Downriver (27 page)

An answer – the wrong one – came to me, in response to Sabella Milditch's oracular riddle. ‘What is the opposite of a dog?' ‘An Andalusian dog': the ‘encounter between two dreams'.

II

The privatization of the railways carried us straight back into all the original excitements – and most of the chaos – that attended the birth of the system. Unchallenged social changes generated their own hubris: anything was possible. Demons slipped the leash. We were lords of creation. We could tear down and reshape cities; send iron ladders steepling out over the unregistered landscape. Holding Companies were cobbled together in wine bars, floated on breakfast telephones, sealed with a snort or a massage: new lines were recklessly launched and abandoned – to fail in Ongar, or out among the mudflats of Sheppey. Viaducts sauntered elegantly across watersport docklands; then waited, in shivering embarrassment, for the ring of Dynasty XXI fortresses they would service to be completed.

When the line was projected from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1834, St Thomas's Hospital was uprooted (leaving the Surgical Tower as an amputated stump), rookeries were flattened, graveyards were excavated to support the piers. ‘Deregulated' energies frolic like Vikings, boast and ravish: paperwork is retrospective. A gang of Irish navvies, sixty strong, appear on your doorstep, grinning, with picks and shovels. Your house comes down that morning. The letter from the council remains ‘in the post'. The viaduct blitzkriegs the market gardens of Deptford; recouping some of the capital investment by graciously allowing the punters to use the edge of the track as a rusticated esplanade, catching glimpses of the mothering river – beyond the hedgerows and the mounds of rubble.

Nothing is wasted. The nice idea was ‘what-if'd' of rehousing the traumatized and homeless tenants in model dwellings constructed in the arches of the viaducts: cave-squatters in Rotherhithe, awaiting a visitation from Ansel Adams. And, meanwhile, engravings were commissioned, replete with idealized
gardens – bell jars, bee hives, pedestrians in a narcoleptic trance. A church spire lifts from the domesticated woodlands.

The reality, sadly, was a lesser thing. The constant passage of steam trains overhead fouled the laundry, choked the kitchens, rattled the stone ‘sleepers', and brought down plaster from the ceiling. Cracks formed, like emergent river systems; water streamed down the curved walls, stimulating moulds and previously unrecorded mosses. The inhabitants fled; black-faced, white-eyed, trembling. The caverns among the arches were translated overnight into brothels and grog shops: they shuddered to other, self-induced, rhythms. The unbroken revelry was drowned by the clattering of the rails. Street traders, and unlicensed hawkers, weaseled the now unrented spaces. Animals were bartered. A tunnel of covert merchandise burrowed its way through the orchards; giving entrance to rats, phlegm taints, cholera. Amateur sportsmen peppered with buckshot anything that moved among the saplings. Indigenous labour mobs disputed points of etiquette with the Irish navvies, invoking the aid of crowbars and shovels still heavy with graveyard clay.

The advantage of this new wave of millennial railway promoters – visionaries in pin-stripe suits and hard hats – is that they are prepared to take a flier on all the eccentric early-Victorian routes: so wantonly trimmed by pragmatists and penny-pinching mandarins. These muzzled sharks burnt to reactivate such fantasies as the mad curve from Fenchurch Street to Chalk Farm: the scenic route, by way of Bow, Victoria Park (or Hackney Wick), Hackney and Highbury. They didn't care where the trains went; the attraction lay in tying up the station concourse. The slower and more complicated the service, the better for business: a captive scatter of sullen consumers bored into stockpiling reserve sets of dollar-signed boxer shorts, croissants, paperbacks, gasmasks, ties to hang themselves… the potential yield had them drooling. Soon there were more stations than railways. Shopping malls, from Peterborough to Portsmouth, were
designed to look as if you needed an ‘away day' ticket to ride the elevators. Combat-fatigued office vets found themselves reserving a seat in some burger bar, and asking to be put off at Colchester. Others set out as usual for the city and were never seen again.

Committed to the black dog's – potentially lethal – offer of Fenchurch Street, I elbowed an opening towards the ticket office, shoving through this demented set of fancy-dress vagrants, muffin men, and wenches whose wobbling chests were displayed on trays decorated by orange-segment chocolates. A pair of security men with commendations from the Scrubs were bouncing a genuine wino, who had wandered in looking for small change, down the length of the pink marble staircase. Everywhere there were posters in celebration of the first ‘railway murder', authenticated by H. B. Irving, actor and author. This assassin, Franz Müller, was depicted as a moody passed-over curate, swallowed in a miasma of pew-guilt and self-abuse. ‘
Ja, ich habe es gethan
.'

