Then what about the sinister ‘gentleman dressed in white paper’, who leans forward to whisper confidingly in Alice’s ear, ‘Take a return ticket every time the train stops’? He is eager to prolong the encounter; ‘busy’ beneath the folds of his newspaper, but that is as far as it goes. He is, I’m afraid, out of stock, standard issue, the Levantine red herring. He will soon undergo a sex change and donate his albino wrappings to Wilkie Collins (inadvertently founding the English Murder Mystery). For the moment, he is no more than Peter Lorre lost inside Sidney Greenstreet’s Hong Kong-stitched castoffs. We can dismiss him with a caution.
The Goat also plays with our prejudices. Tenniel, in giving him no hands, signals his innocence. He claims to have dozed through the whole thing. He is cancelled by rapid horizontal strokes of the pen; cast into the river with the other fall-guys. His name goes into the files of the Black Museum, along with his spectacles, his cufflinks, and his wing-collar. After a decent interval, he will be ‘fingered’ by Colin Wilson – as a blood-guzzling ritualist. His horns will be mounted on the wall of Donald Rubelow’s office. His ‘suicide’ will close the case. The pebbles from his pocket will be returned to the proper authorities.
We are left, once again, with the classic Agatha Christie railway solution: they orl dunit. Railways beget conspiracies: Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins (filmed by Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes), with nuns in high heels, injections, bandages; or Patricia Highsmith’s smoking-car collaborators, exchanging crimes (also translated by Hitchcock, with the ‘help’ of Raymond Chandler); or so many more of the ‘Master’s’ nightmares from the first Thirty-nine Steps to North by Northwest. This man, a true son of Wanstead, must be pulled in for questioning. Tenniel’s dark frame is a trailer for Rear Window. And we have established by now that being dead is no excuse at all.
In making his drawing look so much like a film noir production still is Tenniel telling us something? He makes us consider the role of Lewis Carroll as a compulsive photographer of nymphets. He reminds us that Carroll’s text is an elaborate chess game: ‘the final “checkmate” of the Red King will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game’. There are no counterfeit tricks: follow Carroll’s moves closely enough and he reveals his own guilt, as we all do. He plays the self-inquisitor, employs whimsy, teasing so savagely that he bruises his flesh. He has the arrogance to scatter incriminating messages he is sure we will be too stupid to interpret.
Have other ‘psychic detectives’ penetrated this mystery years before us? The only crimes worth solving are the ones that have not yet been committed: they are still formally immaculate. William Hope Hodgson narrates his ‘Carnacki the Ghost-finder’ tales through the medium of his own ‘Late Watson’; a narrative ‘I’ who is unmasked as ‘Dodgson’ (Charles Lutwidge, perhaps? Author of Phantasmagoria and Other Poems: the ‘real’ Lewis Carroll) in The Gateway of the Monster. The supernumerary trio of disciples who attend Carnacki’s ‘evenings’ are frequently named: Arkright, Jessop, Taylor (Science, Cricket, Neo-Platonism?) – but ‘Dodgson’ is, I believe, mentioned in only two tales; ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ and ‘The Hog’ (which did not feature as part of the original Carnacki canon, and was not included in the wrappered summary of 1910, nor the Eveleigh Nash collection of 1913). ‘Dodgson’ reports the adventures (fantastic-domestic survivals from the Looking-glass World), but – unlike Dr Watson – he is never a participant. Both these men are, of course, the true authors: they are able safely to share the terrors no outside agency has invoked. ‘Some evening I want to tell you about the tremendous mystery of the Psychic Doorways. In the meantime, have I made things a bit clearer to you, Dodgson?’
Tenniel, like Walter Sickert with the Ripper murders, mistook his own obsessions for guilt. He invented elaborate fables to account for his involvement in the knowledge of these terrible sacrifices. Sir John, it should be remembered, joined the staff of Punch in 1851, and produced, after the death of Leech, its principal weekly political cartoon. Now look again at the artist’s heraldic sigil in the bottom left-hand corner of ‘Alice in the Train’. It is exactly the same as the initials you will find imposed in the same position in that most famous of all ‘Ripper’ icons: ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’ (the hooded, knife-wielding spectre with CRIME printed on its forehead). Sir John Tenniel was responsible for both images. (A ‘lost’ word – part-rune, part-mirror script – is buried on the floor beneath Alice’s feet: like the whispers on the dead track at the finish of the Sergeant Pepper LP.)
