Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Edith was smiling: none of this mattered. It was happening to somebody she had known once, and left behind. The researcher tried to cross the park towards her; but time was frozen, the ‘long second’ of science fiction – everybody else was moving so slowly through solid air that was turning into ice. He closed his fist around Gelert’s collar and hauled him, choking, back to the Jaguar. A track was visible where the animal’s weight had resisted, and flattened the wet grass. The engine was over-revving: the car backed up over the flower beds, spinning earth, then jolted out under the arch, and away into the traffic of Roman Road.

  Playing its part, the rain began to fall with more purpose. Edith turned up her collar. She seemed to be quite alone, under the tree, on that dismal ground. Even if she had been searching for one, there was no way out: she was trapped, blocked in by the flats and the railway. Then some men, who had been casually watching, talking among themselves, walked out of the pool of shadows beneath the embankment wall, and came quickly towards her.

  IV

  Living in Restaurants

  ‘The beetles dying of the plague

  don’t care what railways are like’

  Benjamin Péret,

  The Girls’ Schools are Too Small

  We had hardly begun: we were no more than two or three lunches into the project when I first heard the term ‘kill fee’. The trainee director assigned to vet our suitability let it fall from a peak of feigned excitement and urgency: as if this film was the one he had been searching for to launch not only his career, but… ours as well. Together we were a dream-ticket: Ken Loach paired with… Tom Wolfe. We were irresistible. He smiled, and looked from Fredrik’s face to mine in the vain hope of approval. I thought his team sounded, well, a little… over the hill. Museum-bait, in fact. Kitchen-table socialism vampirizing a seizure of good-old Southern-style carpetbaggery. And there was a definite limit, now rapidly approaching, to the number of metaphorical pause-bubbles (…) I could swallow, without punching the over-articulate director in the mouth. I was prepared to suffer just so much in the cause of gluttony.

  Our boy was clearly a non-combatant. And we were the end of the line. A good way of stiffing him from the payroll. We were a dangerous mess, waiting for some fool to tread in it. There was, sadly, a saturation point to how much flaky carnival footage this man could pump through the schedules on the ‘ethnic guilt’ quota, before somebody noticed. It was time to make his play. ‘Kill fee’: it hung there, slightly obscene, a dagger of ice suspended over the pink lawn tablecloth; reminding us of exactly who held the whiphand, and who we were working for. One unjustifiable paragraph, one location more than half a mile from a three-star diner, and we were back on the street, with not much more than our bus fare to show for four months of heroic eating.

  The ‘Corporation’, as is well known, is a Christian version of the Vatican, with all the immemorial chains of command, schisms, heresies, court favourites, interrogations, excommunications, icons, martyrdoms, and public burnings: thickets of conspiracy in which the left hand denies all knowledge of the pocket the right hand is picking. The Vatican has its global responsibilities (getting the dirt out of banknotes, and promoting moon-tested golf-buggies); but the Corporation yields nothing as a fountainhead of dogma. White papers, touched by the hand of Reith, are eternal and infallible:

  (1) There are two sides (and only two) to every argument.

  (2) We shall offer them, without fear or favour, equal air-time.

  (3) The only good book is a dead book. (And grant, O Lord, that it be set in Africa.)

  (4) Yesterday’s dross, if repeated often enough, is today’s classic. (Memo to Contracts: Tighten up on those Repeat Fees.)

  (5) It is always better to employ Irish Jokes, than to tell them. We are never vulgar. Especially about money.

  (6) If the Irish are ‘men of violence’ they may speak only in subtitles.

  (7) It is a short step from the Department of Religious Affairs to the throne of the Director-General.

  (8) Only Accountancy is a Higher Calling. The ‘Accountant’ is the person who is accountable to no one (except, of course, She-Whose-Name-May-Not-Be-Taken-In-Vain).

