Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

by Iain Sinclair

  Under this ground there is a tunnel which we know is a bit dodgy. They can’t do restoration work from within the tunnel, only from above. Land which TfL already owns. The sop is, we’ll declare a conservation area at the east end of Dalston Lane, the Georgian terrace. But, having sold off the terrace, they are quite incapable of having properties restored.

  The council’s vision is to have a newly refurbished Town Hall. They look out and they see their Ocean development and they see their new library block and they think how wonderful they are. ‘See what we’ve achieved.’ And then they come up to Dalston, they haven’t spent a half‐penny here, and they feel proud. They owned it all, the circus building, the Georgian terrace. They sold it for a song. They don’t recognize the value of what’s gone. They don’t appreciate the historic or the social significance. They are not from this community. They work in Hackney for a few years and then move on. Planning officers, they don’t know where Dalston is. They’re not even English, they’re from New Zealand, Australia. A planning officer came to a meeting I organized in St Mark’s. He referred to the area as ‘Dal‐stone’. Where is Dal‐stone?

  Seventy‐five per cent of the population would like to see historic buildings preserved – and that proportion is higher in Dalston. It’s not just the established white community, it’s the Turkish community. Loads of Turkish people support what we’re doing. They have an appreciation of the nature of this place, even though it is not part of their original heritage.

  The forces are huge. This is a multimillion‐pound development, a £200‐million development. The Olympics have made everything much worse, because now all the forces of government are working towards the one strategic objective. They have immense powers: the GLA, TfL (a limb of the GLA), Hackney Council. They offer up a gesture of public consultation, but the consultation is a sham, a waste of time. A lot of work went into opposing their proposals, when they were always a done deal. A hard lesson to learn. Look outside, the site is flat, rubble. It’s like a return to the first age of the railways, the total destruction that follows any major change in the transport infrastructure.

  The council architect said, ‘We’re reinstating the historic urban grid. There used to be a line of houses down Roseberry Place.’ And so there were: two‐storey houses with front and back gardens. Now there will be twenty‐storey blocks with no gardens. What do you mean, ‘reinstating the grid’? That’s architectural bullshit.

  But I’ll stay. Hackney is a unique place. It’s cheek‐by‐jowl with the City. It’s full of different cultures. It’s full of creative people. Will that continue? Can it continue? I get involved in interesting areas of law. I did a case against the Ford Motor Corporation, in Dagenham. A race discrimination case. It was major. We ended up with a £500,000 settlement for two clients. Fascinating. The head of Ford Europe flew over to negotiate a settlement. It was high‐powered stuff. If you work here long enough, you get a reputation. The cases come to you.

  BRITISH SOUNDS

  What would Hannay be doing in Hackney?

  – Sebastian Bell, Saddling Mahmoud

  Mare Street

  It looked bad, the solicitor’s letter. Looked bad for Mutton. This time he was going down. It wasn’t great for me either, being summonsed as a character witness, precious writing hours lost to the deadly bureaucracy of the courts. And worse, much worse, the confirmation that Mutton was in town, in Hackney, on my doorstep; and likely, before the trial or after his release, to want to rehearse the manic episode at inordinate length; telling me what I had said and what I really meant, before delivering a glancing put‐down. He wasn’t called ‘Bad News’ for nothing: the invention was his own. ‘I saw my arrest,’ Mutton said, ‘as performance art, a brand of quantum avant‐gardism produced by an acausal force: the duty of appearing as a symbolic malefactor, elective bad boy, alien.’

  Bad News was part‐Czech, part‐Jewish, adopted Brummie. A white bluesman. Autodidact. Frighteningly articulate when not gagged by a vodka bottle; then violent, obscene. A danger to himself and others. Another character altogether, as he liked to boast, a postmodern Hyde (who had drowned his Jekyll in that lovely cold‐clear Russian spirit). Mutton erupted out of the barbed‐wire jungle of chaos theory, over a Berlin Wall of Adorno, Derrida, Foucault: into the cruel theatre of the street. He had no purchase on reality. And this, in essence, was the case for his defence: until some sucker could be persuaded to treat him as a fiction.