The collaboration with Carroll, and the production of this clairvoyant illustration gave Tenniel the chance to accuse the killer, whose identity he knew – because he had, at some level, shared in the crime. His capped (or crowned) Guard wears the Diamond and stares, eyeless, at the girl: because he is, or stands for, the Red King. He is checkmated. The Goat accuses him, a Tarot Devil, representing ‘ravishment, force, fatality’. So Tenniel is able to put into his depiction of Alice the details of the murders that the police have never made public. The hands of the victims were always tied in front of them – as Alice’s are, within her muff. They were all strangled with a knotted scarf, such as the one that Alice wears. And a single feather was knotted into their hair. I rest my case.
But wait a minute: didn’t Joblard procure a quantity of these same gulls’ feathers for his installation in the London Fields gallery? I must check the files. Yes, it’s there in the Flash Art review: ‘From the dereliction of the East End one passes into the labyrinthine interior and then via a metal staircase (under each step of which a feather has been placed – the Angel’s wing of ascension) to the threshold…’ The feather or quill is an obvious invocation of the idea of ‘inscription’, with its darker twin – confession. Joblard is the guilty man: the Bird-Revenger.
No, no, no. It’s worse than that: if the details of the murders have never been made public – how do I know what they are? I put up my hand, confess. The relief! In the end every writer confesses. It proves nothing; a kind of boast. I must draw on the anger of women to escape from this quilted cage, a strength we will never understand, and transcribe as ‘will’, ‘stubbornness’, or some other biological imperative.
I allow the conceit of my house to form around me: the armour plating of an insect-samurai. I can stick the Tenniel postcard, with a stub of sugar-free gum, on to the window of the phoney carriage – and walk out, be somewhere else. That is the power of the narrator. I need to consult The Crystal Cabinet of Mary Butts, and I climb the rackety ladder into the attic, to search for it. (‘The equivocal nature of the contact between visible and invisible, the natural order and the supernatural.’)
I sit in a hutch of darkness, holding a torch, illicitly leafing through John Symonds’s account of Mary Butts visiting Crowley at Cêfalu, the Abbey of Thelema. The Great Beast offered Butts ‘cakes of light’ – the Host, in the form of ‘a goat’s turd on a plate’. Which she, unceremoniously, declined.
I am walled in by cases of books (unsold stock, forgotten purchases) that will only be read by torchlight. Extracts. Quotations. Specimen sentences questing for meaning. Any one of them could alter the balance of the tale, and postpone that hideous moment of silence – when your turn at the fireside is concluded; the audience demand that you sit down. (Just a moment more.)
This awkward space has none of the spontaneous chaos of Rodinsky’s room. It contains all the material that no longer fits into our lives: clothes we do not wear, letters we shall never again read, cricket bats with lumps knocked out of them. I was finally able to suspend my unfocused quest when I came upon a drawing book in which my daughter, aged about three and a half, had executed a sequence of curious sketches, featuring bubble-headed, tendril-writhing figures. Her mother then took down the child’s terse ‘explanations’ on the opposite leaf. The point was that the illustrations preceded the stories, and explained the unexplainable – only because her mother expec
ted it. The child was perfectly capable of obliging some formal requirement, and ‘doing her own thing’ at the same time.
What interested me, in my present state of compulsive associationism, about these Rorschach doodles was that several of the ‘stories’ concerned railways. Two of these followed each other, but were not necessarily connected. ‘The lady walked down the track. The train came and ran her over, but she got up. And she took the baby home.’ Then came a hot whirlwind, a vortex of crayoned blues and greens – on the perimeter of which was a pink blob; invertebrate, with dangling, threadlike legs. ‘The water dripped on the lady’s hand and made her die. The candle showed her the way in the dark.’
