Downriver (44 page)

‘I can only echo the words… the words the words the words,' she uncurled a fleshy white arm, like Gypsy Rose Lee about to peel a long black evening glove, ‘of Captain Robert… Robert… Falcon Scott. “For God's sake look after… after after… our people… people people.” That has always been… been… and remains remains… our first principle. Looking after our own people.'

Over at the Victoria Dock they were testing the strength of the ice by airlifting the Royal Vegan. The Widow had timed her oration to the second, the recorded applause would steal his
thunder, and neutralize any potential whingeing about ‘traditional values' and amateur heroics, the boy-scout stuff. Anyway, why dig up that polar fiasco? Didn't the bloody man
fail
, beaten by a gang of Viking lager louts? And what had we salvaged of the fabulous mineral wealth of the continent, to say nothing of the buried occult deposits, the blue hollows guarding the Spear of Destiny? Sod all, that's what. Enough ground for a five-a-side football pitch.

A sad knot of anorak-draped proles had been bussed in from outlying geriatric hospitals and day centres to stand at the dock-side, waving-by-numbers at the overalled maintenance workers; while being deafened by the thud of ice-making machinery, the sinister hum of Joblard's privately generated magnetic field, and the low-level raids of helicopter gunships. A day to remember. Or so they were told.

Milditch ushered us towards the Customs Sheds where my old friend the sculptor, S. L. Joblard, was mumbling his final instructions to his regular wild bunch of razor-cropped assassins. These were revealed, on closer acquaintance, as a trio of mild-mannered, obediently impoverished art students, who happened to look like warders from a Hogarthian asylum. Joblard would lead us in our push on the Pole. There was no difficulty about our joining the team. We were winched into sets of bloodstained and stinking parkas, balaclavas, vast gloves on which the fur was still growing. Then we were given a swift onceover by Make-up.

‘We'll have to do something about the suntan, lovey,' Make-up trilled, patting Sonny down with arsenic powder and a copydex laminate. ‘Very persistent, isn't it?' Stone-faced, we received our quota of lip sores, blains, blisters, tissue trauma, and rime-spiked dogfur fringes. We staggered out on to the rink like tipsy rejects from a VD clinic. Milditch, the old pro, leant contentedly on a stick; puffing at his pipe, absorbed in a suitably jaunty
leitmotif
from his headset:
Blood on the Tracks
. The familiar sage-spiced odour of the herb calmed us.

Joblard had retreated into himself: his social persona had shifted
to something unformed and private. It was like watching a detailed reflection drain from a mirror. Joblard no longer reacted to external stimuli. He was quite alone. The polar pantomime meant nothing to him: a convenient method of funding some arcane and potentially unstable ritual. His motives were also opaque. They were not satiric, nor political. He flattered nobody and wanted nothing in return for his efforts. He made no boasts. He listened intently for the return of some sound he had initiated in a previous existence.

It struck me that Joblard had reversed Stevenson's polarity: Hyde had succeeded in manufacturing his own doctor, in the form of Professor Catling. This mask of respectability granted him leave to slip the bear from its chain.

We were undistinguished extras. Joblard would soon break away from our plodding troop of bogus adventurers and strike into the solitary distance, bent against the storm of shredded asbestos that his assistants tipped over the propellers of the wind machine. He would ‘tap' the ice floor, searching for a spirit hidden within a secret hermetic chamber, a presence of ‘concerned agile violence'. He would cast the moon in lead; deliberately inverting the process and meaning of alchemy. He would make a necessary sacrifice. I only hoped that we were not a part of it.

We followed Milditch out; and were ourselves followed by a pre-recorded cacophony of sledge dogs. It felt as if we were about to be hunted to the death. Awkward as underwater divers in our stiff and cumbersome gear, we slid and shambled down a short ramp and on to the ice. Drooling exemplars of Hurler's syndrome gaped at us from the windows of a rank of lime-green minibuses: so many selenotropic vacancies. Helpers jollied them into twitching their miniature union jacks. An orange flare curved against the darkening sky; the wind machines began to clatter and grind. It was impossible to stand upright: we tumbled, a heap of rags, against the dockwall.

Crouching, with gritted teeth, cursing; we were strapped to
our sledges. Roped together, unable to speak, or hear the word of command, locked in our individual hells, we manhauled our ballast (of undistributed Crosby/Sandle brochures) over the thunder of a ground sea – somewhere in the general direction of Southend.

