Downriver (45 page)

The Wicker Man was stepping, with single strides, from barge to barge. The embalmed corpse of the Consort hung from his arms; leathery and fire-blackened, wood in its veins – a bog sacrifice, or Grünewald's Isenheim Christ. The pair were expelled from the world of men, exiled in a collaboration at the heart of the flames: the sudden chill of the furnace's fiercest cell.

We had passed unconsciously through some warp, crossed the
border, and were viewing gospels of the future; but we were frozen, trapped, floating helplessly – unvoiced witnesses. Like Mallory and Irvine (‘still climbing when last seen') we had reached our summit, our Everest; but we could neither return, nor report. We were no longer required. We had all travelled far beyond the possibility of any useful participation in the resolution of these events. The fire erased us. Let somebody else interpret the preserved shadows, the thin prints of lead, the irradiated wafers of light.

‘I am not sure the bubble has burst, I would

prefer to say there has been a realignment'

Alan Selby (Estate Agent),

Débâcle in Docklands

‘Hath a dog money?'

Shylock,
The Merchant of Venice
(Act 1, Scene 3)

Yes, we have no bananas
. A nightmare then? How does one run a credible banana republic without them? Child's play. The ingenuity of our fiscal cardinals, our thinktank of snapping turtles, is needlessly invoked. Sell what has already been stolen and let the victims of this sleight of hand believe that, in some miraculous fashion, their long sequestered property is being returned to them. The zebra-suited pirates, puffy pink faces innocent of all corruption, are rewarded in votes and adulation, in
yen, Deutschmark, krugerrands, dollars
– credit! ‘Interest' is a distorting mirror, its own contrary. Let the plant wither on the vine, but the deal must go down.

It all began when South Wales, from Caerleon to the cathedral city-hamlet of St David's (the grail dreams of Arthur Machen to the seven cantrefi of Dyfed), was ‘leased' to Onokora-Mishima Investments (Occidental); and a Shinto shrine was erected at the epicentre of the Bridgend Enterprise Park. A gold-crusted phallus was set in a rectangle of raked white sand (gathered from the radiated ruins), to frustrate the ambitions of corporate raiders and to abort the flight plans of locusts. Half-naked, male worker/slaves built up the ridges of their upper bodies, glistened and
chanted: admired, from afar, by fluttering painted bird-boys in travesty.
The Sun Dragon!
The ancestor-worshipping rituals of rugby football were honoured by the people of both cultures – living on a pauper's diet of bitter memories, and conquests celebrated only in song. The aboriginal
Cymry
, natural quislings, greased back their hair, shifting allegiance from Gene Vincent to Toshiru Mifune: finding solace in Germanic oratorios, and the seasonal slaughter by fire of innocent estate agents. Their racial pride, a sour thing, was made tame by a cargo cult of hi-tech toys, filling the cupboards of their immaculate hutches. They lived, gratefully, by a creed of strong bellies and limpid poetry.

Norfolk, from Lakenheath to Sculthorpe, went to the Dallas Cowboys. The decision was close, requiring a plebiscite by male suffrage. The benefit-drawing underclass and the mentally disadvantaged (Liberals, Gays, Book Collectors) were rigorously excluded; which resulted, inevitably, in a low turnout of weekenders, east enders, and media gypsies. Who voted, after searching the darkest recesses of their psyches, over many a dinner party, to exclude the Washington Redskins. The pinks and the greens could not live with the word ‘Washington', and the right-thinkers (
sic
) were not about to invite some ragtag of landless Blackfeet to camp in their lush back yard (despoiling the habitat of so many recently discovered toads, coypus and birds of passage). Lock up your daughters. The Dallas Cowboys it was: by a neck (size eighteen, ruffed in fat like prime beef in the stockyard).

But all this was no more than making legitimate a contract which had been,
de facto
, in place for generations. The whole inheritance of abandoned tactical airstrike bases was up for grabs: a dying tundra of miniature golf courses, conifer screens, radiation-free bunkers (conversion-friendly as DIY hyperhypermarkets), baseball diamonds, and American Rules football pitches, complete with electronic scoring facilities (with Early Warning playback and 2,000 provocative sponsor's messages from the Big Book). ‘
The Lord shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a sore botch that cannot be healed.
' (Deuteronomy, 28.35).

