What is beautiful is the poetry of reduction that Paleologou imposes on her quest. From her archaeological record of the density of gum sightings, the photographer conjures a narrative of spectral crowds ‘forming random constellations as if in a parallel universe’. But the suspect act of photography is never enough. She kneels in the dirt, like a supplicant, a local historian making brass rubbings, to put paper over the sticky traces, to rub them with a pencil. This is an affectionate engagement with ‘viral colonies of debris’. It makes no difference if we are seeing these pinpricks as glimmers of million-year-old light from deep space, printed from a telescope, or a pulsing cancer cell enlarged on a slide under a microscope. The fissures are geological.
Effie’s images are contemporary in their desperation to reanimate the city by recording its most disposable but enduring detritus. And pre-modern, in the medieval philosophy of humours, in metamorphosis and alchemy. The prints defy category and date of origin. They are Victorian: hinting at the birth of photography, the death of fundamentalist Christianity, the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
It is not part of the official trajectory of the project, but Effie’s image trail leads straight to the gravestone of William Blake in Bunhill Fields.Visitors, sitting on a bench under a drooping fig tree, contemplate the enormity of the poet’s residual presence in London. And they spit out gum. The coins, placed every day in tribute on the lip of the gravestone, leave rusty traces. The stone is smoothed by exposure to sunlight and acid rain. Paleologou sees her retrievals as part of an established tradition. A tradition of accidental collaboration between attentive artist and the legions of ordinary citizens going about the business of survival. ‘I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye,’ said Blake, ‘any more than I would Question a Window concerning Sight. I look thro’ it and not with it.’
After the event in the chapel, Effie walked me to the colonnade of the hospital, where a selection of her prints were displayed: moons, deserts, laboratory specimens. All derived from chewing gum. The photographer was eager to present her work as part of a triangulation with the oval tablet recording that short spell, 1941–42, when Ludwig Wittgenstein ‘worked incognito at Guy’s Hospital Pharmacy as Drugs Porter and Ointment Maker’, and the unfortunate bronze effigy of John Keats, failed medical student, in one of the stone igloos rescued from old London Bridge.
Before catching a 149 bus at London Bridge station, I marvelled again at the way gum had been made into art, into advertisement, and how the subtlety of Effie’s expanded images was barely noticed in the noise of the place. The night-smudged tower of the Shard broadcast its acoustic pulse into the fretful station concourse, where late travellers were talking to themselves, shouting at their hands.
SHE’S GOING TO BECOME A SPORTS MISTRESS. THAT’S THE ONLY FACT I KNOW ABOUT HER. IT’S NOT EXACTLY ROCKET SURGERY. I SHOWED MY GIRLFRIEND THE PICTURE OF YOU LYING NAKED ON THE FLOOR WITH MONEY ALL OVER. YOU KNOW I DIDN’T SLEEP LAST NIGHT. I REALLY HOPE SHE DOESN’T COME. SHE’S NOT ON EMAIL. AND ALSO SHE CAME TO THE PASSING OUT, DIDN’T SHE? SO I SAID TO JEFF ALL I KNOW ABOUT EMAILS, RIGHT? REFUNDS NEXT YEAR? OH SHIT. BLOODY HELL. I DO SO KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN. WITH AN IRISH ACCENT? CAN YOU IMAGINE? I SHOWED MY GIRLFRIEND THE PICTURE OF YOU. WHEN THINGS GOT REALLY, REALLY BAD, ON THE ADVICE OF A FRIEND, I WENT TO SEE A ZEN MASTER. I TRIED TO TALK, TO TELL HIM WHAT WAS GOING ON, OUT IN THE WORLD, UP IN MY HEAD. AND HE STOPPED ME. SIT PERFECTLY STILL IN A ROOM FOR A LONG TIME AND ALL POSSIBLE VERSIONS OF YOURSELF WILL ARISE. WHAT TIME DID YOU GET YOUR HAIR CUT? THAT’S THREE BEDTIMES TO GET YOUR HAIR CUT. YOU’RE JUST LYING, YOU DIDN’T PUT MONEY IN MY BANK ACCOUNT. CAN YOU ORDER SOME PIZZA? I’M ON MY WAY HOME. CAN YOU BE NICE TO YOUR DAUGHTER FOR ONCE? DON’T TALK TO ME LIKE THAT. I DON’T HAVE MONEY.YOU HAVE TO PAY IT. I WANT A MEXICAN BARBECUE. SHE’S NOT ON EMAIL. EVERYONE’S REALLY INTO THAT AESTHETIC NOW. EVERYTHING YOU DID I’VE SCANNED FOR THE CARPENTER. BUSINESSWISE, I WENT TO THE MEETING AND I RAN THE MEETING. MY DAD IS HELPING ME WITH IT, LIKE GIVING ME A LOAN. WE’RE BOTH IN THE MONEY, SO WHY DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE THAT FOR? I SHOWED MY GIRLFRIEND THE PICTURE OF YOU. REFUNDS NEXT YEAR. NAKED ON THE FLOOR WITH MONEY ALL OVER. YOU KNOW THAT THING WHERE YOU GET ANGER MANAGEMENT? I’M GOING THIS THURSDAY. HOW MUCH IS THE SOUNDBITE? CHECK WITH AMAZON. KNOW WHAT, HARLOW? I SHOULD HAVE KEPT MY MOUTH CLOSED IN REGARD TO MONEY. 