glassine hinge to reveal Millom's final critique; an effort coming as close as his nature would allow to a jest. He had pasted a reduced photocopy over the snapshot portrait my wife had taken for the rear flap: Tenniel's illustration of
Alice in the Train
. The windows have been Tipp-Exed; Africa reduced to a phantom. The linear whirlwind of the railway carriage is now a radiant plaster skull – with Alice and the ‘gentleman in white' clinging, pathetically, to the zygomatic arches. They are the handles of a drinking vessel, balanced in the symmetry of perpetual confrontation.

Millom knew from the start that I would open his parcel as soon as I got on to the train. He had probably succeeded in ‘withdrawing' enough electricity to hold us in the tunnel. That was his message, or his warning. But there is something else: book worms, I can accept, but Millom's pun is grossly literalist. A slithering sightless string-inch breasts the fore-edge of the novel, like a Polish cartoon; wriggles free, drops on to the tartan-covered seat. The heart of the book has been hollowed out, cut away; scooped like melon-flesh. Millom has filled the wounded cavity with contraband earth. Moist pink and grey
things are knotting on the carriage floor, covering my boots; multiplying. The shape of a key has been pressed into the miniature grave.

IX

The spiteful pulsing of the rods in their frozen canisters became the pulsing of Cec Whitenettle's heart. His hand squeezed gently on the geared control. The power of the track travelled through him, so that his hair turned to fire. He was the messenger of the immortal ones. His softly lit cab did not move: it was the tunnel that rushed past him, a hood of black velvet. He was restored, revived; he outpaced the darkness. Rodents scuttled to escape his bladed monster. The slanting walls of the embankment washed over him in green waves. The train was a water snake; it twisted and burrowed beneath the sleeping streets. It absorbed the dream-jungles of all the sleepers. The streamlined observation window became the visor of a winged and wired helmet. Cec listened to a scatter-speak of voices, living and dead: the controllers. It had happened; he was himself the core of the fusion, the germinator of the force he was riding.

It was only with the switch to the branch line, the plunge into the Whitechapel burrow, that the old fears returned. Every night, without fail, a red beast, a kind of deer, stood waiting for him on the curve. He did not touch the brake, but always drove straight on – at it and through it. He would not allow the creature's presence (or its meaning) to trouble him. His cab was monitored: if the central computer showed him slowing, anywhere, he would be surrounded in seconds by balaclava'd security-men, armed snatch-squads eager to redefine the ‘rules of engagement'. He would be rapidly converted to an unemployment statistic – waiting for his number to be called in some linoleum-carpeted retirement home; doped to the eyeballs, nodding through a remorseless procession of soap operas and advertisements; wetting himself.

Cec
knew
there was no living deer: no animal had been reported going over the fence from Victoria Park. The animal was a two-dimensional cartoon; lurid, sticky with varnish. It was the Roebuck of Brady Street, moonlighting from its pub-sign pasture. Now, apparently, even this mild territorial guardian was infected with panic, and obliged to understudy its own apocalypse. One of these days, Cec decided, he would confront his fear – go down the Roebuck, order a drink, sit with the Irish and the Maltese, talk about car auctions.