Downriver (12 page)

III

Edith Cadiz had never felt so much at her ease. She found herself, for the first time in her life, ‘disappearing into the present'. There was a physical lift of pleasure each morning, as she climbed the sharply tilted street from Homerton Station. The day was not long enough. She ran the palms of her hands against the warmth trapped in the bricks: she grazed them, lightly. She held her breath, relishing to the full the rashers of moist cloud in the broken windows of the East Wing. Often she stayed on her feet for twelve hours; not taking the meal breaks that were her due. She was absorbed in the horrors that confronted her. No human effort could combat them. Ambulances clanged up the High Street: security barriers lifting and falling, like a starved guillotine. This was a world that Edith had previously known as a persistent, but remote, vision: a microcosm city. There was nothing like it in her reclaimed Canadian wilderness: an impenetrable heart, with its broken cogs, shattered wheels, and stuttering drive-belts. Her dispersed mosaic of dreams allowed these damaged machine-parts to escape from ‘place' and into time. The victims, vanished within the hospital walls, grew smooth with loss. They dribbled, or voided themselves in distraction, staring at, but
not
out of, narrow pillbox windows. They were all – the tired metaphor came to her – in the same boat: drifting, orphaned by circumstance, unable to justify the continuing futility of their existence.

And it was endless: floor after floor, deck after deck – unfenced suffering. There was no pause in her labour; nothing to achieve. It could never satisfy her. Faces above sheets: amputated from the social body. They did not know what they were asking. They took all her gifts, and put no name to them. The shape of her hands around a glass of water held no meaning.

Each nurse laid claim to some part of the building as territory that she could control: imposing her own rules, her own fantasies. It might be a special chair dragged into a broom cupboard. It
might be a cup and saucer, instead of the institutional mug. It might be a favoured cushion, or a colour photograph cut from a magazine, presenting some immaculate white linen table on a terrace overlooking a vineyard:
Provence
,
Samos
, Gozo, the
Algarve
.

Edith made her decision. She rescued all the children she found lost within the inferno of the wards. They were not always easy to recognize. Some pensioners had discovered the secret of eternal youth. They shone: without blame. They remembered events, and believed they were happening for the first time. They entered chambers of memory from which no shock could move them. They were small and unscratched: they learnt to make themselves insignificant. But some children were fit to pass directly into the senile wards; never having experienced puberty or adult life. They were overcome, shrunken, shrivelled; hidden behind unblinking porcelain eyes. Most did not speak. They should not have been there. They were waiting to be moved on, ‘relocated'. Their papers were lost. Some were uncontrolled, hurtling against the walls, on a hawser of wild electricity. They would leap and tear and shout, spit obscenities. They would punch her. Or cling, and stick against her skirts, burrs: huge heads pressed painfully against her thighs. One child would lie for hours at her feet, and be dead. Another barked like an abused dog.

The room that Edith commandeered in a remote, and now shunned, south-facing tower gamely aped one of those seaside hotels, built in the 1930s, to pastiche the glamour of a blue-ribbon ocean liner. There were wooden handrails, and a salty curved window overlooking the sparkling tributary of the railway, that ran from Hackney, through Homerton, to the cancelled village of Hackney Wick – and on, in the imagination of the idlers, across the marshes to Stratford, to Silvertown, to the graveyard of steam engines at North Woolwich. Another more stable vision was also there for the taking: security systems, tenement blocks, pubs, breakers' yards, a Catholic outstation with albino saints
and blackberry-lipped virgins, and the green-rim sanctuary of Victoria Park.

For a week Edith swept and scrubbed, polished and painted. She stole food and begged for toys and books. She was determined to impose a formal regime; to re-create a High Victorian Dame School. She wanted canvas maps, sailing boats, new yellow pencils, wide bowls of exotic fruit. She wanted music. Their strange thin voices drifting out over the hidden yards and storehouses. Her stolen children, playing at something, came – by degrees – to accept its reality. They were boarders, sent from distant colonies, to learn ‘the English way'. They were no longer solitary: they were a troop. They even, covertly, took exercise. They left the hospital: walking down the Hill in a mad, mutually-clinging crocodile, over the Rec to the Marshes. They were too frightened to breathe: not deviating, by one inch, from the white lines on the football pitches – climbing over obstacles, cracking corner-flags, tramping through dog shit. They huddled, a lost tribe, under massive skies. The rubble of pre-war London was beneath their feet. They walked over streets whose names had been obliterated. They could have dived down through the grass into escarpments of medieval brickwork; corner shops, tin churches, prisons, markets, tiled swimming pools. On the horizon were the bright-orange tents of the summer visitors; the Dutch and the Germans who processed in a remorseless circuit between the shower-block and their VW campers.

