Downriver (40 page)

‘We ascend,' the Minister dropped his voice to a cathedral whisper, ‘in an open-fronted elevator (“a vertical ghost-train”, it has been called); climbing silently through all the strata of wartime desolation: fire-raids, rubble, water jets, Mass Observers, nigger bands in smoky cellars. We re-experience the primal energies of conflict – so cruelly denied to many of us in this comfortable world, where all our enemies have been defeated. Then, at the summit, in the hush of the final chamber, we come upon a still-life tableau of striking simplicity. A sunken pit ringed with plain wooden stools, and a table on which the waxen corpse of the Consort has been laid out, among all his ribbons and honours; his favourite golf clubs bound like a bundle of rods (
fasces
): the symbol of a lictor's authority. We back away in awe. From the portholes, we kneel to look down over the battleground of the city, the sun-capturing towers of Canary Wharf, the silver helmets of the crusaders of the Thames Barrier.'

‘I see it, I see it!' the Architect cried out, with all the agony of a convert. ‘You're reviving Speer. I've thought for some time – though one has been reluctant to admit it – he's quite a respectable figure, once you remove him from the sleazy
milieu
in which he operated. In fact, he seems to have more genuine “bottom” than many of his fellow Neo-Classicists working not a mile from here in the deregulated sector. Acting as muse to a carpet-chewing dictator may, in the long view, prove a worthier calling than fudging some pastiched Byzantine cladding for a cartel of grinning orientals. Isn't Speer's the very stuff that HRH has been advocating all along? (More havoc from the socialist planners than the Luftwaffe?) Speer had that unifying vision, the epic sense of scale, without which there is no
polis
. In time he may very well be recognized as a minor master, and given a retrospective at the Hayward.'

‘The overriding object,' the Minister had clamped his case, and was preparing to depart, ‘is to shift the river axis. The City of the Future must be a phoenix rising out of the ruin of docklands. Abort the flattering urbanities of Canaletto, the pastoral
fancies of Turner: we must assert the primacy of William Blake and his “Hiding of Moses” (page twenty-four in the brochure). Twin pyramids honouring the swamp, a curve of water guarded by a lioness; the precise hieratic steps of material progress. I leave it with you.'

And he bounced from his perch. His perfectly pink head, level with the tabletop, passed among the peaches and pineapples like a runaway sweetmeat, an exotic blancmange. Professor Catling, spoon in hand, stared longingly after his rapidly diminishing form; a trickle of drool starting from the corner of his mouth.

III

The move into the Bow Quarter hit Sonny Jaques like a jolt of mainline adrenaline. Here he was – in the heartland – aligned with the feral energies of the heroic and legendary East End. Scrap the ear-stud (lose that Kit Marlowe boy-prince image), shave the skull, climb into Chagall's bleached blue jacket, and an aircrew cap. Look at me, Ma: worker/artist, Constructivist poet articulating the inchoate scream of the masses.

The Quarter also promised a kidney-shaped pool, an indoor jogging facility, and a panelled library, stacked to its girder-enforced fake ceiling with all the latest blood 'n' boobs videos. Sonny pumped iron. It kept Kathy Acker looking good – and he was ten years younger! There she was in
Time Out
. But he was going to make the cover. (He hadn't decided yet if a tattoo would be construed as bourgeois narcissism, proletarian solidarity, or a brand of brotherhood with the primitives of the Third World. Would it help to pull the chicks?)

The buzzword was
realpolitik
; clear-eyed, stand-up-and-be-counted, a streetgang of warriors. For less than £150,000 you could purchase a few cubic feet of the old Bryant & May match factory, a kiosk tricked out in the style of a blue-ribbon transatlantic liner (tourist class, natch). Or, more accurately, as if the
set for such a vessel had been tastefully vamped in plasterboard, chrome, and plastic mouldings for a Noël Coward revival (
Sail Away
?) This former cathedral of industry was now partitioned into a series of mock-deco hutches: waiting rooms for some futurist dentist. And everywhere the gaunt spectres of the sulphur-jawed skivvies were invoked in sepia-tinted prints. The Bow Quarter was a shrine to the authentic. Volunteer inmates were barricaded against the outside world, eager to turn a blind eye to the railway, and the ramps of petrol-burning lemmings who dirt-tracked within yards of the perimeter fence. (If this is the Bow Quarter, who needs the other three-quarters?)