  The Corporation, in its perpetual and never satisfied search for ‘The New’, operates a nervous compromise between greed and caution: a sinister cloud of anti-matter, giving off odours of sanctity and expensive aftershave, trawls for virgin energies to subvert. Two of the sharpest headhunters, pulling their faces out of their coffee cups with an audible ‘Eureka!’, stumbled, at the same moment, on the name of Fredrik Hanbury: who was so prolific in his journalism, so much in demand, he seemed to be reviewing half-digested pastiches of his own work, flashing from magazine to newspaper in an exuberantly Socratic dialogue that only he was fast enough to follow. This banal coincidence in the recognition of a name it was harder to avoid than to notice was elevated – by a species of desperate occultism that lurks in all stagnant bureaucracies – into a significantly compelling synchronicity. And so, only a year after his seminal book of essays went out of print, the word from the Bush was – bring me the head of Fredrik Hanbury!

  Fredrik had done a number in the London Review of Books on a novel I had recently published; which would otherwise, despite the gallantly double-glazed ‘doorstepping’ of my publisher, have sunk into necessary and well-deserved obscurity. Fredrik suggested that Spitalfields was, currently, a battleground of some interest; a zone of ‘disappearances’, mysteries, conflicts, and ‘baroque realism’. Nominated champions of good and evil were locking horns in a picaresque contest to nail the ultimate definition of ‘the deal’. We had to get it on. There were not going to be any winners. If we didn’t move fast, any halfway-sharp surrealist could blunder in and pick up the whole pot.

  ‘Spitalfields’: the consiglieri liked the sound of it, the authentic whiff of heritage, drifting like cordite from the razed ghetto. But, please, do not call it ‘Whitechapel’, or whisper the dreaded ‘Tower Hamlets’. Spitalfields meant Architecture, the Prince, Development Schemes: it meant gay vicars swishing incense, and charity-ward crusaders finding the peons to refill the poor benches, and submit to total-immersion baptism. It meant Property Sharks, and New Georgians promoting wallpaper catalogues. It meant video cams tracking remorselessly over interior detail, and out, over lampholders, finials, doorcases, motifs, cast-iron balconies; fruity post-synch, lashings of Purcell. And bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines. Ball-and-chain demolitions. Sold! There’s nothing the cutting-room boys like as much as a good ball-and-chain: especially with some hair-gelled noddy in a pin-stripe suit at the controls. Skin-deep Aztec fantasies of glass and steel lifting in a self-reflecting glitter of irony from the ruins. Spitalfields was this week’s buzz-word. And Spitalfields meant lunches.

  But lunches also have their hierarchies. You start on your own doorstep. A sciolist, call him Sonny Jaques, with a gold stud earring, and a doctorate in Romance Languages (from, let us guess, Southampton University), sounds you out about the nearest ‘little Italian place’ that takes credit cards.

  ‘Jaques? I suppose you pronounce that “J’accuse”?’ said Fredrik, to get the ball rolling.

  ‘Jake-Ez, actually,’ the director replied, too self-absorbed to be so effortlessly insulted.

  The trattoria we located, in a backwater off the Kingsland Road, had just opened in a lather of misplaced optimism. I gave it slightly less chance than the Titanic. It would be an off licence within the month. Then a fire-damaged shell. Then a sealed hazard; waiting for the insurance investigators to settle the claim.

  Today it was empty: salmon-pink tablecloths, freshly laundered, and sharp enough to cut you off at the knees; wild flowers; silver service; napkins erupting out of fluted wine glasses. The gaffer – in his black, open-to-the-navel blouse – leapt on Sonny, as if he was a practice manikin for a mouth-to-mouthresuscitation class. The man had packed his bags, and most of the silver. He was ready to chuck in the lease when – as his finger closed on the trigger
– the BBC arrived. It had to happen. Glorious visions cut in on each other: telephone reservations, cigars, signing sessions, assignations, bankable painters doodling on the menu cards, group photographs on the walls (lavishly inscribed), talent scouts begging to be called by their christian names. He wants to join in, to proffer advice. He wants to sit on Sonny’s lap, and ‘kick around’ a few casting concepts.

  But Sonny is going up in smoke; he is live with morbid energy. As Fredrik soliloquizes, he angrily abuses the tiny pages of his notebook. The green pen-tip breaks the surface of the paper. He accumulates the evidence that will be held against us. ‘Right!’ he enthuses, at regular intervals, banging the table; so that our host has to slide from his bench, with an apologetic smile, to catch the flower holders. Sonny glances from Fredrik to me, then back again. ‘Right? That one’s a definite maybe. Excellent. It’s all coming together.’ But nothing is agreed, nothing is made clear: nobody has the bad manners to mention money. Lowlife anecdotes are really what turn Sonny on – but how do we translate them into the script? ‘8mm Diary footage? We can use that. Send it in for transfer. Work on textural variety. I like it.’

