If there was an open mesa left, it was soon bunkered into a firing range. Red flags kicked in the breeze. The occasional lop-sided barn, a heritage token, had been preserved for the well-fancied combat of imported pit-bulls.
And always, beyond the pain — the river: black, costive, drawing me on; flaunting the posthumous brilliance of its history.
III
Tilbury Town is a single street, and it is shut. European rain brings down the dirt that floats so enticingly out from the massed pipes of the power station. The innocent sightseer abandons his guidebook to relish a haberdasher’s grease-streaked window, which features underwear so outdated it has all the nostalgic allure of a fetishist’s catalogue. There is a ‘Financial Consultant’ with a twenty-four-hour sideline in radio-controlled mini cabs. And yet more mini cabs. The chief industry of the place is providing the means to escape from it.
Cranes from the docks seal the set, and diminish it; preposterous as the Bureau de Change that is gratefully dying into its varnish.
After a couple of hundred yards the buildings simply give up. I am lost among the terminal hobs. Locked yards with sheeted secrets, contracts that lack a signature, consignments that were never collected: a killing ground for lorries, misdirected, with an inadequate cargo.
On the inshore edge, between the point where the speculators ran out of ideas and the storm’s horizon, is a pisshouse, half-demolished; a municipal jeu d’esprit, with green tile pagoda roof. The exterior walls are still favoured by local sentimentalists, staggering home with a skinful — and a singular method of celebrating the resonance of location. And here, on the very precipice of oblivion, propped by a flying buttress of ex-Launderette washing machines, is a lit shopfront: a mirage that could almost pass for Milditch’s legendary Antique Haven.
There is a man inside, smoking, warming his hands over a two-bar electric fire. The CLOSED sign is nailed into place. The man looks at me, at my rain-plastered scalp, my dripping coat, my hungry red eyes. Turns back to the fire. Which has a more profitable animation: it throws out sparks. With luck it will burn the place down. He cleans his ear with a matchstick, and rolls the result between his fingers. I rap the window sharply with a coin. He lights another cigarette; rummages under the table, finds a second fire, a fan-blower, and plugs that in.
The existential pathos of this mute Conversation Piece could have endured for a generation. The rain reconstituting my shirt as tie-dyed woodpulp. The junkman’s thoughts set morbidly on poll-tax forms and the price of electricity. A sheet of dirty glass dividing us into Subject and Object, observer and observed. My eyes feverishly annotating the bedlam for a book that would justify this manic quest. Jugs, biscuit tins, trays of bent forks, cracked picture frames. None of it held any interest for him. He might have been hired to sit there. He probably couldn’t escape. The washing machines, like an unrecorded ice age, blocked his exit. He had not chosen any of these things. He hated them. People died; he stored whatever they did not take on their journey. The dead dominated him. I was also a threat: I might want to force even more stock on to the premises.
The tremulous balance of the situation was ravished by a gunshot from the corner of the street. I rapped, with a little more force. The key holder surfaced, gasping, from his control experiment in suspended animation. More shots, skidding tyres, crashed gears… and a Morris Traveller, lacking its side-windows, mounted the kerb. And drew up, a yard shy of my kneecaps.
In the world of junk shops and resurrectionist scavenging, there are no surprises. The unexpected is what we are most comfortable with. My old market colleague, Iddo Okoli — for whom Field Marshal Amin was the cadet version — stepped from his smoking wreck, and removed his bowler, to execute a formal bow. Lion-hearted; he gripped me to his chest, growling dangerously, like a flesh-eating king.
The excavated proprietor shuffled to the door. I followed Iddo inside.
IV
They lay under the pear tree: smeared with themselves, torn, sore, and thirsty. They lay apart, panting. Their tongues lolled in the dirt. They dribbled, slippery with melting ‘KY’ jelly. Then the fatter one, Bobby, crawled off, sick to his heart, unbalanced, and looking for air that he could breathe. His creamy lace-trimmed basque pinched false breasts from his abundant flesh. His varnished skin was marbled with a perplexity of contusions. His black silk stockings were split; revealing spidery tufts of man-hair. He was dragging his insides after him across the graveclass="underline" a dead dog. They were still trapped in the thatch of a barren orchard.
What could be more depressing than the interval between orgies? Bobby wondered if he would ever summon up the enthusiasm to begin it all again. How could he avoid catching sight of last night’s partners? How could he avoid paying them? Always problems for the creative mind.
As he crossed the path, he begged the single stones to pierce him. He relished the sluggish ripples of discomfort. It could have been an hour, or a day, before he reached the concrete steps of the redoubt, and hauled himself on to the river wall, the East Gun Line.
‘Speer’s Theatre’, his friend the painter had called it; wistfully invoking the classical pretensions of the Third Reich. The steps were all that was left. A meaningless piece of something. The outer rim of a Temple of Atrocities. He wanted to lick bloodstains from the cold stone. He wanted to touch the water. The morning light on the river was his salvation.
Wooden stumps in the mud. The ruin of a jetty. The tide was turning: a slime-caked causeway, plastered in filth and sediment, pointed at Gravesend. He often boasted, without much justification, that Magwitch faltered here, escaping from the hulks; and was brought to shore. The last pub in the world, the World’s End.
From beyond the curve of the power station, Bobby saw them coming up on the tide: from the Hope into the Reach. The familiar nightmare. The early light followed, like an attendant; grey, crumbling, flaky. It broke them apart, into a flood of false lumber. They floated in never-connecting circles; going under, dipping from sight. They were all dead. They swam to fetch him. Wavelets, drowned angels; pale-green billows. There were women in hats, holding their children above the waterline. Infants slipping from their arms, slipping from sight. The river’s net was churned; and the ropes were cut.
‘Not again,’ Bobby whimpered, ‘I swear on my life. I’ll never do it again.’ Hot tears bruised the kohl, blackened his eyes, inflicted damage.
More ropes than faces. He knew it would be the same. It could not change. The living location imprisons incomplete instants of time. Sex acts release demons. But the morning light would resolve it, sweep away the visible traces. Except the Indian woman. She was always there. Walking across the water towards him, daintily stepping from wave crest to wave crest: down from the church, court habit, throat hidden in a ruff of sea-bone, most severe.
‘You called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason so must I you. Fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will remain for ever and ever your countryman.’
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.