Iain Sinclair - Downriver

What interested me, in my present state of compulsive associationism, about these Rorschach doodles was that several of the ‘stories’ concerned railways. Two of these followed each other, but were not necessarily connected. ‘ The lady walked down the track. The train came and ran her over, but she got up. And she took the baby home .’ Then came a hot whirlwind, a vortex of crayoned blues and greens — on the perimeter of which was a pink blob; invertebrate, with dangling, threadlike legs. ‘ The water dripped on the lady’s hand and made her die. The candle showed her the way in the dark .’

I could let it go; leave it here with this marvellous soup of worms. By the restored power of the child’s ‘candle’ I could pluck a book from the sack, some forgotten favourite, and carry it back down into the electric house. Kafka’s Trial . The brutal termination of Joseph K. that I had chosen to suppress.

‘But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. “ Like a dog !” he said : it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.’

Cec Whitenettle, a lifelong abstainer, poured out his second half of Bacardi, making it familiar by the addition of an orange cordial. He swallowed it grimly down; his scrawny neck convulsing, his thyroidal cartilage bobbling like a drowning chick. He drank where he stood, in the centre of the room, feet apart, awkwardly ‘at ease’; taking care not to spill a single drop on to his uniform. His glass, as he returned it to the table — in a mindless hydrolic gesture — was coated in thick felt.

Water was steaming from the tap into a blue plastic basin. Cec watched the spiralling thread of its descent: from behind a plate-glass screen. He had no recollection of initiating this incident. He was utterly estranged from it; as from the rest of the objects that surrounded him. The cut-throat razor opened silently and smoothly. Foam curled in a lazy worm on Cec’s open hand, and was mechanically smeared across his face. He slapped at his cheeks, feeling the reassuring rhythms of the contact, feeling the sound. Cec welcomed his ‘auditory disability’, his deafness, the only tangible souvenir of those best remembered years, in the battery: the earth-shuddering pounding of the 4.5s, pitted in the Isle of Dogs. That night, 4 September 1940, when the men realized they themselves had become the principal target. That was their only achievement.

And the bleak mornings: river mist; the desolate mud field, gun barrels tilted at the skies, looking from the road like so many collapsing chimneys. Nothing could compare with it. The solitude and the friendships.

As he shaved, Cec avoided the eyes of the man behind the mirror. He pinched his nostrils shut, lifted them to scrape at the ill-disciplined hairs, emerging to trespass on that narrow trench of puckered labial flesh, with its finicky, inaccessible ridges. The skin of the whole face was drawn back, stretched, inadequately attached to the bone armature beneath. Cec was terrified that the knots would give, the mask would slip, and collapse into folds — never to be ironed out. Already the pouch-cups under his eyes were bruised with anguish, scratched, wax-filled. His large asymmetrical ears stood, naked and proud, from a helmet of cropped and water-combed hair. Surface-nerves flinched as he paddled a cruel application of scented acid into the reluctant pores.

A flask of sugar-saturated tea, marmalade sandwiches, a copy of yesterday’s evening paper, were waiting in the canvas satchel. Cec took his wristwatch from the drawer, advanced it by one and a half minutes, and slipped it over his wrist — with the solemnity of a marriage vow. Time to go: 2.55 A.M. Two-handed, Cec lifted his peaked cap from the chair. No trace of irony: from the instant it touched his head, he was on duty.

He hesitated; returned the cap to its resting place. One for the road: a final shot of Bacardi. Given time, he could develop a taste for the stuff. He licked the glass; refilled it, threw it back. It wouldn’t matter now if his wife did notice. She only kept the bottle for her sister, New Year’s Day. A quick one. She would be sleeping like a sow: tossing about, rolling herself in the sheets, snorting, fingers in her privates; breathing , saveloys and whisky. Shelley Winters’s nightdress, up round her belly — at her age.

The cold air refreshed him. His ungloved hands felt no chill as they scraped the thin filter of frost from the car windows. The world was at its best: it was uninhabited, all its shocks and alarums were sheathed in a prophylactic darkness.

On Morning Lane he waited obediently for the lights; he would have waited for ever. There was not another car on the road; but without rules the universe falls into chaos. He drummed his fingers. The old childhood fancy came back over him: waking one morning to discover a deserted city, from which all the other inhabitants have flown, slipped away into another dimension. He would walk towards the centre, always through the same leafy squares, the memorials nobody else appreciated, touching them, fingering Coade-stone gods; nymphs, goats, griffins. He would tiptoe, unthreatened, on the crown of the road — until he arrived at one of the great department stores, blazing in a costume of coloured lights; where he would wander down avenues of ladies’things, dabbling perfumes, tasting cosmetics, running silks between his fingers, brushing against furs, curtains of animal pelts; testing himself against all their secrets. The mirrors would loose their magic. He would not disturb them. Unobserved, he would be naked as the day he was born.

Cec let the car steer itself down Homerton Road towards the marshes: he was enclosed against the night, the fingers of wind, the buildings of eyes. Tonight, nobody else was alive: a molten stream of fire-insects swarmed endlessly along Eastway, in a mad chase to escape from their own headlights. The marshes were nothing: grass over rubble; coarse turf, impacted by generations of footballing oaths, hid the cratered terraces of dockland. You could rebuild Silvertown from this midden. You could excavate the names of all the eradicated villages. The incendiary warriors were still waiting for the kettle to boil on the primus.

He crossed the imaginary (but irrefutable) border, cut down Temple Mills Lane, and was lost among the enormous shadows of the reclaimed mounds of Stratford. The hoists, the containers stacked into unoccupied babels: this was a transitional landscape that would never achieve resolution. Out of the fire-storms had come industry; out of ruin, imagination. We were promised a life of marvellous changes: no more poverty, no mean and pinched lives. So everything was cleared to make place for a dystopia of fenced-in goods yards, coldstores, bonded warehouses. Railways replaced rivers. Now ‘docks’could be anywhere that capital chose to nominate. This demarcated zone was made ready to service the latest panacea, the concept of ‘The Hole’; a tunnel that would connect these infertile swamps with the threat of Europe, and future prosperity. On this wild gamble, all regulations were suspended. Today was too late. Dig it first, discuss it later. Steel jaws ate the earth, with all the frenzy of orphans searching for their fathers.

Cec nodded to the security ‘bull’ on the gate, who hit the button and lifted the barrier, without bothering to look up from the climax of the snuff-video he was running under his counter. (Some footage had been ‘sampled’ from Sam Fuller’s White Dog . Actuality — in the form of hand-held shots out of a car window, as the victim was run down — was planted alongside. The chase peaked. The white dog pounced. A thick smell of fear leaked from the machine, converting it into a defective microwave.)