Judderman

by D. A. Northwood

  The Malachite Press

  The Malachite Press was formed in 1955. Founded by a breakaway editor from a large and respected publishing house, they began with reprints of some of the greats: Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, C.L. Nolan and Hecate Shrike, before moving into publishing the dark imaginings and twisted fever-dreams of contemporary writers who had crawled out of the counter-cultural explosion that would come, erroneously, to define that decade. These books affected Gary and Danny greatly; they were not sure if they were allowed, or supposed, to be reading such things but the brothers had a knack for words and loved the shapes the symbols made on the pages, and the strange meanings those symbols communicated. The Malachite books were available in affordable paperback editions and so the books helped the brothers open their eyes to the wonders of the city that was their home. And once they could see what there was to see, they could also see the blinkers so many people wore. Or perhaps the people they considered blinkered just didn’t care that much. Gary became fascinated – obsessed, Lisa would say – by how two people could be looking at the very same thing and have totally different experiences. If that was the case, what was reality?

  The Malachite covers became more lurid but the content did not. The press moved into publishing a form of hard-edged Albionic literature, dealing with myths both ancient and contemporary, rural, urban, and suburban. The stories at first were from a hippy utopian perspective (something that would turn sour; the authoritarian tendencies lurking beneath the skin were obvious if you looked), before branching out into stuff that married their traditional focus with the burgeoning youth cults that appeared across the violent streets of Britain. They moved with the times without ever changing their core. They were commended and respected for that.

  The two brothers read stories of skinhead gangs ripped apart and reconstituted by urban demons, creating patchwork monsters of Spurs and West Ham fans. The leering bootboys were stitched together into lumbering beasts that terrorised the towpaths of the Lea Valley and the back alleys of the darker parts of the city. The absurdity was the constituent parts always attempted to war with each other, a monster that was as angry at itself as the rest of the world.

  They read tales of bikers who rode literally out of hell, to engage in punch-ups with lads on scooters down on the shingle of the south coast. The devil wore leather.

  Danny was taken by psychedelic and drug-strafed narratives of hippy communes that slowly but inexorably morphed into weed-stinking prisons of the mind. The Days of Family Wild really stuck with him; perhaps unfairly presenting a pessimistic view of the communal living that had taken root in parts of Scotland, Leeds, and right here in London in four-story Victorian terraces in Hackney.

  The Malachite Press had an occult-detective series that Gary especially loved, following the adventures of a grim and war-damaged investigator named Vincent Harrier. A returning soldier who had served during the war and then in the British Mandate in Palestine during the formation of Israel, Harrier had a knack for navigating London Incognita and a bone-deep cynicism born from the things he had seen.

  Taking place almost exclusively in the bombed out remains of late-forties and early-fifties London, the Harrier books were in the tradition of John Silence and Carnacki, but there was something different about them that really grabbed readers and set the books apart. They were set in a world Gary and Danny recognised – they were born in the nineteen fifties and though of course they’d never experienced it first-hand, they had seen some of the damage that remained from the war, both in the scarred architecture of the city and the damaged psyches of the adults around them. Many of the men of their father’s generation had a sense of having been somewhere far away and never fully come back. Part of them had gone astray, or been left behind, in another land. Their father was a prime example of that. Now he spent his free time sat in a fraying chair, shovelling in the food made by Gary’s mum, and laughing at suited comedians on the telly making fun of Pakistanis and West Indians and the Irish. Woolly patriotism replaced memories of a world ripping itself asunder. There must be comfort in that, Gary assumed; the world reduced to a simple place of us and them.

  Gary didn’t want to single the Second World War out for special treatment – when he saw Charlie hobbling to The Sovereign, and thought about the scraps of metal embedded like maggots in his flesh, it seemed unfair to suggest their seniors were somehow exceptional, that their experience was more noteworthy than the victims of other wars. Gary thought of his hero, Vincent Harrier, witnessing the explosion ripping through the King David hotel and finding his comrades and mates strung up from olive trees by the Irgun. Because something was less-remembered, more troubling to the stories we tell ourselves, did it make it less worthwhile? Gary realised that without a collective recollection people could start to doubt their own memories. The memories of the horror they experienced morphed into what they believed were nightmares. Lived experience became remembered experience. That then became fiction and myth. Gary and Danny also knew ideas of simple good and bad were unhelpful. Dangerous, even. This is why the brothers collected the literature of London Incognita, and the true stories of the people who had endured the war. Saxifraga Urbium, From the City, From the Plough, The Human Kind and The Lonely Soldier Returns to Finsbury Park were all favourites.

