Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Cowboy hauliers, chancers with transport, trade the freight that is still worth bringing in as a cover story: tractors that metamorphose into rocket launchers, heroin-impregnated madonnas, all the miraculous shape-shifting cargoes.

  We broke into a ghost-hut masquerading as a Seaman’s Hostel; a spectacular and previously unrecorded brochure of photo opportunities. The roof had been bombed. Curtains of red dust fell through the chilled air. Voices of departed voyagers. Quarrels, drink. Tall tales, unfinished reminiscences. Shards of mirror glass sanded the stone floor: a lake of dangerous powder, from which you might reassemble a version of the past – by sweeping this snowstorm backwards into the projector.

  The station itself is a mausoleum built to house the absence of Empire; Empire as a way of escape, of plundering the exotic, defrauding our impossible dream of some remote garden of paradise. A cantilevered shed, epic in scale, runs away to piers, Custom Houses, platforms that might once have connected with the city. But now you will have to conjure from your grandfather’s memory the oak-panelled saloons, upholstered in tapestry, the floors covered with Turkey felt.

  The place is shrill with the traffic of the dead: furs, cabin trunks, porters. There are mesmerizing patches of sunlight on the bald stone flags that it is impossible not to acknowledge. We move slowly, talk in whispers: a cathedral of evictions.

  We followed the tunnel down to the Gravesend Ferry, the TSS Edith. Everybody wants to get away. The officers from Tilbury Fort chose to live on the other side, among the decayed Regency splendour, where there was some remnant of life and society. Their ‘pressed’ men were either invalid, or had to be locked at night into their barracks to prevent them from deserting.

  No time, on this excursion, for the World’s End; a low tumble-down weather-boarded building, once the baggage store where troops crossing the river left their equipment. Tables for stripping the drowned. We skirt the pub and its stunted orchard, reluctantly; passing on, to enter the Fort by the ashlar-faced Water Gate.

  Immediately the shades press on you. The lack of any ordinary human presence makes the survival of this enclosure remarkable, and daunting. The tourist feels responsible for the silence. The cobbles of the parade are beaten fears. Bone faces crowd the upper windows of the Officers’ Quarters. Sand spills from the water pump. Someone has placed a dead bird in the mouth of the ceremonial cannon. In the chapel the caretaker inscribes the names of the Jacobite prisoners who died at the Fort, hidden from sight in the tunnels of the powder magazine. Spent weapons, hostages. Highlanders brought by sea from Inverness, for eventual transportation. A museum of madness and suffering set into a vicious – but disguised – pentagon. Redoubts and ravelins spike the surrounding swamplands: the Water Gate can empty the moat and inundate these outlying paddy fields.

  There is a scratching mockery in the movement of the caretaker’s quill, as he columns his pastiche ledger with real names. Cameron, Macfie, MacGillivray, MacGregor. The east wind courses through brick-work passageways, caponiers, and ramps; outflanking the petrified weaponry.

  Among the cabinets of gas masks, mortars, knives, and bandage boxes is a map that illustrates the lines of fire between Tilbury and Gravesend, as proposed by Thomas Hyde Page in 1778. The river at its narrowest point, eight hundred yards, shore to shore, is tightly laced by invisible threads: a stitched vulva. The only entrance to the heat of the city is denied. A pattern is woven over the waters; which remains unactivated to this day. And, therefore, most hazardous.

  The only blood shed in anger was during a cricket match. An Essex batsman, his wicket flattened, held petulantly to his ground, demanding that the strength of the breeze be taken into account. The incensed Kentish outfielders sprinted to the guardroom: most of them moving for the first time that afternoon. The skipper snatched up a rifle, and shot the defaulter where he stood. An elderly invalid, intervening with the garrulous wisdom of his years, was bayoneted through the throat. The sergeant in temporary charge of the Fort, while his officer promenaded the terrace of the Clarendon, was butchered in his nightshirt on the balcony of the Sutler’s House: prefiguring that famous icon of General Gordon, waiting on the steps of the Governor’s Palace at Khartoum for the spears of the fanatics, children of the Mahdi, redeemer at the end of time. (In an earlier incarnation, as Captain Charles Gordon, the stern Bible-puncher had commanded the Royal Engineers at Gravesend – where a small plaque honours him for his devotion to ‘the poor and sick’ of the town.)

