Iain Sinclair - Downriver

A fabulous smell, the spittling sweetness of roasting pork, filled the basement; drool seeped from Elgin’s snoring mouth: it stung the absurd, pre-pubertal pliancy of his skin. His skin was his memory: the retarded child held within this abused and rotting carcase. Elgin screamed aloud, woken by pain; and dropped the candle which was gently cooking his venus mounds. Hungry flames licked across his bare mattress, leaping deliriously from pools of congealed chicken fat to liquid rivulets of chip grease. Sportingly, the fire outlined Elgin’s shape in the bed: the man’s animal traces burnt like a sacrifice. The bog landlord looked down at where he should have been lying. It was a small conflagration: nothing in that. The walls were already black as a holocaust; and several windows were missing, where agitated lovers had done a header into the streets.

Roars of torment from the bull-baited MacDiarmuid roused the pack of lodgers and associates, who tumbled into the night in various stages of undress, inebriation, and sexual attainment. Sheets of flame escaped gratefully into the clean air. The draggletails, their lice and their parasites, sprawled in the gutter on the far side of the street, to watch the show. There had been nothing like it since the Smithfield barbecues.

From the dark safety of the coppice, Elgin saw the Big House. The brute laughter of the peasantry. He had been burnt out, driven from his inheritance: four hundred years of culture trampled in the mud. ‘Save the Rowlandsons,’ he howled. ‘Who will carry out Hogarth’s “Roast Beef of Old England!”? A gold sovereign for any brave lad who dares the flames.’ The fond tricks of the mind, that can promote one of the lesser insurrectionists to a chief among Wicker Men. Elgin the Torch heard the skirl of the pipes on the crown of the hill: the heavy smoke of the hospital incinerator. The road to the isles opened before him.

All that remained of the sorry affair was to witness the figure of Neb, translated from grass gobbler to Blake’s Cain ; his hair on fire, white hands tearing at his scalp. He was trapped in the mansard window, like a negative within a square of film. The heat would print his image into the glass. He lifted the blazing dog above his head, as if the animal were a flaming brand, or the true source of the fire; then he hurled it out in a frosted shatter of moth-sharp fragments. And the beast fell, an incandescent log, through the cold air, down and down, towards the distant street.

VIII

We sat on either side of the Ladies’ Gallery in the Princelet Street Synagogue: I took the East, and Fredrik took the West. The keys were in my pocket. We had locked ourselves into the building. The candle holders, hanging in front of us, were eggs of brass, from which writhed serpentine tendrils. They swayed perilously, revolving in a breeze that had no obvious source. They were muted in a thick dust of bone, masonry, cloth, and prayer; and were crowned by strange double-headed birds, Hapsburg eagles, whose necks twisted against threat from any quarter of the compass. Lamps had been lit on the floor beneath us: necessary oils sputtered. The chamber was dim and anxious. This first stage involved an attempt to stop-down the rush of time, to chill this event, to allow the setting to absorb, and swallow, our invading presences.

Roland concentrated solely on the management of his own performance; following closely the guidelines he recovered from Edith’s frantic and inelegant script. The hints Roland dropped suggested that Edith had not written anything in the form of a play. There were, for example, no speeches or stage instructions. No, what she had done was to ensure that anyone who read her notes with attention would be led to ‘re-enact’ the sequential prophetic curve that any play has to be. The script was a series of physical proposals for a séance that would deliver the event Edith was imagining. Wisely, Roland allowed the ritual site to look after itself. His only ‘theatrical’ contribution was to drape the expressionist backcloth from his Oscar Wilde drawing room over the raised bimah ; making a tent from which we assumed he would, in his own time, emerge.

I don’t know how long we waited. Light died in the sloped glass roof over our heads: it grew strong again, illuminating the cracks, the broken webs of long neglect. I’m sure that neither of us slept, or lost consciousness for more than a few seconds. Very slowly, the shaking and the rolling of past worshippers faded: the silver bells, the pomegranates; the stiffened yolks of eggs, unpeeled from dead faces; the steam from the bath house melted away. And we heard the low whining of a solitary dog. It seemed to come, not from the floor of the synagogue, but from beneath it: a melancholy and inhuman kaddish of loss. The hair rose on our necks. We heard the claws of the dog scratching on tile: turning, circling; faster, faster, from end to end of the cellar that enclosed him. Our sense of the animal developed: a lion-headed, tail-thrashing, back-arched revenger, bumping against the floor that could no longer contain it. The beast was growing. It would burst through the feeble bricks.

Our veins closed, stopping the surge of blood to spasms of pain. The room was filled with suspended heat. We flinched from the rails on which we were leaning. We dug our nails into the palms of our hands.

Now there was a cooler sound, metallic; a length of chain dropping into a dry well. A small gridiron in the floor of the main chamber was lifting itself, falling back into place; lifting again. A stutter of untraceable images flooded in behind the sound. A cloaked sleeper, living or dead. A peasant-priest stalking the circumference, barefoot; drawing his own breath from a glass-flute, in which locusts are imprisoned. Horizontal confessions. Crimes of passion. The supplicant lies, face down, upon the synagogue floor, and whispers his (her) guilt through the grille to an unseen confessor; or into a pool of accumulated evil. The priest is standing on a chair in the inundated cellar, neck twisted, lifting his mouth to catch her (his) spit. The penance involves cleaning with the tongue these loops of cold iron. And it is shared between priest and victim.

With a wild rush of yellow, of thorn and sand, the lion-thing was at the door: it thundered, its breath was rage. We did not want to see it, but we could not move.

Roland Bowman was naked, red, on all fours; crawling like some obsolete chess piece, across the worn boards towards a restored pool of decorated tiles. His movements were precise, but they did not appear to be premeditated. He was the inherited dog, burnt of its fur; birth-shivering, as it aligned itself to enter once more the geography of its ordained narrative. Scalded, raw, vulnerable; Roland pushed himself pitifully along the floor, until we felt the waves of displaced pain enter our own knees and wrists. His muscular control was astonishing.

I gave no credence to what I was seeing. I was the right eye, Fredrik was the left eye: we had both to concentrate to bring this vision into focus. I could not judge its distance from my own amorphous fears and desires. I could not guess what part of this scene Fredrik was censoring with his intelligence. But what I saw shocked me. The dog’s swollen pizzle, emerging like a piston of peeled, pink flesh from its holster of fur. Nothing of Roland was left. He was overwhelmed by this assertion of the animal’s unthinking maleness. I did not believe Roland would ever break free from the creature whose spirit he had so convincingly summoned.

The dog salt-licked the blue pigment from the dutch tiles. He put his shoulder, in turn, to each of the six pillars. He acknowledged the amud , and bent his head before the Ark. Now the vigour drained from him. He was beaten. He dragged on broken legs. His spine was twisted, his head lolled. The crushed beast slunk from our sight under the painted cloth of the tent — and re-emerged, on the instant, by some conjuring effect; erect, strutting, arms thrown wide, parading the cloak of maps. The dog was Edith Cadiz. Or a switch had been made. Roland had volunteered to vanish in her place from this story. He was robed once more in the cardboard streets that surrounded his house. He was dressed in the tale he had told us at his kitchen table, the woman’s life.