Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The Producer, a dues-paying conservationist, paled, cruelly reminded of the ‘biographical details’ he had skittishly allowed his secretary to forward for inclusion in the project’s Official Brochure: ‘Tottenham Hotspur Supporter, bicyclist, knitter of Shetland sweaters, patron of David Mach, and occasional filmmaker’. The Widow was probably looking at the thing at this very moment, asking somebody to explain what it meant. He could forget the peerage. A crippling spasm of yellow pain shook him: he clutched his gut and made a rush for the Gents, where he pounded the digits of his cellphone, trying to reach his Artbroker before the close of trade for the Holy Hour.

‘Sell Mach! Take a loss, anything — get shot. I need weight , formalism. Get me into marble, or forget your percentage, baby. I want work that takes a crane to lift it.’

‘I must admit,’ the Laureate’s Wife elevated her bone-handled fork in the direction of the Chair, ‘to rather a soft spot for Gormley’s “ Brick Man ”. ’

‘Over my dead body!’ screamed the Architect, who was involved in a running battle with an unpronounceable critic who had written of the figure with trenchant enthusiasm. The Architect wouldn’t lift a finger to support anything his Hackney-based rival might (for want of a better idea) editorially endorse.

‘Put up a thing like that,’ said the extrovert Twin, ‘and you’ll frighten the aeroplanes.’

‘ What aeroplanes?’ retorted the Chair, waving an empty glass towards the deserted runway: a gesture the hovering Cypriot waiter read, correctly, as a request for a ‘top up’. More sycophantic laughter. ‘You don’t seriously imagine anyone in their right minds would risk flying out of this cut-price lagoon — a hundred yards of couch grass in the middle of nowhere? The original notion, fatuous as it now appears, was that the terminal itself would be the big attraction — pulling in charabancs of manipulated imbeciles eager to gape at their own reflection, then stagger home with a trolleyful of gimcrack souvenirs. Now the taxi drivers won’t touch the place. They tell their fares it’s been closed down, run them to Stanstead.’

The Architect, fearing the conversation was drifting away from those areas in which he could decisively demonstrate his erudition and understated humanity, slid a sketch of Anthony Gormley’s brick giant across the table. It was instantly skewered by a flash of the Chairman’s steak knife.

‘Damned thing’s got no willy.’ His euphemism was tactfully pitched at a level suited to mixed company. ‘The creature’s a eunuch, sexless as a gilded Oscar. Dickie Attenborough’ll blub if he comes within a mile of it. Ugh! An impractical dildo: won’t be up a week before the Paddys have the bricks away to front some King’s Cross sauna. Jumping Jesus, can you imagine what the Widow would do if her husband’s sacred memorial was shanghaied into the retaining wall of a wankers’ bath house?’

‘Couldn’t we talk about Barry Flanagan?’ The Laureate’s Wife ached to shift into a more life-affirming territory. ‘His dancing hares have got such animal spirit, such dawn-fresh vitality. He’s a true shaman; his drawings come alive before your eyes.’

‘Flanagan?’ snorted the Chair, ‘feller in a trilby? Looks like a bookie’s runner? He’s a potato basher. Quite out of the question.’ (The Producer was relieved. He had shifted swiftly out of Flanagan when the soft furnishings started to cost more than a year’s subscription to Country Life or a modest assignation at the White Tower.)

‘Just so. The gestalt is now most definitely “on the floor”. We have to prepare ourselves for an assault on new forms of reality.’ The Architect clawed back; causing Professor Catling to raise the tablecloth, fearful he had missed out on some notable side dish. ‘Flanagan’s latest proposal excitingly combines a performance element with his always scrupulous truth to materials. He wants us to validate — bear witness to — the construction of a hole in the water . This would have such a miraculously transitional quality, a metamorphosis of liquid into air… an anomaly, I believe, of enormous resonance.’

‘If you think the Widow wants her saintly husband remembered by a hole in the water, you must have a hole in the head,’ snapped the Chair, muttering something further to an attentive aide, who instantly passed the message on to a pocket tape-recorder. (The Architect was on his way back to the Masonic one-night stands.) ‘Look here, haven’t we got a couple of these johnnies on the payroll? They should do something to earn their gravy. The Civil List’s not a gentleman’s club for bloody civilians.’

‘Sir Eduardo,’ said the Architect, eager to stay on the ball, ‘is occupied in laying out an Aztec mosaic somewhere beneath the Elephant and Castle. Sir Anthony, it was felt, had done such sterling service at Millbank that he should be considered for compassionate leave — before he suffered the debilitating effects of front-line trauma. He’s an artist, first and last; not an administrator.’

‘I think,’ said the irrepressible fenland châtelaine, ‘we are all in danger of forgetting the true purpose of this gathering.’ Her remarks were floated in such soft but narcoleptic tones that the disadvantaged drinkers (male) froze in mid-hoist. An unconvinced frog’s leg jerked spastically from the Architect’s open mouth, as if deciding to make one last pathetic leap for freedom. ‘Our brief is to commemorate the aviators who died protecting these factories, deepwater docks, and mean streets.’ She dangled a bloodless hand (so white it seemed to have been kept in a bath of milk) in vague benediction towards the shapeless mounds of masonry that hid the river from their privileged viewing station.

‘We are required,’ she continued, with all the confidence of one who has received absolution from the highest court in the land, ‘to offer our suggestions for the erection of a National Shrine; a place of quiet and meditation, a place fondly to recall those who have gone before, an inspiration to those who will follow.’

‘What did the old boy do in the last show?’ enquired the Chair, ‘apart from blasting out a few craters on the golf courses of the Cinque ports?’

‘Not known,’ the Architect, subdued, whispered into his hand, ‘stricken from the record. “Mentioned in despatches”, certainly. Something biological. And intelligent. Very hush-hush.’

Flash frames of shredded files. Laser-enhanced index cards. Chemically-inspired memory transfusions. They swept over the gob-struck assembly like a hazchem plague. Take your pick: droplets of blood beading the windows, dead fish pelting from the clouds, black and gungy smoke belching in spasms from the fluted stacks of the Silvertown Sugar Mills. And now, operatically, as if orchestrated by Leni Riefenstahl, at this moment when all the secret nightfears of the heart lay exposed on the linen table, a silver chopper skimmed in over the dock, ruffling the hide-thick surface, to land within sight of the petrified diners, on the uncropped grass of the man-made isthmus. Goons, too highly strung to wait for ladders, leapt to the deck, wheeling as they fell, scanning dim horizons, shrugging and twitching inside their Burberrys; patting themselves for the reassurance that they weren’t toting an empty holster. A child, scrubbed and pink, backlit, emerged from the open door of the Sikorski, as if for his first day at prep school, clutching an executive-size briefcase (from which the price ticket was clearly visible) to his bosom. He was dressed in unbruised cricket flannels. A wet bob faking it for the parents’ match.

‘The Minister,’ announced the Chair, ‘early as usual. Come to take our soundings back upstairs.’ Surreptitiously, he slid a magnum Havana back into its pigskin case.