180 DAYS, HALF A YEAR. I’LL KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT NOW. PEOPLE START THINKING. IT COMES TO A FEW QUID. THEY AIN’T MY MATES, KNOW WHAT I MEAN? IT’S NOT ROCKET SURGERY. BASICALLY THEN IN REGARD TO YOURSELF, YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON I CAN COUNT ON ONE HAND. I’M DOING TRAVELODGE, PREMIER INN. TOTALLY GOOD MONEY. HE GRABBED MY SHOULDER, KICKED MY LEG. NANCY, MY BUM! PLUS THE FACT I’VE GOT MY HEADSET ON, YEAH? PEOPLE DON’T NOTICE IT. THEY LOOK AT YOU LIKE YOU’RE OFF YOUR HEAD. THE DOOR WON’T CLOSE PROPERLY. IT WAS SHITTY BUT NOT 100%. WITH AN IRISH ACCENT? CAN YOU IMAGINE? FUCKING AMAZING. IT’S NOT REALLY A TERRORIST MATCH. IT’S MINOR AND SERIOUS OFFENCES. ALISON WILL TELL YOU ABOUT IT. HE’S BEING REALLY CAUTIOUS, UNDERSTANDABLY, WHERE HE’S COMING FROM. WE’LL GET THERE. I’M GIVING YOU THE GREEN LIGHT. JENNY SENT THE INVOICE. SO IT’S ALL GOOD. ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL, I GUESS. I WAS REALLY MAD AT ONE POINT. WE’RE ALL ON THIS JOURNEY TOGETHER. WE GET ANGER MANAGEMENT. HOW MUCH IS THE SOUNDBITE? COMPLEX ISSUES OF HUMANITY VERSUS DESIGNER IN HOXTON. IT’S NOT ROCKET SURGERY. ORDER SOME PIZZA. CHECK WITH AMAZON.
When I saw the drowned photograph, I knew that Effie was the only person to make a record of it: her cool eye, her passion. Her appreciation of the cruel madness of the city as revealed through found objects and captured images, scanned and printed until they lose all recognisable features. Paper returning to bark. Recovering those patterns and grains. The detail in slime and grunge and spill.
Underground streams, lost rivers, culverted brooks: they were making themselves known, bursting through roads, overflowing drains, overwhelming Victorian sewage pipes and water mains. LONDON FLOODING MAYHEM. The front-page spread of the railway freesheet gloried in a long-anticipated vision of a city of canals. After London. If Effie had been covering the story of the Islington disaster, she’d have fixated on the way sodium light flatters rippling sludge in Charlton Place, as evening settles over the shuttered galleries, antique shops and underwear pantries. I could see the site of my former bookstall, the tables where Martin Stone unwrapped his treasures, in the sweep of a new brown river. ‘A disaster movie with torrents of water flowing into the upmarket shopping and dining district around Camden Passage.’ Rare seventeenth-century Chinese vases, Japanese prints – ‘many worth tens of thousands of pounds’ – carried away in a rush of dirty water.
In sympathy with the great disaster, I enjoyed a minor, more absurd challenge of my own: a leak under the bath drained into the storeroom where books and papers were stacked to the ceiling, and where a Marc Atkins print from the era of Downriver hung above the desk where I used to work. Anna referred to it, unkindly, as ‘your Hitchcock silhouette’. The Hitchcock of Frenzy, I suppose. The body washed up on the mud. The malign return of the fat Leytonstone boy from Hollywood.
We had come down to the foreshore in Wapping from the steps beside the Town of Ramsgate pub. I was suited, puffing a cigar, Tower Bridge behind me – with no intimation of the coming Shard or City Hall. I suffered from a persistent nostalgia for that moment, an author portrait for the handsomely produced US edition of my novel. The one that disappeared with the editor, vanished without a trace. Marc’s portrait, classical, frozen, was all that remained of walks undertaken, with journalists or academics, in attempts to bring the excesses of my grunge-baroque London fiction to ground. ‘This is where… and over, on the south bank…’ But it never was. And it never will be. And now the photograph was up to its neck in thick black sludge. The expansive gesture of my cigar arm: waving and drowning. Goodbye analogue London. Goodbye to all that.
