Downriver (55 page)

It was no more than a stroll from the wasteground behind the Gun to Folly Wall: time enough to sober us for the task ahead. I had pestered Joblard to use his network of contacts to procure some craft, anything that stayed afloat, to carry us downriver: beyond the known station of Tilbury towards the potential mysteries of Sheerness. From the Isle of Dogs to the Isle of Sheep: a pilgrimage towards hope, and for Joblard a quest for his origins. But his motivations were hedged in ambiguities. The orphan, who had for so many years – and wisely – left his parentage as an univestigated secret, was now prepared to risk a chance encounter with his closest blood relative. (The pouch of sea, the memory bed.) His mother might serve us our first pint. Ghosts lurked among the marine pleasure shacks, waiting to claim him. The man that he was, the identity he had chosen, could be lost for
ever. He might be forced to abdicate the rare privilege of inventing himself. This journey by water also celebrated the news of his lover's pregnancy, his fatherhood. He was going joyfully backwards to greet the unborn child, returning.

Our pauper's budget (we were so poor – winos kept waving their bottles at us in greeting) did not run to either a reliable craft or a reliable pilot. (
Judea of Shadwell
, Do or Die.) We took what we could get. A friend of a friend of a friend. A name with an answering machine that spat ‘one liners' like a borscht-belt comic on speed, and a flat on the nineteenth floor of the only surviving council-owned towerblock on the Island: the last refuge of society's lepers. ‘There is no such thing as society,' stated the Widow. And, observing this rat pack, it was difficult not to agree with her. Ordinary families had long since decamped to become housing statistics in some less ‘progressive' borough. What was left couldn't be cleared with a blowtorch: post-mortem optimists, chemically castrated ‘outpatients', spittle-flecked psychos too temperamental to be approached without a high-voltage cattle prod… Latter Day Outpouring Revivalists eager to greet the Final Trump (where better?), stamping and chanting and calling down the black, wrath-primed stormclouds.

The agreed meeting place, on the Amsterdam Avenue slipway, was deserted. So far, so good. We had been warned not to leave a car in the neighbourhood. The tinkers would have carved it into saleable segments before we cleared Blackwall. (No problem: the car had long gone, to pay for the railway tickets.) This neat estate (a tribute to the glaziers) was too new to appear on any maps. But it already featured a wine bar and two shops. The first sold property and the other displayed naughty knickers. A pair of open sewers had been cleverly adapted, by the ruse of mustard-yellow bricks and dinky wooden bridges, into Dutch canals. Any disorientated (schnapps-crazy) burgher might reasonably have mistaken the quadrangle for one of those West Polder communities that cluster around Monnickendam. Sharp-pointed red-tile roofs (and anorexic balconies, for pot plants only) looked out on
the scrapyards across the river; the crushers, the lifting plates, the foothills of rusting motors.

An ugly tide licked at the slipway, leaving gifts: pressed cans, detergent bottles, ends of rope. It was hungry to run us down to Tilbury, and whatever lay in wait. I no longer wanted to burden it. I was happy to sit on the wall, watching these reflex spasms – the cough of mud – as I brooded on other rivers, better days.

A few harsh bars of ‘Dixie' on the klaxon of his horn announced the arrival of our captain. ‘No,'I said, ‘absolutely not. Let me out of here.'

In that moment – as I turned from the simple savagery of the river to stare in disbelief at the two customized Cadillacs (welded together, as if they had met in some monster smash and never been separated) – I knew we were in
serious
trouble. Then there was the scarlet boast emblazoned down one flank:
GOPHER IT
! And worse:
HEAPUM GOOD JOB, NO COWBOYS
. Six-wheel independent drive. A black tank bouncing on white-rimmed balding tyres. Our pilot, mercifully hidden behind his tinted windshield, was a card-carrying soldier in the New Confederate Army. The war had been lost. But they fought on: as electrical contractors, respray jockeys, pine strippers. The surviving remnant of Robert E. Lee's greybelly cavalry is hiding out in the swamps of East London. They had the flags, the stetsons, the sideburns. Did we dare to climb into anything driven by a dude who looked like Richard Harris after two or three decades riding across New Mexico, tracking renegade redskins, under the command of mad General Sam Peckinpah? I waited for Warren Oates, Slim Pickens, L. Q. Jones and the rest of the good ol' boys to roll, hawking and chawing, out of the pickup.