  The brothers tried to imagine what it was like to be an adult in this city of theirs, knowing that the people of another nation were dropping bombs on you with the express purpose of causing damage, mayhem, violence, terror. Or worse: they were just doing their job. In some real way, they wanted to kill you. Not you specifically, it wasn’t quite personal, but it was getting close. Knowing what the allies did to the Germans gave the brothers pause for thought. Gary wondered what words like ‘deserve’ meant.

  Near a favourite pub in N16, Gary often stopped to look at the plaque on Coronation Avenue that dedicated itself to the 160 people who died in a single German blast; a bomb that somehow took out the shelter families were hiding in. Sometimes he would visit the victims’ graves in Abney Park Cemetery.

  Gary wondered who put these plaques up; he had never seen anyone in the act, but there they were, screwed into the brickwork. Worse things happened abroad, worse things were happening in Ireland you could argue, but still. It made Gary realise that even London had its moments of weakness. The city that he had thought of as invulnerable was not. The place he and his brother mythologised in their long rambles through the city and their constant hunt for the hidden literatures and lexicons of the metropolis was capable of being compromised. A bomb could drill through a shelter and obliterate all you ever knew. There were enemies without, and enemies within, and the worst thing was that those enemies believed they were doing the right thing.

  Via the stories of their family, and the films and shows on television, Gary felt like he had experienced the war himself. He always had the belief, never fully fleshed out but more felt as an instinctive truth, that London had an ancestral memory that percolated in the blood of all who were born, lived, worked, or died here. It was something to do with the history of the place; and Gary was keenly aware that he made the place and the place made him. This was true of all places, of course; a snake devouring its own tail. London, though, was a huge world-spanning serpent, a Jörmungandr, something Bibilical like the Behemoth, an emperor worm, and the way it cannibalised itself was terrifying.

  The Vincent Harrier books from Malachite Press, with their distinctive black and white covers of urban decay and occult imagery seamlessly merged, understood all of this. The writer of the series, Michael Ashman (rumoured to be a pseudonym, a rumour never proven), waded through the genres of crime and the fantastic, ended up creating unique and essential under-appreciated works that, Gary felt, were vital to the city. His very favourite of the series was titled Saxifraga Urbium, the third book to feature Harrier. The cover showed blitz rubble colonised with the London Pride of the book’s title, with the figure of a woman and toddler, hand-in-hand in eerie silhouette,
their faces hidden in a choking haze as they walked away from the scene into the dust of the city. The book concerned Harrier’s investigations into apparitions seen on the bomb sites in the years after the war. Returning Tommies, reduced to boozing and self-housing (now, in the seventies, we would call this squatting), were seeing spectral bears on the marshes and sabre toothed cats in the shadows cast by the rubble piles. Strange children in gas masks were reported to be running and giggling over dense clusters of fireweed and through the streets singing judder judder judder, you’re all over now. In the novel, Harrier speaks to floriographers, the flourishing swell of self-housers, occult booksellers, the gangs of kids stripping copper from the damaged buildings, all of whom know something is not right with the city. Harrier is drinking heavily of course, damaged by the sights he saw in Palestine, and listening to the talk of the old men in the war-damaged pubs all over the city. The narrative comes to a climax on the 27th of July, the day of London Pride, suggesting a city itself can suffer psychic trauma and project those nightmares onto its populace. It remained one of Gary’s favourite London fictions.

  From Daniel Eider’s Journal

  Canadian Gaelic

  I have been reading lately. Spending hours in the libraries.