I could let it go; leave it here with this marvellous soup of worms. By the restored power of the child’s ‘candle’ I could pluck a book from the sack, some forgotten favourite, and carry it back down into the electric house. Kafka’s Trial. The brutal termination of Joseph K. that I had chosen to suppress.
‘But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. “Like a dog!” he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.’
VII
Prima Donna (The Cleansing of Angels)
‘A locomotive jumped its track and smashed Poe’s tombstone’
Guy Davenport, Olson (The Geography of the Imagination)
Cec Whitenettle, a lifelong abstainer, poured out his second half of Bacardi, making it familiar by the addition of an orange cordial. He swallowed it grimly down; his scrawny neck convulsing, his thyroidal cartilage bobbling like a drowning chick. He drank where he stood, in the centre of the room, feet apart, awkwardly ‘at ease’; taking care not to spill a single drop on to his uniform. His glass, as he returned it to the table – in a mindless hydrolic gesture – was coated in thick felt.
Water was steaming from the tap into a blue plastic basin. Cec watched the spiralling thread of its descent: from behind a plate-glass screen. He had no recollection of initiating this incident. He was utterly estranged from it; as from the rest of the objects that surrounded him. The cut-throat razor opened silently and smoothly. Foam curled in a lazy worm on Cec’s open hand, and was mechanically smeared across his face. He slapped at his cheeks, feeling the reassuring rhythms of the contact, feeling the sound. Cec welcomed his ‘auditory disability’, his deafness, the only tangible souvenir of those best remembered years, in the battery: the earth-shuddering pounding of the 4.5s, pitted in the Isle of Dogs. That night, 4 September 1940, when the men realized they themselves had become the principal target. That was their only achievement.
And the bleak mornings: river mist; the desolate mud field, gun barrels tilted at the skies, looking from the road like so many collapsing chimneys. Nothing could compare with it. The solitude and the friendships.
As he shaved, Cec avoided the eyes of the man behind the mirror. He pinched his nostrils shut, lifted them to scrape at the ill-disciplined hairs, emerging to trespass on that narrow trench of puckered labial flesh, with its finicky, inaccessible ridges. The skin of the whole face was drawn back, stretched, inadequately attached to the bone armature beneath. Cec was terrified that the knots would give, the mask would slip, and collapse into folds – never to be ironed out. Already the pouch-cups under his eyes were bruised with anguish, scratched, wax-filled. His large asymmetrical ears stood, naked and proud, from a helmet of cropped and water-combed hair. Surface-nerves flinched as he paddled a cruel application of scented acid into the reluctant pores.
A flask of sugar-saturated tea, marmalade sandwiches, a copy of yesterday’s evening paper, were waiting in the canvas satchel. Cec took his wristwatch from the drawer, advanced it by one and a half minutes, and slipped it over his wrist – with the solemnity of a marriage vow. Time to go: 2.55 A.M. Two-handed, Cec lifted his peaked cap from the chair. No trace of irony: from the instant it touched his head, he was on duty.
He hesitated; returned the cap to its resting place. One for the road: a final shot of Bacardi. Given time, he could develop a taste for the stuff. He licked the glass; refilled it, threw it back. It wouldn’t matter now if his wife did notice. She only kept the bottle for her sister, New Year’s Day. A quick one. She would be sleeping like a sow: tossing about, rolling herself in the sheets, snorting, fingers in her privates; breathing, saveloys and whisky. Shelley Winters’s nightdress, up round her belly – at her age.
The cold air refreshed him. His ungloved hands felt no chill as they scraped the thin filter of frost from the car windows. The world was at its best: it was uninhabited, all its shocks and alarums were sheathed in a prophylactic darkness.
On Morning Lane he waited obediently for the lights; he would have waited for ever. There was not another car on the road; but without rules the universe falls into chaos. He drummed his fingers. The old childhood fancy came back over him: waking one morning to discover a deserted city, from which all the other inhabitants have flown, slipped away into another dimension. He would walk towards the centre, always through the same leafy squares, the memorials nobody else appreciated, touching them, fingering Coade-stone gods; nymphs, goats, griffins. He would tiptoe, unthreatened, on the crown of the road – until he arrived at one of the great department stores, blazing in a costume of coloured lights; where he would wander down avenues of ladies’things, dabbling perfumes, tasting cosmetics, running silks between his fingers, brushing against furs, curtains of animal pelts; testing himself against all their secrets. The mirrors would loose their magic. He would not disturb them. Unobserved, he would be naked as the day he was born.