  He is wringing our hands: the restaurateur froths with compliments and invitations, as he struggles to reinsert Sonny into a yellow pigskin jacket. Sonny assures us that we give ‘good lunch’; the project is ‘looking great’. We have to go home, stick at it, stay cool, and wait for the call. Unfortunately, by an oversight, Sonny’s pack of credit cards fails to produce a valid one. No problem; Fredrik and I empty our pockets and manage to cover the bill. ‘Just put it on the chitty, boys,’Sonny says, ‘and claim a couple of taxis while you’re at it.’

  Now the caravan rolls on to downside Shepherd’s Bush. Our table rates at least two producers. We are not substantial enough to score anyone from ‘Religious Affairs’; but we get one apiece from ‘Architecture’ and ‘Literature’. Who knows what slot this thing might fit into? Why spike it for the price of a Grade IV (Writers and Talking Heads) binge? There’s a whole cluster of modest Nouvelle Cuisine joints sticking bravely together in the warren, north of Addison Gardens, entirely targeted at working lunches for the Corporation. Every time the budget is slashed on ‘The Late Show’, two of them go out of business. They serve minute, and beautifully arranged, portions – and charge no more than they would for a side of bloody Aberdeen Angus, with all the coronary trimmings. Everybody starves a little, and feels the glow of virtue.

  The architectural producer – the one with the serious tweed jacket, who ‘used to know your friend, the poet, Eric Whatsisname’ – is a man who understands the value of time. He calls loudly for a second platter of new potatoes before we’ve finalized our power-plays over the seating arrangements. The potatoes are dwarf hybrids, the size of slightly pregnant peas. You get five each. The serious jacket is working on a calculation of their weight by volume. He has that combative attitude so prevalent among people who spend their lives bluffing genuine enthusiasts into believing they know nothing about their own subject. And will need a sturdy lifeline from a sympathetic producer. He had been co-opted into Architecture from the London School of Economics; and – having made two films in five years – was generally held to be doing an excellent job, in not wasting public money.

  The other nob is distinctly ‘Arts’; and proves it, by arriving just in time for the lemon sorbet – and still securing more than his fair share of the Austrian anti-freeze. He’s one of the Nigels. The first thing people ask about them is: ‘Is he the one who made a cunt of himself with Genet?’ It always is. Very nice fella, Nigel. Won’t hear a word against him. He should worry; on £40,000 a year, and enough ‘allowed’ days to bang out a novel for one of the posh houses. Some of these Nigels turn eventually into Nicks, and transfer – without fuss – to London Weekend. But this one is still, quite definitely, a Nigel. He knows how to keep the wine flowing. And we all sit in a formaldehyde line, trading blank-verse anecdotes – like late T. S. Eliot at the Edinburgh Festival. Nobody has actually said anything about the film. What film? We must be auditioning for the Masons. It’s a quick handshake, a peppermint, and back to the office.

  On the pavement, the moment before we are cast adrift, Sonny tips us the big wink. The project, he assures us, is ‘on’. We can start mapping the camera angles. Secret signals were, apparently, exchanged across the lunch table. You can read a lot into the way your neighbour turns his fork, or flashes his wine label. We’ll have a production number by the end of the month.

  The feeding, from this point, falls on us. The second (working) stage belongs to kitchens. You begin to understand why notes were kept. Motorcycle messengers lacerate the city bearing triplicate summaries: within the hour, the scenes we have written are returned to us, translated into an ersatz and shifty language. A simple instruction, such as: Camera moves from street into synagogue, is inflated into a page of tortuous explanation. A party of school-kids is invented, so that the camera will not have to be switched on without a justification that would stand up in a court of law.

  In the old days, the 1960s, it was taxis: an endless circuit of cabs with solitary cans of film, script revisions, hampers. Now there’s more gravitas: we talk to agents who talk to agents (and charge us for the privilege); we talk ‘repeats’, and we talk ‘kill fees’. We’ll have to put a nine-month gestation into this script for an initial payment of – what – £200? See how that floats at the next lunch. We could be scheduled, or we could be looking at some very ‘creative’ expenses.