The Customs Sheds and the Airport buildings vanished in a total wipe of stinging plastic pellets. The creaking icebound vessel, the
Terra Nova
, fell behind us: our last icon of escape. A lingering look at its frost-webbed rigging and we were alone in a wilderness of negatives: all the dark shades whose power we had invoked (and insulted) were out there, and they were waiting for us.

‘Stone-crazed lunacy!' Sonny screamed. ‘I only hope someone somewhere is shooting this. We might be doing the stuff for no reason at all. What if we get back to the cutting room without an inch of film?' he gibbered. ‘Maybe, yes, wait. What if, ah, yes yes. We'll scratch the film like those Brakhage freaks, like Norman McClaren, Len Lye. We'll scrape storms out from the emulsion. Cave-painters. Get at the elemental force. Flood it with raw sound. Uncover the primal images. Yes, great. What a breakthrough!'

Henry Milditch remained at ease, comfortable, ganja-loose, marching with steady rhythmic strides; not exerting himself, modest in courage. Oates had joined him, or so it appeared; giving us all the strength to follow. He was, as he told me later, quietly running over the list of junk shops he hadn't checked out in the last month, between Billericay and Westcliff-on-Sea. He was rehearsing the mantra of phone numbers he would need on his return to the terminal.

I cannot guess how many hours passed: we twisted and writhed in our harnesses, our savaged faces always into the wind. We could see no more than ten or twelve yards in any direction. There were no longer any buildings, no walls, no bridges, trees, birds, vehicles – no other people. We were microbes twitching pathetically on a lens of ice: we obeyed the laws of physics,
responded blindly to forces we could not understand. A circle of visibility followed us, as if we were held, wherever we moved, within the spotlight beam of some perverse and experimental theatre.

Now I began to sense the presence of other creatures on the ice, strange familiars whose articulate breath surrounded us: melted by human heat, the speech-mist released whispers of false doctrine, fatal advice. (‘
But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you
.') They guided us between blue crevasses and snow-powdered obstacles: dumped motors, or inconvenient canisters that hissed when you brushed against them. Dog forms pressed on our legs, leaving them chilled and trembling. Snarls of meat savagery forbade us to turn our heads and look back.

Suddenly the load increased; Milditch, leading us, held up an arm – Sonny had fallen on to his knees. We were dragging his dead weight. He was weeping, the hot tears cracking channels in his grotesque white mask. ‘Nobody can shoot in these conditions: we've got to negotiate for time and a half. Or I'm pulling out.' Negotiate with whom? Out where? The dock, by my calculation, was not quite a mile long – maybe a little over two miles, if we had strayed through on to the Albert or the George.
But they were not frozen!
I suppose the machines could have gone ape, mindlessly responding to this atmosphere of trumpeting euphoria. Perhaps the sledges were slowing us to such an extent that we were hardly advancing at all. We had been marching for at least three hours by any real estimate; therefore, we should be out on the Thames itself, and heading for the North Sea, Spitsbergen, and the Arctic Ocean. I believe the Thames itself had magnified our mood by freezing up like some Baltic port: it had plunged into its own past, sealing plagues under a coarse skin of jollity, ox roasts, fire. A green-white membrane was creeping from Woolwich to Bermondsey. The tower of St Alfege would lift from some glacial tongue like the tusks of a trapped mastodon.

Milditch snapped the spell. He had spotted a dark shape that he took to be an emergency cairn, hopefully containing food, medical supplies, and rum. Supporting Sonny between us, we stumbled towards it. There
was
something, a shape in the snow, a mound. We scraped with our gloved hands, scratching and tearing at the unpleasantly glutinous solution. It peeled back in strips, an obscene fruit; or an egg laid by something half-human. We were looking into the face of a woman drowned in air; flattened against the glass, puff-cheeked, rigid – her eyes open. We had unwrapped some casual crime of passion. Another victim entombed in a car. The kind of journey, begun in fever, which frequently ends in the River Lea: hauled out, dripping, white legs in a police net. The blue shirts smoking and sharing a thermos: ‘pacing' the paperwork to enjoy a fine spring morning. But this woman was behind the wheel, clothed, undisturbed: she must have taken a seriously wrong turning and been swallowed alive in a web of soft white rubber; denied breath.