The local dealers, car-boot traders and pensioned ‘wreckers', swooped early to carry off the stacks of Gold Medal paperbacks, the snuff videos, porn aids, uppers, downers, heroin, crack, speed, Southern Comfort, deep-frozen grits, fetishist flying suits and helmets (beloved of skateboarders). It was Saigon revisited. The whole strip, from Grimes Graves to the Wash, was cropdusted with defoliants, bulldozed, burnt, cleared as a pre-season training camp for those genetic braggarts from Texas (bulls, bears, guards, fridges, fleetfoot blacks): the infertile steroid-pumping popeyed gladiators. Museum fodder! These games were a logistic embarrassment run for the benefit of the root-beer and popcorn franchises. Teams would soon confront each other – separated by thousands of miles of water – by shovelling strategies, game plans, meat statistics, favoured plays and form guides into the computer, and taking bets on the outcome. A potentially rich territory was opening up for baby-faced console jocks and goat-slaughtering snake-brained fixers. They were bending the future under the shame of bad money.

The ice floe was breaking. Mother London herself was splitting into segments, the overlicked shell of a chocolate tortoise. Piggy hands grabbed the numbered counters from the table. The occult logic of ‘market forces' dictated a new geography. Banglatown, as it was vulgarly known, replaced the perished dream of Spitalfields. The ‘born-again' Huguenots dumped their Adam fireplaces, and ran. The stern fathers of the One True Faith sent columns of black smoke twisting skywards as they redressed the violations of the culture of drunkards and apostates that surrounded them. Vulture priests, percolating hatred beneath their turbans, bearded in a nest of absolutes, spittled their chanting congregation with infallible accusations.
It is spoken
. Fundamentalist guards patrolled the border tracks (Cable Street to Cannon Street Road, to Bethnal Green, to Commercial Street); white-eyed, reciting the scriptures, AK-47s dangling from their shoulders. Children stoned adulterers, unbelievers, and White Hart Lane heretics. A time of angels and visitations: angels of revelation, angels of death,
trumpeters of the resurrection. Now the censors alone have the melancholy duty of reading books. And condemning them to the flames. The marketplace blazes to a life unequalled since the Marian barbecues. The Brewery, indecently eager to confess its blasphemy, sold its holdings; and was smoothly translated into a prison for theological dissidents, common criminals, and journalists.

We had lost the capacity for experiencing surprise. We were immodest. Nothing Davy Locke told us could bring the blood to our cheeks. The
Book of Revelation
was as familiar as the
Hackney Gazette
, but tamer. We knew that the Isle of Dogs had been sold to the Vatican State, and we did not care. It was a natural consequence of Runcie's merger. One of the shakier assets that had to be stripped. The peg of uncircumcised land was known to the outlying squatters of Blackwall and Silvertown as ‘The Isle of Doges', and to the cynics of Riverside as ‘Vat City'. This deregulated isthmus of Enterprise was a new Venice, slimy with canals, barnacled
palazzi
, pillaged art, lagoons, leper hulks: a Venice overwhelmed by Gotham City, a raked grid of canyons and stuttering aerial railways. A Venice run by secret tribunals of bagmen, too slippery for Vegas; by relic-worshipping hoodlums, the gold-mouthed heads of Colombian cocaine dynasties.

A temporary alliance of Milanese industrialists and pro-Albanian social purists had made things too hot for the established Papal Mafia; a move from the homeland to some more relaxed set of mercantile codes was advisable: and soon! A few hours ahead of the sequestrator's pantechnicon. Nowhere, no rum-crazy atoll, was looser than Docklands. They've torn up the rulebook. Open City, Scum Town. If you can imagine it, then it's been done.

The Princes of the Church threw a few Raphaels into an overnight bag, crated a nightclub of tight-buttocked boy gods, a spare set of silks – and did a runner.

The Isle had passed from the hands of the simple bullion thieves who first correctly identified its present malaise, its untapped
potential, bought the wharves cheap, and laundered their grubby millions (to make a far greater fortune than their under-exercised imaginations could encompass). The indisposed loot became rapidly critical. It reproduced itself in an orgy of self-love. It went off the scale of human greed, and into some borderland of wallowing swine demons. The cartel of Deptford clubowners (company directors and bloody-knuckled bouncers) took the advice of their bent brief and evaporated.