Sonny paced between fridge and window; where he gazed, olive carton in hand, ruminating, upon the squadron of builders' skips that packed the inner courtyard. It was time to put a flame under a few dozing projects. Obviously, Spitalfields was burnt out (caned by the supplements) – but Bow was effervescently marginal, a desert crying aloud for re-enchantment.

‘I think we've got a genuine lever here,' Sonny lectured. I had agreed to meet him, not because I had any expectation that our film project could be resurrected, but because I felt that the Bow Quarter itself would stand a little research. It was a fortress for New Money, not for the seriously wealthy river-spivs. These proper people, the traditionally liquid, had staked out Wapping, years ago, while the here-today-gone-tomorrow boys ravished the Isle of Dogs, laundering their blagswag: leaving such previously despised outposts as Bow to small-change tobacconists, hairdressers, media hustlers, and oral-hygiene mechanics.

‘Francis Smart has flitted – the producer who once met your mate, Eric Whatsisname – so Hanbury's script is on the spike. It's in limbo. It won't be cancelled, but it won't be cleared either. Forget the kill fee. There's no fizz left. They're putting Hanbury out to grass in Dorset, Open University rap, the Valium beat. Smart has cashed in his credits. Now – this is strictly off the record – I don't want to read it in
Private Eye
, you must promise…'

‘Oh, naturally,' I replied, smirking with insincerity, ‘I know the rules.'

‘Well, what happened was – the old fart let some Oxford chum run a graveyard series on “The Chivalry of War”; twenty episodes, bottle-necking Sunday nights. Hours of dreadful stock footage, voice over, rostrum trawls across
The Rout of Ran Romano
; flutes and drums, talking heads; purple, cabbage-skinned passed-over brigadiers thumping maps – and young Lochinvar poncing about in tailored sour-cream fatigues around every battlefield he could think of from Carthage to Marathon, Bull Run to Saigon. The expense sheet's been framed: it's a legend. And in exchange,
quid pro quo
, Smart gets a sabbatical year, recharging the batteries among the dreaming spires. He'll shuffle back at the end of the cricket season to see if there's anything on the boil at the Palace: tread water until the knighthood comes through. Might put in for Controller of Channel 4, or cop the Arts Council as a consolation prize. Then there's always
The Times
. And the antiquarian bookshop.'

He yawned, bored with the inevitability of it all. ‘The fat cats,' he continued, ‘the boys in the red braces have packed away their cellular phones and departed. You can't make a deal anywhere in the Corporation. It's all accountable. I'm trying to get a hook on “The Last Show”, our latest attempt to put insomniacs on a culture drip. The rolling credits look hugely impressive – until you read the christian names. Strictly, “son of”. Kindergarten Athenaeum. But they do need plenty of fillers (they don't use anything else). We can change the title of your treatment and resubmit. Take a few more snapshots, find some new faces. Pop in the odd cutting from the glossies. You'll be on for a research fee. Your agent cops his percentage. Everybody's happy.'

Without further debate we plunged recklessly into the streets, the broad channel of Bow Road. ‘I'm getting the twitch,' screamed Sonny, above the traffic. ‘We're on to an activated possibility.'

I agreed: it was my policy at that time to agree with everything,
to play Russian roulette with whatever fate threw at me, to break – by paths I could not anticipate – into the madness of the city. I would lead Sonny to the redoubt of Imar O'Hagan, the secret Bracken Bunker. Sonny was beginning to see the shape I had already prepared for him.

‘I like it!' he shouted, as he bounced a pensioner into the path of an oncoming 35cwt van. ‘It's got
realpolitik
and balance. This solitary anchorite, O'Hagan, labouring in his cave. Modest, employing horizontal forms, working only with what is available to him – free of sponsorship. A re-enchantment of that which was never previously enchanted. Yes! And we set that against the state art of the Silvertown Memorial, those bragging
vertical
energies, laying claim to emotions they have not earned. The public river and the unregarded wasteland. God, it's almost a title! We've got it. We've got our pitch.'

Sonny beat his hand against his side (altogether missing the historic tablet that stood with its Noah's Ark, named Courage, to honour the memory of the match-girls). He was awkwardly squaring his fingers to screentest the statue of Mr Gladstone that rose out of the curve of the Gents on an island in the middle of the road, around which swept an enraged scum of drivers, catapulting from the flyover.

