Downriver (43 page)

Sonny still danced to a self-inflicted cattle-prod tango. ‘If we can borrow a standby crew from “Local News” or “Blue Peter”,' he said, ‘we'll simply compose with their tired utilitarian footage. Exploit banal images that have no resonance, no sense of being inhibited by meaning. The method has distinct possibilities. Found art, construction by selection: editing is the really constructive stage anyway. Give us your raw material – formulaic establishing shots, over-emphatic close-ups – and we'll electrify the air waves.' He broke off to hammer at the walls of our designer-vandalized compartment. ‘An Art Train! Dziga Vertov!
Kino-Eye!
Montage is the true engine of the lyric. We'll plunder those reservoirs of unconscious aspiration. Take whatever we are given, and
cut/cut/cut
to the heartbeat, to the rhythms of the breath: engines, wheels, statues falling, racing clouds, the quaking towers of the city. Futurists of a New Reality!'

Sonny's lips were moving but the sound, mercifully, escaped from me; ran out into the overhead wires, leapt towards Canvey Island and Shoebury Ness, bearing false messages of revolution and hope. His gestures were wilder and faster. His teeth dazzled like Mexican bone dice. It was like watching a madhouse charade in which some flesh-scorched depressive mimes his remembered account of the Book of Deuteronomy. Without warning, I experienced an excruciating pain in my ear (how crude are the body's metaphors!); as if Sonny's irrepressible torrent of
enthusiasm was splitting the incus, the anvil, with a tiny (and blunt) cold-chisel. Each blow projected a scarlet flash on to the ceiling of the carriage: cooling towers, the moulded angel on the side of the Custom House, the black and silted canal. I tipped forward to rest my head in my hands. Sonny was pouring the landscape, in the form of an ointment of honey and melted film stock, into my external auditory meatus. It was slipping, sticking, soothing; inwardly sealing my father's voice, which prompted me towards actions I could not begin to understand.

Absolute madness! Sonny had no mandate from the Corporation. We were without cameras, crew, or recording equipment. We had no budget. We couldn't raise a production number between us. Our epic looked certain to qualify as one of those masterpieces that exist only in the conversations of film buffs. The fewer people to see them, the fewer to contradict the legend. Eventually you have world rights on a cockney cut of Orson Welles'
It's All True
– and without exposing a single foot of film.

I was drowning in the psychopathology of obsession: the harder I drove myself in composing this account, taking down the voices (the intrusions from ‘elsewhere'), the more exposed those around me became to repeated and meaningless mischiefs. My lacerated ego puffed and swelled to a critical state: I began to believe that, by some magical trope, unwittingly enacted,
I had moved ahead of the events I was describing
. Or even, and this is hardest to swallow, by committing these fictions to paper, I had ensured they would occur. I found myself, a sandpaper-pored Richard Burton, opening my newspaper with palsied hand to have the latest atrocity confirmed.
Vessels of Wrath
: ‘angels that failed', revengers, river-inhabiting, tied to the earth (but not part of it), deluding with false divinations, whispering into the wires, toying with stop lights. Light bulbs exploded as I touched the switch. The typewriter cut out as I pressed the first key (I considered shunning the letters ‘j' and ‘k', but that was insufficient penance). I fell prey to the temptation to destroy everything I had done – as if that would revoke it; to pitch the whole
mess into the fire. As soon as I completed my narrative of the Whitechapel train-fury, typed the final paragraph, I slumped in front of the television set to receive equally distant, but more compelling, versions: blood, carnage, suffering. I began to wrestle with the present tale of widowhood, memorials, monuments, and I was telephoned with the news of my father's death. If I moved on, as I proposed, to crucifixions, cursed motor launches, Islands of the Dead – what could I look forward to?

Walking away from it all – escaping – the house, the desk; a Saturday morning, down the Waste, for old time's sake. And I found in a box on the floor a curious, awkward, Germanic engraving: ‘Descent from the Cross' by A. H. Winter. It was very cheap. I bought it to resell, as I hoped, at the next Book Fair. But succumbed to temptation and held on to it, hung it on the wall. A slumped Christ; maimed, extinguished beyond all hope of resurrection. The peasant disciple, mongoloid with shock, fingers hooked beneath the lifeless shoulders, struggles with a dead beast-weight. The twisted neck, the veins of the kneeling woman. It was unutterably bleak.

