Iain Sinclair - Downriver

(12) A little later, on the same verandah. Everybody is slightly drunker. The photograph itself is inebriated. And the features of the riverboat captain, who leans forward to ‘top up’ the comedian’s glass, have been burnt out like a flaring match-head. The colonists have slipped from focus, but the balcony of the adjacent bungalow has sharpened. The street has gone, leaving in its place a tall bare tree. It is as if the whole set had slid back to the shore. Yarns of the ocean will now be put to the test. The sun has dropped behind the Japanese wheels, giving them an heraldic status. And the photographer has slipped to the floor. He includes most of the tin roof in his composition: a flapping dark sail. A sinister development. But there are more troubling implications. The Dutchman has disappeared ; and another man, younger, with the same moustache, has taken his place. He could , very nearly, be the Dutchman, at another time, ten or fifteen years before: reincarnated, by occult trickery, for this special valedictory piss-up. It is easy to imagine this trio meeting every evening, taking up their invariable positions, drinking their invariable drinks, making the invariable remarks. The second version of the balcony scene might then be an earlier party: aped, to greater effect, in the first postcard. But the fact that the riverboat captain and the comedian are unchanged would seem to contradict this explanation. No, it is much more obvious than that. The Dutchman has taken over the camera . Legless and wobbly, he is attempting to reproduce the original portrait. Perhaps, each man in turn will be the recorder: before returning to reoccupy his place as a bit-player. But all the other postcards, if they were not flawed in processing, have now been lost. And cannot be described. The new face, the man who has been responsible, until this moment, for the pictorial record, is an actor, an ironist. He precisely mimics the Dutchman’s way of lifting his glass with a mannerist delicacy about the positioning of his fingers. He could be the double of Paul Klee, photographed in 1906, in the garden of his parents’ house in Obstbergweg, Berne. He is the true author of this fiction that could, of course, be reassembled in any order, and read in whatever way suits the current narrator. These dim postcards are as neutral as a Tarot pack.

Joblard’s thirst was unassuaged. The game was over. He wanted more. He leant across the bar and plucked the postcards from their board. He fondled them, and sniffed them. He held them against his cheek, and he shuffled them. He turned them over. THIS SPACE, AS WELL AS THE BACK, MAY NOW BE USED FOR COMMUNICATION, BUT FOR INLAND ONLY. The warning proved unnecessary. All the cards — except one — were blank, virgin. The owner could not bear to part with them. They would find their way into a scrapbook. But the billiard-playing cannibals had received the red king’s head, and was postmarked LEYTONSTONE . 3 P.M. SP23. 04. So this tale of the exotic had not been stolen out of the dark continent, but dispatched to greet it . Nothing could match the mysteries shrouding the heart of Leytonstone. The sender had no word to add to the image. He identified his potential audience, spelt out, with some difficulty, an address — and left it at that. Who could, in all conscience, ask for more? Demented investigators, and bounty-hunting snoops, should search out the descendants of ‘F. Wilson, Esq., Santa Isabel, Fernando Poo, S.W.C. Africa’.

The marmosets have gone. Why else would we meet in this place? A graveyard detached from its host: a church tower faking a period grandeur, while its body tumbles wantonly into decay behind corrugated-iron fencing. From the low steps of St John’s, Scandrett Street, I mourn the loss of another secret locale. A temenos remaining sacred because we do not need to visit it. It is there, and that is enough. The balance in our psychic map of the city is unharmed. But now another disregarded inscape has been noticed and dragged from cyclical time to pragmatic time; has been asked to justify itself. Shannon Landscapes are the chosen agents of ‘reality’: red bearded, slow-moving giants in check shirts have the renovation contract. The nautical graves are bulldozed, and the sepulchres retained as captive features. The brute undergrowth has been uprooted, and the ghosts put to the torch. The totemic animals have fled.

Marmosets, lemurs, genets, tamarins and sugar gliders were brought ashore, covertly, and traded from public houses along the Highway. Across the tables of the Old Rose bundles were passed. From under stiff seamen’s jerseys, small hot lives were drawn, living hearts. The locals adopted them without certificates or rabies clearance, without quarantine. These tamed exotics enriched their primal soot. Panicked beasts were drawn down into the dark houses, were petted — or pained — to early death.

But some marmosets broke free: forward-thrusting jaws, bark strippers. They were able to tolerate the hostile temperatures. They took cover behind the walls of this graveyard with its fox-mangy London planes, its chestnuts. They cowered among the white blossoms. From the warehouses came the scents of their homeland; from Cinnamon Street, sacked essences. The slow presence of the river chilled their benign hysteria. With their pinched skull-faces and their tufting professorial hair, they resembled a tribe of pygmy Longfords — flinching, purse-lipped from the pain of the world. Delicate human hands fluttered vaporously, or masturbated in absorbed lethargy. The minimum requirement for their survival was a lack of attention. Unseen, they were immortal. And always beneath them, granting them gravity, lay the children of sea captains and merchants: their mouths stopped with shale. Dead daughters, stacked five to the grave, outlasted by some mute father, who will never be able to forgive them their mortality. Bleak histories whose chiselled narratives are fed with lichen. Now, sitting here as the light died, I projected false images of Guiana on to the mustard-colour bricks. I heard the promise of stone cities in their shrill birdlike voices.

But I was not alone in my interest. Juveniles from the tenements, scavengers of the wastelots, netted them, clubbed them, pelted them with stones. Hereditary enemies: killing what they cannot eat. They trapped and sold them. Peeled them for gloves. The marmosets were caged in huts and experimental basements. Mild theoreticians in white coats probed with blades for the sources of memory. Simple tasks were rewarded. Bells rung brought nuts and chocolate drops. Pieces of their brain were cut away. And still the tasks were performed. Further excavations; cells burnt with hot wire. The performance was slower, but it was completed. The skull, finally, was a hollow membrane, lit by torches: ‘memory’ was active — and unlocated. The landscape is destroyed, but the dream of it is everywhere.

I heard the urgent click and drag of Todd Sileen’s approach. A troubled leathern creaking, nautical and obscure: like wind in the riggings, or the pull of an unoiled wheel. You felt Sileen’s presence, before you could find him. The temperature dropped, and plants died. ‘Baron Saturday’, the urchins called him — from a safe distance, crouching, heads in caps, from terror of his unpupilled eye. They saw him in their fevers. He put stones under their tongues. He slept on a mattress of skulls. He cast no shadow. Breathing heavily, he lowered himself on to the step beside me: a damaged manifest. His leg thrown out, stiff as a plank.