Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I walked with Woolf through the body of the synagogue. Potted histories, simplifications, and reproduced photographs were tacked to the walls — maps of the Diaspora — nailing us to a censored version of the past. The names of the dead, and the amounts of their family donations, were painted on panels beneath the Ladies’ Gallery.

‘Lovely bit of lettering, that,’ Woolf offered his approval, turning away from me towards the place where the Ark would have been kept, bending his head. ‘The fire was first,’ he said, ‘before the tape, before I could trap and hold it. Fire against water. It was close behind me, scorching my heels, burning the shadows. Fire is the essence of voices. It is what you cannot reduce to ash. It’s all that’s left. Last night I saw nothing. I have never seen anything.’

‘But there was no fire.’ I couldn’t resist playing the pedant. ‘It was a false alarm. Someone imagined the smell of gas, someone else freaked out and screamed. Claustrophobia, a mass hallucination. Skulduggery by rival anarchists. A premature panic reaction, anticipating the…’

‘No cellar fire,’ Woolf grunted, chin on chest, making a confession. ‘ It was our fire, transmitted : the fear I can never see. We lifted it last night, gave it entrance. And the skins of those poor people blistered, came away in flaps and patches. The shock singed their coats, blackened their hair. They were like limbs of timber, raked from the ashes. Our self-inflicted terror gained access to that Princes Street Club and caused the first shriek from some exhausted working woman.’

Joblard, who had wandered upstairs for another look at Rodinsky’s room, now rejoined us. He wanted to know what it was that Woolf had seen in the night.

Woolf shook his head, shuffled back towards his faked windows. He had seen nothing. Neither had Joblard anything to report from the golem’s attic. Bottles of rare dust, books, an unmade bed, the calendar with Millet’s ‘Angelus’. He was moving across the room to tear off the leaf for January 1963 (which for some reason caused him irrational annoyance), when an unexpected light from across the street caught his eye: flames breaking from the ground, a basement transformed into a clay oven. He smelt gas, a solution of bitter almonds. He had taken up the key from the wardrobe and — pressing it to his forehead — had drunk all the coldness of the metal, calmed himself. His skin was marked, flushed with the jagged, angry imprint. He replaced the key, with enormous care — his hand trembling — so that it lay once more, precisely , within its own outline in the dust of the shelf. Nothing in the room had been disturbed by his presence.

V

Still high, and not yet ready to come down, I thought I’d drop in at Fredrik’s house on my way home, and feed him a selection of these latest picaresque retrievals; sound him out, see if we could work them into the Spitalfields film — which was, I suspected, a dead duck, well on its way towards the proverbial ‘spike’. ‘Look here, no problem,’ Fredrik reassured. ‘We’ve got a production number, so we’re OK. Yes?’ I’d read these entrails before. When a property’s ‘hot’, you get a phonecall every day, in the late afternoon, as soon as the producer comes in from lunch. Then it cools to once a fortnight — in the morning: from the production secretary. Then silence. Alarmed for the fate of your loving months of research, you crack, lose your cool, ring in. The office has been given over to a think-tank of graduate juveniles who are working up the fillers for the new culture season. Our bossman, we learn, is taking a well-deserved sabbatical at Oxford, recharging the batteries, browsing in libraries (who knows where that could lead?), locking horns with some radical frontline thinkers, and punishing the claret. He was — so the word went — ‘lunched out’, and had taken to snapping, ‘But where’s your justification?’ And: ‘I’ll have to take that one upstairs.’ His wife couldn’t get a decision out of him on next year’s holiday plans, and his boyfriend did not know who was kosher for the dinner-at-home list.

The ‘oral history’ scan was now, apparently, considered slightly — very very slightly — passé , out of kilter, a little bit… earnest. There was no directive, as such, but the whisper from on high indicated that the technique led to whingeing from ‘certain quarters’, complaints about ‘lack of spunk’. The concept was distinctly on the damp side. No; what the revamped programme had to target was the ‘One Pair of Eyes’, side-of-the-mouth, back-of-the-hand, word-to-the-wise humour (Alan Bennett, right?): a flavour perhaps of gay, but loyal , cynicism. ‘Go for those nutty characters you write about; off-the-wall eccentrics, headbangers with chutzpah . Leave the think-stuff to the professionals, love. Dig them out and we’ll shoot them. That’s a promise. You wait, we’ll share a table for the BAFTAs yet. Give me that surreal, subhuman cartoon feel you’re so good at.’

Fredrik’s house lay in a zone of deceptive calm, within the ambiance of the old German Hospital, around which he had, doubtless, already gathered a fine clutch of anecdotes (cross-referenced and inserted on floppy disk). It was tucked away from the traffic on a patch of ground still ripe in the memory of its days as a market garden. Orchards of iron, sour apples of anguish, had buried the scrumping enclosures that made the mean dystopia of city life tolerable — by bordering it with neat fields, streams, farms. Fredrik’s bower reminded me: there had once been an outside, a skin, a chimera of beyond .

A baby tucked under his arm, one telephone pinioned by a raised shoulder, another in his pocket, cats clawing up his corduroys; Fredrik answered my knock. ‘Hey, Iain, very good! Just hang on a moment.’ He was tall enough to scoop the drooling infant on to the top of a cupboard, while he juggled phones — ‘look, let’s have a drink sometime, yes?’ — and dictated the getout of a promised review, for a book that was now going into its third paperback reprint. The tiny child sensed its danger, eyes open, smiling in trust; game to relish the experience.

‘Listen listen listen,’ Fredrik prepared to move into a higher gear, ‘this is all very agreeable.’ He varied the pitch of his voice so that his monologue became, in turn, an invitation, a whispered confidence, a lecture, a stand-off. ‘Look here!’ He patted the head of the telephone and shook the baby. Agents were goaded, producers wheedled, editors repulsed, speeches accepted that he would have to prepare in the train to Cambridge: and all the time, with his stockinged foot, he turned the laminated pages of a picture book that a second, larger child was following with some animation, occasionally hammering Fredrik’s knee with a wooden brick to show his appreciation. All three male Hauburys emitted regular bronchial barks and coughs: the price of living in a reclaimed swamp.

Unfazed by all this commonplace fury, Fredrik contrived to produce a competent pot of coffee, and I was able to edge sideways into the narrative of my latest Whitechapel adventures. I was beginning to see the ‘zone of disappearances’ in a new light — as a focusing lens by which everything that was vague, loose, indistinct, was made clear; given an outline and an identity. Whitechapel created beings who were so much a part of where they were that outsiders — murky in motive, and greedy to do good — could not see what was being put in front of them. They wanted something that simply was not there, and — not finding it — insisted that it must have vanished.

From the Irongate Stairs (by the Tower) streams of the dispersed, the scattered and unhoused, processed through the Minories, or Mansell Street, into the indifferent grasp of the labyrinth: within its protection their old markings were erased. ‘Disappearance’ is what we wish on them, so that we can expose what they never were. We can dump our ruin in the space that they vacate.