Iain Sinclair - Downriver

‘Jon Kay,’ he admitted, sounding surprised. He punched a fist into his open palm, to reinforce the fleeting inspiration. ‘Right,’ he nodded, noticing the boat for the first time, ‘let’s do it. Let’s hit the water.’

Immediately, one of my more reasonable prejudices came into play: avoid at all costs that fateful combination of letters, J/K . And certainly never trust yourself in an open boat with anyone bragging of them. Was the man Victim or Assassin? The evidence of his face suggested an evil compromise. He had taken a few good hits, but he was still smiling. (My God, was nothing sacred? It flashed into my head — the Confederate had that effect on people — that Conrad was christened Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. J/KK . We were betrayed even by our mentors.)

The slogan-sprayed tank was backed up to the slipway, and the craft, on its trailer, was winched towards the slurping water. Joblard had his boots off, ready to wade aboard. He was soaked to the waist, and grinning like a bear.

Kay emerged from his catatonic lethargy to bawl a few nautical quotations he had overheard in riverside dives. When his repertoire was exhausted, he slipped back to the glitzed hearse, fumbled in the glove compartment, swallowed something — and returned, bouncing, to the action. He was sharp enough now to register my examination of the boat’s licence; which, reassuringly, was only illegal by a matter of four years.

‘It’s yours,’ he said, ‘three hundred notes in the hand. Two-fifty — no, two hundred — if you pay me now . And you’d better have it away, sharpish. They’re going to repossess tomorrow. The car, the flat, everything that isn’t nailed down.’

The face of the dog, with its liquid accusing eyes, watched us from the rear window of the jumbo Cadillac. A deserted mistress. A golden sunbeast, long-nosed: some random collision of labrador and collie. Lassie meets White Fang. The creature knew all too well what lay ahead. And celebrated the prophetic nature of its blood with prolonged and marrow-chilling howls. Seeing what it saw, the dog’s small-brained courage was such that — weighing the odds — it begged to accompany us. (A pathos that would have sent tears coursing down the sandblasted cheeks of crusty protection racketeers competitively hurling back firewater in the Grave Maurice, Whitechapel Road.)

Drawn by the noise, from their innocent game of hurling milk crates from a third-floor balcony, a gaggle of urchins gathered on the river wall. Silent harbingers of doom. Further back, in the shadow of the flats, tinkers in breakdown vans watched us, pricing the craft with greedy eyes, counting the salvage: unhurried bounty hunters. They could well afford to wait. They gunned their motors, prepared to track us all the way to the finish.

Kay hauled the trailer out of the water; climbed into the car; set the wheels spinning and smoking on the slimy ramp. He was allowed, this time , to escape the river. He parked. Leaving the dog behind, as guardian; locking its painted cage with an enormous bunch of keys. (The antelope curry smell of improperly slaughtered leather.) Kay rattled back to us. A ghost pirate: his bones were riveted brass.

We waited on the water. But before Kay had rolled aboard, the urchins were all over the Cadillac: chiselling at the hubcaps, bending back the wipers. The dog was snarling and foaming, hysterical with impotent rage. They would get to him later.

None of this mattered. We were afloat. Kay wrestled with the whipcord. The stubby craft swung its nose towards the money-magnet of the city. It was no more than a tub of baby-blue fibreglass, a tray with a cabin, an unplanted goldfish pond driven by an elderly forty-h.p. Evinrude outboard motor. The name on its rump was Reunion . With what, or whom, or where… we were not deranged enough to imagine.

Under instruction, I punted us out with a boat hook; churning up swirls of dark quag. Joblard ripped open the first can of lager. The engine fired. Kay took the wheel.

‘Which way, boys?’ he howled, above the rage of the spluttering outboard. ‘Just point me in the right direction.’

‘Don’t you have any charts?’ I asked, innocently.

‘Charts are for wimps,’ he sneered.

‘Haven’t you ever been to Tilbury before?’ demanded Joblard, increasingly convinced he was booked on an inspirational outing.

‘Tilbury? Tilbury? Where’s that? I go zubbing under Tower Bridge, skate up the Prospect, sink a dozen frosties, and float home on the tide.’

‘Stick her nose downstream and burn it until you smell the sea. You can’t miss it. A big green thing,’ Joblard instructed. It was almost as if he was going to be the one underwriting this excursion.

The motor coughed, died, spat out a rinse of hot oil; fought for life. Jon Kay cursed. He flogged it like a mule. He kicked. He wanted to see our nose riding out of the water: lacy white furrows ploughing behind us. A steepling kerb of wash to drown the engrammic tracery of these mean bayous.

The teeth of the Thames Barrier were approaching: helmeted Templars, flashing with signals, arrows, red crosses — warnings. As soon as we negotiated this psychic curtain, we would quit the protection of the city. Kay tried to fire the motor, shame it into a more manly performance. He entrusted the wheel to Joblard. That decision alone convinced me: we were dealing with a man whose judgement made Humphrey Bogart, rattling his ball bearings and grinding his molars as Captain Queeg, look the very model of sound sense and marine probity. I hoped I would live long enough to stand witness at the Court of Enquiry; to pick up some punitive damages.

Joblard was hunched in concentration, peering dimly through thick, spray-smeared spectacles. His pathetic orange lifejacket was strapped across the bulk of his shoulders like a dowager’s paisley. It wouldn’t keep him afloat for a second. He’d wallow face-down on the tide, a cetacean Quasimodo, vividly targeted for the harpoons of Japanese whalers.

There’s something hideously familiar about Jon Kay’s face. You want to sneak away and check the illustrations in the latest Charles Manson biog. His whole persona is one that any sane civilian would take considerable trouble to avoid. The scab of some ancestral, suppressed trauma is waiting to be picked from his skin. He is a karmic experience of horror, buried alive in the psyche: a dodgy deal in the silver market, a newspaper-wrapped parcel oozing blood fat in the stall of a condemned urinal.

Then he half-turns, he asks for the time — he’s fiddling with a toy TV set, a flat miniature offering random interference, mantic sunstorms — and I remember. Remember it all; the whole squalid story.

Joblard and I, fifteen or so years before, were cutting the grass on the south side of St Anne, Limehouse, when we discovered the wreck of a boat (an Ark?) rising out of the jungle of a neighbouring yard. We sat on the wall. Took a blow. The thing was as unlikely as an helicopter gunship excavated from a Carthaginian amphitheatre. Joblard rolled a cigarette, while I fell to musing on images of flood, inundation, fire and lightning. I glanced up at the tower of the church. A man was swinging out of the octagonal lantern, attempting to lever the clock-face from its fixed position. He was loosely attached to the crumbling masonry by an umbilical length of rope. Old rope, frayed rope. Hangman’s twine. He was swaying nicely in the breeze: enjoying, simultaneously, nose-scraped close-ups of the fossils in the stone and wide-angle longshots of the river and the dying hamlets. His legs thrashed against the clock, predicting the hour of his self-destruction. We judged the distance to the ground, and we waited. ‘The things you see,’ commented Joblard, ‘when you haven’t got a camera.’