Downriver (19 page)

It was happening again: the preternatural sensitivity of this ambiguous setting. Nothing was fixed in age, or in gender; only ‘place' was constant. Roland anticipated the request I had not yet brought myself to make. He shot upstairs and returned with a large brown envelope containing Edith's notes for the play she wanted him to stage. The play had been delivered, in a woeful state, by a wild-haired messenger, whose condition paralleled the package he was carrying. A dog kept him company. A dog that Roland recognized. The animal had been to Fournier Street before.

The synagogue was now part of the Spitalfields Heritage Centre (by rumour, a front for storing Georgian plunder), so there should be no problem about using it for the performance. We'd take our spot in the queue, behind the primitive artists and the stockbroker wedding receptions. Roland made only one condition. He would not give us sight of his script until there had been a private ‘run through', which Fredrik and I would attend: no lights, cameras, or crew were, at this stage, to be involved.

VII

The house in Well Street, Hackney, where Neb lodged was a curious one, but no more curious than its landlord. Elgin MacDiarmuid was a premature New Georgian: he might well have survived, under a preservation order, and several layers of
black animal fat, from the era of the slobbering Hanoverians. He lived, and had for years, before cults or articles, in absolute squalor. He broke his fast, when he was ‘off the gargle', on bottles of sweet South African sherry; dropping, painlessly, into an insulin-coma that necessitated long sandal-flapping treks out along the canal, and into the leafy suburbs: brooding on ancient glories, or the wives that were flown, along with his inheritance and his favourite four-poster bed. In these sere and yellowed years – he had now turned forty – the ‘black dog' was much with him. He sulked in kitchens, he moaned; and sucked for comfort on loose strands of hair, thereby fulfilling most of his dietary requirements. He was amused, as a compensatory fantasy, to announce himself as the hereditary ‘Lord of the Isles' – ‘dear boy' – or, at the very least, his younger brother. He woke daily in the expectation of a piper at the door. He took to attending clan gatherings, sodden wakes, packed with embalming-fluidperfumed Canadians, and canny lowland advocates who charged these foreign puddocks a fierce price for two or three nights of rough-hewn crofter living.

Elgin was running down the last of the family properties; hanging grimly on until the concept of ‘Docklands' could be stretched to include Hackney. Or until they buried him under a motorway sliproad. The family had been traditionally ‘turncoat'; betrayers of Parnell, dinner guests of Black Tim Healy, friends of the Castle. They had thrived on it, to the extent of a brace of hotels in the Joyce Country, and a scatter of London hideaways for the drunks and the gamblers, too far gone to pick a decent American pocket.

Elgin's father's frock coat, a skimpy thing, torn at the seams, and green as moss, barely covered a snuff-stained string vest, and a heaving gut, that would have bulged, if it had not long since collapsed utterly, to hang dead over his leather-belted moleskins: the only surviving legacy of too many nights of ‘great crack' and inferior bottled Guinness.

CRACK
. The word proved something of a liability when
Elgin bellowed it to the world at large: drawing DHSS snoops, vagrants, and outpatients on walkabout, down on his parlour. ‘Great crack, lads. You should have been there last night,' he would cry, even to the fur-tongued companions who had stuck with him to the unforgiving steel of dawn. Now
barrio
-rats, and spike-skulled squatters from distressed chip vans, broke surface; to nail these rumours that worried them, like the smell of baking bread in a starving city. They turned the place over, ripped up the floors, slashed the mattresses, and sprayed the walls with libellous assertions. In their justifiable vexation, they set fire to crates of Elgin's scrolled genealogies, his family portraits. He hardly noticed. Worse things, by far, waited every time he closed his eyelids.

The wiring in Elgin's den burst from the walls in a shower of sparks; vines or snake trophies, inadequately disguised by layers of paper that rivalled a definitive V & A catalogue. The plumbing was authentically Georgian (i.e. there wasn't any); and what substitutes Elgin contrived, he also spilled as he struggled in terror from his bed, to place his foot straight in it, or to retrieve a floating sandal from an overloaded receptacle. His sheets… but there are limits beyond which even the hardened ‘Baroque Realist' falters.

To maintain the stable character of the household Elgin picked his lodgers from among a Johnsonian gathering of riffraff, not yet barred from an Islington hostelry much patronized by antique dealers (or, more accurately, ‘runners' to antique dealers): most of whom vanished like quicksilver at close of trade, to Golders Green, Muswell Hill, or Seven Kings; or dived into back rooms to whisper with furtive connections. Some of Elgin's boys threatened to become actors. Some ‘restored' prints. Some fronted expense-account restaurants. All were prepared to drink. And most were, with no wild enthusiasm, homosexual in persuasion.

