I lean on the rail and look north to where the future Overground line will cross the North Circular. A theoretical circle within a circle, a ritual enclosure like a gentile eruv, overrides the inclinations of rivers, marshes, swamps.
‘Fresh wilderness! Resurrected from the raw-broken concrete at the airfield’s edge,’ sang the poet Harry Fainlight at the Albert Hall on 11th June 1965.
A police car, the first I have spotted on a long day’s tramp across London, is parked on Watson Avenue, some distance from the nearest fastfood outlet. It must be serious. A visible presence symbolically guarding the crossing point between worlds.
Martin Stone departs. Or perhaps my ability to hold firm to the spirit he represents fails? He is not, by inclination, a rambler of territories without shops and windows and bars and sounds, action. He scuttles. He sniffs. He belongs on trains. Getting a hit on the breeze of oil refineries and the estuary, the spectral guitar hero of Savoy Brown – Mighty Baby (‘Britain’s answer to the Grateful Dead’), Chilli Willli and the Red Hot Peppers (‘Bongos over Balham’), the Pink Fairies – takes off, fast, for Canvey Island, to gig, one last time, with Wilko Johnson among the neat bungalows and squatted railway carriages. To tease out books the old rockers don’t know they have: inscriptions, bloodstains. Secret histories. And to wait for a killer wave.
The phantom train on which Martin rides is illuminated by the soft glow of whale oil. Skinny saints are holding phone-torches under their chins. The carriages are lined with books. The ghost train is also a moveable library, in which the volumes required, the wrappered detective novels from the Golden Age, the unwritten Simenons, the second novels by Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Brontë, deliver themselves to your hand, station by station, into the night. Every halt has its special literature. The tip of Martin’s glowing cigarette is like a tracer bullet exiting his cheek.
Barking resisted, but I made the transit. A retail park, bristling with photovoltaic scanners and booster masts, offered: VEHICLE GRAPHICS, BRAND CONSULTATION. Traffic circled a serious roundabout like pilgrims at a hajj. A strange ecumenical chimney dominated the island in the middle of all this action. Estranged traces of the abbey town on the Roding did their honest best to under-write potential development: electro-convulsive resurrection not regeneration. Barking was a settlement proud enough of its past to boast of a centre. From where, as soon as I achieved it, I took a train out.
I was tempted by the joint across the road from the station: BARKING HOTEL. Angry orange capitals against midnight-blue windows. Did I want to spend the night in somewhere that sounded as if it had been deleted from the second draft of a Thomas Pynchon novel? Pynchon’s paranoid comedies looked much less funny, and not at all grotesque, on the day when Donald Trump bagged the presidency. Even Trump’s name was off-form Pynchon. In The Crying of Lot 49, published in 1965, the elusive author has a flash-forward vision of Barking. ‘Less an identifiable city than a group of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.’ To, in this case, the A13. Barking was a conceptual A13 pit stop that nobody wanted to take. A bypass to be bypassed.
The London Evening Standard, in pre-binned mounds at the station entrance, featured the man with the golden hair-hat giving his signature thumbs-up. TRUMP TRIUMPH SHOCKS WORLD. BILLIONAIRE PULLS OFF HUGE UPSET TO BECOME PRESIDENT. PUTIN AND MAY SEND MESSAGES OF CONGRATULATION.
Chris Currell, understandably keen to promote the area’s pedigree, offered me a ticket to a talk on ‘The First Golden Age of Barking’. Implying, of course, that a second, brighter age, brighter than a thousand stars, was about to happen. The lecture, by Professor George Garnett, Medievalist and ‘expert in early modern history’, would take place at Eastbury Manor House, a surviving Elizabethan property now in the charge of the National Trust. With drinks reception and tour of the house.
To avoid another trudge over the North Circular, I hopped on the District Line at Mile End. I arrived two hours early, to give myself time to appreciate the ordinary life of the place – and to find Eastbury Manor House, hidden away among redundant shopping centres, feeder roads and terminal suburbs, on the approach to the A13.
