London Orbital

by Iain Sinclair

  Storage is the major downriver industry: human, industrial, retail landfill. Petrol stations all over the south-east are supplied from Purfleet, night-tankers roll in convoys from the gate. Dracula laid down the paradigm: fifty heavy coffins of Transylvanian earth to be distributed across London.

  Hieroglyphic entries in thick, half-obliterated pencil… the destinations of the boxes. There were, he said, six in the cartload which he took from Carfax and left at 197, Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town, and another six which he deposited at Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey. If then the Count meant to scatter these ghastly refuges of his over London, these places were chosen as the first of delivery, so that later he might distribute more fully.

  The Count recognises that property speculation, an adequate portfolio, begins in the badlands: Purfleet, Mile End New Town, Bermondsey. Dracula anticipates the boys in braces, Thatcher’s bluenosed-sharks, Blair’s private/public arrangements. Buy toxic. Buy cheap: madhouses, old chapels, decaying abbeys. Then make your play: storage and distribution.

  Blood and oil. Carfax and Esso. S/O: Stoker’s Oracle. The politicians, money men and futures traders take their lead from yellow-cover romances of the previous century. ‘All that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in water.’ Like the circle known as the M25, the orbital motorway.

  We are standing under the bridge, admiring its curves and stanchions; taking our hit of noise, the stink of heavy oil, paper-pulp rotting in rain. Having set ourselves on the river path, we can’t get off. We can’t break through to the road. We are obliged to track alongside the Esso drums, to wave at cameras. A Chinese security guard barely understands our question: ‘Purfleet?’ It means nothing to him.

  Renchi stops, sits, to copy a dream into his spiralbound notebook. He summons another river, a yellow table: ‘a ritual I have forgotten’.

  Beyond the Esso compound is a muddy paddock in which bales of yellowing pulp-paper have been stacked. I take the photograph. It’s my last, the lithium batteries are gone and there are no replacements to be had – unless we venture into the Lakeside retail park. A light steady drizzle falls as we get away, through a fence, across railway lines and into Purfleet, near the station.

  One of the local Undead (fanged and carious) suggests a late-breakfast caff: TC’s. TC as in ‘Tank Cleaner’. Behind Purfleet station, you can see the chalk. Carved cliffs. Lorry parks. Portakabins. Hangars in which petrol-carrying tankers are hosed down. TC’s Diner, servicing this zone, is a good idea. The only alternative would be: STATION SPICE (Closed). A Tudor-beam pavilion, site-specific to the station, promising: ‘Authentic Indian Cuisine & Free Delivery’.

  The hyper-authentic TC’s – net curtains, seaside bungalow fittings – offers shelter, a comfortable booth and a vegan breakfast for Renchi (which arrives without derision from the kitchen or laughter from the company). TC’s is Ur-Purfleet. Oil country catering: generous portions, choice of two red-top news comics, room to spread the maps and plot our reunion with the motorway.

  With the second mug of coffee – tomato sauce and egg-splash blotted up on the final square of buttered toast – the walk settles. Conversation declines into satisfied burps. The memory of the morning is fresh and the rest of the day lies on the Formica, waiting to be plotted. We stare out at the rain, the black skies. I’m glad that I picked up another golfing umbrella.

  Like Stoker’s zoophagus madman Renfield (in the Purfleet asylum), we look west. ‘It was a shock to me,’ Dr Seward wrote, ‘to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.’

  2

  My camera was out of action. From TC’s Diner, until I picked up a throwaway job in Aveley, I was relying on Renchi to keep the record. Our afternoon walk into Essex has a very different feel: when reconstructed from photographs that Renchi supplies, his duplicates. When I try to revive the fiction of that journey, I’m lost. I can’t go back into territory where I’m not responsible for laying down the markers.

  Renchi is following his own undisclosed agenda. He’s not interested in signs, hoardings, graffiti: script. His photographs aren’t written. They have a fluid attitude to landscape and our movement across it; the odd thumb in the frame, or unexplained smear, is a bonus. An acknowledgement of the presence of the photographer. Renchi chases light: he starts shooting when it doesn’t register, the river before dawn. Sunbursts into the lens. The effect is more painterly. His prints have a green tinge.

