Downriver (13 page)

His constituents – or unemployment statistics, as he thought of them – were bow-legged, small-skulled, foul-mouthed, impertinent; fff-ing rapid-fire dirges of complaint, out of the corners of mouths tilted into half-zipped wounds. Triscombe could not bend low enough – an old rugby injury – to make out what they said. His slight hearing difficulty, mostly a build-up of cerumen rammed into the external auditory meatus with the tip of his black Biro, was an aristocratic trait, and no hindrance in the chamber: he thought of Harold Macmillan. As did so many others, now that the old confidence-man was safely removed from the scene. Triscombe did not need to sift the words of the fellaheen; he was their voice. He could articulate their primitive and amorphic wails for attention. On their behalf, he dined on rumours, played squash at a City health club; denounced scandals he was too late to get in on. He thought of himself as the ‘people's tribune' and he lived among them. Or, at least,
reasonably
adjacent to them. While he waited for his personal
Belgrano
to cruise down the Hertford Union Canal.

His wife, estranged, and with a cast-iron investment portfolio behind her, refused to set foot in the grime of East London. The property Triscombe acquired in a partly-renovated Early Victorian Square (okayed by John Betjeman), within safe hailing distance of the Islington borders, lease signed three weeks before the election, had proved a decent enough speculation when he ‘let it go'six months later – well before ‘Black Monday'. These large crumbling mansions, built for sober city magnates, had given refuge, in the era of Wilsonian Social Democracy, to some of the more acceptable – and only distantly related – members of
that premature Free Market combo, the notorious ‘Firm': before the towerblocks marched in like triffids. The square, a quadrangle of submerged aspirations and cringing modesty, now preened itself on an actively ‘ruralist' identity. It was a village under siege from marauding misfits, razor-gangs, crack dealers, and fast-breeding aliens. The gentle bohemian newcomers of the 1960s uprooted the comfrey and the cannabis, persuaded someone to take on the cleaning lady, and took flight into the silicon-chip countryside; draining, in the process, the last dregs of their inherited capital. Sadly, this was the ultimate shuffle of the brewery shares. Their homes, now seen as a solid ‘first step on the ladder', passed into the hands of food-photographers, marine insurance trouble-shooters, rising tele actors going into their second Stoppard, and Bengalis shifting from supermarket chains to oil percentages.

Triscombe took his profit and went east, to the summit of the Ant Hill. When in doubt, climb. The nude temptations of worldly power: he loved to look down on the beaten spread of the Borough and say, ‘All this is mine!' There was a reborn credibility in stashing himself among the photogenic ruins of Homerton: it added considerable colour to his CV. A satellite development had been jobbed onto the shabby grandeur that clung to the coat-tails of Sutton House. The estate's title was worked in flourishes of wrought iron into the entrance gates, like something out of
Citizen Kane
. Security guards, a nice blend of ex-para and ex-Parkhurst, patrolled the walkways, Moorish arches, and plashing fountains of this Neo-Alhambra. The tower of St John of Hackney rose proud above the camera-scanned walls, with intimations of vanished Templar glory. The panoramic view towards Leytonstone was not so hot: a set of low-rise blocks, let in by the planners on the dubious grounds that, at least, they were not high-rise blocks. These were the ultimate
barrios
of despair, and behind them lifted a futuristic silver tube: the burning chimney of the Hackney Hospital, belching forth mistakes, ex-humans, and assorted bandaged filth.

Meic Triscombe was a shire-horse among whippets. Red ears pricked for multinational conspiracies, tongue like a dagger, equine teeth set to savage the ‘Secret State' Whitehall plotters: a stallion of wrath! He stamped and snorted; he reared up. He also tended, rather too frequently for comfort, to fall down; so that one, or more, of his limbs was perpetually cased in plaster. An ardent all-night debate on the abolition of the ILEA caused him to tumble the length of a spiral staircase in the terrace house of a female member of his steering committee: cradling in his arms a not-quite-empty bottle of Southern Comfort. A barstool shattered under the sudden imposition of his weight, leaving its shrapnel in his left buttock, while he was denouncing the iniquity of a system that permitted whispering nocturnal trainloads of uranium waste to pass unchallenged through ‘Nuclear Free' Hackney. He suffered an attack of acute food-poisoning, with attendant sweats, cramps, and trumpeting flatulence, on a ‘fact-finding' tour of ethnic restaurants between Lower Clapton and Green Lanes. Meic Triscombe was not unknown to the Hackney Hospital. A procession of mini cabs heaved him out at the gates; where ‘security' told him, firmly, to try elsewhere. They had no facilities for dealing with accidents, emergencies, amputations, inebriations, childbirth, chewed-off ears, grievous bodily harms, or spontaneous combustions: or, indeed, anyone at all who was not actually frothing at the mouth, bug-eyed, and belted into restraint like an ‘Old Kingdom' mummy.

