Downriver (60 page)

I dragged the spurned and tattered rewrite from my pocket and shoved it across the table. Pencilled comments speared the margins: a messianic tutorial. ‘
Who is “I”?'
was the first controversy. An existential dilemma that stopped the present writer dead in his tracks. On that single incisive challenge the whole schmear hangs. ‘
Who is “I”?'
Answer that riddle, or get out of the maze. The slippery self-confessor, the closet De Quincey (I, Me, You, He), speaks of‘the Narrator', or ‘Sinclair': deflects the thrust of the accusation. The narrator exists only in his narration: outside this tale he is nothing. But ‘Sinclair' is a tribe. There are dozens of them: Scots, Jews, Scribblers, Masons, Cathars (even Supernaturals, such as Glooscap, the mangod of the Micmacs). It's an epistemophiliac disguise. A small admission to win favour: a plea bargain. And what gives this self-designated ‘I' the right to report these events? How deeply he is implicated? Is he (I) a liar? Can we (you) trust him?

This was beginning to pinch. I (‘I') let my gaze drift down the lovingly assembled beds of words until I (‘we') arrived at the sentence reading: ‘The man who had shot, and lost, the definitive Minton.' ‘
WHAT IS THIS?
' screamed Bagman's reasonable pencil.
What
is this? As if he suspected it (Minton) of being some species of effete English porcelain. Should I have provided a footnote on the Soho Scene in the 1940s and 1950s, on John Deakin the photographer, on John Minton? Should I have credited Daniel Farson? Was Minton now forgotten? Even among all the kiss-of-life attempts to revive the flaccid corpse of British Romanticism? Did it matter if these strange names remained unidentified, mysterious? Which names, if any,
would
have been acceptable? Mervyn Peake? The wrong sexual persuasion. The Roberts? Colquhoun and MacBryde? Worse. They only exist as fictions in the untrustworthy memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross. Francis Bacon, perhaps? Too many of them. And they're all too famous. (But you will notice if you check back to the first tale that I have, in fact, acted on Bagman's excellent advice, and rejigged the sentence.)

Now the editor was warming to his task. He made short work of the knockabout book-dealing picaresque featuring the Nigerian, Iddo Okoli. (Racist? Afro-American sales?) A firm grey line removed it entirely. We (Bull and I) limped along in a nervous truce for several more pages. ‘Destot's gap' was the next provocation, eliciting an agonized ‘
HUH???
' The medico-theological debate over the point of passage of the nails, hammering Jesus the Nazarene to the cross (palms of the hand or gap in the wrist?), had gone unremarked in Cambridge. And why not? There were sexier topics out there in the slums and shanties of magical realism. Travel was sexy. Poverty was sexy. The New Physics was sexy. Sex was
not
sexy. (Except for Martin Amis.)

The jig was up. All patience expended, Bagman bombarded the innocent pretensions of the flinching text. ‘Bishopsgate Institute?' he snarled, ‘
what
Institute?' The
Princess Alice
went down for the third time, cleaved by the editor's anguish. ‘Too compressed.
What
slaughter?
What
psychopath?
What
nickname?' Guilty. Guilty on all counts. Tumbled. I (I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I,I) have been found out. Deconstructed.
Spike it
. ‘Let's do lunch sometime and talk about happier things.' Bull remains ‘a big fan' and begs to be the first to refuse further ‘sketches', ‘evocations of the city not dissimilar from Tilbury'. So there might still be an outside chance of getting my spoon in the gravy.

‘That's
Butts Green
for you,' said Sofya, ‘those dinky sentence rhythms, straight out of Enid Blyton. I love Bull. He'll change tack when he stops having to read bedtime stories.'

The trouble with
Butts Green
, I believe, is not Bull – but his readers. The magazine is a huge market-forces success. A jewel in the Widow's crown. It's a way of participating in literature without getting your hands dirty. It synthesizes and it addicts: culture crack for provincials. Mail-order sampling. ‘The Last Show' in your pocket.

I was rapidly being written out of my own story. ‘Saul didn't think you'd be up to doing yourself,' Sofya said. ‘He thought you were too shifty and, basically, too bald. He's changed his mind after two days of Milditch. But he's absolutely ecstatic about Dryfeld. He told me to thank you. It's really the haircut he's fallen in love with. We're calling Dryfeld's agent as soon as we get back to the office. Saul wants him under personal contract.'