  I see that I was wearing a light green coat, a woollen cap. I’m brandishing that furled golf-umbrella like a magic wand, pointing, talking. Humping an awkward green rucksack, straps slipping from the shoulder. The physicality comes back, the heat of the wool. The steam that Renchi notes: from the Procter & Gamble smokestack, the tank-cleaning sheds. The casual way he lets a finger block off his composition, lets the viewer know he was there.

  The topography of these photographs is inscrutable. Working from Renchi’s album, it’s easy to understand what the day felt like, how it tasted and how the sky looked. But the squabble of road and rail and river is lost; the bleakness of Mar Dyke with its pylons and boggy fields.

  We walked along the rim of chalk quarries that hadn’t yet been flooded to make a ‘water feature’ around which a business park could accumulate. We edged closer to the rebirth of the M25. Sound was panoramic, the full Dolby embrace: train-hiss, motorway whisper, planes following the river. Everything is at a distance – until, without warning, you bump against it: step into traffic, dodge hurtling metal, risk the hard shoulder, climb an embankment of newly planted trees in opaque plastic tubes.

  Carfax. Quatre Face. The crossing of four roads. The traditional burial place for vampires. In psychogeographic terms, Junction 30 of the M25, the point where the motorway resumes its original identity, is the ultimate Carfax. Ten lanes of the M25 (north/south) violated by the rude east/west incursion of the A13. Their marriage mirrors the crossing of Thames and Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. Currents and countercurrents send vortices of energy swirling in every direction. Gangland rumours locate vanished London faces in concrete flyovers. Ginger Marks, Jack the Hat, Frank Mitchell. The vertical and unseeing dead don’t know which way to turn. Stage your protest on the gantry at Junction 30 and you’ll bring London to a standstill: north, south, east, west. The circulation of blood, the distribution of oil, the interaction of trance and fugue: the world thrown into chaos.

  The TV news channels made it their lead item, when John Whomes, brother of Jack (gaoled for the Essex Range Rover Murders), occupied the gantry. To ensure that his demands were heard. (1) That his legal representatives should attend the ten-week hearing, the investigation into a case with many dubious elements. (2) That Jack Straw should ‘sit up’ and look at the facts laid before him.

  Whomes, a softly spoken, meticulous man, stood on the bridge over the M25 in a bright yellow motorway maintenance jacket and gave interviews to hurriedly dispatched media folk on his mobile. The jacket had been painted with a statement of intent: FREE JACK WHOMES. INNOCENT OP RETTENDEN MURDERS. There was also a banner: FREE THEM NOW. Whomes was sturdy, shaven-headed, determined. His eyes protected by tinted spectacles. He had picked his spot with great care.

  When I met him, in a deserted car park behind Rainham station, as part of a film about the M25, this is how he explained his choice of location:

  I planned it for a lot of months. I drove up and down the M25, thinking of a position. There are only four positions where you can get up, cause a protest, and they can divert the traffic off the road and divert it back on.

  On the morning that we actually went up there, we left home at five o’clock, got down there and had seconds to get up on
the gantry – because we knew it was camera’d and the police would be on us.

  A family friend, Peter, I’ve known since we were toddlers at school, he comes with me on all the protests. He’d come with me that morning because I wanted to get up that first twelve foot of the gantry, because the ladders are missing. He was going to help me and then go. And on the morning, we talked and talked about it, and it was a lovely day, he said, ‘I’m coming with you.’ And he stuck by my brother all the way through and he came up the gantry with me.

  The Range Rover killings at Rettenden achieved acres of coverage. A sensational event treated in a sensational manner: bring back the rope for the scum who poisoned Leah Betts (screamed the tabloids). The broadsheets mused on the way that criminals had migrated to the suburbs and beyond. Upwardly mobile South London villains decamped into Kent, Kenny Noye to his estate in West Kingsdowne. Small fry (booze hauliers, pill distributors, doormen with attitude) took a fancy to Eltham, Swanley, the Isle of Sheppey. Customised bungalows. If you couldn’t make it to Spain, you could convert your semi into a hacienda: gin-palace motorcruiser parked on the patio. Pebbledash hutches with wall-sized Sony Trinitrons, American fridges, World of Leather sofas.