So it was that the stallion, Triscombe, became one of Edith Cadiz's lambs: another unrecognized messenger found babbling on the pavement. He limped across Homerton High Street, leaning heavily on her shoulders, to the Adam and Eve, for a pick-me-up, a bottle or so of medicinal Cognac. His eye, guileless aesthete, admired the relief carvings above the pub entrance – a naked couple, daring divine retribution – while his fingers, unoriginal sinners, tried to sneak a touch at Edith's nipple. It wasn't just the liberating effect of firewater on his sweat glands: Triscombe was amazed to discover that Edith did not need to be
seduced by gusts of Bevanite eloquence. Neither did she succumb to the vapours on his moral high ground. This time he did not have to present himself as ‘the Last Socialist out-of-captivity': the hotshot cocksman who had never sold out. Tears filled his eyes as he spoke of the miners, the hunger marches, the lock-outs. Edith yawned. She wouldn't be shamed into surrender. She was willing: this clown was the agent of fate she had been waiting to snare.

But Triscombe, saturated in the hypocrisy of his calling, was congenitally incapable of taking ‘yes' for an answer. Puppy-eager, he tongued her neck, as he pitched an over-familiar yarn about the slime deals that would see the hospital razed to make way for yet another ‘riverside opportunity'. Even if it took a clear day and a powerful periscope to find the river in question. It was an accepted natural law that any piece of ground overlooking a puddle of water – river, canal, sewer, or open-plan cesspit – would be a golden handshake for a speculative builder: ‘minutes from the City, offering all the advantages of country life'. The Government's public-relations machine had very effectively stolen all this water imagery from its traditional proletarian base. The canal bank had served, from the Social Realists of the 1930s to Alex Trocchi's
Young Adam
, as a dour backdrop for relationships poisoned by industrial dereliction. Now, in the coming blush of privatization, water is declared to be ‘sexy'.

Edith required no such dialectic. She took Triscombe's drink. And she asked him how much money he had. ‘
How much money
?'

Triscombe's mounting excitement tangled him more completely into his usual state of impotence. The horse of panic. He was about to break something. The barmaid shifted a religious statuette out of reach. The landlord shrouded his parrot. ‘How much money?' Trembling, he started to turn out his capacious pockets. She did not mean that: the petty cash for a knee-shaker under the viaduct. She meant
income
, stock-points, retainers, kick-backs, research contracts, leaks to the
Eye
. Could he afford her –
on a regular basis
? Would she fit, snugly, on to the payroll?
Because that was all that mattered. To clear, for her own exclusive use, an uninfected stretch of time.

What Triscombe actually wanted, when they returned to his impersonal apartment, was difficult to speak about, to spell out in precise detail. Edith waited, legs tucked under her, in a bucket-chair, running her fingers, caressingly, through the golden muff that hung under the belly of Triscombe's alsatian: the guardian that slept at her feet. Guarding against what? Special Branch, ‘The Company', Mossad, MI5, MI6? The Widow's favourite chalk-monitors, Ad Hoc Splinter Groups, spooks, wire-tappers? The fellaheen hordes, black gypsy petrol-bombers, Iranian fanatic Jews tooled with castrating shears? Trotskyites, the Red Brigade? Lesbian rapists? This dog, he felt – and he wanted Edith to feel it too – had absorbed most of his own masculine virtues: by close association. The beast manifested his warrior soul: it represented his power, but without the inhibitions of his public standing.

Edith soon understood
exactly
what Triscombe wanted, but she remained perfectly relaxed, detached: there was so much time waiting to be paid for in this room. She would not burn it. Let him get there when he would. She understood that this would be one of the most effective acts of theatre she had been able to conjure. It was truly monstrous, and also quite simple. She would involve herself in a performance that was, by statute, criminal, and degrading; mythic in its blasphemy. She would devour the substance and the essence of taboo – with the bulging, pleading eyes of the instigator following her every movement: the paradigm of an audience. It was Triscombe's vision; he was its victim. She wanted to make an account of this. To repeat the act in language, to perfect and refine it. She slid a notebook from her handbag and started to write.