I recognized the cross, a monstrous concrete tree, as we turned off the motorway and down the private slip-road to the crematorium. Red furnaces against an overcast sky. Perimeter fences of the steelworks. Out of the window of the Silvertown train the whole reel was available, now, today, at this moment, the film of life: event by event, second by second, a procession of single frames. It is all there, all within reach; birth to grave – and beyond: it requires only the courage to
stop everything
and to look.

I pushed the heel of my hand against my ear and succeeded in muffling the pulse of pain. Held firm by the gravity of sick pride, I remained exactly where I was – and nowhere else. There was no further expenditure of stolen time. The trauma was safely frozen.

Sonny is nudging me, opening the door: Silvertown platform. It is as mauve, silky, stocking-filtered, fey, day-for-night
as Delvaux's ‘Nightwatchman'; used on the dustjacket of the American edition of Julio Cortázar's
Around the Day in Eighty
Worlds. Obscure, semi-official buildings. A snake's nest of rail tracks. Hills in the distance – across the river? And the river itself, that self-renewing avenue of escape? Denied to us. I grant no credence to this preposterous set. If this is reality – pass me a paintbrush.

We have to arrange, somehow, to re-enter our narrative, to advance; or stand for all eternity, shivering in this dogmatically transitional limbo. (I flashed to John Clute's warning of my ‘not remarkably powerful grasp of narrative syntax'. But I am powerless to act. It is like being handed a plague card.) I allow myself to be dragged, club-footed, a storm anchor behind Sonny's still bustling pilot boat.

Silvertown, sadly, makes little attempt to live up to the glory of its name. It would have to be acknowledged even in the most optimistic auctioneer's catalogue as ‘distressed'. Subdued by the deconsecrated ziggurat of the Sugar Factory, the thin main street – once active in the field of nautical exploitation – now reluctantly let chaos greet chaos; it tumbled into more and more boisterous characterizations of squalor and decay. The once fire-stormed hamlet was now a glittering beach of sugar. The air was thick with a viscid sweetness; inspissated droplets fell, without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia. As you smiled, charmed by this version of the picturesque, the enamel of your teeth was stripped to the nerve roots; the periodontal membrane dissolving into black lace.

We crossed and recrossed deleted railway bridges, trying to find our way to the City Airport, the Royal Docks, the site of the almost completed memorial to the Widow's Consort (known locally as ‘Dirty Den's Knob'). The tracks always petered out among the same tangles of wire, giant wheels of extinct machines, columns of treadless tyres.

A mustard-plaster Victorian Gothic church, St Mark's, primed with a terrifying bestiary of gargoyles, oversaw and dominated
this principality of unemployed apparitions. S. S. Teulon's masterpiece, with its hollow ceramic blocks, was caged in wire and no longer approachable. Soon it would be returned to the populace, the eager communicants, with a new identity – as a storage shed for the local history collection of the Passmore Edwards Museum. An unneccessary conceit: the entire canton should have been under a bell jar, with a neatly engraved
sans-serif
label. Even the inevitable First War cross was beyond our reach. I pressed against the fence, striping my cheek: a refugee from the razor gangs. The words (
Courage
, Remembrance, Honour) exulted the dead ‘whose names shall live for ever'; but not here, where the sugar-smog has already eaten the gilt from the sandstone, and erased the lost squadron of claimants on our sympathy.

It was long past the time to look for a drink.

VII

The kids leant in wonder on the antlers of their BMX bicycles, as Imar O' Hagan walked inside the wicker head across the Bow wastes. He disappeared into a shallow pit and – for a few minutes – they saw nothing but the crown of the great head itself, the shell-crusted eyes, floating towards them. They mounted up, cowboy fashion, standing on the pedals to race back to a safe distance. The Wicker Man and his double were within a breath of life.

Lacking honest, friable Dorset chalk, Imar had whitewashed the x-ray of the Cerne giant on to one of his lesser mounds. The creature's arm was stretched out in a gesture of reconciliation; not grasping a warrior's club, but a shamanistic twig that resembled nothing so much as a favourite niblick. The face was decorated with a pair of Rotarian-approved spectacles. His vertical manhood fell short (by several yards) of the generative potency of his two-thousand-year-old rival.

When the wicker head was lifted into place, the revenging
Twin, the basket case, stood ready on his scaled-down Silbury. He stared fiercely across an empire of compressed slurry towards the southern horizon and the coronation of his Silvertown rival: this false sibling with its feet set in concrete.

