Downriver (37 page)

What did the quacks know anyway? Giving him placebos, coloured smarties, like some kid – pretending that would cure him. ‘See how you go. Come back in a month, Mr Whitenettle. We can adjust the prescription.' Was it
reasonable
? Who would want to achieve marital intimacy when the whole world was dying? Do apes hump in their cages? Not bleeding likely: they wank themselves stupid. Cec had read all the relevant stuff himself, down the library.
Transient Global Amnesia
,
Automatism
,
Psycho-motor Epilepsy
: your hands can never break free from the controls because they are part of a circuit. A single fracture will destroy it all, lay waste the landscape. The power is in the machine. We have only to hang on, put all our trust in its deeper wisdom.

The roebuck is waiting for him. ‘Hold up, you fucking Bambi. I'll have you.' The creature, for the first time, faces the train – head on: gone rogue, its eyes full of blood. Cec cannot break his grip. The harder he strains, the more power he releases. The engine bucks, leaps, rears. The track hisses like a punctured hose, heats to orange-white: the rails open like the ribs of a clattered Buddha. They are liquid spears of rage. Cec starts to laugh. It hurts his stiffened face. He is a jockey, a monkey mounted on a mad dog. It is no longer his affair.
Let
the train jump its brook; let it tumble down the perilous chasm between the banked windows of the hospital, with all its revenging monsters, and the eternally poisoned site of the first sacrificial murder.

Rattles the crossing: nothing now will halt the fire lizard. It
will bury itself, beyond sight, on the far side of the buffers, the sand traps, in a dead-end tunnel: a drain for anguish. Excused by the formal density of madness, Cec lies on his back, smiling: the stones of London are his heaven, and they move. They slide. He will excavate remote sources of darkness. He is redundant, the train needs him no further: it will travel on, through yellow clay and blue rock, ferrying the solemn dead in search of incorruptible rivers.

X

Tattered and exhausted, Arthur Singleton, haunter of stations, prisoner of White Chappell, planned his escape from the treadmill of time. The field of his ‘life force' was too weak to interest the cameras: undetected, he hooked his rope over the crossbar of the gantry that supported this spy system. Like a first-plunge swimmer, he lay groaning; then edged forward, ready to lower himself into the shallow abyss. One foot clung to the platform, the other searched for the neck of the roebuck. It was foretold: only the Triple Death of Llew Llaw Gyffes could release him.

From the deep pocket of his moss-stained overall Arthur drew out Count Jerzy's massive service revolver, stolen this night from behind the bar of The Spear of Destiny. Its cold barrel, greased and foreign, was inserted in a toothless mouth. He would pull the trigger at the moment of impact. As the train tossed him into the air, so would the rope from the gantry snap his neck; flying, he would squeeze his finger, in a come-hither reflex, spilling his brains into the night – like stars. The unwitnessed silence of his act would stand in place of Llew Llaw's ‘terrible scream'. The falling gunge and the smoking pink cap would be one; an eagle in the dark. Arthur would, at last, get out from under the responsibility of myth. He would be nothing, nameless;
unrequired
.

The eye of the rapidly approaching monster filled the tunnel:
it was scarlet, a steppewolf dribbling fire. It pawed the ground. Arthur knew that the engine was no machine, but a living thing. It was cloaked in vegetation, it was alive; rich with green leaves and secret veins. It was fruiting, streams of clear water ran from its side. The engine had transcended speed, arriving before it was understood: a torrent of fruitfulness, challenging wrath, carrying life and birth, deserts, storms; the jaguar and the stone. The ancient rubbled fields were scorched by a path of new light.

Arthur, in that instant, glimpsed his vanished river: it was unchanged. He did what never can be done, he stepped into it for the second time.

 

‘A lustreless protrusive eye

Stares from the protozoic slime

At a perspective of Canaletto.

