Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Slightly embarrassed by this infusion of greasepaint, I began to shuffle a stack of books that stood alongside the framed Wilde caricature: six mint copies of a celebrated ‘bestseller’ that attributed the most peculiar properties to the local churches. The critics promised your money back if you did not die of terror as you read it. Many of the New Georgian squatters kept a copy in the close chamber, though privately decrying the thing, as a calumny on the disinterested aesthetics of Baroque Architecture. But even as a talismanic icon, I felt that six units was stronging it.

‘When Mother and I moved here,’said Roland, with the frankness that characterized his conversation, ‘and because our interests are well known, all our chums kept making us presents of that book. I haven’t got around to reading it yet. Something holds me back. I couldn’t bear to be disappointed. I liked the Wilde novel so much I wrote to the author, through his publishers, inviting him to trot along for a cup of tea, and a look at the fireplace. He never replied. And I realized afterwards, with utter shame, that my letter must have read like some terrible gauche come-on.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I told him, ‘the publishers probably shredded it. He’s far too much of a goldmine to be interrupted with tea ceremonies.’

This prompted Fredrik — who had been silent for about two minutes, and was turning a dangerous rectal-purple colour — to vault into an improvisational theory that I soon lost track of: it concerned ‘prophetic curvatures of time’, vampire-clones, and hermetic sexuality. He posited an ‘eternal return’; whereby certain figures are unable to escape the Wheel of Fate. Those cultists who look longingly on such as Wilde, Chatterton, Rimbaud, Blake, Stevenson, or Keats are themselves trapped, as in a liquid mirror . Obsession matures into spiritual paralysis. The cultist relives borrowed lives, is bound to gross matter; to ghosts of the undead, and the always-dying. But the created grids of energy can be consulted like a tarot pack: so that, for example, Peter Ackroyd’s The Great Fire of London can anticipate the coming ‘heritage’ triumph of Little Dorrit , and the shift in focus that would make the Thames itself an assertive template from which the new London would be built. This is the confection we are now required to worship: a ‘view’ by the Venetian mercenary, Canaletto.

Roland was actively infected by this madness. He responded to a theme that must have been buried far beneath what Fredrik was actually saying. He shunted us on to the familiar fin de siècle notion of the ‘time-halting’ magic of the photograph, or portrait, where the photographer does not deflect the intensity of the subject: the Dorian Gray syndrome. The person who submits to this, who allows themself to be caught, is caught for ever. They are no longer free to draw breath. The evidence is used, and will continue to be used , against them. ‘Neither is the photographer immune,’Roland insisted. ‘It happened with Robert Mapplethorpe. The love-objects he was driven — so calculatingly — to capture, returned the compliment. And fixed the relationship in a now definitive form.’

It was, Roland thought, Wilde’s photograph, the reckless arrogance of it, taken in New York, January 1882, Napoleon Sarony, that finished him. Wilde posed, with all the insane courage of the damned, in the Masonic costume of the Apollo Lodge, Oxford: knee-breeches, silk stockings, pumps. He had been inducted into the Rose-Croix Chapter, which offered the promise of a ritual of death and resurrection. The regalia included a lambskin apron, of which he was almost indecently fond. From the second Sarony hooded his lens, Wilde’s card was marked; he had only to wait for it. The brothers were going to nail him.

Turning my back on the fetid heat of the room, I walked over to the unshuttered window. I could see across the street into the rectory of Christ Church, Spitalfields: the shadowy, dark-wood staircase designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. An inaccessible ladder in time.

III

There is a grove in Victoria Park much favoured by a snakedhaired former ‘rent boy’, and his inherited dog. Tucked contentedly into his fifties, he remains clear-eyed, unlined; though tolerably weather-beaten. His shaggy dust-powdered mane — unremarked in the Living Theatre years — now drew the odd disapproving sniff from brutally-cropped joggers. Expensive orthodontia (the gift of a fastidious oralist) is being gently eroded by a compulsive fondness for lethally dyed gobstoppers. He dribbles constantly from the corners of a wide and slack-lipped grin. He is known, to those who cannot avoid him, as ‘The Mad Mason’; or, more recently, as ‘Neb’ or ‘Nebby’. This sobriquet deriving from his tendency to crawl along the ground, searching for lost coins, and spirit-messages from the wind. Neb was another who had been ‘ driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws ’. William Blake might have been using a polaroid when he caught Neb’s likeness in 1795. But ‘The Mason’retained, above everything, a mad and reckless joy. Nose among dog turds, he laughed. He lived in an irreparable feud with himself: loud, ungoverned, shouting and punching at shadows. Like a streetwise tom cat he chewed the coarse-spined grass only to make himself sick, to retch up the poisons of the city.

If you spoke to him he would not look at you, because he did not believe you were really there. He plucked obsessively at the lobes of his ears; he gouged his cheeks. Flesh fell from him: turbid fruit. But he had survived the gloomy medical predictions — the venereal probes, the brain wires — by many years; and now his pre-twilight days were spent roaming the broad estates of the people’s park. Within the circumference of what he had already discovered, Neb was a free man.

But he was certainly not one of your usual dog fanciers: an evil category that have conspired to turn London into a steaming slough of inefficiently recycled horse-pieces. Those yelping pragmatists, the dog-owning tendency, huddled together beside a bench, in a circle of dead white earth, talking of ‘points’, diets, canine bowel movements: so many mothers at the school gates. They watched, with barely-concealed pride, as their braindamaged inbreeds did unspeakable things to the legs of collapsed cyclists, or knocked over a howling toddler. They only came to life if any mere pedestrain retaliated and spoke sharply to their darlings; and then they would scream the foulest obscenities, and call on their protector, PC Plod. Park-keepers and policemen, possibly through some kind of genetic deficiency, have a sentimental fondness for these hideous beasts. And, by law, the first bite is on the house. It goes unpunished. Count yourself lucky if you don’t get rabies.

Neb’s grove, fringed with Edwardian trees, was shunned by the dog people. But they paused, in their flight, to monitor their pets while they strained at the stool, legs rigid, eyes on stalks, tails erect, panting knots of concentration. ‘You better watch it, Missus,’ Neb would invariably shout, resenting the trespass. ‘They’re going to let the Koreans build a camp here. That dog of yourn’ll be dizzy, turning on a hot spit. They’ll think this place is a takeaway.’

It was a game. Neb did not care. He was sifting the rubbish the wind had blown against the fence of the keeper’s house. No bagman, Neb stuffed his pockets with scraps of old newspaper; which, later, in his Well Street garret, he would assemble into a promethean scrapbook of unconnected narratives. The Daily Telegraph and the Hackney Gazette were particular friends.