Downriver (32 page)

 

‘A locomotive jumped its track and smashed Poe's tombstone'

Guy Davenport,
Olson (The Geography of the Imagination)

Cec Whitenettle, a lifelong abstainer, poured out his second half of Bacardi, making it familiar by the addition of an orange cordial. He swallowed it grimly down; his scrawny neck convulsing, his thyroidal cartilage bobbling like a drowning chick. He drank where he stood, in the centre of the room, feet apart, awkwardly ‘at ease'; taking care not to spill a single drop on to his uniform. His glass, as he returned it to the table – in a mindless hydrolic gesture – was coated in thick felt.

Water was steaming from the tap into a blue plastic basin. Cec watched the spiralling thread of its descent: from behind a plate-glass screen. He had no recollection of initiating this incident. He was utterly estranged from it; as from the rest of the objects that surrounded him. The cut-throat razor opened silently and smoothly. Foam curled in a lazy worm on Cec's open hand, and was mechanically smeared across his face. He slapped at his cheeks, feeling the reassuring rhythms of the contact,
feeling
the sound. Cec welcomed his ‘auditory disability', his deafness, the only tangible souvenir of those best remembered years, in the battery: the earth-shuddering pounding of the 4.5s, pitted in the Isle of Dogs. That night, 4 September 1940, when the men realized they themselves had become the principal target. That was their only achievement.

And the bleak mornings: river mist; the desolate mud field, gun barrels tilted at the skies, looking from the road like so
many collapsing chimneys. Nothing could compare with it. The solitude and the friendships.

As he shaved, Cec avoided the eyes of the man behind the mirror. He pinched his nostrils shut, lifted them to scrape at the ill-disciplined hairs, emerging to trespass on that narrow trench of puckered labial flesh, with its finicky, inaccessible ridges. The skin of the whole face was drawn back, stretched, inadequately attached to the bone armature beneath. Cec was terrified that the knots would give, the mask would slip, and collapse into folds – never to be ironed out. Already the pouch-cups under his eyes were bruised with anguish, scratched, wax-filled. His large asymmetrical ears stood, naked and proud, from a helmet of cropped and water-combed hair. Surface-nerves flinched as he paddled a cruel application of scented acid into the reluctant pores.

A flask of sugar-saturated tea, marmalade sandwiches, a copy of yesterday's evening paper, were waiting in the canvas satchel. Cec took his wristwatch from the drawer, advanced it by one and a half minutes, and slipped it over his wrist – with the solemnity of a marriage vow. Time to go: 2.55
A.M.
Two-handed, Cec lifted his peaked cap from the chair. No trace of irony: from the instant it touched his head, he was on duty.

He hesitated; returned the cap to its resting place. One for the road: a final shot of Bacardi. Given time, he could develop a taste for the stuff. He licked the glass; refilled it, threw it back. It wouldn't matter now if his wife did notice. She only kept the bottle for her sister, New Year's Day. A quick one. She would be sleeping like a sow: tossing about, rolling herself in the sheets, snorting, fingers in her privates;
breathing
, saveloys and whisky. Shelley Winters's nightdress, up round her belly – at her age.

The cold air refreshed him. His ungloved hands felt no chill as they scraped the thin filter of frost from the car windows. The world was at its best: it was uninhabited, all its shocks and alarums were sheathed in a prophylactic darkness.

On Morning Lane he waited obediently for the lights; he would have waited for ever. There was not another car on the road; but without rules the universe falls into chaos. He drummed his fingers. The old childhood fancy came back over him: waking one morning to discover a deserted city, from which all the other inhabitants have flown, slipped away into another dimension. He would walk towards the centre, always through the same leafy squares, the memorials nobody else appreciated, touching them, fingering Coade-stone gods; nymphs, goats, griffins. He would tiptoe, unthreatened, on the crown of the road – until he arrived at one of the great department stores, blazing in a costume of coloured lights; where he would wander down avenues of ladies'things, dabbling perfumes, tasting cosmetics, running silks between his fingers, brushing against furs, curtains of animal pelts; testing himself against all their secrets. The mirrors would loose their magic. He would not disturb them. Unobserved, he would be naked as the day he was born.

