Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Does love end with death? The sunshine theory was that it did not; many spiritual climaxes lay ahead — if the groundwork was tactfully handled. The bones of the thing had been shamelessly lifted from the Natural Childbirth propagandists — ‘breathing’, stages, levels of pain: unashamed Tupperware Buddhism. The dying were to be taken, step by step, through death; which was, apparently, a kind of wind. They learned to sing their way out, to cut free from their old lives and their worn flesh. They joined with the wind. They moved among the leaves of the trees. They faced what lay ahead. They were instructed to fantasize a picture of the beloved one; then to strip the picture of all its physical attributes, reduce it to a flame; to step into that flame, burning away all memories, all regrets. Love curves around them, like a fault.

As Roland instructed them, with disinterested affection, and with strength, they did indeed begin to taste smells, to hear colour. Their sensuous faculties had never been so acute, because they no longer had the will to oppose them. They were able, by their own volition , to enter a place of safety; a place of which Roland had no knowledge whatever.

Neb and his inherited dog leapt joyously around the fringes of this mantra-chanting seminar, performing his own spinningdervish celebration. He took in marginal details that were of no value to any other human creature: blue plastic streamers caught on the wire, or the last red rays of sunlight picking out the jagged glass fragments in the windows, making them into maps, outlines of islands to be visited by the saints. The tranced neophytes swayed and moaned, while Neb muttered his dark imprecations to the older gods. His lips bubbled with white pellets. The shape of Roland’s dance had conjured a truce with time. His naked white-bone feet were scarcely touching the cool green tiles. The low drone ran out across the park, shadow-spokes through the dark grass: the angry courage of the dying men.

V

Sonny Jaques, the director, had learned by rote the rules that he now preached with all the fervour of a convert. The camera could never remain still for more than nine seconds. The camera may not move unless it is following some person on a legitimate quest. When in doubt: cross-cut. Somehow, half a dozen stock situations, visited briefly, in and out like a milkman, were assumed to be more interesting than any solitary sequence doomed to stand on its own feet. The validity of this argument was always endorsed by quoting the success of ‘EastEnders’. At which point, Fredrik swallowed hard, and thought of the kill fee.

Sonny had to admit, after a night of agony, that he was ‘unhappy’ with Roland. (He had, at the last head count, been sufficiently unhappy with Dryfeld and Joblard to pogrom them from the script altogether. Poor Milditch never made it, even as a kitchen concept.) He liked Roland. Of course he did. He loved him. There was enormous ‘potential’ there, but… we didn’t quite have it in focus yet. I knew we were heading for trouble when I saw those pause bubbles (…) streaming from Sonny’s nostrils.

When Sonny was in a state of doubt, his face gelled into a grin set in plaster of Paris. I wanted to tap him with a hammer, and watch it shatter. He kept an admonitory finger wagging, chopping steadily like a Sabatier blade against a herb-board. ‘Um, um, um. Ah, ah. Um. Ah.’ The tension ran out in rings. The coffee turned to mesozoic mud in our cups. I was all for resolving the matter, unilaterally, with a swift kick in the nuts; but Fredrik had a wonderful way of simply ignoring these local difficulties, cranking the scene on as if they had never occurred. He would suck in a long breath, swallow all the philosophical loose ends still lying on the table, and let rip with a twelve-minute speech, which totally anaesthetized all resistance, and caused the flies to drop dead from the ceiling.

What Sonny wanted to know was: how could we write anything down before we knew what was going to happen? And, if we didn’t write it down, so that it could be approved by three producers and a finance watchdog, then nothing would happen… ever. These ephemeral and unreasonable ideas had to be stiffened up: our ghosts had to be solid , so that we could cut away from them. We had to appreciate the awkwardness of his dilemma.

