Iain Sinclair - Downriver

It’s a pleasing thing to sit on an old brick wall in the early-spring sunshine — the grass cut, the sepulchres cleared of weeds — and watch a lunatic wrestle with a clock. His heels kicked among the Roman numerals, causing them to crash like shrapnel on to the path below. The man persisted, against all nature. What was left was now worthless. But that did not quell him. He was in a man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball duel with time. And he was losing every round. He aged with every swoop of the rope pendulum. The creature they would siphon from the shrubbery would be less than the dust in a beaker of impacted cockleshells. No joy here for the resurrectionists.

Finally, the man snapped; put all his weight on to the minute-arm of the clock, and succeeded in forcing it out, horizontally — so that it pointed in accusation at the watchers on the wall. Time, which had been costive in Limehouse since the First War, now leapt into another dimension. It attacked. Smoking lines of longitude surged back towards the Greenwich meridian. The rulebook was shredded. The arm broke away. It plunged; embedding itself in the soft earth, like the lost Spear of Destiny. (Joblard had it wrapped in billiard-felt, and tied to his bicycle, before it stopped quivering.) But the defenestrated villain was left helpless, suspended by his ankles — an impatient suicide, a bungler — tangled in a web of sisal. He substituted for the missing clock-arm. He marked the scarcely perceptible passage of time for the citizens of the borough, the immortal community of vagrants. They studied him, furtively, through the dark glass of their liquid telescopes: brown apertures of serially emptied cider bottles.

These were still the good old days when the vicar chose to spend his afternoons hearing confession in the Five Bells and Bladebone. We had, wisely, taken the precaution of getting the church keys copied. We had access. We were the unofficial sextons and celebrants. Unhurried, we climbed the tower and hauled our man in. Jon Kay ( aka , Paul Pill; aka , Harry Whizz) was not especially grateful. He did not allude to the affair or to his failure in it. He had moved on. The clock was history. And not, therefore, to be trusted. Winners wrote the story. Losers lived on lies. He thought we might be interested in humping the great church bell into his van. He’d worked out a way to shift it, with fresh ropes and a beam: swing it at the tall west window — right? — shatter the opaque glass, the pigeon shelves, the whole bloody crust of feathers. The bell was strong enough to survive the fall. It would float through any holocaust, like an acorn cup. We had only to lift it and loop the rope around its skirts. He’d see us right. There was definitely a drink in it. No danger.

Somehow we hustled the maniac down the narrow bore of the tower, skating in linseed curls of pigeon dirt as he went. He couldn’t be hushed. I dragged him from in front, Joblard kicked him from behind. He yelled as he trotted. ‘A few organ pipes, boys. I’ve got a blowtorch in the van. One angel then. Let’s do a couple of sodding stained-glass windows. I’ll shift them down the Passage first thing Wednesday. Be realistic . A bible! Who’d miss it? I’ll tear the plates out without moving it from the lectern. Gimme a break, fellers.’

As the most recent incumbent, the Rev. Christopher Idle, remarked to the Observer newspaper (5 June 1988): ‘Over the past twelve years we have suffered most when the church has been locked.’ Sneak thieves are the least of his problems. The Parish Magazine shudders with pulpit-thumping bulls denouncing pyramid-worshipping satanists, mendacious television producers ( all television producers), occult tourists brandishing yellow-back Gothic Romances (in impenetrable verse), oil painters who think the church a fit place to exhibit twenty-foot snail portraits (waggling their horns like the legions of hell). All the dispossessed phantoms of lunacy are screaming at the windows. ‘Let us in. Give us a break, fellers. One angel. A piece of the action.’

Jon Kay. How had this prohibited life-form survived? What miracle had preserved him to rebuke these dark days? Some deathbat brushed its wing against his face. He was too far gone to be affected by mere memory. Electrical connections twitched and sparked. Red cells perished as a septic tide rushed into his cheek. Memory, for him, was a form of sympathetic jaundice. Veins collapsed (like landslides) in his mollusc eyes. He poured with sweat and clawed at his palpitating belly. There was a cure. He scanned the horizon (to check that he was unobserved) and announced: ‘I’m just popping below to write up the ship’s log.’ He bolted the cabin door, and left it to Joblard to bounce us over the boiled milk skin of the sun-polished waters, exuberantly to search out the wash from larger and more powerful vessels.

It’s curious how different people notice different things. ‘What a freak,’ Joblard said, as soon as Kay was out of sight. ‘Did you clock his arms?’ I hadn’t dared go that far. I was still in shock after dealing with his face. We couldn’t, either of us, dodge that: the missing eyelid, the permanent wink. (The story came later, but I might as well throw it in. How Kay had sat on his dark glasses while watching a live sex show in Barcelona. How he’d superglued them together again, along with his eyelid. How his mate had hacked him free with a stanley knife. He never felt a thing.)

The narrow band of visible flesh above Kay’s wrist had, inevitably, been disfigured by the usual blue cartoons of flying fish and grinning skulls: epidermic graffiti too commonplace to merit Joblard’s attention. ‘The skin, eeeugh! Hanging in a nicotine flap. A wilted support-stocking. Bubbled up, percolated. He’s had it cooked . And the graft hasn’t taken.’ ‘Who could blame it?’ I thought; not caring to picture the events that lay behind this trivial deformity.

Joblard, in his turn, paid no attention to the detail I’d picked up on: the overpowering blast of the weed seeping through the deck-boards like compulsory nostalgia. Our captain was a dope fiend, and he was making an ominously early start. He stayed below for about thirty minutes and emerged, red-eyed and tooting, to search for a pair of wraparound shades. (O Save us from that Lidless Stare!) He wanted another shot at raising the ghosts from the aether of his pocket TV, the faulty snuff set. He was hooked on some fantasy of pre-pubertal jailbait, squealing Saturday-morning t-shirts: a mail-order catalogue for the Bill Wyman tendency.

We were drawn together now in what Conrad’s Marlow refers to, ambiguously, as ‘the fellowship of the craft’. The worst was surely over. We were Three Men in a Boat . ‘Three, I have always found, makes good company,’ remarked the jaunty Mr Jerome. But he was another J/K (JKJ), and not to be trusted. It struck me that we had embarked on a contrary statement of Jerome’s Thames journey. Our motives were not dissimilar. The trip was a rehearsal for the book that would follow. It was flawed therefore. Impure. Vulnerable. Upstream for Comedy, Downstream for… whatever it was we were involved with. We had wantonly chosen the wrong direction. We would never pull gently, at our own pace, back towards the river’s source; the spurting puddle in a Cotswold field. We sought dispersal, loss of identity: ‘ moremens more… Lps. The Keys to .’ We were fleeing in desperation, in pieces, letting the water devils out of their sack. We could never implode through comic exaggeration into the mildest and most human of excursions. We would never be reprinted. Never repeated and abused on video. We had forgotten our striped blazers and our cricket caps. We were verminous, hounded from the society of men: a bottle of plagues, expelled like Lenin in his cattle car. We were escaping into an uncertain future.