  The men of Kent escaped from this horror across the river. The Essex ten, claiming a moral – if pyrrhic – victory, ran off over the drawbridge into the sunken levels.

  A photograph, promoting the glories of the station concourse at Tilbury, before the reconstruction, features a newspaper kiosk, with the day’s headlines clearly visible: BIRTHDAY HONOURS. BATTLE IN THE SUDAN. Six massively moustached porters stand at ease, barring all bogus claimants from the Third Class Waiting Room.

  Joblard and I, subdued, retreated; by bulwark and counter-scarp, through fausse-braye and cunette, to the Dead House. We passed out by the Landport Gate and turned towards the hope of the World’s End. On the far shore of the outer moat was the dark tangle of a wild orchard: the gentle flicker of candlelight behind shaded windows. Shrill laughter on the evening air.

  VIII

  When does a victim realize that he is the chosen one? When does a ‘fall guy’ receive the first intimations of vertigo?

  Arthur Singleton, his whites held in place by a knotted Kingston Park tie, stood queasy and distempered, leaning breathless against the brass line of zero longitude. A pale stripe of virtue ran away from his navel and down Maze Hill, between the twin domes of Greenwich Hospital, across the river, and far around the red-splashed globe: to pierce, on its return, his psychic body. A shocking, but unremarked, jolt in the lower spine. He had completed his preparation. He did not salute the bullet-pocked plinth of General James Wolfe, abseiler-extraordinary, and exporter of ‘high degree’ Freemasonry to the North American continent. He walked, head bowed, along the broad avenue towards the heath. He was bent to his fate, tapping his bat on the ground at every third stride.

  Singleton felt a tingling in his palms; the sympathy pains of martyrdom that presaged an heroic contest. He could sense the stigmata sweating blood into his white gloves. Today would be exceptional. He rested and fed all his doubts into a giant oak. The tree was a metaphor for the innings he would play. The roots were laid in the vision of the city, seen from the hill. The trunk was the slow build-up of confidence: ‘seeing’ the ball, before it left the bowler’s hand. And then the branching out, the flowering. The strokes all round the wicket, sketching the tree’s shape into the ground for ever. He had only a necessary fear of the opposition, coupled with the still greater fear of losing ‘face’ among his fellows; the cramming masters, curates, and medical men of Blackheath who would this afternoon meet Lord Harris’s eleven in a charity match, for the benefit of the dependants of the drowned, in the tragedy of the sinking of the paddle-steamer, the Princess Alice. The sky was bruised and purple, racing, livid with threat and prophecy.

  Dr Grace, the Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, Lockwood: names set into the earth like pillars of a temple. Arthur was at the wicket and taking guard with no memory of the preliminary courtesies; the introductions, the toss, the early collapse of the local men. He was wholly detached from the scene, which could have been an engraving in the London Illustrated News. His foot moved towards the first delivery – short on the leg side – and the spectators were applauding a boundary.

  The heath was enclosed in a bell jar of wild light, high clouds chased and harried. He was standing on the world’s curve – and he stood erect, shaping each drive, timing each cut, chipping wide of the stolidly planted fielders. Dr Grace was shaking him by the hand. His voice was unexpectedly high in pitch. Arthur could not understand what he was saying. He walked off. The fever-drained grass stretched into an endless plain. The dark houses slid from his sight. ‘Singleton, well done! Capit
al display, sir! Fine knock, Arthur!’

  He forced a passage through the press of friends and strangers: the ladies, their parasols, their billowing dresses. Soaked. Dripping on to the ground. Shadows that could drown him. Uncovered bodies. Did they need to bring them here? Hair shapeless and obscuring their faces. No eyes. Tongues like slaughtered animals. White mud. Don’t touch. Their cold hands scorch his arm. The dead ones block him. Their fingers twist around his heart. ‘I felt I was going to be like Mother and the best thing for me was to die.’

  Mother was waiting. She offered me her cheek. She had come back, to watch. ‘Arthur, my boy, what has disturbed you? And where is your wig? Surely, you cannot intend to enter court in this undress?’

