Downriver (47 page)

We drank, sucking like lambs at the teat, burning the lining of our throats to sandpaper.

‘It ain't much fun, mate, but there's only one way you're going to make it.' Tommy threw his arm around Davy's shoulder. His foot tapped against something metallic. ‘The pipes, my son. The workmen stop off down the boozer for a bit of something, but they have to be on site by half seven – or they're banged up with two hundred years in purgatory. No panic, but the sooner you get stuck in, the more chance you've got. It ain't no harder than wriggling back into your mother's belly. If you haven't made it by the time work starts, relax: you're in there for good.'

The beam of Tommy's torch obligingly lit up the open mouths of two red pipes that ran along the side of the dock, one above the other, passing within a few yards of the guards' black glass observation kiosk. They continued, so Tommy promised, beneath the perimeter road, and the fortified bridge, to the lock, and finally to the edge of Como itself. A distance of no more than one hundred and fifty yards: as the worm slides.

Already the sun was crawling treacherously out of Blackwall Reach; intimations of a fine spring morning darted along the furrows of the dock, spun against the mirrored temples. It was spellbinding. A remission from the wheels of time.

‘You've got three minutes to get yourself into the pipes. Then I take a pot of coffee to the guards and wake 'em up,' Tommy said. Davy was enjoying this: heaving and shoving, he inserted Imar into the upper bore. A headless torso, Imar thrashed his legs to propel himself from our sight.

Ladders, if they are firmly attached to a wall, I can manage; but crawling
blind
into the unyielding intestines of some obscure (and probably boobytrapped) system, becoming a parasite – a tapeworm – with only the faintest hope of ever reaching daylight – that is something else.

Davy, foaming at the mouth, frenzied as a Khan to the slaughter, followed Imar. I withdrew my last lingering breath from the sour dock (how sweet it tasted!), and plunged into the lower pipe. Anything was better than having Davy's boots kicking in my face. It was hard for those first few yards, the light lost behind you; churned and squeezed in this unforgiving alimentary canal. After that, of course, you settle down. And it is all quite impossible.

III

‘How bright the sunlight was, on the warm grey stones, on the ripe Roman skins, on vermilion and lavender and blue and ermine and green and gold, on the indecent grotesque blackness of two blotches, on apostolic whiteness and the rose of blood'

Fr Rolfe (Baron Corvo),
Hadrian the Seventh

Rolling our shoulders, snaking forward, driven by intestinal spasms: we progress in a bloodless sexual dance. Creep through circles of pain from our elbows and knees, where sharp bones lack that necessary cushion of flesh. Often we collapse. I hear heels drumming above my head. And I am convinced the pipe is filling with water. I hear it. Distorted whispers, voices. Pursuit. I suffer instants of deep sleep, microdreams. I lie with my cheek against the cold metal, until the metal chills to ice and threatens, if I move, to peel away my face. I can't turn back. There is nothing behind me. This journey has no past. We have been here for ever. Only the pipes themselves can eject us; contract, expand, tip us into a bowl of raw light – like some waste product dredged of its virtue. Our vitality has been absorbed by the machine. Motionless, huddled into a defensive ball, we slide towards whatever strange birth awaits us.

The traitor sun has outpaced our lizard shuffle. The waters of the dock scintillate, braided in threads of light, gilt and silver; clusters in which sparks have been struck, colour separations in slicks of oil. But this vision is alienated, trapped in the black iris of the tunnel. It is the lie of a telescope that cannot be brought into focus.

Davy's curly head swings, upside-down, into my pipe, blocking the radiance of light, which streams behind him. ‘We can't move,' he whispers, ‘until the bells ring for Mass. Then we can slip out and join the procession. I don't know exactly what's
going on – some kind of festival. Holy images carried aloft, mutilated martyrs, drums, pipes, hooded penitents, incense: all that stuff.'

Imar is already on the dock. He has spotted a mound of packing cases and pallet boards. Davy signals. We are free. We can squat: peep out from between the slats, and wait for it to happen. Our heads sink on to our knees; we doze.

Plop
.
Ploppp
.
Plip
. The sounds move gently away from us. Mild rings of disturbance chase each other across the dock. It's like listening to a procession of frogs leaping into a pool, while trying to provoke a
haiku
from some monumentally dim Zen monk. The world is rotating so slowly. The objects (whatever they are) are being thrown further and further out into the water. I have no interest in this – a marginal annoyance – but, after watching indifferently for ten minutes or so, the duty of keeping a true record compels me to stick out my head to search for a rational explanation.

