Iain Sinclair - Downriver

She was a couple of years into her fifth term in what was now effectively a one-party state and a one-woman party — what could be wrong? True, there hadn’t been a photogenic disaster for several weeks, a crash, a bombing, some dark débris-scattered location she could avoid — only to appear, phosphorescent with concern, a Marian blue manifestation, primed, lit from her good side, serene and comforting among the bedpans, eager to press the wound with a white-gloved hand: or again, severe with grief in tailored black, stilting on four-inch heels, at some well-guarded memorial service. Never, never (she had been advised), at the graveside: there must be no subliminal associations with mere mortality. ‘Rejoice then!’ she quoted the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh with unironic relish. Ambulance chasing was a thing of the past. (There were no ambulancemen left to drive them.)

The Widow scuttled, lurched, towards the full-length mirror; a mother hen who has recognized a significant lump of her first born in the feeding tray — an eye perhaps, or a tine of red comb. She lifted her plump arms in a vague, archetypal gesture; flashing hazardous sharply jewelled knuckles, while the valet swooped with the Ladyshave and the environment-friendly roll-on. Her survivalist instincts, which some commentators felt were preternaturally acute, nagged: a nerve surfacing in a diseased molar. A fresh initiative was called for, a grander set of photo opportunities, a rallying cry: a lift from lethargy.

Perhaps she should summon a team of ‘our’ boys from Hereford to take out a few Paddys or stungun a Bedouin tent-show? But who was left with the clout to carry the front pages? It was counter-productive to sanction too many ‘natural’ disasters, to whistle up winds she could not bring to heel. The relatives tended to behave so badly, wailing and protesting, asking nanny for ‘compensation’: let them buy a share in the sewage racket. Palliative tele-prompts only muted the whingeing proles until the next share issue. There had even been whispers, brave and foolish (from the submerged wine bars of Stoke Newington), that she was not altogether innocent — how dare they think it — of her beloved Consort’s death. He ‘passed over’, it is true, at a particularly flaky moment: the Widow’s stock had dropped a couple of points in the wake of a Sophoclean chain of takeover scandals, buggers bursting from the closet, call girls with carrier bags of banknotes at railway terminals, episcopal suicides and low-level resignations — Defence Secretaries and the like. But that was a trick that couldn’t be repeated. She was married to the nation now, divorce was out of the question.

Another impassioned bull on matters ecological? She’d already worked her way yards deep into the lectures of Gregory Bateson (as delivered to the Fellows of Lindisfarne). Time has, she discovered, this marvellous facility for civilizing the most recalcitrant material. Stuff that would have put you at the head of the Prevention of Terrorism Index in the 1960s, when it was still prophetic and active, could now be broadcast from St Anne’s Cathedral, Limehouse, in a safely retrospective form. Let us keep a tidy house and sing loud — with William Blake — for vanished green glories. Let the Prince have his Palladian toy town around St Paul’s. Let him bleat about planning, proportion, rustification, the piano nobile . It was a sideshow, a box for chocolate soldiers — popular as Bourton-on-the-Water (and with about as much clout); serviceable for Royal Weddings, which could be timed to coincide with unconvinced by-elections. She’d outmanoeuvred him, shifted the axis downstream: stuffing Wren’s overloaded Roman bauble by rededicating Nicholas Hawksmoor’s unfrocked riverside monster, that ‘masterpiece of the baroque’, as her personal shrine. She could float by barge, in viceregal splendour, turn with the tide, disembark at dawn, or make a progress, a torchlit procession, with heraldic beasts, courtiers, cameramen, brownsnouts, to be greeted on the steps with a lick of the hand from her faithful gauleiter , the mad-eyed Doctor. (Another refugee from Metropolis , visionary social architect, crazed as Mabuse himself, planning a world-assault in Baum’s asylum.) The whole gaudy epic (a pastiched version of Rubens’s ‘Arrival of the Queen at Marseilles’, made suitable for family viewing) would be slapped down on previously primed canvas, by an official War Artist, and hung in the National Gallery before she had swallowed her second gin and french. Get your heritage in first. Build your museum while you still have the muscle to control it. There were still a few dodges she was not too proud to steal from Ambassador at Large, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Acknowledging the crowds she saw as a featureless throb of pre-coital discomfort with a limply dropped wrist, she remained tormented by unease: there was an unidentified splinter lurking beneath her perfectly manicured fingernails. ‘You’d have to be a stiff to get better coverage,’ she muttered. She was ‘prime time’ with all the majors and most of the disk cowboys who cared about their franchises. That was it! Why hadn’t she thought of it before? What were her so-called ‘advisers’ playing at? Those brilliantined lounge lizards, those neutered toms who fed at her table. What on earth was going on at the Agency, for goodness’ sake? Off with the velvet glove (and the velvet hand inside it!). Were there any lard-haunched half-Brits left to bounce? That was always so popular with the back-bench lynch mobs.

Dead, extinguished, excused parade. The Judas kiss of cold marble. The ultimate camera call. Victoria R came up with the same solution when she was beginning to slide back in the ratings: a Memorial to her dear departed husband, her companion, her inspiration. Dead meat, a Consort could still be pressed into service. What are you waiting for ? Put a call through on the blue line to the Sh’aaki Twins. A State Commission must be set up immediately. Yes, NOW! Of course, this morning. No planning permission is required. Flatten Greenwich if you have to. Next time they’ll think before they vote.

II

The Steering Committee convened at the London City Brasserie (Silvertown) had been democratically nominated. Eleven places were laid at a shimmering linen table, that was crowded with surgeries of Georgian silver, light-manipulating facets of crystal. It was possible, by peeping through a captive tobacco plantation, to cop a vision of the grey and choppy waters of the King George V Dock: a subdued and unmeditated absence . The Brasserie exploited one end of the upper deck of the City Airport; the other was reserved for perpetual trade exhibitions, maquettes of riverside apartments. A weekly flight hammered its way, too low to be tracked by radar, to the Channel Islands, weighed down by the lumpy packages of money-laundering service industries. Otherwise this was a showcase with nothing to show.

Brendan (Clancy) Mahoun, a former dock labourer, perhaps ‘lifted’ by the booze (on the strength of his redundancy money), claimed to have seen Our Lady walk upon these waters. Otherwise cold-blooded and calculating investors are always eager to leap on any sign or portent; they grovel for the soothsayer’s blessing. They decided that pilgrims would very soon be rushing the turnstiles from every farflung corner of the Catholic empire. An airport must be constructed. The theory paid off (eventually) at Knock. The sheds were booming: not with alms-jangling shrine hoppers, but with country boys frantic to emigrate. And that was the only way this place was ever going to work.

Ten of these complaisant diners had been nominated directly by the Widow herself, and the eleventh by a conga of ‘practising’ artists (sculptors, window dressers, creative book keepers and the like). The conga had been brought under starter’s orders, a month in advance, by the Widow’s Press Secretary, wearing his other hat as (the entire) ‘Council for Arts and Recreation’. It had been a tricky one, at first blush, finding the names to cloak the event in bogus respectability. In the end, the task devolved, quite satisfactorily, on those heavyweight players, the Sh’aaki Twins, who picked a few hungry faces from among their own holdings. A good lunch was better than the promise of a postal order.