Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I was holding a limp rope. I was attached to nothing. I called out for Joblard. I listened. I was standing in the middle of the estuary, neither in sea, nor on the river: somewhere uncharted between Canvey Island and St Mary’s Marshes. It was too far to walk, and too shallow to swim. The direction to follow was the erased track of a panicked horse. The guide whose whims no pilgrim could anticipate.

It’s so hot the Indians have dragged their mattresses on to the flat roof. Lloyd warned us never to set foot on it. ‘That roof’s as strong as a fistful of wet twin-ply toilet paper,’ he said. ‘Stroll out with your post-prandial cigar — and you’ll drop straight through into the supermarket.’

This was probably no exaggeration. I’d witnessed one of them, in his best suit, during the last of the spring storms, pouring wet concrete feebly into a crack the size of the Californian fault. His best boy respectfully held a ladies’ plastic umbrella over his head. When torrents of rainwater (sky scum, washed dirt) gushed through the ceiling, fusing the strip-lights, the cashier had broken open a special offer of candles: then, when the shop was quiet, climbed to the roof and stuffed the holes (mine-shafts, UFO craters) with Pampers and sanitary pads.

The Bengalis know I’m watching them (some of the time), but they don’t care. They noticed me at once. There are no curtains over our window. It means nothing to them. They are wholly absorbed in their own affairs. Video, jacket, cassette. Cassette, jacket, money . The shifts change, but the lights never dim. The noise of sewing machines, an infernal river, never falters. Day and night. Winter and summer. I think we’d miss it. This avian tide of chattering, fulfilled voices. Money, money, money, money.

Some of them, young boys, male with male — even solemn married couples — are spirited enough. If the roof can stand their devotional humping, it can stand anything. Straight off shift and on to a very recently occupied, still steaming mattress: hot for it. Uncovered acts of love, without emotion. Graciously conducted. Few words, fewer blows. Other men — solitaries — lie there among the chaos (the heaving, the groaning), staring up at a narrow rectangle of sky. An older man, a grandfather, drops at once into bottomless slumber. His territory will be claimed soon enough. He does not enjoy the luxury of dreaming his own dreams. He shares whatever is left in the horsehair: laughter, delight, the music of the gods. Inky leather jackets (welded and creaking), polished skirts (in scarlet nail varnish), cattle coats: they pour from the building in a perpetual haemorrhage. A blood circuit, a wound path. Down the twist of stairs, into the open-mouthed vans: away. Up West. Gone.

I always knew I’d come in the end to this place. I’ve no more connection with it than any other. I passed the house so many times in the course of my ramblings, looked up at the windows, making statements I trusted would never have to be justified. But the change in my life has been a magical one. I have to believe that. I do believe it. I have never been so vulnerable, so content. It’s risky: I am finally getting the things I said I wanted.

There’s not much furniture: a settee under a dust sheet (better left that way), a draughtsman’s desk that runs the length of the room. A desk for a team of draughtsmen. Lloyd left this behind, but will almost certainly get around to claiming it back for one of his other properties. You might even recognize the thing. Lloyd featured it in several of his staged photographs. (What do they go for now? What’s the swap? A car? A year’s water rates? Another house?) What else? The usual cardboard boxes and black polythene rubbish sacks. Odd glasses, half-empty bottles, a pram. Bits and pieces scavenged from old performances and reinvented for domestic purposes: an illuminated globe, an oil lamp from the operating theatre in Southwark. And projects . On the desk, pillows of white paper. Sketches, notes, clean thefts. The time to work it all out. That’s what I’ll never have.

The proportions of our room are peculiar, but satisfying. I relish the knowledge that this was once the living quarters of a Rabbi and his family. I welcome the tradition, without the obligations. The synagogue beneath our feet has been converted into a storeroom for sides of salted fish, brightly labelled tins, hot spices. The Ladies’ balcony is heaped with sacks of Patna rice. The last recorded sighting of David Rodinsky, so Sinclair tells me, was in this room: a party of some kind, a ceremony, bar-mitzvah, Kiddush. ‘It was as if he had become another man,’ Sinclair wrote. He found some letters about it in Princelet Street. ‘The familiar self-consciousness left him. He was fluent in Middle Eastern tongues. What had once appeared a caul of sullen idiocy, stood proud: a performance of wisdom that touched on arrogance. He shone. He seemed to know his own fate.’

I’m convinced: the agent of transformation is still active within these walls. I recognized, but did not fear it. I avoided mirrors. I breathed slowly, with comical deliberation. I knew I would have to come back, sooner or later, to this trap. All those years picking at the scabs of Whitechapel, fondling safe (confessed) images, visiting the butchered sites as if they were shrines: paddling in mysteries. I held off the frenzy, stayed out of it, within rigidly defined margins of safety: a well-informed tourist. I faked it, molten orgasms of righteous indignation. There was always another house to return to, a home, locked within never-revealed systems of protection. It’s terrifying how quickly all that can change. A few abrupt twists of fate. A phonecall extended beyond the demands of courtesy. A third drink. I’ve paid my dues to the furies. And here we are, on set, in the long room, looking affectionately down on the business of the streets; or back, the hidden courtyards, the sleepers on the roof. Shameless. I live here. I belong.

I tasted my coffee. The jiffy bag lay unopened on the desk. I had no desire to break this moment and unstaple the honey-crusted package. Sinclair’s runic scribble: it gets smaller all the time. He has to write now. The phone’s been cut off, and he daren’t set foot in Whitechapel. With his bald dome and spectacles, his notebook, he might be mistaken for Salman Rushdie. They’d hack him to pieces on the cobbles of the brewery. The atmosphere has been fouled up for ever. Gang fights. Banners. Burnings. Aggravation. We all feel guilty, guilt as a constant, a hangover of guilt: even if we haven’t read a word of it. There are no sides to take.

The padded envelope, with its franked red exhortation, is obviously a communication from Sinclair’s publishers, used for the second time. KEEP COLLINS INDEPENDENT. ‘Colin’s what?’ I ad-libbed compulsively. Sinclair thinks I can’t punctuate or spell, that my lips move when I read. I don’t disillusion him. That’s one of the least offensive of his fictions. This portrait of me as a genial drunkard (lowlifer, mutant, dabbler in the black arts) is all nonsense: a shorthand convenience. I’m no Jonsonian ‘Humour’, ready for my knockabout interlude when the narrative drive is flagging. But I go along with it. It leaves me free to pursue my own much fiercer self-interrogation. It’s too comfortable to present ourselves through our flaws, to play them up, become clown, dupe, holy fool. Like a type in a medieval passion play, you finish by impersonating a single quality. ‘The Man Who Stutters’or ‘The Man with One Leg’. You are gulled into wearing a mask that somebody else has selected for you from the literary prop basket. You are the failure of another man’s inspiration. I want to fail in a grander cause.