Downriver Read online

  The mantic shine of fever. Sewage breath. Her voice in his mouth.

  Then the howl; the compressed madhouse shriek of the power station. Steam alarms. Whistle. Dread. The unrinsable taste of sperm in the throat.

  V

  The curtains were drawn. The doors of the pub closed against the vulgar world. The inner circle of the Connoisseurs of Crime paddled yet again through the shallows of forensic legend; traded atrocities. They dominated, complacently, a log fire powered by gas jets. Errlund, his desert boots on Hywood’s chair, was hogging the conversation.

  ‘“Sir” graciously took me along to the Beefsteak,’ he droned. ‘Too many flapping ears at the Athenaeum. The old pansy didn’t want his posh pals to catch him hobnobbing with a scribbler. Yes, he’d try the fish – a palsied scrape of cod. Difficulties with his choppers. Nearly spat them on to the plate every time he opened his mouth. Une belle horreur!’

  ‘Spare us the complete rollcall of domestic details this time, old boy,’ Hywood yawned. He’d heard it all before. And it wasn’t improving. Some fool had mentioned Errlund in the same breath as Marcel Proust, and it had gone, quite disastrously, to his head. The reviewer had, of course, been discussing types of morbid pathology, and not literary style.

  ‘I followed him,’ Errlund continued, impervious to cynicism, or any other form of moral censorship, short of an iron muzzle. ‘I followed him into the dining room. Have you noticed how he walks these days? Waddles, I should say. He lurched between the tables, like a circus elephant with the squitters. Nodded seigneurial acknowledgement to complete strangers. They thought I was doing the decent thing – bringing him out for the afternoon from the nuthatch.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Errlund. Drop the Chips Channon routine, and get on to the serial killings. Are you going to publish the surgeon’s papers in full, or are you going to “summarize” them, and bend whatever you find there to fit with your own theories?’ Hywood tugged at his earlobe in annoyance. He’d given the advantage to Errlund. He’d betrayed interest. Now the bastard would pad it out until all the chaps forgot it was his turn to get in a round.

  ‘When we finally eased him into his seat, he had the greatest difficulty remembering where he was,’ Errlund sailed on, serenely. ‘He stared up at me over his half-moons in a perfect rictus of terror. He must have concluded I was his valet, or bumboy, and he simply couldn’t imagine why I was sitting down with him at table. He was far too gentil to mention it, of course. All that shit flogged into him at Eton and Balliol. His fine grey eyes were watering slightly, and there was just a hint of rouge on his cortisone-puffy cheeks.’

  Errlund paused. His timing was perfect. Hywood’s eyes were shut. But he was faking. ‘Get on with it, man,’ he growled. ‘Or do you want me to finish it for you? “If you do this thing…” Is that right?’

  ‘Quite right,’ Errlund conceded. ‘He gazed at me for a few moments, in silence, to convince me of his seriousness. “If you do this thing,” he croaked, “you’ll be blackballed. No decent club will touch you. You’ll never see your name in the Honours List. Your K will remain a pipedream.” Then he excused himself; his “secret sorrow”, problems with the waterworks. One of the waiters carried him back, trouser-cuffs steaming. He counted his cold sprouts and gave me a very significant look.’

  A snort from Hywood, followed by a jaw-cracking yawn, indicated that he was crossing the borderland of sleep. Errlund’s narrative was underwriting his nightmare. Hywood had joined them at the table.

  ‘His concentration was fading fast,’ said Errlund mercilessly, ‘but he managed to signal for the custard. “Make me a promise,” he trembled. “You will never again associate that noble name with those tedious crimes. They can never pay you enough blood-money. Leave it to the Penny Dreadfuls, old chap. What can it possibly matter to the civilized portion of society if a few whores are slit from nape to navel? I’ve never myself cared for sports, but these hulking and vigorous young blackguards must sow their wild oats. Let them keep it to the streets, and pray they do not frighten the horses.”’

