Iain Sinclair - Downriver

To close, with best regards, from

(Mr) Ian Shames

PS Would like to hear from you!

VI

‘Died of a stroke.’ Stroked to death. A word of such fascinating ambivalence; it is brushed with shock. Apoplexy: out of the blue, a sudden attack, without anger; an interruption in the flow of blood to the brain. And suffered, we have been told, by the masonic Magus, William Gull, before the Whitechapel Murders — removing him from guilt? A blessing then; freeing other impulses, opening locked doors. A way out. An excuse.

Arthur Singleton shared a bed one night with a ‘wet brain’ who told — eyes open and blazing, without thought or hesitation, the same mad loop of rhetoric — how he had gone down into the country, the marshlands, with a troop of gypos. Romany-Jewish, he said, been in Whitechapel since the place was named.

All day the gang directed him, with kicks and blows, to load turnip sacks on to a barge; they kept him chained beneath their lorry at night. But he had never seen things more clearly; leashed like a dog to this tight circumference, free, within the limits of his chain, crawling from behind the wheels to piss himself, or hold his mouth open under the water tap. The cold stars! Pleasure had never been so acute: the sensation that bliss was measured in each slow drip, each pearl that fell — if he could only calm himself to wait — from the cruel metal spout. This hard-won knowledge that moments of release from pain are divided among us, and that we will all achieve our portion, however mean and brief. The edge of things shone and grew bright! He saw the clapboard sheds float, like lions, above the mud. He was not staked — but freed from movement , and from choice. The flame of panic was doused. He lay down and, gratefully, pressed his cheek to the ground.

And he wept, Arthur said that he wept; lids rolled back, staring fixedly at the ceiling’s flaws — the snorts and coughs of the other men. It was all over now; he had escaped, broken away, run through the sedge and soaking fields, dogs at his heels, curses, shotguns, threats. All finished, done.

Without a pause, tears rolling from his unblinking eyes, he was forced to begin again; always the same tale, how the gypos had untied him from these streets and he had gone down with them, freely, into the marshlands.

I had chased the rumours from Highgate to Stratford, from Spitalfields Market to the Minories — but they eluded me, sliding feline around the next corner, spraying the cobblestones. I caught whispers in back-bars, sudden hunched-shoulder silences. Gnomic hints, clues masked in obscenity, had been inscribed, a foot from the pavings, on the locked doors of the Fournier Street mosque: Spring-Heeled Jack had returned .

It began soon after they closed the market down and the methsmen infiltrated the catacombs. They had been driven from the ramps in Fieldgate Street, ferreted from their holes in the ground by the restoration of St-George-in-the-East; burnt or flooded from their skippers. The tides of benevolence outpaced them. Undeveloped bombsites were protected by razor-wire, trick paint that took the skin from your hands, chained wolves. The old trenches and bunkers were transformed by spectral floodlights into a pageant of futurist aesthetics: pecked and raked by overhead cameras. The jake-fanciers, blues boys, and cider-heads had gone under: burrowing into the earth, they renounced the light. Even their final sanctuary, the Monster Doss House, was sealed ‘for renovation’.

But it wasn’t until the third of the Railway Murders — VAMPIRE AND BRIDE-TO-BE IN DOCKLANDS HORROR — that some ambitious nerd on the East London Advertiser , scenting a future ‘paperback original’, invoked Jack; and triggered the inevitable climate of compulsory mass hallucination. Letters poured in from a fools’ pilgrimage of state-sponsored zombies, table-tappers, and hoarders of ‘Old Boys’ Annuals’. Penny Dreadful buffs stumbled gibbering out of Leytonstone with a tale to tell on local radio.

A man had been noticed on the platform at Hackney Wick by an Afro-Caribbean SRN, entrained for North Woolwich, ‘visiting the sister’. She was committed to a monologue concerning a recent wedding party, to which she had not been invited — when she distinctly saw, as she repeated to the Advertiser ’s yawning hack, ‘a dirty, long-haired fellow, gypsy-looking, nicotine-coloured: like he needed a strong evacuant, man’. He was wearing a kind of fancy-dress voodoo cape, ‘Batman thing’, and pretending — so she believed — to wait for the Richmond train. She had travelled the borough in the course of her duties, and handled ‘all sorts’. This joker was a bad one. She remembers saying to her friend, ‘Some people are still, well, I got to say it, not entirely liberated from prejudice’; a movement caught her eye, she glanced out. The gypsy had reappeared on the opposite platform, and was staring straight in at them with his great red eyes, like a big savage dog. It was as if he had jumped right over their heads ! There was no other way. No time to have gone around the train, or even under it. He couldn’t cross the line. But the way he was holding his finger up to his lips, and licking it — uggh, so suggestive! As the train began to move, she opened the window, to take his details: he had vanished. Gave her the shakes, just to talk about it.

There had been another incident — reported in confidence at the muscat-sipping close of a dinner party — where a publisher, returning from a Götterdämmerung of a book-launch, emerged a little tentatively from the underground at Highbury Corner and started to tap his way across the Fields; taking plenty of ‘breathers’ while he steamed the bark from an avenue of lime trees. He was not surprised, and only slightly annoyed, when a figure he described as ‘a Hal Ellson punk, revamped by Clive Barker’ took to ‘posing’ repeatedly in front of him, ‘like an escaped Ballantine Books sensationalist wrapper’. The publisher admitted, to his cruelly sniggering audience, that he had probably not even noticed the freak the first two or three times: it was all he could do to prop up the trees as they threatened to fall and crush him. He assumed he was being solicited by one of the more short-sighted of the homeless predators who claimed the Fields for their habitat. And anyway, as he confessed, he was ‘weary of tongue, smoked raw, stimulated to the point of spontaneous detonation’; his neck creased into folds from nodding a reluctant agreement to the demands of total strangers, bearing contracts for signature.

But, even to this cerebrum-abusing inkbug, the visionary pest on his path was unavoidable: as he managed to navigate around the subhuman entity, so the creature somehow contrived to ‘manifest’ itself six or eight yards further towards the east, his shelter and destination. There was a tedious sweat-handed familiarity about all this. We were back in the halcyon days of mirror-trips, bad acid; meals that re-formed from the traces of vomit on your desert boots. The threat of mugging did not disturb the publisher. He would have welcomed it as a pragmatic solution. It would excuse the present condition of his head. He had been polished by the dry cheek-busses of fluttering PR parrakeets, breathed on by garlic-chewing agents, assaulted by demented authors with saga proposals longer than their own doorstopper scripts. He snapped: lowered his naked scalp and charged, blind, at the sneering phantom. Nothing! A breeze of soft fire: like singeing the hairs on your hands, when you are too drunk to notice. Gone, disparu . A slightly chilled column of air.