It was a night of multiplying existential dread. To emerge from the station is to volunteer as a CCTV suspect. I couldn’t help making a connection with recent footage of the gay ‘date rape drug killer’, Stephen Port, who was captured, strolling side by side with one of the prospects he snared from the Grindr social media site. They were heading off down the shopping precinct towards his Barking flat. Port, a chef in a bus garage canteen, admitted a ‘propensity for sex with unconscious men’. Post-coitus, he killed four of them.
A woman appeared on the local news, walking her interrogator through the tidy graves of St Margaret’s Church in Abbey Park. I couldn’t believe what she was saying in such a moderately alarmed way. Being on television meant holding emotions in check. She kept finding these dead men, eyes open, stacked against a wall. As if they had just shrugged free of earth’s clammy embrace. Port liked to arrange the corpses and to place drugs in their pockets.
The Barking police took the bait: special interest groups doing their thing. Lowlife. Leave well alone. Go through the motions. The killer was finally prosecuted through the persistent efforts of one of the victims’ sisters. Three of the dead men were planted with the sedative GHB. No mobile phones were found. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but the locations where the bodies were discovered pretty much duplicated my walk from the station. And this was the only map of the immediate area on which, thanks to the ever-vigilant Telegraph, I could draw. Neither the station papershop, nor any other place I tried, could offer a local directory. They’d never heard of such a thing. And thought I was mad to ask, a time-waster.
I navigated the night by blind instinct. An outsider, a Salvationist who drove into Barking every day – what a journey, worse than Bunyan – was able to point me in the general direction of the National Trust property. I tried to write down her complicated advice, but it was raining so hard the words were blots and smears. There was a flyover to be negotiated, an underpass, roads named after English counties or Shakespearean dukes. Not appreciating the right moves or body language gives a tunnel or a path between high fences a definite frisson. The nocturnal kebab houses and convenience stores knew nothing of Elizabethan manor houses, even when they were right opposite one of them.
But I made it on time. The gates were padlocked. I circled sodden gardens. And desolate places where car met car, window to window, for furtive exchanges. The estate was purchased by a wealthy merchant after the dissolution of Barking Abbey. Tall chimneys were a symbol of that wealth. The grand house had family affiliations with the Gunpowder Plot.
Drenched, excluded and delusional, I rang Chris Currell.Yes, I had the right place, but I’d turned up a week too soon.
NIGHT HOSPITAL
‘how these tracks ran on into others, others, knowing they laced, deepened, authenticated the great night…’
Thomas Pynchon
The city slept like the hogs of god. London night called to our wounds, psychic and physical, the hot pints of Andrew Kötting’s blood donated to the tarmac of Old Kent Road, the scars he proudly showed, the healed gouges and tracks of the surgery that saved him, up there in the night hospital on Denmark Hill, the one we photographed and inspected on our one-day pedestrian circuit of the Ginger Line – and the hours, days, lost to the black sump of consciousness that is a single unbroken rope of words curling both ways in time, an electro-magnetic anomaly, a pit in which we drink and drown, remembering other walks, the prick, the goad, the flaw lifting us from our desks, away from our tables, books, beds, families. So we are in movement again, dissolving the halo of the original clockwise journey, begun in daylight, for a counter-clockwise, widdershins, nocturnal drift, Haggerston to Haggerston, through the long hours of darkness, back into the light – and, this time, free of the burden of keeping notes and photographs, f
orging a report.
This would be a walk, pure, begun around 7pm on 23rd February 2016, and also an erasure, a rubbing out of the original, as Robert Rauschenberg rubbed out the drawing by Willem de Kooning that he loved, solicited, in order to validate it. We are swallowed by radon yellows and frosted whites, headlight beams, phones that are torches, and we recall the framed artwork, which appeared to be a blank piece of paper, and was actually inscribed, at the invitation of Rauschenberg, by his friend Jasper Johns. I couldn’t be sure who was doing the erasing of which memories and who was taking credit, but we set out in good heart, Andrew in costume, disciplined in his eccentricities, as worn for the first walk, the felt hat with ear flaps that I saw as Andean, a llama herder, in respect of my great-grandfather who ventured in those lands, and Andrew referenced to the Faroe Islands and his own paternal grandfather, who got a second family up there in wartime, connections undiscovered until Kötting made his Deadad film and travelled the world, Germany, Hollywood, Mexico, with giant inflatables of father and grandfather, in a spectacular (and successful) exorcism of the shouts and slaps of childhood trauma and geography (South London suburbia, Chislehurst), stamping the voices down, exploiting the special magic of film as false memory, and looking for another foolish expedition beyond reason.