  Hywood sat up with a start. ‘Did he actually confirm that your man was the guilty party?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Errlund, ‘he was much too far gone. He’d wandered off among the yolky richness of Kentish brickwork, honey-coloured Cotswold stone, Winston, Guy, Jim Lees-Milne. “Must say,” he drawled, à propos de rien, “quite surprised, glancing out of the jarvey on the way over – the vast numbers of coloured people passing unmolested down the Haymarket.” Then, without warning, he shoved a bundle of letters towards me, under cover of the cheeseboard; coughing into his sleeve, and fluttering his eyelashes like a Venetian concubine. “You see, Errlund?” he broke out again. “You take my point? You have a contribution to make. Your name is often spoken aloud on the wireless. I can arrange for you to view all the private papers. I’ll give you another man altogether, a sick soul. A much better yarn. What can the “truth” matter now – when you set it against an advance from an honourable publisher? Your fame is assured. Take your time, go down to the country. It will be marked in the right places, I promise you. Drop in, any Thursday, at the Albany. My day, you know.” I had to lift his hand from my knee. When I walked out, he was still talking to the empty chair. The waiter was taking a brandy glass to his lips, then patting him dry with the folded edge of an Irish-linen napkin.’

  Bobby, the publican and sinner, the gold-maned ‘television personality’, posed for a moment in the doorway, then tottered to the bar and shot a very large gin into a dirty glass. ‘Cunts,’ he whispered, superstitiously. And pressed his glass against the tiny shoulders of the dispenser.

  A Romanesque docker, head slicked with sump oil, sleeves rolled threateningly above the elbow, kept his back to the fireside cabal of Crime Connoisseurs, while he indulged in some serious drinking. He was being talked to, whined at, flattered, flirted with, and altogether patronized by Conlin, the notorious Lowlife photographer. An evil-smelling dwarf who had lost his christian name, thirty years before, in a strict discipline Naval Training Establishment for delinquent boys. His Leica was on the stool beside him. The great Conlin! The man who had shot, and later destroyed, the definitive portrait of John Minton. Beads of salt-sweat rolled down the contours of his coarse-grained skin. Smirking, then sniffing, he began to excavate the docker’s ear with his tongue. Without hurrying, or spilling a drop, the docker finished his drink. He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and clamped his vast hands around the back of Conlin’s neck. He looked for a long moment into the photographer’s eyes: then he nutted him. And watched him drop, screaming, on to the floor.

  Gamely, Bobby rushed forward to hook Conlin’s elbows back on to the bar. Blood was dripping from the photographer’s broken nose into his vodka. Bobby teased a cigarette between Conlin’s trembling lips, and lit it with his own.

  The board behind the line of inverted spirit bottles was decorated with exotic postcards from Bobby’s collection: jungles, ivory poachers, whips, balconies. Bobby tried to take his mind off things by constructing a fiction that would animate these static images.

  Recklessly inspired, he groped for Conlin’s camera. He propped the wilting photographer between the docker and his mate; then fidgeted the group, until the sign, BUOYS, could be clearly read on the left of the composition. He carefully framed out the corresponding door, marked GULLS.

  The dockers were rigid, severe; breathless. One of them mimed danger, by fingering a kiss curl; while the other excited a detumescent bicep.

  Bobby, the artist, was not quite satisfied. After prolonged meditation, and a final check through the viewfinder of his fingers, he darted forward to unzip Conlin, fumble him, shake him out. The earwig! Now satisfied, he snapped the shutter on another fragment of his one-day-to-be-published tribute to a lost generation: the Tilbury Group. He might give his agent a tinkle.

  VI

  Iddo Okoli, savage in Middle Temple mufti – pin-striped, wing-collared, with soup-stained tie – progressed benevolently through the co
llapsed markets, smiling on chaos. His wife, broad, dignified, sheet-wrapped, followed in his slipstream. His children, in a file, struggled with suitcases of outdated textbooks. How his optimism survived, nobody knew. He bellowed at back-counters. He shook the plaster from damp ceilings. He beat on tables. There had been good days when he almost covered his bus fare.

  His prospects changed with a small piece of theatre that became apocryphal in the trade. A literary graveyard, lurking between the Royal Academy and the Museum of Mankind, was ‘rationalizing’ its stock, and adjusting to market forces (prior to becoming an airline office), by reshelving directly into a builder’s skip. Iddo watched, hands on hips, as the nocturnal assistants blinked into the brilliance of the street, carrying as many as three books each; which they dropped, with great precision, on to the growing heap.

  Iddo removed his bowler, and mopped his brow. He examined a few items in this reserve collection. He nominated a dozen or so, on the grounds of weight and size; bounced the hernia-dodging juniors, like so many jackals, and made for the shop, three steps at a time. He attacked the counter and gavelled it ferociously with his fist, until the buyer appeared; yawning and pale with anguish. Iddo was not the most sought-after of ‘runners’. The buyer, fretful, and slightly hungover, inspected the current selection.