Whatever it was that she saw, before she gave up the ghost, was still out there. She was still seeing it; it was in front of us. And as I became aware of this,
at that very moment
, a narrow crack, or passage, opened in the mantle of mist. We could see for miles – but only through a mean slit, a keyhole. Everything was sharp, brilliant. There were precise, elegant shadows. A radiant landscape; too clear to be true. There was grass again, all green things; and a firm cloud on the crest of a hill, getting slowly bigger, coming towards us. We did not dare to breathe: our fernlike exhalations turned to glass, chimed and shattered. The cloud grew into a forked human figure, or something more than that, an unfleshed diagram of veins, sinews, scarlet pulses: a walking tree, a giant.

There was the ugly interference of a monogrammed helicopter overhead, a cone of lights to confuse us; the snow powder swirled and stung, the figure was lost. The Royal Personage was evidently making his appearance. Around us the ice began to creak and strain, to protest: our boots were surrounded by pools of water.
It looked as if, very soon, we would have to start swimming; still chained to the weight of our sledges.

We began to slide, to skid, to scramble for the dockwall. But which direction should we take? Away to our left we caught the orange glow of a fire and, irrationally, pulled towards it; towards a primitive source of comfort. We advanced on the patch of ice that would be first to give. Joblard's cauldron of lead was about to be tipped, his liquid silver spilled. I feared for him. It was always the big men, the bulls, who went fastest: Petty Officer Evans, a legend, a tower of strength, ‘so confused as a result of a fall that he could not even do up his boots'. The culling had to start somewhere: we were too many in too small a place.

The lead hissed at our feet, a scimitar; a moon was cast, a delicate, rough-edged meniscus.
THE MOON IS THE NUMBER 18
, I flashed; how I'd puzzled over that title of Charles Olson's, intrigued but uneasy, until I discovered the tarot, and its interpretation. ‘Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error.' Is that all? It felt much worse; those were pinpricks available anywhere. A few pages deeper into Olson another title lurked:
AS THE DEAD PREY UPON US
. The purity of Joblard's act under these extraordinary circumstances was post-human. What drove him to it? The preparations and the difficulties were everything. He worked best under pressure. He searched for someone to hold a harpoon to his throat. The object itself was redundant, self-erasing, an embarrassment. Joblard hunted the irritation of motive through blocks of inert fat. I can accept anything from these artists – except their justifications: the laboured, stuttering language-seizures forced upon them in their attempts to procure some pitiful dole of credit. ‘Take a bath, man. Don't explain.'

The smoke from the cauldron thickened, and resolved itself: a giant figure had entered our circle. It had shaken free from an antiquarian's gazette, a
Gentleman's Almanac
: a Wicker Man, tongued with fire, his lineaments blazing, a mane of crackling whips. We could see through him, and see ourselves; mesmerized,
inadequate. Sonny had wet himself like a frightened child. The Wicker Man was helmeted like a
poilu
in a spiral of shell. His frame was warted with snails; they popped, and spat hot oil as he burnt. A Job, he was magnificent in a cloak of boils. His wooden ribs breathed fire, but were not themselves destroyed. Gladstone's effigy had marched from Bow in stern rebuke: his arm stretched out, pointing beyond us. Frankenstein's Adam come to his end, prophetic, goaded further than his capacity for forgiveness could bear: he was cast in pride. ‘
I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames
.'

The ice, with cracks like fired timber, was breaking up all around us; we were afloat. Clumsily, we twisted free of the sledge harnesses, and searched for something with which to paddle our floe for the shore. All of Joblard's machines were sparking, smoking, failing. The wind dropped and the fog lifted. A sour lemon sun revealed the Boschian scope of all these Earthly Delights.

The Consort's Folly, the stepped pyramid (its lions, and friezes, and elevators) was a black torch. Flames tore at the sky. Sirens screamed. Masonry crumbled. The concealed steel joists, supporting the Heinkel, buckled; then gave way. The bomber nosedived into the dock, wrecking a rescue launch that was attempting to take the panicked official party to safety. The sound system pounded out anthems of rage. Crimson fire engines ineffectually jetted high streams from both banks: they crossed, married, fell short. Glistening liquid arches converted the dock into a cathedral, and the memorial stack into an altarpiece.