I never considered an insurance claim, for photograph, poster, or storage box of unsold market stock. A lifetime of remainders and unwanted multiples. A library of orphans. My attitu
de to insurance was Greek: forget it. Accept the blows of fate with a good grace. You probably deserve them. But I did think that the defaced image on the wall, vegetally smeared inside and outside its black frame, was a neat illustration for the book on which I was labouring: The Last London. And then, curatorial instincts kicking in, I emailed Effie. Her photograph of the ruined print would be an artwork equal to, if not surpassing, the original. The smoker on the beach was being slowly choked in sewage like some horrendous colonic-irrigation accident. To a person the size of Orson Welles in those late fallow years of compulsive dining around spiked scripts.
On a bitter November morning, wrapped against the wind, Effie arrived with bags and tripod. As I’d suspected, she was excited by the organic nature of the destruction. ‘It’s alive!’ She clawed the photograph from the wall, raging against the deadness of the light. I swung a bulb. She pondered. This was almost as good as the chewing gum. After her experiences in the lab as Guy’s, she was eager to give my print the full forensic analysis. She would carry it away to her threatened London Fields studio. A suitable project for the last days, before the bulldozers moved it.
‘Iain, this is wonderful! Wonderful.’
The shadow on the wall, where the photograph had hung for so many years, was now an impression of tubercular lungs, thick with corrosion. ‘A damp-stain map’, Effie christened it. A set of bloated fingerprints. We looked and looked again: the dome of the mosque on the harbour at Khaniá in Crete emerged. Effie was beside herself. This spoiled Thames portrait, relic of a time that never was, was set aside, while she pondered the revelations of the accidental fresco. The prophetic writing on the wall.
‘Don’t let Anna touch it!’
We were forbidden, absolutely, from painting over the gangrenous mould. That would be an act of vandalism. We were accredited keepers of a holy relic. Effie emailed, at irregular intervals, to be sure that we were aware of our responsibilities: no swabs, no whitewash. She was in the process of revising her academic papers on: Landscapes within Landscapes, Arbitrary Cartography, Archetypical Forms (Morphology/Archaeology). Pleasure and Disgust. Especially the last. She had a new name for her photograph of a photograph, the phantom left by the removal of the destroyed Marc Atkins print: greyfield. I found a pertinent quote in a novel by the crime-poet James Sallis.
‘Greyfields, he called them, for the sea-like acres of cement parking lots, harking back to the design of old industrial sites on brownfields.’
Eager to know how Effie’s greyfield alchemy was progressing, I took my morning walk through Haggerston Park, in the direction of her terraced Bethnal Green house. Would I be trapped in a Dorian Gray scenario? The mud disappearing from the print and poulticing my eyes instead.
He was back. As a reflex gesture, every time I head south down what I now call ‘the St Leonard line’, I glance across at the bench where the Vegetative Buddha used to sit. For several months, no one encroached on his space, or the map of human stains (as yet unrecorded by Effie Paleologou). Arranged in his characteristic boneless slump, the hooded man, a stone or two lighter, with a reduced buffer of plastic bags, was staring south. He had wriggled a few yards further to the west, towards the spiral stairs to the upper deck, where rough sleepers in employment, Russians and Poles, often bunked down.
I strolled alongside to take a closer look, excited by the notion that the mischief of the Kötting GoPro capture was undone. London would accommodate, once more, this living statue. Who was now black. Shapeshifted. Younger. More alert. More engaged. Able to get up and move on.
When Anna saw Kötting’s footage, she said, ‘Are you sure it isn’t a woman?’ I wasn’t sure of anything in our elasticated city, every morning the landscape was revised. It wasn’t just the identity of the sitter, the man’s position was a confirmation of the validity of place. When the latest Haggerston supplicant left after a month or so, a day-for-night casual took his warmed spot, a man in a red Arsenal sleeping bag.
Between the Academy’s plastic football pitches and the sawdust trail to the woods, a man in a black T-shirt and baggy tracksuit bottoms stood rigid on the winter path: shoeless. His trainers were displayed, vertically, against the base of a thin tree. He was staring up at some unnameable thing in the sky, a shimmer in the leaves. His eyes were stonewhite. What does he see? Nothing. The void. This man has gone, hollowed out. Deprogrammed. Beyond him, where the trees begin, they have planted a voodoo mask like the one I found on the walk to Croydon with Stephen Watts. A few words are scrawled in black on the mask: ‘Psalms his way of life.’ When a loud leaf-blowing machine encroaches, spasms run down the visionary’s spine. He is possessed. He will never move until the bark covers him.