  There is a story that has taken my interest. There was a group of hunters that spoke the language of their grandfathers who had fled Caledonia in the wake of the Highland clearances. Perhaps they had fought and lost at Culloden, maintained crofts, endured cold rain and black winters. These hunters padded slowly along the brutal and beautiful coastlines of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and Newfoundland. Their quarry was the sea mink, a mustelid with fur valued highly by the traders who slowly moved the dead pelts of the animal across the North American continent, pelts twice the size of its cousins that we may be familiar with; this led to its ultimate demise.

  What makes a thing desirable kills it.

  The same applies to a place. To geography. To a postcode.

  The native peoples of North America hunted the animal also. Remnants of its pelt were found in the shell-heaps that litter the island coasts off Maine; but it is highly doubtful that these peoples pushed it to extinction. The European fur trade, that is what extinguished the sea mink.

  Now, I hunt for any remnant of the animal in the second-hand shops of London, where a habit is made of consuming history and its fauna in equal measure. I have found nothing, yet, yet I am sure I would know the animal’s fur should I see it.

  Do I have to point out the irony to you? The mink hunters were themselves threatened with extinction. The fate of the native peoples is well known and little cared for, their hearts buried at Wounded Knee for generations now. The gaelic speakers of the North American continent present a deeper and more troubling problem to me. The very words ‘Highland Clearances’ are merely a sanitised, English version of a bitter truth. In their language it is referred to as Fuadach nan Gàidheal. Literally, ‘the expulsion of the Gael’. A clearance is what you do to a patch of wasteland, rooting out stubborn buddleia and knotweed. This was something different.

  A people and a culture, told that it was no longer of any value. Fled, were pushed, across the Atlantic. Here, they helped hunt the sea mink to extinction, allowing it to become one of the many forgotten fauna that form a supporting caste of history. So, a threatened culture aided the extinction of another species.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, behind those imperial languages of French and English, the Scottish Gaelic and its close relative, Irish, were the most widely spoken in Canada. Now it resides merely on Cape Breton island, and other isolated pockets. A few still speak it in cities, but the memory dwindles. A language must be lived. Does language need the landscape that formed it? What happens to the London accent when the city dies, and what did people sound like here generations ago?

  Those of us who traverse London Incognita know the diasporas of the world took their myths with them. So now selkies can be sometimes seen off the coasts of Boston, kelpies in murky ponds on Cape Breton Island, and spriggans in the Canadian forests now jostling for attention with Blackwood’s wendigo. In a similar way, the Jews brought their golems to the streets of London, the Arabs their djinn, and the South Africans their tokoloshes. And something of the loss and pain remained, or came and mated with the native suffering, I am not sure, but whatever happened, something new was formed and that thing was the judderman. This thing that lives in shadow, the bacterial presence in the bloodstream of London, the secret history of the city ready to take the unwary – or the too-aware.

  I have no proof of this, of course. No photograph to offer as evidence. But I know for certain that it walks the half-forgotten alleyways of my city. This is not speculation. I have seen it. I am creating a map of sightings of the judderman.

  But why am I bothering to write about the fate of Scottish Canadians? Well, I am interested in the forgotten tributaries of history. I can acknowledge that the British Empire formed us, and formed the city I love. It created me. That Empire threw our myths and histories into the air like dandelion spores for them to land on distant shores, and mutate in the backstreets at home.

  There is an imagined path I call ‘the wolf walk’. It leads into the centre of the sickness, the swelling teratoma that is forming on the banks of the Thames where a mangled form of the city is growing in random spurts, its component parts jumbled and mashed, no past or future now. So, you may see a limb-like tree from Tyburn bearing its infamous hanging fruit, aspects of Newgate prison, Bedlam ejecting its howling inmates as they clamber over a wreckage of red telephone boxes, paddy wagons, penny farthings, crumpled pornographic magazines, Roman coins and penny dreadfuls.

  I can feel the teratoma swelling, the reappearance of the judderman and the sickness in the city. I have a choice. I know there is no way back to the innocent and naïve world I knew as a child. There’s no going back. The choice is to remain here, or move on to yet another new world.

