Coasting (31 page)

I’d steeled myself to maneuver through a great crowd of shipping, but there was a dead, dull Sunday-afternoon air on the estuary. Every so often a slab-sided bulk container would come sliding out from behind the marshes, but there weren’t enough of them to make a crowd, and they didn’t look much like ships. Tall as office buildings, long as boulevards, they pushed down Sea Reach, showing their enormous gross tonnage in the rude way in which they shoved the water aside with their blunt fronts. They certainly didn’t add much light or color to the day.

I was too late to find the Thames as I remembered it—a great concourse of waterborne traffic, the flat surrounding landscape exotically forested with masts, flags, derricks, funnels, spars, bridgehouses. The container ships had killed all that twenty years ago. In the early 1960s, about 1,800 ships used to sail in and out of the Port of London every week. The average cargo ship then was a 5,000-tonner, and the London docks were packed with them. Their loading and unloading kept 35,000 dockers in work. Places like Bermondsey, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs were rich in ship-business, their streets rank with cargo smells, their pubs jammed to the doors. At twenty, I thought Wapping one of the most dangerous and exciting spots on earth.

Then the container ships came. Five and more times bigger than the old cargo boats, they couldn’t fit into the docks, so they berthed at a string of new wharfside “terminals” downriver. Their roll-on, roll-off system of loading required very few dockers. By the 1980s, instead of 1,800 ships a week, there were 240; instead of the 35,000 men working in the docks there were 2,000; instead of 66 million tons of cargo a year, there were 45 million. The decline in overall trade was undramatic, but there were so many jobs gone, ships gone, docks filled-in, that the loss of life, in every sense of that phrase, was on a scale one might expect of a medium sized war.

The land, such as it was, stole imperceptibly in on either side round
Gosfield Maid;
blackened timber stakes and piles, scallop-shaped clifflets of gleaming mud. Past Mucking Creek, the Thames abruptly turned into a recognizable river, confined and disciplined by walls, fences, jetties, piers. Its color and texture changed too. Glossy with oil, darkened with blue clay, the water resembled a rich and meaty consommé. I had been barely holding my own against the river before, but as the flood tide got under way the boat began to pick up speed through Tilbury and Gravesend, Dartford and Rainham, a long industrial ribbon of ships, trucks and cranes, with the hands-in-pockets crew of solitary men on wharves doing nothing except watch the soupy water spool under their feet, bulging against the piles
and streaming out in feather patterns as it went swelling on inland. You could spend whole days doing that, as I knew. It made you feel giddy and soft-headed and induced fine daydreams. Watching water move is a much sweeter and less unpredictable way of altering the mind than inhaling the smoke of marijuana.

There was one unexpected splash of beauty, in the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. Its silver cowls, ranged across the river like the helmets of giant knights, seemed like a freak instance of our century actually enriching the landscape instead of impoverishing it. The flood barrier itself would save London from drowning. Its massive hydraulics, its guillotines of rust-red steel, its shining and armorial piers made the entry to the city into something like a Roman triumph. The Thames barrier, as
Gosfield Maid
slid through Span C, promised something very big and very glorious around the next bend.

Indeed the next bend yielded the formal brief prettiness of Greenwich, then, after that, the wasteland. Brick dust blew across the river from the ruins of the Surrey Docks, which showed as miles of corrugated iron and slag piles, with earthmovers standing idle on tips of spoil, and toppling pyramids of crushed cars letting in cracks of sky through their wrecked innards. This was a weekday afternoon, still within working hours, but there wasn’t a human being in sight. It looked as if the great work of destruction had been set in train years ago, then suddenly abandoned on a whim. A large blue notice at the entrance to what had once been a dock announced that a “W
ATERSPORTS
C
OMPLEX
” was to be built here, but the paint had peeled and the lettering rendered almost completely illegible by a rash of little scabs left on it by vagrant air-gun pellets.

By another lock, someone brave had set up a tiny farm with one cow, two sheep, a pig, a goat and some hens fenced in behind an improvised stockade of chicken wire and rusty bedsteads. The broken high wall behind the farm had been overpainted with a wildy optimistic mural of blue sky, green fields, oak trees, flowers, a rustic gate. The farm project was meant to give young children an introduction
to nature: in this miserable acreage of scrap which was Rotherhithe, it looked like an act of doomed saintliness.

