Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

By the same author

FICTION

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Downriver

Radon Daughters

Slow Chocolate Autopsy (
with Dave McKean
)

Landor’s Tower

White Goods

Dining on Stones

DOCUMENTARY

The Kodak Mantra Diaries

Lights Out for the Territory

Liquid City (
with Marc Atkins
)

Rodinsky’s Room (
with Rachel Lichtenstein
)

Crash (
on Cronenberg/Ballard film
)

Dark-Lanthorns

Sorry Meniscus

London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

The Verbals (
interview with Kevin Jackson
)

Edge of the Orison

London: City of Disappearances (
editor
)

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

POETRY

Back Garden Poems

Muscat’s Würm

The Birth Rug

Lud Heat

Suicide Bridge

Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems

Jack Elam’s Other Eye

Penguin Modern Poets 10

The Ebbing of the Kraft

Conductors of Chaos (
editor
)

Saddling the Rabbit

The Firewall: Selected Poems

Buried at Sea

Postcards from the 7th Floor

Calling Time on the Grand Project

IAIN SINCLAIR

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

In memory of the huts of the

Manor Garden Allotments

LOSTLAND

Abraham Ojo

A Pretty Average Mess

Chobham Farm

Tom Baker

Manson is Innocent

PARKLAND

Fence Wars

Raids

Funny Money

Resurrection

Not Here

Retribution

Dilworth in Mallworld

Westfield Wonderland

China Watchers

Yang Lian among the Hasids

PRIVATELAND

Crisis

River of No Return

Against the Grain

Future History: Allhallows to the Dome

Northwest Passage

Upstream Pavilions

The Lemon on the Mantelpiece

Fools of Nature: To Oxford

NORTHLAND

In the Belly of the Architect

Freedom Rides

Listening for the Corncrake

Chinese Boxes

Kissing the Rod

FARLAND

Ghost Milk

Berlin Alexanderplatz

The Colossus of Maroussi

American Smoke

Acknowledgements

‘Alas! poor ghost’

‒ William Shakespeare

It was my initiation into East London crime. If Stratford can be called East London. A bulging varicose vein on the flank of the A11, which fed somehow, through an enigma of unregistered places, low streets, tower blocks, into the A12. The highway out: Chelmsford, Colchester. A Roman road, so the accounts pinned up in town halls would have it, across brackish Thames tributary marshes. A slow accumulation against the persistence of fouled and disregarded rivers.

Stratford East. The other Stratford. Old town, new station. Imposing civic buildings arguing for their continued existence. A railway hub that, in its more frivolous moments, carried Sunday-supplement readers to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, for provocations by Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, Frank Norman. For pantomime Brecht.
Carry On
actors moonlighting in high culture. That was about as much as I knew, when the person at the desk in Manpower’s Holborn offices told me I would be going to Chobham Farm.

‘Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford. Right now. This morning. If you fancy it.’

This is how it worked: when I was down to my last ten pounds, I would take whatever Manpower had to offer. Employment on the day, for the day. Bring back the docket on Thursday and receive, deductions made, cash in hand. An office of Australians living out of their backpacks, woozy counterculturalists and squatters from condemned terraces in Mile End, Kilburn, Brixton. It was a dating agency, benevolent prostitution, introducing opt-out casuals to endangered industries desperate enough to hire unskilled, dope-smoking day labourers who would vanish before the first frost, the first wrong word from the foreman. There were always characters at the Holborn desk, justifying themselves, whining about the hours they spent trying to locate the factory in Ponders End where they would be invited to scrape congealed chocolate from the drum of a sugar-sticky vat with a bent teaspoon.

Everybody knew, on both sides of this deal, that it was 1971 and it was all over. The places we were dispatched by the employment agency were, by definition, doomed. From my side, beyond the survivalist pittance earned, there was the excitement of being parachuted into squares of the map I had never visited; access was granted to dank riverside sheds, rock venues in Finsbury Park, cigar-packing operations in Clerkenwell.

‘The social contract is defunct,’ I muttered. I had been dabbling in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not listening to politicians. Rubbish strikes and rat mountains enlivened our 8mm diary films. If the post didn’t arrive, bills wouldn’t have to be paid. We collaborated with civic entropy.

On Upper Thames Street, in a cellar under threat of inundation, I sorted and packed screws and bolts alongside a man in a tight, moss-green, three-piece suit. A Nigerian called Abraham Ojo. I remember that name because I inscribed it across the portrait I painted:
Abraham Ojo floats a company.
Steps dropping vertiginously to a sediment-heavy river. A schematic Blackfriars Bridge. Wharfs. Hoists. Black-windowed warehouses on the south bank. And a stern Abraham with his arm raised to expose the heavy gold wristwatch. Those long wagging fingers with the thick wedding band. Like many West Africans in this floating world, and the ones met, eight years earlier, in my Brixton film school, Abraham Ojo never dressed down. Smart-casual meant leaving his waistcoat on the hanger he carried inside his black attaché case (with the pink
Financial Times
and the printed CV in glassine sleeve). He might, with mimed reluctance, shrug a nicotine-coloured storeman’s coat over his interviewee’s jacket, but he would never appear without narrow silk tie, or fiercely bulled shoes. He favoured hornrim spectacles and a light dressing of Malcolm X goatee to emphasize a tapering chisel-blade chin. Like the Russians I’ve been coming across, in recent times, running bars in old coaching inns in Thames Valley towns, ambitious Nigerians made it crystal clear:
I’m not doing this.
Not now, not really. I am only here, on a temporary basis, because I have a scheme in which you might be permitted to invest: if you forget the fact that you saw me foul my hands with oily tools in a dripping vault.

It was a privilege of the period to encounter men like Abraham. I was fascinated to witness how he patronized his patrons, sneering at them as a caste without ambition or paper qualifications. He refused to register where he was, the specifics of place meant nothing. The chasms of the City, the close alleys and wind-tossed precincts, were knee-deep in banknotes, he assured me. Loose change waiting for a sympathetic address. My mediocre literary degree qualified me, barely, to be a low-level investor in Abraham’s latest scam: the importation of cut-and-shut trucks into Nigeria. Documentation would be juggled. Sources of supply, in Essex and the Thames Estuary, were obscure. When we had enough in the fighting fund to tempt the right officials, cousins of cousins, we would be in clover.