Iain Sinclair - Downriver

But my loss has to be exchanged: the wet green stones become mirrors of transformation. Sinclair (the watcher) is the true orphan. His father dead — and his mother, apparently, detached into a mental realm to which he is denied all access. A dream country where the landscape of childhood is trespassed by a son who is older than her father; a place where unavoidable damage occurs, heals, readies itself to strike once more. Familiar gardens are made awkward by the presence of a one-legged dog. There are afternoon encounters with condescending royalty. ‘I’m so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.’

It is clear. He is the solitary. A deep black pool has spread out between himself and his ancestors. They are benevolent, remote; but they no longer see him. He does not interest them. He is alone. And yet — at the same time — because he led me here, my own sense of family and belonging is so intense that I can turn on my heel, walk away, and never again need to look back.

V

The vicar who had posted in the porch his ‘Seven Reasons Why Women Should Not be Ordained as Priests’ simply did not notice us. He cannoned into me, and recoiled with a leap of undisguised horror. The notion of anyone wanting to poke about in the building before banking hours was abhorrent to him. As always, the Church Commissioners had appointed a Harvard Business School jock to neutralize a site that could, however remotely, be connected to folk memories of ritual and mystery. Medieval shrines are invariably guarded by an unenthusiastic dogma; a plodding sense of responsibility towards the world at large, and nowhere in particular. The further Synod can remove their prayer-negotiable problem from any sanctified enclosure, the deeper their concern. Ethiopia, Mexico City? Always worth a poster. The church is a multinational octopus in the process of rationalizing UK branches that refuse to pay their own way. Our hypermetropic iconoclast obviously loathed every last legend-infested stone of his inefficiently designed and expensively lit workspace.

I sat on a chair near the De Shurland tomb to excavate my feet, plaster over the showier blisters. It was difficult to adjust to this concentrated atmosphere. The light was dust. The church itself an ivory sepulchre. I steamed like a gun-dog brought in from the marshes. Shurland ignored me. He had worse problems to consider. He lay on his side, back to the world; his legs twisted in the rigours of an attack of acute appendicitis. He offered his cheesy skirts to the penknives of amateur calligraphers. At his feet, well within kicking distance, was the mantic skull of Grey Dolphin: his death, his familiar.

This was certainly a curious object, uncontoured by generations of hot hands — like the buttocks of a much-loved public lady. The relic had been fondled into a high-definition sheen: irradiated. It could have served as a lantern for primitive amputations. It gave off a talkative, smoky-grey light which had the capability of penetrating flesh and all of its shadows. But it was mutilated. The spiked ears were gone: enforcing silence, releasing other attributes. The long skull was a bandaged hammer. It reminded me of something I once made, based on a study of Siberian horse sacrifices: but which had subsequently disappeared. And was therefore a special favourite. The Minster carving looked more like a sick crocodile than a horse. A crocodile imagined by someone who had only read of such creatures. A blind craftsman working from distantly relayed messages must have made it. A mail-order croc. The rictus of its fat-lipped mouth had been most unnaturally extended by the Swiss Army knives of boy scouts, frustrated by an annoying scarcity of stones in the hoof. This was a talking horse; a wiseacre, bridled into silence. If I gazed long enough at the skull I would find myself stuck with transcribing and interpreting its miserable monologue. (I knew it would sound like a choric wail of poets, blathering about the Arts Council, the metropolitan critical nexus, the iniquity of publishers’ readers.) I avoided the dead eyes; pebbles hammered into sockets too tight to hold them. The head was spooked, triggered. It was open for consultation.

Worse was to follow. I glanced from my exposed and swollen foot to the leering equine skull: the connection was unavoidable. There was a close family resemblance. My foot, neatly severed and dipped in plaster of Paris, could stand in — sorry! — for Grey Dolphin, when he takes a sabbatical to roam the shingle. And there is something else: the wretched caput is a three-dimensional map of the Isle of Sheppey. The split of the mouth is the Long Reach of the Swale. The right eye is the hill of Minster. The left eye, distorted by the angle from which I view it, marks the still sacred church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty; once a separate island. And now the last refuge of the light. A blinding flash from Sinclair’s camera scorches the dim recess. The skull winks.

I’m catching his madness. I’m starting to believe what I see; or — more accurately — I’m starting to see what I believe. The three-dimensional map is a conceit. The head is no more than a topographical model of what the island should be. A model to which every pilgrim has contributed by scratching his rune into the chill flesh, or cutting his initials into a ploughed field. Mutilate the horse’s stone skull and you mutilate the living earth. The land is forbidden to respond.

Sinclair is lurking behind me, somewhere in the shadows. I am articulating his vision: that is the effect of his silence. I am forced to remember another map, so detailed we could have dug it out of the ground and used it for navigation.

It was the first anniversary of the planting of the eucalyptus tree in memory of the Aboriginal cricketer, King Cole. Sinclair insisted on dragging me all the way along the line of the railway track from Shoreditch to Meath Gardens, dodging among industrial properties, schoolyards, gaunt estates: we held firm to our elevated ladder of sparks, as to a great tribal river, an uncompleted folk song. I told him it was pointless. We were wasting time better spent in the Roebuck. The tree would be uprooted, torn to ribbons, scattered to the winds. This did not matter to him. Once he had adopted (‘written in’) a site, he was bound, in honour, to revisit it: that site had become a repository of meaning, a place of consultation. A blood relative.

A soft rain was falling as we passed under the arch and into the old burial ground. Strange atmosphere. The earth furrowed, twisted, shaken; lashed by some trapped dream-demon. (A caterpillar released from physical laws? A lizard quicker than light?) This slowing of time gave a momentary illusion of calm, soon replaced by a genuine fear of vast serpentine energies held in reserve.

Sinclair felt that we had been readmitted to the day of the original ceremony. Which itself rehearsed earlier ceremonies. Respected future acknowledgements. The trees were a dominant gathering, a parliament of presences: shaped, trained, set free to find their own forms. They ventriloquized the wind. Malign cartoon spirits shuddered among the agitated leaf scales. A priapic mouse-head was grafted on to the torso of a bear.

And I was, as usual, quite wrong. The eucalyptus survived. But the plaque, which Sinclair told me had been screwed into a wooden block beneath the tree, had vanished. He showed me the photograph when we went back to his house: ‘In memory of King Cole, Aboriginal cricketer, who died on the 24th June 1868.’ This might be the only surviving record; slightly out of focus, the pious blessing lost in dreamtime. No casual stroller will know the origin or meaning of this alien tree. The park itself is remote, shunned, hidden behind the mean energies of Roman Road.