Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘This is Tommy Clayden,’ said Davy, making the introductions. ‘He’s the guv’nor at the Gun . The last publican on the Island. And the first sinner. He’ll show us the way in.’

Tommy grasped our hands in his misshapen mitts, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; as if we had met on the terraces at Upton Park, or down the Lane on a Sunday morning. Another one who could have been a contender, if he hadn’t developed a taste for his own stock. He liked getting hit. And he liked drinking. He’d be boasting about how he could ‘take it’ when they shut the fridge door on him for the last time.

‘Right, lads.’ Tommy cut it short, and produced a bottle from beneath his robes. ‘Have a pull. Then fuck off. These cunts’ll be shouting for their double egg and bacon as soon as they unstick their eyelids. That’s what I’m doing here.’

We drank, sucking like lambs at the teat, burning the lining of our throats to sandpaper.

‘It ain’t much fun, mate, but there’s only one way you’re going to make it.’ Tommy threw his arm around Davy’s shoulder. His foot tapped against something metallic. ‘The pipes, my son. The workmen stop off down the boozer for a bit of something, but they have to be on site by half seven — or they’re banged up with two hundred years in purgatory. No panic, but the sooner you get stuck in, the more chance you’ve got. It ain’t no harder than wriggling back into your mother’s belly. If you haven’t made it by the time work starts, relax: you’re in there for good.’

The beam of Tommy’s torch obligingly lit up the open mouths of two red pipes that ran along the side of the dock, one above the other, passing within a few yards of the guards’ black glass observation kiosk. They continued, so Tommy promised, beneath the perimeter road, and the fortified bridge, to the lock, and finally to the edge of Como itself. A distance of no more than one hundred and fifty yards: as the worm slides.

Already the sun was crawling treacherously out of Blackwall Reach; intimations of a fine spring morning darted along the furrows of the dock, spun against the mirrored temples. It was spellbinding. A remission from the wheels of time.

‘You’ve got three minutes to get yourself into the pipes. Then I take a pot of coffee to the guards and wake ’em up,’ Tommy said. Davy was enjoying this: heaving and shoving, he inserted Imar into the upper bore. A headless torso, Imar thrashed his legs to propel himself from our sight.

Ladders, if they are firmly attached to a wall, I can manage; but crawling blind into the unyielding intestines of some obscure (and probably boobytrapped) system, becoming a parasite — a tapeworm — with only the faintest hope of ever reaching daylight — that is something else.

Davy, foaming at the mouth, frenzied as a Khan to the slaughter, followed Imar. I withdrew my last lingering breath from the sour dock (how sweet it tasted!), and plunged into the lower pipe. Anything was better than having Davy’s boots kicking in my face. It was hard for those first few yards, the light lost behind you; churned and squeezed in this unforgiving alimentary canal. After that, of course, you settle down. And it is all quite impossible.

III

‘How bright the sunlight was, on the warm grey stones, on the ripe Roman skins, on vermilion and lavender and blue and ermine and green and gold, on the indecent grotesque blackness of two blotches, on apostolic whiteness and the rose of blood’

Fr Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Hadrian the Seventh

Rolling our shoulders, snaking forward, driven by intestinal spasms: we progress in a bloodless sexual dance. Creep through circles of pain from our elbows and knees, where sharp bones lack that necessary cushion of flesh. Often we collapse. I hear heels drumming above my head. And I am convinced the pipe is filling with water. I hear it. Distorted whispers, voices. Pursuit. I suffer instants of deep sleep, microdreams. I lie with my cheek against the cold metal, until the metal chills to ice and threatens, if I move, to peel away my face. I can’t turn back. There is nothing behind me. This journey has no past. We have been here for ever. Only the pipes themselves can eject us; contract, expand, tip us into a bowl of raw light — like some waste product dredged of its virtue. Our vitality has been absorbed by the machine. Motionless, huddled into a defensive ball, we slide towards whatever strange birth awaits us.

The traitor sun has outpaced our lizard shuffle. The waters of the dock scintillate, braided in threads of light, gilt and silver; clusters in which sparks have been struck, colour separations in slicks of oil. But this vision is alienated, trapped in the black iris of the tunnel. It is the lie of a telescope that cannot be brought into focus.

Davy’s curly head swings, upside-down, into my pipe, blocking the radiance of light, which streams behind him. ‘We can’t move,’ he whispers, ‘until the bells ring for Mass. Then we can slip out and join the procession. I don’t know exactly what’s going on — some kind of festival. Holy images carried aloft, mutilated martyrs, drums, pipes, hooded penitents, incense: all that stuff.’

Imar is already on the dock. He has spotted a mound of packing cases and pallet boards. Davy signals. We are free. We can squat: peep out from between the slats, and wait for it to happen. Our heads sink on to our knees; we doze.

Plop. Ploppp. Plip . The sounds move gently away from us. Mild rings of disturbance chase each other across the dock. It’s like listening to a procession of frogs leaping into a pool, while trying to provoke a haiku from some monumentally dim Zen monk. The world is rotating so slowly. The objects (whatever they are) are being thrown further and further out into the water. I have no interest in this — a marginal annoyance — but, after watching indifferently for ten minutes or so, the duty of keeping a true record compels me to stick out my head to search for a rational explanation.

From the top deck of one of the black glass palazzi (anchored around the dock like a phantom fleet), a burly man in full cardinal’s drag was hammering golf balls out in a loop over Como. They fought bravely for life, reaching into the empyrean; then they failed, lost faith in their own abilities, dropped with a satisfying sound into the unforgiving water. The cardinal snarled, spat red, sickened by their weakness. He took a replacement from a golden bucket, judged its courage between wrestler’s fingers; squeezed until the veins popped. He set the fresh white communicant on to a tiny purple stalk — a doll’s house champagne glass — and thrashed it into the sky. He was now concerned only with distance, with metaphors of his own power, not with style. He expelled the balls, he cursed their lack of faith: he excommunicated them to the limits of his considerable strength. They were ex-balls. They should no longer enjoy his indulgent patronage. Let them sink or swim.

Lathered in flecks of creamy sweat, the cardinal rested his cattle-felling forearms on the rail, and puffed for a moment in meditation on a green cigar, rolling it between curiously prim, feminine lips: wetting it, tasting it, sucking and chewing. ‘Goddamn their greaser eyes,’ he snarled. ‘Never was a wop who knew fuck about offing a stooly. Always got to make a production out of it — ropes, stones, hocus coonshit pocus. Dago assholes, turn a hit into a fucking Verdi opera.’

He resumed his exorcism, his ballet of lift/pause/swoop/strike. Thwack. Thwack. Thwackkk . Black, petro-chemical grease trailed down his bony scalp, wounding it: the heat dissolved the hair dye into a velvet skullcap. He was hooded, pouch-eyed, circled with lack of sleep: a dead tree. Fat knuckles flashed with scarab rings; as if he had been grabbing locusts to gobble in his open hands. One of God’s uglier minders.