Downriver (20 page)

I don't know how long we waited. Light died in the sloped glass roof over our heads: it grew strong again, illuminating the cracks, the broken webs of long neglect. I'm sure that neither of us slept, or lost consciousness for more than a few seconds. Very slowly, the shaking and the rolling of past worshippers faded: the silver bells, the pomegranates; the stiffened yolks of eggs, unpeeled from dead faces; the steam from the bath house melted away. And we heard the low whining of a solitary dog. It seemed to come, not from the floor of the synagogue, but from beneath it: a melancholy and inhuman
kaddish
of loss. The hair rose on our necks. We heard the claws of the dog scratching on tile: turning, circling; faster, faster, from end to end of the cellar that enclosed him. Our sense of the animal developed: a lion-headed, tail-thrashing, back-arched revenger, bumping against the floor that could no longer contain it. The beast was growing. It would burst through the feeble bricks.

Our veins closed, stopping the surge of blood to spasms of
pain. The room was filled with suspended heat. We flinched from the rails on which we were leaning. We dug our nails into the palms of our hands.

Now there was a cooler sound, metallic; a length of chain dropping into a dry well. A small gridiron in the floor of the main chamber was lifting itself, falling back into place; lifting again. A stutter of untraceable images flooded in behind the sound. A cloaked sleeper, living or dead. A peasant-priest stalking the circumference, barefoot; drawing his own breath from a glass-flute, in which locusts are imprisoned. Horizontal confessions. Crimes of passion. The supplicant lies, face down, upon the synagogue floor, and whispers his (her) guilt through the grille to an unseen confessor; or into a pool of accumulated evil. The priest is standing on a chair in the inundated cellar, neck twisted, lifting his mouth to catch her (his) spit. The penance involves cleaning with the tongue these loops of cold iron. And it is shared between priest and victim.

With a wild rush of yellow, of thorn and sand, the lion-thing was at the door: it thundered, its breath was rage. We did not want to see it, but we could not move.

Roland Bowman was naked, red, on all fours; crawling like some obsolete chess piece, across the worn boards towards a restored pool of decorated tiles. His movements were precise, but they did not appear to be premeditated. He
was
the inherited dog, burnt of its fur; birth-shivering, as it aligned itself to enter once more the geography of its ordained narrative. Scalded, raw, vulnerable; Roland pushed himself pitifully along the floor, until we felt the waves of displaced pain enter our own knees and wrists. His muscular control was astonishing.

I gave no credence to what I was seeing. I was the right eye, Fredrik was the left eye: we had both to concentrate to bring this vision into focus. I could not judge its distance from my own amorphous fears and desires. I could not guess what part of this scene Fredrik was censoring with his intelligence. But what I saw shocked me. The dog's swollen pizzle, emerging like a piston
of peeled, pink flesh from its holster of fur. Nothing of Roland was left. He was overwhelmed by this assertion of the animal's unthinking maleness. I did not believe Roland would ever break free from the creature whose spirit he had so convincingly summoned.

The dog salt-licked the blue pigment from the dutch tiles. He put his shoulder, in turn, to each of the six pillars. He acknowledged the
amud
, and bent his head before the Ark. Now the vigour drained from him. He was beaten. He dragged on broken legs. His spine was twisted, his head lolled. The crushed beast slunk from our sight under the painted cloth of the tent – and re-emerged, on the instant, by some conjuring effect; erect, strutting, arms thrown wide, parading the cloak of maps. The dog was Edith Cadiz. Or a switch had been made. Roland had volunteered to vanish in her place from this story. He was robed once more in the cardboard streets that surrounded his house. He was dressed in the tale he had told us at his kitchen table, the woman's life.

Roland's body – hairless, pale, disciplined – had the miraculous capability of allowing any other life to be ‘projected' over his own. He was neutral; the dream actor. A man, a woman, an animal: he could be a cardinal or a horse, a prostitute or a surgeon. The watchers would witness whatever transformations they dared to conceive.

For this role Roland's make-up was predatory and exulting. He laughed, and he licked his white teeth. He ran a finger teasingly over his lips. He shook out the red-gold hair that flowed down his back. Edith was producing a wicked pastiche of the Roland who laid claim to her identity, by making himself the sole curator of her legend. There is no salvation in dumb reverence. Loving admiration metamorphoses to soul-theft. The glamour of the risks that Edith provoked had been peeled like a mask from the bone of Roland's skull. Neither party could break from this terrible contract: the telling and the showing, the being and the dying. The mirror had frozen hard about them.

