Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Nauseous, and light-headed with fasting, Arthur manoeuvred around the sharp spiral of stairs towards the street door. His coat-tails spun out; the pebbles striking the wall a muffled blow at each revolution. Once outside there was no return until dusk fell: the heavy door, operated by a cunningly weighted device, locked behind him.

He did not have far to travel: jobbed on to the Palace of Dossers was a parasitical structure (which may, in fact, have preceded it), the Spear of Destiny; an inn distinguished by several entrances, close passages, and the dubious suggestion that a way might be found into the saloon bar from the cellars of the adjoining pesthouse. Unfortunately this dream, though much discussed, had never been realized. The bones of the searchers lay buried beneath a mass of ugly bricks, licked white by indigenous rodents.

Hands sunk in deep pockets, tolling on his rosary of pebbles, Arthur waited: exiled indefinitely at ‘square leg’. Two hours passed before the window above the pub sign opened — and a wicker basket was lowered on a rope. A swift inspection revealed four lonely coins, but no written instruction. No instruction was necessary. No word or glance was ever exchanged between Arthur and the invisible donor.

The Bangladeshi grocer who had inherited, along with the business, the title of ‘Mickser’ (the aka of a shady and excessively mobile Dubliner from the North Side), parked his Rover Vitesse on the kerb, set its alarms, and scuttled across Fieldgate Street to unchain his plate-glass door, before it was terminally violated by Arthur’s palsied fist. Mickser was genial, even at this ungoldy hour, smooth-skinned, balding more gracefully than Frank Sinatra: an incipient pot belly damaged the clean lines of his stylish shirt. The customer who took the till’s hymen demanded a certain deference. ‘What’s wrong with your bed, Arthur? Too much rub-a-dub, mate. No good at your age, you old bastard.’ Mickser was enjoying himself so much he didn’t bother to ‘adjust’ the change. Slowly, Arthur filled his basket: eggs you could see through, red-top milk, pilchards, sour cream, Mail on Sunday , sliced white loaf. It was calculated to the penny. Arthur pocketed the coins that were returned to him; his most regular income. The hooked rope was waiting, dangling from the pub window; the basket was rapidly pulled from his sight. His brief glory as a discerning consumer was over.

His tribute paid, and his crust earned, Arthur moved south, down Romford Street — a tight chasm between refurbished tenements — shuffling towards the Commercial Road, testing the cracks in the paving stones with an imaginary willow. He kept to his own warren, did not stray from the force-field of the gentle aliens, the brown faces and the unrequired artists: a plantation of sorrows. He had his routes, his benches; but they were fast cutting them down around him, nibbling at the violated brain-stem. The map by which Arthur navigated had been refined to a network of razor strokes on the palm of his hand: scarlet traces scabbing the ingrained dirt. His apparently unmotivated perambulations gave him the leisure to preach a recital of Jesuit sins, to muddy the skirts of the Whore of Rome. He pleaded his innocence to the skies, and caressed the rope burns on his neck: water, he shunned. In the window of a knife shop, he caught his own mocking reflection: how could he remain suspended in time, unaging, and soft as cheese? What was the nature of his crime? He spat a dry pellet of venom at the lying portrait. And cancelled it with a smeared circuit of his arm.

The river, guilty as ever, glimpsed between warehouses, stalled him: his heart went out, he spun on his heel, tramped back, head down, plodding in his extinguished footsteps; demanding sanctuary of The Spear of Destiny . He arrived just as the exanimous sun fell behind the Mosque, innocently emphasizing the glory of its bilious brickwork — against which lurched the lengthening shadows of the unquenched vagrants.

