Downriver (66 page)

As we suffer the steady pull of the gradient between Scrapsgate and the Minster, it is clear that the flog-a-gaff clusters have been confined to the lowlying swamplands: a ghetto of carrier-bag cash, the actual stuff, the grubby fifties. Now, uphill, the stained-glass arcady of sunrise suburbia mixes unself-consciously with captured farmhouses. We are cutting through social and temporal distinctions as precise as geological strata. My blisters are the size of spring onions. The worse my surroundings, the more I suffer. Perhaps Sinclair senses this; he pauses. There is a heart-stopping vision, back down a tributary street, to the sea. One of the container ships is floating into the liquefied sky, a signature, an ephemeral plague transport. Cloud under it, and cloud above. Masts have grown from the telegraph poles. A portent, a death ship; a black galleon moving, with the inevitability of a Jamesian paragraph, into a darkened stadium of rainclouds.

One curious thing: the condition of my feet deteriorates catastrophically but my spirits, perversely, rise. I am sufficiently uncomfortable to encroach upon the borders of ecstasy. Move over St John of the Cross, I'm levitating. This is a homecoming. I cannot walk, I can hardly crawl; I slide, weightlessly, over hedges and neat envelopes of lawn. The long bend at the crest of the hill – before we turn to the business of the Minster and the Abbey – shelters a cottage hospital. We have to investigate. My mother was a nurse. This is (what's left of it) the only hospital on the island. So much I know. I have never before wanted to push matters any further. To any revelation.

Dead on cue, Special Effects sends a raft of rain in from the sea to blind us. Soft, persistent; streaming. We were soon drenched to the bone: a slow soak, layer by layer, through jackets, undershirts, trousers, pants, socks. Garments, dulled by familiarity, clung in a promiscuous embrace; a new skin, a hybrid of cold rubber and wet fleece. We steamed where we stood: a pair of drunks, not sure whose leg it was we had just pissed down. But the discovery (the hillcamp) was worth it.

From the street the hospital was unexceptional, a white-flag victim of the cuts in the health service. Empty offices flickered with faulty, epilepsy-inducing light tubes. Everything portable had been wheeled away to the nearest junk dealer. We were not discouraged. We penetrated the standard semiotic confusion of contradictory notices, warning the radically infirm, the malingerers, to seek help elsewhere. Treatment was off. Wounds would have to be self-stapled, while traumatized casualties swam to the mainland. Impressive boards listed all the services that the hospital did
not
operate. Temporary wartime huts offered the reward of physiotherapy to anyone fit enough to reach them: without the effete assistance of a discontinued bus service.

Beyond all these mist-shrouded props, we found it: the site we did not know, until now, that we were searching for. The enclosed garden. It was overlooked by an ivy-contaminated tower that rose from the main barrack block of the hospital. But it remained hidden in an overgrown hedge of thorns. Its shape was a bruised oval; a drained swimming pool, innocent of flowering plants and frivolous decoration. I was gripped by an excitement that scarcely related to the modest attributes of this exhausted patch. I led the way down a dim tunnel of arched and dripping greenery, and in through the concealed gateway.

I don't know what I expected to find. This was a place defined largely by what it lacked: twisted stirrups of iron suggested that something had recently been torn from the ground, which was gouged and ripped in the struggle. The purpose of the garden was to provoke images of absence, elimination. The people, the
plants, the objects that had gone. How should we read the scars? Orthopaedic benches? Meditation platforms for the terminally ill? Floats for the performance of death chants? Classical statuary? Hothouses? Furnaces? The primitive chapel of a fever sect?

Then I noticed the gravestones, and my madness had a focus. This was so much the scene I should have expected that I was shocked; shamed, gobstruck. It was quite unreal. In the fictional twin of this event, which was playing simultaneously in my mind (as Sinclair intended it should), I would now uncover a startling and significant secret. My mother's name, or some other scrap of family history, would be chiselled on to one of these fire-blackened, moulting placards.

I leant forward to examine the weathered markings on the ring of a recumbent stone figure. The hand moved. It clawed at my throat. ‘I knew that one day you would come. Now I can die in peace. Kiss me, son.' The old gardener sat up, reaching out his arms. The disgraced surgeon who had stayed on, anonymously, to tend this bleak sanctuary.