With a hoe Imar raked up the living grass, the mud and the worms; he stuffed his creation (his Adam, his angel) as he would a cushion. Balls of old newspaper (carolling wars, disasters, corporate raids, rape, surveillance, child abuse) were fed through the cage of his curved white ribs. He kissed the head full upon its lips. He aimed a sharp blow at its paper heart. The physical work was done.

Sitting at the foot of the mound – with slowed breath – Imar opened his sandwich box and gently lifted the twelve snails from their leaf. He was prepared to follow their instruction. Their silver threads would set the destiny of the monster.

VIII

Our search finally yielded, among wine bars fretful to parasite upon the flanks of the City Airport, an old dockers' pub, an unrestored end-of-terrace barrack. The ham rolls were reassuringly authentic: crusted in oven-tanned plaster of Paris, concealing a pink slick of reconstituted animal fat. The Guinness was warm and slightly soapy. The wallpaper had not been pasted to the wall: it had grown like a fungus. And was growing still.

The only other customer, sitting under a photograph of the wreck of the
Albion
, was Henry Milditch. They fitted so well together, these blatant props, that they might have been artfully posed by the management in a patriotic tableau; an advertisement for extra-strong cough drops. Milditch was dressed like a seafaring man. He was bearded, grizzled, red. I could have sworn he was suffering from frostbite. He blew on clenched hands: his eyes narrowed to menacing slits against the glare of sunlight on pack-ice.

‘What'll you have, boys?' Milditch offered, with unprecedented generosity. ‘I've landed a beauty here. Polar trek across the Royal Victoria: two hours a day, three days a week. Five hundred notes in the hand. Can't be bad. And a possible “voice over” if the “South Bank Show” bites on Joblard. Catling's been dropped, or there'd be a clash of chalk-stripes with Melvyn that would devastate the horizontal hold. It was no contest, I walked the audition. I still had the costume I'd liberated from the tele in Greenland; I thought it would come in handy for winter mornings down the Lane. It's promotion for Milditch, boys. I've made it from base-camp gopher to Captain Oates. I was the only applicant with his own gear. So it's hard tack and horsemeat all the way to Christmas.'

It made me shiver talking to him. We dosed the shakes with remedial tots of rum. Milditch had even taken to a pipe. He poked and scraped, puffed out contemplative streams of blue smoke; hummed the odd Music Hall chorus. He offered to take us with him on to the Great Ice Barrier. We could participate in the ultimate bulldog fantasy.

The broken-backed
Albion
hung above us, trapped and framed (a crocodile trophy), as we killed another bottle – holding our wake while we were still around to enjoy it. Royalty fanciers on overcrowded and inadequate piers had been swept away in the tidal wash of the
Albion
's launch. Respectfully dressed to the nines, they drowned where they waved. Their sacrifice authenticating the loss of the vessel. They were ‘justified' when their small tragedy afforded the opportunity for some strikingly purple cadenzas in the national press.

Arm in arm, wrapped in a shaggy cloak of spirits, we staggered up the slope towards the City Airport; battling through a whiteout of sugar-fires, the darkness at noon, the huskies howling in their quarantine cages.

IX

The naked hubris of the Consort's Monument was startling: a scaffolded Colossus, an Ozymandias touting for copy from a gossip-column Shelly. The stack, knitted in coloured searchlight beams, could achieve its apotheosis only as a ruin, a
Planet of the Apes
arm, lofted from future sands for the gimcrack inspiration of stoned romantic poets.

Chained barges were linked across the King George V dock. Choppers worried and swooped. Marksmen crouched on roof tops. Dogs sniffed for plastic explosives and cannabis. (That Janus-headed horror of drug-crazed bombers!) A babble-speak of spooks licking their own gloves. Then the Widow herself clattered on sawn-off stilts into a hail of exploding flashbulbs. She was padded like a Dallas Cowboy; smoke-blue, she chicken-danced towards a nest of microphones. Her head was unnaturally tilted (as if it had been wrongly assembled after a motorway pile-up), but her hair was obedient. A swift, over-rehearsed smile preceded the ankle-stamping homily. ‘And you know… you know you know you know.' The blade-shredded acoustics fed her catchphrases back into the prompt machines, to blare in frantic reverb from speakers which had been hung (like so many skulls) around the perimeter fence for the benefit of the uninvited masses.