  The M25 was exposed as a class barrier. Supergrass Roy Garner left Tottenham for a stud farm in Hertfordshire. The Krays acquired a substantial property in Suffolk. Chaps from Plaistow headed for Essex. Why not? Villains and cabbies. Getting away from: litter, sink schools, compulsory ethnicity. The motorway opened the whole thing up, rave culture, warehouse clubs (with girly names), cashmoney. Sacks of it. The three men who had their brains spattered over a Range Rover, down a farm track in Rettenden, were seen as necessary sacrifices. The inevitable consequence of adopting the diesel-corridor of the A13/M25 as a lifestyle choice: pills, noise, extreme violence. Transient derangement syndrome.

  Crime changed. The job description. Old-timers (retired psychos, compulsive fabulists) said that they would never ever touch drugs. Then wolfed a pharmacopoeia of uppers, downers and inbetweens, while they operated their twilight heritage franchises from Maidstone or Parkhurst. Charlie Kray, always a businessman (so far as retro-tailoring could carry him), went down for the last time after being caught up in a £39 million cocaine trafficking scam.

  Raquels in Basildon, in the bottleneck of the A127 and the A13, is where the action unfolded. Mention Basildon to Southenders and they’ll die of shame before admitting that they’ve set foot in the town. Even in photographs, Raquels looks like the punishment block of a military prison. Like an estuarine storage unit with crazy-serif calligraphy. Within the microclimate of ecstasy culture, random and restless mobility (Canning Town to Dagenham to Basildon to Billericay), it became apparent that there had been a major power shift: doormen were now the significant players. I don’t mean media-friendly performance artists like Dave Courtney (the cigar-infested skinhead from Bermondsey), but working stiffs like Bernard O’Mahoney (ghosted author of So This Is Ecstasy?). O’Mahoney’s account, the background story to the Rettenden Murders, was subsequently filmed as Essex Boys.

  The cover of Essex Boys, the film tie-in edition, places O’Mahoney alongside the three dead men: Tony Tucker, Pat Tate and Craig Rolfe. Any sane citizen would drive miles into East Anglia to avoid this quartet. You wouldn’t even want to inhabit the same universe. Ecstasy with steroid chasers. Coke to clear the head. Amphetamines to clear the room. O’Mahoney couldn’t sleep without his own brand of Night Nurse, a double dose of chlorpromazine.

  After the ecstasy-induced death of Leah Betts, known to O’Mahoney from her visits to Raquels, the Basildon scene imploded: prison-toned crazies, with their cartons of loose cash, their runs to Holland, their big nights at the Epping Country Club, started to rip each other apart. Paranoia was the starting point. Drug psychosis. Bent associates. Bent cops. Bent landscape. Who did what to whom seemed less important than where they did it. Which motor they were driving. (‘Paranoid?’ said O’Mahoney. ‘I felt fucking quadraphonic.’)

  Have a good look at the photographs in Essex Boys. And think about the circumstances in which they were taken. Compare and contrast with the gangland portfolios that dress Kray-era PR. Not a tie to be seen, shirts worn outside trousers, and even (forgive me, Ron) jeans. The Latino trash look is in part a gesture towards Marbella, in part a convenience: so that the shiv of choice can be easily accessed. O’Mahoney wasn’t a weapons freak, a long knife or bayonet usually sufficed. Indoors, his ordnance was pretty much what you’d need for keeping down mice: CS gas (‘purchased on a day-trip to France’), ammonia, gun hidden in the kitchen ceiling. He’d come home for a wash and brush up, after Ronnie Kray’s funeral, showing his respects, when the Old Bill turned him over. The gun had been acquired from a farmer ‘for use in killing vermin’. There were no bullets.

  Most of the violence took place at a coffee stall, in the street outside Raquels, after chucking-out time. Or in Barratt homes: victims jumping from windows, forcible injections, limbs amputated with electric carving-knives. (‘Another feller, they decided they were going to cut off his left hand and left foot. I don’t know why it was his left hand, maybe they were being kind. All because he made a remark about one of their girlfriends.’ Bernard O’Mahoney reminiscing. ‘There was a DJ, unfortunately called Bernie, and he was married to a girl and they separated and he kept pestering the ex-wife who was now going with another feller, and they told him to leave her alone. “You’re separated, just let it be.” But he wouldn’t. So they invited him to a flat in Ilford, strangled him and separated him from his head, his hands and his feet. They cut his head, hands and feet off. They’ve never found his head, his hands and his feet. They dumped him, buried him.’)

