Downriver (54 page)

In the second section of the ‘Last Poem' (though addressed to the loved one, or Muse) there is a deliberate Hamlet-echo of pursuit, inheritance, chill: the elongated boredom of unfulfilled death. And the cold. The words evaporate in the tall corridors of a skull-castle. A son's father returns with questions, dripping earth: ventriloquist of self-inflicted guilt.

This paper voice tracked me, folded and refolded into a zipped pocket, as the train jolted once more towards North Woolwich, and the ferry crossing. Despite official radio warnings – I
couldn't
wait in the house long enough to drag a coat from the cupboard – it was a fine, bright, high-cloud morning. The ‘free' ferry celebrated its role in the narrative by carrying no other passengers.
Do they know something?
They have all shuffled down the foot tunnel. The green river shines like crocodile mud. The south shore is more of a promise than a threat. The rail connection to Erith offers intriguing glimpses, scrub-covered slopes on which to imagine the
Abbey (rems of)
Lesnes. And the more recently imposed fantasy of Thamesmead.

Detrained at Erith, it is a considerable effort to shake free from the town. The river is guarded by a succession of scrapyards, metal fanciers, supplicants for brazery, machine cannibals: only the most dog-footed plodder, sampling each fresh lane, will eventually clear the buildings; and then the fields open gloriously
to the waterline. The Thames is almost domesticated, frisky, Edwardian, a tributary of itself; pleasure boats ride at anchor. I walk, among tethered horses, on an elevated pathway: distant flashes of Dartford. The revolving shadow of the radar scanner on the Crayford Ness beacon plays on a low wall. A peaked sun projects this illusion: the silhouette of an amputee wrestler, frenetically warming up. The creek mouth has a scimitar tide of driftwood, cans, plastics – an over-eager Richard Long installation, an unscavenged beach.

There is a formal, twin-towered rivergate where the rib of the Darent splits from the Thames and begins its own journey. Lost land. Game birds thrash from cover at my approach, shoot out over the water, decoying attention: rubbish fires drift gritty blue smoke from fenced yards. Dumper trucks, far away, grind and drone, tipping out the endless intestinal waste of the towns. The young river wanders, is alive; its surface shimmering, burning with gold scraped from the rims of heavy coins. I cling to the bank until the Darent parts from the Cray, and the view to the south-west is of mean over-settled hills.

The Cray, according to Barry MacSweeney who walked part of it as ‘a hack on the
Kentish Times
', was once a ‘first-class trout stream, used by Henry VIII'. At its mouth it is still unspoilt, a surprising thatch of river wheat, tawny with feather-headed rushes. A small Egypt, Mosaic in implication: a removed place.

But here a path cuts between hedges, back towards Slade Green: a solitary track across Crayford Marshes. An old man, black-jacketed, plods down this narrowing tunnel of perspective; limping, leaning on a stick. I stop to watch, and (of course!) to project on him the spectral avatar of Nicholas Moore. Let him go. I force myself to heed Douglas Oliver's warning about believing ‘every lame man was a messianic sign'. The figure recedes very slowly, weak-footed, lurching inexplicably from verge to verge, avoiding the gravelled camber at the centre of the lane, tapping for grassy softness.

He was hooked, for a long time, on a stile. I was hooked also,
watching him; thinking of nothing else. The ground between us. He became part of the stile, inhuman, a sack balancing on the rim of disaster. He was forced to look back the way he had come, and to face me: while he lowered himself, tragically slow, legs stiff as planks, towards the expectation of solid earth. I must have appeared to him, at that distance, if he noticed me at all, as a stump or post. And even though I now withdraw all the meaning I can discover in this occluded incident, it will not suffice. I am listening for something else, a voice, a sound: something Peter Riley cites as Moore's dominant mode, ‘the speech of a variety of statues'.

