Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Mason’s Mark, found in the stone alcoves at Victoria Park and Guy’s Hospital, Southwark

you think they look like the Thames Barrier? Because the real job of the Barrier is to retain the sleep of the city; not to let our dreams — the most precious of all resources — escape.’

Neb was very tired now, but he kept on walking.

IV

The grass was flat and white where Colonel ‘Colt’Swinefoot’s tents had stood. The evangelist, his caravan, and his shock troops, had moved east, to offer a much-needed blessing for West Ham FC. But the colonel’s apocalyptic warnings hung in the air, like the heavy scorch of frying onions, compressed beef, and temporary repentance: ‘It is the hour of the Antichrist. The mark of the beast is branded into our cheeks. Our tongues shall blacken and swell, until our very mouths are filled. Amen! We will be dragged, cursing, into hellfire.’ And more of the same. Much more. Three hours on his feet was as nothing to Colt. Sweat rolled from his brow. The chorus stamped and sang. Fire buckets rattled with coin. Colt’s sermon, fiendishly amplified, blasted the walls of the old Victoria Park Lido; which had been recently ordained as East London’s first privately-funded lazaret. Neb took it on himself, unpaid, and uninvited, to become one of the angels.

AIDS was a fifth-floor disease, in a four-floor culture. There had to be somewhere — preferably outside the inhabitable zone — where a buck could be turned coping with one of the few genuine growth areas that was still, always excepting the West Coast, scandalously under-exploited. Fortunes would be made when a tested antidote was brought in — but that was the big one, Nobel stuff, the Holy Grail. Meanwhile the name of the game is counselling, care, discretion, and check the credit cards before the first transfusion. Things were happening fast. There was now a state far worse than being an ‘outpatient’. The agents of Venture Capital had identified a brand of ‘quarantine’ that had much in common with other hermetic encampments, kept for aliens in time of war.

The lazaret stood just inside the park gates, at the Grove Road end, beyond a notice announcing that ‘these premises are protected by Barbican Security Services’. The red-brick Stalinist folly with the sea-green pantiled entrance had functioned for many years as a swimming pool. Now it looked as if the set for Fifty-five Days at Peking had been requisitioned for a Living Dead video-quickie. Neb blundered among the enfeebled inmates in their fugitive exile; the HIV-positives, the ‘black spot’ carriers. He ran messages, he went shopping; and, if he was incapable of listening to any instruction, he was ready to talk without hypocrisy or fear. He rushed through the pallets, arms waving like a bird scarer, beating off the gathering darkness. Dame Nightingale: he buddied the sick. He gave them their first strange taste of life-after-death.

Spies reported a fierce debate in the council chambers concerning the fate of this abandoned municipal swimming pool, one of Lansbury’s finest lidos. It was a symbol of a vanished Health and Efficiency era; a huge, chlorine-weeping, corn-plaster-infested trench — where Neb had achieved some of his most spectacular conquests — which should, without doubt, be restored and streamlined as an ‘investment opportunity’. The public purse no longer ran to filling it with water (perish the thought, better to fill it with oil!) for the unbathed peons to splash about, urinating, exposing their unsightly flab, and floating their beer-cans and fag packets. No instruction had, as yet, been received from above to make a charge for entrance to the park: a ‘reserved vehicle area’ was being enlarged and fenced, marked out for the ticket machines. It was perhaps premature, before all the tenders were sifted, to pass any binding resolution. The decision-makers contented themselves, for the present, with covertly enclosing more and more of the open ground; creating a no man’s land, a causeway of conveniently storm-felled trees.

The Controller moved his office into the upper chamber of the Burdett-Coutts Tower; a structure that seemed to have evolved from an unlikely collaboration between Albert Speer and Rowland Emett. Hierarchic steps, and pillars of pink Peterhead granite, gave way to eccentric decoration; clocks, twirls, twists, stone fruits, and weather-damaged puns. The titular spirits were four seriously overweight cherubs: only one of whom had held on to his wings. Their eyes were debauched with red paint. Their pudgy feet rested on squirming fish. Unwillingly — and after an obvious struggle — they had been surgically initiated, made kosher: with full subincision rites. Their off-white pigeon bellies hosted the usual braggart scrawls: I ALWAYS FUCK MY MUM! BONGO + COLL + SPAM. Above their hydrocephalic heads, in Gothic Script, ran the sad legend, ‘For Love of God and Country’. Amen, Colonel, to that.

From his crow-high porthole the Controller weighed the options, comparing, unfavourably, the visible reality of the broken-down lido with the optimistic and rhetorical plans that were spread out on a table at his elbow. The Four Horsemen romped across the paddy — and with them a hook on which he could surely hang his future. Plague! They should get it corralled fast, put their brand on it; make it pay.

Within hours a crude conversion was under way that retained the original concentration-camp fencing and watchtowers, while shifting the pool itself into a ‘basically Neo-Templar ambience’: from hydro to hospice in fourteen days. The ironies implicit in this transaction were thrown away on its perpetrators: a primary source of infection should find itself recast as the ashram of its final flowering.

The pool was submerged in drapes of lemon-and-white canvas, divided into individual cubicles. The surround was tiled, and saturated with fountains. The feel the architect wanted to go for was ‘non-denominational Moorish’. No disturbing images to invoke the past. Just the wind in the trees; reflections of clouds; plashing water falling on stone. The once-sordid changing sheds became ‘day rooms’, with low couches and the (piped) music of strings.

On fine afternoons the living skeletons lay outside on recliners, gazing listlessly at the agitated sails of the trees; as they shifted and quivered, and breathed. There was something heroic and improvised about the whole affair. In the fullness of time, naturally, the baths could be ‘themed’ from diving boards to buffet, and a reasonable charge levied: payable in advance. The destitute could take out insurance, or make their own arrangements, under the sponsorship of caring libraries — if they could find any. This was a transitional phase. The developers were ready, on the nod, to ‘get into bed’ with the council. They were quite willing to sponsor the publication of leaflets, available on request, from all registered gyms, saunas, launderettes, and secondary schools: ‘Holy Communion — Is There a Safe Method of Using the Chalice?’ ‘AIDS and the Trade Unions’.

The local authority that had once tolerated Roland Bowman’s T3 Classes (Therapy-through-Theatre) now transferred him to the lazaret. It was easier to turn the ‘outpatients’ loose than to have them poncing about on a stage, ‘expressing themselves’ and getting ideas. They’d had more than enough of Roland’s subversive readings of the minor classics: all-male, all-female; all paid for by the taxpayer. There was no percentage in it. Roland was a nuisance. One of these days a bored critic might leave Shaftesbury Avenue and review a play staged in a synagogue. They saw their chance and ‘invited’Roland to develop a scenario that had proved highly popular in San Francisco: ‘How to enjoy a fully satisfying relationship with a mortally-disadvantaged partner.’