Slightly embarrassed by this infusion of greasepaint, I began to shuffle a stack of books that stood alongside the framed Wilde caricature: six mint copies of a celebrated ‘bestseller’ that attributed the most peculiar properties to the local churches. The critics promised your money back if you did not die of terror as you read it. Many of the New Georgian squatters kept a copy in the close chamber, though privately decrying the thing, as a calumny on the disinterested aesthetics of Baroque Architecture. But even as a talismanic icon, I felt that six units was stronging it.
‘When Mother and I moved here,’said Roland, with the frankness that characterized his conversation, ‘and because our interests are well known, all our chums kept making us presents of that book. I haven’t got around to reading it yet. Something holds me back. I couldn’t bear to be disappointed. I liked the Wilde novel so much I wrote to the author, through his publishers, inviting him to trot along for a cup of tea, and a look at the fireplace. He never replied. And I realized afterwards, with utter shame, that my letter must have read like some terrible gauche come-on.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘the publishers probably shredded it. He’s far too much of a goldmine to be interrupted with tea ceremonies.’
This prompted Fredrik – who had been silent for about two minutes, and was turning a dangerous rectal-purple colour – to vault into an improvisational theory that I soon lost track of: it concerned ‘prophetic curvatures of time’, vampire-clones, and hermetic sexuality. He posited an ‘eternal return’; whereby certain figures are unable to escape the Wheel of Fate. Those cultists who look longingly on such as Wilde, Chatterton, Rimbaud, Blake, Stevenson, or Keats are themselves trapped, as in a liquid mirror. Obsession matures into spiritual paralysis. The cultist relives borrowed lives, is bound to gross matter; to ghosts of the undead, and the always-dying. But the created grids of energy can be consulted like a tarot pack: so that, for example, Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London can anticipate the coming ‘heritage’ triumph of Little Dorrit, and the shift in focus that would make the Thames itself an assertive template from which the new London would be built. This is the confection we are now required to worship: a ‘view’ by the Venetian mercenary, Canaletto.
Roland was actively infected by this madness. He responded to a theme that must have been buried far beneath what Fredrik was actually saying. He shunted us on to the familiar fin de siècle notion of the ‘time-halting’ magic of the photograph, or portrait, where the photographer does not deflect the intensity of the subject: the Dorian Gray syndrome. The person who submits to this, who allows themself to be caught, is caught for ever. They are no longer free to draw breath. The evidence is used, and will continue to be used, against them. ‘Neither is the photographer immune,’Roland insisted. ‘It happened with Robert Mapplethorpe. The love-objects he was driven – so calculatingly – to capture, returned the compliment. And fixed the relationship in a now definitive form.’
It was, Roland thought, Wilde’s photograph, the reckless arrogance of it, taken in New York, January 1882, Napoleon Sarony, that finished him. Wilde posed, with all the insane courage of the damned, in the Masonic costume of the Apollo Lodge, Oxford: knee-breeches, silk stockings, pumps. He had been inducted into the Rose-Croix Chapter, which offered the promise of a ritual of death and resurrection. The regalia included a lambskin apron, of which he was almost indecently fond. From the second Sarony hooded his lens, Wilde’s card was marked; he had only to wait for it. The brothers were going to nail him.
Turning my back on the fetid heat of the room, I walked over to the unshuttered window. I could see across the street into the rectory of Christ Church, Spitalfields: the shadowy, dark-wood staircase designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. An inaccessible ladder in time.
III
There is a grove in Victoria Park much favoured by a snakedhaired former ‘rent boy’, and his inherited dog. Tucked contentedly into his fifties, he remains clear-eyed, unlined; though tolerably weather-beaten. His shaggy dust-powdered mane – unremarked in the Living Theatre years – now drew the odd disapproving sniff from brutally-cropped joggers. Expensive orthodontia (the gift of a fastidious oralist) is being gently eroded by a compulsive fondness for lethally dyed gobstoppers. He dribbles constantly from the corners of a wide and slack-lipped grin. He is known, to those who cannot avoid him, as ‘The Mad Mason’; or, more recently, as ‘Neb’ or ‘Nebby’. This sobriquet deriving from his tendency to crawl along the ground, searching for lost coins, and spirit-messages from the wind. Neb was another who had been ‘driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws’. William Blake might have been using a polaroid when he caught Neb’s likeness in 1795. But ‘The Mason’retained, above everything, a mad and reckless joy. Nose among dog turds, he laughed. He lived in an irreparable feud with himself: loud, ungoverned, shouting and punching at shadows. Like a streetwise tom cat he chewed the coarse-spined grass only to make himself sick, to retch up the poisons of the city.
