Downriver (58 page)

Later. The city vermin, pouring out of excursion trains (‘Derby Day', hampers, buttonholes), tramped the marshes, grinding down the tussocks. Pickpockets, inebriates, ladies' men, gay girls. Sensation seekers rowing in pleasure boats to the beached wreck, the afterpart of the
Alice
; breaking off pieces of wood, relics to carry home. Watermen fought each other with oars and boat hooks: five shillings for each body recovered. Eyes lost. Traumatic injuries. Ruffians, far gone in drink, drew their shivs on the constable guarding the site; swore to slit any bluebottle who got in their way.

Lines of sleepers. False claimants (legions of Tichbornes)
searched the corpses in the dockyard. Crocodile tears, intimacies. They felt for earrings. They assessed the silk of undergarments. They moved among the dead, weeping and stuffing their carpetbags. By night, inconvenient stiffs from other locations were added to the platform of the unburied. Numbers rose, confusing the statisticians. Foul murders were ‘inspired' by this golden opportunity. It was as if the graves opened in sympathy. The dead multiplied as they lay in state. They coupled in fertile embraces.

Madness on madness. Dig them under. Hide them. War rockets fired over Plumstead Marshes: the feeble and transient shock of magnesium flares. Spirit photographs. The darkness floods back, covering the ground in decent obscurity. Afterimages. The sad legend: little pale-blue flowers with purple leaves,
Rubrum lamium
, grew only over the graves of criminals. Tender, unobtrusive. A starry carpet, visible (
there
) for a single instant of trust.

Wilder and wilder stratagems. The idea of the cannons. The heavy artillery of the river defences put, at last, to use: sixty-eight-pounders with a range of 3,000 yards; muzzle-loaders, firing 250-lb shot, to rock the casemates. It had been suggested by W. Aldridge (plumber, house decorator, wholesale oilman) that gunfire would bring some of the bodies swimming to the surface. ‘
I have seen it tried and have seen a body rise almost perpendicular. The cannon are there as the internal part decomposes gas is formed which renders the body lighter and then the concussion makes it rise all my household with my self, have wept over this sad affair
.'

An irregular bombardment shook the skin of the river, pitching the
Reunion
like a runaway rocking horse: lifting crows from their cover. But none of the anchored dead march of their own volition on to the beaches. We are the only craft to suffer this repeated concussion.

Something happens with the draw of time. With names. The
Alice
. Fleeing from the extreme interest of Lewis Carroll (weaving a labyrinth of mirrors for his English nymphet) into the
tideflow of Thames.
‘Can you row?' the sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting needles
. Dodgson. Dodge-Son. Out on the river with another man's daughters: Lorina, Alice, Edith. ‘Edith' rediscovered as the Tilbury–Gravesend ferryboat. Edith Cadiz.

I was returning from the Children's Hospital in Hackney Road, looking at the waxy yellow (Wasp Factory) light of the windows reflected in a newly dug ditch of water (a future wild-life habitat). I was brooding on the character of a fictional nurse: caring, competent, driven by her obsessions. Another (dream) life as a Whitechapel prostitute. Neither role cancelling the other. And, as I ran home along the southern boundary of old Haggerston Park, I noticed the name plaque of a street that no longer existed, weathered to the high brick wall.
Edith Street, E2
. Only the names survive; riding the tide of history like indestructible plastic. Without meaning or memory. Alice, Edith: the unplaced daughters.

If you need to understand nineteenth-century Southwark, you must float downstream to Deptford. The old qualities migrate, drift like continental plates, move out from the centre: rings on a pond. The faces Dickens saw in Clerkenwell are lurking in Tilbury junkshops. De Quincey's Greek Street chemist is a Travel Agent in Petts Wood. Everything escapes from its original heat. That is why, in error, I located the fatal encounter of the
Princess Alice
and the
Bywell Castle
, midstream, off Gravesend; which was, by historical record, merely the point of embarkation. Rosherville Gardens. No trace remains. The passengers, waiting to go aboard, were already dead. A few songs, a fine sunset. It was over. But nothing is lost for ever. It slips further out, abdicates the strident exhibitionism of the present tense: lurks like a stray dog, somewhere beyond the circle of firelight.

