Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Elgin was running down the last of the family properties; hanging grimly on until the concept of ‘Docklands’ could be stretched to include Hackney. Or until they buried him under a motorway sliproad. The family had been traditionally ‘turncoat’; betrayers of Parnell, dinner guests of Black Tim Healy, friends of the Castle. They had thrived on it, to the extent of a brace of hotels in the Joyce Country, and a scatter of London hideaways for the drunks and the gamblers, too far gone to pick a decent American pocket.

Elgin’s father’s frock coat, a skimpy thing, torn at the seams, and green as moss, barely covered a snuff-stained string vest, and a heaving gut, that would have bulged, if it had not long since collapsed utterly, to hang dead over his leather-belted moleskins: the only surviving legacy of too many nights of ‘great crack’ and inferior bottled Guinness.

CRACK . The word proved something of a liability when Elgin bellowed it to the world at large: drawing DHSS snoops, vagrants, and outpatients on walkabout, down on his parlour. ‘Great crack, lads. You should have been there last night,’ he would cry, even to the fur-tongued companions who had stuck with him to the unforgiving steel of dawn. Now barrio -rats, and spike-skulled squatters from distressed chip vans, broke surface; to nail these rumours that worried them, like the smell of baking bread in a starving city. They turned the place over, ripped up the floors, slashed the mattresses, and sprayed the walls with libellous assertions. In their justifiable vexation, they set fire to crates of Elgin’s scrolled genealogies, his family portraits. He hardly noticed. Worse things, by far, waited every time he closed his eyelids.

The wiring in Elgin’s den burst from the walls in a shower of sparks; vines or snake trophies, inadequately disguised by layers of paper that rivalled a definitive V & A catalogue. The plumbing was authentically Georgian (i.e. there wasn’t any); and what substitutes Elgin contrived, he also spilled as he struggled in terror from his bed, to place his foot straight in it, or to retrieve a floating sandal from an overloaded receptacle. His sheets… but there are limits beyond which even the hardened ‘Baroque Realist’ falters.

To maintain the stable character of the household Elgin picked his lodgers from among a Johnsonian gathering of riffraff, not yet barred from an Islington hostelry much patronized by antique dealers (or, more accurately, ‘runners’ to antique dealers): most of whom vanished like quicksilver at close of trade, to Golders Green, Muswell Hill, or Seven Kings; or dived into back rooms to whisper with furtive connections. Some of Elgin’s boys threatened to become actors. Some ‘restored’ prints. Some fronted expense-account restaurants. All were prepared to drink. And most were, with no wild enthusiasm, homosexual in persuasion.

Neb, oddly, had not drifted in by this route. He didn’t drink: which made him immediately suspect. ‘The creature’s a soot-smeared, melon-headed Ulsterman; a horse-fucker,’ growled Elgin. ‘You’d better lock up the candles.’ But, despite the landlord’s primitive caveat, Neb had been successfully smuggled in, and established, by a props man from Sadler’s Wells; who later survived an attempted self-crucifixion on Hampstead Heath, and dined out on it through half the green rooms in Europe. Neb contrived not to be noticed. He stuck to his attic like a tame crow. He paid his rent, and he went out early. If, by some evil chance, Elgin met him on the stairs, the landlord crossed himself, spat twice on his hands, and prayed he’d be gone in the morning.

Most nights there was a party. Elgin would not allow his tenants to escape so lightly to bed: dues must be paid. ‘Did I ever tell you, dear boy, about the time my grandfather, Lord Cloghal, killed a pig with a polo mallet?’ Bed was, in truth, all that was left to him. The wives, English and high-born, had cleaned out the rest; abandoning him to the ‘crack’ and the incendiary levees. These became so common that the fire brigade refused to turn up to bear witness. A blackened residue of ‘slipper stew’ was what held the pans together. Heavy curtains danced seductively in the candle-light. Orange-crowned fags dropped from tired hands on to pillows of straw.

One of Elgin’s fly-by-night guests, a not very resourceful book thief — who simply removed plate-books from the London Library, gutted, and sold them; watermarks, stamps, and library labels — was in a flat panic to obtain a tube of sufficiently unctuous ointment. Elgin MacDiarmuid, being asked for ‘jelly’, pictured calves’ feet, nursery tea, nanny’s starched apron; and he fell, with an almost audible crash, into a brown study. ‘Gone for ever, dear boy. All gone.’

The pederast, who went under the name of David DeLeon, was bent double, scarcely able to walk, quite ruptured with urgency: suppressing a pitiful sob, he begged from door to door. His catamite lay waiting, with few visible signs of impatience; picking his pimples and squirting the result over a yellowback Sapper novel, that a previous tenant had tried forlornly to collect.

The heat was on. The thief knew the net was closing around him. Even the dim and gentlemanly bookmen like to see the odd knuckle cracked, to witness the uppity bender take a public caning. DeLeon’s shirt melted; he smelt of cages. The hideous sounds of Elgin’s subterranean melancholy — clinking bottles, bog songs, tears — only reinforced his sense of inevitable confinement. Tonight might be his last chance to feast with panthers.

The thief pounded at Neb’s door: without success. He had reduced the grandeur of his demands from vaseline to baby lotion; or butter, polyunsaturated margarine, linseed oil, mayonnaise, louse shampoo. Anything . This wasn’t the moment to count calories. His mouth was far too dry simply to spit on the snake, and hope for the best. He knew Neb was in there. He could hear the inherited dog scratching at the far side of the bolted door. He snapped: converting the imps of lust to demons of wrath. He snatched up a hammer, and a mouthful of nails from the frame-maker’s cupboard, and proceeded, with yelps of rage, to seal Neb into his mansard garret.

Neb, at the first blow, transformed himself into an item of furniture; mute, uncomplaining, clasping his scrapbook to his heart. DeLeon completed his task with the aid of a few loose floorboards. And went below to find a bottle.

Not for nothing had Neb studied the ways of the East. He could feed, for months, on his own karma. He withdrew: he retreated into a floating world of headlines; narrative collages that opened so many possible avenues. He would begin at once on an obituary notice.

GAY ARISTO AND RENT BOY IN THIEVES’ KITCHEN SHOCK. IRISH ANGLE SUSPECTED. A delegation of notables, including the Standing Member, Meic Triscombe, and several faces from the cast of ‘EastEnders’, today broke into the attic room of a house in Well Street, claimed by its owner, Elgrun MacDonald (68), to be of ‘immense historical importance’. The delegation had intended making an award to a long-serving social worker, Nebuchadnezzar Spurgeon, whose selfless activities on behalf of the Grove Road Lazaret (plc) have won him universal acclaim. However, when the doors were broken down by sanitary operatives, it was revealed that the ‘artist’s garret’ was uninhabited. Obscure books on the occult by Colin Wilson, W. H. Hodgson and others were removed for forensic examination. A pile of brown dust was said by one of the actors to be ‘in the shape of a dog’. ‘This mystery will rival the Marie Celeste ,’ claimed a Townhall Spokesperson. ‘It is straight out of Edger Allen Poe [sic].’

Elgin MacDiarmuid, soul-crushed, sunk into a shameless candle-cupping pose: his skull was a parchment membrane. Nightmare shadows stretched and yawned against the walls. A capuchin monkey plucked at his sleeve. Beast faces winked in the panels of the windows. The slop bucket of his fears had been spilled, and the swamp dwellers were loose. There was now no barrier between past and future, between naked panic and its uglier manifestations. He saw DeLeon as he really was. And he called for a shotgun. DeLeon belonged in the trophy room.