Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Then the roof fell in; they were rumbled by accountants, denied, cut off without even a fire-damaged copy of Kenneth Baker’s Little Britain anthology. Their prelapsarian tip of a stall was glimpsed in the corner of the frame during one of Prince Charles’s documentary attempts to announce Himself as the latest Martian poet. He was drifting downstream, confidently stacking the similes, ready to dive out of the sun and strafe this architectural abomination (carbuncle/ashtray/training centre for thought-police), when the transfixed management noticed a troop of scarf-dangling renegades touting for trade — like refugees from some unsponsored touring version of the Marat-Sade . They screamed for ‘Security’, and bulldozed what was left into a skip. The contract for ‘unofficial remainders’ passed on to a discreet and respectable dealer — Henry Milditch — who marketed his salvaged pulp with such skill that he was soon able to retire, as something resembling a gentleman, to the Suffolk littoral. And the Publishers were free to trawl once more for designer casualties from the rock industry, Irish poets whose rhetorical flourishes could be tamed to suit the requirements of English examination boards, and ‘one-off’ vagrants with a story to tell.

Crushed, spurned, spiritually overdrawn, the OPs didn’t have the bottle for another assault on the frontline jumbles; which were now, in any case, the territory of much friskier locusts. They simply vanished, gave up the ghost, blankly wandered the precincts, skate tracks, and concrete walkways. Lepers, bell ringers: they hid themselves behind sob-story placards. They were culled. One of them was fished from the river, swollen and unidentified; the others were beyond tracing. Old enemies might recognize them by an ineradicable vacancy, a born-again naïveté that was almost criminal.

The train had, randomly, stopped and started a dozen times; obedient to the stutter of the Docklands Lightrailway force-field. (Lightrailway or Railway of Light? The only illuminated path over the Plains of Outer Darkness.) While Dryfeld was preoccupied with the arrangement of buttons on his waistcoat, I released the blind and leant from the window to look at the lumpy and shimmering moonscape. We had halted on an embankment that afforded an unrestricted vision of a graveyard, or untended corner of parkland. The branches of deformed trees brushed the damp ground, living ghosts ready to move in greeting towards the stalled carriages of the dead. (I remembered Joblard’s tales of the white ‘mourning’ train shuttling the stiffs to Nunhead: white curtains, white upholstery, white-suited conductors carrying white toppers. The train must have slid silently through suburban halts, like an avatar of death itself.)

The railway had casually amputated a dream site (caterpillar dreaming), encroached on gardens I now recognized as the burial place of the Aboriginal cricketer, King Cole. The dream was maimed, but not destroyed: disregarded. Inside our padded compartment the restored gaslight hissed and spat: we were trapped in a blasphemous parody of the confessional. Dryfeld was a mad, potato-picking axeman, ready to dribble out some tale of mutilation and necrophilia. The great wheels of his bicycle stood between us like a cage, webbing his raw-skinned face in faults and veins. I began to understand something of the terrible conspiracy between victim and murderer.

Through the square of open window, the night — salted with corruptions — pressed on our thoughts, dictating all the lies buried beneath us: forcing us to speak. I was overwhelmed by a sense of the Lombard Street clerk’s hysterical conformity. His life was as bizarre and desperate as that of the unemployed German gunsmith. His fancy took him inwards, tighter and tighter, soliciting the blow that would set him free. The decoration of gold chains was an invitation: he wanted a postal suicide. But Müller’s will was weaker: he was seduced by movement, America, diamond hills, rings, hats, walking sticks. He would be kneeling in scarlet restaurants before women, the wives of merchants — who would, without breaking off their brittle playhouse conversations, lift up their heavy skirts to allow him passage. The scent, the slithering silks, the tan of laced hides! They would roll, laughing, on to their strong bellies; while their complacent husbands, licking on sea-green Havanas, initiated him into the cabala of the stock market. Measure wealth in squares on a map of the city. Herds of red beef, defecating, slid towards the primed bolts; drift on an escalator of hooks, like levitating cardinals. Buy them! Buy them all!

The box shrank on us, sweating out the uncensored instincts. It was unreal: the train was somebody else’s nightmare. The station announcer did not name the proposed destinations. It was necessary at peak hours to discourage passengers: villages went into limbo, were struck from the charts. But for Thomas Briggs the train is a clock. The structure of his life is regular. He has only his possessions to protect him. He demands, in his terror of loss, the death-blow that Müller is forced to deliver: an act so abrupt and unconsidered as to appear a preliminary to self-murder. The nerves of this mirror-divided couple could not survive the artificial confrontation.

Our train has been released, is moving; jerks, shudders. The rails glisten in the night, a frosty ladder. Dryfeld closes the window.

‘An alky before I was sixteen, I was arrested twice on suspicion of being a child molester. Lies! But they believed them. Did time on the liquid cosh for GBH. “Yours or mine?” I shouted. They hacked out a piece of my brain without local anaesthetic. “Make your own, smart ass, out of fear-secretions.” I use the truth as a last resort.’

Was that his voice — or something squeezed from the headrest? His lips were trapped in a sullen pout: photographed for the files of Special Branch. I wanted to drive my face against his fist. To throw open the door: snap it like the spine of a book. Plunge into the air. How could Briggs have been discovered so carefully positioned between the lines — like a bog sacrifice, cut from the peat, placed on a hurdle to be carried to the village? Why didn’t he bounce, skid, tear — a parcel of meat — tumble down the embankment?

I could feel the blood running from my ear. Tongue thickening in my mouth. Eyes milking to pebbles. Briggs’s hand flinched from the first rung on the ladder of steel. Cinders frayed the lacquer from his scrabbling boots. He climbed through the dirt, face down, towards Hackney and the stars: this wild, inhuman persistence of the victim, the dead man.

No prisoner of the past, Dryfeld noticed nothing. His case-hardened ego saved us. To him, this day was already scrubbed from the record. He began to hum, tuning himself to ravish the most recent of Hackney’s ‘early-retirement-from-secondary-education’ bookshops. It was cruel to watch. They always opened in a frenzy of unjustified optimism: fresh paint, cut flowers, and lovingly hung prints of ‘Defoe’s House’, or ‘The Country Residence of the Prior St John of Jerusalem in Well-Street’. Nothing could be less like the classroom: to be surrounded by books, with no grubby kids allowed over the threshold. First-day visitations from Dryfeld and Milditch, and a couple of tentative raids by the Stoke Newington scufflers, stripped the few genuine assets. Then the interminable, dreary years of nerve-strung boredom — with nothing to look forward to but another collection tin dangled by rampant gangs of ethnic ‘steamers’: the revenge of the pupils.

Franz Müller was confessed, hooded, taken out to meet his public. He had been seduced, as Mr Baron Martin remarked in passing sentence, ‘by the devil in the shape of Mr Briggs’s watch and albert chain’. Like Dryfeld he could not give himself over to ‘railway time’. His madness was firmly anchored in the realities of movement, dealing, seizing, holding: intelligence without imagination. All transactions with fate were politely declined.