Downriver (9 page)

A day's aimless exploration – walking to escape, rather than to make any discovery – had ended. I was, in truth, fleeing from an image in the Herb Garret of the old St Thomas's Hospital. Hanging in a corridor, outside the restored operating theatre, is an engraving of a late-eighteenth-century amputation. The wild-eyed victim struggles with the brawny porters. The saw is frozen, inches deep in the fat of his thigh. And, notable in the front row of the audience, is a formally-jacketed Pacific islander; fine-featured, beside the gross and sniggering assistants. This distinguished alien evidently reads the event as a required sacrifice, a test of will, an initiation – and not as some banal exhibition of virtuosity on the part of the surgeon. The mortal intensity of his expression drove me from that place and out along the Surrey shore; diving, after Tower Bridge, into the obscurities of Horselydown, Curlew Street, and Jamaica Road. If I had not broken away from the stranger's mesmeric gaze, I knew that I would very soon be seeing the precise shape of terror he had identified in the aqueous humour of the victim's eye. The engraving was another sorcerer's mirror. I was reading De Quincey then, and – obsessed with spiral stairways, opaque and smoky domes, potential mysteries – I decided to come back across to Shadwell and the homelands by way of the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

If you want to sample the worst London can offer, follow me down that slow incline. The tunnel drips with warnings:
DO NOT STOP
. Seal your windows. Hold your breath. This is not reassuring to the pedestrian, who wobbles along a thin strip of paving, fearing to let go of the tiled wall: working the grime into his icy hand. Your heart fills your mouth, like a shelled and pulsing crab. Why are there no other walkers? Traffic scrapes so narrowly past: the drivers are mean-faced and locked into sadistic
fantasies. White abattoir walls solicit vivid splashes of blood. You
feel
the brain-stem ineluctably dying, releasing, at its margins, dim and flaccid hallucinations.

Half-naked labourers splashing through the darkness, struggling in the heightened air pressure that was necessary to keep back the waters; falling victim to ‘caisson disease', as they excavated, inch by sullen inch, the mile and a quarter of clay and gravel.

DO NOT STOP
. Seal your windows. Read the scars and striations, and wonder if some juggernaut will spread you into them. Keep moving – but not
too
fast. Don't breathe so deeply. We're still going down. It's the wrong tunnel. I must be halfway to France. Don't hyperventilate. Even if I do get out of here, it's too late, my brain will be pumice stone. Stop then; rest, sit – you're dead.

The tunnel covertly opens a vein between two distinct systems, two descriptions of time. The outfall of the city is bled into drained marshlands. Electrical faults animate the rotting convict hulks, spin the wheels of coaches that clatter towards the channel ports. Reports of foreign wars, remote revolutions, run into the stacked trophy rooms of Empire. A voice is forged, a bone whisper, that belongs to neither bank. The tunnel is the ghost of something that never had the chance to die. Niches in the laboratory light of this shrine lack their votive skulls. Unfocused demands slide over the white tiles, searching for their oracle. The shaft should be a
vertical
stroke, and not linked to profit. But instead it was, as always, a boastful speculation, celebrated with bands and flags; stifling at birth its true purpose. The mists of Ultima Thule are dispersed by giant fans. To walk here is to blaspheme. The tunnel can achieve meaning only if it remains unused and silent.

I decided that ‘research' could be pushed just so far. I had been under the river for… I don't know, perhaps half an hour… when I came upon a ventilation shaft – with a stairwell. Blades spun angrily in their cage, paying out, with the worst of humours,
a sallow dole of air. A dark flourish of metal led upwards towards a hope of the light. I must, by now, be back on familiar ground. I felt certain I had trudged to the outskirts of Cambridge. I vaulted a low barrier, ignored the prohibitions, and dragged myself, step by step, into the cool night.

It was the unresolved hour, early evening; dim buildings bent over me: I walked away as fast as I could. But the townscape would not settle into any recognizable pattern. Disturbingly, everything was
almost
familiar – but from the wrong period. I was navigating with a map whose symbols had been perversely shifted to some arcane and impenetrable system.

