“What’s it to you? You a teacher?”
A flash of his card. “No, I’m a policeman. And I think you should come with me. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I have a very important job to do, and I need your help. How would you like to ride a white horse?”
Without protest, the girl left with him.
South
by Joe McNally
Elephant & Castle
As an incomer to London, I have — almost inevitably — found myself enchanted with the city, in more than one sense of the word. I have enthusiastically thrown my hat in with those who purport to read the city; I have picked and hunted for the obscure volumes which I hope will allow me to enter their hallowed halls through recitation of the Sacred Names of the Lost Rivers, and gestured endlessly toward the notions which underpin their fictions.
For the most part, my own experiments in drift have been confined to the northern shores and, due to a specific confluence of geographical happenstance and the practicalities of car-engine maintenance, to the mysterious islets of the dead between Maida Vale and Ladbroke Grove; ghost country, the lands of the west. Too dead even for Ballard.
Think London as Mappa Mundi: wealth and comfort in the west, wealth and sterility in the far north, squalor and industry in the east (less of the latter these days — heritage docks, churches turned Starbucks), and in the south, a cliché Heart of Darkness. Incongruous strips of pristine brickwork along the river, a seething, churning mess we’d rather not think about.
It’s uncharted territory, our own little Third World, just a little too feral for the tame psychogeographer. Not the heritage poverty of the East End, this is the real thing, waving a shattered bottle in your face and ranting a cloud of whiskey fumes before smacking you down and stripping you to your frame. There’s a reason sorcerers don’t cross running water; down here, they’d be trading your scrying glass for rocks within the hour.
But then it hits me, walking from tube to Thameslink at the Elephant, the peak of the delta — Old Kent Road another Nile, tarmac khem, its length vanishing off toward an unknown source in the mythic lands supposed to exist outside the M25. And here at the peak of the delta are the tunnels.
This could have been built for us, the self-styled cultists of the city still reeling from our frantic initiations of acid-fueled underground trips, coke-blasted long marches across the city trailed by gibbering crackheads waiting to fire up the crystal snot on our cast-off tissues, graduation only by turning up some new obscurity to which the metropolisomancers can nail a thousand mad-eyed theses. Here, a series of far-sighted planners, true inheritors of the Dionysiac mantle, conspired or were somehow moved by unseen forces to create a playground for those unable to travel through an underpass without pausing to attempt to decode the hidden patterns brought to half-life by every patch of crumbling concrete and piss stain.
It starts as soon as you vanish back underground after emerging from the tube. (No, it starts with the name: Elephant & Castle. Gnomic, at first quaint, then taking on sinister overtones. The Guild of Cutlers, ivory and steel. Bone and knife blade, a union still celebrated here more nights than not.) The subterranean walkways, with their vandalized or opaque signs, are an immediate hook, an obvious nod to Crete — passages which seem carefully planned to evoke the dread that some bellowing theriomorph might lurk behind each blind turn, pure panic.
At some point, in a misguided attempt to defuse these chthonic terrors, murals have been added showing imagined scenes from some non-history of South London, jungle scenes, subaquatic fantasies. Sharks patrol these walls. But the genius loci won’t be denied. It rots the cheer, warps it over time into mania. Each grin now takes on a sinister aspect, the jolly street traders and their well-fed horses projecting an air of vague unease, like nursery drawings on the walls of a burned-out house. Crumbling and fading, they have become a desperate illustration of something that can only be hinted at in the most oblique symbolism, a private, autistic blend of Hoffman and Ryder-Waite.
Between the two stations, I stop to talk to a homeless woman sitting cross-legged with her back to one of the walls. She could be five or six years younger than me, but looks ten older. She has an immense paperback open in front of her, and I ask what she’s reading, steeling myself to be polite about Tolkien or worse. Instead, it’s an anthology of classic detective stories — Chandler, Willeford, Himes — with the words Pulp Fiction blazing across the cover. She explains that she bought it because she thought it was something to do with the film. She’s about halfway through it now. I give her a pound and tell her to put it toward another book.
A pound’s the least I can do; she’s already shading into fiction, working her way into the web of metaphor, a fate not to be wished on any human or bestowed on them without recompense. It’s a kind of death, after all. There was a real woman sitting in the underpass, reading a real book, I did stop, I did speak to her, I did give her the money, but by reducing her to this incident I triumphantly deny her the rest of her life, all the while patting myself on the back for my razor-sharp literary instincts and dreaming of Mayhew.
She was drawn into the book — her anthology, not this fiction, I’m the only one on this particular voyage just now — expecting something other than what she got, but now realizes that she’s better off with what she did get. Enter the labyrinth and confront... The pat answer is usually some reassuringly bleak psychobabble borrowed from half-heard, never-read Freud or, worse, George Lucas — yourself, your parents, your dark side. The truth is that you’re confronting the labyrinth itself, the ultimate manifestation of the journey that becomes its own destination. Anything you may find is a function of the maze.
An information bauble surfaces from the Fortean Times days. A piece by Paul Devereux on a South American temple which was designed as a shaman machine. The initiate would be fed hallucinogenic cactus, then sent into the temple. Each part was set up to accentuate some aspect of the psychedelic experience — walls that went from echoing to acoustically dead, water channels designed to create apparently source-less sounds, weird lights.
The cactus they used, San Pedro, is now widely available in Camden and Portobello Road. But bang a couple of slices of that and venture in here, and I don’t like to think what you’d get. Certainly not the sort of mantic howler in the outer darkness who lands regular spots in the LRB. Any signs one could read here would sear the brain with revelation, a freebase hit of pure kabbalah, rebridging the divisions between left and right cerebral hemispheres and turning the reader into an ambulatory conduit for the voice of the labyrinth.
It continues. I stride edgily through the shopping center to the Thameslink. The whitewashed concrete hallway feels like an abandoned bunker somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. The floor is inches deep in rainwater, with helpful yellow signs to point out this fact. Nobody is there. The nearest thing to human contact comes from the monitors, relaying information keyed in hours ago in some other location, a cathode ray phantom, news from nowhere. I have an hour to wait for the next train. I’ve missed its predecessor by seconds as a consequence of my chat with the homeless woman. (See: She doesn’t even get a name, but the entire narrative really hangs on her; without her, you would not be reading this, or at least not in this form.)
I make for the bus stop, where the bus I need appears within seconds of my discovering that I need it. Another omen, another metaphor. This is a fertile zone; tiny possibility bombs detonating and sending ripples through the various levels of my mind. The people milling around the shopping center (the pink shopping center, a Little England nightmare made of concrete — dusky colonials and the taint of lavender) become a personal message to me from something beyond.