Oakdene Road is an afterthought, an apologetic addition, succumbing — with little protest — to a plague of pavement-hogging tricycles, motor scooters with L plates, open-jawed Cortinas: a blue-collar compromise between ambition and expediency. The twitchy pretensions of the high-contour semis have wilted within a hundred yards to a boisterous meanness. I don’t want to linger. The pain is palpable. A grey-blue migraine helmet.
Moore’s left-hand maisonette is a pebbledash and red-brick affair, oddly angled. I had visited it often in dreams — of which this was only the most recent version. But ‘my’ house was a mirror image. I pictured it on the other side of the street: where my childhood home would once have been situated, on its steeper hill.
But what made me particularly uneasy was the absence of a door. A flushed and ugly block faced the world with muslin-carpeted windows; offering no entrance, no exchange. The door was a social gaff, shunted to one side, where necessary commercial transactions could be rapidly despatched — away from prying eyes.
I scarcely broke my stride. I snatched a full-frontal snapshot, featuring the stump of Japanese cherry tree (which had not been uprooted, as Peter Riley believed, but hacked off, mindlessly amputated). Yolky flower heads were nudging through the untended grass.
I jogged on down the hill, towards the idea of the river, hoping to reconnect with that possibility. Then pulled up. Turned on my heel, aware that nothing had been resolved (or made clear) by my visit. The roof bristled with aerials. They were equipped to monitor the galaxies. Nicholas Moore’s house was number eighty-nine. Its immediate neighbour was eighty-five. Idly, I wondered what had happened to eighty-seven. (Had it been sucked into the skies? Or offered a more select location?) My oblique (low-angle) view framed an awkward Kurt Schwitters (use what you find) arrangement of doors, window slits, coal-bunker lids. An ‘extension’ that provided an external stairway, while effectively blocking my prospect of the famous garden. Unmoved, an elderly cat stared me out; yawning, breaking wind, and attempting halfhearted press-ups in an upstairs window.
Safely lodged on the train, and returning to the welcoming soot of the city, I took out the folded sheet of paper with Nicholas Moore’s ‘Last Poem’, to examine once more the irritating blank of the final section. I had, of course, now scribbled my own shorthand notes on the verso; possible clues when I came to write about the incident. MILLENNIUM MILLS (train window, Custom House). Royal Pavilion (COURAGE). Darent miander, sun on water (pieces of clock?). Old man bad leg black jacket stick. River wheat. Chemical wilderness, sacks HOPE. Vitbe Bread. Oak Avenue. House, mirror image of dream. Cat.
The page remained frustratingly bare, beyond certain mantic creases, like the footprints of… statues? And from the margin the green waves of Juliet Moore’s dustwrapper illustration were encroaching; cardiac tracings — converted in reproduction to healthy strokes of black. The tide was turning from a knitted electrical stream to a fevered voice-print, soliciting computer analysis. It was all there, but would we find the time to hear it? The instruments to interpret the steps of the dance?
Crossing the fold of the wrapper’s edge were two leaf fingers: the tall bearded iris. The poet’s flower. Recurring through time: Bellini, Dürer, Leonardo’s ‘Madonna of the Rocks’, the Ghent Altarpiece of the brothers Van Eyck. ‘Band of iris-flowers / about the waves’ (H.D.) Iris, personification of the Rainbow. Black iris: Verité, Starless Night.
The word I wanted was the one my transcription of Peter Riley’s tape sent me to the dictionary to check: Sempervivum!
XI. The Case of the Premature Mourners
‘Civilization ends at the waterline’
There had been no point in sleeping. The dreams were too bad; they coloured the days that followed them. They previewed the agonies ahead of us. And anyway, after the first three months, you lose the habit. Then it does get interesting: guessing which strip of water you can safely walk across. I sat with my back, resolutely, to the river, and waited for Joblard to surface. The sculptor was grinning as he snored; an empty bottle nestled in the crook of his arm. It rested content: a sated babe. Primly, Joblard clucked his lips. He patted the bottle; and, waking to the light, smiled. He had forgotten what faced us.
It was no more than a stroll from the wasteground behind the Gun to Folly Walclass="underline" time enough to sober us for the task ahead. I had pestered Joblard to use his network of contacts to procure some craft, anything that stayed afloat, to carry us downriver: beyond the known station of Tilbury towards the potential mysteries of Sheerness. From the Isle of Dogs to the Isle of Sheep: a pilgrimage towards hope, and for Joblard a quest for his origins. But his motivations were hedged in ambiguities. The orphan, who had for so many years — and wisely — left his parentage as an univestigated secret, was now prepared to risk a chance encounter with his closest blood relative. (The pouch of sea, the memory bed.) His mother might serve us our first pint. Ghosts lurked among the marine pleasure shacks, waiting to claim him. The man that he was, the identity he had chosen, could be lost for ever. He might be forced to abdicate the rare privilege of inventing himself. This journey by water also celebrated the news of his lover’s pregnancy, his fatherhood. He was going joyfully backwards to greet the unborn child, returning.
Our pauper’s budget (we were so poor — winos kept waving their bottles at us in greeting) did not run to either a reliable craft or a reliable pilot. (Judea of Shadwell, Do or Die.) We took what we could get. A friend of a friend of a friend. A name with an answering machine that spat ‘one liners’ like a borscht-belt comic on speed, and a flat on the nineteenth floor of the only surviving council-owned towerblock on the Island: the last refuge of society’s lepers. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ stated the Widow. And, observing this rat pack, it was difficult not to agree with her. Ordinary families had long since decamped to become housing statistics in some less ‘progressive’ borough. What was left couldn’t be cleared with a blowtorch: post-mortem optimists, chemically castrated ‘outpatients’, spittle-flecked psychos too temperamental to be approached without a high-voltage cattle prod… Latter Day Outpouring Revivalists eager to greet the Final Trump (where better?), stamping and chanting and calling down the black, wrath-primed stormclouds.
The agreed meeting place, on the Amsterdam Avenue slipway, was deserted. So far, so good. We had been warned not to leave a car in the neighbourhood. The tinkers would have carved it into saleable segments before we cleared Blackwall. (No problem: the car had long gone, to pay for the railway tickets.) This neat estate (a tribute to the glaziers) was too new to appear on any maps. But it already featured a wine bar and two shops. The first sold property and the other displayed naughty knickers. A pair of open sewers had been cleverly adapted, by the ruse of mustard-yellow bricks and dinky wooden bridges, into Dutch canals. Any disorientated (schnapps-crazy) burgher might reasonably have mistaken the quadrangle for one of those West Polder communities that cluster around Monnickendam. Sharp-pointed red-tile roofs (and anorexic balconies, for pot plants only) looked out on the scrapyards across the river; the crushers, the lifting plates, the foothills of rusting motors.