Cec let the car steer itself down Homerton Road towards the marshes: he was enclosed against the night, the fingers of wind, the buildings of eyes. Tonight, nobody else was alive: a molten stream of fire-insects swarmed endlessly along Eastway, in a mad chase to escape from their own headlights. The marshes were nothing: grass over rubble; coarse turf, impacted by generations of footballing oaths, hid the cratered terraces of dockland. You could rebuild Silvertown from this midden. You could excavate the names of all the eradicated villages. The incendiary warriors were still waiting for the kettle to boil on the primus.
He crossed the imaginary (but irrefutable) border, cut down Temple Mills Lane, and was lost among the enormous shadows of the reclaimed mounds of Stratford. The hoists, the containers stacked into unoccupied babels: this was a transitional landscape that would never achieve resolution. Out of the fire-storms had come industry; out of ruin, imagination. We were promised a life of marvellous changes: no more poverty, no mean and pinched lives. So everything was cleared to make place for a dystopia of fenced-in goods yards, coldstores, bonded warehouses. Railways replaced rivers. Now ‘docks’could be anywhere that capital chose to nominate. This demarcated zone was made ready to service the latest panacea, the concept of ‘The Hole’; a tunnel that would connect these infertile swamps with the threat of Europe, and future prosperity. On this wild gamble, all regulations were suspended. Today was too late. Dig it first, discuss it later. Steel jaws ate the earth, with all the frenzy of orphans searching for their fathers.
Cec nodded to the security ‘bull’ on the gate, who hit the button and lifted the barrier, without bothering to look up from the climax of the snuff-video he was running under his counter. (Some footage had been ‘sampled’ from Sam Fuller’s White Dog. Actuality – in the form of hand-held shots out of a car window, as the victim was run down – was planted alongside. The chase peaked. The white dog pounced. A thick smell of fear leaked from the machine, converting it into a defective microwave.)
The car shower needed no human agency: it was triggered by pressure points hidden in the road. The green light scanners cleared Cec, his uniform and his satchel. Even the technical equipment could find no interest in the man. His laser-coated pass carried him safely through the triple cage
, and out on to the deserted platform. The nighttime ‘special’ sulked, steaming like a horse, under rows of overhead sodium-vapour lamps, that stretched a genetic chain of rusty haloes all the way between Hackney Wick and Canning Town. The train, a power-charged demon, had been disguised in panels of mud: its number-coding was standard, but it remained an officially sanctioned pirate. It was not here. It did not exist. The volatile silver canisters held their glowing million-year-old rods within laboratory-cushioned milk churns. Cec’s engine was ready for its advance on Mile End (and its ‘detour’ through Stepney Green and Whitechapel to pick up the drums of reprocessed material from Barking, that did not show up on any manifest – but which were delivered, with the utmost precision, to the cosmetic shell of Liverpool Street). The rest was not Cec’s business: the airstrips of Suffolk, or the lost estuaries of Essex. He knew no more than the comfortably receding lines of track.
Volunteer and they throw the works at you: lie detectors, hot wires, flash-frames, sensory deprivation, stress-curves, cranial measurement, pads on the tongue, anal dilation, scrapes of nail dirt, litmus nappies, ancestor research, criminal record, political affiliations and Tarot reading. Cec had been turned down for the buses on the grounds of ‘poor road sense’; but the spooks found him perfectly suitable, a clean profile. He was deaf, impotent, suffering the onset of premature senility; a psychoneurotic depressive, prone to paranoid anxiety. He had a bad marriage, and no friends. His moral judgements were untrustworthy. He was just about capable of keeping his hand on the steering column. The ideal man: he fitted the job description to the letter.
The hermetic isolation of the cab was his prize: the line ahead was virgin, ready to be swallowed. The platform floated like a tropical island above this mud-churned dereliction. The red warning light flickered, then died: it was time to move out.
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