From the top deck of one of the black glass
palazzi
(anchored around the dock like a phantom fleet), a burly man in full cardinal's drag was hammering golf balls out in a loop over Como. They fought bravely for life, reaching into the empyrean; then they failed, lost faith in their own abilities, dropped with a satisfying sound into the unforgiving water. The cardinal snarled, spat red, sickened by their weakness. He took a replacement from a golden bucket, judged its courage between wrestler's fingers; squeezed until the veins popped. He set the fresh white communicant on to a tiny purple stalk – a doll's house champagne glass – and thrashed it into the sky. He was now concerned only with distance, with metaphors of his own power, not with style. He expelled the balls, he cursed their lack of faith: he excommunicated them to the limits of his considerable strength. They were ex-balls. They should no longer enjoy his indulgent patronage. Let them sink or swim.

Lathered in flecks of creamy sweat, the cardinal rested his cattle-felling forearms on the rail, and puffed for a moment in
meditation on a green cigar, rolling it between curiously prim, feminine lips: wetting it, tasting it, sucking and chewing. ‘Goddamn their greaser eyes,' he snarled. ‘Never was a wop who knew fuck about offing a stooly. Always got to make a production out of it – ropes, stones, hocus coonshit pocus. Dago assholes, turn a hit into a fucking Verdi opera.'

He resumed his exorcism, his ballet of lift/pause/swoop/strike.
Thwack
.
Thwack
.
Thwackkk
. Black, petro-chemical grease trailed down his bony scalp, wounding it: the heat dissolved the hair dye into a velvet skullcap. He was hooded, pouch-eyed, circled with lack of sleep: a dead tree. Fat knuckles flashed with scarab rings; as if he had been grabbing locusts to gobble in his open hands. One of God's uglier minders.

The bells! The bells! A recorded tintinnabulation doubles these canals and fetid lagoons – another Venice – summons albino crocodiles from under the rotting piles. Slithering from their bolt holes, the sick legions of the invertebrate faithful creep into the morning light, protecting their eyes behind dark glasses, huddling under umbrellas: fire-damaged turtles. They tremble towards some unknown cathedral. It is time for us to join with them: to walk upright into the Holy City.

IV

Shuffling along, eyes on the floor, we are disposable extras in some monochrome spectacle: the megalomaniac nightmare of a one-eyed Austrian dictator, whose celluloid epic will be acclaimed for exposing the myth of totalitarianism. (How many times have we heard Lang's account of his interview in Dr Goebbels's office? The hands of the clock. Money in the bank. The Paris train. Polite expressions of the Führer's admiration for
Metropolis
and
Die Nibelungen
.) A premature anti-Fascist, prophetically announcing the coming of the long knives,
Kristallnacht
; wolves from the iron forest skulking into the suburbs.
But prophets are redundant on the Island. The worst has already happened.

The avenues! Treeless, broad, focusing on nothing. Dramatic perspectives leading to no revelation: no statues of public men, no fountains, no slogans. Nothing. No beggars, no children, no queues for buses. This city of the future, this swampland Manhattan, this crystal synthesis of capital, is already posthumous: a memorial to its own lack of nerve. It shudders and lets slip its ghosts. It swallows the world's dross. Isle of Dogs, receiving station of everything that is lost and without value. A library of unregarded texts. Escaped pets. Abortions. Amputated limbs. Hiding place of Idi Amim, Baby Doc Duvalier, Martin Bormann. There must be a showcase tower that contains nothing but the collected shoes of Imelda Marcos. There must be a pyramid filled with the severed heads of torturers, waiting for the quacks to steam them to reincarnation. Their red-veined eyes move, like the eyes in portraits: they watch us. There must be a gambling hell for all those who blaspheme against fate by calling themselves ‘Lucky': a sullen moustached Lord Lucan ‘greets' a toothpick-chewing Luciano, who slips him a counterfeit nickel. There must even be a shrine where collectors of military fetishes can worship the single testicle of Adolf Hitler.

We tramp through award-winning piazzas where all the monuments fake at collapse: heaps of loose honey-coloured bricks have been cunningly arranged to suggest the frisson of real disaster, metal fatigue, earthquake: jagged fragments of Rivera and Orozco murals have been imported from Mexico City. But there are also once-active dockworkers entombed beneath wrecked apartments that were pushed too high in worthless materials, held together with bandaids and unbonded cement. Pastiched catastrophes overwhelm the dusty traces of true archival pain.

