Downriver (61 page)

But still I shouted: BELIEVE ME! I developed, on the instant, a theory of the shunting of place by time. (In itself, a slippery performance.) The validity of received emotion migrates through all civil and temporal boundaries. It is a wild thing, to be seized without reference to the proper authorities. To have any real understanding of the spiritual plight of the Highlanders, it was clearly necessary to shock our complacency, our endemic cynicism. To activate the image of the tunnels.

Wind-scored men held fast in dripping darkness. The list of dead names
is
‘true'. The clansmen and brothers were buried here: or thrown overboard in passage to Van Diemen's Land. I would not libel their suffering. You can purchase that list for £1 a sheet at the Gatehouse. The cells which were illegitimately populated by real ghosts are occupied once more. Manacled men shuffle through the cobbled parade ground. Kilts are issued to every prisoner. It is impossible to outrage the baroque realism of the dying century. Imagine the worse, and then double it.

The chief electrician of our skeleton film crew was cursing
at the wheel of the silver Mercedes he'd spent the morning turtle-waxing, on time and a half. His Rolex said one o'clock. And that was it. ‘Sorry, love. No can do. Dodgy ticker. I was up Harley Street, wasn't I? See the quack, Saturday? No heavy lifting whatsoever. He placed a definite embargo on it. And no tunnels. That's gospel. My life.'

He wedged a cellphone against the side of his head, like a malfunctioning electric razor. ‘Market's jumpy, darling. Bit of a panic on. Shittin' theirselves in the City. Don't like the vibes I'm getting off of Tokyo. Resignations, sex scandals. Respectable blokes topping theirselves. They're wading through blood out there. It's the old knock-on effect, know what I mean? The Mexican Wave, that's what you've got to look out for. I'm thinking of taking a bit of a poke at property. What d'you think? An option on a slaughterhouse in Poplar? Fancy a spin down there before it gets dark?'

Saul Nickoll could forget the Fort. As of now, the script was Fort-less. ‘Nahh, take hours,
hours
, to light it. You're looking at two days, darling, to nick your first shot. Always the same, innit? These poxy location jobs are a real fucker.' Advised the electrician, the last mastodon of the studio system. He screwed in the bulbs, pulled the switch, and waited for his redundancy cheque. Meanwhile: there were free lunches, petrol, and telephone bills. Can't be bad? The entire shoot revolved around the mood swings of this crusty mercenary.

As we backed off, Sofya touched my arm. She had an apology to make. ‘Graphics', it seemed, had lost the only illustration of the
Vessels of Wrath
. I had lent them the photocopy that Joblard made for me from a book of cabalistic ceremonies. They wanted to use these demonic forms to pep up the credits. Now the sheets had vanished into the corridors of the Corporation. And Joblard couldn't remember the book's full title. Was it published by Lackington & Allen? Was the author Francis Barrett? The London Library had no record of its existence.
Mammon, Astaroth, Apaddon
were cast upon the air.
Magot, Katolin, Dulid
and
Kiligil
skimmed over the surface of the waters. The princes, sub-princes, servitors and spirits were loose in the cutting rooms.
Anything
could happen.

We heard the crackle, and felt the heat, of a great bonfire in the centre of the parade ground of the Fort. Through the slit of the open Watergate we saw the orange flames leap. The archives were being cleared. Barrows of paper, bundles roped like sacrificial sheep, were wheeled out from the chapel. Old uniforms, furniture, ledgers. Ancient corners of paper floated over our heads like scorched moths. Teasing fragments, inconclusive extracts. Climbing and twisting, as they drifted above the wall and across the landscape: a nuclear snow falling in yellow mud, riding on the river.

Joblard stuck out his hand and caught a few of them: pressing them, without stopping to read or decipher, into the uncharted depths of his wallet.

III

‘Were there two sides to Pocahontas?

Did she have a fourth dimension?'

Ernest Hemingway

On the slipway beneath the gardens. We had crossed over. The fort slides from our sight behind its fortified wall. It might never have been built. A column of black smoke hangs in the still air like an Indian massacre. The comfortable Monopoly tokens of the Power Station, the Pub, and the Custom House dominate the riverline. But we are safely out of it. Put ashore. Gravesend. I've humped a couple of cans of petrol a mile back to the boat. Joblard has emptied the shelves of the off licence and the pie shop. And Jon Kay has secured two tiny plastic tubes from a car-accessory store to replace the broken oil pipes in the engine.
Will he agree to push on around the bend – through the Lower Hope into the Sea Reach?