  Which is why I left the phone permanently switched to answer mode; the disembodied mechanical voice that comes as part of the rental package. Mutton, waiting at first light for the Bangladeshi minimart to open; hand shaking, unlit cigarette (no matches), tongue stuck to the roof of a stale mouth. Then, at the end of the working day, just as I climbed exhausted into bed – the crazies of the city have a preternatural sense of when to catch you at your lowest ebb – a stereophonic junkie pair, hammering me for their pain, screamed about the inadequacy of the portrait I had contrived, at their instigation, in my latest book. And would I please leave the usual complimentary first edition, lavishly inscribed, at some shop in Cecil Court? It’s a horrible contract, mutual exploitation; the way compliant authors indulge predatory characters, take them on expeditions, buy them drinks, hoping for the worst: a new story. Without a tame scribe, the unwritten of London become desperate, pushed into excesses that propel them towards secure wards, strait‐jackets, tiled cells – in the hope that somebody, anybody, will give form to the howling mania of their non‐existence. And then they are sold short, misrepresented, ugly words put into their mouths. They would, it goes without saying, be writers themselves, if life only spared them the time, between scoring benefits, getting fixed, making the calls.

  ‘You don’t have to move from your desk,’ said Bill Parry‐Davies. ‘Cases come to you.’ And, to prove it, he told me about the Owl Man of Albion Drive. Action pending: Hackney versus a citizen squatter who had lived for fourteen years in a derelict property about whose existence the council had no knowledge, before this Olympic landrush. Here was no ancient hippie or German professional working in a design studio and cycling by night to locate unguarded warehouses. The Owl Man needed the space, the wild garden, for rescued crows and convalescent hawks. His unofficial, self‐funded sanctuary would have continued, unnoticed, if there hadn’t been this unremitting pressure from above: on narrowboats, edge‐land survivalists. A requirement to balance the books. Turn a profit. Pay for the new Town Hall.

  The case that came to me was Bad News Mutton. By way of a letter from his legal representative, Micheline Handsworth‐Beckmann.

  We act on behalf of Mr Mutton who faces prosecution before the Crown Court for an offence of Racially Aggravated Assault, contrary to Section 29(1)(C) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998.

  Mr Mutton’s instructions are that during this alleged assault he was merely acting out a scene in a Tesco Supermarket taken from your novel Landor’s Tower when he made reference to a ‘Paki minute mart’.

  Mr Mutton has asked us to write to you in order to obtain clarification that Mr Mutton is cited as a character in your book and to ask whether or not you would consider providing a character reference for him.

  We would be very grateful if you could provide any detail that you feel may be relevant with regards to Mr Mutton’s character.

  According to Anna, Tesco’s car park, between Mare Street and Morning Lane, was the most aggressive and agitated site in Hackney. And there were plenty to choose from. A game reserve for which you had to be very game; up to speed, cranked. Combat‐hardened. Ready to beat off the professional beggars, coin prospectors, thieves, peddlers of contraband DVDs, confused sad human relics, unhoused madfolk, rough sleepers, shopping‐trolley chauffeurs who demanded the right to reclaim the pound you paid as security. They were lined up along the walls, under the overhang of the roof, part of the action; so that, by carrying your bags, pushing your trolley, guarding your car, they achieved status: honorary consumers. They were like medieval v
agrants, barefoot pilgrims sheltering beside a great cathedral.

  The supermarket had a space‐platform glow. we’re open 24 hours: a thorium luminescence like the lips of unfortunate women who spend their lives painting numbers on watch dials. A terminal zone for tourists who will never leave town. Malformed pigeons, feathers the colour of sodden bog paper, mobbed the spiked tesco sign, scratching their parasites on anti‐bird spikes. The canted roof was slick with droppings.

  Everybody parked here, it was free and the rest of Hackney was impossible, residents only: patrolled, taxed, clamped, dragged away, crushed. Tesco tried barriers, but these were rammed, dismantled. They tried uniformed patrols, but that only stepped up paranoia levels, the excuse for bloody rows, competitive weaponry. CCTV cameras fed mayhem into offices where security personnel dozed. The poet Ed Dorn had the right word for this hectic energy field: aswarm. ‘Drivers bearing away their dietary burdens.’

  The crunching of metal, shivering of glass. Alarms trilling at disputed parking bays. Doors slam, voices rise. Dealers swarm and scatter: the excluded. An oasis. A bright place in the Hackney night of blind walkers who decorate privet hedges with cans of Foster’s and Red Bull. White plastic forks and spoons like the regurgitated bones of extinct fish. Anna carried home the blue baskets in which you piled up Tesco’s goodies and she soaked them in the bath. Then she scrubbed oranges, lemons, in many‐times recycled Thames water.