  We have come in from the cold. We have not yet taken the blood-oath, and signed the Official Secrets form, but we do have an interesting collection of phone numbers. And the promise of an actual contract.

  II

  ‘Research’ was the excuse for a day or two walking the labyrinth: markets and breakfasts. Fredrik wanted to call on Roland Bowman, an actor he had met at a party, who was restoring a house in Fournier Street. Roland had staged, in the tragic basement that once held the Hebrew Dramatic Club (scene of the 1887 false-fire panic, and death-on-the-stairs of seventeen members of the audience), a millennial version of Wilde’s first play, Vera; or The Nihilists. He brought out the Rose-Croix ritual that Wilde had coded into the piece. And his own performance, as Vera, in this all-male production, gained the unexpressed approval of his neighbours, Gilbert and George.

  Roland was no card-carrying Huguenot. He had been drawn here down a track of dreams. He remembered what the house would become. It was all inevitable, and his talent lay in not opposing the current that was already carrying him along. The ruin was now a valuable property in which he camped with his mother, while he breathed life into a shell of bricks and plaster. He was living far beyond his apparently modest means in keeping faith with this vision. Market forces would conspire, in time, to expel him. But that was the nature of the place. The human element was optional.

  At the back of the house was a narrow, walled garden. Roland pointed out the hops he had cultivated, as a gesture of solidarity with the earlier benefactors of this soil, and with the prevailing winds that gifted us with all the odours of Truman’s Brewery: odours you can taste, Whitechapel’s madeleine. Fredrik, of course, had a dissertation handy, culled from the journals of a Quaker brewmaster, asserting that the heady scent of the hops made men drowsy and women lascivious. He knew the Latin names of all the flowers.

  We settled on a bench, all of us sharing a notion that this was slightly unreal, a posed photograph. We wanted to arrive at the story that lay ahead, but there was no way of rushing it. Roland was fascinated by his own wrists. He stroked his fingers obsessively down the length of his arm, gesturing, encircling the wrist; as if he could not believe in its delicacy. He is ageless, benign; a chaste Dorian Gray. He moves in clean lines against a plain background. Nothing is hurried. His arms are thin, but a braid of muscle bunches under the short sleeve of his matelot jersey.

  He showed us the house: we eavesdropped on his private space. What we relished, we also exploited. Our brief from the
Corporation insisted that each minute particular be generalized: it must stand for something, an articulated tendency. If we could not explain it, then it did not exist.

  From the first-floor window I looked back over the garden, and north towards Princelet Street; and I was amazed to discover how much of this area was still covert: hidden space, old courts, outhouses, industrial yards tethered in hawsers of convolvulus, protected by hedges of thorn and nettles. The heart of Whitechapel remained in purdah, sheathed in a prophylactic neglect: from the streets there was no hint that this unexploited kingdom even existed. Had I stumbled, after all these years, on a method of painlessly visiting the past?

  On the other side of the house, facing the magnificent threat of Christ Church, Roland was in the process of creating a room that would set the key for his entire scheme: the minimal decorations he had so far effected were both ritualistic and meaningful. One wall was covered with a painted backdrop; a Strindbergian victim, whose hair, and silent scream, shakes a liquid jungle of intestinal ropes and vines. She is drowning in fire. This hot flush of expressionist bravado is countered by a pale and handsome fireplace, freshly installed: on its mantelpiece is the Spy cartoon of Oscar Wilde.

  Roland was ahead of us. ‘Yes, the fireplace did, in fact, once belong to Wilde,’ he said. ‘And, I suppose, I like to believe that it still does. Sympathizers rescued what they could from Tite Street after the crash. The fireplace passed, for generations, among friends: who could appreciate its value, and its charms, without wishing to obliterate those qualities in a sordid monetary transaction.’Roland was making a speech, and he knew it. He floated upstage from the mantelpiece, so that he could spin, dramatically, on his heel, and allow the sunlight in the window to fluster the red in his hair. ‘I cling to the conceit,’ he continued, ‘that when I’ve finished the job, Oscar will walk in, smoking his blonde cigarettes; ready to accept the sensational role of a character, literally unresolved between life and art. It’s what he always wanted.’