  ‘Um, yes. Better, Iddo.’ He could hardly believe it. ‘Quite presentable. The best books you’ve ever located.’ He prised open the jaws of the till, slipped Iddo the customary paper to sign, and let him get away with a fiver and three singles. Iddo was in the big time.

  By now the skip was attracting the attention of a few lesser carrion; ‘outpatients’ on bicycles, shuffling dead stock between Shepherd’s Bush Green and the Charing Cross Road. Iddo palmed them aside and waded, waist-deep, into the unreconstructed dreck. A dredged armful and back to the counter. Three blue ones!

  At the close of trade, Iddo staked himself to a lethally trashed set of wheels. His horizons detonated. No longer was he trapped within the confines of a fifty-pence bus ride. He could risk Penn, Brackley, Colchester, Guildford. He was one of us.

  And here was I, once his patron, staggering into a docklands junk-shop, under a washing machine that was leaking what I hoped was water down the front of my trousers. There were two more machines waiting outside in the Traveller. And a brace of spin dryers on the roof-rack.

  While the junkman and Iddo debated this lump of cargo-cult plunder, I subsided into the books. I rapidly cast aside the usual trenchfoot volumes of First War photographs. These are loved only by antique dealers, sternly refusing to sell them to bookmen, who wouldn’t give them house room if the dustwrappers were woven out of dollar bills. I spurned the damaged glitz of Edwardian decorative covers: the unreadable in the process of becoming the unsaleable. I was left with five hardcore targets to consider.

  The Tilbury Catalogue. Spring, 1988. Codeword: Hopeless.

  (1) A defective first edition of Joseph Conrad’s Youth, Blackwood, 1902. Pale green linen-grain cloth, with marginal tracery of cigarette burns (Craven A, c.1952). Endpapers somewhat nicotine-tanned. ‘The End of the Tether’, pp. 313 – 17, torn away and used as spills. A distressed copy that has not quite given up the ghost.

  (Verdict? Better have it. My friend Joblard, the sculptor, wants to sample Heart of Darkness.)

  (2) In Tropical Lands: Recent Travels to the Sources of the Amazon, the West Indian Islands, and Ceylon. Published by Wyllie of Aberdeen in partnership with Ferguson of Ceylon, 1895. Despite a trivial dusting of mushroom mulch, a nice copy. Author’s name suppressed under the imploded corpse of a potentially uncommon spider. The creature in question might have posed for the illustration on p. 103, giving this item the additional interest of being an association copy. We make no surcharge on this account.

  (Verdict? Forget it. Anything with a map costs too much money. And Dryfeld is always saying that you can’t sell S. America.)

  (3–5) The final three volumes constitute an incomplete collection of the works of Patrick Hanbury, Director, Department of Medical Entomology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. We can offer a yard of research on The Natural History of Tsetse Flies; and a slim octavo volume, complete with the uncommon ash-grey dustwrapper, produced in a version of the Fortune Press house style, and emphatically titled, The Louse.

  This last item, a cornerstone in any library, is illustrated, in line, with an exceptionally delicate study of Phthirus Pubis (female), from above. An alarmingly vivid section throws a new light on ‘Methods of Rearing’ – by means of lice boxes attached to the skin, in a garter beneath the sock. ‘The louse feeds only on man, and must do so frequently; it has to be reared on human beings and it should be kept on the skin for long periods every day. The most convenient method of rearing the insect was developed by Nuttall…’

  Increased costs of publication do not allow us to do justice to the ultimate volume: Researches in Polynesia and Melanesia, An Account of Investigations in Samoa, Tonga, the Ellice Group and the New Hebrides. The author’s sensitive use of the plate-camera presents extreme forms of physical deformity in the guise of decorative art. Disease-ripe flesh bursts and fruits, escaping from the stunned dignity of gracious native specimens. Never before, in our opinion, has Surrealism courted the analytical eye of Science to such effect. Disbelief wrestles with pathos. The gross excitements of the Freak Show are enclosed within the discretion of the ethnologist’s cabinet.

  (Verdict? Irresistible!)