If the walk so far has been coated in sensual pleasures, the riposte is swift; the path runs into a storm-fence and further access to the river bank is denied. I am expelled, forcibly parted from the Cray, deposited on a mudslide slope, where lorries (Hell Drivers), cursing from a weighbridge, gun the short track that separates them from the A 206. On either side of this slithering hazard are pens of chemical threat, sacks marked HOPE, inadequately sealed skull-drums, hissing valves: behind which rises a tower, proclaiming itself the ultra-Mosque of Vitbe Bread. Its business is to convert the river wheat to uniform envelopes of white shame.

The pub is worse. Any traveller is a leper; a dusty, sweating renegade. A carpet fouler. Born-again barpersons target the Industrial Estate with reflex smiles: Canada Dry, Booker, Chef's Larder (‘Caring About Catering'). The empty, vaselined suits of salesmen are serviced by over-obliging waitresses in cruelly laundered jeans. The soup of the day is pink, slightly saline, with a limp leaf floating on its custard-like surface. Something lumpy and white has struggled for life in it. And has lost.

Now the problems really begin. I am disoriented by a fury of traffic, screaming to get away, or cutting – with no signals – into one of many identical service roads. Unknowingly (fume-crazy), I drift north-east, losing all the river's wisdom: go back on myself towards Erith and the Thames. The first roundabout is a vortex of
unconvincing promises: no offered destination holds the slightest attraction for me. Feebly, I aim for the highest ground and shuffle into one of Nicholas Moore's nightmares: unlittered streets, clean cars, safe margins of grass, lace curtains that twitch faintly as I pass, like the last flicker of breath in an oxygen tent. I shadow the railway embankment, hug to it, a lifeline, a false river that peevishly deposits me at Barnehurst. A nameplate attached to nothing: a subliminal cancellation, an early-morning travel flash. Bad news.

Hours have been lost (to say nothing of the river). The ticket collector, consulting his wall charts, denies any possibility of a link to St Mary Cray. The only hope lies back towards the city. In savage despair, I hop a suburban cattle car to Lewisham: flicker of white graveyards, roof estates, slate churches. A twenty-minute wait on a wind-exposed platform. Then the slanting run south to Petts Wood, in the company of independent, well-tailored ladies gazing sternly out of the windows. Peripatetic anthologists? Raiding the margins of our journey for a South London literary pot-pourri: Conrad's Greenwich, Paul Theroux's
Family Arsenal
at Deptford, Muriel Spark's Peckham Rye, Pinter's Sidcup.

I have only to walk away from the station (Petts Wood), pick my track through a set of mental-health charities, estate agents, windows of cream cakes and wedding dresses; march east, slogging to the crest of a slow hill. ‘St Mary Cray?' ‘Right direction, dear, but it's quite a step.' The distance melts. I am in cruise gear at last: drawn on by a destination that is ‘getting warmer' with every stride.

An avenue of ancient, thick-girthed oaks leads away from the main road and down towards the poet's secret grove. The estate developer, with fond memories, more probably of Richard Todd or the English TV series (written by a blacklisted Hollywood leftie) than of the Errol Flynn/Basil Rathbone extravaganza, and with a dozen sturdy trees
in situ
, went for the obvious theme, Merrie England and the liberties of the Green Wood: Lockesley
Drive, Friar Road, Lincoln Green Road, Archer Road, Robin Hood Green.

But the oaks
are
a truth, unembarrassed repositories, bare of leaves, black against the setting sun: dark magistrates. In their presence the temperature drops, my pace slackens. This zone is… just as I imagined it. I have often shared this pituitary nightmare, floated along these unpeopled cul-de-sacs. The houses can be seen only through diabetic lenses: they are constructed from slabs of coarse sugar, liquorice timbers, bull's-eye windows. My crazed persistence is rewarded, and I enter the vision that was present all along, that buddied my quest: the beached vessel (Islet of
Longueurs
?) in which a poet was free to live undisturbed, except by the voices to which he was constantly forced to attend. The voices of fabulous statues. Cold sublunary passions. Metopal logic, the wit of chalk. But this ‘harsh holocaustic unlife' was not without its rewards. To be left alone: who has the courage to ask for that?