Water slaps invitingly against the boardwalk. The
Reunion
rides the swell, almost as if she meant it. She was ready to sail on without us.

Eight hundred yards is the distance at which Tilbury becomes an acceptable reality. The gaunt figure of Saul Nickoll strides along the battlements, arms swinging stiffly at his sides. Sofya follows, hands in coat pockets, blinking behind silted spectacles: a refugee. She is fleeing from the culture of talk into the terrors of night and storm. And then Nickoll actually performs that terrible director's thing. A lenshead! I would never have believed it of him. He makes a frame of his fingers, glares at the gun emplacements, the sky, reads the light, blows on his fingers: soberly, shakes the brain oil, and waves the crew back to the cars.

The Whitbread Best Bitter trickles down Joblard's throat as the flogs the green cylinder to ease out the last brown droplets. He turns his attention to Jon Kay. ‘Where did you pick up the retread?' he asks, direct as always; pinching a fold of the junkie's loose skin between his finger and thumb. Joblard never meets a medical man without demanding a full and detailed account of his
very
worst experience: arms sucked into slow mincers, tongues amputated from freezer units, meat gangrene, internal organs cooked by microwave leaks.

Kay is lying at the water's edge: a missing engraving from the
Princess Alice
portfolio. His cheeks have hollowed, decompressed around an ice-lolly stick which has to double for the unlocated roach. All mortal expression has drained from him. The life-force has collapsed. His face is an old man's sarcoidal nates, penetrated by a rectal thermometer. He gawps in disbelief at the lead-curtained sky: the brown wash of body liquors. A marbled bar slab wiped of its stout puddles. Light is being slowly crushed towards the waterline.

‘We were crossing the desert. No, wait. Hold up. It was Turkey, was it?' All Kay's yarns opened to the same formula.
It steadied him. ‘Italy. Italy, man! We almost made it.' He smiled at his own presumption. ‘We pulled into an olive grove to check out the grass. Got to know just what you're selling, right? Before you monkey around with it. My mate's a bit road-crazy. Off-beam. Heat shivers. Those mirror things? Mirages, right! Been at the vino all morning. He sits down on the reserve petrol can.'

Kay laughs. An ugly sound. And we laugh with him. His foot, with a misplaced twitch of morphic resonance, drums against
our
red can: the one I lugged through all the recobbled walkways of Gravesend. The twin pictures begin to fit rather too neatly together. Gravesend, having no viable present, needs somewhere else to go. ‘The can's like a primus, right? My mate's wearing cutoff jeans. He's scalded. Jumps in the air. The cap blows. The can hits the ground. Wow! I'm drenched. And he's pissing himself, my mate. Drops his spliff. Ball of flame? Fried like a chicken, man. And I'm screaming; calling him every name in the book. Five months in some shitty clapshop in Naples. They peel my ass. The arms never took, did they? Stayed wet. But the tattoos came through. It wasn't a total disaster.'

After that, we drank in silence. A rusting container hulk, the
Paul Kelver
, Liberian-registered, ghosted like a phantom down the deepwater channel. Horses were penned in a makeshift corral on the deck: nervously, they sniffed the salt air. Dog food on the hoof. Gamey steaks for Belgian tables. Spavined
ragoût
, retired from the shafts of brewers' floats.

Pocahontas didn't want to go ‘home'. This was where they carried her ashore. She knew there was no passage back down the river. No way to re-enter the womb, without dying. The first seal had been broken. The waters had burst. She could never be readmitted to the society of the forest. She was crossed, baptized in holy water. She was another. She was Rebecka, ‘daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan, Emperor of Attanoughkomouck'. It was her husband, John Rolfe, the established man, who was forcing her. She had become the prestige symbol of the Virginia
Company: the silver band on a cigar, a cigar-store Indian. She was more potent as a symbol than as a living woman. Her husband was willing her death. He was colluding with darkness.

