Iain Sinclair - Downriver

What Triscombe actually wanted, when they returned to his impersonal apartment, was difficult to speak about, to spell out in precise detail. Edith waited, legs tucked under her, in a bucket-chair, running her fingers, caressingly, through the golden muff that hung under the belly of Triscombe’s alsatian: the guardian that slept at her feet. Guarding against what? Special Branch, ‘The Company’, Mossad, MI5, MI6? The Widow’s favourite chalk-monitors, Ad Hoc Splinter Groups, spooks, wire-tappers? The fellaheen hordes, black gypsy petrol-bombers, Iranian fanatic Jews tooled with castrating shears? Trotskyites, the Red Brigade? Lesbian rapists? This dog, he felt — and he wanted Edith to feel it too — had absorbed most of his own masculine virtues: by close association. The beast manifested his warrior soul: it represented his power, but without the inhibitions of his public standing.

Edith soon understood exactly what Triscombe wanted, but she remained perfectly relaxed, detached: there was so much time waiting to be paid for in this room. She would not burn it. Let him get there when he would. She understood that this would be one of the most effective acts of theatre she had been able to conjure. It was truly monstrous, and also quite simple. She would involve herself in a performance that was, by statute, criminal, and degrading; mythic in its blasphemy. She would devour the substance and the essence of taboo — with the bulging, pleading eyes of the instigator following her every movement: the paradigm of an audience. It was Triscombe’s vision; he was its victim. She wanted to make an account of this. To repeat the act in language, to perfect and refine it. She slid a notebook from her handbag and started to write.

White-cheeked and musty, Triscombe faced her: his back arched against the wall. A thick blue vein was pulsing on the side of his head, like a worm digging its way out. She thought he might be sick. His breath smelt like wet rope. She spoke to him reassuringly, softly, outlining her demands. ‘A standing order’: the phrase made her smile. A sum, calculated on the spur of the moment, to be paid, monthly, into her account. A selection of Deer Brand black notebooks with red cloth corners. Some Japanese drawing pens. A watercolour by John Bellany that she had always coveted. Afternoons.

Anything . Absolutely. He agreed. His hands were palsied. He had lived with this image since boyhood. Its safety was that it remained an image. Therefore, he was human. Therefore, he could denounce the corruption of the world. Man’s man, people’s tribune — stallion of the virtues. But now this woman was starting to act it out. Jesus Christ, the curtains! In a fever, he checked them. Edith Cadiz was sinking, very slowly, stretching on the floor with the dog, who was turning, waking, yawning his meat yawn. Teased, he growled, and showed his teeth. Edith unzipped her dress. Triscombe was transfixed, a stone man. He no longer wanted any of this. It was agony to him. Edith draped the dog’s head in red silk. It looked as if she had wounded him. She spoke; she blew in his ear. The beast responded, with a show of anger, to these preliminary caresses.

The spread of her arms. Triscombe enters a colour-plate, the childhood illustration he longs to bring to life: Blodeuwedd’s Invitation to Gronw Pebyr . It has been said that fairy stories are erotic novels for children. But they are worse than that, as Triscombe is discovering. A low-cut bodice, with a tightly-laced dress. She heaves with terror. Savage streaks of blooded light escape from the forest: some massacre or sacrifice to pagan gods. The white horse stamping through the fast-flowing river, hoof raised, searching for a dry rock, or… the head of a dog. A hound that will scrabble up the bank, shake himself, and soak the dress of his mistress. She is trapped within its clinging stiffness. She lifts the embroidered hem. The dog nuzzles, thrusting his otter-head between her naked thighs. His rough, salty tongue laps and scratches. She grasps him by the ears, guiding him. Her breath comes faster. She swoons to…

No, no, no. This is all wrong. It is Gelert the Faithful, blood-muzzled in his greeting. Slain in error: destroyer of the wolf-threat, not the sleeping infant. Triscombe is a one-handed reader, slithering among nursery icons, coded legends. He presses his cold nose to the tint of damp pages: the salmon runs, the gold shimmer, the white froth of water breaking around the horse’s raised leg. Edith Cadiz is the raven-haired temptress worming out the secret of the Triple Death. She will destroy him. Her hair covers her face. She is without identity.

Choking spasms of language gushed from Triscombe’s mouth. Things he thought he heard. Voices on trains. ‘She’s a dog, mate.’ Dogmate . ‘On heat all the time, like a fucking dog.’ ‘Came home for his dinner, didn’t he, and gave her one.’ Dogfuck . ‘I know all the bouncers. Every time I borrow a few quid I say, “Cunt, shut your fucking mouth.” That’s why you never get any.’ Cuntmouth . He’s growling, rolling, hurt in his throat; biting at the fur on his wrist, pulling out the waxy skin in a red pinch of flesh. ‘She’s a fucking diamond, son.’

Triscombe is dribbling; grey bubbles of mucilage slather down his chin. Rasping, harsh breath: a file across his lungs. ‘Took ’er down the ’ospital.’ Horse spittle. Whore’s spital. Clap-shop . The bitch. ‘Fucking ’ore.’ The cunt. The dog.

He drops, stunned, into a black imageless sleep. A poleaxed carthorse.

And Edith writes, steadily and fast, her account of events that connect with these events; but which are not these events, and are not an account. She does not describe what has happened. She describes something else, which exists, independently, beyond the confines of this close room.

Naked, Edith looks into the bathroom mirror, and is — for the first time — troubled. She sees: ‘ The eyes of a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable .’ She does not know herself. Her excitement is now as compulsive and primary as Triscombe’s was, when he watched her. She does not make more of this than her written structure can contain. She is satisfied. She has committed herself. She believes that, at last, she has gone too far: there is no way back.

Edith left him, stretched on the floor: she walked, unshowered, down the High Street to the hospital.

V

It is not known, and I do not know, what happened to Edith Cadiz. Some urgent sense of the mystery of the story, locked into her Fournier Street photograph, sent me once again along the railway line from Dalston/Kingsland to Hackney Wick. The Wick had now been relegated, by an unsightly forest of concrete conifers, to the status of the Liechtenstein of the Lee Valley: lacking only the advantages of a competent fiscal laundry service. Once it was a shopping centre, somewhere to travel towards, a destination: the name alone survives. A hoop of gutted enterprises caught between the East Way and the rat-infested river. A station platform boasts of easy access to the Marshlands; where, in the twilight mists, razor-blade-chewing loners wait for their victims to stroll out of domestic banality into a definitive hothouse fantasy. The elevation of the tracks offers a momentary vision — through nicotine-shadowed windows — of the hospital blocks; the Gormenghast on the hill, the Citadel of Transformation. Drawing my last optimistic breath, I suffer the familiar dank whiff of tranquillized dreams, flesh-burns, piss and mindless fear.

I toiled slowly uphill towards a site that I knew had been abandoned. I stared into wild gardens. I ran my knuckles over broken bricks. I photographed reflections in dusty daggers of glass. The trail was cold. All the narrative excitement had returned to its source: the silver-framed photograph in the basement kitchen in Spitalfields. Edith’s actions, the magick she had practised, had been translated into an indefinable quality of light. I was forced to invent and extend the fragments of plot her teasing sense of theatre had scattered over these wasted streets. She no longer had any connection with this place. The hospital was a dead set from which the principal actor had vanished: without her, it was unbearable in its implications.