Downriver (7 page)

I realized that if I, as the disinterested party, did not act fast, we would be condemned to stay here for ever; witnessing this obscene and absolute self-exposure. Tenbrücke was a sick soul, begging us to forgive him – by sharing in his sickness. He was describing himself by showing us each and every object that he had collected. I attempted to pull him back from the brink, by the magical act of naming. ‘Teodor Korzeniowski,' I said, ‘otherwise, Joseph Conrad.'

It was enough. The very sound of it bored him. ‘A dreary fellow, this Old Man of the Sea. A bourgeois mandarin. I never deal in Poles. I don't want herrings. I don't want promises. I want gold bars, furs, fine art. Sell these books, if you can, to the pug in the Holy See. Life's too short to haggle with silk-knickered wops.'

But we have to understand that, naturally, the items in question cannot be given away. Without respect, a deal has no meaning; it would not be binding. Tenbrücke's hand swallows Sileen's cheque, only to drop it with a pained shrug. Sileen had dated it ‘1888'. ‘A final drink, gentlemen. And away.'

I carry the boxes out to the car. The one-legged man, kicking out his customized limb, swivels, grinning, down the spiral staircase.

III

Todd Sileen had captured, for this era, a couple of council properties, tucked away between blocks of undeveloped industrial warehouses and a spate of wild gardens. His sense of when to strike, and when to move on, was unmatched – and would have made him a rich man in some purer sphere of speculation: land, drugs, literary brokerage. Sileen didn't need wages. Without apparent income or occupation, he moved freely over the country and the continent, just as the seasons took him. And all the time, the body of Joseph Conrad – as it could be excavated from documents, letters, and sketches – was re-forming around him. He was nailing himself inside another man's shroud. He was willing Conrad's
physical
immortality; turning this Wapping hutch into an immaculate death-barque. When the very last item in the bibliography was secured, Sileen would cease to exist; and the thing he had made would be there through all the lives of the unsuspecting speculators, rushing to their doom on the river.

He was also working hard at taking over the redundant public library – the rest of the public having obediently decamped – to make it his own. To this end, he brandished his deformity as a credential; crawling into the Borough Housing Office on his hands and knee. But points on that waiting list were an unnecessary luxury. The council had taken power by offering an ear to every Valium-gobbling fanatic. They put themselves forward as the shock-absorbers of disenfranchised anguish; then dutifully dissipated the pain by identifying the most popular scapegoats. And passing out the brickbats. Renegade socialists muttered in pubs that these scoundrels were the barely acceptable face of skinhead fascism in ‘liberal' drag. The party championed ‘local' issues; when, in truth, there was no locality left. Employment was a sentimental memory: the whole corridor from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Dogs was in limbo. It was waiting to be called up. A cold wind ruffled the drowning pools, the labyrinthine
walkways, the dumping pits. A few sponsored artists kept a window on the riverfront polished for the developers. There were lofts of hand-made paper waiting for the best offer.

Sileen was in clover. One of these days they would buy him out. If today's councillors were caught with their fingers in the till, there were plenty more to replace them. Meanwhile, he cultivated his balcony: an explosion of green life, lovingly watered by his amiable provincial girlfriend. She tolerated all his foibles, and cooked with such natural artistry that loungers hung about on the street corner soliciting a dinner invitation. Her life, shared only in certain areas, remained robustly independent in all others. Her presence in the flat humanized the unmannered bluntness of Sileen's dogma.

I watched, awed, as Sileen sank, puffing out his coarse sporran-moustache, into the swamp of an old armchair. He savoured these newest treasures: books to be slotted into place on the shelves that ran out from his shoulders like a benevolent crucifixion. I knew he did not have to read these things, or even handle them. The particular arrangement, by colour and texture of cloth, conferred power. Their touch was stunning to the skin.

