Downriver (14 page)

Edith left him, stretched on the floor: she walked, unshowered, down the High Street to the hospital.

V

It is not known, and I do not know, what happened to Edith Cadiz. Some urgent sense of the mystery of the story, locked into her Fournier Street photograph, sent me once again along the railway line from Dalston/Kingsland to Hackney Wick. The Wick had now been relegated, by an unsightly forest of concrete conifers, to the status of the Liechtenstein of the Lee Valley: lacking only the advantages of a competent fiscal laundry service. Once it was a shopping centre, somewhere to travel towards, a destination: the name alone survives. A hoop of gutted enterprises caught between the East Way and the rat-infested river. A station platform boasts of easy access to the Marshlands; where, in the twilight mists, razor-blade-chewing loners wait for their victims to stroll out of domestic banality into a definitive hothouse fantasy. The elevation of the tracks offers a momentary vision – through nicotine-shadowed windows – of the hospital blocks; the Gormenghast on the hill, the Citadel of Transformation. Drawing my last optimistic breath, I suffer the familiar dank whiff of tranquillized dreams, flesh-burns, piss and mindless fear.

I toiled slowly uphill towards a site that I knew had been abandoned. I stared into wild gardens. I ran my knuckles over broken bricks. I photographed reflections in dusty daggers of glass. The trail was cold. All the narrative excitement had returned to its source: the silver-framed photograph in the basement kitchen in Spitalfields. Edith's actions, the magick she had practised, had been translated into an indefinable quality of light. I was forced to invent and extend the fragments of plot her teasing sense of theatre had scattered over these wasted streets. She no
longer had any connection with this place. The hospital was a dead set from which the principal actor had vanished: without her, it was unbearable in its implications.

At the Texaco Filling Station, a seventeen-stone black, Sumo-flanked, in yellow satin Bermuda shorts, was causing a little chaos: and rather enjoying it. Orwin Fairchilde. He was dominating the confessional-slit of the cashier's window, puffing out his cheeks, like a finalist in a hot-water-bottle-inflating competition. The flesh of his face was a network of scars, some suppurating, some freshly self-inflicted with a Stanley knife. Orwin's grime-encrusted spectacles magnified his eyes into menacing white balls. The cashier was fascinated. He could actually see the eyes inching out of their sockets. He found himself sliding a ‘free offer' cocktail glass across the counter, to catch them. It was late afternoon and the door to his office had, thankfully, been security-locked. But the queue of angry punters was growing all the time. Horns were punched, and held. Those at the back, frantic to turn in from the kamikaze madness of the High Street, were more strident in their complaints than those close enough to take a good look at Orwin's shoulders.

‘Gimme
Rizla
papers, man, an' a box a matches.' Orwin's desires were as specific, and as irritable in their expression, as any dowager's. ‘Not tha'one, stoopid. Take it back. I got tha' picture, in' I? Said wha', man?
How
much? You crazee? Arright then, 'alf a box. Gimme 'alf a box a matches. Tha's right.
Count
'em. Count 'em all out where I see 'em. Don' fuckin' sell me short, man. Gimme Juicy Fruit. Jew-cee Fruu-t. Nooo, iz torn. Tha' one,
tha' one
. You deaf, or sumpin'?'

Now the petrol-freaks are ready to slash Orwin to ribbons with their credit cards. He doesn't budge. He holds a bucket-sized fist in the air, saluting the world. He, very slowly, counts out the few coins he can dredge from his deep pocket: a common-market capful of busker's droppings. But hold up here: something has caught Orwin's jackdaw eye. This enterprising garage is lending its support to local arts and crafts by featuring a gravity-defying
display of ‘exotic' underwear, sculpted, with buckles and hooks, from pink rayon ribbons and panels of spray-black plastic. Rigid duelling suits for solitary posers. But Orwin would like – if the cashier has no objection – to fondle the merchandise. It might make a very suitable gift for his mum. She's been a bit down, lately.

Orwin's no mug. He knows exactly where it's at. He's foxy. He can anticipate to the second the little Paki's decision to reach for the telephone. The catcher's van will be summoned. There'll be a brief, and pleasantly bloody, altercation. Then, it's tea and medicaments. And a reserved armchair in the front row of the dayroom: fade into ‘Neighbours'.

Marsh Hill: red walls of the secure compound. Internal exile. Shovel the flotsam into these hulks of stone. It's the humane alternative to transportation. Better the lash, and the carcinoma-inducing sun. The ghosts fade from sight. Children, without speech, wake in empty flats, and creep, hungry, to school; wearing the clothes they slept in – not knowing if they are expected.