  Mutton came to town, legitimately, in an illegitimate business: the peddling of cheap dishcloths, dusters, soaps, keyrings, pan‐ scrubbers, brooms. Charity. With an authentically faked laminated licence. Door to door, early evening, hitting on preoccupied rate‐payers with a suitable sob story. They didn’t care, some of them. They’d shove a coin or two at you, to get you off the step, into the van. The grifters would divvy up, get hammered, sleep seven to a room, or in the Transit. Down by the canal.

  ‘I say this,’ Bad News beer‐breathed over a distracted Hackney‐estate mother, television chiming, kids asking who it was, bathtime, mealtime, fix‐time, ‘without resort to algorithms. I operate in a narrow fissure between fiction and reality, ready and willing to be crushed and extinguished by unimaginable pressures from the field of treacherously shifting phenomenological pack ice. A fiver for this humble domestic implement, a lavatory brush, will release you from the burden of disbelief.’

  Tesco’s vodka has been arranged on the bottom shelf, at the end of a long hike from the entry doors, up against the wall. Your progress, pocket‐patting, packet‐squeezing, has been monitored. Noted by security with brooding Celtic resentment.

  Mr Mutton (aka the defendant) was accused of a very serious offence, he was facing a prison term. Brush aside the lesser charges, aggravated common assault, actual bodily harm, burglary, blasphemy: this was racism. The conclusion of another complicated London evening. A stone bed and a bowl filled with strange puke.

  ‘For some time,’ he wrote to me while they held him, pending psychiatric reports, ‘I have been feeling that I had a strange ability to conjure up coincidences that were guiding me in some oddly numinous manner. These coincidences or “synchronicities”, to use the Jungian term, have grown tentacles into the world. This leads me to the conclusion that the illnesses and sufferings undergone by characters in your novels signal an occult duality in the nature of things, that sickness is a creative source, a vocation. Is it going too far to suggest that this condition can lead to special powers?’

  Mare Street was forbidden to Mutton, a week hitting the pubs and offies had seen to that. Pitched out of the Marie Lloyd bar at the Hackney Empire by irate comedians, he climbed the gangplank to the Old Ship. Where almost anything goes, this side of a grating West Midlands drone, and lighting a cigarette. There was no credit to be had at Britannia Restaurant (Kebabs, Burgers), nothing to soak up the seething juices of an ulcerated stomach. The man at the counter of the European Supermarket, which offered a wide range of ‘inter‐continental groceries’, shelves of mixed wines, a locked cold‐cabinet, was a good listener. Bad News chatted, without incident, and went away, bottle in each pocket, for three nights. Until the charity‐scam cash ran out and the Transit left town, to try unmapped estates, between Cambridge and Peterborough. Settlements too new for double‐glazing, too remote for Mormons.

  To achieve a solid purchase on the Tesco’s vodka you have to go down on your hands and knees. It’s a sobriety test: to see if you can make it up again, reassume the perpendicular. Unable to decide whether to save 98p on the Smirnoff (which came in at a tenner), or £2.01 on the Absolut Vodka (at £10.98), Bad News went for one of each. A snug fit inside the lining of his greasy overcoat. And a budget third, Red Square, in the basket: £8.49.

  Suddenly, the aisles were too wide. Steepling shelves tottered in on Mutton. The tilted night‐slippery floor had been greased with soap. Fluorescent light‐tubes, buried in quilted panels, made the ceiling into a roaring motorway. He staggered, he stumbled. He tried to flap a returned cheque (with a signature that was not his own) in the cashier’s face.

  SHAPLA: it said on the first badge. And ‘It’s my job to ask’ on the other. A modest blue‐check blouse. Shapla didn’t touch the proffered rectangle of grubby paper; she reached for the buzzer – as Mutton reached for her, grabbing at the delicate, bangled wrist. It’s a nice point of law as to whether he spat, with intent, or dribbled excessively in the heat of the exchange. Uniformed security from office and car park, arriving too late to witness the action, miraculously contrived a duplicate word‐portrait of the event: a detailed linear narrative of something they could have imagined only in their wildest dreams.

