Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Lee Boo dutifully made study of magnifying glasses and telescopes. He watched the stars as they hid within torn fragments of cloth, or flew up from the flame of a candle. He followed the track of the river, as it pulsed through his wrist. He saw his own death floating above the water, nailed to the prow of a warship. With a ‘glass-eye’ stick he could read the stories that had been, and the future he was retreating into. The white man, Blanchard, had taken his place as the son of Abba Thulle. It was his duty therefore to die, and to free the pale exile from his dark twin. He remembered the tale of the brothers, Longorik and Longolap. And the warning: in a strange land when you are offered the choice, for your bath, between clean and dirty water — take the dirty.

Within six months of his arrival at Captain Wilson’s house in Paradise Row, Rotherhithe, Lee Boo was dead. Coconut meat was laid upon his eyelids, so that his eyes should always appear to be open. And so they remain. A link was forged with Madan Blanchard. A few spade-weights of ground in this churchyard and in Coorooraa — removed from local ministrations — became places of mediation, of respite and sanctuary. A true tunnel, unpromoted — and available only to the crazed, the sick, and the dying — had been dug.

Coorooraa was unvisited, ignored by the trading nations, until 1967, when John Boorman brought ashore an alternative Lee, the hard-drinking Mr Marvin: paid to confront, in single combat, the ex-Samurai, Toshiro Mifune, for Hell in the Pacific . I like to think that some insignificant member of the crew, a ‘focus-puller’ or ‘clapper-loader’, with the forlorn ambition of becoming a novelist, sat, away from the others for his evening joint, in the clearing where Madan Blanchard had been laid to rest. He would discover a sentence, whose import he could not yet comprehend, coming into his mind. He would ‘see’a graveyard in London, somewhere near the river. ‘ The marmosets have gone .’ He jots the words, trustingly, into his red-and-black notebook.

The interval, resting on the sepulchre, had calmed me. The known world crept back. It was now so obvious! I had made the mistake of climbing out of a ventilation shaft on the same side of the river that I had embarked from. I had in fact never left Rotherhithe. But an involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

X

With the disappearance of Sileen and the death of Tenbrücke, it became obvious that an inhibition had been removed: one version of the past had been effectively erased. And, as I attempted to write their story, I mutilated the truth, with faults in emphasis and diction; so that the pain lost its yeast. It was unreal. The past that I had described was not Sileen’s past, nor was the death of Tenbrücke justified by my account of it. If the ‘correct’ selection of words — a pure and imagined order of sentences — has the power of animating, and bringing to life; then a failure to obey the Voice must bring forth zombies, breathe the force into monsters. There is speed without focus, action without meaning.

Wharfs developed into concept dormitories. Rancid docks were reclaimed and rechristened. The insolent calligraphy of Harry’s Java Brasserie affronted Sileen’s abandoned hutch. The whole Wapping ditch was converted overnight to estates and protected enclaves. These bespoke ‘riverside opportunities’ are so many stock points; painted counters. They are sold before they are inhabited. Investors shuffle the deeds to other investors, and take their profits. The empty spaces appreciate. Now thrive the chippies.

I met one such in the rain. An eyeball-to-eyeball organist, a Northerner, who slept in a church loft that would soon, under pressure of ‘market forces’, have to be sold. He was on two hundred notes a day , hanging doors. But had no prospects of buying into the area on such starvation wages. ‘They target you,’ he told me, ‘at forty doors a session. Hang ’em high, and hang ’em fast. Then double-check the showflat. I’m in work for years — repairing the damage.’ These unoccupied shells are already crumbling around their hacienda fountains and dockside viewing platforms: Marie-Céleste villages of decamped Lego folk.

‘There’s nice line going,’ the organist said, ‘in rent books. You can pick up two k, down the local, selling them to runners, fronting for Estate Agents — who are themselves fronting for the big Property Combos, who are fronting for God knows what evil blood-bargains of Moloch greed and paranormal enforcement.’ I excused his youthful rhetoric: a man who squats on ecclesiastical land must be allowed to read these matters in nostalgic hellfire terms.

‘Anyone with a rent book,’ he continued, ‘qualifies as a local resident; and is graciously allowed to purchase one of the token flats set aside at a “controlled” price, to allow the fellaheen to acquire a small corner of what used to be their own cantref. In reality, this public-relations charity is smartly turned around into profits of fifty or a hundred thousand per unit: which makes a down payment — thanks to the “capital-friendly” terms on offer in the Enterprise Zone — on a deepwater marina. The Brink’s-Mat mob laundered £750,000 on a couple of windblown jetties, and cleared a million and a quarter. There are far bigger killings on the Isle of Dogs — with far fewer risks — than in knocking over a bonded warehouse. And meanwhile, the now bookless rentiers , having burnt their two thousand in an orgy of hire-purchase video madness, are bouncing on an awayday ticket to Cardboard City.’

Warm, refreshing rain. I stood by the dome of the sealed entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel in King Edward’s Memorial Park, Shadwell. This route has been aborted; the pilgrimage to the shrine of Prince Lee Boo in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin is now a folk memory. I turned from the ironwork — with its obsolete frets and curls, celebrating the initials of the London County Council — and walked away down an avenue of pollarded trees towards the Highway.

I had meant, for years, while tramping its verges, to take a closer look at St Paul, Shadwell: ‘traditionally known as the Church of Sea Captains’. Here were baptized the mother of Thomas Jefferson; the eldest son of Captain Cook; and Walter Pater, a confirmed bachelor. The church grounds, now cruelly abbreviated, ran down to the river’s edge. The present structure, rebuilt in 1820 as a ‘Waterloo Church’, is a workmanlike branch-line station, knocked up by the railway architect, John Walters. It is plain-spoken, untemperamental: a refuge that quietly offsets the Portland-clad baroque grandeur of Hawksmoor’s St George-in-the-East. Easily ignored, St Paul stands as a sanctuary from this other sanctuary — which has recently been assaulted by devil-worshipping poets and dealers in the junk bonds of fiction. The crypt, Joblard informs me, was used as a campsite for the embarking Angolan mercenaries.

These superficial intimations of grace are suddenly challenged by a manic drumming, a ringing of handbells, a torrent of deep-throat chicken-slaughter chants in honour of Les Invisibles . The red church doors are flung open and, down the steps on to the rain-slicked stones, comes a mad voudoun (Catholic, Pentecostal, Masonic, speaking-in-tongues, Judaic lost tribe) funerary procession. A weaving wailing convocation of all the religions, faiths, and superstitions: bay-leaf-swatting cardinals, swordsmen, aproned dignitaries, bearded patriarchs, crusaders with the cross of Malta, and foxy ladies slithering electrically on stilt heels. Comes a mute gaggle of shock-white cockney shufflers, in wraparound shades, manipulating — on bone shoulders — the flower-decked canoe. Comes the pendulum of incense, the sweat-flecked drummer, the jigging and jiving roll-eye smokers. Comes Iddo Okoli, the giant; hat in hand, overcoated, weeping. He waves a great handkerchief like a flag of surrender. He is floating the death-canoe on a tide of faith. He is launched. And all can view the handsome face of the still child: marked with tribal scars, so that his beauty should not excite envy and hatred.