Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I have never felt half-born, unfinished — though I suppose, considering it, that is precisely my state. Incomplete. An old soul, unconnected to the embarrassing accident of parentage: the spasm in the car park, the shudder on the shingle. There is an exhilarating sense of freedom (of risk) in the absence of this banal information: my father’s father’s father, rising and falling fortunes, a sentimental procession. I hate those novels that begin with grandfather catching a glimpse of grandmother at some bucolic hop. Who cares? They are imposters. Why are they dressed like children? They have nothing to do with the case. They insist on telling us things we do not need to know. The orphan is special; touched, chosen. He can be useful. He completes, for some otherwise unsatisfied couple, the illusion of a family. He gives form to something that is missing. He is desired, but without obligation. He can become whatever he wants to become: warrior, coward, poisoner, priest. He is without guilt. He can even refuse to join the game at all. He can lock himself away; troubled, shivering, never quite in focus.

The chance has come to return to this shunned island, and I will take it, only because… it is no longer my story . But this time you have to accept my version: I am the sole recorder. Sinclair is pursuing the trail I have laid for him. His brute persistence is extraordinary — but predictable. He simply cannot resist my casually deployed hints. He has no independent imagination. No capacity for invention. He recognizes. He begs me to do the thing which can only be attempted in this very peculiar context. It’s a one-off. It is written. It must be. I am writing it. I am scratching away at a tablet of slimy slate to recover what I always knew was there: the text I have yet to formulate.

My life had entered a new seven-year cycle. A lot of clutter, human and otherwise, had been left behind. I was beginning to realize it was not quite as simple as that: I would soon have to accumulate some more. We are defined by our possessions — even when they are invisible. But I felt confident the years of physical lumber (things, memory-hooks) were done with for ever.

I could risk suspending my absolute faith in my own instincts, my treaty with the irrational. Let the past, if it would, do its worst. Let it bury its claws in my heart. If we will not listen to the babble of the dead, how can we defend ourselves against the tragic inquisitions of our children?

I was quite ready to cut loose from my oldest fears, the ones I had fondled so affectionately that they became a kind of masturbatory totem: vagrancy, Whitechapel, alcoholic despair. He has gone, he’s faded, split: the projected figure in the solitary dosser’s room, clutching a tattered photograph of the son from whom he is helplessly parted. Tears running down his grizzled cheeks into a salty beard. Bollocks! I wasn’t going to play the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green to satisfy anybody’s mythology.

My early separation, from the couple whose far-reaching instant of pleasure got me, was neither an accident, nor an act of deliberate carelessness. Why make more of it? It had no deeper significance than my childhood in an unspecified district of South London, my temporary tenancy of an unfrocked synagogue. The only necessity is to stay sharp, stay open, refuse nothing. I was determined neither to remain a prisoner of some fantastical version of my past, nor to dodge the suspect, stomach-churning advances of my future.

Interrupted by some marginal irritation, I broke from my meditation. I wanted a way out. It was boring; it was boring me, I almost understood what I was trying to say. This other voice was in the room: one of those snatches of TV dialogue from the supermarket below that come — with selective hindsight — to take on a prophetic gestalt . In truth, they are meaningless: sound pebbles. Monkeys hammering out, if not the plays of Shakespeare, the plays of Joe Orton. Eavesdropping on the eavesdropper. TV is an endless loop of self-cannibalizing drivel into which we can dive to discover anything we want, any soundbite applicable to our purposes. I’d seen the film before, a deathwatch special: Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen .

‘ Orphans! What are they anyway? People without ancestors, nobodies! ’

I dug out my heaviest boots from a rubbish sack. I filled my tobacco pouch. I found the milk money. I put on my smoked glasses and folded half a dozen clean white handkerchiefs into my breast pocket. I was ready for the assaults of pollen. I was ready for Sinclair. I was ready for anything.

IV

‘Much that lies dead in us is alive on an island of voices’

Douglas Oliver, An Island that is All the World

The first time on the island was a mistake. It came back to me as I plodded through the tunnel between the ticket barrier and the platform at London Bridge, I had been here, once before. In the train, years ago, basted in some unclarified domestic estrangement, I never noticed the crossing of the Swale. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment trips that attempt in their mimed spontaneity to lift a chronic depression, but which succeed only in confirming it, focusing it on an innocent location that is, for all time, cursed and banished from the memory.

We jumped out at the first halt, Queensborough. Anything was better than the train; trapped in each other’s company, with nothing left to confess. The shadow of blast furnaces, smoking stacks, migraine hammers: black air. I choked for breath. The sea was hidden. We skulked around a few mean streets, not knowing what we were looking for, nor why we had bothered. I glanced, with dread, at derelicts, dribblers, dwarfish vacancies — there were plenty to choose from (the authorities culled anyone over five feet) — as if any of these gimps should touch me, my father. A man ruined by a single heated spasm, an alien penetration: one bliss shot. The jest soured. My wife flogged it, relentlessly. I felt no fellowship with these stunted, lightless zombies. These grey-necked turkey peckers. Who refused to cross the water.

We took the first train back; I buried the horrors of that afternoon beyond harm’s reach — where they stayed, sleepers, until this moment.

Now on a damp fresh, late June morning, there was a much more seductive (washed-over) edge to the town. Sheerness, a mile or so down the tracks from Queensborough, is another world. I sat in the grease caff and waited for Sinclair. I had armed myself with a notebook and the full breakfast. Which was superb: a karmic trembler swimming in bacon juices, pig sweat, pressed tomatoes, root gristle, salt-caked pressings of blood, essences of panic. I savoured, at my leisure, a heady blend of greed and guilt. I suicided, slowly. I licked the platter with bestial relish. (Is that close to the way he would see it?) Then I unfolded and reread Sinclair’s latest note, while I punished myself with a second cup of sweet-sick coffee. He was precise: Rendezvous, 7 A.M. He would be here. For a man who never seemed to know what century he was living in, he was a disciplined fetishist when it came to the niceties of time. He could never bear to be late for an appointment of his own making.

I looked up at the brass ship’s clock, bolted to the wall above the proprietor’s smirking portrait: a sad self, twenty years younger, with the same criminal bow tie. Bottom-of-the-bill ventriloquist, professional child molester. The hands jerked obstinately towards the fatal hour. Sinclair sat down opposite me. He toted the inevitable camera.

There has been a distinct, a difficult to describe sea-change in these last months. I’d be guessing, but I believe that after his father’s death he absorbed, or took on board, a share of the old man’s qualities. An immediate laying on of hands. They want you to look hard into the open coffin. It’s part of the ceremony. Something comes across that was not around before: a sense of calm, of slowing down? Ironic observation? But this is coupled with an acceleration in the fever of his old obsessions: desperate not to let time go, sand running helplessly through his fingers. He knows he’s the next man on the springboard.