  The boundary ring has been posted with the unfortunates. They are laid out – a catch, a pale harvest – upon wrinkled black tarpaulin sheets. They shine in pitch. They have been hooked and drawn from the river. The heaped poor. They are swollen with death. They did not learn to swim. We have scraped the water from them like a caul of skin.

  Now they are calling for the doctors. ‘Doctor, a moment. Your signature, sir. For my godson. Would you oblige me… your name…’ Bury me! Blind me! Cut out my tongue! Now the umpires, the white coats, are at my elbows. ‘He must rest.’ Clear him; carry him to a secure place. A place in history. Justice will be done in Wisden’s Almanac. Arthur Singleton’s stout innings on a sticky wicket against the established men of England. An obituary tribute to a fine cricketer, and a gentleman; a Wykehamist, a scholar of New College, Oxford.

  Leaning on his bat, Arthur is led from the field. He passes through a narrow gate in the wall, and into a private garden. He taps his willow, with every third stride, on the gravel.

  IX

  We stood outside the World’s End, reluctant to enter, to break the spell of silence. Shadow blades of the pear tree thrash the sailcloth windows. Tupping marionettes. Remote voices. Wood smoke. ‘The dead are dancing with the dead.’ This clapboard shanty has been sifted from the spoils of the river; nailed together out of drowned timber – spar set to mast, pegleg to oar – ramped out of chaos. World’s End, fin du globe.

  The door was not locked. We pushed through to the bar. And backed our drinks into a remote corner. Uninvited guests at the requiem for an orgy that was still waiting to happen.

  I put the photocopies I had made from Patrick Hanbury’s Researches in Polynesia and Melanesia on to the table, to show them to Joblard – who had a taste for the impossible. He liked to stretch the boundaries of disbelief until he achieved a frisson of naked panic. He used his fear to kick-start a slumbering consciousness.

  ‘Certain spots,’ wrote Hanbury, ‘particularly those associated with death, are haunted. I recollect that two members of the hospital staff met a devil… and were so terrified that they dropped most of their clothes, but would not return to find them.’

  Hanbury’s photographs are a metaphor for the story of tribal contact with Europe, and the cruel refinements of European light. They demonstrate, in growths of outlandish tissue, our need to capture the extraordinary: to analyse, convert, to put a price on. The amused subjects stand willingly before the hooded stranger and his tripod. They accept the presence of the black box that will reduce them; shift them to a generality, an illustration of a definable tendency. Delicate ritual markings become ‘deformities’. Pattern succumbs to elephantiasis; a vast strawberry richness. The scrotum sagging from the warrior to the ground beneath him. Clusters of enlarged follicles. The truly monstrous is calmed by its context. Ulcers, yaws, lesions.

  We are ashamed. We turn away. The calm acceptance in the face of the natives forces us to close the book, and drop it into my bag. But that is not enough. We search for something, anything, to carry us into a safer narrative.

  Then we recognize, with distaste, both the turtle-necked figure sprawled at the fireside, and the fleshy publican; his eyelids stroked with kingfisher blue ultima, his lips violet, above small rabbit-sharp teeth. They are the recorders and violators of the myth of the unsolved serial murders. They convert that slaughter into a brotherhood of remembrance. They honour the imagined (and nicknamed) psychopath who brought the four of them together as the ‘Connoisseurs of Crime’. Errlund, Bobby Younger, Nick Hywood, Sgt Roughdew: the philosopher, the publican, the journalist, and the keeper of the Black Museum.

  Errlund was boring his friends with the latest anecdote dug out by his researchers from the Bishopsgate Institute. He had the reputation of never having actually to write a single word of any of his books. ‘He was doing cut-ups when William Burroughs was still getting his kicks from dropping aspirin into Coca-Cola,’ Hywood said of him. ‘He’s the first of the Post Moderns. The ultimate technician of disinterested commercialism.’

