Downriver (63 page)

I'm convinced: the agent of transformation is still active within these walls. I recognized, but did not fear it. I avoided mirrors. I breathed slowly, with comical deliberation. I knew I would have to come back, sooner or later, to this trap. All those years picking at the scabs of Whitechapel, fondling safe (confessed) images, visiting the butchered sites as if they were shrines: paddling in mysteries. I held off the frenzy, stayed out of it, within rigidly defined margins of safety: a well-informed tourist. I faked it, molten orgasms of righteous indignation. There was always another house to return to, a home, locked within never-revealed systems of protection. It's terrifying how quickly all that can change. A few abrupt twists of fate. A phonecall extended beyond the demands of courtesy. A third drink. I've paid my dues to the furies. And here we are, on set, in the long room, looking affectionately down on the business of the streets; or back, the hidden courtyards, the sleepers on the roof. Shameless. I live here. I belong.

I tasted my coffee. The jiffy bag lay unopened on the desk. I had no desire to break this moment and unstaple the honey-crusted package. Sinclair's runic scribble: it gets smaller all the time. He has to write now. The phone's been cut off, and he daren't set foot in Whitechapel. With his bald dome and spectacles, his
notebook, he might be mistaken for Salman Rushdie. They'd hack him to pieces on the cobbles of the brewery. The atmosphere has been fouled up for ever. Gang fights. Banners. Burnings. Aggravation. We all feel guilty, guilt as a constant, a hangover of guilt: even if we haven't read a word of it. There are no sides to take.

The padded envelope, with its franked red exhortation, is obviously a communication from Sinclair's publishers, used for the second time.
KEEP COLLINS INDEPENDENT
. ‘Colin's what?' I ad-libbed compulsively. Sinclair thinks I can't punctuate or spell, that my lips move when I read. I don't disillusion him. That's one of the least offensive of his fictions. This portrait of me as a genial drunkard (lowlifer, mutant, dabbler in the black arts) is all nonsense: a shorthand convenience. I'm no Jonsonian ‘Humour', ready for my knockabout interlude when the narrative drive is flagging. But I go along with it. It leaves me free to pursue my own much fiercer self-interrogation. It's too comfortable to present ourselves through our flaws, to play them up, become clown, dupe, holy fool. Like a type in a medieval passion play, you finish by impersonating a single quality. ‘The Man Who Stutters'or ‘The Man with One Leg'. You are gulled into wearing a mask that somebody else has selected for you from the literary prop basket. You are the failure of another man's inspiration. I want to fail in a grander cause.

It amuses Sinclair, after three or four Russian stouts, to pretend to believe my name is really
Jobard
, the French for ‘ninny', ‘simpleton'.
Joblard (sic)
is how he has addressed the jiffy bag.

It might be a book. I'll have to open it. I'll risk a squeeze. At least, it won't be a bill. The electricity can't be cut off. We haven't got any. We live by the natural rhythms of the day. Even among all this chaos –
especially
among this chaos – everything is slow and calm. Dust motes spiralling in trumpets of sunlight. The persistent drip of water wearing away the basin. We are waiting on the unhurried dictation of an unborn child.

The large jiffy bag contains a smaller one, too small to hold a
book. It is addressed to Sinclair in a hand I do not know. What could this second bag have contained? Sinclair has nothing but books. He eats books. He pays with books. He sleeps on them. He'd probably sleep
with
them if he could. He begets books. There's also a letter. I'll save the letter. One thing at a time. Heat more water in the pan. We still have gas – until the end of the month. Another filter paper, another mug of coffee. Getting weaker with each infusion: no more than an
aide-mémoire
, recalling the sensation of previous cups; and – by way of that sensation – the cluster of thoughts and images, the day dreams, floating to the surface as I sipped before, and as I sip now; my eyes firmly closed in creative indolence. Somewhere, there is half a Gozitan cigar to be found: marking my place in a notebook, shredded by the opening and closing of the hinges, perfuming the creamy paper with dark and oily resins.

