Iain Sinclair - Downriver

We made it to the bar on the stroke of opening time, getting our drinks in, before the place was invaded by a scream of grim-faced ‘alternative comedians’ — the alternative, I suppose, would consist of being funny — who ‘wrote’ nose-picking duologues for a pair of infamous vodka-swilling slobs. These dyspeptic businessmen nerved themselves to face the odd TV ‘special’, enough to keep their images polished for the advertising slots that provided most of their real income. They gazed in naked envy at the queens of ‘Voice Over’, with their villas in Tuscany; and they gritted their teeth over the video empires of clapped-out stand-up comics, who could now afford the best psychotherapy that money could buy. But the nerve-jangling hell of sitting for an hour, trapped in the back of a cab, while the failed ‘Mastermind’ at the wheel performed his audition, made them wonder if the street-cred of an office in Hackney was worth the candle. Their bosses, compulsively over-achieving bonzos, subtly emphasized their superior status by dressing in a gross parody of City uniforms. We hold the equity, brothers. And don’t, for one minute, forget it. Charcoal-grey suits, with silk linings, the colour of rancid ice-cream; no ties. An uneasy compromise between wide-nostrilled insider-dealer and scrap-metal show-off, cased up for the dogs. The pack shuffled and sparred around the two luminaries, spitting and swearing, trying to look as if they had just boogied in off a building site, in their trainers, dirty socks, and shaving-foam basketball boots. The benzedrine thrust of their social vision demanded a constant spray of obscenities, aimed exclusively at other television programmes; and a dozen imbecile schemes to resurrect the Tottenham Hotspur midfield by importing a brace of ‘total footballers’, whose names they could neither remember, nor pronounce. But this did not inhibit them from chanting these names, loudly, as they topped each other in flights of absurdity and pretension: until the affair lost all focus, erupting into a face-slapping, foot-stamping, ‘knee-him-in-the-nuts, Sidney’ squabble. They were ejected. ‘A good working lunch’ would be the favourite description: ‘creative tension’. They stood around on the kerb, filling out forms to claim their expenses, and composing complicated requests, to be delivered by mini cab from the Mare Street deli. They were ready to recharge their batteries. The best of them were snoring on the pavement, as they waited for the fleet to arrive.

We had the bar to ourselves. Fredrik was evidently experiencing some difficulty in recalling what we were doing here. He never had fewer than twelve projects on the boil at the same time; pacifying demented, near-suicidal producers, not by delivering his script, but by suggesting, over a three-hour lunch, ever more wondrous possibilities: glittering ratings-winners, replete with intellectual and moral credibility, certain to confirm reputations and make, as an incidental by-product, fortunes. But he needed time, ‘seed money’, equipment, secretaries. He’d go to his grave, pelted in a hailstorm of writs.

Excited, making notes for an article on whisky labels, and another on pub telephones, Fredrik broke off: to slide the neighbourhood fright sheet across the table. There were a couple of paras about a missing nurse, last seen on the platform at Homerton, now presumed to be another victim of the ‘Railway Vampire’. This was unexceptional, a mild filler; the equivalent of a Flower Show critique. It was buried among the ranks of block-headline teasers: MAN LOSES EYE IN ACID ATTACK; EPILEPTIC RAPED DURING FIT; GUARD JAILED FOR SEX WITH DAUGHTERS; ARMED SWOOP ON EMPTY HOUSE. An interesting form of ‘new journalism’ was developing, uncredited, in these local weeklies: a calculated splicing together of the most surreal samples of proletarian life, with an ever-expanding, colourenhanced section on property speculation. ENJOY FACILITIES OF DOCKLANDS; INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY; FIRST TIME RELEASE, ONLY MINUTES FROM THE CITY! ONE MILE FROM CITY… 800 YARDS FROM BISHOPSGATE. The provocation is stark: throw open your windows, you can pee into the river.

But the horror tales — BLACK THUGS WITH HOME-MADE SPIKED BALL AND CHAIN RUN AMOK ON TERROR TRAIN — serve another, more sinister, purpose: they drive out the crumblies, the garden cultivators, to the forest clearings, to Loughton, to Ongar, or the poulticed mudflats of the Thames Estuary, the ultimate boneyards of Essex. More Victorian family homes, strong on ‘character’, and low on plumbing, are released on to a greedy market. Hard-boiled feminist crime writers, and stringers for City Limits , peddle across town, from Camden and Muswell Hill, to take up the slack. ‘Baroque realists’, and tame voyeurs fixated on entropy, tremble in paroxysms of excitement and distaste. There hasn’t been such hot material lying around in the streets since they nobbled public hangings and bear baiting. Suddenly, we’re all Henry Mayhew and Jack London. It’s — shudder — unbelievable, terrible. We rush to our word-processors, the hot line to Channel 4. We’re going to get the lead story, with photograph, in the London Review of Books .

Fredrik’s wife, a lady of great charm, wise enough to prepare herself for Hackney life with two or three Liberal Arts degrees, and a wicked sense of humour, was now a psychiatric consultant at the Hackney Hospital: this being the only kind they went in for. She had, Fredrik explained, recognized the snapshot of the nurse that accompanied the story of the railway vanishing act in The Gazette . The girl’s name was Edith. Edith Cordoba? Edith Drake? She couldn’t remember. But she wasn’t English. She was sure of that. East Coast American? Wore expensive shoes. Had worked in the hospital for almost a year, which constituted some kind of record. And she wasn’t even on Valium, with Noveril chasers.

Could it be? Edith Cadiz a nurse? It was time to visit this hospital, to trace the infected fantasy to its source. Fredrik knew where some of the bodies were buried. He had been working around here shooting standard-issue inner-city squalor, that could be assembled fast to provide a poverty-row back-up for a ‘major Statement’ that a ‘Very Important Personage’ wanted to deliver, at peak viewing time, to his future subjects. ‘One’ had been suffering lately from a rather disquieting sensation that ‘something ought to be done’. His uncle felt much the same way about South Wales. Much good had it done him. Or them. A lecture was even now being hammered out by half the unemployed architects in the country, who could — under the protection of the blue-blooded ecologist — safely savage the half who had managed to climb off the drawing board.

I left Fredrik to his task; blowing foam into the pub phone, while he sold a potential essay to Germany, analysing… the reformist uses of the very instrument he was now clutching in a stranglehold. ‘Discontinued alternatives,’ he was screaming, while he waited for a simultaneous translation. I would adopt my usual method, and circumnavigate the hospital walls; see what the stones had to say.

The hospital site covered ancient parkland, and might yet be profitably developed. It had, in the meantime, been designated the dumping ground for all the swamp-field crazies, the ranters, the ultimate referrals. Leave here, and there is only the river. The shakers were swept in — or delivered themselves, gibbering, at the gates: they were rapidly tranquillized, liquid-coshed, and given a painted door to contemplate. The only other ticket of admittance led, by way of the left-hand path, to the Drug Dependency Unit; which attempted, by methods traditional and experimental, to wean the helpless and the hopeless from their sugary addictions. The main thrust of this enterprise — stilling the inarticulate voice of rage — merely created a host of new, and more exploitable, addictions. Only the pharmacists and the Swiss turned a dollar. The wicked old days of brain-burning and skull-excavation (with soiled agricultural instruments) were a folk-memory. That machinery was too expensive to replace. A wimpish revulsion against water treatments led, logically, to the gradual suspension of all bath-house activities. Whole wings were simply abandoned to nature; eagerly exploited by rodents, squatters — and smack dealers who traded their scripts without quitting the sanctuary of the hospital enclave.