Iain Sinclair - Downriver

At the Texaco Filling Station, a seventeen-stone black, Sumo-flanked, in yellow satin Bermuda shorts, was causing a little chaos: and rather enjoying it. Orwin Fairchilde. He was dominating the confessional-slit of the cashier’s window, puffing out his cheeks, like a finalist in a hot-water-bottle-inflating competition. The flesh of his face was a network of scars, some suppurating, some freshly self-inflicted with a Stanley knife. Orwin’s grime-encrusted spectacles magnified his eyes into menacing white balls. The cashier was fascinated. He could actually see the eyes inching out of their sockets. He found himself sliding a ‘free offer’ cocktail glass across the counter, to catch them. It was late afternoon and the door to his office had, thankfully, been security-locked. But the queue of angry punters was growing all the time. Horns were punched, and held. Those at the back, frantic to turn in from the kamikaze madness of the High Street, were more strident in their complaints than those close enough to take a good look at Orwin’s shoulders.

‘Gimme Rizla papers, man, an’ a box a matches.’ Orwin’s desires were as specific, and as irritable in their expression, as any dowager’s. ‘Not tha’one, stoopid. Take it back. I got tha’ picture, in’ I? Said wha’, man? How much? You crazee? Arright then, ’alf a box. Gimme ’alf a box a matches. Tha’s right. Count ’em. Count ’em all out where I see ’em. Don’ fuckin’ sell me short, man. Gimme Juicy Fruit. Jew-cee Fruu-t. Nooo, iz torn. Tha’ one, tha’ one . You deaf, or sumpin’?’

Now the petrol-freaks are ready to slash Orwin to ribbons with their credit cards. He doesn’t budge. He holds a bucket-sized fist in the air, saluting the world. He, very slowly, counts out the few coins he can dredge from his deep pocket: a common-market capful of busker’s droppings. But hold up here: something has caught Orwin’s jackdaw eye. This enterprising garage is lending its support to local arts and crafts by featuring a gravity-defying display of ‘exotic’ underwear, sculpted, with buckles and hooks, from pink rayon ribbons and panels of spray-black plastic. Rigid duelling suits for solitary posers. But Orwin would like — if the cashier has no objection — to fondle the merchandise. It might make a very suitable gift for his mum. She’s been a bit down, lately.

Orwin’s no mug. He knows exactly where it’s at. He’s foxy. He can anticipate to the second the little Paki’s decision to reach for the telephone. The catcher’s van will be summoned. There’ll be a brief, and pleasantly bloody, altercation. Then, it’s tea and medicaments. And a reserved armchair in the front row of the dayroom: fade into ‘Neighbours’.

Marsh Hill: red walls of the secure compound. Internal exile. Shovel the flotsam into these hulks of stone. It’s the humane alternative to transportation. Better the lash, and the carcinoma-inducing sun. The ghosts fade from sight. Children, without speech, wake in empty flats, and creep, hungry, to school; wearing the clothes they slept in — not knowing if they are expected.

Edith Cadiz, as a nurse, no longer existed. There is no record that she was ever here. The turnover is too high. Doctors put in for a transfer before they drive, for the first time, through the gates. Nurses suffer breakdowns that would once have merited a chapter in any medical memoir. All I have learnt is that the quest for the woman and her journals — if pursued — will initiate abrupt retribution. It is safer to return to the photograph, which is itself a kind of death. I will speak of ‘composition’, ‘grain texture’, and the ‘magnificent eloquence’ of her flung-back arms. But is this a gesture of triumphant completion — or a dancer terminated by a sniper’s bullet?

VI

In 1868 an Australian Aboriginal, ‘King Cole’ (as he had been named by his sponsors), stepped ashore on English soil at Tilbury. Shaven-headed convicts, social defaulters, premature Trade Unionists, and supernumerary Irishmen had been regularly exported to the antipodean wilderness, in chains, from the far shore: shells of the hulks lay there still, rotting in the black mud, between Woolwich and Crayford Ness. Now was the time to trade, to exchange these criminals for good yellow gold and nigger cricketers.

‘Nothing else of interest,’ commented the Daily Telegraph , ‘has come out of that blighted desert’; adding, in jocular parenthesis, that it might prove to the advantage of all godfearing Christian gentlemen if Mr Charles Darwin booked passage with the dusky savages, when they returned to their wilderness. He should question them closely, demanding anecdotes of their grandfathers, the monkeys. Indeed, with their fine dark beards, slanting brows, and deep-set eyes, did not these sportsmen bear a striking resemblance to the Fenland Sage? They would surely take him, on a more intimate acquaintance, for a god; and cause him to revise his blasphemous works — in the light of his personal knowledge of the labours of divinity.

King Cole, standing at the rail of the Parramatta , watching the pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew that this was the Land of Death. He had dreamt this place and, therefore, it had become familiar. He was returning, without fear, to the country of the Dog Men, the destroyers. A great tree had followed him for many days over the ocean: the eucalyptus that must grow from the stone of his heart.

Johnny Cuzens, Dick-a-Dick, Mosquito, Jim Crow, Twopenny, Red Cap, Mullagh, Peter, Sundown, Bullocky: they were dressed in ill-fitting gamekeeper’s waistcoats, bow ties, flat hats. They walked in silence, close together, carrying their own bags up the creaking gangway towards the Immigration Hall. King Cole recognized these planks immediately, as they all did: the Bridge of Hazards. If they walked beyond it, there was nothing but the Leaping Place of Souls.

King Cole was prepared: his fingers ran rapidly over the painted markings on the wall, the priapic pinmen at their dance. The loving encounters of women and animal-ancestors. So they came into an arching cathedral of sunlight, of voices, and confusion, and movement. They kept together. The dead man with the others.

They were covered in black smoke. Smoke surrounded them, warning them of the city. The voices of trees were hidden in the smoke. The carriage doors were slammed by porters: the pages of iron books, a collapsing library. Shouts, waves: as of the drowning. The Immigration Hall was once more deserted. And the station photographer had nothing to record but their absence, the subtle alterations in temperature that their passage had provoked. He infected his plate: the kiosk, the clock, the soul-snaring patterns in the stone flags of the floor. Officials watched from behind their moustaches, legs spread, at ease: the returned soldiers. A faded placard: ‘ Birthday Honours ’.

The glass plate, coated with white of egg sensitized with potassium iodide, washed with an acid solution of silver nitrate, developed with gallic acid, was fixed; and made available for close examination, long after the anonymous photographer was dead and forgotten. The positive image, when it appeared, uncredited, years later, in a nostalgic album celebrating ‘the steam era’, revealed — by some fault in the processing, some fret of time, or trick of the light — that the roof of the Hall had become a version of the river, a reflection of water from the dock: ropes, hawsers, hull-shadows, ripples of tide. Tons of water hung, and floated in the air, above the heads of the porters who were sternly facing the demands of posterity: emptying themselves into the shrouded camera, so that they could remain forever ‘on call’. And the river would flow above them, until they ceased — or we ceased — to believe in it; when they would be swept away entirely.