Now serious predators with multinational connections moved in, grabbed their percentage, and let the place collapse: skins tore from the buildings, radiation-sick lizard flesh. Many were never completed. Only a much-photographed frontage existed: colonies of rats multiplied behind exhibitionist façades. The cosmetic dentistry of the project was revealed. Sour smells crept west from the unrepentant swamps. Nervous settlers formed themselves into wagon trains, hired native guides, and galloped for the causeway. Tinkers crept out from under railway bridges, out from inoperative building sites, out from holes in the ground. They stripped the portable fittings, the scrap, the engines and tyres: they trashed the software, left cold turds floating in disconnected bidets. They cruised in unlicensed vans, with hooks and chains. Speed-freaks incubating sawn-off shotguns sprawled in pickup trucks, blasting the heads from inquisitive rodents, setting them free to find a higher plane of existence. Even the lowlife, blood descendants of river vampires and cannibal buccaneers, were uneasy. There were no cargoes left to pilfer, no household goods unofficially to pawn. It was a time to let it all go.

Armed guards, in a rehearsed manoeuvre, synchronize their multifunctional watches, and pull out from the fortresses. Pearl of the East, Dogtown. Screams. Sirens. Panic in the unpaved streets. Gold-card boatpeople stammer aphasically as they trundle their suddenly ridiculous rowing machines, their Pierre Cardin business suits in zipped bags, down to the water's edge. The bleeping of half a hundred hyperventilating paging devices: cicadas in a fire-storm. Khaki-complexioned tremblers in designer
jogging suits are waving frantically on rotten jetties for river taxis to carry them back to civilization. They see it now. It was all the most ghastly mistake.

And, as they made good their escape, a fleet of labouring transport planes, freshly painted with the Papal Tiara and the Triple Cross, spilled their grim cruciform shadows across the hop fields of Kent; a circuit of Sheppey, and they followed the renegade river to belly into Gatwick. The chopper shuttle to Mudchute hill began under the flag of diplomatic immunity: locked files, treaties with dictators (living and dead); shop-soiled shrouds, bleeding plaster virgins, crates of sanctified bones (barking and bleating), pre-stamped pardons, thongs, nails, hairshirted statues, masonic hit lists, the phone numbers of reliable accountants and vestal hostesses with medical clearance, and enough fragments of the True Cross to build a Bailey bridge to Greenwich.

We were hiding out in Imar O'Hagan's Bow bunker: the three of us, twitchy, defensive, booze-brave – conspirators looking for a conspiracy. The world beyond these concrete walls had lost all credibility. Bad dreams were the accepted currency. Strangeness was palpable. It was hard to draw breath. I felt the mould creep from the earth floor on to the membrane of my lungs. Our hands shook, and were cold: held rigid in trays of iced water. Imar had a wild, blood-rimmed grin: something cornered and eager to bite back.

‘I'm convinced,' said Davy, ‘we are confronted by a demonic entity, a blue-rinse succubus draining the good will of the people. That woman can't be stopped without a stake through the heart, burial where four roads meet, a fist of garlic up the rectum. She's a force of nature. But she's not self-created. As Jane Harrison says, “the gods are our needs made manifest”. They describe the thing we most desire. The Widow is the focus of our own lack of imagination; the robot of our greed and ignorance. Therefore, she is indestructible.'

‘Right!' I chipped in, ‘the culture that ignores Doug Oliver's
The Infant and the Pearl
, and compels him to live in exile, gets what it deserves – nothing. We have earned the freedom to live by a more popular text,
A Dominatrix's
Log. The mindless worship of our silver-skinned abbess of pain.'

Davy was lucky to be alive. (If that was still the preferred state.) He had the hunch something
big
– millennial palpitation, Zoa shifting – was going down in Vat City. He was set on penetrating the outer defences of the Isle of Doges, to find out what that monster was; to witness the shape of the thing, and if necessary – if that is what it cost – to celebrate his martyrdom at a time of his own choosing. He decided to go in as a civilian, a tourist. He bought his rail ticket with the regular flock of bead-worrying, St Vincent de Paul-shepherded, halt and lame at Bow Church.

The unpiloted observation truck floated down its fairground track, guided by the hand of the saints, who offered a fine scenic view of Imar O'Hagan's Ridgeway terminal, his earth mounds and hill systems, and beyond that – the deleted catalogue of housing ‘solutions': vertical graveyards, glass jars stacked with dishonoured ancestors. Potential pilgrims (at Devons Road, All Saints, and Poplar) were scanned by spies in bullet-proof booths, who rang their suspicions down the line to the border post, which utilized the bankrupt Billingsgate Market. These chilled fish-packing sheds were conveniently, and economically, lit by the vaporous glow of radon daughters, fluorescent waste products with a half-life of a thousand years.