Over the months, Edith coaxed the children towards language. Or shocked it from them: in tears, and in fits of laughter. The railway passengers noticed this single window, blazing with light.

Other unlocated souls made themselves known to her. Orwin Fairchilde, cushion-cheeked, chemically castrated, had been turned out of the ward as ‘insufficiently disturbed': he could not escape its pull. He pretended to be part of the queue of outpatients that formed early at the gates: a queue from which never more than one or two highly-strung potential travellers hauled themselves aboard any vehicle foolish enough to slow down. Cars kept
their doors and windows locked. The other loiterers remained – until dusk fell – leaning against the hospital wall; picking up sheets of old newspaper, greeting unknown friends, or screaming challenges at imaginary enemies. The queue was perpetual and self-generating: an unfunded ‘halfway house' between the hospital and the insanity of the world at large. The people who mattered offered a loud ‘
Yo!
' to Orwin's oracular question: ‘Are you in the queue, man?'

Orwin polished his bottle-glass spectacles on his shirt-tails. Then he set up his elaborate, but eccentric, sound system. He Scotch-taped his sheet music to the side of a bus shelter, and dived, scowling, into ‘Greensleeves'. He plucked at the strings of an Aria-Pro (II) electric guitar – as if he was extracting porcupine-spines from his bulging thigh. The noise was hellish. He sealed his eyes, and entered some dim cave of absolute concentration.

It became a ritual of Edith's to take Orwin for a drink in the Spread Eagle on her way to the station. He would roll a cigarette and offer it to her. She would refuse, and offer him a drink: which he, in his turn, declined – on religious grounds. He spoke about the Ethiopian Saints who had lost themselves in this City of Sin; but who would certainly acknowledge Orwin as a fellow spirit, by spotting the coded note-sequences in his music. The Saints left messages for him in books. But, of course, the libraries would not let him get his hands on them: claiming that he could not read. The teachers had all been bribed to keep him in ignorance.

Dr Adam Tenbrücke also spent time as a temporary guest of the hospital. He had been found, weeping and shaking, running his head at the door of a warehouse-gallery on the perimeter of London Fields; which featured, at the time, a chamber flooded with sump oil. This was instantly optioned by the Saatchis. The owner, a claque of tame critics, and a few jealous hangers-on rushed outside, squawking, ‘Did Doris ring?' – bursting to break the news to any passing drifters. They tumbled, in a heap, over
Tenbrücke, who was rocking back on his heels, imitating a blind monkey. Smelling the weirdness of ‘real' money, the owner dragged him inside.

Tenbrücke pointedly refused to sign his name in the Visitors' Book, and would speak only in German. The Gallery Man, now suspecting the devious hand of the encamped ‘travellers', rang for the snatch-squad – who were only too happy to tranquillize the gibbering doctor with their truncheons. He was delivered – a knot of terror – to the reception cages. He would talk of nothing but suicide. ‘I'm drowning in filth,' he whispered. In other words, he was depressingly normal. He sounded like a politician. They frisked him, hit him with enough stuff to stop a runaway horse, and turned him loose. He tore off his clothes and – howling Aryan marching songs – stumbled down Marsh Hill. He walked back to Limehouse Basin along the River Lea: white, and fat, and stark-naked. But he went unmolested; just another long-distance health freak jogging into obscurity.

It was still quite possible to survive on a nurse's salary; but not to eat, to travel, to take decisions over your own life. Therefore, most of the nurses moonlighted as cleaners, or as barmaids. Even their uniforms were rented – warmed by their bodies – to a drinking club on the Stoke Newington borders; where they were worn, with minimal adjustments, by hostesses who catered to a certifiably specialist clientele.

