Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Well, it caters for me!’ the Magwitch-lookalike growled, immovable. ‘And I never pee.’

This was true. He would not give the time to it. The daylight hours were for scavenging, not eating or pleasuring, or indulging the whims of a caffeine-twitchy bladder. In decent darkness he gorged himself to the boundaries of immobility on trays of innocent vegetables. He evacuated his bowels, massively, once every full moon; according to the opening hours of remote provincial bookshops, and the dictates of his personal lunar calendar.

The lovingly re-created teak compartments of the Chalk Farm Special, shimmering in maroon and canary yellow, were intended to carry only human ballast. Cyclists cycled: for health, economy, the liberation of womankind, and shapely calf muscles. Dryfeld chose to disagree: firmly. The first railway murder of the new system was imminent.

A compromise was finally arrived at — with the yelped assistance of half a hundred gun-jumping middle-management chickens who were trying to make a run from the city, before they let the advance wave of lager louts out of their software cages. Dryfeld would purchase an entire compartment, six broad seats, and progress in the dignity of a pasha; stabling his wheeled steed and book bags in unaccustomed splendour. I would travel with him, as confidant and betrayer.

I hadn’t set eyes on the man for months, not since the advent of his overnight fame. Feeling, correctly, that the old sources, the clandestine bookshops, had been pillaged by book fairies and part-time dabblers, Dryfeld produced a vitriolic booklet listing them all in microscopic samizdat typeface: providing the only true and accurate portrait of their virtues (along with a wholly inaccurate stab at their phone numbers and opening hours). It read, to civilians, like some entrancing fiction: the Pilgrim’s Progress of the Enterprise Culture. The Guardian picked up on it at once, rolling out Richard Boston to retrieve the mysterious author from among the stacks. A three-second TV flash of man and bicycle — and the image was buried in the brain-pans of even the most submerged members of the trade. Dryfeld was now so successful that it was a matter of weeks before he found himself in the bankruptcy courts, hammered by lawsuits, lovingly embraced by creditors who had fallen for the optimistic rumours of his death. His inviolate lack of social identity was detonated. He existed: as a National Resource, an eccentric who had gone public. It took an extreme effort of will — and a few hefty bribes — to duck under and out, to reprogramme his ice-worn routes.

Seeing me, he launched unprompted into the monologue he had broken off when I tipped him — chuckling over the strokes he had pulled in Mossy Noonmann’s pit — on to Steynford Station one cold December afternoon. I heard his remorseless and inelegant dissertation on male nipple piercing, all the way to the A1’s escape ramp, as I gunned the motor in celebration of my release from his overwhelming presence. The odour of electroconvulsed apricots followed me all the way to London.

‘Begging!’ he announced, spreading his newspapers across three seats, wedging the bicycle between us, and drawing down the tasselled blind to remove such feeble distractions as the external world. ‘I’ve decided to give it a real go.’

The intended purpose of my trip on this (or any) railway was eliminated by Dryfeld’s ill-considered action. Before the viaducts were built the middle classes had no opportunity of spying on the lives and habits of the underclass, no chance of peeping into tenement cliffs for jolts of righteous horror. Nor was there any excuse for the card-carrying voyeur to swallow Rear Window snatches of brutalist sex in sauce-bottle kitchens: the aphrodisiac scent of burnt onions and damp armpits. The elevated railway provided the first cinema of poverty — open-city realism — as the trains cut through the otherwise impenetrable warrens of metropolitan squalor.

‘Begging has got to be the next great adventure for disaffiliated free-range capitalists like us,’ Dryfeld continued. ‘I had my virgin pop at it last week. Went to my favourite veggy restaurant with a woman I knew would give me trouble. I took no money, said I’d been mugged; didn’t tell her it was by the Revenue. The stupid bitch had more sense than I gave her credit for: she walked out before I’d finished my second bowl of soup.’ He smiled in remembrance of the incident.

‘Never feed them first,’ he advised. ‘And never feed them after. They eat too much.’ He stroked his hairy lapels — and sneaked a crafty glance at his reflection in the darkened window. He had the vanity of a craftsman among embalmers.

The voice roared on. It had outlived its host. Dryfeld was free to admire his tweeds to the point of cerebral orgasm. ‘Found myself ejected into Greek Street,’ he said, ‘while the manager held on to the Katherine Mansfield I’d intended to flog to the lady. I quite fancied her, so I was only going to treble the price I first thought of. I soon discovered the first rule of scrumping for cash: don’t mutter something about “20p for a cup of tea” — demand a fiver for a taxi. They’ll think you’re one of them. Money talks to money. These vagrants are all amateurs. They stop as soon as they’ve got enough for a wet. And — worse — they share it!’ He shuddered at the notion. ‘I cleared the price of the meal in ten minutes. Had to celebrate. Went back and ate it all again. Begging’s a definite winner — as long as you’re not a beggar.’

His alarmingly ruddy face glistened in beads of sweated blood; glowed like a respray. He scowled in complete self-absorption from beneath malignant caterpillar eyebrows. The bony ridges of his profile were shifting and sliding to reform, chameleon-like, in a simulacrum of the railway butcher, Franz Müller; whose sepia-tinted mugshot had been thoughtfully placed where the mirror should have been. I responded, tamely, by the defensive magic of fingering my imaginary watch chain, and accepting the damaged etheric identity of Thomas Briggs, the ill-fated Lombard Street clerk.

My bullish companion had once more recognized a shift in the market, in time to work his ticket and move on — before the forty-quid-a-week small-business mob snapped at his heels, blaming their empty begging bowls on a failure to secure the best underground tunnels. By the time they steeled themselves to fork out for his guidebook on ‘How and Where to Make Your Poverty Pitch’, Dryfeld would be ankle-deep in his latest survival hijack. Keep stomping, stay alive.

He even had word of the ‘Outpatients’. First the good news: they stumbled on a Publisher going through a sticky patch who was prepared to unload a few sacks of high-culture rejects for the OPs to flog on the streets at one-third of cover price. Or, if that was too tough to calculate, for anything they could get. The OPs set themselves up with a stall on a windswept patch of river frontage alongside the National Theatre. The initial miscalculation came when they attempted to sell the same titles — wafer-thin playscripts — that the theatre bookstall was unsuccessfully promoting a few yards beyond them. The second mistake was fatal: they acted on the enterprising notion of carrying back all the valuable books to the Publisher’s door, and claiming half the cover-price as ‘returns’. For a few months all went well, the world they had ripped off was in chaos, shuddering from the threats of corporate raiders: they lived high on the hog, purchasing new saddles for their bicycles, no longer scuffling through the dawn markets; pigging out on a pharmaceutical cornucopia. They floated, glazed and benign, over Camden Town and environs: envied among their scriptless peers.