Downriver (18 page)

Mason's Mark, found in the stone alcoves at Victoria Park and Guy's Hospital, Southwark

you think they look like the Thames Barrier? Because the real job of the Barrier is to retain the sleep of the city; not to let our dreams – the most precious of all resources – escape.'

Neb was very tired now, but he kept on walking.

IV

The grass was flat and white where Colonel ‘Colt'Swinefoot's tents had stood. The evangelist, his caravan, and his shock troops, had moved east, to offer a much-needed blessing for West Ham FC. But the colonel's apocalyptic warnings hung in the air, like the heavy scorch of frying onions, compressed beef, and temporary repentance: ‘It is the hour of the Antichrist. The mark of the beast is branded into our cheeks. Our tongues shall blacken and swell, until our very mouths are filled.
Amen!
We will be dragged, cursing, into hellfire.' And more of the same. Much more. Three hours on his feet was as nothing to Colt. Sweat rolled from his brow. The chorus stamped and sang. Fire buckets rattled with coin. Colt's sermon, fiendishly amplified, blasted the walls of the old Victoria Park Lido; which had been recently ordained as East London's first privately-funded lazaret. Neb took it on himself, unpaid, and uninvited, to become one of the angels.

AIDS was a fifth-floor disease, in a four-floor culture. There had to be somewhere – preferably outside the inhabitable zone – where a buck could be turned coping with one of the few genuine growth areas that was still, always excepting the West Coast, scandalously under-exploited. Fortunes would be made when a tested antidote was brought in – but that was the big one, Nobel stuff, the Holy Grail. Meanwhile the name of the game is counselling, care, discretion, and check the credit cards before the first transfusion. Things were happening fast. There was now a state far worse than being an ‘outpatient'. The agents of Venture Capital had identified a brand of ‘quarantine' that had much in
common with other hermetic encampments, kept for aliens in time of war.

The lazaret stood just inside the park gates, at the Grove Road end, beyond a notice announcing that ‘these premises are protected by Barbican Security Services'. The red-brick Stalinist folly with the sea-green pantiled entrance had functioned for many years as a swimming pool. Now it looked as if the set for
Fifty-five Days at Peking
had been requisitioned for a
Living Dead
video-quickie. Neb blundered among the enfeebled inmates in their fugitive exile; the HIV-positives, the ‘black spot' carriers. He ran messages, he went shopping; and, if he was incapable of listening to any instruction, he was ready to talk without hypocrisy or fear. He rushed through the pallets, arms waving like a bird scarer, beating off the gathering darkness. Dame Nightingale: he buddied the sick. He gave them their first strange taste of life-after-death.

Spies reported a fierce debate in the council chambers concerning the fate of this abandoned municipal swimming pool, one of Lansbury's finest lidos. It was a symbol of a vanished
Health and Efficiency
era; a huge, chlorine-weeping, corn-plaster-infested trench – where Neb had achieved some of his most spectacular conquests – which should, without doubt, be restored and streamlined as an ‘investment opportunity'. The public purse no longer ran to filling it with water (perish the thought, better to fill it with oil!) for the unbathed peons to splash about, urinating, exposing their unsightly flab, and floating their beer-cans and fag packets. No instruction had, as yet, been received from above to make a charge for entrance to the park: a ‘reserved vehicle area' was being enlarged and fenced, marked out for the ticket machines. It was perhaps premature, before all the tenders were sifted, to pass any binding resolution. The decision-makers contented themselves, for the present, with covertly enclosing more and more of the open ground; creating a no man's land, a causeway of conveniently storm-felled trees.

The Controller moved his office into the upper chamber of
the Burdett-Coutts Tower; a structure that seemed to have evolved from an unlikely collaboration between Albert Speer and Rowland Emett. Hierarchic steps, and pillars of pink Peterhead granite, gave way to eccentric decoration; clocks, twirls, twists, stone fruits, and weather-damaged puns. The titular spirits were four seriously overweight cherubs: only one of whom had held on to his wings. Their eyes were debauched with red paint. Their pudgy feet rested on squirming fish. Unwillingly – and after an obvious struggle – they had been surgically initiated, made kosher: with full subincision rites. Their off-white pigeon bellies hosted the usual braggart scrawls:
I ALWAYS FUCK MY MUM! BONGO
+
COLL
+
SPAM
. Above their hydrocephalic heads, in Gothic Script, ran the sad legend, ‘For Love of God and Country'. Amen, Colonel, to that.

