Iain Sinclair - Downriver

This narrative was, I felt, beginning to take a dangerous turn. Millom’s agitation was increasingly seismic. He was being cannibalized by his own metaphors. His breath came in rasping seizures, gusts of recycled aniseed. His starched white cuffs were flashing mirror-gauntlets; as he jerked and jabbed and twisted. The rusting dog-fox hairpiece slithered on his moist scalp, ready to make a run for it. Suddenly, and without warning, he drew the blade from its narrow sheath and drove it into the earth, a couple of inches from my boot: an uneasy moment.

‘You’re standing on her,’ Millom whispered, relishing the theatrical effect, ‘the final victim! A girl of twenty-five, a beauty; Prima Donna , the whores called her. She was left without a cup of blood in her entire body. It has been revealed to me that the man who did this thing drank it, believing it would make him invisible. And I know who that man was. Or “is”, because I’ll tell you something else for nothing — he’s still alive ! He punished himself with immortality. You understand? The last ritual was successfully completed.’

By reflex, I looked straight down — ready to meet the dead girl’s accusing stare. The grave was freshly dug, blanketed in red and white carnations, on which an inverted crucifix had been carelessly tossed. There was a splendid new headstone, listing badly to port — as if someone (in escaping from the earth?) had tried to pull it over: The Prima Donna of Spitalfields. And Last Known Victim of Jack the Ripper. Do Not Stop to Stand and Stare Unless to Utter Fervent Prayer. (Mary Magdalene Intercede.) Dedicated by John Millom, 3 December 1988 .

‘I had her moved. Dug out from a paupers’ pit and placed here; beside the ground I have already reserved for my own interment — when the time comes. Am I wrong?’

The man was obviously moved by the enormity of the implications he had floated. Pulling a vast scarlet handkerchief from his breast pocket, he trumpeted ostentatiously. I averted my eyes in shame. Frosty silver trains were rattling and shuddering beyond the graves; defining the perimeters of the dead in a shower of sparks, hobbling the ghosts with thin fire.

John Millom was kneeling. Thinking himself unobserved, he dug his hands into the turned soil — and filled his pockets with damp clay.

V

The cheesy net curtains did nothing to filter out the inhuman entropy of High Road, Leyton; an embolic flutter of muddied Transits, partially resprayed Cortinas, and an angry boil of citizens scouting for the first rumours of the bus pack. The street had no evident purpose, beyond proving the Third Law of Thermodynamics (‘Every substance has a limited availability of energy…’).

Millom’s apartment smelt sour, unused: he had rented a ledger of unfranked slights, and half-digested resentments. The furniture was impregnated with ancestral flatulence (bad meat, verruca’d potatoes, cabbage boiled to a nappy-like consistency): it asserted a strident eagerness to be elsewhere. Grossly fragrant vapours, rising through the Axminster from the Pharmacy beneath, did nothing to sweeten the atmosphere. They suggested experiments with feline essences and mouth-violets intended to disguise the more active stinks of chicken vindaloo and illegal chemistry. Everything Millom owned was accounted for and in its place: unloved. A lighter touch was provided by the cloth-texture reproductions in their ornate frames (obviously ordered ‘sight unseen’, or left behind by some previous tenant).

The room described a reversed L , or mason’s square (the Egyptian ‘foot’ hieroglyph); taking in views of Calderon Road to the north, and the High Road to the west. The proportions were unsettling, tending to slip and drift: a lozenge with a single shrine-invoking focus. I perched on the rim of a leatherette chair, struggling to repel its alarmingly adhesive embrace. At any moment the points of the golden compasses would close like chopsticks, and I would vanish into the only ‘window’ open to me: John Millom’s emblematic map.

This scroll, or chart, dominated the east wall and had taken, so he said, three years to assemble. It was a socio-alchemical portrait of Whitechapel; featuring, of course, events from the autumn and early winter of 1888. They spiralled in ropes of demented imagery from a sulphurous heliocentric furnace: a Sun-Father. The words were engraved with marker pen on a marly field. Victim faces, hacked from magazines, were imposed on the courts and furtive alleys: heads bigger than houses, black eyes like dew-ponds. A rash of sticky heat raised these transfers of redundant obsession: names became stars, became pentacles; trees were swords. The circumference was cut by a scarlet thread drawn from the fixed point of the steeple of Christ Church, Spitalfields. The craftsman’s own interpretations and comments were too intemperate to await some anecdotal occasion: they blazed free. ‘ I SAY TO SCOTLAND YARD: WHY PRETEND TO FORGET YOUR OWN LIES? Knight picked the WRONG GODFREY. WHO has the KEY??? ’

‘Like it?’ Millom smiled, proudly. ‘Now you can see I know what I’m talking about. It’s all clear. Right? I learnt how to lay out information effectively when I ran a crack sales team. My time, your money. Am I wrong? We ate it up: Loughton, Chingford, Billericay, Stanford-le-Hope; west as far as Enfield, even Potters Bar. Heating equipment, bathroom suites, brass-ware, sanitary ware, boilers, tanks, polypipes, plastic plumbing systems: we handled the lot. Just get your basics right, I used to drive the message home. GOTH : Gather, Order, Transform, Harmonize. Then, when they’d proved they could cope with responsibility, I’d slip them a big one — JAH : Jettison, Assert, Hazard. Take risks. No pain, no gain. Am I wrong?’

He stood back, mesmerized by the enormity of his achievement, ogling the chart with dubious paternal pride. It was, like all the other ‘treated’ rooms I had encountered, a map of nothing but its maker’s brain. For these people, there was no ‘outside’. Their rooms were works of fiction that fought to quell, through partial confession, the vessels of wrath. My very own job description.

‘I always told them at group meetings,’ Millom blathered on, ‘remember JAH . Number One: Jettison. Cut out inessentials; fall-guys, stoolpigeons, false accusations. Number Two: Assert. Put down the facts in the clearest possible way. Dates, times, locations. Number Three: Hazard. Don’t be timid, don’t be bamboozled by so-called “experts”, with their mouths full of language. The man we want couldn’t have been more down-to-earth: he had a practical solution to a practical problem. Am I right? He was a pragmatist. I’m telling you. My solicitor is one hundred per cent behind me on this one. Won’t stand still for any loose talk about “Royals” or “Secret Societies”. All anarcho-socialist long-hair propaganda.’ He tapped the side of his nose in a gesture that trembled with import.

‘Reach under the red carpet and you’ll soon get your fingers around our circumcised friend, the ringleted Israelite, unpicking the woof of an ordered society: exclude him at your peril. Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg; Charlie Chaplin, he was half-Jewish, a Comintern agent. They kicked him out of America. Am I wrong? My solicitor doesn’t think so. He holds duplicates, in his safe, of all the Protocols. Anything happens to me — he has his instructions.’

I wanted to pursue the matter of the key (???), for some reason it haunted me. (I suppose I was still thinking of Davy Locke’s sunstreak epiphany.) But it was not easy to put Millom, in his cuff-twitching, finger-jabbing flow, on hold.

‘Key? Key?’he pursed his lips in a vinegar pout of denial; trying to cover up the guilty words on his chart with a damp and boneless hand. ‘The Jews didn’t find out about that, did they? Your media czars — Bernstein, Weidenfeld, Lew Grade, Victor Gollancz — they’re all in it. You won’t see the key on the television with Michael Caine, will you? Am I wrong?’He slid open a drawer and took out a cigarette packet from which he extracted something wrapped in tissue paper.