  The people who belong to London Cognita, who cannot see what is amiss, they live in that swelling teratoma. They peruse the shelves in the aisles of its supermarkets, and they buy, they consume, they eat, sleep, shit, fuck, and they watch their flickering screens at home in living rooms, they laugh at the racist comedians and they laugh at the men who grin on our televisions and hide their dark secrets. They cheer at the football, and trade blows outside the stadiums. The wealthier ones who live on the hills of London pursue other entertainments, explore a world of art and literature that occasionally intersects with my world, but they delude themselves that their arbitrary position in society elevates them, and their choice of what to spend their money on makes them superior somehow – but culture consumers, thinking themselves removed from the consumer culture, are sad tragedies. The people of London Cognita exist and they believe, by and large, that they are happy.

  But none of this can last.

  Jenny Duro

  Three months had elapsed since Danny’s disappearance. Autumn was coming in and All Hallows’ Eve was on the approach.

  ‘It’s a thin time of year, Gary, you know what I mean?’ Danny had said, just over a year ago, as the two brothers watched fireworks burst and scream over Alexandra Park. Gary remembered the tongues of flickering bonfire flame in their family garden. ‘A thin time of year, when you can find the thin places.’ Gary remembered how his brother had then thrown his cigarette into the bonfire, how as a toddler he had thought it was called a ‘bomb fire’, and the way the orange light had twisted and illuminated his parents’ faces.

  Gary felt that he now, when it was almost too late, understood. If he were to find his brother and find the judderman, it would be in a thin place. This was the thin time of year where the fictions of London became all too visible. Now was the time.

  The leaves were turning, rusting, reddening and yellowing, and the mornings were misty and indefinite. Gary was standing on the south bank of the river Thames, opposite the Embankment, watching the river larks. As always now, he had risen before m
ost of the commuters were on the move, pulled on his walking boots, made a thermos of strong sugary tea, and set off through the city from his parents’ home in north east London. He was enjoying the encroaching chill in the mornings and the rapidly darkening days. Jays and chattering magpies flitted in the trees of the green spaces he passed through, darting grey squirrels perched on the rims of dustbins watching him with dead black eyes. In these morning rambles through the city, he saw lucid foxes with eyes like deep yellow stars, plump rats plopping into the water of the overgrown canals, and people awake when they really should not be. Gary knew the appeal of the amphetamines that powered these living ghosts; he was starting to rely on them himself. London, at dawn in the minutes before it roused itself, was a place of wonder. A place of dream and possibility. It was through this dreaming city that he made his way down to the sacred river, walking for miles as the city awoke.

  The Thames when he arrived was at low tide, as he knew it would be. The river larks he had come to see sifted through the mud and detritus with a patience and determination that Gary admired. There were three men, what appeared to be a child or a dwarf, and a woman; the woman he had come to see. One of the men inserted his hand into the soft mud of the Thames shore, searching for something his equipment had alerted him to. To Gary it looked like he was performing an obscene gynaecological examination on the naked river. He shook away the thought as he lit a cigarette and swigged from his thermos.

  ‘Do not think of the city as gendered, as man or woman, Gary. It’s way too easy. Lazy. A cliché. We need to think harder and deeper than that.’ The words his brother had spoken on one of their long evenings together, discussing the hidden knowledge of London.

  ‘I know, Danny. It is both and it is neither. Woman and man. The first and the last. The emperor worm that devours itself.’

  Gary thought the mud of London must be polluted, toxic with age, but the larks were there regardless. They were addicts, turning up bits of pot, animal remains from old abattoirs, clay pipes, auroch thighbones, medieval combs, the occasional human knuckle, old and corroded coinage depicting dead monarchs. Gary had read many novels that romanticised the river larks of London Incognita; Through This Mud We Find Ourselves and Poor Jack were his favourites, and he idealised the larks against his own better judgement. To Gary, they stood on the edge of criminality, slathered in London’s sludge and grime and muck, sorting the forgotten histories of the city and making a profit into the bargain. It was irresistible, mythic. Whereas he wandered geographically, they journeyed through the layers of time in the city, mining history. They understood the idea of city as palimpsest better than most.