From his crow-high porthole the Controller weighed the options, comparing, unfavourably, the visible reality of the broken-down lido with the optimistic and rhetorical plans that were spread out on a table at his elbow. The Four Horsemen romped across the paddy – and with them a hook on which he could surely hang his future.
Plague!
They should get it corralled fast, put their brand on it; make it pay.

Within hours a crude conversion was under way that retained the original concentration-camp fencing and watchtowers, while shifting the pool itself into a ‘basically Neo-Templar ambience': from hydro to hospice in fourteen days. The ironies implicit in this transaction were thrown away on its perpetrators: a primary source of infection should find itself recast as the ashram of its final flowering.

The pool was submerged in drapes of lemon-and-white canvas, divided into individual cubicles. The surround was tiled, and saturated with fountains. The feel the architect wanted to go for was ‘non-denominational Moorish'. No disturbing images to invoke the past. Just the wind in the trees; reflections of clouds; plashing water falling on stone. The once-sordid changing sheds
became ‘day rooms', with low couches and the (piped) music of strings.

On fine afternoons the living skeletons lay outside on recliners, gazing listlessly at the agitated sails of the trees; as they shifted and quivered, and breathed. There was something heroic and improvised about the whole affair. In the fullness of time, naturally, the baths could be ‘themed' from diving boards to buffet, and a reasonable charge levied: payable in advance. The destitute could take out insurance, or make their own arrangements, under the sponsorship of caring libraries – if they could find any. This was a transitional phase. The developers were ready, on the nod, to ‘get into bed' with the council. They were quite willing to sponsor the publication of leaflets, available on request, from all registered gyms, saunas, launderettes, and secondary schools: ‘Holy Communion – Is There a
Safe Method
of Using the Chalice?' ‘AIDS and the Trade Unions'.

The local authority that had once tolerated Roland Bowman's T3 Classes (Therapy-through-Theatre) now transferred him to the lazaret. It was easier to turn the ‘outpatients' loose than to have them poncing about on a stage, ‘expressing themselves' and getting ideas. They'd had more than enough of Roland's subversive readings of the minor classics: all-male, all-female; all paid for by the taxpayer. There was no percentage in it. Roland was a nuisance. One of these days a bored critic might leave Shaftesbury Avenue and review a play staged in a synagogue. They saw their chance and ‘invited'Roland to develop a scenario that had proved highly popular in San Francisco: ‘How to enjoy a fully satisfying relationship with a mortally-disadvantaged partner.'

Does love end with death? The sunshine theory was that it did not; many spiritual climaxes lay ahead – if the groundwork was tactfully handled. The bones of the thing had been shamelessly lifted from the Natural Childbirth propagandists – ‘breathing', stages, levels of pain: unashamed Tupperware Buddhism.
The dying were to be taken, step by step,
through
death; which was, apparently, a kind of wind. They learned to sing their way out, to cut free from their old lives and their worn flesh. They joined with the wind. They moved among the leaves of the trees. They faced what lay ahead. They were instructed to fantasize a picture of the beloved one; then to strip the picture of all its physical attributes, reduce it to a flame; to step into that flame, burning away all memories, all regrets. Love curves around them, like a fault.

As Roland instructed them, with disinterested affection, and with strength, they did indeed begin to taste smells, to hear colour. Their sensuous faculties had never been so acute, because they no longer had the will to oppose them. They were able,
by their own volition
, to enter a place of safety; a place of which Roland had no knowledge whatever.

Neb and his inherited dog leapt joyously around the fringes of this mantra-chanting seminar, performing his own spinningdervish celebration. He took in marginal details that were of no value to any other human creature: blue plastic streamers caught on the wire, or the last red rays of sunlight picking out the jagged glass fragments in the windows, making them into maps, outlines of islands to be visited by the saints. The tranced neophytes swayed and moaned, while Neb muttered his dark imprecations to the older gods. His lips bubbled with white pellets. The shape of Roland's dance had conjured a truce with time. His naked white-bone feet were scarcely touching the cool green tiles. The low drone ran out across the park, shadow-spokes through the dark grass: the angry courage of the dying men.