  ‘One of the pleasure-seekers on the Princess Alice – or so she claimed – was “Long Liz”, the Ripper’s third victim,’ Errlund began. ‘She was perfectly respectable then, dolled up for the excursion; three layers of petticoat, and no drawers. Petite bourgeoise. Sheerness, North Woolwich. Can you hear the band out there, midstream, hacking away at “Nancy Lee”? Cockney hordes packed into the saloon; bawling, shoving, belching stout, dressed to the nines. Nothing changes. A few “commercials”, tradesmen with their popsies, fathers feeding misinformation to their brats on the upper foredeck. Beneath them, the great wheels were churning, bringing her about. On the bridge a seaman screams, “My God, Captain, that man is starboarding his helm!” And the Bywell Castle, an iron-screw steamer, comes straight on them. “Thin as eggshell”, the Alice breaks up directly. Singing becomes screaming. They were in the water. The idlers on the river wall could see the light die in their eyes. They were only yards from the shore. Their fingers clawing without purchase at the cold tide. Layers of muslin belling into strange shapes, getting heavier, wrapping them in cement.’

  ‘And you suggest,’ said Roughdew, hoping to edit a wearisome exposition, ‘that this experience launched “Long Liz” on the fatal phase of her career? She felt somehow that she did not deserve to survive? She was looking, ever after, for a second chance to die?’

  ‘She had been escorted.’ Errlund was not so easily diverted. ‘Her husband, and her two dear ones. She would not give them up. She snatched at a rope trailed from a small craft. It was already full and low in the water. The baby was dragged from her arms by the undertow. A man climbed on to her back, using her like a ladder, kicking for dear life. She lost her front teeth. But she held to the rope. Ropes were threaded all over the river, a great net of holes. Ropes and lanterns. A grim trawl. She was two hours in the water. They brought her off, finally; got her ashore. Greenwich. Horse-blanket, brandy, a complimentary ticket from the London and Blackwall Railway. Before the stars were out, she was back in her lodgings. It might never have happened.’

  ‘Amen!’ muttered Hywood.

  Errlund plunged on, intoxicated by his own rhetoric. ‘But that was her story, the drowning; that was her justification. Small ghosts accompanied her into every public house in Whitechapel. They did for Michael Kidney, a dockside labourer she was living with. “I couldn’t share a pillow,” he said, “with two dead angels.” The lies that Liz told became the truth of it. Her single encounter with the crush and weight of water, the overwhelming force of the river, carried her away. Spindrift. She drank in revenge. Diluted the Thames with gin. Until that night when, at last, she went with a “wrong-un”; up from Cable Street, factory gateway. She was split open, severed from the phantoms she could not bring to term. The victim of a monster she could exploit, neither for gain nor sympathy.’

  ‘Very pretty,’ said Hywood, ‘but what was the fate of the surrogate Ripper, the Bywell Castle?’

  Errlund made a show of checking his papers. ‘She left Alexandria,’ he said, ‘with a cargo of linen, bound for Tilbury – and was never seen again. There were rumours that she’d rounded Cape Corvoeris. And then, nothing. Off the map, lost, gone to Atlantis. She’d served her purpose. You go downstream with impunity only once. If
you get safely past Blythe Sands, you’re in a different story.’

  X

  The hill was smoking: it seemed to have been shelled by some infernal ordnance. ‘I am walking into hell,’ thought Arthur Singleton. The trees were a sham. Elizabethan veterans: hollow, dry as chalk, held upright by ties and staves. There had been some unimportant tragedy. A mistake, an accident. Pieces of smouldering black cloth were caught on the bushes. The air was burnt and sour. Fragments of bone were trodden into the earth.

  Arthur walked between the umpires. As they walked, they dropped pebbles into his pockets. One pebble, he surmised, for each run scored; for every stroke of his life.

  They cut directly through the contours of the maze, did not meander, or pace out the mystery. They snapped the invisible strings, plunging down towards the dance of light that flickered so transiently on the water. They were reading his confession to him. They told him the things he had done. The letter was placed next to his heart.

  Now Arthur saw the raised spear of a white church between the twin domes of the hospital. There were masts and ladders. Courtyards, narrow passageways. Stone steps, green with algae.

  He paddled carefully out from the dark and narrow beach, until he was moving freely. And without effort. The mud did not settle on his white trousers. He slid. The steep gradient went away from him. He drifted. He opened his arms. The water flowed into his veins. He crossed over.