Iain Sinclair - Downriver

All this Hogarthian stuff was beneath the notice of the Count’s wife, the Lady Eleanor, who kept to the burgundy-flock cave of the snug, standing guard over her inscribed portraits of Bobby Moore, Archie Moore, Kenny Lynch, Charlie Magri, ‘Babs’ Windsor, and assorted bracelet-waving gangsters. She perched, a silver-dipped cockatoo, on her high stool; scarlet of claw, dragging deep on menthol-flavoured fags, and tossing back thimbles of obscure but highly-scented liqueurs.

Joblard and his camarade were among the familiars of Eleanor’s bosky covert. They were, once again, in temporary retreat from the slings and arrows of bailiffs and bankers, estranged families, over-eager disciples and equally impoverished friends. They were potless, and squatting in a borrowed cell among shelves of authenticated nouveaux proles: dope dealers, outworkers, arts administrators and the like. But, while they lived within the shadow of the Doss House, it had not yet become a final reality, a fixed abode. The old vision Joblard suffered — of destitution, memory loss, vagrancy, wine — merely simmered on the back burner: his face returned to him from the scabs and rags of some passing mendicant. They were welcomed to the pub as friends, and courtiers, with no interrogation as to their past or their future. The Spear was gradually revealed, over the months of leisurely intoxication, as an independent principality — with its own laws, health service, banishments and forfeits.

One evening, two of the ‘potato-heads’ began to fight; ineffectively, a solid table between them — but with sufficient spunk to attract the sporting instincts of the assembled Jocks, who were so bored that they were watching a foam-flecked nutter spit out segments of his own tongue. Luckily for the amateur combatants, Jerzy was not in the bar. Occasionally he would withdraw — fingering a swiss roll of crisp new banknotes — to conduct a ‘bit of business’ upstairs with dark-suited associates, who arrived in the alleyway, bearing heavy suitcases and well-wrapped packages. And who left, unsteadily, without them. Bursts of strident martial music may have been timed to baffle obscure blood rituals, or overheated currency debates — but they led to rumours, never more, of planned coups: Knights of the Rosy Cross, Timber Wolves , worshippers at the flame of racial purity.

The Lady Eleanor had been left alone to cope with any dramas, short of a visitation from the angel with the key to the bottomless pit. Unable to lever herself from the adhesive surface of the stool, or to show her face in the retort of the street bar, she essayed a rising sequence of hysterical fit-inducing hisses and whistles. Joblard, ever the gent, was constrained to stagger forward; partly from a nice sense of social obligation, but mostly in quest of serviceable lowlife anecdotes, should it prove necessary — as it so often did — to sing for his supper around the dinner tables of such recently humanized investment opportunities as Finsbury Park or South-west Hackney.

The first Paddy, late of County Offaly — a sullen, custard-pallor student of Aquinas — made skilful use of a well-seasoned crutch; jabbing with dogmatic insistence at his opponent’s sauce-stained waistcoat, while mumbling a succession of discredited Latin tags. The cumulative effect of these guerrilla raids was to enrage his elderly adversary to the point of a massive sunrise apoplexy. The man’s spectacles — more decorative than functional — sported only to sustain the gravitas of a former ‘boy curate’ at Mooney’s House, Pearse Street, shattered when the sharpened crutch-tip caught him a spiteful blow behind the ear; bringing his misshapen blackberry-crusted nose into sudden and violent contact with the formica.

The engrossed but watchful North Britons saw their chance and, punting the crutch under a bench, left the Offaly sciolist grounded and cursing, while they dragged the honourably-discharged potman — whom they correctly assessed as the weaker vessel — out into the yard; where they proceeded to kick what remained of the living daylights out of him.

The potman’s fury was unabated; he was unusually blessed in still having a few functional grinders left in his mouth — which he clamped, with commendable pluck, in the green calf of the nearest Scotsman, whose howls brought the children in from the streets, and gathered quite a crowd of disengaged ladies of the night. Murder, cannibalism — or the first dentally-performed amputation — was narrowly avoided by the swift action of Joblard, who summoned the Count. Annoyed at being diverted by this puny affray from the imminent sacrifice of a non-Aryan fowl, Jerzy produced a baroque service revolver from behind the bar, and began to pistol-whip the Caledonian raiding party. They were put to ignominious flight, leapfrogging each other, through the liquid mush of an upturned bin, to reach the safety of the Doss House. It was Culloden Moor revisited.

So this was the curious social sketch with which Joblard lured me into a meet: at the modest cost of a couple of rounds of beer, and a probable tandoori luncheon. There was already a dotted ‘tear here’ track running down my spine. I was ready to split wide open. I trembled in that state of mingled inspiration and paranoid-dementia, in which the strangest characters I could capture on paper, after many sleepless nights, would interrupt my agonized efforts at composition with a brisk knock on the door. They only wanted to introduce themselves, to put a few simple questions about ‘the geometry of time and transformation’. They begged to confess, dragging sacks of documents into the hallway. They recited, with perfect recall, the legends I had not yet nerved myself to complete. Once, as I passed a cinema, on my way home from the bank (in the usual catatonic depression), a man I had only that morning ‘killed’ in the most hideous way, stepped out and touched me on the shoulder. Would I care to inspect the building’s haunted attic?

Unfortunately, there was no way I could resist the pre-fictional content of Joblard’s expertly pitched outline. A pub that seemed to have been christened by Rudolf Steiner? A Polish Count, with a potentially renegade past, who never left the safety of his protected enclave? What was the true history of this Billy Bones of Fieldgate Street: the door watcher, hugging his revolver to his chest, and having his food delivered in a basket on the end of a rope? Was it significant that he bore a remarkable resemblance to his fellow countryman, Karol Wojtyla, the Supreme Pontiff? Who was this bruiser in silks, this man of secrets? I could not wait to be initiated into these latest mysteries — even though I knew that my own fears had whistled them from the woodwork, like a bacterial culture from sweating gorgonzola.

II

There are mornings when the iron clouds do not press, when it all lifts, and your stride across the cobblestones is light and turf-sprung. You are accompanied by a sense of wellbeing: the world moves through an ease of recognition, and Fieldgate Street opens into a discreet metaphor of itself. The present stain — bricks, dirty windows, furnaces, generators — is accepted, but does nothing to damage the older sense, still vital; the unassumed joy of entering into the original field. White Chappell spreads out before us, muscular and calm, without fences or limits, expanding as far as we let the sight of it run. The great minatory blocks of the Monster Doss House and the London Hospital sink beneath their own folly; are absorbed in dunes of marram grass. That boundary, or edge of what is known, visited only in sleep, and towards the end of the night, is now gently insistent. Beyond the dry river of New Road, ruffled and buffeted by a false wind from vehicles attending only to the irrational need to be elsewhere, is the unachieved and unachievable meadow: the imagined shrine, solace to pilgrim and vagrant. The healing shadow of this resurrected earth mound, a clay Silbury, is set outside the severe concentration of the city.