In Bermondsey, the spice warehouses were being torn down. Their backs were gone, but big iron hooks still hung from the pulleys which were cantilevered out from under their eaves, and there was a stubborn residual scent of cinnamon in the air, like a stain. On a lone atoll of redevelopment, where some yellow brickwork was rising behind scaffolding on a wharf, the natives had left prominent messages for the visitors: S
OD OFF
L.D.D.C. (this addressed to the London Docklands Development Corporation); T
HESE ARE OUR BACK GARDENS NOT YOURS; WE WANT HOUSES FOR LOCAL PEOPLE, NOT PALACES FOR PLAYBOYS
.

There was very little traffic on the river now. The few barges and lighters were well outnumbered by the glassed-in excursion boats taking tourists to Greenwich and back, their P.A. systems booming. I heard
Gosfield Maid
pointed out as “one of the many yachts now to be seen sailing on the London River.”

On the north bank, the warehouses were doing rather better out of the decade than the blitzed shambles on the other side. Gutted and repointed, their sooty brickwork scoured by pressure hoses, they were being converted into flats and offices, with salads of real estate agents’ signs advertising luxury river-view penthouses to any millionaires who happened to be passing. One sign said S
TUDIO
A
PARTMENTS FROM
£85,000. For a bed-sit, even for a bedsit with a view, the price seemed steep, particularly considering what the view was actually
of
—a little water and an infinity of dust, rubble, chain-link fencing and heaps of junked cars like so many squashed blowflies. £85,000? For
that?

Below Tower Bridge, half a dozen yachts had gathered round the entrance to St. Katherine’s Dock, waiting for high tide and the opening of the lock gates. Two were flying German ensigns, one was Dutch, and the foreign visitors were volubly approving all they saw—the evening light on the water, the handsome drawbridge, the fulsome stone battlements of the Tower behind it. Elated and shaky
with the adventure of their two- and three-day passages across the North Sea, they’d arrived at a destination worthy of the excitement that they’d had in reaching it. In twenty minutes, now ten, now five, London would open to them like a treasure chest. I kept out of the talk on the jetty, the questions, the consulting of watches. I envied them their city. It sounded, even in languages I couldn’t understand, like a marvelous place, but it didn’t sound at all like the London I could see.

The lock gates opened, and we rafted into a pool overhung with faces and cameras. I searched the faces and found my own friend there, conspicuous as the only person in the crowd who was not dressed in bright pastel holiday gear. When I waved, she didn’t see, but I was answered by smiles and waves from several families of polite Japanese.

Alone among the London docks, St. Katherine’s had—not so much survived as been mysteriously transmogrified.
Gosfield Maid
, with two on board now, motored into a sort of marine stage set, full of restored Thames barges, their red sails furled on their spars, historic steamships, yachts and motor cruisers. At the center of things, a white-painted clapboard pub called the Charles Dickens struck the requisite note of spanking new old-world. The warehouses had been quarried out into a pedestrian shopping mall of oil-lamp-lit boutiques. We squeaked past the gilded figurehead of a barge, and pleased though I was to see my friend, I thought, this looks like a wasted journey, to have sailed a hundred and twenty-five sea miles only to arrive back at the Rye Town Model.

She drove at a terrifying speed. Lighted hoardings flashed by over our heads, far too fast for me to read what they said. Giant packs of cigarettes, bottles of beer, airplanes, faces—the images sped past, but I had no time to grasp whose images they were. Nor did I remember Linda as a demon driver. Crouched low in my seat, with the safety harness buckled tight around my chest, I wondered what on earth had happened to her character in my absence.

“Please slow down—”

“I’m only doing thirty.”

“You can’t be.”

“Look at the clock.”

“I suppose it’s me. Six knots is my top speed.”

I tried to adjust back to a city that felt like a fireworks display of rockets and whizzbangs. It was too fast, too bright, too loud to take in. We shot through an underpass and came out at the other end like a bullet.

“You know about the
Sheffield?”
Linda said.

“Sheffield? No—”

“The Argentinians have sunk it with an Exocet.”

“Were many people killed?”

“I don’t think so. Twenty—something like that. Not like the
Belgrano.”