London can absorb all this. Night can absorb London. Hogs roll and snore. The purity of the notion of looping the city through the hours of darkness, following the necklace of railway stations and freeing them from the narrative laid down by the account offered in my book, London Overground, with no record kept, no tablet grabs fed into the Cloud, was undone, at once, by the presence of John Rogers and his camera. John was making his own film of yet another pedestrian circuit of the Ginger Line and he would trot beside us, under a gravid moon, as far as Hampstead Heath, or the point where his left knee gave out. And then there was the consideration that this unwritten, unpromoted, unnecessary jaunt was being recalled and revised for another book. And sampled, edited and shown at select locations in the film by John Rogers.
‘The leg is in pretty steady pain but no problem. My left hand won’t grip and it feels dead. It’s been stitched back the wrong way round. I’ve got some serious frontal lobe damage,’ Andrew said. ‘Should be worth enough compensation to fund a couple of films.’
He projected expeditions to canine burial grounds in the Atacama Desert, troubadour marches from the grave of King Harold at Waltham Abbey to the site of the Battle of Hastings. Many years older, closer in age to his deadad, I was ready to step aside, to find a way to be done with the business of London. Despite the horror of the Old Kent Road motorbike accident – or, perhaps, because of it – Andrew spoke of his returns to Deptford, Hackney, Soho, Camden, as homecomings; a delighted reimmersion in the familiar stinks and sounds, the breakfasts and banter, the chlorine laps of lidos, the friends who gave him welcome and shelter, the community, as he called it, the collaborators who, despite everything, signed on for the next voyage.
Movement was talk. John darting ahead to frame his shot, before we were gone again in a windmilling of arms. The traffic of hipster Hackney, railway Hackney, bicycle Hackney, skunk Hackney, was clustering and dispersing at Overground stations, fizzing with snapchat opinion and sliced monologues of compulsive banality. ‘You stood up and walked out? That was going to be a good story.’ Winter tables where confessions are shouted across the thick babble from inside and cigarettes stubbed out in gluten-free burger substitutes. The tribe. The hats. The noise.
Soft dusk of mirrors out of which something was about to walk. Pynchon paperbacks in novel Kingsland Road independent bookshops, franchises twice removed from other markets. Coffee, a bun and a poetry slam.
I grab Andrew’s elbow. His eyes glaze over, tolerant of another landslide tumble of digression – I’m deep into my nocturnal anecdotage – but this is more urgent, a whisper.
‘On the bench!’
Rounded back set against the prevailing evening traffic, expelled from his sanctuary, snow-hooded, hunched into himself, ballasted with plastic bags, is the Vegetative Buddha of Haggerston Park. EVERY LITTLE HELPS. His wrappings and paddings are not so remarkable in the neon-splashed hipster dusk. Tortoise-neck retracted. Thick-legged with layers of trousers and pyjamas like the rings on an old, diseased elm. I looked under the bench for the sawdust trail.
Now there was no view, no sightline for us to trace. Jigsaw of paving slabs. Steel-shuttered convenience store. Sealed manhole. Clothing appropriate to getting through the night. Our park fixture had moved a few hundred yards down Whiston Road and around the corner. His protector, St Leonard, had not yet snapped his chains.