That would be the conventional ending. The curtain call. The bullshit. I laughed aloud at the inadequacy of my invention. I'm no Edgar Poe. I can't stack the adjectives like H. P. Lovecraft. There was nothing, nobody. No message. A graveyard had been cleared, tidied away, to create this lachrymose and unvisited park. The bones of the dead must have gone into some communal pit. The larger memorial slabs rested – a convocation of umbrellas – against the thorn hedge. Lichen invaded the powdery whiteness, the death cosmetic. I stared hopelessly at forgotten names. Nothing. Let them go. I smiled at the discovery of a ‘Julius Caesar', whose pretensions ended here, smothered in poison ivy.

I moved from stone to stone, running my fingers into the trenches of meaningless letters, tracing the words, mouthing them like a convict with reading difficulties. The quest could have ended on the instant. I had no urge to continue. I was ready to join the stones. The trenchcoat I had bought in Holland, a respectable field-green, was transformed by the remorseless
panels of soft, seafret rain. It petrified. It was spotted, blotched, soaked with grey earth: flecked like an apple leprosy. I was drip-fed on stone. Meltwater ran down the channels of my spine.

Why didn't the bodies float out from their pit, logs of leather? The rain was here to stay. It was apocalyptic rain. Washing the gravestones clean. They were propped open, a Book of the Dead. Stone pages. The language was impenetrable; it meant nothing.

Lights burnt in the hospital tower. Birth. The knife. I forced myself back into the pain of my raw heels. I rubbed them, with steely purpose, against my stiff new boots. I provoked the pain to answer me: my only oracle. I was insanely determined to find endorsement in this drowned field. Or to die in the attempt. I had no idea how much further we had to walk. This was one of the great moments of my life. A true epiphany, without hope of reward.

Sinclair (of course) has his camera out. Poking it in my face. Hoping that some meaning he can subvert will be returned to him in a flat packet from the chemist's shop. He knows there are spots of rain on the lens, which he hopes – by an act of faith – to add to the truth of what he has captured. He shadows my movements, watching and frowning as I open myself to the experience: he exploits, annotates, measures, anticipates the final stages of the journey. There is never anything he needs to find: another one, one more, a new sentence.

I had been wrong for so many years, living under an inhibiting illusion.
I
was not the orphan. My father might be anywhere. Here. From this damp hilltop, I felt his breath of freedom: the space, the scraggy fields running down to an ordinary sea. I felt his life: voyager at Sheerness, surgeon, mechanic, porter, imbecile – it didn't matter. I was charged with a liberating rush of irresponsibility and courage. I could not be condemned to repeat a life that had never happened. What I had of my mother was her youth. And that lives on, that is what I retain. A girl of twenty-two walking towards the Court, arm in arm with her own mother, both dressed for a day in town. Now I was able to accept the
image related to me as a family fable. I remembered (without seeing) the movement of it; lurching and knowing and wanting. An infant on my adopted mother's shoulder, carried to the chamber where our relationship would be formalized. I was looking back, grinning – as in recognition. The involuntary exercise of my lips later interpreted as a smile. ‘He saw his real mother and he blessed her.' In her youth. Then. She is fixed. I will leave her, leaving nothing; losing nothing, holding on to that strength. The blessing of a
double
parentage, of blood and of habit. The habit of love. Years of trust bringing me back, returning me to a new beginning.

But my loss has to be exchanged: the wet green stones become mirrors of transformation. Sinclair (the watcher) is the true orphan. His father dead – and his mother, apparently, detached into a mental realm to which he is denied all access. A dream country where the landscape of childhood is trespassed by a son who is older than her father; a place where unavoidable damage occurs, heals, readies itself to strike once more. Familiar gardens are made awkward by the presence of a one-legged dog. There are afternoon encounters with condescending royalty. ‘I'm so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,' said the Queen Mother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.'

It is clear.
He
is the solitary. A deep black pool has spread out between himself and his ancestors. They are benevolent, remote; but they no longer see him. He does not interest them. He is alone. And yet – at the same time – because he led me here, my own sense of family and belonging is so intense that I can turn on my heel, walk away, and never again need to look back.

