Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Something very strange is happening. I grip the arms of my chair, tighten my fingers around the slats of the table. I want no part of this. There is a remission in the gravity of time, a period of involuntary ‘feedback’. Our script is in turnaround. If I do not resist — I will be written out. It’ll take over, write itself. Uncensored. On this day the river disgorges its dead. I swear that one man, his pockets bulging, crawled from the water on the far side of the sands. He pulled himself upright, feeling his way like a blind man, tapping, and resting on an antique bat. A faded pink cap, tipped forward over his eyes, made him look both clownish and bald.

The stumps are unevenly set. They sink at different levels into the mud, so that the bails will not sit across them. Neither will the ball bounce. They’ve been playing for hours, and nothing has reached the batsman. He is patient, lifting his weapon, and then lowering it again, as each attempted delivery falls far short of the crease. The dead balls are left, buried in the sand like infertile eggs. The players are all so solemn. There is no sense of competition, only of collaboration in an eternally recurring ceremony.

I look down at my glass. I’ve been pulling steadily, all this time, at the gravy-coloured froth; but to no effect. The level of liquid is unchanged. My Leysdown cigar remains half-smoked. The blue ring I puffed into the still air hangs exactly where I launched it years before.

Before what ? How long have I been here? How long has here been here? Long enough to unspool twelve parallel wheels of fate, twelve concurrent dreams? The remote white figures are unburdened. I cannot dismiss them, call them in. A crackle of wraparound noise: wind mischief, a territoriality of birds, unsounded bells; silent bell towers directing the circuit of cooling air. Spasms of gunfire from across the darkened fields. My cousin, the humpbacked ratter, has lived to see the twilight. The tide insinuates itself over the tongue of sand. The outfield has already been squatted by an extended family of diving ducks. An oil-feathered pun, an English score card floating from sight.

I’m weary, burnt-out, blown. I’m sick, I’m tired of sweeping up the parrot droppings from the floor of his mind, but there’s time for one more. One final crackpot theory. I’ll fake the soliloquy, talk for the ghost. Sinclair proposes that a cricket match is essentially a trial of psychic health. He finds he performs most effectively when he is run-down, exhausted, or injured in some way. It is only then that the conditioned reflexes relent; they are inhibited, and his modest will towards failure grows weak. The act of bowling, or striking the ball, fulfils itself without his egoic interference. Writing this book has been a Wagnerian roller-coaster: tree-felling drives, followed by legless first-ball gropes. I don’t know if this proves his thesis or destroys it. But the conclusion must be: the sickest team wins. Wait until this gets out! They’ll be pressganging the terminal wards, digging up plague pits, injecting our South African mercenaries with wet beriberi, malaria, trypanosomiasis. We’ll be a power again. We’ll be contenders.

The Grace/Gull impersonator throws Sinclair the ball. ‘Get rid of it, chuck it in the river,’ I want to scream. It’s his turn to inflict some damage. He counts out his twelve paces and scratches a mark with his (sick) heel in the sand. He checks his grip, shuffles, jogs on the spot, runs in close to the stumps, and lets it go.

For a moment I think nothing has happened. The batsman plays no shot. The fielders are lifeless. A freelance wound, a lengthening suture of red advances from the West, from Fowley Island. The ball — if it was ever delivered — passed through, and on, without harming man or wicket. It connects with, and disappears into, the long rays of the setting sun.

Now there is a quality of yolky golden light revolving in a benign cartwheel along the course that the ball should have taken. Something calm and bright and inexhaustible. A spinning nimbus of maize and bees and song. A bowling hoop of sticky radiance: wasps, wax, feathers, corndust. An Egypt, a linen sail. A spiral of white sand. A waterfall turning back on itself. A rush, a dart, a hymn. And as this pulsing yellow trawl, this phenomenon, bounced across the estuary towards the cancelled land, an umprompted description came into my head. A set of alien words. ‘ The opposite of a dog .’ I have not the slightest idea what that means.

I am without desire, and outside time. I hold my drink in my hand, but there is no longer a glass to contain it. The tide has caught them. I think the sandbar has vanished. It’s too dark to see. The fields close around me. I hear the snorting and stamping of horses. I want to come back to this place, to bring my family, my children; but I don’t want to be here now. I must ring the ladies of Eastchurch for a cab to ferry me out. Until that arrives I’ll just sit here, and keep my eyes firmly closed.

X

The oppressive closeness clears. A sudden violent storm had left the streets of Whitechapel fresh and wet. Sofya Court walked home. She had given the swollen jiffy bag into the hands of the cashier at the Indian supermarket in Heneage Street. To be delivered to Joblard on his return. Her duty was discharged.

‘ HERE AT LAST IS THE GRIMOIRE ,’ she had written, ‘ WHICH WE SO CARELESSLY MISLAID. I HOPE IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO CONSTITUTE A HAPPY ENDING? ’

November 1989, London

My thanks to Mr Shames (of Stoke Newington) for granting me permission to quote from his letters. And also to Peter Riley (of Cambridge) for time and hospitality; as he recounted his memories of the poet, Nicholas Moore.

The rest of the book is not so reliable. Much, I’m afraid, is mere fiction (i.e. it hasn’t happened yet). My journalistic accounts of verifiable newspaper incidents, such as the planting of the eucalyptus in honour of King Cole, live down to the ethical standards of that trade. (You can’t believe a word of them. I was there; but Meic Triscombe, Edith Cadiz and the rest were floating in the aether.)

Professor Stephen Hawking, as far as I am aware, has never set foot in the Isle of Dogs; nor yet the Isle of Doges. The words I have entrusted to him are derived from his published works. (The interested reader will know that Professor Hawking did ‘attend a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican’.) His appearance in my narrative is a (desperate?) quotation of virtue.

I can’t go so far as to claim that ‘this version of history is my own invention’. It would be more truthful to suggest that these inventions are versions of my own history.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to those twelve (unknowing) souls who accompanied me through my grimoire of rivers and railways. They deserve to remain anonymous.