Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I shared the director’s repulsion. But I had written none of this. This chamber had no place in my text. It was worse than even my damaged mind could imagine. I wanted Tilbury Fort, Highlanders in tunnels, catacombs, waxworks, cricketers, the Mahdi. I wanted the World’s End populated with post-orgy catamites and Ripper-yarning clubmen. I wanted corpses to rise out of the river, shrieking in accusation. I wanted the past to resolve itself, and the present to become habitable. I wanted fire angels, warrior/priests, horses that spoke in Latin couplets. I wanted an absence of dogs. And, most of all, I wanted this shifty troop of inadequates to have to drag all their cumbersome equipment into the deepest, darkest, dampest of the subterranean passages: the pools of stagnant air, the trapped voices of prisoners. They should confront everything that cannot be transferred on to videotape. There was no hell hot enough for the man responsible for converting Vessels of Wrath to bland stutters of electrical impulse. (Was I that man?)

The Beta-Cam, so they said, cost £50,000. It was a nasty, flat case on a thin tripod: an executive ghetto-blaster, a mail-order toy, with a trumpet of lenses protruding from its side. And it was useless ten feet from daylight. ‘Sunguns’ had been vetoed by the electrician. His word was law. The catacombs were therefore expendable. The script girl, under instruction, deleted them with a stroke of her felt-tip. British Rail (most of whose income came from facility fees from advertising agencies) wanted £200 an hour to let this mob loose in the derelict Tilbury Riverside station. They sent along a female trouble-shooter to tot up the score, minute by minute, on her pocket calculator. ‘We had Kenneth Baker yesterday,’ she said, looking me in the eye. ‘Beautiful manners, a real gentleman.’

Nickoll now proved he had the essential quality of a great film-maker: the ability to burn money. He was well on the way to landing the Corporation with a seven-minute version of Heaven’s Gate . Questions in the House would certainly follow. Resignations were in order. Heads would roll. The Widow was, at this moment, being fitted into her largest set of tombstone gnashers.

Jon Kay shuffled around the crew trying to bum a cigarette. They looked at him with open contempt. Send for wardrobe. That hair! They were green and clean, and pink of tongue: apple-cheeked, scrubbed, concerned. In perfect dental health. Snugly confident in the overweening freshness of their underpants. Milditch simply turned his back on the nodding time-warp spectre, and lit a cheap cheroot. To blow away the bad memory.

If we hang about, thought Joblard, we might score a free lunch. ‘Don’t forget to keep your bar bills,’ he warned. ‘And any others you can pick out of ashtrays or spittoons.’ Get your invoices in fast : that’s the first rule. And that was all we’d ever be likely to take out of this fiasco. A couple of corn-crusty cheese rolls and a bottle of gassy Guinness.

We retreated. Left them to it. Watching Nickoll work was like watching hairs grow from a wart. We staggered into the Passengers’ Lounge, and sat, spark out, under a mural of palm trees, coral islands, straw huts. It had been executed in a tequila sunburst of radioactive colour: Bikini Atoll, in the shimmering realization of the impact of fifteen million tons of TNT, courtesy of a bomb named Bravo . This Robert Louis Stevenson espresso bar was clearly intended to jolly the cruise victims into the mood for the high jinks ahead of them. Its effect on less well-prepared browsers was instantaneous. We slumped, heads in hands, mute, cattle-felled: contemplating a snap preview of all our best-kept fears. Fallout, mouth cancer, plague, famine, bereavement, premature burial: these were the lighter passages.

Sofya Court, the researcher, sat with us. A human presence, she subtly distanced herself from the rude mechanicals of the film crew. She was a modest exile; but with the will and persistence to have twitched this lifeless project into an active mode. She doubled, androgynously, for the authority of the director. There are, after all, many more subjects to be researched than directed. A chequered Hibernian overcoat, studious spectacles, trousers, black shoes. Neat badge-sized earrings to emphasize the delicacy of her ears. Fine hands. The dial of her watch on the inside of her wrist. Time hidden.

‘What happened to Sonny?’ I asked. I was mildly curious, but the effort of putting the question was enough. My interest in him had, I found, faded before she could reply. Sonny was out of it. Out of the screenplay.

‘Ah, yes,’ she smiled; so transiently it was possible to miss it, ‘Sonny.’ He evaporated as she mentioned his name. A shadow slithering across a tile floor. Moisture at the pool’s edge. ‘I do see him sometimes in the corridor. But what’s left to say? We can never decide who’ll nod first.’ Freelance producers, it seems, come and go with the seasons: the realpolitik marches on. Only researchers are immortal. ‘I believe they’re sending him to… Paraguay.’ She made it sound like a one-way ticket. They don’t want him back. Ever .

This whole episode was cranking into back-lot Dostoevsky. The unshaven beer-breathed trio, in from the river; rancid with boredom. Swamp scum. Drooling, mumbling glossoplegics awaiting their next appointment with the Grotesque. Outpatients sharing a squeaky banquette with their fantasy salvation, a golden-haired Slav. A soft-spoken waif who chose to live and work in Whitechapel; to involve herself with demonstrably unhealthy material, morbid life-forms. And all to the despair of her family who suffered so much, and worked so long, to escape the place and all its memories. Our children, in one afternoon, unpick the ambitions of a generation. How innocently they enact our unspoken nightmares!

Jon Kay, ever the literalist, tried to lay his head on Sofya’s lap. He leered up at her. A lost soul crying for a mate to share his purgatory. She made a tiny adjustment to the line of her coat. Kay’s pipe-dream died. He slid floorward, and began to snore.

Sofya probed me, discreetly, about the fate of my tale, He Walked Amongst the Trial Men , which had initiated all this termite activity: brought us out on to the rivers and railways. (That stuff had been recycled more times than a Brick Lane pint.) It was her business to gather information, to interrogate, to forget nothing. The story, which she invoked, had originally been commissioned by the magazine, Butts Green , a defunct student publication from Cambridge, kibitzed into multinational stardom by the hard-nosed marketing strategies of Bull Bagman, its American proprietor. The magazine, which had previously limped along on a diet of unpaid effusions from E. M. Forster (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn — and anybody else who wanted to audition for Faber), now showcased the hottest properties in World Lit. If you were a near ‘name’ or a future ‘maybe’, one issue would confirm your bankable status.

But Bull and I shared a trivial secret. I knew all about Bull’s previous identity. He was once a terminally distressed fenland bookdealer, going under the stagename of ‘Mossy Noonmann’. Fame, in the form of a libellous caricature in a forgotten novel, did him in. Put paid to the old lifestyle (if that is what you could call it). Tourists clogged up his cellar, staring at him in disbelief, as at a chained lunatic. And worse: the landlord noticed the long months of rent arrears. The commercial advantages of an instant eviction. Mossy was defenestrated, unhoused, cut loose. Most of his ‘stock’ gave itself up voluntarily to the exterminator. The rest made a dash for the drains.

Two months later, and forty miles south, Mossy was riding into Silicon City. A change of name, a change of pitch: he was a power in the land once more. And this time — it was for real! The wilder his schemes, the more the bankers loved it. He couldn’t ask for enough money. But he could try. He’d been trained in the right school. All the 1960s scoundrels were getting out of books and into publishing. Much more scope on a sinking ship. Room to manoeuvre. And, anyway, the Americans had stopped buying antiquarian literature and started collecting imprints, conglomerates, prestige Georgian properties.