Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Roland’s body — hairless, pale, disciplined — had the miraculous capability of allowing any other life to be ‘projected’ over his own. He was neutral; the dream actor. A man, a woman, an animal: he could be a cardinal or a horse, a prostitute or a surgeon. The watchers would witness whatever transformations they dared to conceive.

For this role Roland’s make-up was predatory and exulting. He laughed, and he licked his white teeth. He ran a finger teasingly over his lips. He shook out the red-gold hair that flowed down his back. Edith was producing a wicked pastiche of the Roland who laid claim to her identity, by making himself the sole curator of her legend. There is no salvation in dumb reverence. Loving admiration metamorphoses to soul-theft. The glamour of the risks that Edith provoked had been peeled like a mask from the bone of Roland’s skull. Neither party could break from this terrible contract: the telling and the showing, the being and the dying. The mirror had frozen hard about them.

There was only the sound of bare feet sliding on the boards. Roland spun to face the Four Quarters of the World: he stretched out his arms. He was passing down a track already flattened in the wet grass, under the arch, and out of Meath Gardens: rain in his face, he brushed against the drooping purple heads of buddleia. Eyes shut, following the wind; he crossed Roman Road towards the corroded green effigy of a blind man tethered to a stone dog. He could go no further. He was enclosed by a crescent of water; which he drew, at once, into the unsuspecting air. Faith kept the shining column in balance on his hand, a liquid wand.

Fredrik, coughing fiercely, stood up, a handkerchief clutched to his lips: he loomed alarmingly over the balcony rail. Shadows from the swinging lamp aged him; grew a dark judicial beard. He challenged the woman who stood beneath us on the floor of the synagogue. He spoke, but the voice was not his own: it was chalky and base. He rose to defuse the gathering tension of the moment: only to discover that he was now the dominant part of the act. He was implicated: the necessary articulator of a written voice.

‘Who is he who gives you this authority?’ Fredrik choked out the words he was hearing for the first time. He fingers closed on his throat, so that he could feel them, and assess their truth.

Edith countered his assault with movement, the steps of a dance: she glissaded, turned, showed her back. She ripped the sleeve from her cloak, and let it float into the unlit margin of the stage.

‘What business do you have with Hebrew ceremonies, the taint of idolatry, and the like?’ Fredrik continued his cabalistic interrogation.

With a sound like dry flame rushing over a tinder-trail, Edith split open her costume of maps: it hung loose from her shoulders, drowned wings. A sudden leap obscured her: she was hidden behind one of the red pillars.

‘By the power of the four princes I require your submission.’ Fredrik slumped back into his seat. He was stripped of his borrowed dignity. He did not speak again.

But Edith Cadiz was instructed by her angel and would suffer no governance. Roland, naked once more, had the body of a woman.

IX

We returned to the house in Fournier Street: it was a clean, fresh morning. Vagrants were already standing around their perpetual oil-drum fires. Nobody ever saw one of these fires being started. Forklifts were shuttling the vegetable market; odd, single trays of exotic fruits were carried to taxis. It was still quiet enough to enjoy the agitated cicada-hum of the sewing machines. We waited for Roland in his mother’s sitting room. But there was no clear space into which our turbulent imaginings could skulk, searching for respite. The room was crowded with so many gathered mosaic-fragments of the old woman’s previous lives. It was one floor higher, but the same shape as Roland’s Wildean chamber: it seemed smaller, packed as it was with occasional tables, mementoes, knick-knacks, votive offerings.

While Fredrik gossiped happily with Mrs Bowman about Canada — where he had spent a few fugitive years finding out that he was not an academic, and that Black Mountain poets, individually or en masse , would never produce anything but aggravation — I picked up the photograph of Edith Cadiz which I had excitedly rediscovered among the ranked portraits of husbands, ballet masters, loved enemies, and lost friends. I suppose I was expecting, or projecting, the ultimate Dorian Gray transformation: that the silver print would now represent Roland Bowman in Edith’s skin. Our night in the synagogue had to clarify the insane ambiguities that infected this house (and all its visitors). I was, by temperament, much happier analysing glass slides with finite examples of captured time, than scrambling across the living face of Whitechapel. The story, in all decency, should end here. I revolved the frame in my hands. I tried every angle. There was no change. That elegiac aggression was as strong as it had ever been: the pearly smoothness of light on her body. The gesture of the arms that refused a definitive interpretation. It was undoubtedly the same woman.

Mrs Bowman, bird-eyed, caught me at my investigations. ‘Quite pretty, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’m very fond of that frame: cost me thirty-five pounds in Bermondsey. I couldn’t get Alfie to shift on the price. Girl’s quite attractive too. Absolutely the right period. That’s why I’ve never bothered to change her. I felt she went so well with the frame. And, when you’ve only a son left, well, you do tend to collect another little family to keep you company.’ She laughed. ‘I think of them as quite real. I make up all sorts of stories about them. But only for friends, of course. Yes, I do find myself wondering, from time to time, who she was; and if her life was anything like the one I have saddled her with.’

I could only stare at her, with ill-mannered bluntness, and will some saving breath of ‘Bates Motel’ transvestite shape-shifting slaughter. Roland would surely emerge from behind the wig, a carving knife in his upraised arm. But, no, sadly; this was a small, voluble, and wholly convincing woman. Then I heard a key turn in the lock of the street door, and light fast footsteps, that could only be Roland’s, raced towards us, up the long flights of stairs.

Arthur, who was also, obscurely, known as ‘Monty’ or ‘The Boy’, opened his sticky seropic eyes in a room that had bent around him in the night; that had contracted to a necklace of tyres. He could not draw breath in it. There were no corners to the walls. He was alone, abandoned, far from ground, amputated from memory: a trustee with a black ribbon sewn to his sleeve. He no longer had to suffer the linoleum wards, or the dormitories with their milky puddles of disinfectant, their anguish, sprayed threats and sudden, random blows. He did not need to twist on his mattress at the mercy of some communal nightmare; or to wake, on this fine morning, to the bite of another man’s parasites, inherited from a foam pillow, still saturated with unshriven dreams.

But at this altitude there was no purchase; Arthur’s mind slipped, forcing him to bury his face in a pink and threadbare cricket cap. All night he had been remembering his teeth, seeing himself wrap them in soft purloined lavatory paper: then the discovery of his secret hiding place by some dark and stalking double. Shame. Anger. His breakfast extended over the entire day, as he sucked his string of rind towards a slow and salty dissolution. No, he had been too cunning for that. They were gone. His teeth were the past, a squandered inheritance, wilfully forfeited.