White-cheeked and musty, Triscombe faced her: his back arched against the wall. A thick blue vein was pulsing on the side of his head, like a worm digging its way out. She thought he might be sick. His breath smelt like wet rope. She spoke to him
reassuringly, softly, outlining her demands. ‘A standing order': the phrase made her smile. A sum, calculated on the spur of the moment, to be paid, monthly, into her account. A selection of Deer Brand black notebooks with red cloth corners. Some Japanese drawing pens. A watercolour by John Bellany that she had always coveted. Afternoons.

Anything
. Absolutely. He agreed. His hands were palsied. He had lived with this image since boyhood. Its safety was that it remained an image. Therefore, he was human. Therefore, he could denounce the corruption of the world. Man's man, people's tribune – stallion of the virtues. But now this woman was starting to act it out.
Jesus Christ
,
the curtains!
In a fever, he checked them. Edith Cadiz was sinking, very slowly, stretching on the floor with the dog, who was turning, waking, yawning his meat yawn. Teased, he growled, and showed his teeth. Edith unzipped her dress. Triscombe was transfixed, a stone man. He no longer wanted any of this. It was agony to him. Edith draped the dog's head in red silk. It looked as if she had wounded him. She spoke; she blew in his ear. The beast responded, with a show of anger, to these preliminary caresses.

The spread of her arms. Triscombe enters a colour-plate, the childhood illustration he longs to bring to life:
Blodeuwedd's Invitation to Gronw Pebyr
. It has been said that fairy stories are erotic novels for children. But they are worse than that, as Triscombe is discovering. A low-cut bodice, with a tightly-laced dress. She heaves with terror. Savage streaks of blooded light escape from the forest: some massacre or sacrifice to pagan gods. The white horse stamping through the fast-flowing river, hoof raised, searching for a dry rock, or… the head of a dog. A hound that will scrabble up the bank, shake himself, and soak the dress of his mistress. She is trapped within its clinging stiffness. She lifts the embroidered hem. The dog nuzzles, thrusting his otter-head between her naked thighs. His rough, salty tongue laps and scratches. She grasps him by the ears, guiding him. Her breath comes faster. She swoons to…

No, no, no. This is all wrong. It is Gelert the Faithful, blood-muzzled in his greeting. Slain in error: destroyer of the wolf-threat, not the sleeping infant. Triscombe is a one-handed reader, slithering among nursery icons, coded legends. He presses his cold nose to the tint of damp pages: the salmon runs, the gold shimmer, the white froth of water breaking around the horse's raised leg. Edith Cadiz is the raven-haired temptress worming out the secret of the Triple Death. She will destroy him. Her hair covers her face. She is without identity.

Choking spasms of language gushed from Triscombe's mouth. Things he thought he heard. Voices on trains. ‘She's a dog, mate.'
Dogmate
. ‘On heat all the time, like a fucking dog.' ‘Came home for his dinner, didn't he, and gave her one.'
Dogfuck
. ‘I know all the bouncers. Every time I borrow a few quid I say, “Cunt, shut your fucking mouth.” That's why you never get any.'
Cuntmouth
. He's growling, rolling, hurt in his throat; biting at the fur on his wrist, pulling out the waxy skin in a red pinch of flesh. ‘She's a fucking diamond, son.'

Triscombe is dribbling; grey bubbles of mucilage slather down his chin. Rasping, harsh breath: a file across his lungs. ‘Took 'er down the 'ospital.'
Horse spittle
.
Whore's spital
.
Clap-shop
. The bitch. ‘Fucking 'ore.' The cunt. The dog.

He drops, stunned, into a black imageless sleep. A poleaxed carthorse.

And Edith writes, steadily and fast, her account of events that connect with these events; but which are
not
these events, and are
not
an account. She does not describe what has happened. She describes something else, which exists, independently, beyond the confines of this close room.

Naked, Edith looks into the bathroom mirror, and is – for the first time – troubled. She sees: ‘
The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
/
Both intimate and unidentifiable
.' She does not know herself. Her excitement is now as compulsive and primary as Triscombe's was, when he watched her. She does not make more of this than her written structure can contain. She is satisfied. She has
committed herself. She believes that, at last, she has gone too far: there is no way back.