‘The identities of all the city’s inhabitants,’ Matthew Beaumont said, ‘are indelibly inscribed on their bodies.’ I had joined Beaumont for a discussion of his book, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London, Chaucer to Dickens, in the newly established Kingsland Road bookshop we were now passing, Burley Fisher. Small-press local publications basking, unloved, on a table. Chairs to the door, the street. Proprietor lurking to bar unruly elements, old Hackney. Hard now to distinguish, in this territory, the bookshops from the artisan coffee outlets, the barbers. Books as objects are so retro, they can dress a set or be available for purchase. This is a cruising strip, busy with transients and tablets, with fewer of the deranged and desperate, the self-medicating aliens who challenged your footsteps for a certain length of road before breaking away and sweeping back, always remaining within stalking distance of the sub-post office, where they jumped the queue to play the cash machines with the latest scavenged card or dived forward on a speculative raid into the Turkish grocer, to ogle and stroke bottles they didn’t have the energy to lift.
The Vegetative Buddha in hooded winter parka was not a man of the crowd, the drifting pavement monad, the party to which no one required an invitation: he was a man against the crowd; disaffiliated, mute. Breathing, but barely so. By day fixed on wooden slats in a high-walled enclosure facing south. By night on a metal bench facing east, facing the elevated hiss of the Overground railway. He did not acknowledge the passing stream. The ones, with their balconies and bicycles, turned into twitching insomniacs by their never-sleeping, never-satisfied electronic devices.
Eventually, as I explained to Andrew, as we passed the bookshop window, those who try to write and publish are obliged to present themselves here for the entertainment of Hackney readers, or potential readers, who might be persuaded to carry away a book defaced with a signature. Matthew Beaumont, appearing out of darkness, seemed to have slipped, directly, from the pages of Nightwalking. He was condemned to intone certain passages, to embody them, before being allowed to step back outside and being absorbed once more into the restless monad.
On the smokers’ patch of pavement at Burley Fisher, even before I had time to fashion my report on the nightwalk with Kötting, a man in winter headgear much like Andrew’s, and fingerless gloves, much like mine, ready for the weather, stood talking to early arrivals for his own bookshop event: Jarett Kobek. The author of i hate the internet lived in Los Angeles and had just arrived in London from Berlin, where his book was riding high in the charts. Kobek, with whom I had been in correspondence for decades – he made contact after reading White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – was resolutely lower case in the fashion of late-modernist poets. And he made it clear from the beginning that he was capable of firing up his own paranoid-critical conspiracy theories from a safe distance. A remote viewer of the London noir of politics and ritual murder.
In terms of that marketable commodity, books, Kobek announced that Ayn Rand had corrupted the American psyche beyond repair, with her superman philosophy, her Trumpish towers and speeches that never knew when to stop. The comic-book genius Alan Moore, Jarett asserted, was the antidote, or better than antidote: a bright star in a darkening sky. Kötting tended to agreed about Moore, having espoused his theory of Eternalism: all of cosmological time being set, hard as Brexit, into a four-dimension block, a town plan where livin
g and dead are separated by a couple of terraced streets in Northampton. Andrew had never read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged or heard of Ayn Rand. Kobek composed lower-case Tweets and subverted Wikipedia fictions, which he collaged for the alarmed delectation of the post-truth blogosphere.
We went for a quiet drink in the Fox, which was once an authentic villains’ pub, but was now assimilated and rushed with friendly beards and confident young women. Tables had to be reserved. And there was a trick to ordering a drink. We had to shout to make ourselves heard across two yards of space. Jarett was from California and not a native shouter. He kept his knitted cap well down on his head. It was part of his internet persona. He really could not believe what had happened in Germany. He set aside the one drink, a clinking pint of vodka, that he allowed himself before a reading, to show me iPhone footage of the miles of red-spined copies of i hate the internet on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Images are anecdotes in bars where you can’t hear yourself talk. Like monkeys on typewriters, arriving at the composition of Hamlet, the tablet-strokers of the Fox would eventually call up the clip Kobek was offering me. You could see the red of the shelved books ripple across the room like a spreading bloodstain.
Approaching Dalston Junction, where yellow jackets were surveying potential non-swiping Oyster defaulters, I snapped a photograph, while assuring Andrew and the panting John Rogers, who was shouldering his camera, how great it was, this time, to be making the reverse Overground circuit without the requirement of keeping a record.
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