Iain Sinclair - Downriver

III

Whitechapel Station comes more nearly to resemble a Berlin checkpoint every time I use it. There are barriers, scanners, plexiglass enclosures, money-eating slits. Remote-control uniforms (that may or may not be inhabited) demand tickets and passes. How would you recognize your own face as it flattened and bent across the visor of a helmet? Travellers are required to submit to a primitive body-search before passing into the tunnels. They are groped by buzzing hoops, pulled from the line, questioned against white tile walls.

‘Fucking surfers, mate,’ ‘Tiresias’ the newspaper seller (so named because he had ‘foresuffered all’, and never ceased to speak of it) told me, as he struggled, disapprovingly, to heft a copy of the Guardian , ‘still shovellin’ ’em orf of the track. Took ’em in buckets dahn the ’ors-pital, dint they?’

I nodded, meaningfully, as if I knew what he was talking about; he was spitting doom at the next customer, so I didn’t hang about. I was already late: I’d planned to visit the Whitechapel Gallery on my way — to pick up a Yiddish phrasebook. I should have known better, the place doesn’t open until eleven o’clock (culture breakfasts late in these islands): two or three mitching schoolkids and a solitary vagrant were mooning about outside, eager to get into the refurbished snack bar. I had to satisfy myself with sampling the blue Wedgwood plaque polyfilled to the Library wall in celebration of Isaac Rosenberg. Then a speedy browse through the repro maps and the tables of redundant stock, now offered for sale. (I selected a well-worn salmon cloth 2nd imp. of G. Scott-Moncrieff’s Café Bar , July 1932: ‘A Novel without Hero or Plot’. Joey the Jumper had once recommended it.) Soon there will be more texts outside in the 10p bins than on the library shelves.

Another odd thing about the station entrance is that any space not dominated by badge-flashing muscle has been colonized by an indiscreet hullabaloo of male whores, rent boys, and tasty runaways; most of them favouring the style known as ‘Goth’ (or ‘Vandaloon’) — sooty-black rags, white faces, chicken crowns. The undead in lethargic rehearsal. This seemed to confirm one of Millom’s more off-the-wall pronouncements. He claimed the police were refusing to make public the fact that the victims of the most recent spate of railway murders were all male . (Some of his best chums, so he said, were on the force. And they were ‘sickened’ by what was going on. They feared a backlash. Lynch mobs. Homophobia. And feared it to the extent that they were busy formulating a policy of pre-emptive strikes. Hang a few ‘cornholers’ by the testicles. Décourager les autres .) The authorities were gravely concerned about a ‘wave of panic’ hitting the balance sheets of the New Companies; commuters shifting their always fickle allegiance to the collapsing road system. It was true: cars were, at this moment, honking swinishly in bumper-tobumper jams that stretched all the way back to the Bow Flyover; tempers fraying into clinical psychopathy. There were ‘incidents’, fights, screaming women: panicking ‘weekenders’ trying to fight their way out of Timber Wharves Village in heavily provisioned Range Rovers were terrified by the very real threat from marauding Highway Gangs — who were ready to strip them to the springs, and add another bushel of hysteria to the telescoping zone of chaos.

Millom had ranted about plague, enforced sodomy, pyorrhoeal kisses, neck bites, genital stalks bitten off in Dionysiac ecstasy: the victims, in their turn, becoming predators — the entire railway network rife with plasma-drooling vampires. He warned of maniacs with endemic viral erections, flesh dripping from their bone faces like cooking fat, never stepping ashore, sleeping with their eyes open, ever vigilant in the quest for new victims. An eternity of travel, with no destination, no memory of life in the settlement: restlessness, hunger, hatred. The system was racing to a standstill: blocked by ghost trains, cruising for clean meat. Millom wouldn’t step outside his door, he claimed, without his swordstick. He would make rashers out of the first gay who so much as asked him for a light for his cigarette.

The stamina, such as it is, of these weary Vandaloons is carelessly expended on subdued attempts at begging (that would have provoked Dryfeld’s undying scorn). They risk no more than the exhibition of an unwashed hand: the full chart of their ferrous deficiencies. Many have sunk on to the ground, doing nothing and knowing nothing. Their interest in life is minimal, and does not stretch far beyond the recognition of this station as a worthy place to haunt.

And so it is: an off-balance, unplanned assembly of tunnels, spidery stairwells, bridges going nowhere. The station appeared to be linked, by undiscovered passages, to the London Hospital, and a gaunt warehouse on Durward Street (overlooking the Jewish Burial Ground and the cobblestones where the body of the Ripper’s first victim was discovered). Dust-licked windows bell out over the track; swollen curves of Flemish bonded yellow marl bricks are shored up with proscribed medieval timber. There are watchers everywhere.

I descend, pass along deserted platforms, climb stairs that float in space, unattached and shifty. I glimpse apertures of remote light, occulted details of the hospital, slogan-plastered walls, a narrow footbridge surreptitiously edging over the track, from sealed attic to sealed attic. I am almost ready to abandon my rendezvous with Millom; to give my allegiance to the derelicts, go no further, find a hole, a forgotten office, and dig in.

The sun has exploited a fault in the leaden skies above this labyrinth of unfulfilled ambitions: the mist begins to shift, to infiltrate the smoke from a fire some workmen have lit beside the track. A man, a hunched solitary, is standing at the far end of the long platform, beneath a bank of television screens that play back an idealized version of this necropolis junction: pearly, dim, soft. These pictures have the quality of transmissions from a diving bell in the deepest ocean trench. Eel-grass fronds of morbid light flare from the black hole of the tunnel: an extinct monster’s last breath.

It is probably not worth the effort of asking this man if he knows the place for the Mile End train — but something about the epidural rigidity of his stance, the bulging pockets of his white coat, the incongruous pink cap, makes me think he could justify a line or two in the notebook. He has absorbed events, without participating in them. They have stuck to him like a quilt of burs.

‘Is this right for Mile End?’ No response. It would be as useful to question the angels on their green plinth at the station entrance. But the television sets, in a reprise of some primitive short by Lumière, were now featuring that twin-screen classic, The Arrival of the Train . I could even make out the word — UPMINSTER — advancing like a special-effects title. I was about to turn away when I noticed one mildly disconcerting detail. I was quite alone on the slippery silver dish: my co-star had taken personal modesty to the extreme degree of remaining invisible . His etheric double was not there.

The train in dutiful longshot slid across the frame, hit its mark with the precision of an old pro, and disgorged a few flower-bearing tourists, determined visitors of the sick. I could still see, and admit to, an ill-performed parody of my lean and noble figure, sullen cap pulled over eyes, carrier bag in hand: but there was nobody beside me. I wheeled towards the old man on the platform (that time-warped Gerontion): he had not moved. He stared remorselessly at the screen; he must have penetrated to a deeper channel. He gawped like an addict, untouched, but unwilling to break free. I did not poke him, test his reality with my fingers. The smell was overpoweringly authentic: it is only his ghost that does not register. He slips, unharmed, through the electronic net; ergo, he is not allowed to exist.