Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  But Jon Kay was growing increasingly agitated: his stash was gone, his thirst raged. ‘Remember me.’ His life was dedicated to forgetting. He wanted out. He snatched the wheel and drove us, head on, towards the industrial jetties at Purfleet. We skimmed the shallows, churning mud. I fought to regain control, while Joblard screamed in his ear – the sculptor’s long-suppressed stutter erupting into a paroxysm of sneezes – that Tilbury was around the next bend. We’d all take a break: a long and liquid breakfast.

  II

  Tilbury Riverside and the Custom House had vanished. They were hidden, we assumed, behind two white cruise liners, basking, back to back, like sharks (with Red Stars rouged on to their slumbering snouts). The skies above were monumental, a union of warring republics. They were heroic, drawn up in lines of battle. Tanks buried in snowdrifts. Ruined cities. The river was brown with the sweat of the fields. With the blood of military martyrs. A montage of symbols assaulted us: flags, waving sailors (in flat, bobbed caps), anchor chains, rushing agitated clouds.

  Kay needed a drink. He had fulfilled his side of the contract and brought us down to Tilbury. It had been ominously easy. He believed (as these freaks always do, against all evidence to the contrary) that he had, somewhere, just enough smoke to get him home – if he could still remember what ‘home’ was. Now he demanded a couple of big stiff ones. He ran the Reunion in between the Russian liners, and he tied up.

  We stepped ashore in a foreign land (more foreign than the rest of it, than Rotherhithe or Silvertown). No word of English fell on our ears. The seamen shouted at Jon Kay. And laughed. They mimed the universal hand pump of derision. Kay had to be dragged from the security fence that blocked our access to the Gravesend Ferry and the path to the World’s End, which lay beyond it, in the shadow of the Fort. We were waved, by uniformed officials, towards a covered walkway: a crazily angled gangplank that disappeared into the citadel of the Custom House. Even the signs were in… Polish? PASAZEROWIE POZOSTAJACY W LONDYNIE PROSZWE SKRECIC W LEWO. Sunlight laid a ladder of immigrant abstractions along the tilted boards of this glasshouse tunnel. A cleaner stood, motionless (like an onlooker at some spectacularly messy accident, who thinks he might be in the frame of the newsreel cameras), staring at us; two brooms and a shovel rested in his hands. The atmosphere was one of unrelieved Baltic gloom.

  A hunched figure trudged ahead of us, plodding on sea legs, hands sunk in sullen pockets: his red, fungic chin slid chestwards in defiance of the inevitable bureaucracy on the far side of the frosted glass. He had learnt how to wait, and how to express his unbending disdain – by the slightest movement of his upper lip. A movement that offered the controlled exposure of a powerful dentato-laciniate bite. He came ominously close to actually relishing the challenge of hours of form-filling tedium: the repetitive cycle of questions in the snuff-coloured room. The boredom of ashtrays and official calendars. He was a stocky, balding man; collared and hatched in a dark blue donkey jacket. An Estonian stoker soliciting political asylum? Or a Basque pornographer caught with a suitcase of bestial snapshots?

  We trailed behind him, accomplices, vacuumed into an eddying zephyr of guilt. But the benefits of quitting the river grew more doubtful with each step. Amphibian reptiles, we knew we had been tricked: there was no way back. The cleaner, self-consciously, threw open the Custom House door and gestured with his broom. Dutifully, we turned left: towards the winking red eye of the camera.

  ‘Mmmm, all right. OK. I s’pose that’ll do,’ commented the director – with a notable absence of vitality – in a toast-dry Birmingham Ring Road accent, that was still quite fashionable at the cutting edge of the visual arts. He was a tall man and a tired one. He didn’t believe in anything he could see in front of him. Why bother? A certified deconstructionist. Who had lost his faith in the validity of performance. Actors, hot for motivation, could hope – at best – to witness his struggle to pretend that they had already gone home. They were obstacles blocking his heartfelt longshots. And the state of their hair… Those sweaters … He shook his head. Satisfaction, we discovered, was expressed as: ‘I don’t want to sound over-enthusiastic, but…’

  The methodical Pole (a sewer-rat Cybulski), who had led us into this trap, stalked over to the window; distancing himself, as far as the limits of the hall would allow, from the film crew, whose antics were no more than a source of potential embarrassment to a man of his achievements. It was Milditch, of course: earning a crust.