I dig out the staples from the fat lip of the envelope – one by one, with a fork; lay them around the circumference of my plate. The hooped silver bones of a centipede. I study the arrangement. Pick up one of the staples and lick it. Uninteresting, flavourless. I shake the packet. Something wriggles out, falls reluctantly on to the table. This is much better, the colour is superb. A bruised purple, infected with carmine: that must have been the original state. Soutine's impasto. Colour that's hung on a hook until it's ready to declare itself. It shifts. It prevaricates. It broadcasts its history. Dies, regresses into a morbid, flagellant blue. A slate licker's punishment. I lift it on my fork, bring it close to my lips – as a rasher of dead veal. A grey corpse cut. Waggling. Six inches of meat fallen from a hanged man's mouth.

What am I dealing with,
exactly
? The pith of a skinned lizard? Too dark; too much blood in it. The tannin-dyed cock of a Tibetan priest, beaten out flat on a stone? I don't want to think of this sample as what it actually is, or was. Or what it is now intended to be. What does it want –
of me
? It's altogether less painful to stall, to speculate, construct post-Martian similes. The thing has been savagely divorced from its natural setting, the
purse of wet meat, the talk box. A human tongue is, at the best of times, an obscenity. A naked muscle, slithering with bacteria-marinated mucus, food memories; its papillae travestying lime-white kettle fur. And this tongue has not been decently amputated; it has been torn, uprooted, ripped from the throat. It lies on the desk like a silent scream. As I poke it reflectively with the tines of my fork, it twitches. It persists: it has something to say. It is still eager to rap, to taste, to forewarm of pleasures as yet unrisked. Scorpic to the end, it arches to the touch. It spits defiance.

I swear this is not my affair. I don't know the tongue. The tongue does not know me. The smaller jiffy bag is clearly addressed to Sinclair (or ‘St Clair', as they have it). It's his business, his mess. Now I will have to read his bloody letter. The usual see-through copier paper, crammed to the margins; but – this
is
rather remarkable – it's written in his own hand, his holograph. No typewriter. He must be serious. Desperate. He's cracking up. I'll throw the thing away. I'll try another coffee transfusion. Kill the taste of the water. The taste in my mouth.

II

Haggerston, 198–

Joblard:

a favour. You will by now have opened the mysterious package and performed your own autopsy on the small gift that arrived for me this morning, innocently lurking among the usual clutch of threats, begging letters, final demands – and poems written in red Biro on lined paper, postmarked
HALIFAX
, and emanating, without a doubt, from Hebden Bridge.

That's the time of day to live through. From then on it's a quiet slog to survival. I squeeze my heart back into my chest. I start to shake as I listen for the postman's footsteps. I'm crouched behind the door, sweating. I've been there for hours. All night?
Possibly. I've forgotten what it was like to sleep in a bed. The rattle of the brass flap, the aggressive slither of envelopes cascading on to the mat, has become – for months now – something of an ordeal. My hands tremble. I can't decide whether to smash what's left of the furniture, or to break into tears. Often, I'm done in for the day. Another one gone, shot. Dealers are ruthless in setting up meetings, for which they never show. Poets? Poets are the worst. Don't
ever
get involved with poets. Stick with the pulp boys, the rippers and gougers. They're pussy cats. Edit the belly-bursters, the revolving head merchants. All delightful conversationalists. Poets? The sound of the word and my knuckles are turning white. They are rabid correspondents, openly psychotic, proud of it, proud of their galloping paranoia. They issue threats by the hour, polemics, circulars of hate. You take your life in your hands if you reply to one of their mad spiels. Carry heavy life insurance before you offer veiled criticism of a stanza. Reject one? You're dead. Accept one? Worse, they want to sit on your shoulder and watch you love every last syllable.

It's cruel. My creditors are pressing cheques on me, but they return like homing pigeons. Tax assessments, all different, all massive, double by the week; invoking punitive penalties. Publishers sue me for work I have no recollection of taking on. I've promised ‘afterwords' for books that have not yet been written. I won't bore you with the domestic traumas: death, disease, cash-pleas. The usual lightweight stuff. I can
taste
madness, see it from the window. It would be a relief to let go, to gibber like all the other blanked cancellations; wander off down the middle of the road, looking for the right bone-crusher. So what's new? Nothing. There's just more of it. And my ability to climb out, to watch it happening, is going, going, gone. How long can I stave off the onset of stone craziness by the trick of writing about it?

