Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘This was the pass key, made from a corset-spring, with which the man I am not yet at liberty to name picked the lock of the private madhouse and escaped into the streets. I acquired it, through mutual associates, from an official, no longer employed by the hospital: a favour for a favour, so to speak.’

I looked at the meagre object, which seemed hopelessly inadequate for the task of carrying its burden of iconic signification. It was more of a fish-hook than an implement of power. It lay, unactivated, on the occasional table: a symbol with nothing to symbolize. I tried to bury myself in the unyielding chair, to escape Millom’s presence: the engorged veins, the carmine flush coursing through the unripe pallor like an over-administered hit of embalming fluid. He was holding his breath, sucking in the flaps of his cheeks, preparatory to some momentous announcement.

‘You’ve shown you know when to keep silent,’ said Millom, with a choreic twitch of approval (as if I’d had any choice in the matter!), ‘now I will return the compliment and let you have first sight of the document you will publish on my behalf. But I must make one thing absolutely clear before you read it: though every word is transcribed in my holograph, I did not write it . It was dictated to me — by the one person who could have known, without dispute, the full secret of the Whitechapel Murders. I have used my own methods to “go over”, cross the line, make contact. I have been granted access to the voice of that lovely young girl, the victim of the locked room, the madonna of that oven of meat. She will speak to you through my hand.’

The lights had come on in the High Road: Millom stood before me, continuing to demonstrate the progressive degeneration of his basal ganglia. He jerked like a pantomime demon: black-browed, corvine, streaked by the lurid beams of rush-hour traffic. The seediness of the situation was intolerable, but my criminal curiosity stifled all repulsion: I accepted his bundle of blue lined paper, unknotted the pink rose ribbon, and began to read.

VI

The Prima Donna’s Tale (As transcribed by John Millom, Calderon Road, 1/1/89)

I had not, I think, been dead beyond two or three months when I dreamed of the perfect murder. Perfect? No, hardly that — inevitable; pure in design and execution. My murder would be an exercise of memory: I would recover something that had, perhaps, never taken place, and I would make it happen. Now the past could be whatever I wanted it to be. I had surely earned that right. My power was absolute.

I saw the outline of a girl’s body, frosted with unstable light. I saw my own double, kneeling sadly over that body, then moving into the shadows.

A cracked window pane. Muslin belling over a chair-back. The guttered stub of a candle in a broken wine glass. Something shapeless and made from felt smouldering in the open grate.

The room was an oven. But the smell was of incense, not of meat.

I couldn’t hold any impression of the girl’s face; dark hair was drawn across her throat like a wound. She would certainly have been called ‘handsome’, ‘strong-bodied’, ‘gay’. But she had turned awkwardly, her legs raised as if for the stirrups. I do not know her, nor do I understand why she condones such abject and degrading poses.

An east wind blusters the powdered snow through a congregation of deformed angels: their names are gone, their faces are without features. They press heavily on the frozen cloth of earth, inhibiting the drowsing dead: those who lack the courage to dream.

A shower of sparks from an engineless train, breaking before the icy station: a platform of chilled and stamping travellers. They have forgotten us. Our desires cannot trouble the banality of their thoughts. Snow faintly falling, like the descent of their last end; unnoticed, unrecorded. Oak and elm, a chaplet of heartsease. Memory anticipates event. A clear, young voice, beyond the courtyard: ‘Only a violet.’ It is too late. There is nothing to revenge. A dream to be shaped. Dreamt again, perfected. I move in that dream, I float on its surface. Once more I am sitting at the window, awaiting his step on the cobblestones. I have no power to change the order of the ritual.

This was the best time, the preparation. Self-absorbed, my actions mirrored my intentions: an uninstructed immediacy. There was no anticipation of pleasure, nor dread of failing to provoke an interest. Brushing and rebrushing my hair, halfremembered words of some song. In the elbow-chair, a heavy rug over my knees. From the window, the world at an angle: across the court, a bare wall. Or running my cold fingers over the shape of my own face, making it into a mask of glass. Letting the act collapse into the memory of the act. Bare-legged. A green linsey wrap. Tapping my nail on the sill. Warmed, lit from behind by the glow of a coal fire.

The resonance of a church bell runs a prophetic tremor along the board floor; a warning step, uneven on the cobbles. A single knock.

The door is opened, I do not move; yellow suede gloves of his manservant. Hair oil and horse ordure. ‘I shall return, sir, upon the hour.’ High, mud-spattered boots.

His hand, then, lifted; out in front of him, grey cotton; stretching to touch me — so lightly — on the cheek. Paternal. To confirm my agreement, to implicate me. His leather travelling bag is abandoned on the floor; hideous, a mastiff with its limbs amputated. Or, a soft pouch for transporting bees. He turns, turns from me to bolt the door. The key to the room is his, the knock a sham: another of his subtle cruelties. He does not speak.

She stood in the centre of the room while he undressed her with his gloved hands. A foliage of flame, fern tongues, disturbed the grate: a demented tangle of blades. Crippled shadows, across the wall, uniting them in urgent and repeated acts.

She sat in the elbow-chair, waiting; he selected a pair of intricately laced boots from the cupboard. Nothing is said. Mumbled threats, instructions. The heavy cloth of his coat pressing on her, greasy with spilled food, old smoke.

Then he was at the window, worrying a corner of grey muslin between his finger and his thumb. She was on her knees, water steaming from the spout of an old black kettle: washing him. They were helpless, without breath, sunk in their poses — when the knock came. They were drowned.

An unyielding hand upon his elbow. The blind surgeon is led away. Out of the court, through the warren, and across the highway to the lit building, the source of his power. The opera house of all her dreams.

It could have continued indefinitely. I do not remember how it began or how long it endured, who had initiated the affair, or who had set its terms. Our meetings succeeded one another with the remorselessness of a black letter text. So long ago, so far back; voices beyond the court were calling to the shore. Sparks from the train, like fire-sprites released from a shattered stone; like sun-specks on water. Abandoned. Forgotten. My consciousness divided, bound, tied in brown paper parcels: jogging on a onehorse cart towards some mortuary shed.

There were times when it was his pleasure to sprawl in the elbow-chair, my linsey over his knees, my reflection beyond him in the grime of the window, my long hair a wig to his glistening white skull. He required me to brush him, powder him, to gently stroke the pulse in his temples. There were times when he fell to his knees — as in a seizure — clasping my foot to his lips, an alabaster gull chipped from a fallen monument; his dry mouth rubbing, a sand beetle in a nest of dead twigs.

It could have continued, it did, the years, ageing together, ghost-tryst, shadows miming desire in a house of the dead, a museum of trapped reflexes: masked, we enacted obscure rituals.