Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The light was infected, a bead curtain of airborne droplets. It was bad light. Bugs burning up. You could smell it. The peculiar intensity of a sunstream revealing a circle of jungle floor better left in dampened shadow. Things crawled. White eyes flashed beneath the wavelets. The clouds were at war, split by the beams of heavy searchlights. Smoke solid skies, bone smoke. Foreclosing this petty adventure. The river became all rivers. The James, the Congo, the Amazon. Eliot’s Mississippi. Let the green vegetation creep down the banks. Let it smother the storage tanks. It will not yield. The river is the agent of transformation.

‘Is that the Isle of Grain?’ I pointed to a headland that shone on the distant Kent shore. Nobody knew. It was unreal, a promise. It could be the beacon at Egypt Bay. It could be Allhallows. The light played with our expectations; offering a visible destination at which to aim our craft. It was all too easy.

Against all mythic prohibitions, I looked back. Black gouts of engine oil were gushing from the outboard into the water. A torn shark. Surely, I thought, this is not right. This shouldn’t be happening. I nudged Joblard. We were bumping against something. Jon Kay had fulfilled his potential. He had run us aground.

‘But this is impossible ,’ he bleated. ‘I don’t believe it. The river is three miles wide.’ He gunned the motor to a scream: churning us deeper and deeper into the quaggy filth. With a groan of hurt, and a radical crunch, the propeller-shaft parted from its blades. Kay had done it. Give him his due. He had put us on to the notorious Blythe Sands.

We were not the first. We fought for space in these temperamental paddies, these bury-yourself swamps, with the wrecks of East Indiamen: colonists, convicts, merchants, brides, and rum-soaked soldiery. We hardly merited an entry in the log of nautical disasters. We had nothing to leave in the sands except our bones. Many vessels waited for months at Gravesend: commissioned, provisioned, crewed — needing clearance, a letter from the owners. They came so soon to grief.

An old acquaintance, the Paul Kelver , had anchored on the borders of the sandbank, to wait her turn for the pilot boat. We could see the condemned horses, as they fretted and stamped. Joblard rubbed his hands. Nothing made him happier than the arrival of a long-anticipated trauma. Now it could only get worse. He unzipped a Jacobean gash of teeth.

The fates were in the mood to indulge him. The skies darkened, lost all muscle tone, and fell. They pressed on the horizon, leaving us with nothing to admire but a thin mercury column. We were imprisoned in a radiation helmet, a black chimney of soot. We were blinking at what was left of the world through the slit of a visor. A wind of hate rushed past us, spitting and gobbing, kicking green water over our bows. A sheet of rain (a rain hoarding), solid as steel, swept towards us from the open sea.

‘Can’t we pull ourselves out of here?’ I asked, bright-eyed as a Rover Scout. ‘Isn’t there a rope?’ Kay cackled until he shook. His eyes were rolling like lubricated bearings. His single lid shorted and twitched. He drooled. He knew it was all over. This was the image he had spent his life searching for; driving through deserts, begging for mayhem. This was IT! To run aground with two blustering inadequates in the middle of the widest stretch of the Thames, the tide on the turn, head-on to a gathering storm. A storm? A storm among storms. The storm.

The winds were the Vessels of Wrath, named vortices of bad will — self-inflicted, and gaining in strength. Rushing (fleeing) into the vacuum of our fear. They did not hesitate to expose all our defects: greed, violence, jealousy, hatred. We had left behind the safe harbour of boredom and complacency, we were defenceless. We saw, in this personalized weather, all the things we had never quite dared to imagine.

Rain stripped us in a hail of blades. Our shirts were rags. Joblard’s orange (distress flare) jacket stuck to him like an acid-attack skin. We were drowning where we stood. But I didn’t want Jon Kay for company on that journey. I decided to go over the side. I pulled off my sodden corduroys, and jumped.

The water came halfway up my things, and the sand was firm. Joblard, lurching like King Kong with a migraine, followed me. He had lost his spectacles and was blind to the horrors that surrounded him. He could have gone under and never noticed it. He grabbed a boat hook, wrapped the tow rope around his shoulder and took off in the general direction of Norway: a deleted icon of St Christopher as a sumo wrestler. I shoved at the stern. The boat had taken plenty of water: rain was filling it like a moulded birdbath. But it moved. It shifted.

Jon Kay sat on the cabin roof, tailor-fashion, and watched us. The calm epicentre, the target. He was crossing the desert again. (Sand to water. Water to sand.) The rope stretched out. Joblard vanished, deep among canyons of rearing swell. Waves broke over his head. He roared. He shouted something we could not hear. For a moment, we glimpsed him again, clinging crazily to his staff: blowing and swallowing and gasping for breath. Broken spears of lightning pitched from the black skies. Antlers of white fire. Cracks in the glass. Sounds of rending and tearing; ripples of thunder. The night guns were all blazing, booming and echoing. Stereophonic shock waves tagged the mucoid dome: bringing to life the theoretical fire pattern of the shore defences. They fizzed and short-circuited in sprays of pinball madness.

One of the horses, driven to risk everything, smashed free of its pen and plunged from the side of the pitching container ship. It was immediately lost in deep water: swimming or drowning. The elements were all assembled for a minor apocalypse. They posed, daring some fool to try and describe them.

I left the Reunion and fought my way towards Joblard. The sea was now the darkness of ignorance. I saw Jon Kay in a sequence of flash frames, lit by strokes of lightning. Electrical anomalies played tricks with my vision. I saw two men in the boat. Kay was crouched in the stern, trying to coax the outboard into life, frantic to escape from the thing confronting him on the cabin roof: a second, and more convincing, portrayal of himself. This minatory being was cross-legged, webbed in a graft of inky shadows. His wet hair rose into stiffened peaks, horns. His finger pointed in accusation at the heavens. Kay saw himself as the Beast, the Other: the Stranger in the cutter, Okeus, John Smith, Spring-heeled Jack. The names meant nothing. He had run out of aliases.

The stranger’s long arm hung over the side, obliterating the ‘E’in the boat’s title. Jon Kay had undisputed command of the motorized ashtray, Runion . He cowered like the sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap. From the Scottish play. He waited on the coming of the witches, the bearded women.

Then the lightning found its target. The irritation of the matchbox television, still flickering its feeble interference, guided the jagged discharge towards Jon Kay’s trouser pocket. The Runion was a fireball. Cheap plastic wrinkled, and contracted like an anteater’s mouth. Kay was on his feet, naked, winged with flame. Wrestling his double. He was magnificent. He soliloquized defiance. Holding and damning. The scorched skin justified, at last, its pensioned deformity.

‘So there you have it,’ as Fredrik Hanbury would say on ‘The Last Show’, wrapping up some number on how water resists all attempts at privatization. Is provoked. To answer back. With an anti-commercial, in which we have a featured role. Bottomless budget. The camera becomes an industrial vacuum cleaner, sucking down the skies, draining the sea — and all its flotsam.