There are too many disappearances to record. The old woman in the low-level flats on Goldsmith’s Row. She called out to me, every morning, from her open window: ‘Sorry, dear, which day is it?’Words exchanged, contact. She vanished when the scaffolding went up, the renovations, and she never came back.
Haggerston Baths, as we always knew, would not reopen. One of the activists, Josune Iriondo, reported: ‘We have heard today the shocking news that Hackney Council’s plan to save Haggerston Pool in collaboration with an independent business partner has collapsed in disarray, leaving three bids for the site from developers, none of which includes a pool.’
Coming through Broadway Market, and stopping to see if the latest Maigret had arrived, I heard that the independent bookshop, translated here from Notting Hill, now faced closure, eviction, rent hikes, more customised flats. More bench bars with brick walls. When the owner made a bid for a vacant property on the other side of the road, she thought she had clinched it. But, at the last moment, she was gazumped.
‘Can you tell me who topped you?’ I said.
‘A barber.’
‘A barber?’
‘A barber for beards. Very upmarket beards.’
What would the old villains – vanished, on permanent call to parrot their senile confessions for heritage TV – have to say? The barber. The tailor. The panelled breakfast café on Bethnal Green Road. Charity boxing. Fit lads. Great prospects. The business. Celebrity funerals.
Yesterday’s criminals are giving nostalgia a bad name in the Carpenters Arms, down in Hare Marsh. Myself among them, for balance, an overview. We are drawn back yet again, sunlight blinding interviewees, to the Kray Twins pub where we filmed the dying embers of the fugitive book trade in 1992. And where we listened to Tony Lambrianou rehearse the last ride of Jack the Hat. His brother Chris, who went away with him for fifteen years, is still around. Nicely mannered, a gent. Warm greeting for me. Veterans together. One of the Queensbridge Road boys. What a Proustian wake.
Maureen Flanagan, described as ‘Britain’s most photographed model’, lent this heavy-shouldered macho mob, the memory men and their minders, a bit of fragrant style. She welcomed me like an old friend, and was sure that we’d bump into each other in Hackney one day soon.
The film crew were young and bored. Single set-up. Fixed camera. Knock it off. The heaviest presence, I thought, was the Southwark publican and freelance funeral arranger (by appointment), Freddie Foreman. The man vulgarly known as ‘Brown Bread Fred’. I’d like to have told him how impressed I’d been by some of the bits his son, the actor Jamie Foreman, turned in. That toadlike venom. The narrowing eye ahead of eruption. Bill Sikes for Polanski. But I thought better of it. Freddie glowered in his anecdotage and confessed (within safe limits). He kept his back to me.
When he’d gone, and the car had taken him out of it, across the river, the director put me in the picture. ‘Freddie thought you were Old Bill. Sweeney. Says he can smell them a mile off.’
What has happened to our chartered Hackney streets? Artisan bakers, hip estate agents and beard-sculptors to Broadway Market frontiersmen with polished shoes. The old hairdressers to the underworld aristocracy, often immigrants, are long gone. The one Turkish barber left from the bad times has put up cuttings to boast of a location fee from David Cronenbe
rg’s Russian mafia piece, Eastern Promises. Times change. Maureen Flanagan met the Twins when she did the hair of Violet, their beloved mum. Now she is an established author, ghosting her serial memories.
BREXIT MEANS BREXIT
Just as my pedestrian circumnavigation of London, by way of the M25, the orbital motorway, began here, and just as I obeyed the impulse to celebrate the millennial eve in an Indian restaurant where the customers were putting it away fast in order to get down to the Thames for the fireworks, my end was my beginning: Waltham Abbey. One day’s walk from my Hackney house. Almost out of it, but not quite. Close to the Eleanor cross marking the homecoming of a dead queen. Close to the park from which Wren’s Temple Bar had been removed, stone by stone, and banished to Paternoster Square. One day’s ride for King Harold and his battle-weary housecarls and conscripted peasants, victorious in the north: slaughtered Vikings, slaughtered brother, repelled invaders. Let’s give those economic migrants from across the English Channel a bloody nose. No time or inclination to regroup and formulate a comprehensive battle campaign. The route, abbey to abbey, bone pit to bone pit, was a pilgrimage of disgrace. A footmarch of resistant populism (the populace had no choice). A crusade before the crusades in tribute to the last English king. Battle means Battle. A hill of skulls. The cropping of crows happy to peck at meat from anywhere.
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