Iain Sinclair - Downriver

But Jerome did not set out to provide raw material for institutional whimsy: books at bedtime, television pastiche, fat cats in Portobello blazers too boyishly enjoying themselves. He meditated a grander concept, The Story of the Thames (no less): a journey, limited in duration, which would cunningly open itself to episodic seizures by the son et lumière of history. He would be possessed by guidebooks, architectural jottings, myths gathered from waterside inns. But, as always, the fiction achieved an independent existence that overwhelmed him, tearing the publisher’s advance treatment to shreds. The feeble (premature heritagist) pageant collapsed. The vigour of the past ambushed him at every turn in the river. It was alive, unexorcized. And not hiring out for exploitation.

The Victorian boatmen were ‘real’ characters: George Win-grave (a bank manager), Carl Hentschel (who worked in his father’s photography business), and Jerome K. Jerome (an author?). It was once possible to visit them, to interrogate them on the degree of accuracy in the report of their adventures. Only the dog was a lie. He was the conscience of the quest. Without him, it was all meaningless. Our beast was alive — but we had betrayed him, left him imprisoned within the black Cadillac. Even now he was measuring its air, panting against the sealed windows. He had to survive. This was his story. The rest of us were wraiths, unsound fictions, diseased figments of the dog’s (oxygen-rationed) imagination. If the tale belonged anywhere… it was in his mouth.

Jon Kay felt our panic: my terror that our fate remained a prisoner on the Isle of Dogs. ‘That fucking animal!’he roared. ‘He’ll tear the seats to ribbons. He’ll throw up on the fur rug. He’ll piss into my restored leather upholstery.’ And he made this the excuse for another heavy session below decks, chainsawing the ship’s log into kindling. Now you could hear him draw the smoke to his lungs with hungry bronchial gasps. He was drowning in his own breath — mimicking the dog’s plight. Even Joblard, gripping the wheel like a length of chicken-neck, careering wildly over the river, realized something inadmissible was going on. Six inches beyond the reach of his sea boots.

The cabin door burst from its hinges. Kay was too far ‘out of it’ to work the bolt. He reeled towards us, holding the door in front of him like a barman’s tray. He was in the wrong script. He was looking for the head of John the Baptist. He pitched the door over the side and collapsed in a boneless heap; sprawled, face-down, in a puddle of what might once — at the kindest estimate — have been water from the bilges. We watched him closely, ready for anything.

He was silent for a few moments (the mercury tension leaping at the thermometer): he stared morosely into the ever-shifting depths. The surface was perilously smooth. The glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

Clinically, Jon Kay could be diagnosed as suffering, in one hit, all the symptoms of cannabis misuse/overdose/withdrawal. He was euphoric, relaxed, talkative, disorientated/fatigued, paranoid, irrational/hyperactive and crazy as a tick. A loose-tongued compulsion took him — a returning fever — and he began to rap.

‘We were bringing a couple of keys across the desert. No, Turkey. Was it? Istanbul. Early evening. I had the wheel. Really loose. Handle it with my eyes shut. Sheeew! Don’t ever go off the road there, man! Stay in town. Two wrong turnings and they’ve got you penned in a concrete pit, a ramp. Streets with no names. Dead ends. No way out. And hundreds, hundreds of these little kids… wow… out from the ground… skulls with rats’ teeth… climbing on the Land Rover. No, man! Smashing the lamps. Bending the mirrors. Slicing the canvas. I tell you, we were beating them off with tent poles. Give us cigarette. Fickyfucky. Suck your dick? I’m trying to reverse. Can’t see. Faces. Windscreen covered like a blanket. Termites. And then, then… the worst thing…the very worst…’

It was all too much, too far away. He aborted it. What did it matter? He ducked under; rattled around, searching helplessly for his misplaced stash. ‘Got to get some speed on, man,’ he burbled, on his return, ‘or we’ll never make Tilbury. I’ve handled real boats, boats with balls, boats that jumped from wave to wave. They had to, man. Give the horse his head, or get blasted out of the water.’ He swivelled, arms outstretched, demonstrating the Wall of Death aerodynamics he demanded. ‘Skidded, planed. Right? Sharp curve down the moving wall of noise? Dropping a cargo for the Aldeburgh fishermen. Then — whoooooosh! — away… before we’re even registered on the radar. Yeah! ’

He barged Joblard from his perch and guided the Reunion , with unexpected delicacy, in alongside a rotting red hulk. The old ‘Powder Magazine’, he called her. And he made us fast to her chains, while he tinkered once more with the Evinrude .

Joblard pierced another can; and shut his eyes, wedging the glossy green-and-red spout between nose and lower lip — while he glugged in naked satisfaction. We relaxed and enjoyed the morning. It had been, so far, one of the best. Suspended time. The hours on the river are never held against you. We drifted back and forth, cradled between memory and forgetfulness. Superb clouds, menacing and charged with iron, squadroned in from the sea: continents of cloud, shaping and parting, overlaying the last brave peepholes of blue. The scene was pure narrative, a conversation piece: horizon to horizon, unchecked, a revelation of ‘England’s End’.

We had not yet escaped Woolwich Reach. We pitched and bumped against the Powder Magazine which might, for all we knew, be still active. Nobody had anything to say. We were submerged in the sounds of the tide rushing past our captive craft, and the steady trickle of beer, flushed in choking gulps, down Joblard’s capacious throat. But it was coming back on me. After-images of unredeemed pain. The fixed present was slipping, getting away: under siege from the combined forces of the poisoned light, the solidity of the water, and the low-lying, feverish marshground. We were ephemeral to the singular quality of this scene.

I saw a tier of chained hulks, as they had once been — or perhaps as they were about to become. I saw them as prisons. ( ‘What’s Hulks?’ said I. ‘Answer him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right cross th’meshes.’ ). The prison service was collapsing, overwhelmed with technical offenders, swollen with the evicted mad, the helpless, the demented. Market forces suggested privatization on the American model. But we had our own well-tried methods. We had thousands of years of dark history to draw on. The hulks had been pressed back into service. I could not believe what I told myself I was seeing.

Men-of-war, old Indiamen, burnt-out relics of the Falklands campaign were chained together, another Thames barrier, a malign thunderhead. We lay among them. They were low in the water, patched with canvas, rotten, decayed. The pollution of the river met all the diseases of timber in an illicit and riotous embrace. No name but ‘hulks’ would satisfy this graveyard fleet. The deck planks were cemented by grey-green mosses: spores migrated on to the raw skins of the sleeping bilboe-shod convicts. They scratched, they tore at themselves — sunk too deep in exhaustion to wake for such minor annoyances. Blackened fingernails opened wounds in which bred a pomp of maggots. Woolwich was swiftly returning to its former glory. (A red-white-and-blue illustration on the lid of a matchbox.)

Dissenters and criminals (marginal to the needs and legitimate desires of the state) were once spilled into the wilderness of an unmapped world; where they fought for breath with savage aboriginals. The hulks provided a neutral zone, removed from the land’s heat. To live here was to lose your memory. You could not vote or speak. But the outbreak of the American War of Independence made it impractical to transport these brutalized slaves. They were held in perpetual transit: a floating Gatwick, without the duty-frees. The only destination was death. Which was also the only product of their labours. Dame Cholera. Work was the only freedom. ‘ Punished by being kept on Board Ships or Vessels properly accommodated for the Security, Employment, and Health of the Persons to be confined therein, and by being employed in Hard Labour in the raising of Sand, Soil, and Gravel from, and cleansing, the River Thames …’