Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Listen, jerkoff,’ screamed the Californian wife, edging ominously close to a full-blown attack of the vapours, ‘get your act together, or forget your gratuity.’ She wanted to be safely back in their own room at the Tower Hotel before she was forced to gamble on the facilities of the ‘Little Girl’s Room’ in a dockside public house selected, for the worst possible reasons, by their now discredited guide and mentor.

‘You will notice, recently restored,’ the guide continued, unabashed, ‘the actual gallows on which maritime offenders were stretched for the entertainment of the local populace. They were left dangling, bowels vacated…’ (He had the godalmighty nerve at this point, as the wife recalled later, to leer directly into her face) ‘…before being suspended in chains, from that post, to be washed over by three tides.’

‘Why three?’ said the woman. ‘Wasn’t that being a little excessive?’

‘Reasons of arcane ritual, Madame, difficult for visitors from an infant culture to comprehend. The three tides symbolized the three branches of the awful machinery of state. First, there was the Executive. Next, the Legislature. And, finally… to make sure they had bloody snuffed it. Same thing up the road, wasn’t it? They staked the heart of the Ratcliffe Highway vampire. Simple insurance, lady. No snivelling about miscarriages of justice after three good black Thames tides. Bring it back, I say. The corpses looked like cuttlefish. And had about as much to say for themselves.’

The Californian temptress turned her back on him, for a reviving snort of duty-free, Chanel No. 19, Eau De Toilette spray. She was beginning to hyperventilate; and was trying to regain control by essaying a sequence of prescribed facial exercises — leaving onlookers to assume she was about to suffer a quite interesting epileptiform seizure.

The gibbet itself, now being quizzically tapped by the man from Soquel, was no more than an effete sample of contemporary piracy on behalf of the Town of Ramsgate public house. In season, for a couple of weeks in June, it was much snapped, taped, and committed to polaroid. It was located near enough to the true site of the Hanging Dock to provide a Hammer-film frisson for twilight drinkers in the walled garden.

The Californians did not care, at this time, to venture down the steep ramp and on to the foreshore of the Thames for a view of Tower Bridge with the tide out: the curious rocks, sacks, and spokes revealed in the slurping mud. They passed back down a narrow alleyway to their valet-serviced gondola, slotted, so inconspicuously, alongside a clutch of showroom-quality Porsches, Range Rovers, and Jaguars. The guide, following closely on their heels, in case they made a run for it, decided on the instant to scrub around his usual Ratcliffe Highway number: the patron of the Crown and Dolphin had been less than generous with his little ‘drink’ on the last visit.

The guide turned his script, seamlessly, towards Rotherhithe, which was becoming a notably tasty shrine to the Fictitious Past. They could start at the Picture Research Library, where they could admire the utterly authentic accumulation of detail that went into making the utterly inauthentic Little Dorrit . And, if they were lucky, they might get to share a demi-tasse with the lady-director herself. (‘Do we call her Christine or Christina?’ ‘Well, it’s spelled… but her husband. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. She’s a lovely person. She’s got absolutely no side.’) Then there’s the Heritage Museum, the Glass Works, the Knot Garden, and the site of Edward III’s Manor House, presently indistinguishable from a six-hundred-year-old midden.

‘Right, that’s favourite,’ the enterprising nebbish thought. ‘Straight down the tunnel, drinks on the deck of the Mayflower pub, swift shuffle around Prince Lee Boo’s sepulchre — and it’s three fish platters, guv’ nor, and a bottle of Chablis at the Famous Angel.’

Dr Adam Tenbrücke, only yards from the gibbet, went unnoticed by the fact-grubbing tourists. He had decided to take his violet suicide note as a ‘performance-text’ and to give it the full treatment. He slithered down the scummy steps, and hobbled across the sharp stones of the over-welcoming septic beach. His red brogues were licked with green-grey mud. A heavy chain dangled from the mesozoic timbers of the wharfside; part of the décor of an otherwise uninspired set.

Tenbrücke sank down gratefully beside it. He took out the handcuffs and — well practised in these matters — secured his wrists behind his back. He fumbled, blindly, for the large ring on the wall. He was safe. No more decisions to be made. He was bait to the furies: a maggot of chance. There was just enough play in the chain for him to pitch forward. He could kneel, his head on his chest, in the damp slurry. And wait.

VI

I remember Joblard telling me once that as a child he had stayed with relatives in Rotherhithe, among the Surrey Commercial Docks. He had woken on the first morning, wiped the misted window with his pyjama sleeve, and seen through the porthole a great liner of ice — as he thought — sliding, with tragic inevitability, down the street; pressing close between the curtained blocks. Not sure if he was asleep, the boy rubbed his face against the cold glass — until he felt a vein in his cheek beating inside this new and frozen skin. The tenement itself had become a vessel; they were voyaging out, unpiloted, into desolate wastes. He tried, without success, to force open the window. Icebergs were locking on the tide; clanking together, smoking in collision: advancing on the city in a blue-lipped armada of destruction. The Pleistocene was revived. It was welcomed. Bison would herd together in lumber yards. Antlered shamans would carve the marks of power on the walls of the Underground; would initiate fires in long-deleted stations.

One of the stokers, up on the deck, leaning on the rails, noticed the boy watching from the circle within the opaque window. He waved. In that terrible moment, Joblard realized his own mortality. He also could be seen ; his existence was no longer a secret, and never would be again.

Later that morning, with his two cousins, he made the discovery of a ventilation shaft leading down into the Rotherhithe Tunnel. They spent the day scouring the streets for old nails and bolts, lockjaw-inducing lumps of rust; until they had stuffed to the brim several large brown-paper bags. They climbed up on to the grille that covered the mouth of the shaft, and skilfully aimed their missiles on to the huge fan-blades beneath them. The noise, in that enclosed space, was most gratifying. It was the Sands of Iwo Jima, Hamburg, the Graf Spee rolled into one. The scavenged shrapnel was hurtled into the tunnel; devastating the traffic, and maiming a solitary cyclist. The satisfaction they derived was that of the disinterested artist: it was wholly imagined. There were no curtain calls. The perpetrators were already out of Brunel Road and halfway up Clack Street; their socks around their ankles, chortling and punching, distrusting the shrill vehemence of their own laughter.

VII

From that moment, Tenbrücke felt better. He tilted the burden of his head. There was so much sky. Passengers on the river, glancing back at him, thought he had made a discovery: he was excavating a shard of Roman pottery from the shallows — with his teeth. While he looked over at the far bank, he forgot why he had come to this place. He had stopped trembling, and he felt light and, for the first time, a little frivolous. The river plashed, a soup of mud, swooshing the immortal rubbish, backwards and forwards, in a lullaby motion. He heard voices above him.

‘Down there, girl. Just look at it. Fucking filth! Ignorant bleedin’ bastards. What happens? The tide shifts it off of ’ere. So they build a Thames fucking Barrier to stop it getting away. All right? Next morning it’s all bleedin’ back again. Fucking ridiculous.’