Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Enough . I don’t have to write about this. I see Sinclair forging ahead once more. I don’t know how long we have been walking or what distance we have covered. He has seen the things I have described. I have accepted the things he has seen. Our track is undisturbed. We turn from the Swale, uphill. Climb a stile, and are welcomed by a tumble of abandoned tractors, broken pallet boards, rotting turnip heaps. The safety of unfarmed farmland.

A red car was parked on the road alongside a tyre cemetery. The kind of chaotic, labyrinthine (high-risk) dump kids are instantly attracted by. I needed a rest. Badly. I searched out a dry tyre on which to collapse.

‘Wouldn’t sit there, boy,’ said a conversational mangel-wurzel, ‘not if you’m courting. Some nice ol’ rats live in them tyres. Biggest fucking beasts I ever seen.’

A character in a greasy cowboy hat stuck his head from the car window, and followed it with some kind of high-velocity combat rifle. ‘Farmer don’ mind,’he said. He was waiting for twilight. ‘Best sport to be ’ad on the island. Blow them fuckers’ heads off, watch ’em run for it. Twenty, thirty yards down the road.’ He drooled, and spat. A copycat redneck with a six-pack and a box of cartridges.

What does this oaf think about as he sits fondling the safety catch and keying himself up for the moment when the mutant rats make their suicide dash from Tyre City to the pyramids of mouldering potatoes? He seemed calm enough, and well-adjusted — by Sheppey standards. He may just have been drunk, or waiting for the pills to wear off. He didn’t even take a friendly potshot at us. The man probably voted Green, and worked as an accountant. He was certainly the tallest male we’d encountered. He must have been almost five foot two, without the hump. A potential relative, a kissing cousin.

I led Sinclair up the yellow road by a dozen paces. I didn’t break my stride until I could see the bell tower of St Thomas the Apostle. And so we came at last to an enclosure on which I had absolutely no claim. A building I could respond to openly, without hope of reward — or fear of punishment. A circuit of grass that shone in the afternoon sun, that existed without my description of it; that was suspended from the narrative.

Pale, uncontaminated land. Fields of peas were pressing on the path; dripping from the recent showers, brushing against our coats. I picked a pod and split it with my fingernail. The peas were blunted, squarish and very sweet upon the tongue. The density of ‘green’ that now surrounded us was almost unbearable. Light recovered from the storm, charged light. It called for blood; axe splashes, unmotivated crimes. This was the perfect frame, the correct exposure: the meadow of death. But not for me; it was not my story. Sinclair did not turn in at the church gate. He wanted to see what was on the other side.

IX

‘I used to watch the line where earth and sky met, and long to go and seek there for the key of all mysteries…’

(Prince Muishkin) Fedor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

The landlord of the Ferry House Inn was waiting for us. ‘You’ll have to get a move on, lads. Or you’ll miss it.’ The track swerved away from the flagged terrace of the pub, and down to the old river crossing; where a fancy-dress group stood stubbornly around, as if they expected — against all the odds — that the discontinued ferry service would operate one last time. Perhaps, lacking the imagination for any other occupation, they had simply refused to budge when the ancient boatman retired. They looked ridiculous: sub-actors, professional extras forgotten by the crew — somewhere out of reach of the railways.

I was beyond shock, but the landlord registered my self-doubt. The lack of trust in my eyes. ‘The day of the match,’ he said, ‘isn’t it? The cricket on Horse Sands. Been happening this day since time immoral.’

Sinclair came back to life. He rubbed his hands. And worse: he took from his coat pocket a varnished, red leather ball and began to pick at the seam. I bet he knew all about this, the evil sod. I hate cricket. I despise the hours of contentless boredom, punctuated by threats of occult violence (too far away to be interesting). And I abhor the nagging danger of sudden grievous harm, perpetrated against even the entirely innocent spectator, who is trying to sip a glass of cold Rhinish wine, and dip into a novel of urban mayhem, until it all goes away. ‘The classic art of hurling hard balls at soft ones’ is his friend Dryfeld’s terse but accurate definition. I’ll have nothing whatever to do with this. It will certainly end in tears.

Horse Sands was a shark-shaped islet of river mud that emerged at low tide from the Swale. Apparently, once a year (on the anniversary of some repulsed Viking raid), an eccentric cricket match took place on the sandbar; lasting just long enough for the already inebriated participants to get their feet wet, lose a few balls in the river, and work up a raging thirst. Nobody kept the score. They made up the rules as they went along. They turned out in absurd and unsuitable costumes. And took it all, in the English fashion, with the utmost seriousness.

The walk out to the wicket could be the trickiest part of the game. But the batsman waiting to receive his first delivery in the middle of all that water — wondering if the ball will be flung at his head, or drop at his feet in the mud — has nothing of topographical interest to contemplate beyond a botched prospect of Faversham. The cultivated cricketer (the Fry, the Brearley, the Raffles, the Roebuck) will think of murder. Black Will and Shakebog hired by Mistress Arden to assassinate her husband. Apocryphal ghosts in an unperformable drama. He will also recall, with guilty affection, all those tearjerking John Ford set pieces. Monument Valley. Huddles of wind-whipped repertory faces gathered, yet again, at the river: to praise some arrow-punctured corpse. John Wayne, Ward Bond , the other Ben Johnson .

I don’t want it. I’m not going down there. Enough is enough. I’ll nurse my Guinness on the terrace, and watch. I’m not falling for that wide-angle sentimentality. The rhetorical assumption of a man (shot low from behind) striding out from a square of darkness into an over-exposed furnace of action. This time I’ll wet my lips, keep my notebook open on my lap, and make the report. The narrator cuts the cord.

The boat arrives to carry them over. A low flat-bottomed skiff, paddled from the stern. The cricketers wait at the slipway in an awkward huddle: they nudge and josh, or fiddle obsessively with their laces. A choir of rejected Spy cartoons. There is a bull-necked, waistcoat-bursting man, who has not quite decided whether he will impersonate Dr Grace or Sir William Withey Gull. His chin juts aggressively, but his beard is patently false. A Herculean bat swings from his hand. There is a woman dressed like a Red Indian. Or a Red Indian dressed like a woman. A dead one. Her clothes and skin are the colour of oxidized copper: a drowned and ugly green. She moves towards the water, her arms stiff, raised: as if to encourage the other fielders to close in for the final over before the tea interval. A circus dwarf in a light-brown derby is flicking and catching a boomerang. His face shines with white lead, his huge eyes are outlined in black. He is pushed aside by a limping, cursing man — who struggles to unravel himself from an umpire’s floor-length dust coat. A fantasy nurse, in breathless costume-hire uniform, pushes a heavy bicycle. Sinclair helps to manoeuvre the vulgarly exaggerated telescope of a Pacific islander with a bone through his nose. All we need — and I think we are about to get it — is the arrival of the Reunion , with her griddled pilot still chained to the wheel.