Iain Sinclair - Downriver

The page remained frustratingly bare, beyond certain mantic creases, like the footprints of… statues? And from the margin the green waves of Juliet Moore’s dustwrapper illustration were encroaching; cardiac tracings — converted in reproduction to healthy strokes of black. The tide was turning from a knitted electrical stream to a fevered voice-print, soliciting computer analysis. It was all there, but would we find the time to hear it? The instruments to interpret the steps of the dance?

Crossing the fold of the wrapper’s edge were two leaf fingers: the tall bearded iris. The poet’s flower. Recurring through time: Bellini, Dürer, Leonardo’s ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, the Ghent Altarpiece of the brothers Van Eyck. ‘Band of iris-flowers / about the waves’ (H.D.) Iris, personification of the Rainbow. Black iris: Verité, Starless Night .

The word I wanted was the one my transcription of Peter Riley’s tape sent me to the dictionary to check: Sempervivum !

There had been no point in sleeping. The dreams were too bad; they coloured the days that followed them. They previewed the agonies ahead of us. And anyway, after the first three months, you lose the habit. Then it does get interesting: guessing which strip of water you can safely walk across. I sat with my back, resolutely, to the river, and waited for Joblard to surface. The sculptor was grinning as he snored; an empty bottle nestled in the crook of his arm. It rested content: a sated babe. Primly, Joblard clucked his lips. He patted the bottle; and, waking to the light, smiled. He had forgotten what faced us.

It was no more than a stroll from the wasteground behind the Gun to Folly Wall: time enough to sober us for the task ahead. I had pestered Joblard to use his network of contacts to procure some craft, anything that stayed afloat, to carry us downriver: beyond the known station of Tilbury towards the potential mysteries of Sheerness. From the Isle of Dogs to the Isle of Sheep: a pilgrimage towards hope, and for Joblard a quest for his origins. But his motivations were hedged in ambiguities. The orphan, who had for so many years — and wisely — left his parentage as an univestigated secret, was now prepared to risk a chance encounter with his closest blood relative. (The pouch of sea, the memory bed.) His mother might serve us our first pint. Ghosts lurked among the marine pleasure shacks, waiting to claim him. The man that he was, the identity he had chosen, could be lost for ever. He might be forced to abdicate the rare privilege of inventing himself. This journey by water also celebrated the news of his lover’s pregnancy, his fatherhood. He was going joyfully backwards to greet the unborn child, returning.

Our pauper’s budget (we were so poor — winos kept waving their bottles at us in greeting) did not run to either a reliable craft or a reliable pilot. ( Judea of Shadwell , Do or Die.) We took what we could get. A friend of a friend of a friend. A name with an answering machine that spat ‘one liners’ like a borscht-belt comic on speed, and a flat on the nineteenth floor of the only surviving council-owned towerblock on the Island: the last refuge of society’s lepers. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ stated the Widow. And, observing this rat pack, it was difficult not to agree with her. Ordinary families had long since decamped to become housing statistics in some less ‘progressive’ borough. What was left couldn’t be cleared with a blowtorch: post-mortem optimists, chemically castrated ‘outpatients’, spittle-flecked psychos too temperamental to be approached without a high-voltage cattle prod… Latter Day Outpouring Revivalists eager to greet the Final Trump (where better?), stamping and chanting and calling down the black, wrath-primed stormclouds.

The agreed meeting place, on the Amsterdam Avenue slipway, was deserted. So far, so good. We had been warned not to leave a car in the neighbourhood. The tinkers would have carved it into saleable segments before we cleared Blackwall. (No problem: the car had long gone, to pay for the railway tickets.) This neat estate (a tribute to the glaziers) was too new to appear on any maps. But it already featured a wine bar and two shops. The first sold property and the other displayed naughty knickers. A pair of open sewers had been cleverly adapted, by the ruse of mustard-yellow bricks and dinky wooden bridges, into Dutch canals. Any disorientated (schnapps-crazy) burgher might reasonably have mistaken the quadrangle for one of those West Polder communities that cluster around Monnickendam. Sharp-pointed red-tile roofs (and anorexic balconies, for pot plants only) looked out on the scrapyards across the river; the crushers, the lifting plates, the foothills of rusting motors.

An ugly tide licked at the slipway, leaving gifts: pressed cans, detergent bottles, ends of rope. It was hungry to run us down to Tilbury, and whatever lay in wait. I no longer wanted to burden it. I was happy to sit on the wall, watching these reflex spasms — the cough of mud — as I brooded on other rivers, better days.

A few harsh bars of ‘Dixie’ on the klaxon of his horn announced the arrival of our captain. ‘No,’I said, ‘absolutely not. Let me out of here.’

In that moment — as I turned from the simple savagery of the river to stare in disbelief at the two customized Cadillacs (welded together, as if they had met in some monster smash and never been separated) — I knew we were in serious trouble. Then there was the scarlet boast emblazoned down one flank: GOPHER IT! And worse: HEAPUM GOOD JOB, NO COWBOYS. Six-wheel independent drive. A black tank bouncing on white-rimmed balding tyres. Our pilot, mercifully hidden behind his tinted windshield, was a card-carrying soldier in the New Confederate Army. The war had been lost. But they fought on: as electrical contractors, respray jockeys, pine strippers. The surviving remnant of Robert E. Lee’s greybelly cavalry is hiding out in the swamps of East London. They had the flags, the stetsons, the sideburns. Did we dare to climb into anything driven by a dude who looked like Richard Harris after two or three decades riding across New Mexico, tracking renegade redskins, under the command of mad General Sam Peckinpah? I waited for Warren Oates, Slim Pickens, L. Q. Jones and the rest of the good ol’ boys to roll, hawking and chawing, out of the pickup.

This creature, our self-inflicted Ahab, hitched his pants and lurched, bow-legged, towards us. He couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to be a cowboy or an Indian. He had the bronze skin of a reservation Apache, and the last non-institutionalized Frank Zappa moustache on the planet. A shockwave of snakecurl hair had been tipped over him: like well-mashed seaweed.

He wore a checked shirt, jungle-green combat vest, baggy cords, scummy loafers. He looked dangerous: focused on a badge of light that was rapidly arrowing into the past — straining to reconnect those ECT-toasted synapses. It was too late to escape. Our fear had heated our interest. Could we resist it? This was time travel without the hardware. Straight back into whatever had come through, in critically mutilated form, that sad decade, the 1960s. A paradigm of the Weird was whinnying to break free from the Sanctuary.

Introductions were made. The Confederate promptly forgot our names; they were of no importance. He had enough trouble hanging on to his own: remembering which alias was current, and in which country. His ego had been broken into powder and snorted. The snuff-stains on the drooping ends of his moustache had more grip on reality. His mind had lost all adhesion. It was a grey tongue of outdated flypaper. We slid down it without leaving a smear.