But it was the opening of the Dalston/Kingsland to Whitechapel rail link that granted Edith's continued presence at the hospital and economic viability. Now, at the end of her working day, she could take the North London line to Dalston, change, and step out within half an hour on Whitechapel High Street. Time to read, once again, her faded pink copy of
The Four Quartets
. ‘
And so each venture/Is a new beginning
,
a raid on the inarticulate
…' The generous arches and lamps of the London Hospital penetrated the gloom like a Viennese opera house. Edith slipped Mr Eliot back into her raincoat pocket.

The balance was achieved. Edith Cadiz could nurse by day,
and supplement her earnings by unselective prostitution at night; ‘blowing' the priapic hauliers, who were working out the last days of the Spitalfields Vegetable Market. It would be simplistic to suggest that Edith's was a mechanical response to circumstantial poverty. The twist was more complex: if she was unable to live as a nurse, she was also unable to live as a prostitute. The attractions of these twinned survival-modes were quite different. They were separate, but equal. In both theatres of risk, Edith was involved with external demand-systems that gave her unexpected courage, and fed her dramatic sense of self. The risks she took brought to life a scenario, in which she could not quite believe that she participated. She maintained, to the end, an inviolate sense of silence. The emissions of the lorry drivers, she trusted, would somehow engender language for the mute children, safely secreted in their ruined tower.

Edith was an unusual person.

IV

The great shame, and dishonour, of the present regime is its failure to procure a decent opposition. Never have there been so many complacent dinner parties, from Highbury to Wandsworth Common, rehearsing their despair: a wilderness of quotations and anecdotes. ‘My dear,' a Camden Passage ‘screamer'smirked, as I cleared a few boxes of inherited books from his cellar, ‘we never get asked to Mayfair any more – it's always Hackney. Wherever that is.' Writers were glutted on hard-edged images of blight. They gobbled and spat, in their race to be first to preview the quips that would surface in next week's
Statesman
; or to steal, from some Town Hall booby, statistics to lend credence to a
Guardian
profile. Literary bounty-hunters – bounced publishers, and the like – scouted out-of-print anthologies for any Eastern European poets, in wretched health, who had not yet been ‘targeted' for an obituary. They fell over each
other to finger these deservedly-forgotten scribblers at thirty pounds a hit.

And if the Spitalfields weaver's loft, or the country house, wistfully rendered in a mouthwash of Piper twilight, staggered on as icons of a vanquished civilization, then the fire-blackened cityscape of the Blitz was the setting increasingly invoked by the barbarians of the free market. Exquisitely made-up young ladies tottered out on Saturday mornings to hawk the
Socialist Worker
, for an hour, outside Sainsbury's. Duty done, they nipped inside to stock up on pâté, gruyère, olives, French bread, and Frascati for an alfresco committee meeting. The worse things got, the more we rubbed our hands. We were safely removed from any possibility of power: blind rhetoric without responsibility. Essays, spiked with venom, were the talk of the common rooms. Meddlesome clerics fought for the pulpit. The most savage (and the wittiest) practitioners were never free from the telephone. Review copies clattered on to the mat, obsequiously eager to face the treatment. TV lunches were grim as public floggings. Government narks listened at every door. Nobody wanted it to end. Jerome Bosch art-directed the steaming imagery. It was positively Spanish: Index, Inquisition,
Auto-da-Fé
. Nobody wanted to be the one to hammer the first stake through this absence of a heart. We'd have nothing to write about, except ley lines and unexplained circles among the crops.

The ‘Standing Member', Meic Triscombe – a stoop-shouldered, flat-footed, arm-flailing shambler, whose delicate porcine features were lost in the barren disk of his face – haunted his electoral boundaries like the Witchfinder-General. His nose, a detumescent erection, twitched after conspiracies, winks in the council chamber, wobbly handshakes. He favoured quarrelsome lime-striped shirts; always untucked, fanning out behind him; quite loud enough to set the dogs barking, and causing women to miscarry in the streets. Asthmatic – and allergic to almost all life-forms – he gasped and sneezed, turning his frailty to advantage, by pretending to be overcome by emotion: a Shakespearean
soliloquy of pity for the human condition. Choking and spluttering, he drenched his audience in a spray of peppermint-tasting mucus; desperately running the sleeve of his blazer across his watery eyes. There was no other calling in which he could parade his disabilities in such a favourable light. On the telephone he could be genuinely alarming. And had been reported several times as a pervert.