Iain Sinclair - Downriver

But all this was no more than making legitimate a contract which had been, de facto , in place for generations. The whole inheritance of abandoned tactical airstrike bases was up for grabs: a dying tundra of miniature golf courses, conifer screens, radiation-free bunkers (conversion-friendly as DIY hyperhypermarkets), baseball diamonds, and American Rules football pitches, complete with electronic scoring facilities (with Early Warning playback and 2,000 provocative sponsor’s messages from the Big Book). ‘ The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed. ’ (Deuteronomy, 28.35).

The local dealers, car-boot traders and pensioned ‘wreckers’, swooped early to carry off the stacks of Gold Medal paperbacks, the snuff videos, porn aids, uppers, downers, heroin, crack, speed, Southern Comfort, deep-frozen grits, fetishist flying suits and helmets (beloved of skateboarders). It was Saigon revisited. The whole strip, from Grimes Graves to the Wash, was cropdusted with defoliants, bulldozed, burnt, cleared as a pre-season training camp for those genetic braggarts from Texas (bulls, bears, guards, fridges, fleetfoot blacks): the infertile steroid-pumping popeyed gladiators. Museum fodder! These games were a logistic embarrassment run for the benefit of the root-beer and popcorn franchises. Teams would soon confront each other — separated by thousands of miles of water — by shovelling strategies, game plans, meat statistics, favoured plays and form guides into the computer, and taking bets on the outcome. A potentially rich territory was opening up for baby-faced console jocks and goat-slaughtering snake-brained fixers. They were bending the future under the shame of bad money.

The ice floe was breaking. Mother London herself was splitting into segments, the overlicked shell of a chocolate tortoise. Piggy hands grabbed the numbered counters from the table. The occult logic of ‘market forces’ dictated a new geography. Banglatown, as it was vulgarly known, replaced the perished dream of Spitalfields. The ‘born-again’ Huguenots dumped their Adam fireplaces, and ran. The stern fathers of the One True Faith sent columns of black smoke twisting skywards as they redressed the violations of the culture of drunkards and apostates that surrounded them. Vulture priests, percolating hatred beneath their turbans, bearded in a nest of absolutes, spittled their chanting congregation with infallible accusations. It is spoken . Fundamentalist guards patrolled the border tracks (Cable Street to Cannon Street Road, to Bethnal Green, to Commercial Street); white-eyed, reciting the scriptures, AK-47s dangling from their shoulders. Children stoned adulterers, unbelievers, and White Hart Lane heretics. A time of angels and visitations: angels of revelation, angels of death, trumpeters of the resurrection. Now the censors alone have the melancholy duty of reading books. And condemning them to the flames. The marketplace blazes to a life unequalled since the Marian barbecues. The Brewery, indecently eager to confess its blasphemy, sold its holdings; and was smoothly translated into a prison for theological dissidents, common criminals, and journalists.

We had lost the capacity for experiencing surprise. We were immodest. Nothing Davy Locke told us could bring the blood to our cheeks. The Book of Revelation was as familiar as the Hackney Gazette , but tamer. We knew that the Isle of Dogs had been sold to the Vatican State, and we did not care. It was a natural consequence of Runcie’s merger. One of the shakier assets that had to be stripped. The peg of uncircumcised land was known to the outlying squatters of Blackwall and Silvertown as ‘The Isle of Doges’, and to the cynics of Riverside as ‘Vat City’. This deregulated isthmus of Enterprise was a new Venice, slimy with canals, barnacled palazzi , pillaged art, lagoons, leper hulks: a Venice overwhelmed by Gotham City, a raked grid of canyons and stuttering aerial railways. A Venice run by secret tribunals of bagmen, too slippery for Vegas; by relic-worshipping hoodlums, the gold-mouthed heads of Colombian cocaine dynasties.

A temporary alliance of Milanese industrialists and pro-Albanian social purists had made things too hot for the established Papal Mafia; a move from the homeland to some more relaxed set of mercantile codes was advisable: and soon! A few hours ahead of the sequestrator’s pantechnicon. Nowhere, no rum-crazy atoll, was looser than Docklands. They’ve torn up the rulebook. Open City, Scum Town. If you can imagine it, then it’s been done.

The Princes of the Church threw a few Raphaels into an overnight bag, crated a nightclub of tight-buttocked boy gods, a spare set of silks — and did a runner.

The Isle had passed from the hands of the simple bullion thieves who first correctly identified its present malaise, its untapped potential, bought the wharves cheap, and laundered their grubby millions (to make a far greater fortune than their under-exercised imaginations could encompass). The indisposed loot became rapidly critical. It reproduced itself in an orgy of self-love. It went off the scale of human greed, and into some borderland of wallowing swine demons. The cartel of Deptford clubowners (company directors and bloody-knuckled bouncers) took the advice of their bent brief and evaporated.

Now serious predators with multinational connections moved in, grabbed their percentage, and let the place collapse: skins tore from the buildings, radiation-sick lizard flesh. Many were never completed. Only a much-photographed frontage existed: colonies of rats multiplied behind exhibitionist façades. The cosmetic dentistry of the project was revealed. Sour smells crept west from the unrepentant swamps. Nervous settlers formed themselves into wagon trains, hired native guides, and galloped for the causeway. Tinkers crept out from under railway bridges, out from inoperative building sites, out from holes in the ground. They stripped the portable fittings, the scrap, the engines and tyres: they trashed the software, left cold turds floating in disconnected bidets. They cruised in unlicensed vans, with hooks and chains. Speed-freaks incubating sawn-off shotguns sprawled in pickup trucks, blasting the heads from inquisitive rodents, setting them free to find a higher plane of existence. Even the lowlife, blood descendants of river vampires and cannibal buccaneers, were uneasy. There were no cargoes left to pilfer, no household goods unofficially to pawn. It was a time to let it all go.

Armed guards, in a rehearsed manoeuvre, synchronize their multifunctional watches, and pull out from the fortresses. Pearl of the East, Dogtown. Screams. Sirens. Panic in the unpaved streets. Gold-card boatpeople stammer aphasically as they trundle their suddenly ridiculous rowing machines, their Pierre Cardin business suits in zipped bags, down to the water’s edge. The bleeping of half a hundred hyperventilating paging devices: cicadas in a fire-storm. Khaki-complexioned tremblers in designer jogging suits are waving frantically on rotten jetties for river taxis to carry them back to civilization. They see it now. It was all the most ghastly mistake.

And, as they made good their escape, a fleet of labouring transport planes, freshly painted with the Papal Tiara and the Triple Cross, spilled their grim cruciform shadows across the hop fields of Kent; a circuit of Sheppey, and they followed the renegade river to belly into Gatwick. The chopper shuttle to Mudchute hill began under the flag of diplomatic immunity: locked files, treaties with dictators (living and dead); shop-soiled shrouds, bleeding plaster virgins, crates of sanctified bones (barking and bleating), pre-stamped pardons, thongs, nails, hairshirted statues, masonic hit lists, the phone numbers of reliable accountants and vestal hostesses with medical clearance, and enough fragments of the True Cross to build a Bailey bridge to Greenwich.