I stopped a man in a donkey jacket, and asked him if he knew where the Highway was. He stared at me blankly, then mumbled something that sounded as if it had been inefficiently dubbed. A chemist's shop was open – but it was signed
Apoteker
. The realization came over me: I was dead. My hallucination in the Rotherhithe Tunnel was to believe that
I was still alive
! I must have stumbled, fallen; crushed my head. I was now beached in the suburbs of purgatory. I walked faster – clammy-handed, scrotum tightened with fear – trying to escape from my own shadow. I ran for the sanctuary of a squat and depressing building – because the lettering above its entrance appeared to be in English. I knew that the language of the dead would be a dreary cuneiform Esperanto. The building was revealed as the Evangelical Church of the Deaf! A hellish vision. Bleak sermons of damnation thundered at a cowed congregation, their faces hidden in their gloves. I sprinted. Paradise Row led me, through dark shells of decay, to a stygian river.

I searched the far bank for the outline of the Famous Angel. I willed the skeleton of Tower Bridge to rise from the waters. Close passageways between tenements brought me to Hope (Sufferance) Wharf, and the church of St Mary the Virgin. I passed through the gates and into the churchyard. There was a single distinguished tomb, railed off: beyond it, across cobblestones, I could see a finely proportioned late-eighteenth-century
house; oil lamps burning at an upstairs window. Standing proud from the building, floating, turned away from each other, were two children; stunted – but not quite deformed – fingers clutching books. If the books slipped from their grasp, the children would fall to the ground: the trancelike spell of this levitation would be shattered. They were both dressed in woad-extracted blue. The boy wore a full-skirted coat, with yellow hose; and the girl – a long dress, clean pinafore, mob cap. Their lips were not altogether innocent of cosmetic enhancement. They stared expectantly towards the river. Their stillness was unsettling, other-worldly. They were not so much children as incomplete adults. But no force that I could summon would turn them or bring them to speech. Their language would never be negotiable in this elided diocese.

The breath goes out of me. I collapse on to the preserved tomb: all its neighbours have been reduced to an unreconstructed heap of slabs and broken angelic forms. I am confronted with the legend of Prince Lee Boo. He is here: open-eyed, separated from me by a single sheet of stone – which becomes, as I lie facing him, a two-way mirror. I excavate his life from the letters on his grave. I am forced to listen to the story from his own lips, as they move in synch with the words that I read. The words are subtitles, cut in braille, for this kingdom of the deaf. Lee Boo is condemned endlessly to repeat the authorized version of what his short life has become. He must make do with whatever audience he can secure. Until he is allowed to move, I cannot move. That is the price the stone-mirror requires.

Dean Swift, infallible with rage, anticipated the affair by half a century. The East India packet, the
Antelope
, sailing from Rotherhithe in 1783, under the command of Captain Henry Wilson, was shadowed by its already-wrecked fictional namesake and double. A coral reef was breaking the surface, before the pilot was dropped at Gravesend. Sheerness, in the evening sunlight, became Oroolong. The surgeon, Lemuel Gulliver, led the crew
ashore, disappearing into the pink sand like a damp stain in the midday sun.

The islanders of Coorooraa, modest and sharp-witted, offered their friendship, while the mariners constructed a new schooner to carry them back to their homeland. In exchange, the white men demonstrated the magic of toys and bright instruments. They settled local wars. The chief (or Rupack), the Abba Thulle, decreed that his second son, Prince Lee Boo, should travel, under the protection of Captain Wilson, to learn the secrets of glass and fire. Wilson left behind him, as an article of good faith, Madan Blanchard; a feeble-minded youth who gloried in the honour of his selection for this solitary – and lifelong – glory.

By this typically one-sided act of enterprise trading, Lee Boo was imported into Rotherhithe as exotic ballast. He was paraded at balloon-launches, prize fights, and ‘all ticket' amputations. He was fortunate that Groucho's had not yet opened its doors. It only required his rapid demise to convert him into a theatrical ‘smash': an operetta with dances and sentimental speeches, a pantomime. The flyers can be examined to this day at the Picture Research Library.

Lee Boo dutifully made study of magnifying glasses and telescopes. He watched the stars as they hid within torn fragments of cloth, or flew up from the flame of a candle. He followed the track of the river, as it pulsed through his wrist. He saw his own death floating above the water, nailed to the prow of a warship. With a ‘glass-eye' stick he could read the stories that had been, and the future he was retreating into. The white man, Blanchard, had taken his place as the son of Abba Thulle. It was
his
duty therefore to die, and to free the pale exile from his dark twin. He remembered the tale of the brothers, Longorik and Longolap. And the warning: in a strange land when you are offered the choice, for your bath, between clean and dirty water – take the dirty.

