A day’s aimless exploration — walking to escape, rather than to make any discovery — had ended. I was, in truth, fleeing from an image in the Herb Garret of the old St Thomas’s Hospital. Hanging in a corridor, outside the restored operating theatre, is an engraving of a late-eighteenth-century amputation. The wild-eyed victim struggles with the brawny porters. The saw is frozen, inches deep in the fat of his thigh. And, notable in the front row of the audience, is a formally-jacketed Pacific islander; fine-featured, beside the gross and sniggering assistants. This distinguished alien evidently reads the event as a required sacrifice, a test of will, an initiation — and not as some banal exhibition of virtuosity on the part of the surgeon. The mortal intensity of his expression drove me from that place and out along the Surrey shore; diving, after Tower Bridge, into the obscurities of Horselydown, Curlew Street, and Jamaica Road. If I had not broken away from the stranger’s mesmeric gaze, I knew that I would very soon be seeing the precise shape of terror he had identified in the aqueous humour of the victim’s eye. The engraving was another sorcerer’s mirror. I was reading De Quincey then, and — obsessed with spiral stairways, opaque and smoky domes, potential mysteries — I decided to come back across to Shadwell and the homelands by way of the Rotherhithe Tunnel.
If you want to sample the worst London can offer, follow me down that slow incline. The tunnel drips with warnings: DO NOT STOP. Seal your windows. Hold your breath. This is not reassuring to the pedestrian, who wobbles along a thin strip of paving, fearing to let go of the tiled walclass="underline" working the grime into his icy hand. Your heart fills your mouth, like a shelled and pulsing crab. Why are there no other walkers? Traffic scrapes so narrowly past: the drivers are mean-faced and locked into sadistic fantasies. White abattoir walls solicit vivid splashes of blood. You feel the brain-stem ineluctably dying, releasing, at its margins, dim and flaccid hallucinations.
Half-naked labourers splashing through the darkness, struggling in the heightened air pressure that was necessary to keep back the waters; falling victim to ‘caisson disease’, as they excavated, inch by sullen inch, the mile and a quarter of clay and gravel.
DO NOT STOP. Seal your windows. Read the scars and striations, and wonder if some juggernaut will spread you into them. Keep moving — but not too fast. Don’t breathe so deeply. We’re still going down. It’s the wrong tunnel. I must be halfway to France. Don’t hyperventilate. Even if I do get out of here, it’s too late, my brain will be pumice stone. Stop then; rest, sit — you’re dead.
The tunnel covertly opens a vein between two distinct systems, two descriptions of time. The outfall of the city is bled into drained marshlands. Electrical faults animate the rotting convict hulks, spin the wheels of coaches that clatter towards the channel ports. Reports of foreign wars, remote revolutions, run into the stacked trophy rooms of Empire. A voice is forged, a bone whisper, that belongs to neither bank. The tunnel is the ghost of something that never had the chance to die. Niches in the laboratory light of this shrine lack their votive skulls. Unfocused demands slide over the white tiles, searching for their oracle. The shaft should be a vertical stroke, and not linked to profit. But instead it was, as always, a boastful speculation, celebrated with bands and flags; stifling at birth its true purpose. The mists of Ultima Thule are dispersed by giant fans. To walk here is to blaspheme. The tunnel can achieve meaning only if it remains unused and silent.
I decided that ‘research’ could be pushed just so far. I had been under the river for… I don’t know, perhaps half an hour… when I came upon a ventilation shaft — with a stairwell. Blades spun angrily in their cage, paying out, with the worst of humours, a sallow dole of air. A dark flourish of metal led upwards towards a hope of the light. I must, by now, be back on familiar ground. I felt certain I had trudged to the outskirts of Cambridge. I vaulted a low barrier, ignored the prohibitions, and dragged myself, step by step, into the cool night.
It was the unresolved hour, early evening; dim buildings bent over me: I walked away as fast as I could. But the townscape would not settle into any recognizable pattern. Disturbingly, everything was almost familiar — but from the wrong period. I was navigating with a map whose symbols had been perversely shifted to some arcane and impenetrable system.
I stopped a man in a donkey jacket, and asked him if he knew where the Highway was. He stared at me blankly, then mumbled something that sounded as if it had been inefficiently dubbed. A chemist’s shop was open — but it was signed Apoteker. The realization came over me: I was dead. My hallucination in the Rotherhithe Tunnel was to believe that I was still alive! I must have stumbled, fallen; crushed my head. I was now beached in the suburbs of purgatory. I walked faster — clammy-handed, scrotum tightened with fear — trying to escape from my own shadow. I ran for the sanctuary of a squat and depressing building — because the lettering above its entrance appeared to be in English. I knew that the language of the dead would be a dreary cuneiform Esperanto. The building was revealed as the Evangelical Church of the Deaf! A hellish vision. Bleak sermons of damnation thundered at a cowed congregation, their faces hidden in their gloves. I sprinted. Paradise Row led me, through dark shells of decay, to a stygian river.
I searched the far bank for the outline of the Famous Angel. I willed the skeleton of Tower Bridge to rise from the waters. Close passageways between tenements brought me to Hope (Sufferance) Wharf, and the church of St Mary the Virgin. I passed through the gates and into the churchyard. There was a single distinguished tomb, railed off: beyond it, across cobblestones, I could see a finely proportioned late-eighteenth-century house; oil lamps burning at an upstairs window. Standing proud from the building, floating, turned away from each other, were two children; stunted — but not quite deformed — fingers clutching books. If the books slipped from their grasp, the children would fall to the ground: the trancelike spell of this levitation would be shattered. They were both dressed in woad-extracted blue. The boy wore a full-skirted coat, with yellow hose; and the girl — a long dress, clean pinafore, mob cap. Their lips were not altogether innocent of cosmetic enhancement. They stared expectantly towards the river. Their stillness was unsettling, other-worldly. They were not so much children as incomplete adults. But no force that I could summon would turn them or bring them to speech. Their language would never be negotiable in this elided diocese.
The breath goes out of me. I collapse on to the preserved tomb: all its neighbours have been reduced to an unreconstructed heap of slabs and broken angelic forms. I am confronted with the legend of Prince Lee Boo. He is here: open-eyed, separated from me by a single sheet of stone — which becomes, as I lie facing him, a two-way mirror. I excavate his life from the letters on his grave. I am forced to listen to the story from his own lips, as they move in synch with the words that I read. The words are subtitles, cut in braille, for this kingdom of the deaf. Lee Boo is condemned endlessly to repeat the authorized version of what his short life has become. He must make do with whatever audience he can secure. Until he is allowed to move, I cannot move. That is the price the stone-mirror requires.