Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Sofya told Nickoll we’d walk on, ahead of the crew, to the Fort. They had only to can a selection of failsafe cutaways and it was a wrap. They could break for lunch. The technicians wouldn’t, at any price, eat a second time in the World’s End. They were going to shoot off with their Egon Ronays to road-test a place near Stanford-le-Hope.

Joseph Conrad lived there once, I thought. But the only scholar I knew (an ex-postman) who had tried to search out the house, achieved nothing more remarkable than an old man, spitting in a hedge, claiming descent from Tunstall, who — he said — either shot, or was shot by, Billy the Kid. He couldn’t be sure. But it was definitely in the film. One of the family came over once from New Mexico, wearing a white stetson and a string of liquorice around his neck: took photographs. ‘We’re searching out all the living Tunstalls in Essex, England. And then in Ireland.’ The old man didn’t say whether he qualified. He’d never heard of Conrad anybody, not in Stanford-le-Hope. No Poles of any description.

The road between Tilbury Riverside and the World’s End is the strangest in Europe. A bank of earth (mercifully) hides the river. Unwary tourists usually opt for the elevated route, enjoying an uninterrupted vista of mud and tide: the timeless roof-stacks (in slate, mustard, replacement vein tissue) of Gravesend. Distance lends a false appeal. Imagined pleasures will never be sweeter. And yet some lingering masochistic fret sends us trundling down the low road: at the mercy of white-knuckle winos in clapped-out Cortinas, convinced that last orders have already been called. The marshes, to the north, are the training ground for a pack of the rat-hunting undead; who are armed with nothing worse than lead-tipped clubs and blood-rusty forks.

Sofya pauses to take a snapshot. It is certainly a spectacle: this foolishly reclaimed swampland. Let them have it, I say. Give it all back to the waters. Erase these sunken levels, these broken industrial toys. Sheds. Straw bales. Pylons. Ditches. Undeclared violations. I’m beginning to love it. That’s how far I have degenerated.

Jon Kay can’t cope with the size of the sky. He’s snorting like a horse, an asthmatic Welsh cob. Joblard and Sofya are relishing the discovery of a scatter of teenage female runaways, lying in (rag) heaps beside the road, legs spread, auditioning for La Strada ; smoking with little dry-lipped sucks, not inhaling — blowing out a suggestive rinse of bad air, picking brown tobacco shreds, with chipped and scarlet nails, from between their tiny teeth. Self-packaged White Trash hopeful of Russian sailors. Ready to lean over backwards for international relations. By the state of their dress, they have been waiting for months in the couch grass. The set was far too theatrical for us to consider: a promo-nostalgic 1950s blackout. Jon Kay felt comfortable for the first time since we stepped ashore. He even scored an American cigarette.

Manhandling a multicolour bicycle towards the World’s End was a glamorous dyke: a stone-freezing scowl and bellow of greeting revealed the exotic creature as the lowlifer’s lowlifer, Dryfeld. The perceived universe of logical linear progressions was coming apart in front of our combat-weary eyes.

‘Great ass — for a bull,’ Kay acknowledged with a low whistle. ‘Must be the cycling. I bet she really stomps those pedals.’ He leant forward to test with a shaky paw the tightly-corseted pudding, the muscular cleavage of his fantasy. He was lucky to miss. The rest of us were too far gone in civilization to allude to Dryfeld’s startling change of image. He must have grown tired of beggars and golfing tweed. He was getting too well known. Women rushed up to touch the hem of his skirts. Children threw stones.

He had cracked Milditch’s legendary junkshop, while waiting for his turn to face the cameras. There was nothing else to do. He’d eaten two breakfasts. And the nearest serious bookshop was sixteen miles down the track. So he put the frighteners on the junkman and came away with a satchel of trade catalogues. The film business excited him. He was crazy with energy. He out-wolfed Wolfit. He laughed so loud and so long that falcons lifted from the grain silos, to hover like heraldic totems gone, badly, to seed. They’d been brought in, so Joblard informed us, to finish off the pigeons. It didn’t work. Now the silos themselves were awaiting demolition.

We cowered, and pretended that we did not know this all-too-public aberration. Dryfeld was putting the wind up even the hardened drinkers, lying under the warped pear trees in the pub garden; their faces buried in grey alopecic scuff. Tottering on six-inch heels, he gave the best imitation I have ever seen of the Widow’s television walk: the way she reels at the camera, hurdling across hot coals, and expecting some able-bodied male, some promotion seeker on the far side, to hold out his arms and catch her.

The pub was of no interest to the fruit-sucking Dryfeld. He stormed on towards the Fort. And — as he swayed and pitched — he roared out the story of his transformation: to our shame and to the undisguised delight of a party of smutty schoolboys with loosened ties and substance-abused blazers.

It appeared he had developed a fancy for the company of children. Young children. He liked to spend money on them. And hear what they had to say. He could freely indulge in childhood pleasures denied at the first attempt: helicopter flights, picnics, museums, opera — the spread of the city. He developed a decided craving for the position of Nanny. (Eat your heart out, Bette Davis.) Also: he wanted to model the uniform. He knew he had the legs for it. Sadly, he met with a series of unreasonable and unnecessarily abrupt rejections. Most wounding. He was discriminated against. The job specification required the applicant to be experienced. And female.

No problem. Surgery was on the cards, but King’s Cross was nearer. (He was buggered if he’d live with all the other stitched changelings in Hay-on-Wye.) He’d read in the Guardian about a place where you could get yourself done over in an afternoon. ‘It was amazing,’he repeated, entranced, reliving the experience. ‘Quite amazing! It lasted three hours. Assisted shower, powder, underclothes, razor, seminar in make-up. They wanted to shave off my eyebrows. I wasn’t having that. “Tuck ’em under a Veronica Lake wig,” I said. I drew the line at forking out extra for a studio portrait, “built in from the shadows — in the style of Edward Steichen”. They couldn’t guarantee I’d look like Marion Morehouse, so I told them to stuff it. Marched across the road to the station, and queued, with all the other claimants, for the photobooth. The transvestites seemed to be army officers. It was like a regimental reunion in there. They collected their snapshots in plain manilla envelopes; tore them in half, unopened, dropped them in the bin on the way out — and were home in time for dinner. Sheer waste! I’m auctioning mine to the highest bidder from a rival magazine.’

There was an armed guard on the Watergate of the Fort. We were scanned and registered by the red eye of a swivelling, vulture-necked camera. Another heritage prison. Alcatraz among the marshes. Visit the felons in complete safety, and rattle their cages. A day out for all the family. Test the electric chair at a carefully monitored voltage: snug in a pair of authenticated rubber bloomers. Amuse the kiddies.

They’d sold more tickets in the first two weeks than in ten years of boring Armada tableaux, restaged battles, cases of waxworks. The dummies had been melted down and replaced with genuine recidivists. Even as we stood waiting for the machine to process Sofya’s pass, another black-window van pulled up and shook out a stock of assorted Scotsmen: poll-tax refusniks, street-fighting parliamentarians, ginger-haired nationalists. The underground catacombs of the Highlanders were waiting. They had been whitewashed and fitted with pallets. Credit-worthy villains were given the opportunity to buy their own cells.