Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The dealer, of course, has nothing to do with this. A jest on their part. A warning against fantasy, tale-telling. The gathering of arcane information. Imaginative speculations of no concern to civilians.

I know now that my friend, the over-inquisitive anarchist, Davy Locke, was the one who did not make it off the Island. He fell among Doges. He was worried by dogs. You are looking at what is left of him. I wish (with my life) that he could be reconstructed from that blood porridge exclamation. I know also that from here on in, I’m mute: a stone. A pebble on the beach.

I spent a long week combing the bunkers and the waste-lot gardens before I found Imar O’Hagan, who accompanied us to the Island on that phantasmagoric adventure. He’d lost everything, except his enthusiasm. His hole in the ground had been mysteriously flooded and his flat burned out. He was fanning the ashes with court orders. The trays of frozen bats and snakes, the birds of prey were melting on the floor under a black and twisted fridge. Total extraction. Oral catastrophe. Pathetic lumps of flesh coal, feathers of tar. A death stink rising through the forensic acids. Imar’s still crazy, still grinning. He’s taking to the road. And he isn’t coming back. He swears he’s on the trail of an industrial tunnelling gimmick, pipes that eat their own way into the earth.

When he dropped in at the pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, for a farewell drink, the night before I found him, the landlord had a package waiting under the bar — delivered by hand. Nothing for the studio. A pair of ears and a key, rusted with blood. The full matador’s tribute! Imar was being offered some friendly advice concerning ‘activities incompatible with his status’ as marginal artist, and supplicant on the tolerance of society at large. Our delight in exploring and exploiting the anomalies and perversions of the secret culture (islands, docks, stations, airports, churches) had waned: it was, frankly, detumescent, limp as lettuce. Which brings me to the favour I want to ask.

My project, the grimoire of rivers and railways, is almost complete: its spiritual wellbeing is critical. I’ve gone over the top, invested too much. I’m sure it’s very close to the end, but it lacks a final tableau vivant , a magical getout. The one that lets the narrator melt from the narration. Can we make our escape while the witnesses (the readers) weigh the plausibility of some tricksy conclusion? I can’t carry on; or, rather, I can participate, provoke the action, but I cannot report it. For a whole dreary catalogue of reasons, this has become impossible. Anything I touch transforms itself into a fresh metaphor for pain and anguish, burns those around me, leaves me unharmed. I want to offer you the protection of the narrator’s role: I want you to keep the record of our trip to Sheppey.

You know what this year has been like: a motor-neurone shuffle between surgical wards and crematoria, with the occasional day trip to the Magistrate’s Court or a bookfair thrown in for good behaviour. Now the ultimate blow has fallen and my typewriter, a senile heavyweight I have nursed for months, indulging all its petty-minded eccentricities, has decided to go ape. It’s had enough. It’s sick of the depressive muck and filth it’s been forced to process. I didn’t get my story done in time. My rental with fate was revoked.

Apparently, nobody will touch a Silver-Reed. ‘Pity it’s not an IBM, John,’ they mutter, backing off. ‘Can’t get the parts. Not worth bothering, mate. Only go wrong again in three months, then where are you? Know what I mean?’

Grimly, I started up Holloway Road (forty minutes at the wheel and five years beaten out of your ticker): to the place where I bought the thing. At least, they couldn’t deny that somebody used them. They didn’t have to. They had the perfect answer. The shop was gone. Decamped in the night, with all its booty of iffy keyboards and illicit phials of Tipp-Ex for primary-school sniffers. The site had been grabbed by yet another estate agent. They were staggering in with the palm trees, as I went for a death-or-glory U-turn.

Next, on a tar-bubbling, three-shirt day, to Roman Road. The good old Roman. You can trust the Roman. ‘Bring ’er in,’ they said on the phone, ‘we’ll take a look.’ A blink was enough. I was bounced out of a side-door, a blanket over my head, like some terminal junkie, so far gone he hits the same chemist four times in a week with his pitifully forged paregoric script.

Finally, in raging despair, I tracked down a mechanic, hiding out in an attic off the Bethnal Green Road, who said he’d try anything for cash in hand. I’d have to schlep the monster up three flights of stairs. He couldn’t collect it. His motor was temporarily ‘off the road’. I explained (personally taking on all the guilt, as for a defective child) that every W , every H repeated incontinently, turning my camera-ready sheet into a duff concrete poem.

A fortnight later the repaired machine was back on my desk. Feverishly, I whacked out the first sentences of the twelfth (now never to be written) tale. And was returned a few random lines of gibberish. The keys I hammered bore no resemblance to the symbols that defaced my page. For example: my attempt at ‘From this point, I’ll write by hand’ emerged as ‘ Fff- thjy jfjttf Jjuu yfjtt hy hftu .’ ‘I’m going crazy’ was spat back as ‘ Jf- fjt uffty .’

‘That’s it,’ I said, and dropped the sick beast out of the window, narrowly missing next door’s neutered and basking tom cat. The ex-machine, a set of fat steel dentures, grinned back at me as it fell: hit the stones, and exploded, sending a long repressed spiral of mania sawing through the overgrown weeds, the lovingly transplanted hart’s-tongue ferns, the metal-green dust on unpicked raspberry warts.

But my conscience — stabbed by the loss of a companion who had, whatever her faults, carried me so far — left me twitching and sleepless. I crawled out of bed, crept into the garden, and humped the disembowelled veteran on to my shoulder: to jog through the streets to London Bridge Station.

‘What crackpot therapy is this?’ you ask. ‘What primal agony fad?’(I know you lay the letter aside and walk across to the window to see if the pub has opened. It hasn’t. Carry on.)

At five A.M. the early-morning punters were a heavy presence in the town. If they are not actually allowed to sleep at their consoles, they’re panicky to get back to them before the sun rises — like vampires to their coffins. There might be a flicker in the overnight price of peanut butter. These mercury-complexioned sleepwalkers ignored me. Anyone demented enough to hoist a wrecked Silver-Reed must be coming from the dark ages. A head case. A money hater. Unlucky to see, dangerous to approach. I loped in a lather of self-celebrating masochism along Bishopsgate, past Leadenhall Market. I was in pursuit of a fugitive image from a television documentary about South American Indians, road runners, who chew coca leaves and race (God knows why) in dusty, marathon relays, trundling monster tree stumps.

The journey took two hours and involved three changes of train. (I had, by the way, chickened out of the notion of manhandling my burden all the way on foot. Life’s too short for absolutes. This was an instant penance.) My first taste of Sheppey. We were halted for twenty minutes on the bridge over the Swale, no man’s land, a limbo between the living and the living dead. Too much sky. Wide flat fields; maggoty sheep cropping the flame tongues of blast furnaces. Something evil and mean had insinuated its way into a minor Plantaganet tapestry: had poisoned the natural infusions of time.

Later, in Sheerness, on the streets, I saw the inhabitants as wraiths, doubles, fetches, tricksters. They were bloodless, secretive. They were the humble dead going about their business. A colony of the dead (like the end of Jim Thompson’s novel, The Getaway ). They could not touch me. I wasn’t there. My typewriter floated among them, a levitating soup tureen.