We find ourselves sniffling into our sleeves, exposed to all this emptiness, to nothing beyond the
dementia praecox
of the buildings themselves. They confess, they boast, they lie; they make us ashamed of the tired remnant of our humanity.

How much further? The procession of charcoaled communicants winds among tombs of vanished dish-hogs, the heavy players who put their trust in sky-sucking satellites. They slink down sirocco-buffeted canyons of damaged glitz that swiftly repudiate any notion of pedestrianism. The desire to lift our heads to the stars, to admire the pulsing lights on the summit of these alcazars, is immediately blocked by a jungle ceiling of tracks from the elevated railway, as it shuttles in another cargo of relic buyers, grit-tongued penitents, architecturalists with cameras, endlessly repeating the same reflected images, flattening the city, carrying it back out into the world; lecturing, proselytizing, extending the screwball aesthetics of collaboration and surrender.

There were no streets in this paradigmatic city, only public boulevards, and tributaries linking the basins of dark water, the unmeditated pools. But even in their obscurity these tributaries had to be named, and the names set in alabaster to mock them:
Ambrosiano
,
Gelli
,
Sindona
,
Ortolani
,
Marcinkus
.
Marcinkus
? Why not? It might have been the Bishop from Cicero, Illinois (home of Alphonso Capone, Jake ‘Greasy Thumb' Guzik, Frank ‘the Enforcer' Nitti), we saw on the rooftop, wasting the golf balls. The Bishop was no longer a name; neither living nor dead, he remained perpetually incommunicado, an exile in his Tower of the Winds. There was still too much he could tell. Let him spit in the water.

We were evidently closing on the heart of the place. The grand boulevard was zonally marked; so that we passed through colours, states of consciousness – perhaps of grace – through Platonic harmonies towards the cathedral of all the mysteries. Blinking, we emerged from darkness (base lead) to approach the painted spokes of the sun, an hallucinatory scintillae of Byzantine gold. The formal stages of our initiation were designated by Neo-Classical letters tooled in silver upon the scarlet brick road.
P V
,
P IV
,
P III
,
P II
…

The light blinded us, bent wantonly back from the pyramid at the peak of the Magnum Tower, eight hundred feet above
the scutal bowlers of the pilgrims. It remained London's tallest man-made structure: a fortified nest, an angled chamber, the nearest point to the hand of God. He had only to uncurl His finger to touch it.

William Blake's interlocking columns of words were the armature around which the monster's panels had been bolted. The Magnum Tower

… frown'd dreadful over Jerusalem,
A building of Luvah, builded in Jerusalem's eastern gate, to be
His secluded Court…
Dens of despair in the house of bread, enquiring in vain
Of stones and rocks, he took his way, for human form was none;
And thus he spoke, looking on Albion's City with many tears:
‘What shall I do? What could I do if I could find these Criminals?'

By indulging in these ethical speculations we have fallen far behind the other communicants. They look at nothing, advance with regular, zombie-piston tread on the portico of the Anubic Temple. I am willing to pause in admiration of the twin deities, the basalt throned jackal-headed guardians on their granite plinths, who oversee this pilgrimage of dead souls; but Davy is tugging at my coat-tails, pulling me away from a fatally seductive vision of Cynopolis, City of Dogs. We escape from the central boulevard, dodge down one of the tributaries, a blind alley that leads inevitably to another fenced building site, a ziggurat shrouded in flapping black nylon.

Alien footsteps, creaking spars, subdued voices: we press ourselves back into the shadows, lurk behind the hollow pillars of a false atrium, watching. We expect, at least, a Conradian bark or Twelfth Dynasty funerary barge, sliding down the herring-bone road to disappear among the floating draperies of the wrapped mound. But there is only the noise: a dragging, bumping grind
of some recalcitrant cargo over the uneven mosaic of bricks. The performance is not far behind. Two priests, a fat one and a thin one, tethered like oxen to a grand piano, shudder and shake; their faces pasty and flushed above soiled white bibs. They struggle past us without lifting their heads, mopping themselves with rags of altar cloth. This listless Laurel and Hardy couple have been sentenced to perform this bizarre penance, as I imagine it, for crimes against children. Roped together in a sterile hermaphroditic marriage, they debate the Pelagian Heresy while orchestrating, with every step forward, a hideous discordant jangling. We have penetrated some latter day version of
Pilgrim's Progress
: moral lessons are being made
visible
. We have only to interpret them.