Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Elgin tried to rise from his knees, but he couldn’t make it. Thick salt tears slid slowly down his gelid cheeks. Nothing could halt the flow of his keening lament. ‘One of us had to go. The country couldn’t hold the both of us. I bummed the boat fare from the uncle. They were glad to see the back of me. Mother weeping. “All for the best.” Plenty of honest work on the other side. Kilburn? Did they think I was a common labourer, a paddy from the bogs? I had a year’s heavy engineering behind me. UCD. Wasn’t it founded by Cardinal Manning himself? I had commendations, letters from Tony Cronin. Don’t lift me on to the golden throne. I don’t want the Pontiff’s crown. Can’t eat, not here. Intestinal problems. Negroes masturbate in kitchens. They make the soup from it. Put drugs in your coffee. You wake in the Papal apartments, breakfast tray served by the nuns of the Congregation of Maria Bambina. Orgies. Filth. And they’re measuring you for your shroud. They say it’s a portrait in oils. That’s a lie. The man’s the official mortician. Look, listen to me. I didn’t ask for any of it. All I wanted was an introduction to an intelligent middle-class woman. His wife, your wife. A graduate with a taste for theatre, a bit of spending money and a double bed. Was it too much to ask? The time to finish my monograph on Douglas Sirk?’

The redhead jerked on the chain and Elgin fell into the mud; lay where he fell. We could not insult our hosts by asking for his release. He was almost as valuable as a crippled horse. They would rather kill us all; ‘found floating’.

‘There is a way.’ The tinker’s conspiratorial grin reminded me of someone, years before, a book thief on the markets, who had vanished overnight into rumour, or Amsterdam, run off with a nympho speed-freak. ‘For a price, I could get you in. For a reasonable consideration. Right to the top, the Holy of Holies: the Magnum Tower. I deliver you to the building — the rest is your own business. But don’t try and stop them, whatever you see. They’ll shred you and feed you to the crows. The equinox is closing on ’em, they won’t wait.’

Davy listened with intent, while compulsively squeezing the bulb of his nose. The redhead fumbled through cavernous pockets, pulling out lengths of string, apple cores, biscuits, coins — before he located the three badges. They were stamped with the inevitable symbol (the lingam and the water crosses), and they bore the legend, in ‘Perpetua Italic’, NIHIL OBSTAT .

‘Of course,’ yelled Davy, ‘the conference! The Jesuits cobbled it together, to prove to the world how open-minded they’ve become. All the cameras will be there. The international correspondents. It will go out, via satellite, at the very moment the secret ceremony is enacted in the pyramid of glass: the one that is intended to halt time, wound its membrane, and give them access to unimagined powers. This is good, very good. The long lenses will be tight as warts, in a phallic cluster, on the face of Stephen Hawking, as he lectures the princes of the church on cosmology. A classic example of the “divine illumination of intellect”. What paternalism, what benevolence! A new era of enlightenment is upon us. Dogma challenged by revelations from the furthest stars.’

‘Hawking here ?’ I gasped.

‘It’s not so shocking,’ Davy said. ‘They’ve already wheeled him in for an audience with the Capo di Capo ; laid down the guidelines. “Anything you want, Professor — we’re men of the world — up to, but not including, the Big Bang. That alone is God’s affair. The instant of creation.” What do they think God is? A cosmic wind?’

I wondered if Sonny Jaques was on the bus. He would have loved this. What a scene was in prospect! The TV boys, the hungans in red braces, wetting themselves in anticipation. Hat-chet-faced video directors (with millennial razor-trim hairstyles) leased from the ad agencies. The Professor, the brain of the universe, wired to his special-effects voice-box, as he faces the tiers of expectant ascetic faces; skull caps, crimson robes. El Greco! Ten full days to work on the lighting. Simultaneous translation into every known language. The lecture already previewed in the Listener , so that the media vermin can get their pieces written before the programme goes out. ‘Space-time is finite,’ Hawking states, ‘but has no boundaries.’ Wow! Beautiful! When that little bombshell hits the fan the pyramid alchemy will be activated: we’ll all be halfway to heaven.

‘No panic,’ said Davy. ‘Hawking knows where it’s coming from. He’s sharper than any of them. It’s not for nothing he was born exactly three hundred years after Galileo Galilei. He knows the risks he’s running. He’s well aware that they’ll spray him in images of reincarnation, heresy, old mistakes made good. He can carry it. And we’ll be right there with him. Three hard-boiled prime-time news hounds: collar and tie strictly optional. Let’s do it, let’s join the professionals!’

V

A bruised wind, frustrated, bounced the tall buildings, sibilating like a host of linkpersons struggling with the revised pronunciation of ‘Rushdie’. It chopped the slate waters of the dock into small waves, broken anvils. The light dropped to pewter, with glints of sick plum; martyr stains spreading an irrevocable wound. The evil silver-green hulks of decommissioned Polaris submarines rode the swell, converted to wine bars, the private dining facilities of Vat City news-laundering executives.

With his lupine features set into what he proposed as a clerical sneer, the drooling redhead waved us on. His rickety legs were trapped in tourniquet trousers that finished six or seven inches shy of his sockless ankles. He stabbled at the dirt with blade-sharp shoes. Mycosis fungoides erupted from the grassy duffle coat that enveloped him; conferring, he imagined, a miraculous respectability. We stalked his heels, indian file, cockily flashing our Nihil Obstat badges at the shuttered glasshouses.

Sticking to the dockside, lashed by icy droplets flicked into our faces by an increasingly sullen wind; we crept beneath towering tributes to the service industries: excess information, sky-trawling disks (humming with morbid radiation), self-cancelling messages from the stars. Anything could happen, as long as it happened fast . Nothing was made — except the deal. Immaculate telephone consummations. Fax machines mindlessly reproducing themselves in pin-sharp detail. High-profile offices, lit to be photographed, were unsullied by human occupation.

Replacing the Flour Mills (the Rope Works, Chandlers, Ship Repairers) were faceless dung-beetle enterprises, with designer stationery, offering fast food / muscle tone / wet bikes / hire car / personalized chemicals / Galleria / wine vaults / lingerie / roses / blowjobs at your console. ‘Selling’ was too important, too rarefied a skill, to be tied any longer to mere products. It was an autonomous artform, practised for its own sake, creating insatiable hungers even among the most resistant of all targets, the other salesmen.

A narrow alley between boarded-up lots returns us to the central boulevard. The path towards the Palace is before us, lined with hierarchies of guards. First, the gendarmeria pontifica in dark glasses, leather corsets, belts, holsters, jaundice cigarettes, submachine pistols; then the guardia palatina , leaning on ceremonial halberds. We fall silent and bunch together, close in on other groups of media wannabetheres, as they scramble unenthusiastically from the car-park crypt with their video cameras, furry soundsticks, cellular telephones; their unshakable cynicism. But something in nature has been affronted: the wind tears at them, flicking back the tails of their trenchcoats, unshuffling the sculpted layers of their hair. Revenge is imminent. Tangled balls of razor-wire roll down the avenue like tumbleweed. The glamorous cladding on the architectural anthology of the towers starts to unpeel, to flap and clatter: an unserviced facelift. A dustbowl of semaphoring scarecrows, we are tossed against the plinths of the Anubic guardians; offered as unworthy sacrifices to the jackal-headed gods. We abase ourselves, scrape our foreheads in the dirt. And crawl up the slippery marble steps into the Temple.