Iain Sinclair - Downriver

III

Another victim had been found: in the scrub woods near the Springfield Park Marina — by a party of nature ramblers. The trademark that allowed the police to identify the killings as being ‘the work of one man’ had not been made public (not yet invented?). The bodies had all been discovered within half a mile of a railway station. Which didn’t mean much: after the ‘privatization’ that description covered most of London. The same could be said of burger bars, mini-cab firms, video-rental libraries, and (at least three) estate agents. But the presumption remained: the killer used the railway as a means of prospecting for victims, then vanished down the line into some rival system. These tributaries were often absorbed, or adapted to another leisure pursuit, before they were even listed. The tabloids were on heat; dusting off the usual rumours of martial-arts loners, civil servants steeped in the black arts, ‘butchers, Yids, and foreign skippers’. They purchased dubious polaroids that seemed — from the moral high ground — to rebuke the victims for levity in the face of death. They were unworthy of the circulation-boosting role for which they had been definitively nominated. The dead girls laughed over wine glasses, or wrinkled their noses on sun-blasted poolsides: PARTY GIRL SHOCK. THE PURSER’S STORY. EXCLUSIVE.

The phone rang. Davy Locke wanted to fix a meet in Well Street. He sounded flaky; speaking so slowly and deliberately that I was forced to imagine an attic of eavesdropping spooks: paranoid shadows straining, with uncertain shorthand, to transcribe every last word.

Davy was waiting outside the shell of a fire-gutted house. It was cold, a Siberian wind cutting across the marshes: he stamped, flicking away the liquid pearls that slid from his wide nostrils like lighter fuel. He wore a docker’s jacket (the docker didn’t need it), and groin-enhancing ballet tights. He had his arm around the inevitable racing cycle; the best tool for a fast getaway. His tight, knotted hair and formidable beak gave him the look of an exile, a Lithuanian, or a tranquillized Marx Brother. He had made the call from the kiosk on the corner. That had taken him most of the morning. (These new vandal-proof headsets have been commandeered throughout the East End by heroin dealers. They supply the perfect excuse for hanging around, doing nothing: and nobody can put his foot against the door to trap you.) The rat-scab character in possession had the phone off the hook, and was saying nothing. He was in no state to punch the buttons. The shivering lookouts were nodding off on their feet. The tom-tom (main man) was a twenty-stone black freezer, festooned in chains like a contraband Christmas tree (nothing works like role-dressing), who sat at the open window of a paint-trashed Cortina blowing empty pink speech bubbles. Nobody cared, or gave them a second glance. We were well off limits. Davy didn’t want to talk about it; he wanted to let me see for myself.

The windows of this Grade 2 ‘listed’ husk (illegal post-1709 sash boxes, flush with façade) were boarded over, the door was padlocked: Davy had the key. As we passed into the hallway, he began preparing me for the room we were to visit. The smell was appalling, it met us at the foot of the stairs (painted softwood banister, whose knotty and ‘anaemic’ surface was hidden beneath many layers of cheap gloss): burnt feathers in a flooded executioner’s cellar. A friend of Davy’s, from the obscure anarcho-libertarian group of which he was the active element, had asked him to open up this attic chamber and make a series of slides to record exactly what he found. He would learn no more of the events that created this abused environment, until the slides were safely handed over.

The room was low and dark, a loft for feral pigeons, high above the dim traces of a street market; odd shops doomed by the changing patterns of traffic. The sort of time-lagged patch in which to consummate minor drug deals or fence stolen radios. Orange peel stuck to the windows of defunct cobblers; magazine racks stank of libidinous tom cats. There was nothing to buy except cigarettes, condensed milk, and ostracized dog food.

Davy pulled the boards from the windows and revealed the paint-covered walls. I had never seen anything quite like it. Or, rather, I had seen pale versions, bowdlerized segments: ink-blot tests, Pompeian bath houses, subway graffiti, Mayan codices (treated by William Burroughs). It was startling that an uninhabited room could carry such a cacophany of voices — protests, denunciations — and still stand. Every inch of the surface had been painted over, sprayed, scribbled with messages, invocations, pyramids, ankhs, oozing lingams and lightning strokes of despair. We had forcibly entered a book that now surrounded us. It was diary, shopping list, calculus, and anthology of quotations. ‘ Love and man’s unconquerable mind .’ ‘ Love is the law, love under will .’ ‘ The Familiar Spirits are very prompt — it is well to occupy them .’

Water had been flung on the walls in a crude attempt to eradicate these terrifying assertions — but they had returned, time after time; smeared, but firm in their outlines. ‘ I ACCUSE …’.

There followed the names and telephone numbers (where applicable) of local informers, bent coppers, Fallen Angels, Vessels of Iniquity, Vessels of Wrath, Incubi and Succubi. Footpaths and broken vein-tracks jolted across the mural from childlike hospitals to sparrows crucified upon hills. There were sailing boats and steam trains. The world had been recast, populated with bears, talking fish, horned gods: a true Mappa Mundi . Pages from pornographic novels were collaged with the faces of musicians and terrorists. Orton and Halliwell’s bedsitter in Noel Road was the Habitat version of this. The contents of a mind at the end of its tether had been spilled: a lurid spatter of brain grit.

The floor was clogged with mounds of damp sawdust — as if the furniture had been eaten and, conically, excreted. Bas-relief torcs of blood were splashed over the skirting boards. ‘Dogfights,’ Davy explained.

The house had been torched so many times that the landlord had given up and gone back to Ireland (where a grant had been found for him to make a start on his memoirs: fictions of the unlitigious dead, Flann O’Brien, Behan, Paddy Kavanagh, Julian Maclaren-Ross, the Two Roberts). Squatters moved in, and the girl followed them. Davy didn’t know her name. But she was the tenant whose work he had catalogued. A weekend job for a friend that would last him a lifetime.

There were incidents with the local constabulary. The girl imagined she was being watched: bricks shifted in the wall. Pencil beams winked in the darkness. (Peepholes were cut between railway compartments in the wake of the Thomas Briggs murder. They were known as ‘Müller’s Lights’. But customers, valuing their privacy, complained loudly: the scheme was abandoned.) She would not remove her clothes. Astral messages were being transmitted into her head from Atlantis; which was, apparently, located beneath Horse Sands, off the Isle of Sheppey. She took down what she heard. Atlantis was a pirate radio station: an offshore fort where they babbled of sacrifices, dream lovers, and the coming birth of the light.

It had all been too much for her boyfriend, who had moved out: gone back north. Left alone, the girl fed the demons with smack. Paid her way with shaming services. She was visited by agents with skins made of glass. Her visionary exultation increased. Once she talked for seven hours at a stretch to a complete stranger, leaning against the exterior wall of the Hackney Hospital. He said nothing. She left him there. It was raining heavily: wet hair masked his face, he was splashed by the traffic. Deep stains blotted through his baggy poplin suit. He rocked his head, helplessly — a blinkered stallion.