Dryfeld? It was getting worse. If we had to have Dryfeld in the film – couldn't we afford an impersonator? I knew that Raymond Carver was dead, but I'd settle for Alexei Sayle. We'd have to act fast. The medics kept telling Dryfeld if he didn't stop drinking, he'd be dead in six months. The man was a teetotaller.

I'd only ventured to Tilbury in the first place because Milditch put me on to a junkshop that turned out to be a howling dog. I asset-stripped a few of the more blatantly fictional elements – and ran for my life. I was then bullied by
Butts Green
into cutting and cutting again; line-editing, clarifying, glossing, paraphrasing and – finally – casting to the winds. Only to discover, as I lurched
from the river's grasp, that my fragmented nightmare was being captured on videotape. The film existed before the book could be completed. The book had therefore been declared redundant by all interested parties. And they wanted the advance returned by the first post. If I could find an even hungrier hack to ‘novelize' the mini-saga then I wouldn't have to pursue this madness to its inevitable climax. I could sit back and read the pulp version in the comfort of my own room. Later, after relishing the exhibitionist wrapper, I could sell it.

Sofya told Nickoll we'd walk on, ahead of the crew, to the Fort. They had only to can a selection of failsafe cutaways and it was a wrap. They could break for lunch. The technicians wouldn't, at any price, eat a second time in the World's End. They were going to shoot off with their Egon Ronays to road-test a place near Stanford-le-Hope.

Joseph Conrad lived there once, I thought. But the only scholar I knew (an ex-postman) who had tried to search out the house, achieved nothing more remarkable than an old man, spitting in a hedge, claiming descent from Tunstall, who – he said – either shot, or was shot by, Billy the Kid. He couldn't be sure. But it was definitely in the film. One of the family came over once from New Mexico, wearing a white stetson and a string of liquorice around his neck: took photographs. ‘We're searching out all the living Tunstalls in Essex, England. And then in Ireland.' The old man didn't say whether he qualified. He'd never heard of Conrad anybody, not in Stanford-le-Hope. No Poles of any description.

The road between Tilbury Riverside and the World's End is the strangest in Europe. A bank of earth (mercifully) hides the river. Unwary tourists usually opt for the elevated route, enjoying an uninterrupted vista of mud and tide: the timeless roof-stacks (in slate, mustard, replacement vein tissue) of Gravesend. Distance lends a false appeal. Imagined pleasures will never be sweeter. And yet some lingering masochistic fret sends us trundling down the low road: at the mercy of white-knuckle winos in
clapped-out Cortinas, convinced that last orders have already been called. The marshes, to the north, are the training ground for a pack of the rat-hunting undead; who are armed with nothing worse than lead-tipped clubs and blood-rusty forks.

Sofya pauses to take a snapshot. It is certainly a spectacle: this foolishly reclaimed swampland. Let them have it, I say. Give it all back to the waters. Erase these sunken levels, these broken industrial toys. Sheds. Straw bales. Pylons. Ditches. Undeclared violations. I'm beginning to love it. That's how far I have degenerated.

Jon Kay can't cope with the size of the sky. He's snorting like a horse, an asthmatic Welsh cob. Joblard and Sofya are relishing the discovery of a scatter of teenage female runaways, lying in (rag) heaps beside the road, legs spread, auditioning for
La Strada
; smoking with little dry-lipped sucks, not inhaling – blowing out a suggestive rinse of bad air, picking brown tobacco shreds, with chipped and scarlet nails, from between their tiny teeth. Self-packaged White Trash hopeful of Russian sailors. Ready to lean over backwards for international relations. By the state of their dress, they have been waiting for months in the couch grass. The set was far too theatrical for us to consider: a promo-nostalgic 1950s blackout. Jon Kay felt comfortable for the first time since we stepped ashore. He even scored an American cigarette.

Manhandling a multicolour bicycle towards the World's End was a glamorous dyke: a stone-freezing scowl and bellow of greeting revealed the exotic creature as the lowlifer's lowlifer, Dryfeld. The perceived universe of logical linear progressions was coming apart in front of our combat-weary eyes.

‘Great ass – for a bull,' Kay acknowledged with a low whistle. ‘Must be the cycling. I bet she really stomps those pedals.' He leant forward to test with a shaky paw the tightly-corseted pudding, the muscular cleavage of his fantasy. He was lucky to miss. The rest of us were too far gone in civilization to allude to Dryfeld's startling change of image. He must have grown tired
of beggars and golfing tweed. He was getting too well known. Women rushed up to touch the hem of his skirts. Children threw stones.