‘Who
is
that? What's the church? Bow? The bells? You mean, this is
it
? The epicentre? We're there, in there,
there
there, at it – we've arrived.'

He advanced at a run towards Gladstone, emitting idiocies like a froth of ectoplasm. The Grand Old Man's right hand gestured prophetic scorn back towards the Bow Quarter, in bird-limed resignation.

‘Brilliant! This anonymous vision of the great liberal patriarch. It's biblical. Decency. Authority – by respect. An earned authority. Feel the humanity burning in those eyes. My God, he's actually supported by a cairn of books. What's that? Dante? Of course,
Juventus Mundi
. And a third volume whose title is turned away from the spectator; thus preserving the essential mystery of
personality. That's us. The third force, the mediators between spiritual heaven and material hell. We must shoot our film with the same sense of unegoic communality espoused by the modest craftsman who created this statue. Come on, yes – do you see it? – let's go.'

He vaulted the protective fence, to hurl himself among the hog-run of cars. I could not bring myself to point out the sculptor's name, larger than life, cut into the side of the pedestal: Albert Bruce Joy. Sonny spun past corrugated fences that surrounded soon-to-be-demolished municipal mausoleums: the fences were plastered with fly-pitched posters for rock groups whose names had all been lifted from the canon of modernist literature. A hyperactive collage of quotations; many from William Burroughs, some from Joyce, some even from Jean Rhys. Authors whose works would finally exist only as names on hoardings:
memento mori
to bands who went out of business before the paste was dry. The hallucinatory wave patterns of the fence metamorphosed a leering Derek Jameson into an avatar of the Elephant Man.

Devons Road opens to the north from a submerged precinct, half-developed, half-boarded for the bulldozers: nothing happens until you duck under the railway bridge. Sonny was rambling euphorically, pirouetting in tight circles: panoramas of blight – ‘yes, yes' – grass humps, horizons of aborted social experiments. These were the final killing fields of the welfare state: bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity. ‘Yes, yes, yes!' Sonny's camera/eye swept from the dead nettles of the embankment to the spark-grid of the south-flowing railway cutting, from the marshes to the distant docks. This island earth: a dab of infected lint helplessly staunching a terminal haemorrhage.

He chanted an ecstatic litany of road signs: Fern Street, Violet Road, Blackthorn Street, Whitethorn Street. ‘I can see for ever,' he said, ‘an open vein, the lifeblood of London, a trail of light. Devons Road converting to St Paul's Way, filtering and fading, dying as Ben Jonson Road. Do you realize that Ben Jonson's first
known work,
The Isle of Dogs
(1597), was suppressed by the Privy Council as “lewd, seditious and slanderous”? It earned him ten weeks in the Marshalsea, where he was plagued by two narks, government agents; one of whom, Robert Poley, was present at the death of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford. Now the play's lost, only the record of the punishment remains.'

‘There's something unlucky about the mere mention of the place,'I replied. ‘It probably vanished with Jonson. There's no other reason to go there; you can leave the known world behind. Let it be struck from the maps.'

‘Poets knew how to live in those days,' Sonny accused. ‘Jonson was branded, rope-scorched; an angry, sweating, pock-marked, ungodly man. He killed the actor Gabriel Spenser on Hoxton Fields with a sword. This empty arena lets all those things flood back. Do you feel it? It's a flattened book, ready to snap shut, and kill us like flies. We're there, and here. On it, in it. Found. A slice through the wedding cake of culture, a geological section: a
self-preserved
dereliction.'

It was true. We had stumbled into the Borderland, the space between the fortress developments of New Money to the north and the
De Stijl
colour-charts and pineapple-dressings of the riverside oases to the south: between the poisoned swamp of the Lea and the Limehouse Cut was one last slab of unclaimed territory.

Beneath the railway embankment was a wide allotment band, neatly tended, five-year-planned, baled with straw; a medieval strip system, generously sooted by the constant fret of passing trains. Commuters could glimpse this rustic scene and imagine a greening of the inner cities. The hospital barracks conveniently blocked out the uncontained acres of industrial graveyards. It was marvellous: we were floating between Empson Street and Purdy Street – the austerities of the Cambridge School and the fine baroque flourishes of homophile decadence.