Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Which, I suppose, we have to investigate,’ I groaned wearily, ‘before we consider some way of getting out of here.’

‘Unless,’ Davy persisted, with relish, ‘unless the freezing of time has had some darker consequence. You realize we may actually have been flung back into an ahistorical anomaly: a confirmation of Hawking’s absence of boundaries, a liquid matrix, a schizophrenic actuality that contains the fascinating possibility of finding ourselves placed in post-modern docklands and quattrocento Florence, at the same time . So that all those greedy pastiches have become the only available reality, “real fakes”, if you like. We arrived here by an act of will: was it our own ? What if the inevitable return of our natural cynicism and disbelief has let slip Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , renegades from Dickens’s prison hulks, or any other composite monsters — including those from this fiction you are supposed to be writing? If the imagination is primary, then anything we can imagine must lie in wait to ambush us.’

We strolled carelessly down through ancient overgrown apple orchards towards the windmills; passing among unconcerned sheep, ruminant philosophers, skull-faced Augustans, and their loose-bowelled lambs — urgently worrying at their mothers’ dugs. Our speculations were comfortable: the chalky prattle of tutors perambulating an enclosed quadrangle. We knew that the savage world was safely distanced on the other side of a high wall.

We didn’t need to come any closer to the windmills to see that Elgin MacDiarmuid’s living nightmare and his dying ambition had both been fulfilled. He had been crucified, in the Roman fashion, between a pair of tinkers. The windmills were all crucified men, staked, to face the river: a warning; or a boast.

Our contemplation of this latest atrocity could not be prolonged. No aesthetic reveries; no measured comparisons with Mantegna or Grünewald. Late Gothic or early Expressionist? The unacceptable sound of skulls falling into a petrol drum. The wind returned: from the crown of the hill, in the shape of thundering hoofs that churned the soft brown earth. First, the scarlet pillbox hats, the buttoned tunics; then the rearing, foam-flecked horses, monsters of stone; the stretched hounds, the spears, running men, shouts of triumph. Uccello’s ‘Hunt by Night’ had come loose from its hoarding. We knew now what they were hunting.

‘Split up,’ screamed Davy, ‘run!’

‘The tunnel!’ Imar shouted, already ahead of us; tearing, with wild erratic strides, for his talismanic vision of Greenwich and the snail-domed observatory.

‘That’s no good, man,’ warned Davy. ‘They’ve flooded it. The foot-tunnel’s drowned.’

Too late. Imar had vaulted into the goats’ pen, sprinted, stumbled, checked, fallen, lost a boot, gashed a leg, slithered through a yard of dozing sows, and out again, shit-plastered, on to the perimeter road.

Davy yelled that he would double back towards Glass City, link up with the surviving tinkers; or, failing that, dive into the water: swim for it.

I decided in an instant — what other choice was there? — the last human street on the Island, Coldharbour, was the place for which to aim. The ground beyond the Gun, a derelict terrace, was my target. Already future fictions were accumulating around those images of honest decay. We were divided, the power of the triad was broken; we lost sight of each other. We fled from our separate mounted demons; the sharp spears ripping our clothes, the teeth of the dogs tearing at our sinews. It is my fear alone that gives life to these chimeras of pursuit.

At last, after so many words, the metaphor is workable: escape. Flight. Careering across an alien landscape, the unknowable vacancy of another man’s dream. Running, and putting the world behind you. Escaping from it, or letting it swallow you whole? Nothing remains. No trace of being. No history. No tools of language. Don’t look now . Try to confirm the reality of the final set. The dark barrel of the Gun. Then hide, vanish, become zero, a ripple on the tide: the crazed anchorite I am already supposed to be. Enjoy the luxury of silence, exile, cunning? Forget it. Posthumous sediment at the bottom of a bottle of yellow wine.

The perspective of Uccello’s time-hurdling Hunt ordains a single, distant figure of prey. One victim only, but which of us should be the lucky man? It might prove interesting to find out.

Weak: weak rather than sick, I followed my sickness to the river, willingly anticipating its arrival — the tickle in the throat, the raw and bloody eyes. (Are we not all, more or less now, sick? Who cling so stubbornly to the cities? Sicker on some days than others. Noticeably sick. Unable to stand up, retching. Sick in the head. Wanting to inflict damage, editing those encounters — or walking, head bowed, into the path of a car. The viruses, the newcomers, spread in a blush of shame, disguise themselves, return home; kissing the damp chicken-flesh. I remember in 1967 talking with R. D. Laing in a waste garden alongside the Roundhouse. A garden? The Roundhouse? R. D. Laing? He had this messianic intensity — which is relish, celebration — going on about an artist who chose to live in Manhattan, because he liked feeling his lungs grind to tissue, black lips, fevers; he took it on, the early version. How remote it sounded, how intriguing. In the sunlight, which was Belsize Park to Primrose Hill; the trees. The bloody minded-ness of hanging on, knowing : watching the tremble, the crazy runners racing after themselves, clutching at their hearts; the filth — the fatalism of an apocalypse clique. End of sermon.)

I wanted the smoothed tapeworm of the North Woolwich shuttle: the unlisted halts, the elevated views over frenzied sections of motorway, sun scars flashing on curved windshields. Only in the train could I step out of time and hear its brazen doors bang behind me. All notebook-twitching novelty had long been drained from this journey. I could use it like a contemplative retreat. A weekend visit to the Trappists — with the bonus of moving scenery .

What is it with trains? The line of doors slam shut like a collapsing house of cards, or — seen from above — oars on a prison galley. Nailed into our juddering coffins, we slide down the rails towards the furnace: in fits and starts. That might be it. The train generates metaphors, similes. (And without much self-criticism: no revision capacity.) It’s ready (indecently eager) to be everything except itself. If I could hold my mind still, hold the compartment in one place. The only movement is in time; sideways . Parallel loops of film. The wheels of the train running backwards. Which train escapes the station? Jumps the line; an oblique reality, an unexpected angle. (Not angles, but angels.)

I can’t forget that story Bruce Chatwin tells in The Songlines (one of the italicized fillers: captured ‘On the train, Frankfurt — Vienna’). It’s a clever piece of writing, its moral judgements slanted into this dark fairy story with no visible strain. A ‘pallid’, fleshy, airless youth is travelling to Vienna to meet his father. Chatwin opens the carriage window to breathe in ‘the smell of pines’. The inevitable fabulation awaits his return.

The father, a rabbi, survives — but his story is a terrible one. In 1942 the Nazis painted a star upon the door of his house in Romania. He ‘shaved his beard and cut his ringlets. His Gentile servant fetched him a peasant costume… He took his first-born son in his arms’ and fled into the forest. Worse than Grimm. He left behind, with a final embrace, his wife, two daughters, and infant son. All died in Birkenau.