The smoky candle end of time'

T. S. Eliot,

Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

One morning… the newspapers loud with her praise, the
Sun
in its heaven, banked television monitors floating a cerulean image-wash, soothing and silent, streamlets of broken Wedgwood crockery, satellite bin lids flinging back some small reflection of the blue virtue she had copyrighted, filmy underwear of sky goddesses, clouds of unknowing… the Widow rose from her stiff pillows – bald as Mussolini – and felt the twitch start in her left eyelid. She ordained the
immediate
extermination of this muscular anarchy, this palace revolt: but without success. She buzzed for the valet of the bedchamber, a smiler in hornrims. He entered the presence with a deferential smirk, hands behind back (like a defeated Argie conscript), bowing from the hip: he was half a stone overweight, creaking with starch, and greedy for preferment. He disconnected the ‘sleep-learning' gizmo, the tapes that fed the Widow her Japanese humour, taught the finer points of cheating at stud poker, and provided an adequate form forecast to the current camel-racing season. She was a brand leader, she did not sleep. ‘A' brand leader?
The
leader, the longest serving politico-spiritual Papa Boss not yet given the wax treatment, and planted in a glass box to receive the mercifully filtered kisses of a grateful populace.

The golden curls were sprung and twisted, lacquered into their proper place. The valet held up the wig for her approval. She made her choice from a cabinet of warriors' teeth, toying between the chew-'em-up-and-spit-out-the-pips version and the infinitely more alarming smile-them-to-death set that the boffins never quite managed to synchronize with her eye-language. The Widow was a praise-fed avatar of the robot-Maria from
Metropolis
; she looked like herself, but too much so. The ‘blend of Wagner and Krupp' (in Siegfried Kracauer's memorable phrase) had suffered a meltdown: it was gonzo, dangerous to its living soul and the souls of all other life-forms. She was a prisoner of the rituals she alone had initiated. If she ever appeared in her original skin the underclass would riot and tear her to pieces. And so she suffered the stinking baths of electrified Ganges mud (bubbling like Malcolm Lowry's breakfast), the horse-sized ‘hormone replacement' shots. Even now the lab boys were grinding a fresh consignment of monkey testicles in the mixer. The eyedrops, the powder, the paint: she censored the morning radio bulletins. Not a breath of criticism, nor a whisper of forbidden names: all was analgesic ‘balance', the cancellation of energy. Muzak for the hospitalized, garden notes for the dying. Jollity was unconfined; house-broken ‘rogues with a brogue' winked and blarneyed, and sold. But
something
was not right.

She was a couple of years into her fifth term in what was now effectively a one-party state and a one-woman party – what
could
be wrong? True, there hadn't been a photogenic disaster for several weeks, a crash, a bombing, some dark débris-scattered location she could avoid – only to appear, phosphorescent with concern, a Marian blue manifestation, primed, lit from her good side, serene and comforting among the bedpans, eager to press the wound with a white-gloved hand: or again, severe with grief in tailored black, stilting on four-inch heels, at some well-guarded memorial service. Never,
never
(she had been advised), at the graveside: there must be no subliminal associations with mere mortality. ‘Rejoice then!' she quoted the Bhagwan Shree
Rajneesh with unironic relish. Ambulance chasing was a thing of the past. (There were no ambulancemen left to drive them.)

The Widow scuttled, lurched, towards the full-length mirror; a mother hen who has recognized a significant lump of her first born in the feeding tray – an eye perhaps, or a tine of red comb. She lifted her plump arms in a vague, archetypal gesture; flashing hazardous sharply jewelled knuckles, while the valet swooped with the Ladyshave and the environment-friendly roll-on. Her survivalist instincts, which some commentators felt were preternaturally acute, nagged: a nerve surfacing in a diseased molar. A fresh initiative was called for, a grander set of photo opportunities, a rallying cry: a lift from lethargy.

Perhaps she should summon a team of ‘our' boys from Hereford to take out a few Paddys or stungun a Bedouin tent-show? But who was left with the clout to carry the front pages? It was counter-productive to sanction too many ‘natural' disasters, to whistle up winds she could not bring to heel. The relatives tended to behave so badly, wailing and protesting, asking nanny for ‘compensation': let them buy a share in the sewage racket. Palliative tele-prompts only muted the whingeing proles until the next share issue. There had even been whispers, brave and foolish (from the submerged wine bars of Stoke Newington), that she was not altogether innocent – how
dare
they think it – of her beloved Consort's death. He ‘passed over', it is true, at a particularly flaky moment: the Widow's stock had dropped a couple of points in the wake of a Sophoclean chain of takeover scandals, buggers bursting from the closet, call girls with carrier bags of banknotes at railway terminals, episcopal suicides and low-level resignations – Defence Secretaries and the like. But
that
was a trick that couldn't be repeated. She was married to the nation now, divorce was out of the question.