Oakdene Road is an afterthought, an apologetic addition, succumbing – with little protest – to a plague of pavement-hogging tricycles, motor scooters with L plates, open-jawed Cortinas: a blue-collar compromise between ambition and expediency. The twitchy pretensions of the high-contour semis have wilted within a hundred yards to a boisterous meanness. I don't want to linger. The pain is palpable. A grey-blue migraine helmet.

Moore's left-hand maisonette is a pebbledash and red-brick affair, oddly angled. I had visited it often in dreams – of which this was only the most recent version. But ‘my' house was a mirror image. I pictured it on the other side of the street: where my childhood home would once have been situated, on its steeper hill.

But what made me particularly uneasy was the absence of a door. A flushed and ugly block faced the world with muslin-carpeted windows; offering no entrance, no exchange. The door was a social gaff, shunted to one side, where necessary commercial
transactions could be rapidly despatched – away from prying eyes.

I scarcely broke my stride. I snatched a full-frontal snapshot, featuring the stump of Japanese cherry tree (which had not been uprooted, as Peter Riley believed, but hacked off, mindlessly amputated). Yolky flower heads were nudging through the untended grass.

I jogged on down the hill, towards the
idea
of the river, hoping to reconnect with that possibility. Then pulled up. Turned on my heel, aware that nothing had been resolved (or made clear) by my visit. The roof bristled with aerials. They were equipped to monitor the galaxies. Nicholas Moore's house was number eighty-nine. Its immediate neighbour was eighty-five. Idly, I wondered what had happened to eighty-seven. (Had it been sucked into the skies? Or offered a more select location?) My oblique (low-angle) view framed an awkward Kurt Schwitters (use what you find) arrangement of doors, window slits, coal-bunker lids. An ‘extension' that provided an external stairway, while effectively blocking my prospect of the famous garden. Unmoved, an elderly cat stared me out; yawning, breaking wind, and attempting halfhearted press-ups in an upstairs window.

Safely lodged on the train, and returning to the welcoming soot of the city, I took out the folded sheet of paper with Nicholas Moore's ‘Last Poem', to examine once more the irritating blank of the final section. I had, of course, now scribbled my own shorthand notes on the verso; possible clues when I came to write about the incident.
MILLENNIUM MILLS
(
train window, Custom House
).
Royal Pavilion
(
COURAGE
).
Darent miander, sun on water (pieces of clock?). Old man bad leg black jacket stick. River wheat. Chemical wilderness, sacks HOPE. Vitbe Bread. Oak Avenue. House, mirror image of dream. Cat
.

The page remained frustratingly bare, beyond certain mantic creases, like the footprints of… statues? And from the margin the green waves of Juliet Moore's dustwrapper illustration were encroaching; cardiac tracings – converted in reproduction to healthy strokes of black. The tide was turning from a knitted
electrical stream to a fevered voice-print, soliciting computer analysis. It was all there, but would we find the time to hear it? The instruments to interpret the steps of the dance?

Crossing the fold of the wrapper's edge were two leaf fingers: the tall bearded iris. The poet's flower. Recurring through time: Bellini, Dürer, Leonardo's ‘Madonna of the Rocks', the Ghent Altarpiece of the brothers Van Eyck. ‘Band of iris-flowers / about the waves' (H.D.) Iris, personification of the Rainbow. Black iris:
Verité, Starless Night
.

The word I wanted was the one my transcription of Peter Riley's tape sent me to the dictionary to check:
Sempervivum
!

 

‘Civilization ends at the waterline'

Hunter S. Thompson,

The Gonzo Salvage Co

There had been no point in sleeping. The dreams were too bad; they coloured the days that followed them. They previewed the agonies ahead of us. And anyway, after the first three months, you lose the habit. Then it does get interesting: guessing which strip of water you can safely walk across. I sat with my back, resolutely, to the river, and waited for Joblard to surface. The sculptor was grinning as he snored; an empty bottle nestled in the crook of his arm. It rested content: a sated babe. Primly, Joblard clucked his lips. He patted the bottle; and, waking to the light, smiled. He had forgotten what faced us.