“I suppose it might sober Thatcher up. Do you hear people talking about the war much?”

“Not much. It’s just something else that’s on the TV.”

“Is anyone for it?”

“No one I know. I suspect my mother might be for it. At least, she reads the
Daily Telegraph
. I suppose that must mean she’s for it.”

“My
mother’s dead set against it. She talks as if she was trying to get up a military coup against the government.”

“I wouldn’t put much hope in a coup organized by your mother.”

The flat appeared to belong to a stranger, a warren of unaired and dusty rooms, too big and bare to be at home in. The pile of mail was full of the usual threats to distrain my goods, sever my electricity supply and cut my telephone off at the root. Life on the third floor seemed perilously high. The plane tree in the street outside was thick with green. Its leaves brushed my windows and darkened the living room. When I’d been here last, the tree had been bare, the room full of winter sun.

It was at night that London seemed strangest. I’d grown used to a sky of cold ultramarine in which you could pick
out the Great Bear and find Polaris without thinking. The sky over North Kensington was starless, a sickly electric orange in which even the moon was hard to find. Deep into the small hours this synthetic sky glowed through the bedroom curtains, and I’d come awake, expecting to find it already afternoon.

Once I yelled my way out of a nightmare. This was a useful but embarrassing trick. Trapped in nightmares as a child, I’d tried to scream and managed only a dry choked rattle in the throat which brought no one in the dream to my rescue; then I learned to break the barrier, waking myself with a whoop that began far back inside the dream and lived noisily on into the room where I found myself sitting up in bed and hollering. I never knew exactly how loud these screams actually were. They happened only when I slept alone.

On my third night back in the city, I woke appalled at having drawn attention to myself in such a shaming way.
Had
the neighbors heard? It had sounded to me like a very loud scream indeed. I listened, in the weird orange light that passed for darkness. Not a sound. Then there was. It was a low, bubbling cry of fright, repeated twice. I went to the window, but no one was out there. The gardens were still, the windows of the houses at the back were all unlit. Silence. When the cry, or rather gurgle, came next time, I pinpointed it to a curtained window with a raised sash, thirty yards away.

At 0335, the explanation struck me as perfectly obvious: this was a London nightmare, transmitted like a virus from sleeping stranger to sleeping stranger, working its way slowly round and down from the northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate, through Brondesbury, Kilburn, Kensal Rise, sidling off to Westbourne Park and drifting along Ladbroke Grove to Notting Hill. Each screamer was handing the dream on intact to its next victim—and the dream was of London itself, a surreal city in which you tried to run, fell, called for help, and woke to hear the strangled sounds of all the other people who were trying to shout their way out of the labyrinth.

There was no weather in this city: there was rain, of course, and sometimes the sun shone, but there was no
weather
. You couldn’t tell which direction the wind was coming from, or even if there was any wind at all. The branches of the plane tree jostled outside the window every time a bus went past; London air was kept in a continuous slow swirl by the passage of traffic through the streets. But the cycle of Atlantic depressions and ridges of high pressure, with the wind swinging round, southwest to northeast, northwest to south, seemed to pass clean over the top of London’s head. I listened out of habit to the shipping forecasts, but they were like news from abroad. “Humber, Thames. Southwest 7 to Gale 8, perhaps Severe Gale 9 in Thames later. Rain later. Moderate becoming poor.” But the leaves were hardly stirring in the plane tree, and the visibility, at least as far as the elevated M40 motorway to the south, was excellent and getting even better.

There was no weather, and no horizon. You couldn’t move around the city by instinct, feeling your course by the way the shadows fell, measuring distance traveled by the transit of trees and hilltops, as countrymen and sailors do. You navigated by artificial landmarks, monument to monument, with no compass points: Eros to Winged Victory to Harrods, then right and left and right again.

In thirteen years of living in London, I’d learned to think of the artifice of the city as a kind of nature in its own right; but on this visit I was being thrown by novelties that should have been novel only to the most naive of crofters on a day trip from Skye. London seemed unmanageable, unimaginable. I had approached it by a classic foreigner’s route—exactly the same route that was taken by the Irish emigrants in the 1840s and the European Jews in the 1880s—and London had rewarded me by summarily demoting me to the role of tourist.