Iain Sinclair - Downriver

This is another of those moments I enter reluctantly, only to find myself overcome: breathless in dumb recognition. We slither down a private road, made anxious with warnings, and are greeted — across an authentic duck pond — by the sight of a red-brick manor house: lifting the unprepared onlooker straight back in to… what? A time that never existed, but which instantly activates all the simpering ducts of sentiment. I find myself transfixed: staring through the rain-curtain, over luxuriant chlorophyll meadows, at the preserved façade; the ancient black-wood door, the asymmetrical arrangement of windows. It works superbly as a backdrop, but it has no substance. The stone-dressed hide is stretched on a framework of scaffolding: a nomad’s tent. The body of the house has gone. We are left with an exploitable exterior for costume drama: a photogenic sweep of wall to disguise the empty gardens. I have no business with this place. Yet I am both grinning and weeping. My response to the dangerous combination of colours in this wind-thrashed circuit of trees is as unexpected as it is absolute.

Sinclair is standing beside me, nodding his agreement. His gouty white fingers too numb to slide open the lens cap of his camera. Our walk has degenerated into a series of poses in the teeth of the English scenery (the weather!): on to which we are determined to project some meaning, some significance we can achieve in no other way. The history of our day is expressed in a morbid checklist of roadside halts. And this is, Sinclair would blasphemously assert, also the history of England.

VII

The long march to the sea ends at Leysdown; or, as I keep calling it, Leytonstone. There is nothing more. The Leytonstone Keys: a scrofulous gathering of subhuman shacks, huddled together in order to limit the damage to a single location. We are entertained by the freakishness of Venice (California), without the carcinoma additives, and without the boringly self-justifying eccentricity of its inhabitants. Would it be ethical to make our discovery public? To endanger this time-warped reservation? Leysdown on Sea is the ancestral dreamsite of a Lost Tribe: all the aboriginal cockney characteristics, celebrated in fiction and in song, have migrated here — and have been buried alive in pitches of caravans, mobile homes, wooden sentry boxes (inner-city privies), and upturned tin boats, veterans of Dunkirk. The displaced dwarfs of Camberwell, the ex-stevedores of Millwall, the draymen of Whitechapel have drifted in on a mindless tide. This is the Last Redoubt, the final stand. Beyond the groined and squelching shore is the German Ocean: a cocktail of mud and filth and regurgitated burger-gristle too rich even for the grey-complexioned molluscs. The now almost extinct qualities plagiarized in hop-picking documentaries struggle for breath on this remote gulag. Walthamstow. Leyton High Road. Kingsland Waste . The dead villages gasp for air.

A cloud of murderous buoyancy assaults us. Nuts us, headbutts our melancholy. We can smell the noise: winkles, whelks, chip fat, the onion sizzle of crematorium takeaways. We are storm-shaken ghost prospectors struggling into town, empty-handed, with no energy to look for the action. Everything is on a funfair scale. As ‘clock’is to ‘golf’, so Leysdown is to Leytonstone. We should have ingested shovel-loads of criminal substances to suffer this. Morally shriven, we can only gape at pubs the length of Brabazon hangers. You’d have to be a shrunken head to relish the atmosphere. Every discount warehouse on the North Circular would have to empty itself into these saloons to make them appear less deserted and terminally sad. Slot-machine brothels pull back from the main drag like professionally vandalized cathedrals: drills of sick light (redgreens), crippled bandits, junk symbols, wobbly fruit, shake-til-u-retch bikes, revolving drums of strawberry-blonde snot-corn.

And what if all this is my true inheritance? Sinclair can enjoy it. It’s so vile he can hardly believe his luck. For him, Leysdown is just another ‘routine’, another paragraph. Break out the showboating similes, the patronizing travel rap. I have to accept the contagious hamlet as part of my story, give it equal weight to the graveyards of Minster. I have the shaming and inexplicable urge to search the local phonebook for traces of my mother’s family. I drag Sinclair, smirking complacently, into a waterfront dive.

It’s a hundred yards long and hires out, in off-peak months (September to June), as a bowling alley. We’re the only bona fide customers. One old man in the corner has died. But nobody’s noticed. We share the space with a coy Rottweiler, who has an uninhibited pork-scratching and fag-packet habit. We stand in dripping puddles, pretending not to be Travellers, while we order our Pils beers with Irish whiskey chasers. The barmaid yawns. She couldn’t care less if we piss on the floor. No Irish. No call for it. Settle for Teacher’s. Our sheltered window on the ocean. Red-felt banquettes. Low, kneecapping tables. Women in dresses too small for their daughters, drenched to the skin, writhe and hobble across the wharf to the bingo hall. Formal hairstyles collapsing into turbans of boiled string. If any of my family are still living here… I’ll walk straight into the sea and finish it.

Sinclair puffs on a cheap cigar and swabs his spectacles on the flowered curtains, while I circle all the possibilities in the phonebook, scratching the numbers into a wet Carlsberg beermat. Too stupid to escape, my abdicated name lives on in columns of strong black type. I’ll carry the beermat away, hidden in my wallet. And one starless night, when the world is on its edge, I’ll use it. The phone in one trembling hand, a loaded pistol in the other.

This is the end of the claims of civilization. The feeble encroachments of humanoid life-forms. From this point on, we are free. We have expunged all our tribal responsibilities. We have marched through the terrors of the morning. The rain relents. I begin to imagine a new light in the sky. And to consider the nature of the final act that Sinclair has prepared for us.

He leans forward in his chair, innocently rubbing his eyelids. What does he want of me? A vitality lacking in his portrait of the island? An engagement he can never share? I am critically exposed. We are the only sentient beings left in the land. There is no protection in the slumbering benevolence of my nature against the warped and ruthless instincts of this man. I believe he would kill us both, without a qualm, if that was the most satisfying way to escape from the burden of the story. But he doesn’t know. Not yet. He doesn’t know how it ends.

VIII

‘Is it still us that all this is about?’

Gert Hofman,

The Parable of the Blind

The rain has indeed slackened to a light and refreshing drizzle. The horizon retreats, and is defined. The stalk towers of an offshore fort appear from the mist as an uncharted hazard. The beach is our private territory. None of the caravan people ventures beyond Leysdown. They are happy to curse the weather, and abuse the pinballs; to drink, smoke, gob, gab, break wind, snore, scratch, and — very occasionally — dangle a fishing line into the water. But the spatter of sewage pipes and the slobbering black-green gunge that rots the old wood pilings has no real appeal for them. Nothing can compare with the gloriously toxic rancour of the Limehouse Cut or the Hertford Union Canal. They have no enthusiasm for a space they cannot dominate. They are comfortable only when the path is sealed by hampers, umbrellas, transistors, dogs, and sandwich boxes bursting with maggot life. Our way is clear. No condoms squelch underfoot. The whole strand could be mined from Warden to Shell Ness. Amorous entanglements are consummated in bucking Cortinas, parked outside neon and roughcast concrete bar rooms.