Subdued, the
Reunion
came into Erith Reach, like Purcell's cutter: heavy with corpses. I relieved Joblard at the wheel. The sky was a darker ocean, livid with portents. Our faces were stinging and raw. Red-cheeked as schoolboys. As brides on the staircase. There was an immediate surge of bliss. A connection
with other voyages. Our small craft bucked over gentle waves, a sheep in open pasture: we had escaped. We had left behind the dense pull of the city, the bad will (hating, fearing) of a huddled and grasping populace. Channels of beaded sunlight opened their doors to us. We had only to follow.

Erith Rands. To starboard: the cluster of an old sea town, its slipways, gardens, taverns. A municipal facelift that had fallen behind on its payments. Then marshlands, horses; the revolving radar beacon at the mouth of the Cray. Crossing my own path. An unlucky thing? An accident? I saw myself plodding along, buoyant, grim-faced, quest-hungry – carrier bag in hand, map and camera. ‘It's too late,' I wanted to shout. ‘That story never worked out.'

I saw the hieratic river gate, like the entrance to a flooded temple. The local storm gods crowded above, perched like calligraphic crows. They assaulted the entablature, but were unable (as yet) to break through. The framed window of light shone with columns of grey and silver. It wouldn't last. It was a flaw, a fault, a forbidden glimpse. This presentation of emptiness was the (lost) third section of Nicholas Moore's ‘Last Poem'. Words. They were not his words, but they came into my mouth. Uninvited. I spoke them aloud, startling Jon Kay, who tongued his spliff, swallowing the hot worm of ash in a small crisis of heartfelt loss. ‘Remember me.'
Remember me
. The only goal worth striving for, William Burroughs has always stated, is immortality.
Remember
. The museum of memory. No more than that. Gardens of river wheat. Feathers of golden truth. Another path opening; a meandering tributary to the ocean of the world's business. A possibility. I remember. Charles Stuart, on the scaffold – to Bishop Juxon. ‘Remember.'

But Jon Kay was growing increasingly agitated: his stash was gone, his thirst raged. ‘Remember me.' His life was dedicated to forgetting. He wanted out. He snatched the wheel and drove us, head on, towards the industrial jetties at Purfleet. We skimmed the shallows, churning mud. I fought to regain control, while
Joblard screamed in his ear – the sculptor's long-suppressed stutter erupting into a paroxysm of sneezes – that Tilbury was around the next bend. We'd all take a break: a long and liquid breakfast.

II

Tilbury Riverside and the Custom House had vanished. They were hidden, we assumed, behind two white cruise liners, basking, back to back, like sharks (with Red Stars rouged on to their slumbering snouts). The skies above were monumental, a union of warring republics. They were heroic, drawn up in lines of battle. Tanks buried in snowdrifts. Ruined cities. The river was brown with the sweat of the fields. With the blood of military martyrs. A montage of symbols assaulted us: flags, waving sailors (in flat, bobbed caps), anchor chains, rushing agitated clouds.

Kay needed a drink. He had fulfilled his side of the contract and brought us down to Tilbury. It had been ominously easy. He believed (as these freaks always do, against all evidence to the contrary) that he had, somewhere, just enough smoke to get him home – if he could still remember what ‘home' was. Now he
demanded
a couple of big stiff ones. He ran the
Reunion
in between the Russian liners, and he tied up.

We stepped ashore in a foreign land (
more
foreign than the rest of it, than Rotherhithe or Silvertown). No word of English fell on our ears. The seamen shouted at Jon Kay. And laughed. They mimed the universal hand pump of derision. Kay had to be dragged from the security fence that blocked our access to the Gravesend Ferry and the path to the World's End, which lay beyond it, in the shadow of the Fort. We were waved, by uniformed officials, towards a covered walkway: a crazily angled gangplank that disappeared into the citadel of the Custom House. Even the signs were in… Polish? PASAZEROWIE POZOSTAJACY W LONDYNIE PROSZWE SKRECIC W LEWO. Sunlight laid a ladder of immigrant
abstractions along the tilted boards of this glasshouse tunnel. A cleaner stood, motionless (like an onlooker at some spectacularly messy accident, who thinks he might be in the frame of the newsreel cameras), staring at us; two brooms and a shovel rested in his hands. The atmosphere was one of unrelieved Baltic gloom.