Edith Cadiz, as a nurse, no longer existed. There is no record that she was ever here. The turnover is too high. Doctors put in for a transfer before they drive, for the first time, through the gates. Nurses suffer breakdowns that would once have merited a chapter in any medical memoir. All I have learnt is that the quest for the woman and her journals – if pursued – will initiate abrupt retribution. It is safer to return to the photograph, which is itself a kind of death. I will speak of ‘composition', ‘grain texture', and the ‘magnificent eloquence' of her flung-back arms. But is this a gesture of triumphant completion – or a dancer terminated by a sniper's bullet?

VI

In 1868 an Australian Aboriginal, ‘King Cole' (as he had been named by his sponsors), stepped ashore on English soil at Tilbury. Shaven-headed convicts, social defaulters, premature Trade Unionists, and supernumerary Irishmen had been regularly exported to the antipodean wilderness, in chains, from the far shore: shells of the hulks lay there still, rotting in the black mud, between Woolwich and Crayford Ness. Now was the time to trade, to exchange these criminals for good yellow gold and nigger cricketers.

‘Nothing else of interest,' commented the
Daily Telegraph
, ‘has come out of that blighted desert'; adding, in jocular parenthesis, that it might prove to the advantage of all godfearing Christian gentlemen if Mr Charles Darwin booked passage with the dusky savages, when they returned to their wilderness. He should question them closely, demanding anecdotes of their grandfathers, the monkeys. Indeed, with their fine dark beards, slanting brows, and deep-set eyes, did not these sportsmen bear a striking resemblance to the Fenland Sage? They would surely take him, on a more intimate acquaintance, for a god; and cause him to revise his blasphemous works – in the light of his personal knowledge of the labours of divinity.

King Cole, standing at the rail of the
Parramatta
, watching the pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew that this was the Land of Death. He had dreamt this place and, therefore, it had become familiar. He was returning, without fear, to the country of the Dog Men, the destroyers. A great tree had followed him for many days over the ocean: the eucalyptus that must grow from the stone of his heart.

Johnny Cuzens, Dick-a-Dick, Mosquito, Jim Crow, Twopenny, Red Cap, Mullagh, Peter, Sundown, Bullocky: they were dressed in ill-fitting gamekeeper's waistcoats, bow ties, flat hats. They walked in silence, close together, carrying their own bags
up the creaking gangway towards the Immigration Hall. King Cole recognized these planks immediately, as they all did: the Bridge of Hazards. If they walked beyond it, there was nothing but the Leaping Place of Souls.

King Cole was prepared: his fingers ran rapidly over the painted markings on the wall, the priapic pinmen at their dance. The loving encounters of women and animal-ancestors. So they came into an arching cathedral of sunlight, of voices, and confusion, and movement. They kept together. The dead man with the others.

They were covered in black smoke. Smoke surrounded them, warning them of the city. The voices of trees were hidden in the smoke. The carriage doors were slammed by porters: the pages of iron books, a collapsing library. Shouts, waves: as of the drowning. The Immigration Hall was once more deserted. And the station photographer had nothing to record but their absence, the subtle alterations in temperature that their passage had provoked. He infected his plate: the kiosk, the clock, the soul-snaring patterns in the stone flags of the floor. Officials watched from behind their moustaches, legs spread, at ease: the returned soldiers. A faded placard: ‘
Birthday Honours
'.

The glass plate, coated with white of egg sensitized with potassium iodide, washed with an acid solution of silver nitrate, developed with gallic acid, was fixed; and made available for close examination, long after the anonymous photographer was dead and forgotten. The positive image, when it appeared, uncredited, years later, in a nostalgic album celebrating ‘the steam era', revealed – by some fault in the processing, some fret of time, or trick of the light – that the roof of the Hall had become a version of the river, a reflection of water from the dock: ropes, hawsers, hull-shadows, ripples of tide. Tons of water hung, and floated in the air, above the heads of the porters who were sternly facing the demands of posterity: emptying themselves into the shrouded camera, so that they could remain forever ‘on call'. And the river would flow above them, until they ceased – or we
ceased – to believe in it; when they would be swept away entirely.

