Iain Sinclair - Downriver

La-place lifted his snake staff and crashed it against the ground. The whole congregation followed his beat. And they chanted. Cephas, Agassu, Ogu. Cephas, Agassu, Ogu. Cephas Agassu Ogu. Cephas Agassu Ogu. CephasAgassuOgu. CephasAgassuOguCephas-AgassuOguCephas … Faster, faster. Faster . It became a single sound. A manifestation of the wind. In that long rush of breath the wind gained access to the chamber. Curled itself familiarly around the upraised staff.

Cephas rose from his throne, lion king, priest-emperor, flung out his arm. He opened wide his mouth and roared with mad laughter. Roared and shook. Roared until the congregation grew silent and trembled in fear.

Baron-Samedi, saluting in turn the woman and the goat, threw back his tailcoat and drew out, with a showman’s flourish, the severed head of the dwarf, the arbitrarily remaindered sexer. He held it over the prostrated white-robed figures, like an owl lantern. They twisted their faces deeper into the sand.

The skull had a tongue in it, and spoke. A liquorice teapot: its jaws clattered. Baron-Samedi played ventriloquist to the mesmerized flock. The skull jabbered: the morse of castanets. ‘Beware, Cephas — bathed in glory. King and martyr. Arch-impostor. Beware, Agassu. Blood god, patron of waters. Beware, Ogu — of the Beast who is coming. The dajjal killed by Jesus at Lud. Mahdi, false redeemer, speared on the twelfth step of the staircase. Believe in nothing, deny nothing. Neither omens, nor portents. I am a prophet foretelling a prophet.’

This mock-Cawdor millennial rap was terminated when the dwarf-fool snatched his brother’s head and carried it away upon his shoulder, setting his own face into a mask of alabaster, letting the skull speak for him. Or yelping with the bloody egg in chorus, duetting, chanting; reverberating like an oracular cave. He wore a strange apron sown with a sporran of lead, the kind of self-constructed garment that early x-ray technicians adopted to protect their gonads. He bowed before Cephas, and placed the head — as a trophy — in his emperor’s capacious hands. But, as soon as the great man was occupied with silencing the loquacious caput, the dwarf opened the jewel-crusted Papal robe and tied it behind Cephas’s back with a silver tassel.

The goat is sprinkled with water. The woman feeds him with palm leaves. Baron-Samedi conducts the wedding. Now the extent of Cephas’s urgency is evident to his shocked subjects. Time is repulsed, withdraws. Faces appear on the surface of the woman’s crisply ironed hood. Dreams that the dead dream. Snatched moments. Suspended memories. Illusory frames promising more than they can deliver. ‘This is me. Now and for ever. This is the truth.’ All the ages of the woman in a flicked concertina of static images. Mary Butts in London. A party face, flashing with laughter. Red-gold hair. Illusion of movement. Cocteau’s Paris: surrounded by gulls, the ghosts of her young men. They perch on her lap. The Abbey. Heat. Scorn. Solitude. The light drowned in a western ocean. Sennen. Ignoring the camera’s tired inquisition. Lifeless, without interest. Edith Cadiz. The face in performance. Face of terror. Well Street. Fire-window. The park. Face of death. White linen. Earth crumbling into her open mouth. Alice.

Leading the goat, her bachelor, the woman walked towards Cephas. The drumming stopped. There was no wind. There was silence to the end of the world. The cutting edge of the pyramid.

Strengthen my disbelief . I took Davy by the wrist and reached for the wrist of Imar. We formed a triangle within the square of the box, within the triangle of the pyramid, within the square of the detached tower, within the revolving lingam of the Island. We had to believe more strongly in some other reality, a place beyond this place. To feel the curvature of time, which is love: to resolve the bondage of gravity. To move out along that curve, to have the courage to make that jump. I willed a mental picture of the only other site on the gulag for which I felt any affection (muted, ambivalent): the slight elevation of Mudchute, a remembered field. Afternoons of children and animals. And, at its perimeter, the original windmills of Millwall. An engraving in the Nautical Museum. See it . The view towards Greenwich, the classical vision of form: hospitals, avenues, churches, order. I willed the others to see what I saw, and to hold to it. Now . As time was made to hesitate, stutter. The will towards madness; using our terror to escape from terror.

The walls of the lift shook and shuddered: snail-cracks ran through the glass, a system of veins, a fern garden. The crossed keys became the map of another place; a river defence, lines of fire. Earth jars crashed from the roof, and shattered. Rum and salt. Essences of the unborn. Dead sugars. Our nanosecond of resistance to the spin of time was aborted. The goat was dead; the knitted entrails steaming in the hands of Baron-Samedi. The grinning waiter in a cannibal restaurant. Cephas was crushing the shoulders of the only woman on the Island. His breath drawn so deep as to steal all the oxygen from the chamber. We were choking, cobalt-blue: our brains dying on the stem. She was webbed within a curtain of eyes. The hunsi were queueing inside Cephas’s hunger for a share of the sweetmeats: a singular gangbang.

The woman pulled off her conical hood, shook out her hair. Cephas hesitated. He was looking at death. He was looking at a face without features, an empty mirror. The flesh was as blank, as uncontoured, as linen. Wild light from the south streamed through the pyramid, down the reopened ley, from Blackheath and Greenwich Hill, over the dark waters, cutting through the blasphemy of the architects. It rushed to meet itself. Imar’s heated snail-path silvered the coupled contraries in gummy radiance.

We closed our eyes, gripping each other’s wrists, gasping for breath. We felt what we saw: grass. Moved our hands, brushed the steel floor. The springy, sharp resilience of grass breaking through the walls of the elevator. Tickling our shocked skins, dewy blades. A green cell, a wind from the river.

We lifted our heads. We did not need to open our eyes, we saw . The pyramid was pulsing — a drop of sweated blood — far in the distance; reaffirmed at the summit of the black tower. Far, far away, above the terracotta roofs of this morning-fresh medieval city, this transported Siena. Beneath us, along the riverside, a parade of windmills: decent samurai. The first, the true, the unexploited Island. Marsh grass rustled by breezes from the Reach. The outline in the earth, the foundations of the Chapel House. Coarse fields split by a single urethra track.

And we began to roll, to tumble, laughing, cheeks pressed in the cool damp grass, down the gentle slopes of Mudchute hill.

VIII

We had come through; but at what cost, we preferred not to consider. We touched our arms, patted ourselves, tenderly feeling for bruises and broken bones. We stood up. It was morning. Ridiculous. Soft white sheep bleating on toy hillocks. The stacked, angled roofs of some Italian city-state; some hill town celebrated in guidebooks. Bells. Church bells across the deep-water docks. There were even piglets with corkscrew tails churning up the mud. All the excavated silt from Millwall had created a token farm for the brochures of developers: a grass enclosure around which to heap their defiant fortresses. The edge too had been worked, planted with market gardens. Even the windmills had been restored. Only the uprooted trees, with their huge earth-bowl bases, witnessed the night of storms.

‘There’s something very strange about those windmills,’ Imar remarked, ‘even with a fresh river breeze, the sails are not turning.’

‘Obviously heritage fakes,’ said Davy, ‘carefully sited along the riverfront to hide whatever is going on behind them.’