  Off-highway. On the marshes. Anywhere within easy reach of the A13. The Disney Corporation was supposed to be interested in the site, London’s last wilderness. Bill Oddie and the Twitchers, the Rainham ornithologists, fought the plan. The Ministry of Defence hoped to do a deal for £1.1 million. ‘Its destruction,’ said Oddie, ‘would have been like knocking down St Paul’s and building a multistorey car park.’ The marshes survive as big sky wetlands, much loved by avian migrants, scrap dealers, freelance morticians.

  When the pressure was on – cops, journos, ripped-off confederates (all confederates) – O’Mahoney took to the road. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool. The coast. And always, above all, the A13 into the M25. (‘Three more of the firm’s couriers were taken out by police as they were on their way from Basildon to make a drop at a London club. They were stopped by the police at Purfleet. Each had a bag tucked inside his boxer shorts containing 100 ecstasy pills.’)

  The place where we were standing, admiring John Whomes’s gantry at Junction 30, gave us an overview of spectacularly corrupted territory. Everyone wanted a piece of it: Lakeside developers, civil engineers, motorway missionaries, global pharmacists, smalltime pill hustlers, doormen deputed to bury heads and hands and feet.

  The Essex police, in pursuit, used the motorway ramp as their top spot for pulling dubious vehicles.

  ‘The M25 is an asset for everybody,’ O’Mahoney said. ‘There is a stretch of elevated road at Thurrock which is a favourite for the police to arrest people on. I got arrested on there myself with a drug dealer – because when they pull you up on that side of the road, unless you’re prepared to jump sixty feet over the side, into a field, they know you’re not going anywhere. The M25 is useful for all sorts of people. Essex is surrounded by ports, motorways. Essex is well connected for getting stuff shifted around, do you know what I mean?’

  I think, by now, we do. The story is visible in the scars on the landscape. The crossing of roads. Recurring vampire imagery. I’m never going to drive through Thurrock again without a garlic necklace.

  O’Mahoney recalls a man named Darren Kerr.

  Kerr had been in a telephone box in Purfleet when a car had pulled up. He had acid thrown in his face. Then he was bundled into the boot and dumped in Dagenham… He was blinded in one eye and the whole side
of his face was a mass of angry scars. His injuries were so bad he had to undergo surgery in the specialist burns unit at Billericay Hospital… While recovering in hospital he was paid another visit. A man turned up dressed as a clown. He had Dracula teeth, a clown’s wig… and he was carrying a bunch of flowers… When he saw Darren he whipped away the plastic flowers to reveal a shotgun.

  Life happens. First as gothic romance, then as dark comedy: plastic fangs and a sawn-off shotgun. I wasn’t sure that the meeting we’d arranged with Bernard O’Mahoney was a good idea. O’Mahoney followed by John Whomes. At a quiet railway station that looked over Rainham Marshes. Early on, Whomes thought O’Mahoney was implicated in the Rettenden killings. The former doorman, a business associate of Tony Tucker and Pat Tate, should have gone down instead of his brother Jack. O’Mahoney wasn’t the only one in the frame, the victims were about as popular as flesh-eating bugs; but the supposed ill-will between our potential interviewees gave the afternoon a certain edge.

  Former villains (ghosted) never turn up unaccompanied for a meet with a journalist. If you can’t bring a minder (a witness), dress an unemployed relative as your driver (dark suit, white shirt, sunglasses). Lean on a mate. We’re talking status, respect. The media vermin (jumpy) will be mob handed. They’ll have cameras and tape-recorders. You need the reassurance, one of your own at your shoulder; a bent brief to give you the nod. To steer you away from self-incrimination.

  We’re meeting at a station nobody uses in the day, but we’ve all arrived by car. The researcher who set this up, a man called John Sergeant, likes his grub. He doesn’t mind staying on the road for weeks, confirming conspiracies he’s dowsed on the Net, but he needs a burger in his hand, a pork pie, a packet of peanuts. Sergeant has shot off to locate a fast-food outlet in Rainham. I’m waiting, alone, on the steps outside the station.