Iain Sinclair - Downriver

As the weakened vagrant went under, let go, the reels speeded: the machine lurched and spat. The tape was flesh. The Grundig was skinning Arthur alive, peeling his memory. The spools travelled so fast, they did not move at all. Escaping sounds were coarsened in a spindle of autopsy bandages. Sound was light. Woolf made frantic motions, as if lathering his hands with soap. His tongue, still glowing like sodium vapour, lizard-flicked for imaginary flies. This passage of the tape was tidal, impregnated, sweeping over obstacles. There was a shower of static: panicked feet running the cobbles.

A moist darkness muffled the world, wrapped the tower in living felt, sooted the floorboards. Woolf waved us back; so that we formed our own rectangle, as we pressed against the walls of the circular chamber: Joblard, myself, Woolf and the Grundig. Suddenly there was no focus for our attention; we made no attempt to listen. The tape took over our critical functions: it drew our breath, massaged our heart-pumps. We were submerged in our own reveries. We had forgotten if Woolf was recording or playing; transmitting, or forcing us to transmit to other, as yet unidentified, attics.

I drifted into a sort of uninspired lethargy: sounds without images, bands of mute colour, violet-grey lesions, persistent green moulds, puddles of crushed chalk. Joblard’s roll-up had ignited his mouth: it spread in a lycanthropic grin. I became convinced that his lips were on fire, his cheeks were salt and his eyes had rolled into scorched feather-balls. His whole head was a dog of flame. And now — at this moment — the tape began to release gasps of fear; the asthma of sex-seizures, closed throats, trauma. It grated and rattled. The pain was intense, lungs shredding as they drowned in hot sand. I had to close my eyes and cover them. But it was useless. The tape was ‘passing’a worm of clotted black blood. Absurd guitars and hollow Tijuana brass had infiltrated the cupboard walls, the boards clattered and shook with stamping heels. Mad skullhouse laughter, halothane submersion: the words of the chorus stretching into phantom Yiddish. We were helpless, slithering towards extinction; ‘wetbrained’ like a six-day wine school, retching on our own bad air.

The rim of the porthole-window was a spinning disk of heat, in which it was possible to transcribe the cracks and dirt-veins as runic violations, bad will, attempts to seize the power of an ill-directed sacrifice.

The sound of a loose tape-end, repetitively thwacking against the spool, died: the machinery was running down. Nothing was moving. A faint spiral, or fountain of light, lifted in an uncontrolled vortex. It was more a comical irrelevance than any kind of grail or chalice: a trumpet in a sham séance. The voices of which it was composed competed for the dominant roles in a meaningless operetta. We had begun to ‘see’ — or perhaps to be seen — but that was not astonishing, and would not open the path to the field we desired, without daring to approach.

In the morning, over a late breakfast in the Market Café, Woolf asked if we had experienced it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the terror of being trapped underground by fire, choking on black smoke. I couldn’t breathe.’

‘Fire?’ replied Joblard. ‘You mean drowning, going under. I saw black trails of river-slurry sliding from your nostrils. You were going down for the third time in the corner of that room. Then mud packed close around my skeleton. I couldn’t raise my hands from the floor. I was a living fossil; lying beneath the Thames, watching my own past float over my head, exhibitionist and unforgiving.’

Woolf Haince, post-human, nodded; mumbled; picked up and set down his canvas satchel of paints and brushes. He refused to adjudicate between our competing visions. Or to tell us what we ‘should’ have seen. Nothing surprised him: he lived at such a pitch of nerve that every moment was his first. He was not implicated in his own destiny. He had seen the worst, and passed through it. He was stamped and registered in a book that was marked for the furnace. He made no claim for this place, above any other.

We walked with him, and we walked alone — Woolf had withdrawn into an impenetrable cocoon of melancholy — up Wilkes Street towards the Heritage Centre. A little, pigtailed girl with polished black shoes and tailored overcoat was standing in the doorway of a refurbished Georgian residence, plucking at the handle of her new travelling bag; while her father, impatiently stretching his cuffs, rotated on his heels, staring up and down for the taxi he had ordered. The perfect proportions of his Doric doorcase with the regional rustication, so little used outside Spitalfields, gave him no comfort. ‘Do stop that, darling,’ he scolded. And ‘darling’, recognizing the danger signal, obeyed. The desired cab was, in fact, stalled within thirty yards of its goal; the cabbie cursing and mouthing, leaning on his horn, trapped behind a double-parked van, into which a sharply cased pair of Bengali disco-dancers were waltzing a herd of heavy-odour leather coats, for the traildrive ‘Up West’. They could have given the girl a lift to Knightsbridge, and lowered Daddy’s blood pressure which was beginning to pump the mercury, gathering itself for the big bolt, as he heard the crash of markets, screen-glitch, the runaway numbers, the futures that were all used up.

Cornering into Princelet Street, we paused to admire Woolf’s handiwork, the trompe-l’oeil versions he had painted over the plasterboard windows of the synagogue. But, before we could advance on Brick Lane, Woolf plucked at my shirt-tail and dragged me into the building. In the hallway was a table, on which had been spread a rack of sponsored booklets, produced for the Museum of the Jewish East End: everything you never realized you needed to know about ‘East End Synagogues’ or ‘Yiddish Theatre’.

‘The fourth corner! Six to Ten, Princes,’ Woolf insisted, stamping his plimsolls, ‘the address! Here, this street, last century, used to be called “Princes”, not “Princelet”. Got changed, didn’t it, 1893? Too many, they said, princes in the East End. January 18, 1887, remember, the Hebrew Dramatic Club? Lenin spoke there once, they’re trying to get the money.’ He held the red guidebook up against his face, pretending to read, turning the pages, backwards and forwards, until he found the passage he wanted. Then pointed across the road to the Club’s exact location. He closed the book, recited by rote, at speed; a frantic, unpunctuated single rush of breath.

‘William Cohen, a weaver of Brick Lane, Spitalfields, described what happened to a reporter from Reynolds Newspaper:

“The piece played was the ‘Spanish Gypsy Girl’ and it being a favourite in this quarter the club room in Princes Street was literally packed… Everything went smoothly up to the last act, and five minutes after that had commenced I heard the sounds of a disturbance in the gallery. I thought at first it was only a fight, but presently I heard a cry that the gas was escaping, followed by a shout of fire. A fearful panic was created: everyone rushed towards the doors. Simultaneously someone turned out the gas; the building was then enveloped in darkness… the screams of the women and children were deafening and heartrending… presently some candle lights were brought on to the stage, and then I saw a fearful sight. Round about the doors bodies were piled up to the height of several feet… the stream coming down from the gallery had met the stream from the body of the hall and every minute some one was falling, only to be trampled upon. Presently a policeman appeared on the scene…”

‘Seventeen people lost their lives in the tragedy. In fact there had been no fire, and the inquest failed to establish whether there had indeed been a gas leak, or whether, as Abraham Smith the manager suggested, the accident might have been deliberately caused by the jealousy of a rival clubowner, Mr Rubinstein of the Russian National Club in Lambeth Street…’