Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The surreal audition fades and we run for the fence. It has been disguised, in playful trompe l’oeil , with a painted forest. Uccello’s ‘Hunt by Night’ surrounds us: crimson tunics, spears, straining hounds pursue the unseen prey into the deepest realms of darkness.

The secret of the mural’s perspective reveals a loose board. On the far side of the painted forest are living horses, chained to a stake, quizzical, coquettishly tossing their axe-shaped heads. A yellow Hazchem container has been converted into a dormitory for tinkers. A few men sit around a bucket of fire, cleaning their shotguns and drinking from unlabelled bottles.

‘Massive!’ said Davy. ‘Canary Wharf to Cannery Row in the blink of an eye.’ Curs were foaming on short ropes. None of the men looked at us, no movement was apparent anywhere; but, walking slowly towards the fire, we knew that we were covered from all sides. Shotguns nestled comfortably in laps, impatient fingers stroked trigger guards.

‘Where are the women?’ Imar blurted. ‘Did you ever see a tinker site in daylight with men still on it? And where are the kids?’

‘That’s right,’ Davy mused. ‘Not a female to admire since we got on the Island. Even in the crocodile plodding to Mass. No tribal mothers, vinegar spinsters, no repentant harlots. Not a single one.’

‘They’re death in this place.’ One of the tinkers spoke, without looking up from the fire. A long lank, shivering, red-haired dodgem-car jockey. He picked a crust of scab from his nose, wiping the silvery snot on to his sleeve. He hunched his coat-hanger shoulders, quivering in seizures of uncontrolled and unmotivated laughter. ‘Any bitch found here is taken. The black skirts can’t stand the heat of ’em, the smell. Raw fish eggs.’ He spat into the fire bucket and watched the spittle cook. ‘They bring in a few whores in an ambulance for the Bishop: the rest of ’em make do with castrati and the odd bout of solitary snake-strangling.’

He mimed an obscene and frenetic form of boxing-glove onanism. He giggled. ‘Keep women out of it and the black skirts’ll leave you alone. Fuck your own fists, boys.’ He nodded; his head loose as a dummy. He laughed until bubbles of lager ran out from his nose, to be lapped up on a pustule-decorated tongue. He gobbled a heap of downers from his open palm. His dog-yellow eyes were already mad as one of the coal-dancing damned.

‘They’ve got the enforcers,’ Davy told us, ‘to make it stick. “Swiss Guards”, they call them, so they can pay them in cheese: lovely bricks of soft yellow gold. Far worse than the Tonton Macoute, these beauties. More dangerous. Psycho-police eavesdropping on your nightmares. They “anticipate” every outbreak of heresy. Dawn raids. The generators and the water baths are running before you hear the tap at the door. Torture as a fine art. They have no other interests.’

‘You’ve never been here before,’ I mumbled, ‘how do you know the moves to make?’

‘Well Street,’ Davy replied. ‘I discovered, by accident, the means of interrogating an empty room, holding an oracular séance with the voices trapped in its walls. I was drawn back, when it was all over and the photographs were taken, to the place where the girl-junkie died. I slept there two or three times a week. It became obsessive. But it was never the same as dreaming. You can take any room where there has been some form of interrogation — torture cell, psychiatrist’s study, confessional, lovers’ afternoon hotel — and the activity does not cease simply because the participants withdraw. The true monologue (these exchanges are inevitably one-sided) soaks into the plaster. The interlocutor is unnecessary, gets in the way, clouds the issue with his feeble attempts at “drawing out” and giving unacceptable visions a rational form.’

Davy creased his knuckles, trying to depress his eyes into their sockets; forcing back the things he had seen. He only succeeded in bringing them into a sharper focus. He drew breath. He was shaking. But he went on.

‘I opened my hands. I ran my palms over the walls. I made them bleed. I circled, I squeezed. The voices were there. They came back to me. I asked nothing; I lay on the floor. The heart of her fear was opened to me. But it was held within another thing I could never understand, a hoop of sticky light: wasps, wax, corn-dust. I tried to touch it. It was playful, sliding across the walls. And then all her prints, maps, words came rushing out from the distemper. I had whitewashed over the crazed and panicking graffiti. But it insisted . It was immortal. And the horror was that… it started to make sense . You know the symbol they use? The jackal-headed guardians of the Island lingam? Dog Island, Isle of…’

‘Cunt!’ The red-haired tinker was at Davy’s throat, blade open: its tip pressing against the jugular vein. ‘Shut it. Can’t be said. Nobody speaks it, the old name. Your tongue’ll be ripped out like the page of a book. They’ll do you up.’

Worse than the superstitions of theatricals, with their ‘Scottish Play’, their ‘break a leg!’: the same curse. The same treaty with the dark side. The same abdication of courage. ‘Don’t say it!’ To name is to cause, to set in motion. Once spoken, never recalled. The name lives: is independent of its begetter. A power these people clearly understood. Titles out of the past were forbidden; bringing to mind, as they did, more honourable times. This was the treaty under which the tinkers made their camp. We were forced to comb our thesaurus of euphemisms and allude to the ‘Heresy-free Zone’, ‘Capital-friendly Isthmus’, ‘Islet of Saints and Savers’.

Imar turned his back on us and took out his penny whistle. And as he played, something crawled out from under the container; something white and snail-slow, a Permian reject, a dead man returning.

‘Him’s better than any of your women.’ The tinker grinned. ‘Got a bung’ole like a glove filled with garlicky butter.’ He licked his broken teeth, and prodded the creature with a surgically-abbreviated shotgun.

The gelded monster crawled agonizingly towards the fire, and Davy recognized, with dread, the former Well Street landlord, Elgin MacDiarmuid. His condition, once boastfully reprehensible, was now terminally forlorn: broken, trembling, unshelled. Two damp peaks of sweat-soaked hair suggested the horns of a snail. He was naked under a grease-stiff gaberdine. His feet useless in layers of flapping bandage. They pulled him into the light on the end of a sharp pin. He had the fatal softness of a grub and the self-justifying mean spirits of the reformed drunk. He had swallowed his heart.

‘Blessed Mother of God, help me. Jesus, Holy Lamb, help me. Sweet Babe of Heaven, bless my suffering. I’m not ready.’ Elgin supplicated, in tears; arms flailing like the flippers of a seal, sweeping sawdust in some ring of shame. ‘I beg you. Don’t let them crucify me. I ran away once before. You remember? I was younger, I had my strength then. I could tear in half the telephone directory for the city of Cork. I went back, oh mothering bitch. The nails! Do you understand? They drive them through the wrists, not the soft palms. Hang me bleeding like Medhbh’s pig? And for what? I was “pricked” once for the priesthood. Talk to the Christian Brothers. I could have been a Jesuit. Why do they allow this thing? I was at home, holding on; gathering my thoughts, getting ready to write — until they put the accursed television into every bar from Stillorgan to Finglas. Couldn’t get a drink for it. McDaid’s, Toner’s, the Pearl Lounge. “No no,” I screamed at them. The curate winked. “Right, sir, sure enough.” He switched the channel, thought I wanted the racing from Punchestown. I knew they were watching me out of that little spot that never goes away even when you switch it off. I needed a ticket out. Not too far gone to recognize the arch-blasphemer, Shamus Joys himself, sneaking in by the back door. On the steps of an aeroplane, with the pilgrims at Knock, sniffing good Irish air. The blackguard! Didn’t he try it before? With his cinematograph? His Galway whore? Brandishing the blackthorn like the devil’s own pizzle. Did he ape the Pole and put his lips to the sod? He did not. Come back, Elgin. They’ll have you. They want to nail me to a Jew’s tree.’