Sileen opened a goatskin volume and, without needing to search for the place, tapped out a letter from Henry James. ‘The news of Conrad's collaboration with Hueffer is to me like a bad dream which one relates before breakfast, their traditions are so dissimilar. It is inconceivable…'

The letter was plucked from my hands. And replaced by a late photograph, executed by Boris Conrad: his father, leaning back, eyes firmly closed in a transport of exquisitely simulated agony. He offered me an autographed schooner, waiting on the tide. I admired, in turn, postcards of rivers, forts, crocodiles, ivory poachers. I slowed to the asthmatic breath of this Edwardian domesticity. Salvaged chairs emitted comfortable tobacco-replays; released from their depths carelessly incarcerated farts.

Now Sileen, madly by lamplight, checked the oversize photocopied sheets of Conrad's bibliographer,
Smith
; cackling as he
ticked off his recent purchases. He had made an authentic capture I could not understand or evaluate. But I knew that I was incontinently eager to escape from it.

IV

With no view from his window – no vision to accuse him – Sileen survived. Tenbrücke was made miserable by the presence of the river. He could do nothing with it. Yet he could never bring himself to pull the drapes and blank the world out. It would still be there. And he would see it. He covered his eyes with his hands. He felt his brain drowning in occult semen; pearly slime dripping slowly on to sawdust; cold honey leaking from the sharp lip of a teaspoon.

His residence was a controlled environment. Each object smirked in self-justification. It knew its value. It had the advantage. It ‘appreciated' as fast as its curator, Tenbrücke, was dying, decaying, sweating himself away. Even the wooden blocks of the floor shone in aggressively shifting patterns: arrowheads pointing the path to extinction.

Tenbrücke willed himself quite deliberately to let the knuckle of dead cigar ash drop on to the white Afghan rug – but he could not do it. Terror beaded the stubble of his skull. Angry boils erupted on his neck. Tubercles insinuated in his oxters. His stomach spasmed convulsively. But the Waterford-crystal glasses on the silver tray remained unsmeared, brittle. The seals on the bottles were unbroken. The lemons were unblemished anchorites: worthy of Zurbaran. Tenbrücke, like Sileen, was a man who spent much of his time alone in his chosen space. He had married late – and too wisely – a much younger woman; an innocent who hoped, one day, to inherit most of Caithness. For now, she was safely occupied in the city. She satisfied his lack of desire. They ate out.

Tenbrücke fiddled with the knobs of the shower unit. He left
the perfectly adjusted stream of water running, but he did not undress. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeding the black coverlet through his fingers. He was melting. He could smell animal-death on his body: a beast hunted to climax. He tasted ash mixed with rain. Something was wrong. One of the floor tiles was –
of its own volition
– lifting, coming away. A light was hidden beneath, and a light was lifting it. There must be a hole in the ceiling of the flat below. Tenbrücke would have to ring the agents with a formal complaint: or, better, instruct his lawyers to hit them for a completely new floor. He was tired of tiles. He wanted weathered marble, inset with birds, branches, flames; lapis-lazuli, veins of silver. The light was so strong: what were they doing? There must be an unlicensed photographic session in progress. The riverside apartments were very popular with New Wave pornographers.

He found that, without moving, he was able to look directly into the hole and – although this defied the laws of physics – he could see everything they were doing. It was just as if he was in the room with them. He
was
in the room with them. He joined them in their circle of salt: a circle of names he knew had been stolen from the Kabbalah, the Book of Spirits. Now he breathed as they breathed, faster and faster; choking, a claw at his throat. His eyes watered from the smoke of burning incense. He heard the repeated whispering of the name:
Belial. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al
. It was his own voice. A polished dish was in his hands. And he saw in it a distorted face, a face of fire: bearded Falstaff; laughing, high-eared, red. He bared his teeth. And bit through the flesh of his cheeks, until the blood ran out from his mouth.

The pain brought him back. It was over. He slid open a drawer. Customized handcuffs, thongs, and a leather mask lay on top of two neat stacks of folded and ironed pyjamas. He tore off his shirt, losing buttons; mopped his malarial torso with a pyjama jacket, which he then put on.