Within six months of his arrival at Captain Wilson's house in
Paradise Row, Rotherhithe, Lee Boo was dead. Coconut meat was laid upon his eyelids, so that his eyes should always appear to be open. And so they remain. A link was forged with Madan Blanchard. A few spade-weights of ground in this churchyard and in Coorooraa – removed from local ministrations – became places of mediation, of respite and sanctuary. A true tunnel, unpromoted – and available only to the crazed, the sick, and the dying – had been dug.

Coorooraa was unvisited, ignored by the trading nations, until 1967, when John Boorman brought ashore an alternative Lee, the hard-drinking Mr Marvin: paid to confront, in single combat, the ex-Samurai, Toshiro Mifune, for
Hell in the Pacific
. I like to think that some insignificant member of the crew, a ‘focus-puller' or ‘clapper-loader', with the forlorn ambition of becoming a novelist, sat, away from the others for his evening joint, in the clearing where Madan Blanchard had been laid to rest. He would discover a sentence, whose import he could not yet comprehend, coming into his mind. He would ‘see'a graveyard in London, somewhere near the river. ‘
The marmosets have gone
.' He jots the words, trustingly, into his red-and-black notebook.

The interval, resting on the sepulchre, had calmed me. The known world crept back. It was now so obvious! I had made the mistake of climbing out of a ventilation shaft on the same side of the river that I had embarked from. I had in fact never left Rotherhithe. But an involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

X

With the disappearance of Sileen and the death of Tenbrücke, it became obvious that an inhibition had been removed: one version of the past had been effectively erased. And, as I attempted to write their story, I mutilated the truth, with faults in emphasis and diction; so that the pain lost its yeast. It was unreal.
The past that I had described was not Sileen's past, nor was the death of Tenbrücke justified by my account of it. If the ‘correct' selection of words – a pure and imagined order of sentences – has the power of animating, and bringing to life; then a failure to obey the Voice
must
bring forth zombies, breathe the force into monsters. There is speed without focus, action without meaning.

Wharfs developed into concept dormitories. Rancid docks were reclaimed and rechristened. The insolent calligraphy of Harry's Java Brasserie affronted Sileen's abandoned hutch. The whole Wapping ditch was converted overnight to estates and protected enclaves. These bespoke ‘riverside opportunities' are so many stock points; painted counters. They are sold before they are inhabited. Investors shuffle the deeds to other investors, and take their profits. The empty spaces appreciate. Now thrive the chippies.

I met one such in the rain. An eyeball-to-eyeball organist, a Northerner, who slept in a church loft that would soon, under pressure of ‘market forces', have to be sold. He was on two hundred notes
a day
, hanging doors. But had no prospects of buying into the area on such starvation wages. ‘They target you,' he told me, ‘at forty doors a session. Hang 'em high, and hang 'em fast. Then double-check the showflat. I'm in work for years – repairing the damage.' These unoccupied shells are already crumbling around their hacienda fountains and dockside viewing platforms:
Marie-Céleste
villages of decamped Lego folk.

‘There's nice line going,' the organist said, ‘in rent books. You can pick up two k, down the local, selling them to runners, fronting for Estate Agents – who are themselves fronting for the big Property Combos, who are fronting for God knows what evil blood-bargains of Moloch greed and paranormal enforcement.' I excused his youthful rhetoric: a man who squats on ecclesiastical land must be allowed to read these matters in nostalgic hellfire terms.

‘Anyone with a rent book,' he continued, ‘qualifies as a local
resident; and is graciously allowed to purchase one of the token flats set aside at a “controlled” price, to allow the fellaheen to acquire a small corner of what used to be their own cantref. In reality, this public-relations charity is smartly turned around into profits of fifty or a hundred thousand per unit: which makes a down payment – thanks to the “capital-friendly” terms on offer in the Enterprise Zone – on a deepwater marina. The Brink's-Mat mob laundered £750,000 on a couple of windblown jetties, and cleared a million and a quarter. There are far bigger killings on the Isle of Dogs – with far fewer risks – than in knocking over a bonded warehouse. And meanwhile, the now bookless
rentiers
, having burnt their two thousand in an orgy of hire-purchase video madness, are bouncing on an awayday ticket to Cardboard City.'