Another impassioned bull on matters ecological? She'd already worked her way yards deep into the lectures of Gregory Bateson (as delivered to the Fellows of Lindisfarne). Time has, she discovered, this marvellous facility for civilizing the most recalcitrant
material. Stuff that would have put you at the head of the Prevention of Terrorism Index in the 1960s, when it was still prophetic and active, could now be broadcast from St Anne's Cathedral, Limehouse, in a safely retrospective form. Let us keep a tidy house and sing loud – with William Blake – for vanished green glories. Let the Prince have his Palladian toy town around St Paul's. Let him bleat about planning, proportion, rustification, the
piano nobile
. It was a sideshow, a box for chocolate soldiers – popular as Bourton-on-the-Water (and with about as much clout); serviceable for Royal Weddings, which could be timed to coincide with unconvinced by-elections. She'd outmanoeuvred him, shifted the axis downstream: stuffing Wren's overloaded Roman bauble by rededicating Nicholas Hawksmoor's unfrocked riverside monster, that ‘masterpiece of the baroque', as her personal shrine. She could float by barge, in viceregal splendour, turn with the tide, disembark at dawn, or make a progress, a torchlit procession, with heraldic beasts, courtiers, cameramen, brownsnouts, to be greeted on the steps with a lick of the hand from her faithful
gauleiter
, the mad-eyed Doctor. (Another refugee from
Metropolis
, visionary social architect, crazed as Mabuse himself, planning a world-assault in Baum's asylum.) The whole gaudy epic (a pastiched version of Rubens's ‘Arrival of the Queen at Marseilles', made suitable for family viewing) would be slapped down on previously primed canvas, by an official War Artist, and hung in the National Gallery before she had swallowed her second gin and french. Get your heritage in first. Build your museum while you still have the muscle to control it. There were still a few dodges she was not too proud to steal from Ambassador at Large, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Acknowledging the crowds she saw as a featureless throb of pre-coital discomfort with a limply dropped wrist, she remained tormented by unease: there was an unidentified splinter lurking beneath her perfectly manicured fingernails. ‘You'd have to be a stiff to get better coverage,' she muttered. She was ‘prime time' with all the majors and most of the disk cowboys who cared
about their franchises.
That was it!
Why hadn't she thought of it before? What were her so-called ‘advisers' playing at? Those brilliantined lounge lizards, those neutered toms who fed at her table. What on earth was going on at the Agency, for goodness' sake? Off with the velvet glove (and the velvet hand inside it!). Were there any lard-haunched half-Brits left to bounce? That was always so popular with the back-bench lynch mobs.

Dead, extinguished, excused parade. The Judas kiss of cold marble. The ultimate camera call. Victoria R came up with the same solution when she was beginning to slide back in the ratings: a Memorial to her dear departed husband, her companion, her inspiration. Dead meat, a Consort could still be pressed into service.
What are you waiting for
? Put a call through on the blue line to the Sh'aaki Twins. A State Commission must be set up immediately. Yes, NOW! Of course, this morning. No planning permission is required. Flatten Greenwich if you have to. Next time they'll think before they vote.

II

The Steering Committee convened at the London City Brasserie (Silvertown) had been democratically nominated. Eleven places were laid at a shimmering linen table, that was crowded with surgeries of Georgian silver, light-manipulating facets of crystal. It was possible, by peeping through a captive tobacco plantation, to cop a vision of the grey and choppy waters of the King George V Dock: a subdued and unmeditated
absence
. The Brasserie exploited one end of the upper deck of the City Airport; the other was reserved for perpetual trade exhibitions, maquettes of riverside apartments. A weekly flight hammered its way, too low to be tracked by radar, to the Channel Islands, weighed down by the lumpy packages of money-laundering service industries. Otherwise this was a showcase with nothing to show.

Brendan (Clancy) Mahoun, a former dock labourer, perhaps
‘lifted' by the booze (on the strength of his redundancy money), claimed to have seen Our Lady walk upon these waters. Otherwise cold-blooded and calculating investors are always eager to leap on any sign or portent; they grovel for the soothsayer's blessing. They decided that pilgrims would very soon be rushing the turnstiles from every farflung corner of the Catholic empire. An airport must be constructed. The theory paid off (eventually) at Knock. The sheds were booming: not with alms-jangling shrine hoppers, but with country boys frantic to emigrate. And that was the only way this place was ever going to work.