It’s enough to get Drummond started on another of his current projects, a heart-of-darkness voyage up the Congo with Mark Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp). Along with the inevitable Gimpo (covert camera). The African voyage, with all its logistical problems (paranoia, corruption, disease, river-stink), is the second part of a wildly ambitious trilogy. One: a journey through Finland towards the North Pole, with an icon of Elvis Presley. Two: the Conrad revival. Three: the final (terminal) trip to the moon.
Jessie Weston’s tag — ‘the otherworld is not a myth, but a reality’ — underwrites everything Drummond attempts. Plotting his adventures is better, much better, than carrying them out. The moon jaunt involves a swim, clutching a buoyancy barrel or life preserver, from Cuba to Cape Canaveral. The next bit is vague: blag themselves aboard Apollo-whatever, or lift off by force of will (a Georges Méliès stunt). The moon’s a dead rock and also a state of mind. The secret history of popular music (which Drummond celebrates) couldn’t exist without it — as a rhyme, a simile. Rhymes are dangerous things, forging connections which can never be broken. Rhymes are addictive. They clog up the memory files.
If Florida doesn’t work out (troubled back story: exiled Cubans, Chicago hoods, hit men; the missing sliver of Kennedy’s skull), Drummond and Manning will move on to Peru. Straight lines in the desert, clear skies. They’ll take every pharmaceutical, mushroom, cactus extract, loco weed, they can get their hands on. That should do it, bring the moon down. Until they can snort its dust.
There wasn’t much definition in the sky. Pylons and earthworks, water you can’t see. The occasional horse hoping for a handout. I thought of Jock McFadyen’s painting Horse Lamenting the Invention of the Motor Car (1985). A blue pantomime beast with a bandaged foreleg on a carpet of wasted turf, surrounded by a stream of toy cars. David Cohen called McFadyen ‘the Stubbs of the automobile’.
The reservoir nags of the Lea Valley, scab-eyed and shaggy, are cousins to animals that live on Dublin housing estates. They stretch necks over barbed wire fences, toss at an irritation of fleas. Wet brown eyes couldn’t be set further apart, without falling off. The horses have a melancholy presence, never finding a comfortable direction in which to set their too heavy heads.
Atkins is beginning to limp. This walk is a relatively gentle one, but for some reason — perhaps the monotony of the track, the uneven pebbles — it hurts the unwary.
Drummond can’t decide if our expedition is asking the right questions. The land is too anonymous, no major blight, a steady stream of I — Spy water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp).
I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick black smoke. Urban walkers perk up; we’re back in the shit. The noise. The action.
The situation, at the junction of the North Circular and the Lee Valley Trading Estate, is readable. It’s what we are used to, what we advocate; faux-Americana, waste disposal, spray from twelve-wheeled rigs. Powerhouse, Currys. A Mercedes franchise. Signs and signatures. Zany neon calligraphy. Warehouses parasitical on the road, on the notion of movement, easy parking. Old riverside enterprises that basked in obscurity have been forced to come to terms with brutalist tin, container units with ideas above their station. The aesthetic of the North Circular retail park favours colours that play, ironically, with notions of the pastoraclass="underline" lime-green (pond weed), yellow (oil seed rape), blood-red. Road names aren’t literary, they’re chemical. Argon Road is a memory trace of Edmonton’s contribution to the manufacture of fluorescent lamps. Light is troubled, unnatural. The scarlet scream of the furniture warehouse fights with the graded slate-greys of the road, the river and the sky.
I love it. I like frontiers. Zones that float, unobserved, over other zones. Road users have no sense of the Lee Navigation, they’re goal-orientated. Going somewhere. Noticing Atkins, foot on barrier, perched in the central reservation, snapping away, drivers in their high cabs see a nuisance, an obstacle. A potential snoop. They’d be happy to run him down. Atkins sees a speedy blur, abstraction, the chimney of London Waste Ltd blasting steam.
Visible evil. Pollution from a low-level castle, remaindered Gothic. Better and better. The London Waste facility is battleship-grey, a colour that is supposed to make it invisible in the prevailing climate: rain, exhaust fumes, collapsed skies. The expectation is that on an average Edmonton morning, diesel fug and precipitation will disguise the 100-foot tower of the biggest incinerator in Britain.
The Waste Zone, that’s one they left out of the brochure. You arrive at the edge of the city, out of sight of Canary Wharf, and you take a dump. Surgical waste, pus, poison, plague. Corruption. All the muck we spew out. It has to go somewhere. Edmonton seems a reasonable choice.
In October 2000, a group of Greenpeace protesters occupied the summit of the burning tower. Gridlock on the M25 is a modest fantasy compared to a blockage in the procedure for the destruction of clinical waste. The Edmonton furnaces dispose of 1,800 tons of putrid stuff, contaminated bandages, body tissue, dirty nappies, used hypodermic needles, every day. At the time of the protest, waste material was piling up in seven boroughs (Camden, Enfield, Barnet, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Waltham Forest). Hackney had its own long-running dispute, black bags burst on the streets, as a consequence of the council’s bankruptcy and cutbacks. Generations of braggadoccio incompetence, a system built on institutionalised malpractice.
Waste that couldn’t be shipped to Edmonton was transported to landfill sites in Essex and Huntingdon. Convoys took advantage of the M25, which increasingly functioned as an asteroid belt for London’s rubble, the unwanted mess of the building boom, the destruction of tower blocks, the frenzied creation of loft-living units along every waterway.
We’re intrigued by London Waste Ltd and their Edge of Darkness estate. What was once grey belt, the grime circuit inside the green belt, is now called upon to explain itself. Before the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority, Euro slush funds and council tax tithes, it didn’t matter. Reclamation was never mentioned. Fish and fowl were there to be hunted. Dirty and dangerous industries provided employment, built cottages for the workers. Now we have Best Value.
The incineration industry, and the London Waste Ltd plant at Edmonton in particular, were investigated by television journalist Richard Watson, on behalf of the Newsnight programme. A predictable story of fudging, economy with the truth, buck-passing and ministerial denial. Until August 2000, London Waste were guilty of mixing relatively safe bottom ash with contaminated fly ash. The end product was then used in road building, and for the manufacture of the breeze blocks out of which the plethora of dormitory estates were being assembled. Waltham Abbey and its satellites as Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The defoliant Agent Orange, 50 million litres of which had been dropped by the Americans on Vietnam, registers around 900 nanograms of dioxin to one kilogram of soil. Mixed ash from the incinerators, used on chicken runs in Newcastle, registered 9,500 nanograms. Eggs concentrated the effect. They didn’t need shells. You could see right through them. Dioxins are carcinogenic. Combined with dust, when householders carry out repairs, hang paintings, drill holes in breeze blocks, they are guaranteed to keep future surgeries and hospices busy.