Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Once the twin towers of the Monster Doss House had been decorated with flags: the pride of the fleet, a red-brick leviathan, studded with portholes. An Imperial fantasy: Wembley Stadium set in a grassless desert. It had been photographed, part of the social record, for the first, October 1903, edition of Jack London’s The People of the Abyss — where it can still be found, sheltering between page 240 and page 241. In its pomp the Doss House had shaken to the snores of a thousand men, snorting and gobbing the choked filth of their lungs. But now the half-dozen tolerated vagrants were forced to hide themselves — even from each other — somewhere in its telary vastness; camped in locked corridors, they fought for the remaining blankets with patients too bizarrely infected to be accepted, even as charity-appeal posters, by the London Hospital. They were not ‘star material’, and would never get a call from Mel Brooks, or be played on Broadway by David Bowie. They died, slowly, in unrecorded cupboards.

Sticking to the damp walls of this pest seminary were plagues without names, that would test the recall of even the most diligent antiquarians of medical science: fibrillations, lesions, scabs, lymphs, bubonoceles, swellings, welts, knots, discharges and seizures unidentified even in the holograph manuscripts of medieval Spanish apothecaries. This sad rump of nostalgic vagrancy, these stinking heritage ghosts, clung to life only to bleed the fundraisers; scratching their way into the casting directories of documentary film-makers, or whining their mendacious autobiographies from doorstep to doorstep through Bloomsbury. They were the ‘house guests’ of the developers until the Monster Doss House could make its appearance in the brochures as ‘an historical site’, and City-based newcomers could get their rocks off recolonizing a genuine Poor Law survival ward. They could make pets of the cockroaches. This fired-clay alp was built to last for ever by planners in the grip of dynastic certainties. Features of the original plumbing would be incorporated with no surcharge. Speculators, on the instant, were sweating to buy a piece of it. They were dumping wine bars in the Old Kent Road, like so many cat sacks, just to stay liquid. But — until the first ruched sorbet curtains dressed the portholes — the dead men had a role to play as walk-on ‘local colour’.

The porthole, looking out to the west, was no longer a temptation for Arthur. His turret room, a literal crow’s nest, had once been a privilege the inmates had fought to achieve: wrestling through gutters, ambuscading the key holder with sand-filled stockings, biting and clawing to be first man at the evening window. They had to hobble Scotch Dave with a paraquat and British Sherry cocktail, when he took to protecting his claim by sleeping all afternoon on the Doss House steps. Joey the Jumper actually dug himself into the refuse bin of the London Hospital’s surgical ward, so that he could maintain a death-watch on the padlocked door. He was submerged, head on knees, in a canister of mustard slime, pus, and gungy dressings — but he couldn’t control the compulsive drumming of his heels, or gag his endlessly rotated mantra of early Christian martyrs. ‘Stephen, James the Apostle, James the Righteous, Paul and Peter, Symeon, Ignatius, Rufus and Zosimus, Telesphorus, Germanicus, Polycarp.’ One of the warty roundhead orange-boys put a lucifer to a trailing tongue of bandage that spilled from the bin’s lid, and Joey was deep-fried in his own fat.

The mysterious attraction of the west window was no difficult matter to explain: the unashamed voyeurism of the incarcerated onanist. Monkeys in zoos, or lifers in strip-cell confinement, obey the same imperatives — without any visual stimulation. Before the ochre-brick ‘Espresso Mosque’ had been grafted on to Whitechapel Road it had been possible for these one-handed visionaries to stand unbuttoned at the grimy porthole, and to sweat cobs with the effort of focusing red eyes on the overnight lorry park beneath them. They stood through all the tedious hours of darkness, hammering against the sill, bruising strained flesh in an orgy of untargeted self-mutilation. They hung as if ‘on the rope’, suspended over the pulsing violet ghetto. They learnt to ‘see’ with their ears, to follow the subtlest shifts and arrangements of human commerce: tree-breath, water whispering under the paving stones. Their fathers rebuked them from the throats of birds.

Then, as dawn broke, blooding the slate and the wet tarmac, they caught the first tremble in the curtained cabs of the longdistance hauliers. They saw the gay girls stretch out their legs, skirts riding high, risking the drop back on to firm ground. The girls were inevitably overweight, with make-up spattered like an autistic action painting; or scrawny, nerve-ticked, scratched, pimpled, and frantic to score — wriggling in satin, torn fish-net, split and smeared saddle-leather. But the vagrants were not disillusioned. These were their saints. The distant mechanisms of exchange became a portfolio of detached details: knees metamorphosed to skulls, tangled in rat fingers; black gearshifts; elbow joints; neck hair; segments of wheel fur. Laughter died in blows; threats, whispers. Lights flared along the windscreens in promiscuous delight. Cigarettes burnt cruelly through the hooded darkness. Thumbs agitated belt buckles. Hands swallowed stiff banknotes. The watchers were implicated, mumbling, taking sides; making their selection from a repertoire of pain and pleasure; wanking themselves into vacancy, letting their brains run from their sudorific noses in streams of unwiped silver.

But that view was gone for ever. The Garden of Earthly Delights was strictly off limits. The muezzin who wailed his exotic arias over the pantiled roofs, the sprouting chimneys, and the glistening gutters, had captured the townscape. It was his: to curse, to anathematize, to hurl fire and brimstone on to the sublimely indifferent heads of sinners, as they gurgled like hogs, shoving their lips into the triangular wounds on cans of export lager. The gun turret of this Disneyland mosque, behind its bullet-proof glass, was empty. The summons, bringing the devout traders to their knees, was pre-recorded. Mercifully, the holy man was spared even a glimpse of these unamputated follies.

No need for Arthur to waste precious minutes on his toilet. He rolled from his mattress, fully dressed, in waistcoat, collar and cuffs, fingerless gloves: he reached for the once-white dustercoat that served as a blanket. He was lost without it; a disbarred hairdresser. The coat was his comforter, and his calendar. One pocket, when he inherited the garment, contained six limestone pebbles. Therefore, Arthur lived by a six-day week: the day of rest was an option he rarely needed to invoke. His existence was perfectly adjustable to the symmetrical paradigm of cricket. His philosophy discovered, in the end-to-end, turn-and-turn-about duality of the game, a Manichaean implication. The strictly regimented numerology satisfied him in a way that was too deep to articulate.

Each morning, buttoned into his overall, Arthur shifted one stone. ‘Another night gone,’ he would mutter, grimly. But when all the stones were disposed of, safely lodged in the originally barren pocket, it was necessary to begin the cycle again; using the untainted hand to trundle the heated pebbles back, one by one, to their starting place. Any small calculation (in the way of purchasing bread or a newspaper) that might require the aid of the stones had to be entered into only as a last resort: or the crucial mensuration of passing time was thrown into chaos. Midweek saw Arthur at his most balanced. By the end, he sagged; weighed down by the bias of a full pouch. A severe strain was placed on an area already disputed between ilium, ischium, and pubis. He walked like a man conscious of the fact that his trousers are held up by faith alone. He rattled: enemies were warned, friends scattered.