  The Corporation has its own mausoleum for spiked scripts. Files of unachieved treatments that have not yet been infected with the black spot. A sperm bank to counter some future threat of a strike by the Writers’ Union. A prophylaxis on ideas. A drought of projects: empty restaurants. There has to be the occasional reprieve for the corridor of suggestions unblessed by accountants. ‘Yentob thinks it’s mega-interesting, baby, but too many calories. Try Channel 4.’ There have to be sleepers to foist on ‘difficult’ directors coming to the end of short-term contracts on ‘The Last Show’. That nervy collage of brilliantly achieved trailers. That culture-clash headache.

  Which explained this Custom House invasion. I had abandoned my three-month ‘rewrite’ somewhere back among all those lunches and phonecalls, the motorcycle messengers waiting on the doorstep for urgent revisions – which only elicited further phonecalls. Which elicited further lunches. Which elicited…

  My Tilbury story (erased history) was finally being shot under the impossible title of ‘Somdomites Posing’: which, apparently, made reference to Queensberry’s illiterate and insulting card (the fate card), left for Oscar Wilde at the Albemarle Club: ‘To Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite’.

  A new director (on his way to the knacker’s yard of pop promos), Saul Nickoll, replaced the emotionally bankrupt Sonny Jaques. He determined to blow what remained of the year’s budget on a single grand gesture: the least likely script he could find. Mine was the worst by a comfortable margin. It was so far off the wall that nothing could save it. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nickoll, ‘if things start to make any kind of sense… we’ll throw in a few clips from your home movies. Keep ’em guessing. Red frames. Bogus surgical procedures. Fountains of blood.’

  And Milditch, being both actor and bookdealer, was typecasting as the paranoid, doom-laden author/narrator. I was being impersonated by a melancholy and balding market trader of doubtful reputation. Why didn’t they go the whole hog? Cable for Charlie Manson?

  ‘Milditch looked terrible in Spotlight,’ said Nickoll, gleefully. ‘And the portrait was seven years old. He’s perfect to play you.’

  Milditch knew now he had made one of those mistakes that destroy a career. Like Dickie Attenborough doing John Reginald Halliday Christie. There’s nowhere left to go – except the colonies. Or the other side of the camera. He’d finish his days in blackface, a loincloth and a turban. This part would have been well within the compass of a ‘walker’. Even so, Milditch was ready to do the business, give it the cold-eye stare. But Nickoll wouldn’t talk to him. Nickoll wouldn’t, if he could avoid it, talk to anyone. I was beginning to appreciate the man.

  Nickoll had the slight, forward-leaning stoop of a man used to looking down on people: on actors, who tended to be dwarfish, with neatly husbanded imperfections the camera was ready to forgive. Nickoll forgave nothing. He understood it; but he did not forgive it. He suffered, and he dubbed a world-weary smile. A Spanish saint on his way to the gridiron. He was darkly clad, of course; in the usual gulag chic. And he favoured a quotably minimalist haircut, close razored and modestly abrasive. His appearance was a statement. ‘No comment.’ But he was something of a connoisseur of haircuts. He collected them, pigeonholing the entire newsreel of human history by its length and style. His method was universally acknowledged as more accurate than carbon-dating. ‘Mmmm, all right,’ he’d drone, ‘late 1950s…’ 58? No, ’59. Joe Brown at the Two Is.’ And he’d stroke his notionally shaved chin.

  He modelled blue crombie overcoats, left behind, in something of a hurry, at the Ol
d Horns (Bethnal Green), and white mufflers. He disliked conversation. He had a wonderfully practised way of turning his back on anything that offended his haircut religion. Milditch’s functional crop, which looked as if it had been performed inside a coal bucket by a gang of blind chickens, gave him palpitations. He had the trick, under these distressing circumstances, of switching his attention to shoes, one of his lesser interests: until he felt able to cope with the shock to his nervous system. The aesthetic damage.

  There were two ways that he signalled his emotions. When things were going badly, and it was all getting away from him, he chewed his hangnails. He gnawed voraciously at the celluloid meniscus, spitting out grey chippings like mangled grape seeds. When it was not quite so bad, and he was able to watch a scene without putting his head in a black rubbish sack, he put on his serious spectacles and gazed into the distance: to avoid the possibility of an involuntary smile.

