Iain Sinclair - Downriver

An irregular bombardment shook the skin of the river, pitching the Reunion like a runaway rocking horse: lifting crows from their cover. But none of the anchored dead march of their own volition on to the beaches. We are the only craft to suffer this repeated concussion.

Something happens with the draw of time. With names. The Alice . Fleeing from the extreme interest of Lewis Carroll (weaving a labyrinth of mirrors for his English nymphet) into the tideflow of Thames. ‘Can you row?’ the sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting needles . Dodgson. Dodge-Son. Out on the river with another man’s daughters: Lorina, Alice, Edith. ‘Edith’ rediscovered as the Tilbury — Gravesend ferryboat. Edith Cadiz.

I was returning from the Children’s Hospital in Hackney Road, looking at the waxy yellow (Wasp Factory) light of the windows reflected in a newly dug ditch of water (a future wild-life habitat). I was brooding on the character of a fictional nurse: caring, competent, driven by her obsessions. Another (dream) life as a Whitechapel prostitute. Neither role cancelling the other. And, as I ran home along the southern boundary of old Haggerston Park, I noticed the name plaque of a street that no longer existed, weathered to the high brick wall. Edith Street, E2 . Only the names survive; riding the tide of history like indestructible plastic. Without meaning or memory. Alice, Edith: the unplaced daughters.

If you need to understand nineteenth-century Southwark, you must float downstream to Deptford. The old qualities migrate, drift like continental plates, move out from the centre: rings on a pond. The faces Dickens saw in Clerkenwell are lurking in Tilbury junkshops. De Quincey’s Greek Street chemist is a Travel Agent in Petts Wood. Everything escapes from its original heat. That is why, in error, I located the fatal encounter of the Princess Alice and the Bywell Castle , midstream, off Gravesend; which was, by historical record, merely the point of embarkation. Rosherville Gardens. No trace remains. The passengers, waiting to go aboard, were already dead. A few songs, a fine sunset. It was over. But nothing is lost for ever. It slips further out, abdicates the strident exhibitionism of the present tense: lurks like a stray dog, somewhere beyond the circle of firelight.

Subdued, the Reunion came into Erith Reach, like Purcell’s cutter: heavy with corpses. I relieved Joblard at the wheel. The sky was a darker ocean, livid with portents. Our faces were stinging and raw. Red-cheeked as schoolboys. As brides on the staircase. There was an immediate surge of bliss. A connection with other voyages. Our small craft bucked over gentle waves, a sheep in open pasture: we had escaped. We had left behind the dense pull of the city, the bad will (hating, fearing) of a huddled and grasping populace. Channels of beaded sunlight opened their doors to us. We had only to follow.

Erith Rands. To starboard: the cluster of an old sea town, its slipways, gardens, taverns. A municipal facelift that had fallen behind on its payments. Then marshlands, horses; the revolving radar beacon at the mouth of the Cray. Crossing my own path. An unlucky thing? An accident? I saw myself plodding along, buoyant, grim-faced, quest-hungry — carrier bag in hand, map and camera. ‘It’s too late,’ I wanted to shout. ‘That story never worked out.’

I saw the hieratic river gate, like the entrance to a flooded temple. The local storm gods crowded above, perched like calligraphic crows. They assaulted the entablature, but were unable (as yet) to break through. The framed window of light shone with columns of grey and silver. It wouldn’t last. It was a flaw, a fault, a forbidden glimpse. This presentation of emptiness was the (lost) third section of Nicholas Moore’s ‘Last Poem’. Words. They were not his words, but they came into my mouth. Uninvited. I spoke them aloud, startling Jon Kay, who tongued his spliff, swallowing the hot worm of ash in a small crisis of heartfelt loss. ‘Remember me.’ Remember me . The only goal worth striving for, William Burroughs has always stated, is immortality. Remember . The museum of memory. No more than that. Gardens of river wheat. Feathers of golden truth. Another path opening; a meandering tributary to the ocean of the world’s business. A possibility. I remember. Charles Stuart, on the scaffold — to Bishop Juxon. ‘Remember.’

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.