Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Things had improved; my guardian, and familiar, had lost his collar — but not the weals that reminded him of its once-irritant presence. The cur waited at the head of the stairs, hieratic, dribbling in the dirt, posed for me to appreciate its startling defect: it had no eyes. I do not mean that it was blind, or that its eyes had been gouged out by handlers preparing it for some specialized dogfight. Coarse hair covered the place where the sockets should have been. The skull was smooth as wood. The animal had never possessed eyes, and did not appear to miss them.

An answer — the wrong one — came to me, in response to Sabella Milditch’s oracular riddle. ‘What is the opposite of a dog?’ ‘An Andalusian dog’: the ‘encounter between two dreams’.

II

The privatization of the railways carried us straight back into all the original excitements — and most of the chaos — that attended the birth of the system. Unchallenged social changes generated their own hubris: anything was possible. Demons slipped the leash. We were lords of creation. We could tear down and reshape cities; send iron ladders steepling out over the unregistered landscape. Holding Companies were cobbled together in wine bars, floated on breakfast telephones, sealed with a snort or a massage: new lines were recklessly launched and abandoned — to fail in Ongar, or out among the mudflats of Sheppey. Viaducts sauntered elegantly across watersport docklands; then waited, in shivering embarrassment, for the ring of Dynasty XXI fortresses they would service to be completed.

When the line was projected from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1834, St Thomas’s Hospital was uprooted (leaving the Surgical Tower as an amputated stump), rookeries were flattened, graveyards were excavated to support the piers. ‘Deregulated’ energies frolic like Vikings, boast and ravish: paperwork is retrospective. A gang of Irish navvies, sixty strong, appear on your doorstep, grinning, with picks and shovels. Your house comes down that morning. The letter from the council remains ‘in the post’. The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford; recouping some of the capital investment by graciously allowing the punters to use the edge of the track as a rusticated esplanade, catching glimpses of the mothering river — beyond the hedgerows and the mounds of rubble.

Nothing is wasted. The nice idea was ‘what-if’d’ of rehousing the traumatized and homeless tenants in model dwellings constructed in the arches of the viaducts: cave-squatters in Rotherhithe, awaiting a visitation from Ansel Adams. And, meanwhile, engravings were commissioned, replete with idealized gardens — bell jars, bee hives, pedestrians in a narcoleptic trance. A church spire lifts from the domesticated woodlands.

The reality, sadly, was a lesser thing. The constant passage of steam trains overhead fouled the laundry, choked the kitchens, rattled the stone ‘sleepers’, and brought down plaster from the ceiling. Cracks formed, like emergent river systems; water streamed down the curved walls, stimulating moulds and previously unrecorded mosses. The inhabitants fled; black-faced, white-eyed, trembling. The caverns among the arches were translated overnight into brothels and grog shops: they shuddered to other, self-induced, rhythms. The unbroken revelry was drowned by the clattering of the rails. Street traders, and unlicensed hawkers, weaseled the now unrented spaces. Animals were bartered. A tunnel of covert merchandise burrowed its way through the orchards; giving entrance to rats, phlegm taints, cholera. Amateur sportsmen peppered with buckshot anything that moved among the saplings. Indigenous labour mobs disputed points of etiquette with the Irish navvies, invoking the aid of crowbars and shovels still heavy with graveyard clay.

The advantage of this new wave of millennial railway promoters — visionaries in pin-stripe suits and hard hats — is that they are prepared to take a flier on all the eccentric early-Victorian routes: so wantonly trimmed by pragmatists and penny-pinching mandarins. These muzzled sharks burnt to reactivate such fantasies as the mad curve from Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm: the scenic route, by way of Bow, Victoria Park (or Hackney Wick), Hackney and Highbury. They didn’t care where the trains went; the attraction lay in tying up the station concourse. The slower and more complicated the service, the better for business: a captive scatter of sullen consumers bored into stockpiling reserve sets of dollar-signed boxer shorts, croissants, paperbacks, gasmasks, ties to hang themselves… the potential yield had them drooling. Soon there were more stations than railways. Shopping malls, from Peterborough to Portsmouth, were designed to look as if you needed an ‘away day’ ticket to ride the elevators. Combat-fatigued office vets found themselves reserving a seat in some burger bar, and asking to be put off at Colchester. Others set out as usual for the city and were never seen again.

Committed to the black dog’s — potentially lethal — offer of Fenchurch Street, I elbowed an opening towards the ticket office, shoving through this demented set of fancy-dress vagrants, muffin men, and wenches whose wobbling chests were displayed on trays decorated by orange-segment chocolates. A pair of security men with commendations from the Scrubs were bouncing a genuine wino, who had wandered in looking for small change, down the length of the pink marble staircase. Everywhere there were posters in celebration of the first ‘railway murder’, authenticated by H. B. Irving, actor and author. This assassin, Franz Müller, was depicted as a moody passed-over curate, swallowed in a miasma of pew-guilt and self-abuse. ‘ Ja, ich habe es gethan .’

A contemporary account revealed that the victim, Thomas Briggs, was discovered on the tracks, ‘his feet towards London — his head towards Hackney’. The object of the crime, a gold albert chain, was traded in the Cheapside shop of a jeweller called Death. Müller fled to America, attempting to subsidize his voyage by devouring, as a wager, five pounds of German sausages at a sitting. He failed: his dry mouth refusing the slippery and uncooked cargo.

The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro. A one-man militant tendency I took, at first horrified glance, for some hireling doppelgänger of Müller was storming between the colour-co-ordinated barriers; ploughing all before him with a chieftain among bicycles, varnished in radioactive puke. He was wearing a rough-weather set of golfing tweeds, in purple-and-lemon checks that would have brought Jeeves to the edge of apoplexy; and which now succeeded, where all else failed, in driving off the sightless dog. A modest morning’s work for my old comrade in adversity, the unchristened Dryfeld.

‘I have, sir, no desire to urinate on your property. I want a ticket for my bicycle.’ At the sound of his voice: families, climbing out of taxis, climbed straight back in again. The security men developed a pressing interest in railway timetables. Fathers hid their children’s faces in unsuitable magazines.

A posse comitatus of minor uniformed officials were urgently striving to explain that their award-winning reproduction short-haul carriages — though mounted on metal frames with spring buffers, upholstered, horsehair-cushioned, smooth as a diligence in their flight over the city — had no corridors, no guard’s van, no toilet facilities, and no space reserved for bicycles. The journey was too short, too spectacular, to be of value to cyclists — who liked to keep their heads down, while they ground, masochistically, at the pedals. The line did not cater, and did not intend to cater, for that sort of person: the trouser-clipped, yellow-bandaged anarchist.