  I had every confidence in Nickoll. If anybody could turn my humble disaster into a millennial catastrophe, he was that man. He gave the impression – even now – that if only he could heave Milditch into the dock, with concrete flippers on his feet, get him out of the way, he might be able to deliver some definitively controversial footage. Meanwhile, he chewed his fingers down to the knuckles, and gummed unhygienically on soft cartilaginous tissue. He was picking out lumps of white skin from between his excellent teeth.

  The teeth of the little Scottish script girl, on the other hand, were chattering like the typing pool of a fictional tabloid. The sound man (her lover) glared at her in a proprietary rebuke. She tried to invent some way to describe, for editing purposes, the fantastical lack of event unfolding in this refrigerated hall. The sound man, buried in quilts of arctic down, was in despair. There was nothing to record. Not even the lugubrious hoot of tug boats or the wind whistling through miles of corridor. He had only to keep sound out: neutralize the turbo-props battling to reach the City Airport, or the getaway drivers rehearsing a screech of three-point turns along the quays of the empty dock behind the Custom House.

  Nickoll, irritated by his moping underlings, now revealed himself as a closet humanitarian. He noted the script girl’s lead-blue lips and frostbitten nose and felt obliged to pass some comment. ‘I’d rather be skinned alive with a blunt razor blade than wear a jersey like that. It puts pounds on you, girl.’

  He twitched in agony: the awful embarrassment of being confronted, in flagrante delicto, by the author of the very farrago he was trying to animate. He wished he could simply hurl back in my face the pages of high-flown nonsense I had so wantonly cobbled together in some warm study, far from the front line. Authors were sick men: punishing themselves, and wallowing in the pain. And worse, much worse, expecting to implicate innocent readers by conning them into turning the first few (inevitably comic) pages.

  I shared the director’s repulsion. But I had written none of this. This chamber had no place in my text. It was worse than even my damaged mind could imagine. I wanted Tilbury Fort, Highlanders in tunnels, catacombs, waxworks, cricketers, the Mahdi. I wanted the World’s End populated with post-orgy catamites and Ripper-yarning clubmen. I wanted corpses to rise out of the river, shrieking in accusation. I wanted the past to resolve itself, and the present to become habitable. I wanted fire angels, warrior/priests, horses that spoke in Latin couplets. I wanted an absence of dogs. And, most of all, I wanted this shifty troop of inadequates to have to drag all their cumbersome equipment into the deepest, darkest, dampest of the subterranean passages: the pools of stagnant air, the trapped voices of prisoners. They should confront everything that cannot be transferred on to videotape. There was no hell hot enough for the man responsible for converting Vessels of Wrath to bland stutters of electrical impulse. (Was I that man?)

  The Beta-Cam, so they said, cost £50,000. It was a nasty, flat case on a thin tripod: an executive ghetto-blaster, a mail-order toy, with a trumpet of lenses protruding from its side. And it was useless ten feet from daylight. ‘Sunguns’ had been vetoed by the electrician. His word was law. The catacombs were therefore expendable. The script girl, under instruction, deleted them with a stroke of her felt-tip. British Rail (most of whose income came from facility fees from advertising agencies) wanted £200 an hour to let this mob loose in the derelict Tilbury Riverside station. They sent along a female trouble-shooter to tot up the score, minute by minute, on her pocket calculator. ‘We had Kenneth Baker yesterday,’ she said, looking me in the eye. ‘Beautiful manners, a real gentleman.’

  Nickoll now proved he had the essential quality of a great film-maker: the ability to burn money. He was well on the way to landing the Corporation with a seven-minute version of Heaven’s Gate. Questions in the House would certainly follow. Resignations were in order. Heads would roll. The Widow was, at this moment, being fitted into her largest set of tombstone gnashers.

  Jon Kay shuffled around the crew trying to bum a cigarette. They looked at him with open contempt. Send for wardrobe. That hair! They were green and clean, and pink of tongue: apple-cheeked, scrubbed, concerned. In perfect dental health. Snugly confident in the overweening freshness of their underpants. Milditch simply turned his back on the nodding time-warp spectre, and lit a cheap cheroot. To blow away the bad memory.

  If we hang about, thought Joblard, we might score a free lunch. ‘Don’t forget to keep your bar bills,’ he warned. ‘And any others you can pick out of ashtrays or spittoons.’ Get your invoices in fast: that’s the first rule. And that was all we’d ever be likely to take out of this fiasco. A couple of corn-crusty cheese rolls and a bottle of gassy Guinness.

