Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘SEX CHANGE WIFE’ MURDERED AFTER WITCH’S WEDDING. Husband wanted affair with another man, court told . DERANGED KILLER IS LOCKED AWAY FOR EVER — 54- year-old man’s fingernails were ripped off with pliers — Mr Berman was a loner . CLASS WAR DENY ATTACK. DRUGS DOCTOR BACKON REGISTER. WOMAN RAPED BY GANG WHO LACED DRINK — as the evening progressed a group of ‘nice Chinese lads’ introduced themselves — when she awoke she was surrounded by a group of men, giggling hysterically, who pinned her down and took it in turns to rape her, she said. The East London Licensed Victuallers’ Association emphasized that they have never discriminated against gypsies. There is a difference between gypsies and Travellers. As a shopkeeper born and bred in Stoke Newington… I am writing a documentary TV programme about people with original jobs and driving ambition… Stamford Hill, where she was beaten, slashed with a knife, forced to sleep in a broom cupboard and warned that if she breathed a word she would be visited by black magic spirits .

The book-running days ended for Neb four years ago, shortly before the legendary Nicholas Lane went into exile. Neb had an obscure commission to purchase any items appearing on the stalls that touched on the Masonic Craft. But this was not enough for him: he lectured loudly on the corruptions of the Brotherhood to all who would, or would not, listen. He flapped, he spat: beak-nosed pamphleteer, bog-leveller. A William Prynne, born again. He broke the oath of silence, he waggled his tongue: on flyleafs, he sketched the secret seals. Browsers, picking effetely at Ardizzone squiggles, were initiated into the outlandish mysteries of the Bora Ceremony.

Inevitably, Neb was noticed. There was a rival: black-suited, loose-wigged, a silver dealer, with leather gloves, and the pallor of a stagnant urine sample. A man who bought, and removed from view, anything that even hinted at knowledge of the Ancient and Accepted Rites, the Higher Degrees. He would explode with gaseous ripples of fury, in a chain-reaction bilious attack, if these forbidden books were not, on the instant, polished, triple-bagged, and slid from the sight of the vulgar.

Then came the fateful day when the Mad One — who was beginning to mix the polemic rant with shrill anecdotes of some of his stickier ‘rent-boy’ triumphs — spotted a punter, debating with his wife the purchase of a pair of sugar tongs, and yelled, ‘I had your old man, Missus, twice : in the pergola by Manor House Hospital. You know it? Just off the Heath. He wasn’t much. Do you have to start him talking dirty?’ The death-kit, silver-hoarding Masonic hitman cornered, unexpectedly, at that moment, bearing some swag from the Georgian Village. He appeared — with a look of lemur-like paralysis — to recognize Neb: in both his capacities. But it was too late. Neb was flying.

‘Wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Look at him.’ Neb’s voice leapt into the equine register of a Frankie Howerd impersonator. He was enjoying himself. The punter’s wife was calcified; while the accused man, in reflex shame, was stuffing his pockets with all the silver snuffboxes on the stall. The stallholder, swathed in money belts like a Zapataist guerrilla, was puffing herself up, cobra-fashion, ready to emit a scream that would take out most of the windows between the canal and Barnsbury. ‘Tight-arsed bugger. You should see what he did to me. I can’t walk down to the Job Centre without leaning over. Don’t let him near you, love, when he’s got a broom-handle.’

One of Neb’s flailing manic arms caught Nicholas Lane’s wine glass, and spun it into the air — a chalice of blood — causing it to invert, and the blush of cheap red claret to soak gratefully into the pages of J. S. M. Ward’s Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods . As Neb reached forward to repair the damage, he succeeded only in tearing, into two unequal portions, the fold-out plate illustrating The Templar Charter of Transmission . He stood there, open-mouthed; flapping ineffectively at the wine stain with the ravished drawing.

If it had been possible, the hitman would have paled: his complexion was already on the unconvinced side of goat’s whey. He was a back-door johnny staggering home from an all-night blood-transfusion party.

He stared directly into the lens of Neb’s left eye; he gained entrance. The Mad One was head-clamped, zapped with a stungun. The heat drained from him. It was as if a mirror had been implanted between Neb and the world. There was no longer anything he could touch without passing this incorruptible guardian; the self that had died, one microsecond before. Therefore, he did not age. He was without purchase on life, a harmless thing. He stumbled from the market. And he never returned. He had, in that swift division of time, been emasculated; banished to the reservation of those who live without light. The inherited dog joined him; a protector to keep off the curious, a buddy to see him through to the end. Neb had found the beast, wandering half-starved, in Meath Gardens.

The Mad One was effortlessly replaced — a new boy was on the streets before he had reached Haggerston — but his charge stood. Masonry is a certain recipe for a bestseller. Anything on that topic will be bought by the brothers to keep it out of the hands of the uninitiated. And bought. And bought again. It is the ‘investigative’ author who does not always enjoy his royalties. He suffers: the mad late-night phonecalls; the handprinted letters, leavened with non-sequiturs; the blinding headaches. Is the paranoid, as William Burroughs says, in possession of all the facts — the only sane man in a tilted world — or has he merely initiated an irreversible conspiracy against his own sanity ?

Neb was arrested two or three times, out beyond the cricket square, for exposing himself; but this was more carelessness than any desire to boast, or to engage yet again in human commerce. He was finished with all that. The tape was running backwards: as he circumnavigated the grass ocean, he re-enacted incidents from his past; he triumphed in ancient conflicts. The limits of the park became the limits of his world-picture. His childhood was visited among the swings and sheds: chapped legs, and the smell of warm pee. His adolescence was associated with water: the boating lake and its islands. Hiding from eyes and stones; scratchy with secrets, unregistered library books under his jacket. He missed the ugly plaster dogs on their plinths. They had been hacked off for renovation. And would be replaced by freshly painted fakes. Death lurked, Neb felt, in the misted windows of the Burdett-Coutts Tower. The evil moment of his conception kept him clear of the twin stone igloos culled from the block masonry of old London Bridge.

These igloos were the subject of one of Neb’s perpetual monologues. He muttered as he stalked: he clapped his hands. The mason’s marks, hidden behind the capstone, obsessed him. The triangle, the circle, and the cross. Shiva the Destroyer; flame on the funeral pyre. ‘Lifted from the river; the medieval bridge, the chapel,’ he nodded, as if making the discovery for the first time. ‘They stole the stones — two for Vicky Park, one for Guy’s! You won’t get me out on the water. Under the arch? Never!’ He prophesied disaster; drowning, lung-burst. What other kind of prophet was there?

He spoke of the alcoves as ‘dream-helmets’. And it is true that they were generally avoided. Cyclists kept cycling. Adulterers stayed in their vehicles, as if frightened of the lions. ‘Sleep in those things,’said Neb, ‘and you’ll incubate your own death. You’ll be forced to dream all the nightmares that have ever flowed down the river, all the plagues and executions. Why do