Coming into a strange land, she was installed at the Belle Sauvage, Ludgate; where William Prynne the pamphleteer denounced the performance of the
Tragical History of Dr Faustus
, with its ‘visible apparition of the devil on the stage'. A time of freaks and harbingers. The Scottish showman, Banks, exhibited his silver-shod horse at the same inn: walked it up the short hill to old St Paul's, where it succeeded in climbing to the top of the tower. (A horse with the eye of a crow? The river, once only, a horse map?)

London was posthumous. She had dreamed it. A child in the forest. Trees became the pillars of a great court. Gods appeared, painted in gold-and-white lead; shining, buried in layers of stiff cloth until they could scarcely move. The sun, the moon, and the stars were trapped upon a ceiling of overhanging branches: dark, feathered arms.

Twelfth Night, 1617. Pocahontas attended the court masque. Ben Jonson. She was accompanied by her stone-faced warriors, the Chickahominies: scornful, proud, holding to the costume of their tribe. The Indian Princess was modest; correct in manner and dress. She maintained an unsurprised dignity before these spectacles of savage transformation: she-monsters delivered of dancing puppets, clouds that spoke in rhyme. She was initiated into the mysteries of new and dangerous gods. It was the price of the bargain she made so many years before: when she reached out her hand to touch the apparition of a stranger.

John Smith was the first. But not her husband. She had been eleven years old when she saw him. He would not live by what he was. He would not live by what she knew him to be. The memory of the forest is not a recent memory. Memory is recognition. The people know this. Fate is memory, memory fate.

Returned to his own country, Smith delayed his visit. There was an awkward interview at Brentwood. ‘You did promise
Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason, so must I do you. Were you not afraid to come into my father's Country? Did you not cause fear in him, and all his people? And fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then, I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other.'

Betrayal. What is spoken cannot be unsaid. ‘Your countrymen will lie much.' But when their word is given in the way of business, they believe, it can be taken back. It will not stand. They look for interest, returns. Circumstances alter cases, they say. Each day is new. We wake to a different sun.

For Pocahontas, all this is heresy. A promise is a contract honoured to the final breath. Her beauty was in strength. The firm set of her mouth. The broad nose. Her features held no appeal for the courtiers, the men of affairs. Rebecka. Eleven years old, looking on John Smith (nameless name): divorced at once from her father's gods. Smith was her father. ‘Okeus, who appeareth to them out of the air. Thence coming into the house, and walking up and down with his strange words and gestures.' His presence revealed by freak winds, or ‘other awful tokens'. Her desire for him gave him a human shape, an outline she could bear. He came to the forest. He sat at the strings of the death-cutter with Purcell and Mullins. He spoke whatever it was they feared most to hear.

John Rolfe carried her aboard the
George
, in enforcement of duty. Along with their young son, Thomas. She was his to command. She knew she would die of it. Rolfe brought a dead woman on to the vessel. The houses of the city were grey, limed, huddled: a graveyard. Downriver: the fortified places, the church at Erith. The bleak marshlands, treeless, offered no cover for the spirits.

She was sinking. Lifted ashore in great pain at this hithe. We step aside, make room; we watch. She passes us: carried to the
Inn on a seaplank, by four sturdy sailors. Another corpse, beached and scrubbed. Another narrative claimant.

The shadow of the statue in St George's church fell across her window. A replica of William Ordway Partridge's Jamestown monument. More Hiawatha than daughter of Powhatan. Single feather, arms open, palms spread: making entrance in some lumberjack operetta. She was divorced from herself. There were two of her.

She opened her hand on the flowered bedspread. Stone entered her heart. What she was offering could not be accepted. The city was half-born, unmade. A plague dish. Let her become a charm against fever. Let her preach a quiet ruin upon the dockyards, the timbers. Soon the forest will march back to claim her. The sap to varnish her cheek. Her breath is wood smoke.

Our fuel tanks were topped and ready. We were invaded by waves of shame and courage, fear and anger: an inhuman desperation. (Like reading a letter from one of those unloved poets who turn rejection into full-blown martyrdom by way of the correspondence columns of the
TLS
.) ‘Let's do it,' said Joblard. ‘Let's try for Sheerness.'