Cec let the car steer itself down Homerton Road towards the marshes: he was enclosed against the night, the fingers of wind, the buildings of eyes. Tonight, nobody else was alive: a molten stream of fire-insects swarmed endlessly along Eastway, in a mad chase to escape from their own headlights. The marshes were nothing: grass over rubble; coarse turf, impacted by generations of footballing oaths, hid the cratered terraces of dockland. You could rebuild Silvertown from this midden. You could excavate the names of all the eradicated villages. The incendiary warriors were still waiting for the kettle to boil on the primus.

He crossed the imaginary (but irrefutable) border, cut down Temple Mills Lane, and was lost among the enormous shadows of the reclaimed mounds of Stratford. The hoists, the containers stacked into unoccupied babels: this was a transitional landscape that would never achieve resolution. Out of the fire-storms had come industry; out of ruin, imagination. We were promised a life of marvellous changes: no more poverty, no mean and pinched lives. So everything was cleared to make place for a
dystopia of fenced-in goods yards, coldstores, bonded warehouses. Railways replaced rivers. Now ‘docks'could be anywhere that capital chose to nominate. This demarcated zone was made ready to service the latest panacea, the concept of ‘The Hole'; a tunnel that would connect these infertile swamps with the threat of Europe, and future prosperity. On this wild gamble, all regulations were suspended. Today was too late. Dig it first, discuss it later. Steel jaws ate the earth, with all the frenzy of orphans searching for their fathers.

Cec nodded to the security ‘bull' on the gate, who hit the button and lifted the barrier, without bothering to look up from the climax of the snuff-video he was running under his counter. (Some footage had been ‘sampled' from Sam Fuller's
White Dog
. Actuality – in the form of hand-held shots out of a car window, as the victim was run down – was planted alongside. The chase peaked. The white dog pounced. A thick smell of fear leaked from the machine, converting it into a defective microwave.)

The car shower needed no human agency: it was triggered by pressure points hidden in the road. The green light scanners cleared Cec, his uniform and his satchel. Even the technical equipment could find no interest in the man. His laser-coated pass carried him safely through the triple cage, and out on to the deserted platform. The nighttime ‘special' sulked, steaming like a horse, under rows of overhead sodium-vapour lamps, that stretched a genetic chain of rusty haloes all the way between Hackney Wick and Canning Town. The train, a power-charged demon, had been disguised in panels of mud: its number-coding was standard, but it remained an officially sanctioned pirate. It was not here. It did not exist. The volatile silver canisters held their glowing million-year-old rods within laboratory-cushioned milk churns. Cec's engine was ready for its advance on Mile End (and its ‘detour' through Stepney Green and Whitechapel to pick up the drums of reprocessed material from Barking, that did not show up on any manifest – but which were delivered, with the utmost precision, to the cosmetic shell of Liverpool Street).
The rest was not Cec's business: the airstrips of Suffolk, or the lost estuaries of Essex. He knew no more than the comfortably receding lines of track.

Volunteer and they throw the works at you: lie detectors, hot wires, flash-frames, sensory deprivation, stress-curves, cranial measurement, pads on the tongue, anal dilation, scrapes of nail dirt, litmus nappies, ancestor research, criminal record, political affiliations and Tarot reading. Cec had been turned down for the buses on the grounds of ‘poor road sense'; but the spooks found him perfectly suitable, a clean profile. He was deaf, impotent, suffering the onset of premature senility; a psychoneurotic depressive, prone to paranoid anxiety. He had a bad marriage, and no friends. His moral judgements were untrustworthy. He was just about capable of keeping his hand on the steering column. The ideal man: he fitted the job description to the letter.

The hermetic isolation of the cab was his prize: the line ahead was virgin, ready to be swallowed. The platform floated like a tropical island above this mud-churned dereliction. The red warning light flickered, then died: it was time to move out.

II

Anyone who has ever written anything about Whitechapel, or the Whitechapel Murders, will soon discover they have issued an open invitation to every conspiracy-freak who is not actually under lock and key (and who is able to raise the price of a phonecall). It starts even before your book is published, almost as soon as the typescript receives its ultimate correction: as you slide the drawer shut, the phone rings. It's always late at night; the caller has no name – his manner is circuitous, a shade abrupt. The voice is a vibrating needle of glass: you sense the veins knotting, the controlled resentment, the white hand clenching and unclenching. There is no time for, or interest in, your evasions: a message has to be delivered.

