Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Edith came to this country, modestly funded, with money her mother saw as a final pay-off: she settled in Palliser Road, Baron’s Court — a piece of ground given back to a squabble of more or less house-trained colonials, as being otherwise unfit for human habitation. She embarked, unenthusiastically, on the usual acting, modelling, and waitressing courses that she was far too intelligent, and singular, to complete. She was not without ego, and a certain talent for showing off; but she preferred not to demonstrate her capabilities, while some anthropoid agent’s hairy chaingang-paw crawled up her skirts. It wasn’t so much that she felt her virtue was worth more than a couple of bottles of Retsina: she wearied of the invariable bullshit surrounding this banal and ugly transaction. They never said, ‘Fuck me and I’ll get you the Royal Court.’ The fatherly monologues were so repetitive, so punctuated with sincere smiles, and confidence-inducing pats on the thigh. They could have been put on disk: (a) boastful lists of possessions, (b) holiday yarns, (c) ingratitude of former clients, (d) venality of producers, (e) excellent prospects of increased earning capacity, (f) desirability for prolonged discussion in more congenial environment.

Neither was Edith keen to transform herself into a sunsilk bimbo, gagging on rampant chocolate-coated members, and conducting furtive assignations with a jar of coffee. She didn’t want to pick up brownie points hanging around holes in the ground with Peggy Ashcroft and Ian McKellen, or picket embassies to get the parts that Julie Christie turned down. She wanted to be left alone to discover the limits of what she could become. She wanted to relish performance for its own sake, to use her power to the full — because that, more than anything else, gave her satisfaction.

Roland, as he explained, had not initially been involved with whatever it was she was working on. She called around for a cup of tea. She chatted with Mother. She ate Roland’s biscuits. Sometimes she slept for two or three nights in Fournier Street. And then, out of the blue, one August morning, she knocked on the street-door, and invited Roland to come and see her show. She was leading a dog on a chain: a heavy-pelted wolf cousin, a male. Roland went with her. The show was amazing: ferocious, insulting, funny. And performed in the most unlikely — and previously resistant — setting: the Seven Stars, Brick Lane.

Our current obsession with colonizing the past — as the only place where access is free — had made available, courtesy of the Borough Library, a collection of reproduction maps of East London: gaudy fakes to authenticate any cocktail bar. They were inexpensive, printed on stiff card; with roads, the colour of dried mustard, sprouting from the empurpled lamb’s heart of the City. You could walk your fingers in imaginary journeys, and sneeze from the real dust that you disturbed. The Thames was alive; a slithering green serpent, a cramp in the belly.

Edith’s particular favourite was Laurie & Whittle’s New Map of London with its Environs, including the Recent Improvements 1819 . And she had constructed, with paste and a heavy needle, a costume shaped from this map: part Edward Gordon-Craig, part Maori kite-bird — a feathered storm-disperser. Wearing it, she became an angel of threat; or a demon of bliss. She respected the traditional accoutrements of her trade — the cloak, the gloves, the boots, the thong — but she elaborated their shape, the angle of the shoulders, the constriction of the waist, until she turned herself into a living artefact, a weapon. She played with her make-up: her slightest movement provoked a paradoxical reading of the history of the patch of ground on which her audience were standing. She was increasingly absorbed, excited. Colour printers in Wilson Street provided enlargements of especially libidinous zones: The Victualling Office, Sugar Loaf Green, Callico Houses, Morning Lane .

But before she appeared in her ‘special’ costume, Edith Cadiz attacked them with a dance that was savage in its invitation. She was naked, too soon; shuddering and leaping, with no accompaniment, to wild sounds of her own invention. She laughed in their faces. She flashed them with spiders and rods of iron. She showed them wounds they knew they would inherit; then forced them back against the walls, by spinning pebbles of fear. The attention of the punters was fully engaged: they were unsexed, wary. It was what they had come for, but it was not right. Dry-mouthed, they could not swallow their beer.

After the subdued interval, in which they were able to recover their identities, Edith walked among them, collecting her tithe. They had paid, so they looked at her, and over her — as they had the courage for it: they made jokes. She was naked still, her smoothness glistened with pearly beads. There was a heat and a honey-sweetness on her. Two points — where high cheekbones stretched her face into a mask — had been pinched into colour; otherwise, she was pale, stiff, without animation. She shook out her hair. They dropped their furtive coins into an alopecic and grease-stained bowler.

The tension is broken. Conversation revives. Edith tells the publican that her hat once belonged to T. S. Eliot. He thinks she is alluding to the ‘Chocolate-coloured Coon’, and suspects that the hat is illegal, contraband: ‘worth a few bob’. He is almost tempted to make an offer.

For the second half of the show, Edith does not move at all: a wartime Windmill nude, exposed to a ring of ‘breathers’, their knees heaving and bumping beneath rubberized police-issue raincoats. She wears her costume of maps. There are rings sewn to districts that have previously been cut so they will tear away, at a touch. Heard from the street, the sound of the audience is elongated and alarming. They are out of control. They feel their tongues being slowly split with rusty shears.

Edith Cadiz invites her sweating jackals to sing out the street names: Heneage, Chicksand, Woodseer, Thrawl, Mulberry . She gives them a voice to relieve their tension. And — if they nominate a name that has been prepared — her wolf-dog leaps from the audience, rushes to her, takes the brass ring in his wet mouth, and pulls away a Spitalfields terrace with a twist of his powerful neck. The jagged gap reveals new streets, fresh relations: Edenic glimpses. The tired city is transformed: a dustpit fades to expose an orchard, a church lifts through a sandbank, a hospital (with blazing windows) slides beneath the surface of a slow-moving river. The punters are maddened. The Thames attacks Hornsey. Leadenhall Market removes to Chingford.

The affair was too rich and strange. It was talked about, but it was not popular. They felt safer with the black leather bike-girls, cracking whips in their faces; and the others, the contortionists whose trick muscles could suck coins out of the sawdust, without using their mouths or hands. Edith was left alone on stage, in a scatter of torn paper. She was bruised and scratched by the dog’s claws, his slavering enthusiasm. Some of the colour had run with her sweat: it was moving over her shoulders, down across her belly. Her wounds were an urban survey, promoting fresh deltas and rivulets, revitalizing dead hamlets, soon to be linked by fantastic railways of silver and bronze: animal-headed marvels, belching fire. She had succeeded; but she was not sure what that meant. She found herself, suddenly and dangerously, prophetic.

Roland too had witnessed something forbidden: something he could not shrive by making a report of it. Without malign intent, he left the fatal black spot in my hands.

II

A couple of weeks later, hustled by his producers, Fredrik rang me. We arranged to meet for a drink in the Chesham Arms, Mehetabel Road, Hackney: just down the ramp from Sutton House, a genuine, but well-disguised Tudor Manor that had probably survived thanks to the obscurity of its location. ‘They’ had not yet decided which motorway would bury it. The planners assumed this weather-boarded relic was another bankrupt mock-Tudor sandwich bar, and they left it alone: ‘Turn that one over to the Pest Squad, Ron!’ The building was sealed, and guarded by a depressed gaggle of ghosts and clinically-reticent poltergeists. It burst into life, infrequently, as opposing factions argued about its purpose, or jemmied away the skirting boards to reveal — in triumph — stubs of rat-gnawed chalk or some defunct grammarian’s detention exercises. Both parties would fervently claim these rodent droppings as the evidence that clinched the very case they were attempting to prove. Then the whole business would sink back once more into perpetual limbo.