Iain Sinclair - Downriver

A curious sensation rippled upwards from the soles of his feet, to break — in hair-raising confrontation — on the waves of involuntary surrender, spiralling blindly down the freeway of his spine. All six chakras were in critical overdrive. He licked his lips like a man drowning in sand. Was that a bowl of yogurt? What was she up to? ‘Eh? Eeee. I–I. Ohh, you-uuuuu!’ he vowelled his distress, rupturing in a single convulsion the elocutionary pretensions of a lifetime. She was, very slowly, devouring him. He couldn’t stand it. He was lifting from the runway, surging through railway tunnels, breaking over rocks, pounding the white buildings, waterfalling; with a singular greed to rewrite all previous definitions of ecstasy.

At this hour only the Sh’aaki Twins were not pissed out of their skulls: they were getting rather silly on lime-flavour carbonated water. They were playing the game of spinning an empty claret bottle: whoever it pointed at could choose an item from his brother’s collection of contemporary lithographs. Nobody was keeping score, but it appeared that the one remaining wine waiter (who slept on the premises) was now the proud possessor of forty-eight prime examples of Kitaj, Schnabel, Kieffer, Koberling, Penck, Bellany, Baselitz, Polke, Johns and Warhol. Indeed, the man was able, in a modest way, to set himself up as a respected dealer, and adviser to new investors in this notoriously high-risk field.

The Film Producer, who had snuffed his way through his own supplies, was starting to ‘freebase’ the sugar basin. It was, as Professor Catling judged, the optimum moment to make his outrageous pitch. ‘We’ve dutifully rubber-stamped the shitty Bayreuth we were convened to bless, OK, fine; but now we have a chance to make our mark and — within the same budget — initiate another project, an original proposal that can slip through on the back of what the grey men require. We can recover our reputation for probity, hold our heads high among the community of artists. Let us act with stealth and in a way they will never suspect — until it is far too late.’ He let his balled fist drop on to the table, startling the recumbent Producer, and throwing the Sh’aaki Twins into a fit of the giggles. His rhetoric expired over a palpitating dunescape of naked buttocks that strained, diligently, to make the earth move. ‘We don’t want our names in lights,’ Catling said, ‘but neither will we allow them to be scribbled on the water.’

He flicked open a scuffed sketchbook and gave his own interpretation of the defiant dogma of that utterly obscure sculptor, S. L. Joblard. He translated, with impressive fluency, these pages of frantic thaumaturgic doodling: the mineral metaphors, the pencilled ghosts, the chalky erasures, the leagues of angels.

Professor Catling, prepared to travel in the quest of visionary stimulation, had ‘discovered’ Joblard’s work in a remote gallery on the edge of London Fields, Hackney. An old drovers’ patch of no consequence whatsoever that was notable only for lending its name to a spirited work of lowlife fiction by John Milne. Joblard, it seemed, had conceived the idiot-simple notion of borrowing the ice-making machine from the Lea Valley Skating Rink to freeze the western dock, the second eye of the Silvertown skull, to create a polar ocean. In the ice would be embedded the salvaged wrecks of several whaling vessels. Fram, Terra Nova , and Discovery would be represented, however dubiously, within sight of the North Woolwich railway. The rubble of demolished riverside terraces would be dumped, then layered in foam or polystyrene chippings, to suggest Mt Erebus. Tattered canvas tents, war surplus (Brick Lane), would be despatched to the most far-flung regions, to double for Scott’s camp sites. A dart-nibbled builders’ shed would stand in for the shore base. Expenses would be minimal. There might even be a small profit to be earned in clearing such unexploitable relics. Outdated tins of bully beef, prairie beans, dog food, and pemmican could be buried in flag-marked cairns. Wind machines could guarantee a force-ten blizzard. Brave spirits, at the flash of a Euro credit card, could relive the noblest failure of them all — the dash to the Pole. Junior executives, under compulsion, would build their characters, hone their cutting edges, in a race against a team of Russian sailors from Tilbury (prepared, for the price of a night among the Soho slot machines, to fake it as Amundsen’s hardy Norwegians).

Joblard of course had other — darker — notions he would tack on behind this preposterous smokescreen: shamanistic ceremonies concerned with lunar eclipses, molten lead, horse skulls, brick ovens, ice spears, the invocation of animal ancestors. These, Professor Catling had the tact not to mention.

The thing was put to the vote. The Sh’aaki twins sniggered, took out an option, and accepted. The Film Producer was already on his way home, via the Limehouse nick, in a canvas sack marked ‘DOA’. The couple under the table, locked into writhing (and interchangeable) combinations of hunger and tumescence, continued to heave like huskies: they rose to the occasion, offering up tacit moans of approval. And so, to the sounds of feeding time in the wolf pen, a ribbon of pure madness was innocuously inserted among the footnotes. Professor Catling signalled for the waiter to summon a taxi.

VI

In that refurbished cattle truck, shuddering on some embankment ledge, above fenced mud fields, over paludal wastes into which sacks of paper credit had been tipped as ballast; in that rattling, enclosed space, pressed hard against the smeared, cold window — I began to understand the concept of breakdown. Complete, absolute despair. The ego extinguished. The power of the centre, the unviolated heart of my being, was tattered and frayed. I tasted vomit on my lips. And felt my angel shiver to be free. Sonny spoke aloud, but his voice was untrustworthy. It was my mother’s voice, calling out in the darkest hour of the night, addressing me with my dead father’s name.

The quality of the desolation outside the carriage’s window-screen altered; it shifted and shook, as I drove my knuckle against the ball of my eye, feebly opposing this accumulation of evidence with mere pain. I pulled my cheek from the dirty glass, leaving behind a negative frame: the portrait of a ghost, a man without moral substance. I had never confessed to being anything but a jaunty witness, a paddler in the narrative shallows. Now there was nothing else to look at. There was no ‘story’. The landscape had withdrawn its labour: an unsettled greyness. This heat-printed trace, this copied man, stared back into the train with an unfocused, autistic gaze; and saw Sonny sitting with some straw-stuffed bundle of laundry. Borrowed clothes, borrowed skin; the inevitable carrier bag of other men’s books.

The catastrophic rump of Stratford and Plaistow, Canning Town and Custom House became, as the train moved, the blast furnaces of Margam, the rolling mills, the fire-tongued stacks belching their gritty deposits on to the salt breeze; creeping over low hills, to strip ancient damp oaks, or gift the valley folk with lush cancers and squamous growths; dying among the inhuman lightless depths of conifer plantations, in which foxes hid from squadrons of shotgun-toting foresters. I was back in Wales, being driven down the coast road, west, following the coffin. Pieces of that journey lodge, and overwhelm my lack of interest in yet another East London railway adventure. Salient flashes of the Thames, between wrecking yards and stiff-necked cranes, burn into the persistence of the broad flat Severn. I saw the shell of Margam Abbey, and the roofless chapel on the hill above the maze; while, all the time, we continued to jolt towards the business of Silvertown.