Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

But squatting in a corner, they have all gone, is an American girl, with cropped hair and set jaw, resolved, her own game. Intoning the list, playing back the names of victims and variants, within the range of an identified threat; her own compilation, set against the slow ceremony. Nobody listens. Recording a loop, followed by an immediate chorus; her own voice, unrecognised, as it moves, imperceptibly ahead, as it leads her into what she does not know.

Victims and variants, murdering martyrs.

A tide of ash-textured light climbs against the custodial windows. Her head sunk onto her knees. The tape-recorder, an alien presence, detaches itself from her dim intention. The names have escaped. They tremble and manifest in the dawn air, lifted, a shield raised, not in protection, but to strike, the blue signature of a guillotine.

The bare chamber; a half-circle of smoothed stones around a long table. The table is stone also, is pure white. A cut cube. One man, ash-haired, dressed in black, at the head of the corner. The light from the dome is circumspect, veiled. House of the Hammer. Hidden among gardens, fountains, courts, rooms, stairways, double-doors. Unrecorded secrets. Place of power. Where history is remade. Decisions are taken in soft voices.

Gull waits on the twelve. Ready, willed, to apply the compasses. Breath held; the room slowed, stopped. Gull rolls his eye to white glaze. Tongue in his throat. Hands folded over the belly. Dropping the temperature. Redeeming his time.

He is ready to preside over his own dissolution.

They enter, separate, from twelve unmarked doors. Hooded. In white. White gulls of heresy. Incongruous cowls over uniforms of anonymous power; greys, chalks, lime. The instruments are set upon the surface of the table.

‘I am glad you were able to come to this place,’ Gull begins, ‘you necessary twelve. And now the game is on. Twelve London physicals with not a name between them to call their own.’

‘Sir William, I am Howard. Dr Howard. The names of my colleagues…’

‘Are of no account whatsoever, Doctor. Doctor Benjamin Howard.’

Gull drew a bag from his pocket and reached deep down into it. ‘Would you care for a grape?’

He cut off a bunch, selecting a prime specimen, which he proceeded to rapidly skin.

‘Or would you prefer the relic?’ He poked the crumpled purple scrap across the table. ‘Does it not resemble the foreskin of our Lord? The first drop of His Blood that was shed. Practical people, the Jews.’

He swallowed. ‘I take but little wine, but the sugar of the grape seems to supply the readiest refreshing material of which I have in my own person any experience. Grapes and raisins and water, gentlemen. And with each grape a lesson in theology. From the first drop to the glorious conceit of transubstantiation. This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. But which of you will betray me?

‘You are writing very busily, gentlemen. Putting down your names for fear that you forget them before the end. Do not stop. Write that down. And that. And that. It exercises the fingers most usefully.’

Dr Howard drew the white bag from his head. A young man with heavily oiled and carefully arranged hair, thin on the scalp. Simous nose, snuffling, probably with some allergy; rasping.

‘Do you want to look at this paper, Sir William? There is nothing written, I do assure you, on its outside.’

He slid the top sheet towards Gull. Who did not move. ‘Is the nothing in your own hand, Dr Howard?’

‘There is nothing, Sir William. Nothing at all.’

‘Then it is a forgery!’

‘Not of my making.’

‘ That , sir, is my proof. Who said I could not swim?’

The eleven, the hooded ones, scribble furiously over their papers. A team scoring the scorer.

‘Sir William, your record and your achievements, recent as well as over the past forty years, are too well known to need my advocacy — but we are gathered in this chamber today in the character of a court of medical enquiry; there are matters, at present wholly in shadow, that must be brought into the light.’

‘ De Lunatico Inquirendo . You are a commission in lunacy. You prove your own fitness to sit upon this commission by demonstrating my insanity. Excellent! I have a Gold Medal in Lunacy; I am Lecturer in Lunacy; Fullerian Professor in Lunacy; Fellow of the Royal College of Lunatics; Resident Madman to Guy’s Hospital; Baronet and Mooncalf Extraordinary to Her Majesty the Queen. I rave in my chains; I rattle. The marble is winning, gentlemen.

‘I have been mad for a long time, in a dream of men, of duties. What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly? He requires much more. He requires the truth. I saw more clearly than others. I held that our science alone is sufficient to raise, and will in course of time raise, the human tribe towards a higher form. I believed in a physiological physic founded upon a study of individual peculiarities, and sought not to battle violently with disease but to harness nature’s own healing powers. Discover the essence and distil it! I knew power and felt that it was my own. Mad! Mad then. With never a yelp. I sought to become what I was.’

Gull stood up, walked around the table. Dr Howard rose, hesitantly. To confront the outstretched little finger of Gull’s right hand, which was intimately threatening his outraged nostril.

‘With this humble digit I probed the rectum of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. You notice the length of my first joint? There was only a slight puckering on the anterior wall of the stomach, but his annular structure was so tight that it admitted only the tip of my little finger. The first joint. What do you think, Doctor — that I have not washed it from that day? I have entered the divinity of kings to the length of my finger nail. How many men can say as much?’

The scratching of pen-nibs on paper had altogether ceased. Gull resumed his seat.

‘A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and wine!’

Gull’s broad hand on the table-top. They stare in heat, scorching a print of its outline into the marble. Fingers hooked once more into his waistcoat. Another naked grape, obscenely squelched.

‘Observe the dyer’s hand!’

Gull placed his right hand upon his left breast with the thumb squared upwards. He bowed with mocking piety.

‘Sir William, there is the question of experimentation upon animals.’

‘Never harken to a crow that lies, or a dog that tells the truth!’

‘You attempted to defend, I believe, Claude Bernard who invented a stove which enabled him to watch the process of baking dogs alive. You justified this hideous performance by claiming, and I quote, “our moral susceptibilities ought to be bribed and silenced by our selfish gains”. Of what would those gains consist? Precisely? ’

‘Better prepared meat! I am not a red indian savage. I will not devour raw flesh. If I have practised the necessity of vivisecting animals I have not hesitated to also experiment upon myself. I have watched myself bake in far more fierce ovens. I have seen my fur crisp, my skin crack, my brain burst. And I have had the self-knowledge of what that suffering would mean. I always knew before I began. That is exquisite torment.’

‘In 1873 you read a paper before the Clinical Society of London, “On a Cretinoid State supervening in Adult Life in Women”. It was a justly celebrated account of myxoedema based upon five cases, women from a small privately-funded asylum, under your personal supervision, as part of Guy’s Hospital. In this paper you mention nothing of the thyroid gland and of any experiments in its removal. And yet we have sworn evidence that in pursuit of your own wholly unproven thesis you removed these glands, first from monkeys and later from the women themselves; you succeeded in producing a chronic myxoedema, a cretinoid state, with the tissue-changes, physical and mental hebetude, memory loss, the alteration in excretions, temperature, and voice. But, by as late as 1888, no practical use has been made of these barbarously achieved results.’