  We retreated. Left them to it. Watching Nickoll work was like watching hairs grow from a wart. We staggered into the Passengers’ Lounge, and sat, spark out, under a mural of palm trees, coral islands, straw huts. It had been executed in a tequila sunburst of radioactive colour: Bikini Atoll, in the shimmering realization of the impact of fifteen million tons of TNT, courtesy of a bomb named Bravo. This Robert Louis Stevenson espresso bar was clearly intended to jolly the cruise victims into the mood for the high jinks ahead of them. Its effect on less well-prepared browsers was instantaneous. We slumped, heads in hands, mute, cattle-felled: contemplating a snap preview of all our best-kept fears. Fallout, mouth cancer, plague, famine, bereavement, premature burial: these were the lighter passages.

  Sofya Court, the researcher, sat with us. A human presence, she subtly distanced herself from the rude mechanicals of the film crew. She was a modest exile; but with the will and persistence to have twitched this lifeless project into an active mode. She doubled, androgynously, for the authority of the director. There are, after all, many more subjects to be researched than directed. A chequered Hibernian overcoat, studious spectacles, trousers, black shoes. Neat badge-sized earrings to emphasize the delicacy of her ears. Fine hands. The dial of her watch on the inside of her wrist. Time hidden.

  ‘What happened to Sonny?’ I asked. I was mildly curious, but the effort of putting the question was enough. My interest in him had, I found, faded before she could reply. Sonny was out of it. Out of the screenplay.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she smiled; so transiently it was possible to miss it, ‘Sonny.’ He evaporated as she mentioned his name. A shadow slithering across a tile floor. Moisture at the pool’s edge. ‘I do see him sometimes in the corridor. But what’s left to say? We can never decide who’ll nod first.’ Freelance producers, it seems, come and go with the seasons: the realpolitik marches on. Only researchers are immortal. ‘I believe they’re sending him to… Paraguay.’ She made it sound like a one-way ticket. They don’t want him back. Ever.

  This whole episode was cranking into back-lot Dostoevsky. The unshaven beer-breathed trio, in from the river; rancid with boredom. Swamp scum. Drooling, mumbling glossoplegics awaiting their next appointment with the Grotesque. Outpatients sharing a squeaky banquette with their fantasy salvation, a golden-haired Slav. A soft-spoken waif who chose to live and work in Whitechapel; to involve herself with demonstrably
unhealthy material, morbid life-forms. And all to the despair of her family who suffered so much, and worked so long, to escape the place and all its memories. Our children, in one afternoon, unpick the ambitions of a generation. How innocently they enact our unspoken nightmares!

  Jon Kay, ever the literalist, tried to lay his head on Sofya’s lap. He leered up at her. A lost soul crying for a mate to share his purgatory. She made a tiny adjustment to the line of her coat. Kay’s pipe-dream died. He slid floorward, and began to snore.

  Sofya probed me, discreetly, about the fate of my tale, He Walked Amongst the Trial Men, which had initiated all this termite activity: brought us out on to the rivers and railways. (That stuff had been recycled more times than a Brick Lane pint.) It was her business to gather information, to interrogate, to forget nothing. The story, which she invoked, had originally been commissioned by the magazine, Butts Green, a defunct student publication from Cambridge, kibitzed into multinational stardom by the hard-nosed marketing strategies of Bull Bagman, its American proprietor. The magazine, which had previously limped along on a diet of unpaid effusions from E. M. Forster (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn – and anybody else who wanted to audition for Faber), now showcased the hottest properties in World Lit. If you were a near ‘name’ or a future ‘maybe’, one issue would confirm your bankable status.

  But Bull and I shared a trivial secret. I knew all about Bull’s previous identity. He was once a terminally distressed fenland bookdealer, going under the stagename of ‘Mossy Noonmann’. Fame, in the form of a libellous caricature in a forgotten novel, did him in. Put paid to the old lifestyle (if that is what you could call it). Tourists clogged up his cellar, staring at him in disbelief, as at a chained lunatic. And worse: the landlord noticed the long months of rent arrears. The commercial advantages of an instant eviction. Mossy was defenestrated, unhoused, cut loose. Most of his ‘stock’ gave itself up voluntarily to the exterminator. The rest made a dash for the drains.