A contemporary account revealed that the victim, Thomas Briggs, was discovered on the tracks, ‘his feet towards London – his head towards Hackney'. The object of the crime, a gold albert chain, was traded in the Cheapside shop of a jeweller called Death. Müller fled to America, attempting to subsidize his voyage by devouring, as a wager, five pounds of German sausages at a sitting. He failed: his dry mouth refusing the slippery and uncooked cargo.

The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro. A one-man militant tendency I took, at first horrified glance, for some hireling
doppelgänger
of Müller was storming between the colour-co-ordinated barriers; ploughing all before him with a chieftain among bicycles, varnished in radioactive puke. He was wearing a rough-weather set of golfing tweeds, in purple-and-lemon checks that would have brought Jeeves to the edge of apoplexy; and which now succeeded, where all else failed, in driving off
the sightless dog. A modest morning's work for my old comrade in adversity, the unchristened Dryfeld.

‘I have, sir, no desire to urinate on your property. I want a ticket for my bicycle.' At the sound of his voice: families, climbing out of taxis, climbed straight back in again. The security men developed a pressing interest in railway timetables. Fathers hid their children's faces in unsuitable magazines.

A
posse comitatus
of minor uniformed officials were urgently striving to explain that their award-winning reproduction short-haul carriages – though mounted on metal frames with spring buffers, upholstered, horsehair-cushioned, smooth as a diligence in their flight over the city – had no corridors, no guard's van, no toilet facilities, and no space reserved for bicycles. The journey was too short, too spectacular, to be of value to cyclists – who liked to keep their heads down, while they ground, masochistically, at the pedals. The line did not cater, and did not intend to cater, for that sort of person: the trouser-clipped, yellow-bandaged anarchist.

‘Well, it caters for me!' the Magwitch-lookalike growled, immovable. ‘And I
never
pee.'

This was true. He would not give the time to it. The daylight hours were for scavenging, not eating or pleasuring, or indulging the whims of a caffeine-twitchy bladder. In decent darkness he gorged himself to the boundaries of immobility on trays of innocent vegetables. He evacuated his bowels, massively, once every full moon; according to the opening hours of remote provincial bookshops, and the dictates of his personal lunar calendar.

The lovingly re-created teak compartments of the Chalk Farm Special, shimmering in maroon and canary yellow, were intended to carry only human ballast. Cyclists cycled: for health, economy, the liberation of womankind, and shapely calf muscles. Dryfeld chose to disagree: firmly. The first railway murder of the new system was imminent.

A compromise was finally arrived at – with the yelped
assistance of half a hundred gun-jumping middle-management chickens who were trying to make a run from the city, before they let the advance wave of lager louts out of their software cages. Dryfeld would purchase an entire compartment, six broad seats, and progress in the dignity of a pasha; stabling his wheeled steed and book bags in unaccustomed splendour. I would travel with him, as confidant and betrayer.

I hadn't set eyes on the man for months, not since the advent of his overnight fame. Feeling, correctly, that the old sources, the clandestine bookshops, had been pillaged by book fairies and part-time dabblers, Dryfeld produced a vitriolic booklet listing them all in microscopic
samizdat
typeface: providing the only true and accurate portrait of their virtues (along with a wholly inaccurate stab at their phone numbers and opening hours). It read, to civilians, like some entrancing fiction: the
Pilgrim's Progress
of the Enterprise Culture. The
Guardian
picked up on it at once, rolling out Richard Boston to retrieve the mysterious author from among the stacks. A three-second TV flash of man and bicycle – and the image was buried in the brain-pans of even the most submerged members of the trade. Dryfeld was now so successful that it was a matter of weeks before he found himself in the bankruptcy courts, hammered by lawsuits, lovingly embraced by creditors who had fallen for the optimistic rumours of his death. His inviolate lack of social identity was detonated. He existed: as a National Resource, an eccentric who had gone public. It took an extreme effort of will – and a few hefty bribes – to duck under and out, to reprogramme his ice-worn routes.