A hunched figure trudged ahead of us, plodding on sea legs, hands sunk in sullen pockets: his red, fungic chin slid chestwards in defiance of the inevitable bureaucracy on the far side of the frosted glass. He had learnt how to wait, and how to express his unbending disdain – by the slightest movement of his upper lip. A movement that offered the controlled exposure of a powerful dentato-laciniate bite. He came ominously close to actually relishing the challenge of hours of form-filling tedium: the repetitive cycle of questions in the snuff-coloured room. The boredom of ashtrays and official calendars. He was a stocky, balding man; collared and hatched in a dark blue donkey jacket. An Estonian stoker soliciting political asylum? Or a Basque pornographer caught with a suitcase of bestial snapshots?

We trailed behind him, accomplices, vacuumed into an eddying zephyr of guilt. But the benefits of quitting the river grew more doubtful with each step. Amphibian reptiles, we knew we had been tricked: there was no way back. The cleaner, self-consciously, threw open the Custom House door and gestured with his broom. Dutifully, we turned left: towards the winking red eye of the camera.

‘Mmmm, all right. OK. I s'pose that'll do,' commented the director – with a notable absence of vitality – in a toast-dry Birmingham Ring Road accent, that was still quite fashionable at the cutting edge of the visual arts. He was a tall man and a tired one. He didn't believe in anything he could see in front of him. Why bother? A certified deconstructionist. Who had lost his faith in the validity of performance. Actors, hot for motivation, could hope – at best – to witness his struggle to pretend that they had already gone home. They were obstacles blocking his heartfelt longshots. And the state of their hair… Those
sweaters
… He shook his head. Satisfaction, we discovered, was expressed as: ‘I don't want to sound over-enthusiastic, but…'

The methodical Pole (a sewer-rat Cybulski), who had led us into this trap, stalked over to the window; distancing himself, as far as the limits of the hall would allow, from the film crew, whose antics were no more than a source of potential embarrassment to a man of his achievements. It was Milditch, of course: earning a crust.

The Corporation has its own mausoleum for spiked scripts. Files of unachieved treatments that have not yet been infected with the black spot. A sperm bank to counter some future threat of a strike by the Writers' Union. A prophylaxis on ideas. A drought of projects: empty restaurants. There has to be the occasional reprieve for the corridor of suggestions unblessed by accountants. ‘Yentob thinks it's mega-interesting, baby, but too many calories. Try Channel 4.' There have to be sleepers to foist on ‘difficult' directors coming to the end of short-term contracts on ‘The Last Show'. That nervy collage of brilliantly achieved trailers. That culture-clash headache.

Which explained this Custom House invasion. I had abandoned my three-month ‘rewrite' somewhere back among all those lunches and phonecalls, the motorcycle messengers waiting on the doorstep for urgent revisions – which only elicited further phonecalls. Which elicited further lunches. Which elicited…

My Tilbury story (erased history) was finally being shot under the impossible title of ‘Somdomites Posing': which, apparently, made reference to Queensberry's illiterate and insulting card (the fate card), left for Oscar Wilde at the Albemarle Club: ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite'.

A new director (on his way to the knacker's yard of pop promos), Saul Nickoll, replaced the emotionally bankrupt Sonny Jaques. He determined to blow what remained of the year's budget on a single grand gesture: the least likely script he could find. Mine was the worst by a comfortable margin. It was so far
off the wall that nothing could save it. ‘Don't worry,' said Nickoll, ‘if things start to make any kind of sense… we'll throw in a few clips from your home movies. Keep 'em guessing. Red frames. Bogus surgical procedures. Fountains of blood.'

And Milditch, being both actor and bookdealer, was typecasting as the paranoid, doom-laden author/narrator. I was being impersonated by a melancholy and balding market trader of doubtful reputation. Why didn't they go the whole hog? Cable for Charlie Manson?

‘Milditch looked
terrible
in
Spotlight
,' said Nickoll, gleefully. ‘And the portrait was seven years old. He's perfect to play you.'

Milditch knew now he had made one of those mistakes that destroy a career. Like Dickie Attenborough doing John Reginald Halliday Christie. There's nowhere left to go – except the colonies. Or the other side of the camera. He'd finish his days in blackface, a loincloth and a turban. This part would have been well within the compass of a ‘walker'. Even so, Milditch was ready to do the business, give it the cold-eye stare. But Nickoll wouldn't talk to him. Nickoll wouldn't, if he could avoid it, talk to anyone. I was beginning to appreciate the man.