Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Kay laughs. An ugly sound. And we laugh with him. His foot, with a misplaced twitch of morphic resonance, drums against our red can: the one I lugged through all the recobbled walkways of Gravesend. The twin pictures begin to fit rather too neatly together. Gravesend, having no viable present, needs somewhere else to go. ‘The can’s like a primus, right? My mate’s wearing cutoff jeans. He’s scalded. Jumps in the air. The cap blows. The can hits the ground. Wow! I’m drenched. And he’s pissing himself, my mate. Drops his spliff. Ball of flame? Fried like a chicken, man. And I’m screaming; calling him every name in the book. Five months in some shitty clapshop in Naples. They peel my ass. The arms never took, did they? Stayed wet. But the tattoos came through. It wasn’t a total disaster.’

After that, we drank in silence. A rusting container hulk, the Paul Kelver , Liberian-registered, ghosted like a phantom down the deepwater channel. Horses were penned in a makeshift corral on the deck: nervously, they sniffed the salt air. Dog food on the hoof. Gamey steaks for Belgian tables. Spavined ragoût , retired from the shafts of brewers’ floats.

Pocahontas didn’t want to go ‘home’. This was where they carried her ashore. She knew there was no passage back down the river. No way to re-enter the womb, without dying. The first seal had been broken. The waters had burst. She could never be readmitted to the society of the forest. She was crossed, baptized in holy water. She was another. She was Rebecka, ‘daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan, Emperor of Attanoughkomouck’. It was her husband, John Rolfe, the established man, who was forcing her. She had become the prestige symbol of the Virginia Company: the silver band on a cigar, a cigar-store Indian. She was more potent as a symbol than as a living woman. Her husband was willing her death. He was colluding with darkness.

Coming into a strange land, she was installed at the Belle Sauvage, Ludgate; where William Prynne the pamphleteer denounced the performance of the Tragical History of Dr Faustus , with its ‘visible apparition of the devil on the stage’. A time of freaks and harbingers. The Scottish showman, Banks, exhibited his silver-shod horse at the same inn: walked it up the short hill to old St Paul’s, where it succeeded in climbing to the top of the tower. (A horse with the eye of a crow? The river, once only, a horse map?)

London was posthumous. She had dreamed it. A child in the forest. Trees became the pillars of a great court. Gods appeared, painted in gold-and-white lead; shining, buried in layers of stiff cloth until they could scarcely move. The sun, the moon, and the stars were trapped upon a ceiling of overhanging branches: dark, feathered arms.

Twelfth Night, 1617. Pocahontas attended the court masque. Ben Jonson. She was accompanied by her stone-faced warriors, the Chickahominies: scornful, proud, holding to the costume of their tribe. The Indian Princess was modest; correct in manner and dress. She maintained an unsurprised dignity before these spectacles of savage transformation: she-monsters delivered of dancing puppets, clouds that spoke in rhyme. She was initiated into the mysteries of new and dangerous gods. It was the price of the bargain she made so many years before: when she reached out her hand to touch the apparition of a stranger.

John Smith was the first. But not her husband. She had been eleven years old when she saw him. He would not live by what he was. He would not live by what she knew him to be. The memory of the forest is not a recent memory. Memory is recognition. The people know this. Fate is memory, memory fate.

Returned to his own country, Smith delayed his visit. There was an awkward interview at Brentwood. ‘You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason, so must I do you. Were you not afraid to come into my father’s Country? Did you not cause fear in him, and all his people? And fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then, I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other.’

Betrayal. What is spoken cannot be unsaid. ‘Your countrymen will lie much.’ But when their word is given in the way of business, they believe, it can be taken back. It will not stand. They look for interest, returns. Circumstances alter cases, they say. Each day is new. We wake to a different sun.

For Pocahontas, all this is heresy. A promise is a contract honoured to the final breath. Her beauty was in strength. The firm set of her mouth. The broad nose. Her features held no appeal for the courtiers, the men of affairs. Rebecka. Eleven years old, looking on John Smith (nameless name): divorced at once from her father’s gods. Smith was her father. ‘Okeus, who appeareth to them out of the air. Thence coming into the house, and walking up and down with his strange words and gestures.’ His presence revealed by freak winds, or ‘other awful tokens’. Her desire for him gave him a human shape, an outline she could bear. He came to the forest. He sat at the strings of the death-cutter with Purcell and Mullins. He spoke whatever it was they feared most to hear.

John Rolfe carried her aboard the George , in enforcement of duty. Along with their young son, Thomas. She was his to command. She knew she would die of it. Rolfe brought a dead woman on to the vessel. The houses of the city were grey, limed, huddled: a graveyard. Downriver: the fortified places, the church at Erith. The bleak marshlands, treeless, offered no cover for the spirits.

She was sinking. Lifted ashore in great pain at this hithe. We step aside, make room; we watch. She passes us: carried to the Inn on a seaplank, by four sturdy sailors. Another corpse, beached and scrubbed. Another narrative claimant.

The shadow of the statue in St George’s church fell across her window. A replica of William Ordway Partridge’s Jamestown monument. More Hiawatha than daughter of Powhatan. Single feather, arms open, palms spread: making entrance in some lumberjack operetta. She was divorced from herself. There were two of her.

She opened her hand on the flowered bedspread. Stone entered her heart. What she was offering could not be accepted. The city was half-born, unmade. A plague dish. Let her become a charm against fever. Let her preach a quiet ruin upon the dockyards, the timbers. Soon the forest will march back to claim her. The sap to varnish her cheek. Her breath is wood smoke.

Our fuel tanks were topped and ready. We were invaded by waves of shame and courage, fear and anger: an inhuman desperation. (Like reading a letter from one of those unloved poets who turn rejection into full-blown martyrdom by way of the correspondence columns of the TLS .) ‘Let’s do it,’ said Joblard. ‘Let’s try for Sheerness.’

Together we dragged Jon Kay aboard. If necessary, we would lash him to his own wheel: like Dracula’s helmsman. We no longer needed a pilot. We were hot to quit this final landfall. The taint was choking us. There was no more protection in wood and plaster. No tax shelter in memory, in other men’s tales. Out then, out on a running tide. Eastwards.

The engine fired at the first touch of the rope. The Reunion , with previously suppressed reserves of omphh, surged gratefully off the chart. There were no maps for where we were going.

IV

The ductile spread of the waters cooled, in a moment’s narrowing of the diaphragm, into a blanket of unrelieved latex. The pluck and suck that gives fair warning, but does not slow our progress.

Now there were only container ships, hugging the Essex shore, blocking out the oil refineries: Mucking Flats, Lower Horse, Deadman’s Point, Canvey. ‘Cowards!’ howled the resurrected Kay. The tide was with us. The wind. The light. We were expelled, cut loose. Good riddance, said the stones. There was nothing to go back for: the world disappeared in our wash. We skated on the edge of an abyss. Jon Kay had his hands on the wheel. He spat in the face of the Furies. He’d already taken off his dark glasses and flung them over the side. With his winking lidless eye, he looked a thousand years old. His flapping tent-show skin. He was something carried in a cardboard box from the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields. He grinned like a mummy. His teeth were black wood. He haemorrhaged sawdust from every seam. He had locked himself totally into some older journey. Outfoxing the coastguard: Harry Morgan off the Florida Keys. GOPHER IT! We had run beyond our permissions. We were bouncing towards the mystery of Sheerness. It was written. Fate.