Seeing me, he launched unprompted into the monologue he had broken off when I tipped him – chuckling over the strokes he had pulled in Mossy Noonmann's pit – on to Steynford Station one cold December afternoon. I heard his remorseless and inelegant dissertation on male nipple piercing, all the way to the A1's escape ramp, as I gunned the motor in celebration of my release from his overwhelming presence. The odour of electroconvulsed apricots followed me all the way to London.

‘Begging!' he announced, spreading his newspapers across three seats, wedging the bicycle between us, and drawing down the tasselled blind to remove such feeble distractions as the external world. ‘I've decided to give it a real go.'

The intended purpose of my trip on this (or any) railway was eliminated by Dryfeld's ill-considered action. Before the viaducts were built the middle classes had no opportunity of spying on the lives and habits of the underclass, no chance of peeping into tenement cliffs for jolts of righteous horror. Nor was there any excuse for the card-carrying voyeur to swallow
Rear Window
snatches of brutalist sex in sauce-bottle kitchens: the aphrodisiac scent of burnt onions and damp armpits. The elevated railway provided the first cinema of poverty – open-city realism – as the trains cut through the otherwise impenetrable warrens of metropolitan squalor.

‘Begging has got to be the next great adventure for disaffiliated free-range capitalists like us,' Dryfeld continued. ‘I had my virgin pop at it last week. Went to my favourite veggy restaurant with a woman I knew would give me trouble. I took no money, said I'd been mugged; didn't tell her it was by the Revenue. The stupid bitch had more sense than I gave her credit for: she walked out before I'd finished my second bowl of soup.' He smiled in remembrance of the incident.

‘Never feed them first,' he advised. ‘And never feed them after. They eat too much.' He stroked his hairy lapels – and sneaked a crafty glance at his reflection in the darkened window. He had the vanity of a craftsman among embalmers.

The voice roared on. It had outlived its host. Dryfeld was free to admire his tweeds to the point of cerebral orgasm. ‘Found myself ejected into Greek Street,' he said, ‘while the manager held on to the Katherine Mansfield I'd intended to flog to the lady. I quite fancied her, so I was only going to treble the price I first thought of. I soon discovered the first rule of scrumping for cash: don't mutter something about “20p for a cup of tea” –
demand
a fiver for a taxi. They'll think you're one of them.
Money talks to money. These vagrants are all amateurs. They stop as soon as they've got enough for a wet. And – worse – they share it!' He shuddered at the notion. ‘I cleared the price of the meal in ten minutes. Had to celebrate. Went back and ate it all again. Begging's a definite winner – as long as you're not a beggar.'

His alarmingly ruddy face glistened in beads of sweated blood; glowed like a respray. He scowled in complete self-absorption from beneath malignant caterpillar eyebrows. The bony ridges of his profile were shifting and sliding to reform, chameleon-like, in a simulacrum of the railway butcher, Franz Müller; whose sepia-tinted mugshot had been thoughtfully placed where the mirror should have been. I responded, tamely, by the defensive magic of fingering my imaginary watch chain, and accepting the damaged etheric identity of Thomas Briggs, the ill-fated Lombard Street clerk.

My bullish companion had once more recognized a shift in the market, in time to work his ticket and move on – before the forty-quid-a-week small-business mob snapped at his heels, blaming their empty begging bowls on a failure to secure the best underground tunnels. By the time they steeled themselves to fork out for his guidebook on ‘How and Where to Make Your Poverty Pitch', Dryfeld would be ankle-deep in his latest survival hijack. Keep stomping, stay alive.

He even had word of the ‘Outpatients'. First the good news: they stumbled on a Publisher going through a sticky patch who was prepared to unload a few sacks of high-culture rejects for the OPs to flog on the streets at one-third of cover price. Or, if that was too tough to calculate, for anything they could get. The OPs set themselves up with a stall on a windswept patch of river frontage alongside the National Theatre. The initial miscalculation came when they attempted to sell the same titles – wafer-thin playscripts – that the theatre bookstall was unsuccessfully promoting a few yards beyond them. The second mistake was fatal: they acted on the enterprising notion of carrying back all
the valuable books to the Publisher's door, and claiming half the cover-price as ‘returns'. For a few months all went well, the world they had ripped off was in chaos, shuddering from the threats of corporate raiders: they lived high on the hog, purchasing new saddles for their bicycles, no longer scuffling through the dawn markets; pigging out on a pharmaceutical cornucopia. They floated, glazed and benign, over Camden Town and environs: envied among their scriptless peers.