Neb, oddly, had not drifted in by this route. He didn't drink: which made him immediately suspect. ‘The creature's a soot-smeared, melon-headed Ulsterman; a horse-fucker,' growled
Elgin. ‘You'd better lock up the candles.' But, despite the landlord's primitive caveat, Neb had been successfully smuggled in, and established, by a props man from Sadler's Wells; who later survived an attempted self-crucifixion on Hampstead Heath, and dined out on it through half the green rooms in Europe. Neb contrived not to be noticed. He stuck to his attic like a tame crow. He paid his rent, and he went out early. If, by some evil chance, Elgin met him on the stairs, the landlord crossed himself, spat twice on his hands, and prayed he'd be gone in the morning.

Most nights there was a party. Elgin would not allow his tenants to escape so lightly to bed: dues must be paid. ‘Did I ever tell you, dear boy, about the time my grandfather, Lord Cloghal, killed a pig with a polo mallet?' Bed was, in truth, all that was left to him. The wives, English and high-born, had cleaned out the rest; abandoning him to the ‘crack' and the incendiary levees. These became so common that the fire brigade refused to turn up to bear witness. A blackened residue of ‘slipper stew' was what held the pans together. Heavy curtains danced seductively in the candle-light. Orange-crowned fags dropped from tired hands on to pillows of straw.

One of Elgin's fly-by-night guests, a not very resourceful book thief – who simply removed plate-books from the London Library, gutted, and sold them; watermarks, stamps, and library labels – was in a flat panic to obtain a tube of sufficiently unctuous ointment. Elgin MacDiarmuid, being asked for ‘jelly', pictured calves' feet, nursery tea, nanny's starched apron; and he fell, with an almost audible crash, into a brown study. ‘Gone for ever, dear boy. All gone.'

The pederast, who went under the name of David DeLeon, was bent double, scarcely able to walk, quite ruptured with urgency: suppressing a pitiful sob, he begged from door to door. His catamite lay waiting, with few visible signs of impatience; picking his pimples and squirting the result over a yellowback Sapper novel, that a previous tenant had tried forlornly to collect.

The heat was on. The thief knew the net was closing around
him. Even the dim and gentlemanly bookmen like to see the odd knuckle cracked, to witness the uppity bender take a public caning. DeLeon's shirt melted; he smelt of cages. The hideous sounds of Elgin's subterranean melancholy – clinking bottles, bog songs, tears – only reinforced his sense of inevitable confinement. Tonight might be his last chance to feast with panthers.

The thief pounded at Neb's door: without success. He had reduced the grandeur of his demands from vaseline to baby lotion; or butter, polyunsaturated margarine, linseed oil, mayonnaise, louse shampoo.
Anything
. This wasn't the moment to count calories. His mouth was far too dry simply to spit on the snake, and hope for the best. He knew Neb was in there. He could hear the inherited dog scratching at the far side of the bolted door. He snapped: converting the imps of lust to demons of wrath. He snatched up a hammer, and a mouthful of nails from the frame-maker's cupboard, and proceeded, with yelps of rage, to seal Neb into his mansard garret.

Neb, at the first blow, transformed himself into an item of furniture; mute, uncomplaining, clasping his scrapbook to his heart. DeLeon completed his task with the aid of a few loose floorboards. And went below to find a bottle.

Not for nothing had Neb studied the ways of the East. He could feed, for months, on his own karma. He withdrew: he retreated into a floating world of headlines; narrative collages that opened so many possible avenues. He would begin at once on an obituary notice.

GAY ARISTO AND RENT BOY IN THIEVES' KITCHEN SHOCK. IRISH ANGLE SUSPECTED
.
A delegation of notables, including the Standing Member
,
Meic Triscombe
,
and several faces from the cast of ‘EastEnders'
,
today broke into the attic room of a house in Well Street
,
claimed by its owner
,
Elgrun MacDonald
(68),
to be of ‘immense historical importance'
.
The delegation had intended making an award to a long-serving social worker
,
Nebuchadnezzar Spurgeon
,
whose selfless activities on behalf of the Grove Road Lazaret (plc) have won him universal acclaim
.
However
,
when the doors were broken down by
sanitary operatives, it was revealed that the ‘artist's garret' was uninhabited. Obscure books on the occult by Colin Wilson, W. H. Hodgson and others were removed for forensic examination. A pile of brown dust was said by one of the actors to be ‘in the shape of a dog'. ‘This mystery will rival the Marie Celeste
,'
claimed a Townhall Spokesperson. ‘It is straight out of Edger Allen Poe
[sic].'