‘Mr Sinclair? I am able to reveal to you that I am in possession of privileged information (hopefully, to be published before the year is out),
comprehensively
refuting all previous theories. All the books you have read, those manufactured bestsellers, have been nothing but a tissue of lies, illegitimate confessions sponsored by… by… The truth has nothing, absolutely
nothing
, to do with the Royal Family, the medical profession, or the Masons. I am the only one who has pieced together the entire story. It's all going to come out. But, as yet, I can tell you… nothing.'

Significant silences, painfully indrawn breath: all the inevitable grey-room warnings, whispered so loudly that they wake the children in their cots.
Let it alone!

Then, shortly after your book is launched (one copy on the reserved shelf in Camden Town, twelve ordered from Glasgow – author's name sounding vaguely Scottish – returned on receipt, with request for refund against postage), the postman is knocking with the first bulky envelope; taped and double-sealed, stuffed with obscurely menacing news cuttings. ‘Has anybody official tried to dissuade you from publishing?' (‘Only the publishers,' I mumble.)

Evidence accumulates in the form of photocopied accounts of spontaneous combustions: ‘
MAN BURSTS INTO FLAMES
.
Paul Green, a 19-year-old computer operator, was walking along a quiet road in De Beauvoir Town, Hackney, around midnight when he suddenly burst into flames. He doesn't smoke. He thinks the blaze might have been set off by a passing car but he doesn't remember hearing any vehicle pass him. Police have spoken to Paul and examined the scene but are still puzzled by the fire. Paul is a holder of the Duke of Edinburgh's bronze medal, and has two O levels
.'

Or, some local-history buff will point out, rather crossly, that ‘Nicholas Lane', the seemingly innocuous name of one of my fictional characters, is also a respectable channel, severing King William Street, where a Hawksmoor church is lurking – and where, apparently, T. S. Eliot spent his days as a banker, buried beneath the pavements, peering at typists' legs through squares
of sea-green glass. More and more; madder and madder. ‘
Elderly man critical after two-ton concrete and steel block plunged on to his car killing his wife. The couple were driving in heavy traffic along King William Street
.'

I am deluged in accounts of corrupt surgeons, victims sprayed with kerosene, amnesiac detectives croaking out incriminating details in south-coast retirement homes, death-bed confessions occurring simultaneously (and word-for-word) in Adelaide, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen; clairvoyants, quacks, syphilitic poetasters; cocktails of feline blood (granting invisibility), showers of bread loaves, transported cathedrals; Russian-Jewish anarchists, Helena Blavatsky, M. P. Shiel, Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria. As one of these documents – truthfully but inelegantly – concludes: ‘The only exit therefore eventually left would be access to the zoo.'

To retain my sanity, it was necessary for me to cultivate the spittle-bibbed rudeness that is second nature to any antiquarian bookseller, to brush aside these twittering, but harmless obsessionists who cling to some personalized fragment of the past; determined, beyond reason, to wring every droplet of meaning from the soiled fabric. The events of nineteenth-century Whitechapel have been overtold to the point of erasure; confirming nothing beyond their eternal melancholy. The puffers, sniffers, scribblers and scratchers are determined to keep that small flame dancing in the circle of their sour breath.

John Millom was, I thought, different from the others only in degree: he was the most extreme example, the ultimate ‘Ripper' nut. There was something so fixated, so dementedly popeyed, in the stuttering urgency of his phonecall that I found myself agreeing, reluctantly, to meet him, to examine his long-accumulated store of documents. It would, he assured me, change my life. There was a manuscript, I would know as soon as I looked at it, would
have
to be published. I had the ear of paperback editors, didn't I? I even had permission to call a few literary agents by their christian names.

Millom would be waiting on the platform at Leyton from eleven o'clock on the morning of 3 December. He would be wearing a dark ‘business' suit and a tie with the insignia of the local Round Table. I, in my turn, would hold aloft a carrier bag issued by the Forbidden Planet bookshop, with their logo prominently displayed. I couldn't say what I would be wearing. I didn't know what I was wearing now.