V

Sonny Jaques, the director, had learned by rote the rules that he now preached with all the fervour of a convert. The camera could
never
remain still for more than nine seconds. The camera
may not move unless it is following some person on a legitimate quest. When in doubt: cross-cut. Somehow, half a dozen stock situations, visited briefly, in and out like a milkman, were assumed to be more interesting than any solitary sequence doomed to stand on its own feet. The validity of this argument was always endorsed by quoting the success of ‘EastEnders'. At which point, Fredrik swallowed hard, and thought of the kill fee.

Sonny had to admit, after a night of agony, that he was ‘unhappy' with Roland. (He had, at the last head count, been sufficiently unhappy with Dryfeld and Joblard to pogrom them from the script altogether. Poor Milditch never made it, even as a kitchen concept.) He liked Roland. Of course he did. He
loved
him. There was enormous ‘potential' there, but… we didn't
quite
have it in focus yet. I knew we were heading for trouble when I saw those pause bubbles (…) streaming from Sonny's nostrils.

When Sonny was in a state of doubt, his face gelled into a grin set in plaster of Paris. I wanted to tap him with a hammer, and watch it shatter. He kept an admonitory finger wagging, chopping steadily like a Sabatier blade against a herb-board. ‘Um, um, um. Ah, ah. Um. Ah.' The tension ran out in rings. The coffee turned to mesozoic mud in our cups. I was all for resolving the matter, unilaterally, with a swift kick in the nuts; but Fredrik had a wonderful way of simply ignoring these local difficulties, cranking the scene on as if they had never occurred. He would suck in a long breath, swallow all the philosophical loose ends still lying on the table, and let rip with a twelve-minute speech, which totally anaesthetized all resistance, and caused the flies to drop dead from the ceiling.

What Sonny wanted to know was: how could we write
anything
down before we knew what was going to happen? And, if we didn't write it down, so that it could be approved by three producers and a finance watchdog, then nothing would happen… ever. These ephemeral and unreasonable ideas had to be stiffened up: our ghosts had to be
solid
, so that we could cut
away from them. We had to appreciate the awkwardness of his dilemma.

As he talked Sonny liked to pace, and also to eat; so that we were dutifully swivelling, backwards and forwards across the table, like the crowd in the Hitchcock tennis match, following him as he made his way to the refrigerator for another handful of black olives. (The family supper had dwindled by this time to a carton of leather-skinned yogurt and an anchovy that was waiting to be carbon-dated.) When Sonny had accumulated a dozen or so stones in his paw, he would arrive at the head of the table and roll them emphatically towards us, like poker dice. ‘Ah, um. Ah.'

The pitch that Sonny went for – the only concept with
filmic
possibilities – was the notion that Roland should act out some play, it didn't matter what, in the deconsecrated synagogue at Princelet Street. We can light it with millions of candles, swing incense, wave flags: let's go for it.
Ivan the Terrible
,
part
3!

‘But hold up, boys, don't get carried away too soon. If living actors are involved, we're hung up on paying union rates, the budget is blown: we'll have to lunch in some bug-infested Brick Lane rat hole. That's serious stuff. The catering is not your department. Just give me seven and a half sheets of negotiable paper that I can take upstairs, without getting egg on my face.'

VI

I drank coffee with Roland Bowman in his basement kitchen. As we chatted, I searched for the photograph of the dancer, Edith Cadiz; but it was no longer on show. Secretly, this pleased me. I didn't want to know if the photograph had changed: if it showed some fresh aspect of Edith's disappearance that I would have to act upon. Any minor alteration in the image would mean an alteration in the account I had already written of it.

Roland was perfectly willing to discuss the director's latest
temporary enthusiasm. Previous experiences with the Corporation had resigned him to any twists of fate, however bizarre. He was excited to be involved, but knew in his heart nothing would come of it. He had been in the synagogue once before, with a Firbank adaptation, that had drawn the town, but passed unnoticed in Fleet Street. Now curiously, Fleet Street had marched – like Birnam Wood – to the Isle of Dogs, while Roland held, blindly, to his ground.