Elgin MacDiarmuid, soul-crushed, sunk into a shameless candle-cupping pose: his skull was a parchment membrane. Nightmare shadows stretched and yawned against the walls. A capuchin monkey plucked at his sleeve. Beast faces winked in the panels of the windows. The slop bucket of his fears had been spilled, and the swamp dwellers were loose. There was now no barrier between past and future, between naked panic and its uglier manifestations. He saw DeLeon as he really was. And he called for a shotgun. DeLeon belonged in the trophy room.

A fabulous smell, the spittling sweetness of roasting pork, filled the basement; drool seeped from Elgin's snoring mouth: it stung the absurd, pre-pubertal pliancy of his skin. His skin was his memory: the retarded child held within this abused and rotting carcase. Elgin screamed aloud, woken by pain; and dropped the candle which was gently cooking his venus mounds. Hungry flames licked across his bare mattress, leaping deliriously from pools of congealed chicken fat to liquid rivulets of chip grease. Sportingly, the fire outlined Elgin's shape in the bed: the man's animal traces burnt like a sacrifice. The bog landlord looked down at where he should have been lying. It was a small conflagration: nothing in that. The walls were already black as a holocaust; and several windows were missing, where agitated lovers had done a header into the streets.

Roars of torment from the bull-baited MacDiarmuid roused the pack of lodgers and associates, who tumbled into the night in various stages of undress, inebriation, and sexual attainment. Sheets of flame escaped gratefully into the clean air. The draggletails, their lice and their parasites, sprawled in the gutter on the
far side of the street, to watch the show. There had been nothing like it since the Smithfield barbecues.

From the dark safety of the coppice, Elgin saw the Big House. The brute laughter of the peasantry. He had been burnt out, driven from his inheritance: four hundred years of culture trampled in the mud. ‘Save the Rowlandsons,' he howled. ‘Who will carry out Hogarth's “Roast Beef of Old England!”? A gold sovereign for any brave lad who dares the flames.' The fond tricks of the mind, that can promote one of the lesser insurrectionists to a chief among Wicker Men. Elgin the Torch heard the skirl of the pipes on the crown of the hill: the heavy smoke of the hospital incinerator. The road to the isles opened before him.

All that remained of the sorry affair was to witness the figure of Neb, translated from grass gobbler to Blake's
Cain
; his hair on fire, white hands tearing at his scalp. He was trapped in the mansard window, like a negative within a square of film. The heat would print his image into the glass. He lifted the blazing dog above his head, as if the animal were a flaming brand, or the true source of the fire; then he hurled it out in a frosted shatter of moth-sharp fragments. And the beast fell, an incandescent log, through the cold air, down and down, towards the distant street.

VIII

We sat on either side of the Ladies' Gallery in the Princelet Street Synagogue: I took the East, and Fredrik took the West. The keys were in my pocket. We had locked ourselves into the building. The candle holders, hanging in front of us, were eggs of brass, from which writhed serpentine tendrils. They swayed perilously, revolving in a breeze that had no obvious source. They were muted in a thick dust of bone, masonry, cloth, and prayer; and were crowned by strange double-headed birds, Hapsburg eagles, whose necks twisted against threat from any quarter of the compass. Lamps had been lit on the floor beneath us: necessary
oils sputtered. The chamber was dim and anxious. This first stage involved an attempt to stop-down the rush of time, to chill this event, to allow the setting to absorb, and swallow, our invading presences.

Roland concentrated solely on the management of his own performance; following closely the guidelines he recovered from Edith's frantic and inelegant script. The hints Roland dropped suggested that Edith had not written anything in the form of a play. There were, for example, no speeches or stage instructions. No, what she had done was to ensure that anyone who read her notes with attention would be led to ‘re-enact' the sequential prophetic curve that any play has to be. The script was a series of physical proposals for a séance that would deliver the event Edith was imagining. Wisely, Roland allowed the ritual site to look after itself. His only ‘theatrical' contribution was to drape the expressionist backcloth from his Oscar Wilde drawing room over the raised
bimah
; making a tent from which we assumed he would, in his own time, emerge.