Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

‘The shock finished him.

‘The creeping acolyte, who was in attendance, hovered like a dung fly, with his “Lord Arthur requires… Lord Arthur demands…” Damp-pitted student, scarcely in control of his own bowels. Couldn’t answer you the day of the week.

‘“I have done nothing, Sir William,” he bleated.

‘“Well, at least, you have done that right,” I told him. Before I sent him packing.

‘“Do not shelter me,” Lord Arthur mumbled, “I want the true state of things, Sir William.”

‘“You are heart-dead,” I replied, “the rest follows. We have done our business.”

‘“Sir, I have burnt my boats. I listened to the councils of lesser men. They led me to hope that there might still be time. I have a wife, a young family,” he whined in my face.

‘“Lord Arthur, your time has been long overdrawn. I came upon a phrase in an essay promoting that grievously misguided poet, Thomas Chatterton, ‘You cannot burn your boats when you live inland.’ Certainly it’s not a trick for the living; but the coffin is the only craft that you will sail in. Good-day to you.”’

The parable was spat at Hinton’s neck, wasted.

They entered the old Templar enclosure by St John’s Gate; Gull, flushed and hieratic; Hinton, dragging his foot, trenching the dust.

Cattle were driven in front of them, sullen, loose bowelled, within sight of the slaughter pens. The gaudy shop-signs promised tripe, offal, meat fresh from the hoof. Grinning butchers leant upon axes. Meat dressed like confectionery. The stench of fear. Sweet stink of guttered flesh. Pelt, horn and tail bubbling in the vat.

But the high clear voices of young boys rehearse the blessings of this newly minted morning. From St Bartholomew-the-Great a wedding choir shapes its cone of glory: sea-gulls under twisted basalt columns.

‘Such purity of sound!’ cried Hinton, ‘such glimpses of the real in the apparent. They celebrate the woman in man. It is surely the heartless and unblemished song of the castrati . The true affinity of sacrifice is with rapture. But what a price! Can it be worth it? Manhood plundered!’

‘It can. We must eat.’

Gull took Hinton by the elbow and drove him, the shortest course, down the central aisle of the great meat cathedral of Smithfield, under the sign of Absalom & Tribe Ltd, under the hooks and lanterns, through the beach of blooded sawdust.

This night place; herds arriving, muffled in darkness, dressed for the table by morning; thick scent of fat clings to the clothes, buckets of dark ornaments, black and purple, glistening pebbles of skin. The animal inside-out. They walk into the stomach of an upended cow; they are lost in its iron ribs, milk turned by terror into acid.

Gull’s fast is soon broken.

They join the bloody-coated slaughtermen in Brown’s Restaurant; plain wood, long mirrors enshrining the market, forcing the doctors, the butchers, the priests into a single moulded frame; hot breath clouding the detail, a trellis of fruits and grains.

Hinton takes no more than a mug of scalding coffee, his thoughts now so completely undressed that they spill, pus from an open sore.

‘I know it was those shrieks at night, like the baying of cattle, helpless, pointless, already dead, those hell shrieks, when I lived at Whitechapel, that banished the self from me. A horror came over me, which remains undiminished after all other experiences of horror: it was this above all that determined the shape of my life.

‘I am a Knight of the Holy Ghost: I felt it as we entered the gates of this city within a city. I am born of the water and the wind.’

‘A fool,’ replied Gull, lighting a cigar, black as lung blood, ‘is known by the littleness of his folly. You, my friend, swollen on excess, are like a dog so maggot-filled that it seems to move of its own volition, to crawl on its belly. Every thought breeds three illegitimates, every illegitimate another nine. There will be so much of you that you will be altogether gone. You are the book, chapter and verse, of your own Apocalypse. I must forcibly restrain you — to keep you with me. I hear a voice crying, “Cover him, crush him, keep him down.”’

Hinton is lost in a cope of blue smoke, beheaded, arms jerking; plaintive.

Gull drops ash onto a wafer of white butter, admonishes, ‘Hurt not the oil and the wine!’

Hinton slumping onto his arm; crushed in his pulpit.

‘We have come to the end. It was too much for my brain. I am so exhausted that I seem scarcely to believe in anything before me.’

He is surrounded. Gull’s three-button coat curtains him, the power of lead, and behind, unseen, Gull’s full face, reversed, King of Pentacles, bull-heads upon his shoulders, rising, black and ferocious, from the rim of his chair.

But still he cannot attain silence.

‘I am on the side of the bad. I hate the good with their meagre sympathy and their fermented intelligence. I acknowledge the woman in man, the meaning of the prophecy, that which has been spoken: we fulfil what we discover. We reinvent what has been, so that it becomes what is.

‘“The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: and upon her forehead was a name written…”’

‘“MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS”.’

Gull was leaning forward, his head resting upon his fists, dull mollusc eyes, unblinking, a stone.

‘Just so. Mystery, Babylon, The Mother. The shriek at night. The midnight harlot’s curse…

‘And what does God accept as a sacrifice? See what He has accepted from the harlots! See the enormous power…

‘The great sacrifice must be made to cast out prostitution. The cure is in a woman-sacrifice, nothing else or less. For what is prostitution but a stupendous woman-sacrifice? Shall there be less sacrifice in the world when prostitution is no more? Not till heaven and hell change places!

‘Prostitution protects and maintains the prudery of respectable women. This is too high a price for virtue. Women cease to be women while they maintain prostitutes to lie with the beast in man, to milk the poison from our desperate sense of mortality. Man cries out, in fear and shame, “I must die!” He shrieks aloud even as he bucks and rears upon his harlot-lamb, dies as he spends.’

‘No woman,’ remarked Gull, ‘is a duchess a hundred yards from a carriage.’

Hinton stared at his hands, seeing claws, knotted, sweating.

‘How little comes of this rancid philosophy, from the softening influence of literature. How little is known of prostitution. We must break Satan’s subtle chains — the self-life. Roll back the heaviest stone from the sepulchre. And who shall perform this? An angel clad in white with heavenly lustre on his wings.’

‘ His ?’ enquired Gull. ‘An angel with an interest in moral philosophy, with a shovel beard, and a nose like a stallion’s bulb?’

‘Prostitution is dead. I have slain it. A woman has possessed the talisman. But I am the Saviour. I have found it out. It will be two hundred years before my work is understood.’

‘My friend,’ replied Gull, ‘you are overmodest. You think of death as a purely human idea. Death is a dimension, like time. Only time can redeem it. You have circumnavigated the theory but you cannot describe the action. The act is to be acted. Or it is nothing.

‘The sacrifice will only be complete with the willing assent of the victim. That time is almost upon us, the time beyond words. If we mistake it — it will not return.’

He breathed: a moist cloud upon the mirror, an eye of breath that slowly contracted, revealing the face of a young woman, floating in the silver; a woman standing behind them, with no hat or bonnet. They did not turn. Red knitted cross-over around her shoulders, dark hair, very young, linsey frock, black velvet body.