If you spoke to him he would not look at you, because he did not believe you were really there. He plucked obsessively at the lobes of his ears; he gouged his cheeks. Flesh fell from him: turbid fruit. But he had survived the gloomy medical predictions – the venereal probes, the brain wires – by many years; and now his pre-twilight days were spent roaming the broad estates of the people’s park. Within the circumference of what he had already discovered, Neb was a free man.
But he was certainly not one of your usual dog fanciers: an evil category that have conspired to turn London into a steaming slough of inefficiently recycled horse-pieces. Those yelping pragmatists, the dog-owning tendency, huddled together beside a bench, in a circle of dead white earth, talking of ‘points’, diets, canine bowel movements: so many mothers at the school gates. They watched, with barely-concealed pride, as their braindamaged inbreeds did unspeakable things to the legs of collapsed cyclists, or knocked over a howling toddler. They only came to life if any mere pedestrain retaliated and spoke sharply to their darlings; and then they would scream the foulest obscenities, and call on their protector, PC Plod. Park-keepers and policemen, possibly through some kind of genetic deficiency, have a sentimental fondness for these hideous beasts. And, by law, the first bite is on the house. It goes unpunished. Count yourself lucky if you don’t get rabies.
Neb’s grove, fringed with Edwardian trees, was shunned by the dog people. But they paused, in their flight, to monitor their pets while they strained at the stool, legs rigid, eyes on stalks, tails erect, panting knots of concentration. ‘You better watch it, Missus,’ Neb would invariably shout, resenting the trespass. ‘They’re going to let the Koreans build a camp here. That dog of yourn’ll be dizzy, turning on a hot spit. They’ll think this place is a takeaway.’
It was a game. Neb did not care. He was sifting the rubbish the wind had blown against the fence of the keeper’s house. No bagman, Neb stuffed his pockets with scraps of old newspaper; which, later, in his Well Street garret, he would assemble into a promethean scrapbook of unconnected narratives. The Daily Telegraph and the Hackney Gazette were particular friends.
‘SEX CHANGE WIFE’ MURDERED AFTER WITCH’S WEDDING. Husband wanted affair with another man, court told. DERANGED KILLER IS LOCKED AWAY FOR EVER – 54-year-old man’s fingernails were ripped off with pliers – Mr Berman was a loner. CLASS WAR DENY ATTACK. DRUGS DOCTOR BACKON REGISTER. WOMAN RAPED BY GANG WHO LACED DRINK – as the evening progressed a group of ‘nice Chinese lads’ introduced themselves – when she awoke she was surrounded by a group of men, giggling hysterically, who pinned her down and took it in turns to rape her, she said. The East London Licensed Victuallers’ Association emphasized that they have never discriminated against gypsies. There is a difference between gypsies and Travellers. As a shopkeeper born and bred in Stoke Newington… I am writing a documentary TV programme about people with original jobs and driving a
mbition… Stamford Hill, where she was beaten, slashed with a knife, forced to sleep in a broom cupboard and warned that if she breathed a word she would be visited by black magic spirits.
The book-running days ended for Neb four years ago, shortly before the legendary Nicholas Lane went into exile. Neb had an obscure commission to purchase any items appearing on the stalls that touched on the Masonic Craft. But this was not enough for him: he lectured loudly on the corruptions of the Brotherhood to all who would, or would not, listen. He flapped, he spat: beak-nosed pamphleteer, bog-leveller. A William Prynne, born again. He broke the oath of silence, he waggled his tongue: on flyleafs, he sketched the secret seals. Browsers, picking effetely at Ardizzone squiggles, were initiated into the outlandish mysteries of the Bora Ceremony.
Inevitably, Neb was noticed. There was a rival: black-suited, loose-wigged, a silver dealer, with leather gloves, and the pallor of a stagnant urine sample. A man who bought, and removed from view, anything that even hinted at knowledge of the Ancient and Accepted Rites, the Higher Degrees. He would explode with gaseous ripples of fury, in a chain-reaction bilious attack, if these forbidden books were not, on the instant, polished, triple-bagged, and slid from the sight of the vulgar.