There was only the sound of bare feet sliding on the boards. Roland spun to face the Four Quarters of the World: he stretched out his arms. He was passing down a track already flattened in the wet grass, under the arch, and out of Meath Gardens: rain in his face, he brushed against the drooping purple heads of buddleia. Eyes shut, following the wind; he crossed Roman Road towards the corroded green effigy of a blind man tethered to a stone dog. He could go no further. He was enclosed by a crescent of water; which he drew, at once, into the unsuspecting air. Faith kept the shining column in balance on his hand, a liquid wand.

Fredrik, coughing fiercely, stood up, a handkerchief clutched to his lips: he loomed alarmingly over the balcony rail. Shadows from the swinging lamp aged him; grew a dark judicial beard. He challenged the woman who stood beneath us on the floor of the synagogue. He spoke, but the voice was not his own: it was chalky and base. He rose to defuse the gathering tension of the moment: only to discover that he was now the dominant part of the act. He was implicated: the necessary articulator of a written voice.

‘Who is he who gives you this authority?' Fredrik choked out the words he was hearing for the first time. He fingers closed on his throat, so that he could feel them, and assess their truth.

Edith countered his assault with movement, the steps of a dance: she glissaded, turned, showed her back. She ripped the sleeve from her cloak, and let it float into the unlit margin of the stage.

‘What business do you have with Hebrew ceremonies, the taint of idolatry, and the like?' Fredrik continued his cabalistic interrogation.

With a sound like dry flame rushing over a tinder-trail, Edith split open her costume of maps: it hung loose from her shoulders, drowned wings. A sudden leap obscured her: she was hidden behind one of the red pillars.

‘By the power of the four princes I require your submission.'
Fredrik slumped back into his seat. He was stripped of his borrowed dignity. He did not speak again.

But Edith Cadiz was instructed by her angel and would suffer no governance. Roland, naked once more, had the body of a woman.

IX

We returned to the house in Fournier Street: it was a clean, fresh morning. Vagrants were already standing around their perpetual oil-drum fires. Nobody ever saw one of these fires being started. Forklifts were shuttling the vegetable market; odd, single trays of exotic fruits were carried to taxis. It was still quiet enough to enjoy the agitated cicada-hum of the sewing machines. We waited for Roland in his mother's sitting room. But there was no clear space into which our turbulent imaginings could skulk, searching for respite. The room was crowded with so many gathered mosaic-fragments of the old woman's previous lives. It was one floor higher, but the same shape as Roland's Wildean chamber: it seemed smaller, packed as it was with occasional tables, mementoes, knick-knacks, votive offerings.

While Fredrik gossiped happily with Mrs Bowman about Canada – where he had spent a few fugitive years finding out that he was not an academic, and that Black Mountain poets, individually or
en masse
, would never produce anything but aggravation – I picked up the photograph of Edith Cadiz which I had excitedly rediscovered among the ranked portraits of husbands, ballet masters, loved enemies, and lost friends. I suppose I was expecting, or projecting, the ultimate Dorian Gray transformation: that the silver print would now represent Roland Bowman in Edith's skin. Our night in the synagogue
had
to clarify the insane ambiguities that infected this house (and all its visitors). I was, by temperament, much happier analysing glass slides with finite examples of captured time, than scrambling
across the living face of Whitechapel. The story, in all decency, should end here. I revolved the frame in my hands. I tried every angle. There was no change. That elegiac aggression was as strong as it had ever been: the pearly smoothness of light on her body. The gesture of the arms that refused a definitive interpretation. It was undoubtedly the same woman.

Mrs Bowman, bird-eyed, caught me at my investigations. ‘Quite pretty, isn't it?' she said. ‘I'm very fond of that frame: cost me thirty-five pounds in Bermondsey. I couldn't get Alfie to shift on the price. Girl's quite attractive too. Absolutely the right period. That's why I've never bothered to change her. I felt she went so well with the frame. And, when you've only a son left, well, you do tend to collect another little family to keep you company.' She laughed. ‘I think of them as quite real. I make up all sorts of stories about them. But only for friends, of course. Yes, I do find myself wondering, from time to time, who she was; and if her life was anything like the one I have saddled her with.'

I could only stare at her, with ill-mannered bluntness, and will some saving breath of ‘Bates Motel' transvestite shape-shifting slaughter. Roland would surely emerge from behind the wig, a carving knife in his upraised arm. But, no, sadly; this was a small, voluble, and wholly convincing woman. Then I heard a key turn in the lock of the street door, and light fast footsteps, that could only be Roland's, raced towards us, up the long flights of stairs.