This creature, our self-inflicted Ahab, hitched his pants and lurched, bow-legged, towards us. He couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to be a cowboy or an Indian. He had the bronze skin of a reservation Apache, and the last non-institutionalized Frank Zappa moustache on the planet. A
shockwave of snakecurl hair had been tipped over him: like well-mashed seaweed.

He wore a checked shirt, jungle-green combat vest, baggy cords, scummy loafers. He looked dangerous: focused on a badge of light that was rapidly arrowing into the past – straining to reconnect those ECT-toasted synapses. It was too late to escape. Our fear had heated our interest. Could we resist it? This was time travel without the hardware. Straight back into whatever had come through, in critically mutilated form, that sad decade, the 1960s. A paradigm of the Weird was whinnying to break free from the Sanctuary.

Introductions were made. The Confederate promptly forgot our names; they were of no importance. He had enough trouble hanging on to his own: remembering which alias was current, and in which country. His ego had been broken into powder and snorted. The snuff-stains on the drooping ends of his moustache had more grip on reality. His mind had lost all adhesion. It was a grey tongue of outdated flypaper. We slid down it without leaving a smear.

‘Jon Kay,' he admitted, sounding surprised. He punched a fist into his open palm, to reinforce the fleeting inspiration. ‘Right,' he nodded, noticing the boat for the first time, ‘let's do it. Let's hit the water.'

Immediately, one of my more reasonable prejudices came into play: avoid at all costs that fateful combination of letters,
J/K
. And certainly never trust yourself in an open boat with anyone bragging of them. Was the man Victim or Assassin? The evidence of his face suggested an evil compromise. He had taken a few good hits, but he was still smiling. (My God, was nothing sacred? It flashed into my head – the Confederate had that effect on people – that Conrad was christened
Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
.
J/KK
. We were betrayed even by our mentors.)

The slogan-sprayed tank was backed up to the slipway, and the craft, on its trailer, was winched towards the slurping water.
Joblard had his boots off, ready to wade aboard. He was soaked to the waist, and grinning like a bear.

Kay emerged from his catatonic lethargy to bawl a few nautical quotations he had overheard in riverside dives. When his repertoire was exhausted, he slipped back to the glitzed hearse, fumbled in the glove compartment, swallowed something – and returned, bouncing, to the action. He was sharp enough now to register my examination of the boat's licence; which, reassuringly, was only illegal by a matter of four years.

‘It's yours,' he said, ‘three hundred notes in the hand. Two-fifty – no, two hundred – if you pay me
now
. And you'd better have it away, sharpish. They're going to repossess tomorrow. The car, the flat, everything that isn't nailed down.'

The face of the dog, with its liquid accusing eyes, watched us from the rear window of the jumbo Cadillac. A deserted mistress. A golden sunbeast, long-nosed: some random collision of labrador and collie. Lassie meets White Fang. The creature knew all too well what lay ahead. And celebrated the prophetic nature of its blood with prolonged and marrow-chilling howls. Seeing what it saw, the dog's small-brained courage was such that – weighing the odds – it begged to accompany us. (A pathos that would have sent tears coursing down the sandblasted cheeks of crusty protection racketeers competitively hurling back firewater in the Grave Maurice, Whitechapel Road.)

Drawn by the noise, from their innocent game of hurling milk crates from a third-floor balcony, a gaggle of urchins gathered on the river wall. Silent harbingers of doom. Further back, in the shadow of the flats, tinkers in breakdown vans watched us, pricing the craft with greedy eyes, counting the salvage: unhurried bounty hunters. They could well afford to wait. They gunned their motors, prepared to track us all the way to the finish.

Kay hauled the trailer out of the water; climbed into the car; set the wheels spinning and smoking on the slimy ramp. He was
allowed,
this time
, to escape the river. He parked. Leaving the dog behind, as guardian; locking its painted cage with an enormous bunch of keys. (The antelope curry smell of improperly slaughtered leather.) Kay rattled back to us. A ghost pirate: his bones were riveted brass.

We waited on the water. But before Kay had rolled aboard, the urchins were all over the Cadillac: chiselling at the hubcaps, bending back the wipers. The dog was snarling and foaming, hysterical with impotent rage. They would get to him later.