The notion of an Aboriginal cricket team proved a rewarding speculation for the hotelier (and former Surrey man) Charles Lawrence, and his partners, the ‘shadowy' W. G. Graham, and George Smith of Manly. The demand for novelty they stimulated was such that, within ten years, a troop of white Australians followed them over – to the disgust of several elderly MCC members, who felt they had been cozened into wasting time on a cheap fraud. ‘Demm'd fellers can't be Australian. They ain't even half-black.'

The 1868 ‘darkies' drew a large crowd to Lord's, six thousand of the curious, sportsmen and their ladies – despite the counter-attractions of the Ascot meeting – to watch the Aboriginals face up to a side that included the Earl of Coventry, Viscount Downe, and Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Bathurst who, statisticians will recall, ‘bagged a pair', falling twice to the wiles of Johnny Cuzens. King Cole limited himself to half a dozen overs of under-arm lobs, which he bent dangerously, or pitched into the sun – to drop directly on to the stumps.

At the close of play, the Aboriginals put on another kind of show: running the hundred-yard sprint backwards, throwing boomerangs and spears, executing tribal dances, and dodging the cricket balls that young blades were invited to hurl at them.

King Cole spat blood on to a white cloth. The linen absorbed the outline of the stain, a map of his lungs. A nurse folded and removed the soiled towel; but the place was recognized. King Cole was eager to relive his death. He found the infection he needed in cow's milk; he had to release it. Nodular lesions spread through the weakened tissue. His lungs were paper, patched with paper. They were beyond use. Night sweats, fevers: he melted. They could not look at him. He returned the name they had given him in a triumphant pun: his eyes burnt like coals.

Two weeks after the circus at Thomas Lord's cricket ground, King Cole lay dead in Southwark. They brought him from Guy's Hospital to a pauper's grave in Victoria Park Cemetery, East
London; long accepted as a necropolis of the unregarded. They carried him on a board, past the domed scalloped alcove, a cross-section igloo, built from the Portland stone blocks of Old London Bridge; and they aimed him at its twin, across the river, in the far reaches of the park, beyond the cricket grounds. The particular site where they folded King Cole into the earth is now diligently disguised as ‘Meath Gardens': a light-repelling reservation, amputated from its original host by the twin cuts of Old Ford and Roman Road.

And here, Meic Triscombe – a powerful advocate of Aboriginal Land Rights (‘Land is Life') – was instrumental in arranging that a hardy eucalyptus tree (sacred to caterpillar dreaming), and supplied courtesy of Hillier's Nurseries, should be planted by some noted local figure, who was known to be sympathetic to the Cause; and who could be relied upon to conduct himself, and the difficult ceremonies, with dignity – but also with passion, subdued fire. Triscombe thought he knew just such a person. He would not have to travel a million miles to find him. The memory of King Cole would stay forever sharp in Tower Hamlets.

A cricket match would follow on a specially laid synthetic strip, donated by Tru-Bounce (Wanstead). There might be a little low-key television coverage. A quirky, heart-on-the-sleeve account by some local pundit to pitch for the Saturday
Guardian
. Who lived in the Borough these days? Alun Owen? Andrew Motion? Fredrik Hanbury? Triscombe could call in the favours. He would emerge, rightly, on the international stage, confronting global issues: genocide, torture, acid rain. He'd stuff the greeny yellowy whale-bait on their own patch. Sponsorship, by Qantas, was assured. This was the ‘Qantas Aboriginal cricket tour'. A nice conceit: ‘Qantas' Aboriginals, presumably living in burnt-out fuselages, and hunting by jet. The ‘souvenir programme' already credited: Slazenger, Puma, Barclays Bank, Nescafé, Cell Link (suppliers of mobile phones), Wood of Bournemouth (supplier of BMW), TNT Magazine, Benson & Hedges, East Midland Electricity Board, Arcade Badge Embroidery Co., Australian
Wool, and Contagious Films. Triscombe's in-house humour would have to be aimed with great care; some of these jokers could be touchy.

The commemorative match in Victoria Park, between the ‘Qantas' Aboriginals and Clive Lloyd's eleven, was a modest affair, a sober success. The bespectacled and ageing panther gathers the ball at extra cover and returns it, straight to the wicket-keeper's gloves, with an effortless flick. His young teammates do the running for him, giving away the odd ‘overthrow' on the bumpy daisy-dusted turf. The Aboriginals conduct themselves in the accepted all-purpose style, that could mean a team of cigar-chewing Dutchmen, headhunters with filed teeth, or morally stunted mercenaries going anywhere to chase a krugerrand.