 

‘Then to the tower to watch'

William Hope Hodgson,

The House on the Borderland

Arthur, who was also, obscurely, known as ‘Monty' or ‘The Boy', opened his sticky seropic eyes in a room that had bent around him in the night; that had contracted to a necklace of tyres. He could not draw breath in it. There were no corners to the walls. He was alone, abandoned, far from ground, amputated from memory: a trustee with a black ribbon sewn to his sleeve. He no longer had to suffer the linoleum wards, or the dormitories with their milky puddles of disinfectant, their anguish, sprayed threats and sudden, random blows. He did not need to twist on his mattress at the mercy of some communal nightmare; or to wake, on this fine morning, to the bite of another man's parasites, inherited from a foam pillow, still saturated with unshriven dreams.

But at this altitude there was no purchase; Arthur's mind slipped, forcing him to bury his face in a pink and threadbare cricket cap. All night he had been remembering his teeth, seeing himself wrap them in soft purloined lavatory paper: then the discovery of his secret hiding place by some dark and stalking double. Shame. Anger. His breakfast extended over the entire day, as he sucked his string of rind towards a slow and salty dissolution. No, he had been too cunning for that. They were gone. His teeth were the past, a squandered inheritance, wilfully forfeited.

Once the twin towers of the Monster Doss House had been
decorated with flags: the pride of the fleet, a red-brick leviathan, studded with portholes. An Imperial fantasy: Wembley Stadium set in a grassless desert. It had been photographed, part of the social record, for the first, October 1903, edition of Jack London's
The People of the Abyss
– where it can still be found, sheltering between page 240 and page 241. In its pomp the Doss House had shaken to the snores of a thousand men, snorting and gobbing the choked filth of their lungs. But now the half-dozen tolerated vagrants were forced to hide themselves – even from each other – somewhere in its telary vastness; camped in locked corridors, they fought for the remaining blankets with patients too bizarrely infected to be accepted, even as charity-appeal posters, by the London Hospital. They were not ‘star material', and would never get a call from Mel Brooks, or be played on Broadway by David Bowie. They died, slowly, in unrecorded cupboards.

Sticking to the damp walls of this pest seminary were plagues without names, that would test the recall of even the most diligent antiquarians of medical science: fibrillations, lesions, scabs, lymphs, bubonoceles, swellings, welts, knots, discharges and seizures unidentified even in the holograph manuscripts of medieval Spanish apothecaries. This sad rump of nostalgic vagrancy, these stinking heritage ghosts, clung to life only to bleed the fundraisers; scratching their way into the casting directories of documentary film-makers, or whining their mendacious autobiographies from doorstep to doorstep through Bloomsbury. They were the ‘house guests' of the developers until the Monster Doss House could make its appearance in the brochures as ‘an historical site', and City-based newcomers could get their rocks off recolonizing a genuine Poor Law survival ward. They could make pets of the cockroaches. This fired-clay alp was built to last for ever by planners in the grip of dynastic certainties. Features of the original plumbing would be incorporated with no surcharge. Speculators, on the instant, were sweating to buy a piece of it. They were dumping wine bars in the Old Kent Road, like so many cat sacks, just to stay liquid. But – until the first ruched sorbet curtains
dressed the portholes – the dead men had a role to play as walk-on ‘local colour'.

The porthole, looking out to the west, was no longer a temptation for Arthur. His turret room, a literal crow's nest, had once been a privilege the inmates had fought to achieve: wrestling through gutters, ambuscading the key holder with sand-filled stockings, biting and clawing to be first man at the evening window. They had to hobble Scotch Dave with a paraquat and British Sherry cocktail, when he took to protecting his claim by sleeping all afternoon on the Doss House steps. Joey the Jumper actually dug himself into the refuse bin of the London Hospital's surgical ward, so that he could maintain a death-watch on the padlocked door. He was submerged, head on knees, in a canister of mustard slime, pus, and gungy dressings – but he couldn't control the compulsive drumming of his heels, or gag his endlessly rotated mantra of early Christian martyrs. ‘Stephen, James the Apostle, James the Righteous, Paul and Peter, Symeon, Ignatius, Rufus and Zosimus, Telesphorus, Germanicus, Polycarp.' One of the warty roundhead orange-boys put a lucifer to a trailing tongue of bandage that spilled from the bin's lid, and Joey was deep-fried in his own fat.