He wanted to write something down, to leave a note for his
wife. He needed to imagine her, still in her scarf and Barbour, searching for him, calling his name: the square of blue paper, unread, in her hand. But it was impossible. He was trembling too much to hold a pen. He pulled on a camelhair coat, stuffed the handcuffs into his pocket, and ran out of the flat for the last time.

V

A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk, and Kish. You were obliged to superimpose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs. They were so heavily insured against disaster that they were almost
obliged
to justify the premiums by dropping dead before they overdrew another breath.

The woman kept dabbing her lipstick with a Kleenex, and flinching visibly from the sneering intimacies of the tour-guide; who last had his teeth investigated in celebration of the election of Clement Attlee and the coming Socialist Dawn. Harold Wilson's white-hot technology of dentures, he ignored. The husband wondered how the same soft drink he used in Soquel could taste so
strange
in London, England. What did they do to it, for chrissakes? Maybe the dyes for the logo had some kind of freaky half-life? This frigging town was awash with terrorists brandishing poisoned umbrellas, crazy Irish bombers, Arabs spitting in your
food, and fall-out from Russia stripping the trees. If you could find a train that was moving, it was sure to explode. They couldn't even keep the beer cold. They sure as hell imported the formula, but were too dumb, or too greedy, to follow it. Ugly bunch of chicken-shit dick-heads! Skin like bath-scum. Fughh!

The guide was in spate, and lying outrageously. He appeared to be rehearsing for an occasional column in
The Times Literary Supplement
, that would get up everybody's nose with its preening erudition. They swallowed what they wanted of it, and wondered if they could survive yet another evening in the National Theatre before cutting their losses and skipping to the Hemingway Conference in Venice.

‘Can you believe what those English critics wrote about
Serious Money
?' the woman whined. ‘We just found it was totally without soul. It was so
shallow
. It didn't confront the real issues. And the theatre! My God! No air-conditioning: you're practically sitting in some guy's lap. No wonder the English are all sex criminals. I felt so
dirty
. Believe me, it wasn't easy to get those tickets. I'm sorry to say this, but we were conned. We won't be back in a hurry, will we, Bob?'

‘You are standing,' said the guide, a little wobbly himself; his arm thrown affectionately around the gibbet, ‘on the very site of the infamous “hanging dock” that saw the execution of so many pirates; including, of course, Captain Kidd. You probably recall the name from the cinematographic version – 1945 – with Mr Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland…'

‘Errol Flynn,' said the Californian bookman. ‘Errol Flynn did all the pirates.'

‘I beg your pardon. No, sir. Flynn was a colonial, son of the Empire. Born Hobart, Tasmania, circa 1909. There is some debate about that, I grant you. Two schools of thought. Tedd Thomey suggests… But I won't bore you with scholarship. Flynn played Captain Blood in 1935 for Michael Curtiz (or,
Mihaly Kertesz, if you prefer it), an extrovert Hungarian gentleman, later acclaimed for the film
Casablanca
, made in…'

‘Randolph Scott only made Westerns,' said Bob the bookman, grimly. ‘He was never in a pirate picture. I like Randolph Scott. I've got all his stuff on video.'

‘Indeed, sir, the performer in question is widely admired, particularly by our European cousins, for the mythopoeic Western films made with that fine amateur of the
corrida
, Budd Boetticher. Some critics laud the cycle for its moral austerity in the use of landscape – while others, more cynically, put the bleakness down to Harry Joe Brown's tight control of the budget. For myself, I would have…'

‘Listen, jerkoff,' screamed the Californian wife, edging ominously close to a full-blown attack of the vapours, ‘get your act together, or forget your gratuity.' She wanted to be safely back in their own room at the Tower Hotel before she was forced to gamble on the facilities of the ‘Little Girl's Room' in a dockside public house selected, for the worst possible reasons, by their now discredited guide and mentor.

‘You will notice, recently restored,' the guide continued, unabashed, ‘the actual gallows on which maritime offenders were stretched for the entertainment of the local populace. They were left dangling, bowels vacated…' (He had the godalmighty nerve at this point, as the wife recalled later, to leer directly into her face) ‘…before being suspended in chains, from that post, to be washed over by three tides.'