Then came the fateful day when the Mad One – who was beginning to mix the polemic rant with shrill anecdotes of some of his stickier ‘rent-boy’ triumphs – spotted a punter, debating with his wife the purchase of a pair of sugar tongs, and yelled, ‘I had your old man, Missus, twice: in the pergola by Manor House Hospital. You know it? Just off the Heath. He wasn’t much. Do you have to start him talking dirty?’ The death-kit, silver-hoarding Masonic hitman cornered, unexpectedly, at that moment, bearing some swag from the Georgian Village. He appeared – with a look of lemur-like paralysis – to recognize Neb: in both his capacities. But it was too late. Neb was flying.
‘Wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Look at him.’ Neb’s voice leapt into the equine register of a Frankie Howerd impersonator. He was enjoying himself. The punter’s wife was calcified; while the accused man, in reflex shame, was stuffing his pockets with all the silver snuffboxes on the stall. The stallholder, swathed in money belts like a Zapataist guerrilla, was puffing herself up, cobra-fashion, ready to emit a scream that would take out most of the windows between the canal and Barnsbury. ‘Tight-arsed bugger. You should see what he did to me. I can’t walk down to the Job Centre without leaning over. Don’t let him near you, love, when he’s got a broom-handle.’
One of Neb’s flailing manic arms caught Nicholas Lane’s wine glass, and spun it into the air – a chalice of blood – causing it to invert, and the blush of cheap red claret to soak gratefully into the pages of J. S. M. Ward’s Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods. As Neb reached forward to repair the damage, he succeeded only in tearing, into two unequal portions, the fold-out plate illustrating The Templar Charter of Transmission. He stood there, open-mouthed; flapping ineffectively at the wine stain with the ravished drawing.
If it had been possible, the hitman would have paled: his complexion was already on the unconvinced side of goat’s whey. He was a back-door johnny staggering home from an all-night blood-transfusion party.
He stared directly into the lens of Neb’s left eye; he gained entrance. The Mad One was head-clamped, zapped with a stungun. The heat drained from him. It was as if a mirror had been implanted between Neb and the world. There was no longer anything he could touch without passing this incorruptible guardian; the self that had died, one microsecond before. Therefore, he did not age. He was without purchase on life, a harmless thing. He stumbled from the market. And he never returned. He had, in that swift division of time, been emasculated; banished to the reservation of those who live without light. The inherited dog joined him; a protector to keep off the curious, a buddy to see him through to the end. Neb had found the beast, wandering half-starved, in Meath Gardens.
The Mad One was effortlessly replaced – a new boy was on the streets before he had reached Haggerston – but his charge stood. Masonry is a certain recipe for a bestseller. Anything on that topic will be bought by the brothers to keep it out of the hands of the uninitiated. And bought. And bought again. It is the ‘investigative’ author who does not always enjoy his royalties. He suffers: the mad late-night phonecalls; the handprinted letters, leavened with non-sequiturs; the blinding headaches. Is the paranoid, as William Burroughs says, in possession of all the facts – the only sane man in a tilted world – or has he merely initiated an irreversible conspiracy against his own sanity?
Neb was arrested two or three times, out beyond the cricket square, for exposing himself; but this was more carelessness than any desire to boast, or to engage yet again in human commerce. He was finished with all that. The tape was running backwards: as he circumnavigated the grass ocean, he re-enacted incidents from his past; he triumphed in ancient conflicts. The limits of the park became the limits of his world-picture. His childhood was visited among the swings and sheds: chapped legs, and the smell of warm pee. His adolescence was associated with water: the boating lake and its islands. Hiding from eyes and stones; scratchy with secrets, unregistered library books under his jacket. He missed the ugly plaster dogs on their plinths. They had been hacked off for renovation. And would be replaced by freshly painted fakes. Death lurked, Neb felt, in the misted windows of the Burdett-Coutts Tower. The evil moment of his conception kept him clear of the twin stone igloos culled from the block masonry of old London Bridge.
