Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The car shower needed no human agency: it was triggered by pressure points hidden in the road. The green light scanners cleared Cec, his uniform and his satchel. Even the technical equipment could find no interest in the man. His laser-coated pass carried him safely through the triple cage, and out on to the deserted platform. The nighttime ‘special’ sulked, steaming like a horse, under rows of overhead sodium-vapour lamps, that stretched a genetic chain of rusty haloes all the way between Hackney Wick and Canning Town. The train, a power-charged demon, had been disguised in panels of mud: its number-coding was standard, but it remained an officially sanctioned pirate. It was not here. It did not exist. The volatile silver canisters held their glowing million-year-old rods within laboratory-cushioned milk churns. Cec’s engine was ready for its advance on Mile End (and its ‘detour’ through Stepney Green and Whitechapel to pick up the drums of reprocessed material from Barking, that did not show up on any manifest — but which were delivered, with the utmost precision, to the cosmetic shell of Liverpool Street). The rest was not Cec’s business: the airstrips of Suffolk, or the lost estuaries of Essex. He knew no more than the comfortably receding lines of track.

Volunteer and they throw the works at you: lie detectors, hot wires, flash-frames, sensory deprivation, stress-curves, cranial measurement, pads on the tongue, anal dilation, scrapes of nail dirt, litmus nappies, ancestor research, criminal record, political affiliations and Tarot reading. Cec had been turned down for the buses on the grounds of ‘poor road sense’; but the spooks found him perfectly suitable, a clean profile. He was deaf, impotent, suffering the onset of premature senility; a psychoneurotic depressive, prone to paranoid anxiety. He had a bad marriage, and no friends. His moral judgements were untrustworthy. He was just about capable of keeping his hand on the steering column. The ideal man: he fitted the job description to the letter.

The hermetic isolation of the cab was his prize: the line ahead was virgin, ready to be swallowed. The platform floated like a tropical island above this mud-churned dereliction. The red warning light flickered, then died: it was time to move out.

II

Anyone who has ever written anything about Whitechapel, or the Whitechapel Murders, will soon discover they have issued an open invitation to every conspiracy-freak who is not actually under lock and key (and who is able to raise the price of a phonecall). It starts even before your book is published, almost as soon as the typescript receives its ultimate correction: as you slide the drawer shut, the phone rings. It’s always late at night; the caller has no name — his manner is circuitous, a shade abrupt. The voice is a vibrating needle of glass: you sense the veins knotting, the controlled resentment, the white hand clenching and unclenching. There is no time for, or interest in, your evasions: a message has to be delivered.

‘Mr Sinclair? I am able to reveal to you that I am in possession of privileged information (hopefully, to be published before the year is out), comprehensively refuting all previous theories. All the books you have read, those manufactured bestsellers, have been nothing but a tissue of lies, illegitimate confessions sponsored by… by… The truth has nothing, absolutely nothing , to do with the Royal Family, the medical profession, or the Masons. I am the only one who has pieced together the entire story. It’s all going to come out. But, as yet, I can tell you… nothing.’

Significant silences, painfully indrawn breath: all the inevitable grey-room warnings, whispered so loudly that they wake the children in their cots. Let it alone!

Then, shortly after your book is launched (one copy on the reserved shelf in Camden Town, twelve ordered from Glasgow — author’s name sounding vaguely Scottish — returned on receipt, with request for refund against postage), the postman is knocking with the first bulky envelope; taped and double-sealed, stuffed with obscurely menacing news cuttings. ‘Has anybody official tried to dissuade you from publishing?’ (‘Only the publishers,’ I mumble.)

Evidence accumulates in the form of photocopied accounts of spontaneous combustions: ‘MAN BURSTS INTO FLAMES. Paul Green, a 19-year-old computer operator, was walking along a quiet road in De Beauvoir Town, Hackney, around midnight when he suddenly burst into flames. He doesn’t smoke. He thinks the blaze might have been set off by a passing car but he doesn’t remember hearing any vehicle pass him. Police have spoken to Paul and examined the scene but are still puzzled by the fire. Paul is a holder of the Duke of Edinburgh’s bronze medal, and has two O levels .’

Or, some local-history buff will point out, rather crossly, that ‘Nicholas Lane’, the seemingly innocuous name of one of my fictional characters, is also a respectable channel, severing King William Street, where a Hawksmoor church is lurking — and where, apparently, T. S. Eliot spent his days as a banker, buried beneath the pavements, peering at typists’ legs through squares of sea-green glass. More and more; madder and madder. ‘ Elderly man critical after two-ton concrete and steel block plunged on to his car killing his wife. The couple were driving in heavy traffic along King William Street .’

I am deluged in accounts of corrupt surgeons, victims sprayed with kerosene, amnesiac detectives croaking out incriminating details in south-coast retirement homes, death-bed confessions occurring simultaneously (and word-for-word) in Adelaide, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen; clairvoyants, quacks, syphilitic poetasters; cocktails of feline blood (granting invisibility), showers of bread loaves, transported cathedrals; Russian-Jewish anarchists, Helena Blavatsky, M. P. Shiel, Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria. As one of these documents — truthfully but inelegantly — concludes: ‘The only exit therefore eventually left would be access to the zoo.’

To retain my sanity, it was necessary for me to cultivate the spittle-bibbed rudeness that is second nature to any antiquarian bookseller, to brush aside these twittering, but harmless obsessionists who cling to some personalized fragment of the past; determined, beyond reason, to wring every droplet of meaning from the soiled fabric. The events of nineteenth-century Whitechapel have been overtold to the point of erasure; confirming nothing beyond their eternal melancholy. The puffers, sniffers, scribblers and scratchers are determined to keep that small flame dancing in the circle of their sour breath.

John Millom was, I thought, different from the others only in degree: he was the most extreme example, the ultimate ‘Ripper’ nut. There was something so fixated, so dementedly popeyed, in the stuttering urgency of his phonecall that I found myself agreeing, reluctantly, to meet him, to examine his long-accumulated store of documents. It would, he assured me, change my life. There was a manuscript, I would know as soon as I looked at it, would have to be published. I had the ear of paperback editors, didn’t I? I even had permission to call a few literary agents by their christian names.

Millom would be waiting on the platform at Leyton from eleven o’clock on the morning of 3 December. He would be wearing a dark ‘business’ suit and a tie with the insignia of the local Round Table. I, in my turn, would hold aloft a carrier bag issued by the Forbidden Planet bookshop, with their logo prominently displayed. I couldn’t say what I would be wearing. I didn’t know what I was wearing now.

My attitude was inexcusable: I needed Millom more than he needed me. I had no intention of doing anything with his offer, other than pressganging him (as a prime freak) into my book of tales — which was in a critical condition; and likely, without a speedy transfusion, to collapse under its own density, like a dead star. This compulsive scavenging took me to many places better left unvisited: Leyton was the worst of them.