Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘What I did not reveal to you,’ the woman’s voice continued; floating across the carriage, sometimes overhead, sometimes breathing on my cheek, ‘when you began to fictionalize my story — to follow up clues I left, to quote my friends, and visit places where I had never been, forcing me to give them mind — was something of great importance: a link confirming the strength of my solitude. It happened when I was searching the glass-powdered decks of the hospital for a room to use for the children. I saw a light burning on the upper floor of a wing that I knew had been abandoned. They were closing down more and more of the outlying units, allowing them to fall into disrepair — so that the debts would be impossible and it would be easier to hand the site over to the developers. When there is nothing else to sell, you sell yourself.’

A band of cheesy, orange light excited the empty carriage, transforming the headrest into a face without features. The white cloth was printed with charcoal shadows that I could interpret or ignore.

‘Later that evening, when I was travelling home, on this line, wearily drowning myself in a Virago reissue of Stella Bowen’s Drawn from Life …’ The Voice, having engaged my full attention, dropped dramatically. It was becoming almost flirtatious. ‘…I recognized the very words that came into my head as I walked, exhausted, along the corridor to the room with the solitary light. Everything depends on these connections. Serendipity, don’t you agree? What does Eliot say? “ We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree / Are of equal duration .” Everything we say parrots words that have already been spoken. We speak in quotations. And what we struggle to bring into focus has certainly inspired some other woman, years before we were born. We are at the mercy of our grandchildren. I wanted no more than to repeat the words I felt I had caused Stella Bowen to write.

‘“ Homerton was a nightmare. I wish I could say that my social conscience was born from that moment, but it wasn’t. I wanted to run away from it all …”

‘I grew impatient with Stella. She was too reasonable, phlegmatic, too much of a colonial — putting her own abilities into storage, while she created unstressed domestic enclosures for her man, the artist, the talker. She fed on such modest resentments; indulging this walrus while he “agonized” over meaningless infidelities. He didn’t have the courage of his own corruptions. Why didn’t she poison him? But, despite my antipathy, our selfless careers moved in tandem. In this place, of all places — in Homerton — Stella met the person I myself discovered still trapped in a forgotten hospital wing. She felt the same dangerous, involving excitement, and the fear that I felt. She described that person in my words. “ A flaming object… with her scarlet hair and white skin and sudden, deep-set eyes .” The woman who had been called Mary Butts.’

Now it was my turn to vanish. The Voice required no supporting actor. Unheard, it existed. The story had outlived the storyteller.

‘In Mary Butts,’ the Voice said, ‘I came into my own time. In her aggression, I let myself slip the leash. It was like one of those dreams in which we are able to interrogate the famous dead. We find the teachers we need. And they are so reasonable, so amused.

‘From outside the hospital window I watched myself taking her hand. She smiled, but her eyes were always moving away, across the room, deeper into the darkness. She never spoke. But I understood, instinctively, what she was saying: the words never stopped. Sometimes I turned, as I was making my way back to the wards, looked at her. The small white face would be shining, her lips painted, a great gash of red — but the wide-brimmed hat was already eaten with shadows, it was fading: I was frightened that she would fade with it.

‘Gradually, I came to piece together her story. I didn’t need to read about her, the footnotes in Parisian memoirs, the sketches by Cocteau. She was a woman unable to contain the energy she generated. She made men uneasy, aggressive. Her social work meant nothing to her. She was stretching beyond it, sustaining herself with retrieved images of a sensual and eternal past: the house, the woods, the paintings, the sea. She was locked in a battle for survival with her mother: a single self-devouring organism. This conflict was more important than these broken-down urban wraiths in their desolation and anguish. She wanted to confront Whitechapel in quite another way — through John Rodker. She would challenge, possess and destroy it: the anarchy and the ugliness.

‘She had such extraordinary style that she could stand up against all the demons she raised in confirmation of her own strength. The crisis, of course, came in a battle-to-the-death with that monumental slug, Aleister Crowley, the most authentic of fakes — and in the battle’s more deadly analogue, her addiction. She saw — and this was unbelievable to me — in her prophetic sufferings, the visionary nature of this swampland hill, this bone-mound. She saw it as it ought to be : an unviolated site, temenos , ring of trees; antler-crowned about a river of trout and darting sunlight.’

The Voice was fulfilled. It yielded. In the artificially charged silence that followed, the seat across from me began to bleach and fade. Colour was sucked from the cloth: it crackled like water-resistant skin. It was brilliant and white; taking the form of a mourning cloth, or cloak. It was a coat, inhabited, shaped, lifting with the warmth of a human presence — but empty, self-supporting.

Earth ran on to the floor of the carriage, like a shower of sand. I saw the outline of a girl emerging from a fault in the upholstery. Head hung down, her long red hair covered her face. Her dancer’s legs stretched out along the seat. She was startlingly pale, powdered in arsenic, white lead. Her lips were blue. Her skin had dried, and cracked like paint. Another Antigone, this girl had been buried alive: to honour her brother’s death, and her father’s crime. Therefore, she lived; trapped in the memory of life. Unlike David Rodinsky, who — building his own grave — walked free. Alive, he had been a dead man: clay in his mouth, ‘hesitant in conversation’. Now the room absorbed his pain.

I knew that I was looking at Edith Cadiz, the invented (and self-inventing) victim. I had no idea how to release her, or how to procure my own escape.

‘Corpse-maggot! Suckler of Semites!’ A distant male growl — gravel and lethargy — forced the succubus to shift and falter, to adopt a more martial form. Under these accusations, Edith Cadiz became Mary Butts. ‘ Soror Rhodon : the faithless, red-haired grub who rejected my cakes of light.’ Aleister Crowley had been summoned, to complete a forgotten quarrel. There could be no advance without the intervention of this contrary.

Too ripe: the ribs of the carriage collapse. The succubus is provoked to reveal her other face. Melting wax flesh. Scarlet cap of hair. A viscid, pus-queen slithering, yellow, from the wounded steel. Breath of decay. A grey, mutton-ooze sweating from her hands. The compartment darkens and shrinks. Light is repulsed. The seats swell, crushing us together. I taste the mud and the poisoned spines. Her sharpened nails are dragging across the conjunctival membrane of my eye. I no longer have place in this, even as an unreliable witness. I do not possess the technical language to justify the completion of my account.

Now the male thing rolls and lisps; stuttering its obscenities over the insect-ka of the woman. It probes, blind, for a thoracic duct from which to drink. We are enclosed in a ‘formless horror’; lost to the world. The window panels smoke to slate. The whole box is no bigger than a fist: or a camera with a capped lens. We stick to the coated film, like flies. Butts invokes her master, the Assyrian bull-demon.