  Iddo and the junkman had not wasted their time. While I have been browsing among the beached detritus of the Imperial Dream, they have slapped hands to celebrate the resolution of their infamous deal. Iddo alternately squeezed and pommelled the junkman, until he swallowed his still-burning fag. The junkman, in revenge, pelted Iddo with banknotes, and worried him in the general direction of the river.

  Any offer for my fancied books is redundant to the thrust of the moment. Iddo’s motor – with fresh detonations, smoke clouds, the singe of chicken feathers – buffets him back to his self-inflicted Apocalypse. Normality creeps awkwardly on to the set. The junkman resumes his brave attempt to cook himself between two fires. Money does not interest him. A hip-flask does. He brews up; growing weary of the exercise long before the water boils. Condensed milk, Camp coffee, sewage water, whisky. We achieve a kind of bleak, post-bellum fellowship. And he is happy to elucidate the nature of the scam.

  He has cornered the market in the unloved. The streets are awash with non-functioning electrical hardware. He gives it shelter. He operates an unsung Battersea Dogs’ Home for Zanussi, Hoover, Indesit, Electra, Hotpoint, Bosch, Bendix, Creda, Electrolux, Philips. All the tribes of brutalized and deserted dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and tumble dryers. They were never turned from his door. He has a backer, a deal-maker; some local publican with media connections, contacts on the Ivory Coast. They wait until they can cram a dozen containers, then set keel from what’s left of the docks, to Lagos. Top dollar!

  ‘We’re webbed up, squire,’ the junkman smirked. ‘All the way to the Generals. There’s a nobbled Russian geezer with the Third World Aid delegation who loves to bilk the “sooties”. We sweetened him with a nicked Harrods charge card and enough small change to play the slot-machines for a fortnight.’

  Apparently, the dosh has to be laundered through a government-funded education programme: heavyweight Industrial Training Films. A category that has fallen into sad disfavour since the days of Lindsay Anderson and ‘Free Cinema’. Now a few bearded Dutchmen, cut off in their prime by the Civil War, rush around with U-boat cameras and outdated stock trying to incite their students, who are interested only in wearing bow ties and driving around in air-conditioned Cadillacs, to recapture the fire of John Grierson’s social visionaries. They project, in furtive cellars, romantic images of steel furnaces, backlit assembly lines, and naked sweating workers. But the students want only to be Game Show anchormen, with travel allowances to Bangkok. The Dutch instructors have to deal in black-market primitive art
to survive. They are almost always caught. The police are tipped off by the traders, who buy back their own goods at a ‘special’ price. The film-makers pay their way out of prison, or die in chains.

  None of this concerns the junkman. A few modest currency fiddles on the side, and he’s in clover. A detached residence that backs on to the railway track at East Tilbury; heated swimming pool, cocktail lounge, pebble-dash portico, closed-circuit security system, Mercedes: and a panoramic view across the biggest rubbish dump in Essex to the Romano-British settlements now tactfully concealed beneath river mud. As Glyn H. Morgan remarks in his seminal work, Forgotten Thameside (sic), Letchworth, 1966: ‘In spite of the recent disappearance of the hut circles the scene is still well worth a visit.’

  Wade in, traveller, and stick fast. Try to imagine, as you go under, Claudius bringing his legions over from the Kent shore. This is where it happened. This was the place.

  Look on these new men: Princes of Ruin, Lords of Squalor.

  VII

  A few weeks later I was back. It wasn’t going to be easy to shake free of this place. I needed to investigate without the frenzied rush of hunting for negotiable books. I walked from Tilbury to Tilbury Riverside. I wanted to take a longer look at the station concourse, the Custom House, the Fort, the Gravesend Ferry – and I invited Joblard to accompany me. We would identify the stretch of water where the Princess Alice went down with the loss of six hundred and forty lives: salvaged bodies exhibited on three piers. Our motives were, as always, opaque and spiritually unsound.

  Pensioned trading hulks rusted in the docks: fantastic voyages that would never be consummated. The cranes had become another forest to be culled for their scrap value, another location for ‘Dempsey and Makepeace’. The rampant dereliction of the present site was as much an open invitation to the manipulators of venture capital as the original marshlands had been to the speculators and promoters who dug out the deepwater basins, and laid thirty miles of railway track in 1886. When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out’, fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps. And when the first gay squatters arrive, bearing futons… the agents smile, and reach for their chequebooks. The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only to present it, framed in perspex, to the Docklands Development Board.