By now you will certainly have smoked the second half of your mandrake root cigar, and you will have succumbed to another cup of coffee before turning, reluctantly, to my note. That's good. (Do you feel that you're playing a part in a spiked
fiction? I used to. It was OK. When it's scriptless, that's much tougher.) The slippery hint you are poking around on your plate is not a subtle one; though, you might consider, not without its own bleak humour. Don't worry: I can identify the source of the tongue (ugh!) The pathology, with which we have been confronted, has been squeezed like tomato paste in a Mafia video. But I'm afraid it's more serious than that. The thinking behind this gesture is coolly pragmatic. In other words, they know exactly what they're doing.

‘They?' you ask.
They
. Here we go. The old conspiracy circuit. Bear with me. Please. The object itself, the glossa, was stapled to a portion of card torn from a bookdealer's catalogue. There's a man I know in Upper Tooting who trades under the flag of convenience of ‘Ferret Fantasy', and who habitually fills in any space left at the end of his price list with a few lines of domestic intelligence or biblio-banter; before, cordially, signing off. His name is Locke. The torn corner of lemon-coloured catalogue which formed the base for the uninviting open sandwich I received in the post had the single word,
Locke
, ringed in felt-tipped pen.

The dealer, of course, has nothing to do with this. A jest on their part. A warning against fantasy, tale-telling. The gathering of arcane information. Imaginative speculations of no concern to civilians.

I know now that my friend, the over-inquisitive anarchist, Davy Locke, was the one who did not make it off the Island. He fell among Doges. He was worried by dogs. You are looking at what is left of him. I wish (with my life) that he could be reconstructed from that blood porridge exclamation. I know also that from here on in, I'm mute: a stone. A pebble on the beach.

I spent a long week combing the bunkers and the waste-lot gardens before I found Imar O'Hagan, who accompanied us to the Island on that phantasmagoric adventure. He'd lost everything, except his enthusiasm. His hole in the ground had been mysteriously flooded and his flat burned out. He was fanning the
ashes with court orders. The trays of frozen bats and snakes, the birds of prey were melting on the floor under a black and twisted fridge. Total extraction. Oral catastrophe. Pathetic lumps of flesh coal, feathers of tar. A death stink rising through the forensic acids. Imar's still crazy, still grinning. He's taking to the road. And he isn't coming back. He swears he's on the trail of an industrial tunnelling gimmick, pipes that eat their own way into the earth.

When he dropped in at the pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, for a farewell drink, the night before I found him, the landlord had a package waiting under the bar – delivered by hand. Nothing for the studio. A pair of ears and a key, rusted with blood. The full matador's tribute! Imar was being offered some friendly advice concerning ‘activities incompatible with his status' as marginal artist, and supplicant on the tolerance of society at large. Our delight in exploring and exploiting the anomalies and perversions of the secret culture (islands, docks, stations, airports, churches) had waned: it was, frankly, detumescent, limp as lettuce. Which brings me to the favour I want to ask.

My project, the grimoire of rivers and railways, is almost complete: its spiritual wellbeing is critical. I've gone over the top, invested too much. I'm sure it's very close to the end, but it lacks a final
tableau vivant
, a magical getout. The one that lets the narrator melt from the narration. Can we make our escape while the witnesses (the readers) weigh the plausibility of some tricksy conclusion? I can't carry on; or, rather, I can participate, provoke the action, but I cannot report it. For a whole dreary catalogue of reasons, this has become impossible. Anything I touch transforms itself into a fresh metaphor for pain and anguish, burns those around me, leaves me unharmed. I want to offer you the protection of the narrator's role: I want
you
to keep the record of our trip to Sheppey.

You know what this year has been like: a motor-neurone shuffle between surgical wards and crematoria, with the occasional day trip to the Magistrate's Court or a bookfair thrown
in for good behaviour. Now the ultimate blow has fallen and my typewriter, a senile heavyweight I have nursed for months, indulging all its petty-minded eccentricities, has decided to go ape. It's had enough. It's sick of the depressive muck and filth it's been forced to process. I didn't get my story done in time. My rental with fate was revoked.