  ‘Get back to your Paki minimart’ was the vile phrase to which Mutton was forced to confess. There was no going around that one; the chemistry of need, the thirst‐crazed cells, were no mitigation. Nor was the lengthy history he recited, shop by shop, of his prior dealings in Asian‐owned‐and‐family‐operated convenience stores. Bad News had paid, over the years, for estates to be reclaimed in Sylhet and the damp delta; his vodka binges built villages on stilts. He drained cabinets of chilled bottles for the benefit of abstemious and religious folk with whom he had always enjoyed a lively and stimulating dialogue. The alky, by his own account, was a one‐man charity: pissing gold.

  ‘I was not insulting the cashier,’ Mutton said. ‘I was talking to myself, a mental note to avoid ugly consumer hangars and to stick with small community businesses.’

  When that line of argument collapsed, he went for a plea of diminished responsibility: he could behave only in a way that had already been predicted in his various fictional outings. The creature had standards of malevolence to maintain. Or he risked being written out, killed off. He should never have strayed from his Brummie patch, it’s true. To register bad behaviour in Hackney you had to come up with premier‐league lapses.

  ‘Being of bad character is a considerable burden,’ he wailed. ‘And is my way of rebelling against the sterile rationalism of the world.’

  Nobody had the stamina to enquire further. The card that kept him out of gaol was madness. ‘I subtly planted, in the judge’s mind, the connection between my obsession with synchronicity and a bipolar disorder. Nothing to be done, nowhere to go. Racism ameliorated by palpable disability.’

  London’s elected mayor, Ken Livingstone, purged insults offered to a Jewish journalist from that dreadful tabloid, the Evening Standard – for which he operated, in his fallow years, as a well‐rewarded restaurant critic – by weeping public tears over the historic wound of slavery. This is never an endearing sight, politicians overwhelmed by crimes for which they could in no way be held responsible, while denying any knowledge of the horrors which can and should be laid at their door. They blub, on camera, about the brutal and corrupt colonialism which provided this country with the wealth and institutions that made us great. But present oil wars? Assassinations of the innocent? Extraordinary rendition? The price we pay for the democratic freedoms we enjoy.

  The bright new buildi
ngs of Hackney were stuffed with chains and bridles, photocopies of the shipping manifests of vessels involved in that obscene trade, the export of humans. As if that was the end of it: a distant chapter fit for heritage. Compulsory viewing for crocodiles of innocent schoolchildren. ‘Multiculturalism,’ Ed Dorn wrote, ‘is the cult par excellence of late imperialism.’ A concept much abused in recent times and under whose rubric too many civic corruptions shelter.

  The prosecutors were pure‐blood monoculturalists, generations grown in the same villages of County Offaly, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Mutton, on the other hand, was a cocktail of European sediments, settled and resettled; persecuted, expelled, intermarried, on the drift. He spoke too many languages in too few places. He was wholly English: a mess of prejudices, foulmouthed, self‐serving, an absolute pain. But always himself, absolutely that. A cultural pluralist who had spent years in public libraries, street markets, car‐boot sales.

  Hackney had no use for Bad News. Case thrown out on a technicality, the accused was insane. Careless in the community. Get him out of town. Now.

  Anna remembers, in the days when she patronized Tesco, sitting in the café section, to recover after a hard session of supermarket sweep. An old lady took shelter at her table. She felt safer in company, she said. A lively troop, down from the closed hospital on the hill, arm‐wavers, mutes, the damaged who had nowhere else to go, followed her inside. ‘That’s what I love about Hackney,’ the old lady whispered. ‘It’s more of an adventure every time I go out.’

  Millfields

  To be waiting at a bus stop for your connection, mid‐morning, work abandoned, is a rare privilege. You have to understand the pressure TfL employees are under, squeezed from above by accountants, to arrive within seconds of the stipulated time, up there in lights, above the shelter. Get ahead of yourself and you are obliged to dawdle, taking in the view, ignoring restless clients carving up seats, munching, shouting into mobiles, hefting outsize rucksacks. The white middle classes no longer use public transport, outside the early City shunt. They power‐walk, pump‐cycle, pile into high‐wheeled Chelsea tractors or tax‐avoiding electric dune buggies. If the driver of the 242, bladder bursting, is held in the Dalston Lane gridlock, he’ll have to gun it past the next few stops. Cross his legs. Park up, risking everything, to acid‐irrigate a convenient garden. Or ring for the wife, as happened to one prostate sufferer, to bring down a change of trousers.