He had cracked Milditch's legendary junkshop, while waiting for his turn to face the cameras. There was nothing else to do. He'd eaten two breakfasts. And the nearest
serious
bookshop was sixteen miles down the track. So he put the frighteners on the junkman and came away with a satchel of trade catalogues. The film business excited him. He was crazy with energy. He out-wolfed Wolfit. He laughed so loud and so long that falcons lifted from the grain silos, to hover like heraldic totems gone, badly, to seed. They'd been brought in, so Joblard informed us, to finish off the pigeons. It didn't work. Now the silos themselves were awaiting demolition.

We cowered, and pretended that we did not know this all-too-public aberration. Dryfeld was putting the wind up even the hardened drinkers, lying under the warped pear trees in the pub garden; their faces buried in grey alopecic scuff. Tottering on six-inch heels, he gave the best imitation I have ever seen of the Widow's television walk: the way she reels at the camera, hurdling across hot coals, and expecting some able-bodied male, some promotion seeker on the far side, to hold out his arms and catch her.

The pub was of no interest to the fruit-sucking Dryfeld. He stormed on towards the Fort. And – as he swayed and pitched – he roared out the story of his transformation: to our shame and to the undisguised delight of a party of smutty schoolboys with loosened ties and substance-abused blazers.

It appeared he had developed a fancy for the company of children. Young children. He liked to spend money on them. And hear what they had to say. He could freely indulge in childhood pleasures denied at the first attempt: helicopter flights, picnics, museums, opera – the spread of the city. He developed a decided craving for the position of Nanny. (Eat your heart out, Bette Davis.) Also: he wanted to model the uniform. He knew
he had the legs for it. Sadly, he met with a series of unreasonable and unnecessarily abrupt rejections. Most wounding. He was discriminated against. The job specification required the applicant to be experienced. And female.

No problem. Surgery was on the cards, but King's Cross was nearer. (He was buggered if he'd live with all the other stitched changelings in Hay-on-Wye.) He'd read in the
Guardian
about a place where you could get yourself done over in an afternoon. ‘It was amazing,'he repeated, entranced, reliving the experience. ‘Quite amazing! It lasted three hours. Assisted shower, powder, underclothes, razor, seminar in make-up. They wanted to shave off my eyebrows. I wasn't having that. “Tuck 'em under a Veronica Lake wig,” I said. I drew the line at forking out extra for a studio portrait, “built in from the shadows – in the style of Edward Steichen”. They couldn't guarantee I'd look like Marion Morehouse, so I told them to stuff it. Marched across the road to the station, and queued, with all the other claimants, for the photobooth. The transvestites seemed to be army officers. It was like a regimental reunion in there. They collected their snapshots in plain manilla envelopes; tore them in half, unopened, dropped them in the bin on the way out – and were home in time for dinner. Sheer waste! I'm auctioning mine to the highest bidder from a rival magazine.'

There was an armed guard on the Watergate of the Fort. We were scanned and registered by the red eye of a swivelling, vulture-necked camera. Another heritage prison. Alcatraz among the marshes. Visit the felons in complete safety, and rattle their cages. A day out for all the family. Test the electric chair at a carefully monitored voltage: snug in a pair of authenticated rubber bloomers. Amuse the kiddies.

They'd sold more tickets in the first two weeks than in ten years of boring Armada tableaux, restaged battles, cases of waxworks. The dummies had been melted down and replaced with genuine recidivists. Even as we stood waiting for the machine to process Sofya's pass, another black-window van pulled up and
shook out a stock of assorted Scotsmen: poll-tax refusniks, street-fighting parliamentarians, ginger-haired nationalists. The underground catacombs of the Highlanders were waiting. They had been whitewashed and fitted with pallets. Credit-worthy villains were given the opportunity to buy their own cells.

My outlandish improvisation, in advance of the truth, was made actual. But Sofya, a professional researcher, could not escape from the woeful inadequacy of mere facts. An unpleasant inclination towards verifiable evidence. She cruelly pointed out that the prisoners taken by Butcher Cumberland after Culloden had not, according to historical records, been held underground – but were housed in the now demolished barrack block. The passages of the powder magazine were an addition from the last war. Therefore my story was pure fiction. And my fiction was corrupted by its desire to tell a story. Lies, all lies. The text was untrustworthy; especially when it lectured its audience like a logorrhoeic tour-guide.