None of this mattered. We were afloat. Kay wrestled with the whipcord. The stubby craft swung its nose towards the money-magnet of the city. It was no more than a tub of baby-blue fibreglass, a tray with a cabin, an unplanted goldfish pond driven by an elderly forty-h.p. Evinrude outboard motor. The name on its rump was
Reunion
. With what, or whom, or where… we were not deranged enough to imagine.

Under instruction, I punted us out with a boat hook; churning up swirls of dark quag. Joblard ripped open the first can of lager. The engine fired. Kay took the wheel.

‘Which way, boys?' he howled, above the rage of the spluttering outboard. ‘Just point me in the right direction.'

‘Don't you have any charts?' I asked, innocently.

‘Charts are for wimps,' he sneered.

‘Haven't you ever been to Tilbury before?' demanded Joblard, increasingly convinced he was booked on an inspirational outing.

‘Tilbury? Tilbury? Where's that? I go zubbing under Tower Bridge, skate up the Prospect, sink a dozen frosties, and float home on the tide.'

‘Stick her nose downstream and burn it until you smell the sea. You can't miss it. A big green thing,' Joblard instructed. It was almost as if he was going to be the one underwriting this excursion.

The motor coughed, died, spat out a rinse of hot oil; fought for life. Jon Kay cursed. He flogged it like a mule. He kicked. He wanted to see our nose riding out of the water: lacy white
furrows ploughing behind us. A steepling kerb of wash to drown the engrammic tracery of these mean bayous.

The teeth of the Thames Barrier were approaching: helmeted Templars, flashing with signals, arrows, red crosses – warnings. As soon as we negotiated this psychic curtain, we would quit the protection of the city. Kay tried to fire the motor, shame it into a more manly performance. He entrusted the wheel to Joblard. That decision alone convinced me: we were dealing with a man whose judgement made Humphrey Bogart, rattling his ball bearings and grinding his molars as Captain Queeg, look the very model of sound sense and marine probity. I hoped I would live long enough to stand witness at the Court of Enquiry; to pick up some punitive damages.

Joblard was hunched in concentration, peering dimly through thick, spray-smeared spectacles. His pathetic orange lifejacket was strapped across the bulk of his shoulders like a dowager's paisley. It wouldn't keep him afloat for a second. He'd wallow face-down on the tide, a cetacean Quasimodo, vividly targeted for the harpoons of Japanese whalers.

There's something hideously familiar about Jon Kay's face. You want to sneak away and check the illustrations in the latest Charles Manson biog. His whole persona is one that any sane civilian would take considerable trouble to avoid. The scab of some ancestral, suppressed trauma is waiting to be picked from his skin. He is a karmic experience of horror, buried alive in the psyche: a dodgy deal in the silver market, a newspaper-wrapped parcel oozing blood fat in the stall of a condemned urinal.

Then he half-turns, he asks for the time – he's fiddling with a toy TV set, a flat miniature offering random interference, mantic sunstorms – and I remember. Remember it all; the whole squalid story.

Joblard and I, fifteen or so years before, were cutting the grass on the south side of St Anne, Limehouse, when we discovered the wreck of a boat (an Ark?) rising out of the jungle of a neighbouring yard. We sat on the wall. Took a blow. The
thing was as unlikely as an helicopter gunship excavated from a Carthaginian amphitheatre. Joblard rolled a cigarette, while I fell to musing on images of flood, inundation, fire and lightning. I glanced up at the tower of the church. A man was swinging out of the octagonal lantern, attempting to lever the clock-face from its fixed position. He was loosely attached to the crumbling masonry by an umbilical length of rope. Old rope, frayed rope. Hangman's twine. He was swaying nicely in the breeze: enjoying, simultaneously, nose-scraped close-ups of the fossils in the stone and wide-angle longshots of the river and the dying hamlets. His legs thrashed against the clock, predicting the hour of his self-destruction. We judged the distance to the ground, and we waited. ‘The things you see,' commented Joblard, ‘when you haven't got a camera.'

It's a pleasing thing to sit on an old brick wall in the early-spring sunshine – the grass cut, the sepulchres cleared of weeds – and watch a lunatic wrestle with a clock. His heels kicked among the Roman numerals, causing them to crash like shrapnel on to the path below. The man persisted, against all nature. What was left was now worthless. But that did not quell him. He was in a man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball duel with time. And he was losing every round. He aged with every swoop of the rope pendulum. The creature they would siphon from the shrubbery would be less than the dust in a beaker of impacted cockleshells. No joy here for the resurrectionists.