These igloos were the subject of one of Neb’s perpetual monologues. He muttered as he stalked: he clapped his hands. The mason’s marks, hidden behind the capstone, obsessed him. The triangle, the circle, and the cross. Shiva the Destroyer; flame on the funeral pyre. ‘Lifted from the river; the medieval bridge, the chapel,’ he nodded, as if making the discovery for the first time. ‘They stole the stones – two for Vicky Park, one for Guy’s! You won’t get me out on the water. Under the arch? Never!’ He prophesied disaster; drowning, lung-burst. What other kind of prophet was there?
He spoke of the alcoves as ‘dream-helmets’. And it is true that they were generally avoided. Cyclists kept cycling. Adulterers stayed in their vehicles, as if frightened of the lions. ‘Sleep in those things,’said Neb, ‘and you’ll incubate your own death. You’ll be forced to dream all the nightmares that have ever flowed down the river, all the plagues and executions. Why do
Mason’s Mark, found in the stone alcoves at Victoria Park and Guy’s Hospital, Southwark
you think they look like the Thames Barrier? Because the real job of the Barrier is to retain the sleep of the city; not to let our dreams – the most precious of all resources – escape.’
Neb was very tired now, but he kept on walking.
IV
The grass was flat and white where Colonel ‘Colt’Swinefoot’s tents had stood. The evangelist, his caravan, and his shock troops, had moved east, to offer a much-needed blessing for West Ham FC. But the colonel’s apocalyptic warnings hung in the air, like the heavy scorch of frying onions, compressed beef, and temporary repentance: ‘It is the hour of the Antichrist. The mark of the beast is branded into our cheeks. Our tongues shall blacken and swell, until our very mouths are filled. Amen! We will be dragged, cursing, into hellfire.’ And more of the same. Much more. Three hours on his feet was as nothing to Colt. Sweat rolled from his brow. The chorus stamped and sang. Fire buckets rattled with coin. Colt’s sermon, fiendishly amplified, blasted the walls of the old Victoria Park Lido; which had been recently ordained as East London’s first privately-funded lazaret. Neb took it on himself, unpaid, and uninvited, to become one of the angels.
AIDS was a fifth-floor disease, in a four-floor culture. There had to be somewhere – preferably outside the inhabitable zone – where a buck could be turned coping with one of the few genuine growth areas that was still, always excepting the West Coast, scandalously under-exploited. Fortunes would be made when a tested antidote was brought in – but that was the big one, Nobel stuff, the
Holy Grail. Meanwhile the name of the game is counselling, care, discretion, and check the credit cards before the first transfusion. Things were happening fast. There was now a state far worse than being an ‘outpatient’. The agents of Venture Capital had identified a brand of ‘quarantine’ that had much in common with other hermetic encampments, kept for aliens in time of war.
The lazaret stood just inside the park gates, at the Grove Road end, beyond a notice announcing that ‘these premises are protected by Barbican Security Services’. The red-brick Stalinist folly with the sea-green pantiled entrance had functioned for many years as a swimming pool. Now it looked as if the set for Fifty-five Days at Peking had been requisitioned for a Living Dead video-quickie. Neb blundered among the enfeebled inmates in their fugitive exile; the HIV-positives, the ‘black spot’ carriers. He ran messages, he went shopping; and, if he was incapable of listening to any instruction, he was ready to talk without hypocrisy or fear. He rushed through the pallets, arms waving like a bird scarer, beating off the gathering darkness. Dame Nightingale: he buddied the sick. He gave them their first strange taste of life-after-death.
Spies reported a fierce debate in the council chambers concerning the fate of this abandoned municipal swimming pool, one of Lansbury’s finest lidos. It was a symbol of a vanished Health and Efficiency era; a huge, chlorine-weeping, corn-plaster-infested trench – where Neb had achieved some of his most spectacular conquests – which should, without doubt, be restored and streamlined as an ‘investment opportunity’. The public purse no longer ran to filling it with water (perish the thought, better to fill it with oil!) for the unbathed peons to splash about, urinating, exposing their unsightly flab, and floating their beer-cans and fag packets. No instruction had, as yet, been received from above to make a charge for entrance to the park: a ‘reserved vehicle area’ was being enlarged and fenced, marked out for the ticket machines. It was perhaps premature, before all the tenders were sifted, to pass any binding resolution. The decision-makers contented themselves, for the present, with covertly enclosing more and more of the open ground; creating a no man’s land, a causeway of conveniently storm-felled trees.
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