As he talked Sonny liked to pace, and also to eat; so that we were dutifully swivelling, backwards and forwards across the table, like the crowd in the Hitchcock tennis match, following him as he made his way to the refrigerator for another handful of black olives. (The family supper had dwindled by this time to a carton of leather-skinned yogurt and an anchovy that was waiting to be carbon-dated.) When Sonny had accumulated a dozen or so stones in his paw, he would arrive at the head of the table and roll them emphatically towards us, like poker dice. ‘Ah, um. Ah.’

The pitch that Sonny went for — the only concept with filmic possibilities — was the notion that Roland should act out some play, it didn’t matter what, in the deconsecrated synagogue at Princelet Street. We can light it with millions of candles, swing incense, wave flags: let’s go for it. Ivan the Terrible, part 3!

‘But hold up, boys, don’t get carried away too soon. If living actors are involved, we’re hung up on paying union rates, the budget is blown: we’ll have to lunch in some bug-infested Brick Lane rat hole. That’s serious stuff. The catering is not your department. Just give me seven and a half sheets of negotiable paper that I can take upstairs, without getting egg on my face.’

VI

I drank coffee with Roland Bowman in his basement kitchen. As we chatted, I searched for the photograph of the dancer, Edith Cadiz; but it was no longer on show. Secretly, this pleased me. I didn’t want to know if the photograph had changed: if it showed some fresh aspect of Edith’s disappearance that I would have to act upon. Any minor alteration in the image would mean an alteration in the account I had already written of it.

Roland was perfectly willing to discuss the director’s latest temporary enthusiasm. Previous experiences with the Corporation had resigned him to any twists of fate, however bizarre. He was excited to be involved, but knew in his heart nothing would come of it. He had been in the synagogue once before, with a Firbank adaptation, that had drawn the town, but passed unnoticed in Fleet Street. Now curiously, Fleet Street had marched — like Birnam Wood — to the Isle of Dogs, while Roland held, blindly, to his ground.

It was happening again: the preternatural sensitivity of this ambiguous setting. Nothing was fixed in age, or in gender; only ‘place’ was constant. Roland anticipated the request I had not yet brought myself to make. He shot upstairs and returned with a large brown envelope containing Edith’s notes for the play she wanted him to stage. The play had been delivered, in a woeful state, by a wild-haired messenger, whose condition paralleled the package he was carrying. A dog kept him company. A dog that Roland recognized. The animal had been to Fournier Street before.

The synagogue was now part of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre (by rumour, a front for storing Georgian plunder), so there should be no problem about using it for the performance. We’d take our spot in the queue, behind the primitive artists and the stockbroker wedding receptions. Roland made only one condition. He would not give us sight of his script until there had been a private ‘run through’, which Fredrik and I would attend: no lights, cameras, or crew were, at this stage, to be involved.

VII

The house in Well Street, Hackney, where Neb lodged was a curious one, but no more curious than its landlord. Elgin MacDiarmuid was a premature New Georgian: he might well have survived, under a preservation order, and several layers of black animal fat, from the era of the slobbering Hanoverians. He lived, and had for years, before cults or articles, in absolute squalor. He broke his fast, when he was ‘off the gargle’, on bottles of sweet South African sherry; dropping, painlessly, into an insulin-coma that necessitated long sandal-flapping treks out along the canal, and into the leafy suburbs: brooding on ancient glories, or the wives that were flown, along with his inheritance and his favourite four-poster bed. In these sere and yellowed years — he had now turned forty — the ‘black dog’ was much with him. He sulked in kitchens, he moaned; and sucked for comfort on loose strands of hair, thereby fulfilling most of his dietary requirements. He was amused, as a compensatory fantasy, to announce himself as the hereditary ‘Lord of the Isles’ — ‘dear boy’ — or, at the very least, his younger brother. He woke daily in the expectation of a piper at the door. He took to attending clan gatherings, sodden wakes, packed with embalming-fluidperfumed Canadians, and canny lowland advocates who charged these foreign puddocks a fierce price for two or three nights of rough-hewn crofter living.