V

The vicar who had posted in the porch his ‘Seven Reasons Why Women Should Not be Ordained as Priests' simply did not notice us. He cannoned into me, and recoiled with a leap of undisguised horror. The notion of anyone wanting to poke about in the building before banking hours was abhorrent to him. As always, the Church Commissioners had appointed a Harvard Business School jock to neutralize a site that could, however remotely, be connected to folk memories of ritual and mystery. Medieval shrines are invariably guarded by an unenthusiastic dogma; a plodding sense of responsibility towards the world at large, and nowhere in particular. The further Synod can remove their prayer-negotiable problem from any sanctified enclosure, the deeper their concern. Ethiopia, Mexico City? Always worth a poster. The church is a multinational octopus in the process of rationalizing UK branches that refuse to pay their own way. Our hypermetropic iconoclast obviously loathed every last legend-infested stone of his inefficiently designed and expensively lit workspace.

I sat on a chair near the De Shurland tomb to excavate my feet, plaster over the showier blisters. It was difficult to adjust to this concentrated atmosphere. The light was dust. The church itself an ivory sepulchre. I steamed like a gun-dog brought in from the marshes. Shurland ignored me. He had worse problems to consider. He lay on his side, back to the world; his legs twisted in the rigours of an attack of acute appendicitis. He offered his cheesy skirts to the penknives of amateur calligraphers. At his feet, well within kicking distance, was the mantic skull of Grey Dolphin: his death, his familiar.

This was certainly a curious object, uncontoured by generations of hot hands – like the buttocks of a much-loved public lady. The relic had been fondled into a high-definition sheen:
irradiated. It could have served as a lantern for primitive amputations. It gave off a talkative, smoky-grey light which had the capability of penetrating flesh and all of its shadows. But it was mutilated. The spiked ears were gone: enforcing silence, releasing other attributes. The long skull was a bandaged hammer. It reminded me of something I once made, based on a study of Siberian horse sacrifices: but which had subsequently disappeared. And was therefore a special favourite. The Minster carving looked more like a sick crocodile than a horse. A crocodile imagined by someone who had only read of such creatures. A blind craftsman working from distantly relayed messages must have made it. A mail-order croc. The rictus of its fat-lipped mouth had been most unnaturally extended by the Swiss Army knives of boy scouts, frustrated by an annoying scarcity of stones in the hoof. This was a talking horse; a wiseacre, bridled into silence. If I gazed long enough at the skull I would find myself stuck with transcribing and interpreting its miserable monologue. (I knew it would sound like a choric wail of poets, blathering about the Arts Council, the metropolitan critical nexus, the iniquity of publishers' readers.) I avoided the dead eyes; pebbles hammered into sockets too tight to hold them. The head was spooked, triggered. It was open for consultation.

Worse was to follow. I glanced from my exposed and swollen foot to the leering equine skull: the connection was unavoidable. There was a close family resemblance. My foot, neatly severed and dipped in plaster of Paris, could stand in – sorry! – for Grey Dolphin, when he takes a sabbatical to roam the shingle. And there is something else: the wretched caput is a three-dimensional map of the Isle of Sheppey. The split of the mouth is the Long Reach of the Swale. The right eye is the hill of Minster. The left eye, distorted by the angle from which I view it, marks the still sacred church of St Thomas the Apostle at Harty; once a separate island. And now the last refuge of the light. A blinding flash from Sinclair's camera scorches the dim recess. The skull winks.

I'm catching his madness. I'm starting to believe what I see;
or – more accurately – I'm starting to see what I believe. The three-dimensional map is a conceit. The head is no more than a topographical model of what the island
should
be. A model to which every pilgrim has contributed by scratching his rune into the chill flesh, or cutting his initials into a ploughed field. Mutilate the horse's stone skull and you mutilate the living earth. The land is forbidden to respond.

Sinclair is lurking behind me, somewhere in the shadows. I am articulating
his
vision: that is the effect of his silence. I am
forced
to remember another map, so detailed we could have dug it out of the ground and used it for navigation.