The immense hands — flashy with senile lentigo , trellised with hard blue veins — that Arthur had last seen gathering up the wicker basket, now lay, without threat, on the polished mahogany surface of the bar. This horizontal mirror of ancient wood played back the transaction as a sepia-tinted reverse-angle shot. A signet ring, the size of a Klondike nugget, stood out from the publican’s paw like a supplementary knuckle. Its owner seemed simply to have allowed it to grow, in situ : it was worth more than the pub’s freehold. The man himself was composed equally of bone and metal. His shoulders were Detroit fenders, and his bullneck would have blunted any chainsaw. He was formidable, long-skulled, spike-haired, with calcitic eyes and brows like cutlass slashes. He commanded the deck of the pub by the slightest twitch of his nostrils. He offered Arthur no greeting. A bottle of barley wine was opened and slid towards him. No payment was exacted, and no glass was produced.

Arthur retreated to his corner in the snug, to watch over the tables and to empty the ashtrays (usually, into his own pockets). If anyone else had been occupying Arthur’s favoured chair he would have thought nothing to plonking himself down directly in their lap: the social gaff was never repeated. But ‘The Boy’ — this decrepit and weather-stained adolescent — was not regarded by his peers as a serious drinking man. Half a dozen barley wines, and any dregs left in the pots, saw him through a single session. The Irish considered him, for all practical purposes, a teetotaller; a snivelling chapel-haunting bogtrotter who wouldn’t stand his round; a sheep-tickling gombeen eejit suckled on rainwater dripping from the arse-hairs of a spavined donkey. And that was when they were in a conciliatory mood, badgering Arthur to slip them a bottle of lavatory cleaner to give ‘a bit of body’ to the Hanger Lane stout.

The Paddies shared the front bar, in an uneasy truce, with a school of choleric and pop-eyed Jocks, who were ready, after a dozen Youngers, cut with blue, to let fly at anything that moved. These amiable exiles were easily recognized by their pinched and blistered lower lips; eaten away by spitting a perpetual stream of f -sounds, ‘Jimmie’, from behind what was left of their upper teeth. Rabid and posthumous men, without social identity, they had followed William Hare, the resurrectionist, on the long road south. ‘ Hang Burke, banish Hare, / Burn Knox in Surgeon’s Square .’ Hare, having narrowly escaped the gallows — where Burke dangled for almost an hour — was released from gaol on 5 February 1829, and ‘put on a train south’. He travelled under the name of ‘Mr Black’; to vanish for ever into the streets of Whitechapel. Another blind beggar, another silent volume.

By day, the Micks worked Euston; not having the imagination to travel further afield than the spot where they fell off the Liverpool train. The younger lads walked about with their hands out, waiting for some philanthropist to stick a shovel in them. They mingled awkwardly with the wall-whores; drinking anything that was put in front of them, and stripping to the bone the first man to drop, or take a fit. Only the strongest warriors begged a path back to the safety of the Doss House. The unfortunate, and the sick, received abrupt cosmetic surgery on the end of a broken bottle, or were brutally culled by the refuse departments of the state — tumbling to their deaths from visionary staircases that appeared before them in solitary cells; gibbering-out in controlled pharmaceutical experiments.

But the landlord, Jerzy the Count, could call the whole pack to order by the simple act of heaving himself down the length of the bar, snapping open his personal cigar box, withdrawing a Cuban dynamite-stick, which he rammed between his lips, primed like a blowpipe, to spatter defaulters with high-velocity dumdums. He thumped the lid shut, causing the unboiled teeth, in the confectioner’s glass jar on the shelf behind him, to rattle. Jerzy acted as unofficial dentist to the Doss House; knotting a red handkerchief around the fangs of any swollen-cheeked supplicant mad enough to moan over his drink; he swiftly extracted the decayed stump. Then cleaned out the bone fragments with a pair of pliers. Many halfway-healthy canines, incisors, premolars, and molars had also been recklessly sacrificed for the free tot of neat Polish spirits that concluded the operation. The raw shock of the first gulp numbed the tongue, froze the eyeballs in tent-peg horror, and even, momentarily, silenced the Glaswegians. Some of Jerzy’s trophies, enamelled veterans, were capped in gold, souvenirs of plumier days; most were yellow pebbles, cabbagecoloured drachma.