An ugly tide licked at the slipway, leaving gifts: pressed cans, detergent bottles, ends of rope. It was hungry to run us down to Tilbury, and whatever lay in wait. I no longer wanted to burden it. I was happy to sit on the wall, watching these reflex spasms — the cough of mud — as I brooded on other rivers, better days.
A few harsh bars of ‘Dixie’ on the klaxon of his horn announced the arrival of our captain. ‘No,’I said, ‘absolutely not. Let me out of here.’
In that moment — as I turned from the simple savagery of the river to stare in disbelief at the two customized Cadillacs (welded together, as if they had met in some monster smash and never been separated) — I knew we were in serious trouble. Then there was the scarlet boast emblazoned down one flank: GOPHER IT! And worse: HEAPUM GOOD JOB, NO COWBOYS. Six-wheel independent drive. A black tank bouncing on white-rimmed balding tyres. Our pilot, mercifully hidden behind his tinted windshield, was a card-carrying soldier in the New Confederate Army. The war had been lost. But they fought on: as electrical contractors, respray jockeys, pine strippers. The surviving remnant of Robert E. Lee’s greybelly cavalry is hiding out in the swamps of East London. They had the flags, the stetsons, the sideburns. Did we dare to climb into anything driven by a dude who looked like Richard Harris after two or three decades riding across New Mexico, tracking renegade redskins, under the command of mad General Sam Peckinpah? I waited for Warren Oates, Slim Pickens, L. Q. Jones and the rest of the good ol’ boys to roll, hawking and chawing, out of the pickup.
This creature, our self-inflicted Ahab, hitched his pants and lurched, bow-legged, towards us. He couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to be a cowboy or an Indian. He had the bronze skin of a reservation Apache, and the last non-institutionalized Frank Zappa moustache on the planet. A shockwave of snakecurl hair had been tipped over him: like well-mashed seaweed.
He wore a checked shirt, jungle-green combat vest, baggy cords, scummy loafers. He looked dangerous: focused on a badge of light that was rapidly arrowing into the past — straining to reconnect those ECT-toasted synapses. It was too late to escape. Our fear had heated our interest. Could we resist it? This was time travel without the hardware. Straight back into whatever had come through, in critically mutilated form, that sad decade, the 1960s. A paradigm of the Weird was whinnying to break free from the Sanctuary.
Introductions were made. The Confederate promptly forgot our names; they were of no importance. He had enough trouble hanging on to his own: remembering which alias was current, and in which country. His ego had been broken into powder and snorted. The snuff-stains on the drooping ends of his moustache had more grip on reality. His mind had lost all adhesion. It was a grey tongue of outdated flypaper. We slid down it without leaving a smear.
‘Jon Kay,’ he admitted, sounding surprised. He punched a fist into his open palm, to reinforce the fleeting inspiration. ‘Right,’ he nodded, noticing the boat for the first time, ‘let’s do it. Let’s hit the water.’
Immediately, one of my more reasonable prejudices came into play: avoid at all costs that fateful combination of letters, J/K. And certainly never trust yourself in an open boat with anyone bragging of them. Was the man Victim or Assassin? The evidence of his face suggested an evil compromise. He had taken a few good hits, but he was still smiling. (My God, was nothing sacred? It flashed into my head — the Confederate had that effect on people — that Conrad was christened Josef Konrad Korzeniowski. J/KK. We were betrayed even by our mentors.)
The slogan-sprayed tank was backed up to the slipway, and the craft, on its trailer, was winched towards the slurping water. Joblard had his boots off, ready to wade aboard. He was soaked to the waist, and grinning like a bear.
Kay emerged from his catatonic lethargy to bawl a few nautical quotations he had overheard in riverside dives. When his repertoire was exhausted, he slipped back to the glitzed hearse, fumbled in the glove compartment, swallowed something — and returned, bouncing, to the action. He was sharp enough now to register my examination of the boat’s licence; which, reassuringly, was only illegal by a matter of four years.
‘It’s yours,’ he said, ‘three hundred notes in the hand. Two-fifty — no, two hundred — if you pay me now. And you’d better have it away, sharpish. They’re going to repossess tomorrow. The car, the flat, everything that isn’t nailed down.’
The face of the dog, with its liquid accusing eyes, watched us from the rear window of the jumbo Cadillac. A deserted mistress. A golden sunbeast, long-nosed: some random collision of labrador and collie. Lassie meets White Fang. The creature knew all too well what lay ahead. And celebrated the prophetic nature of its blood with prolonged and marrow-chilling howls. Seeing what it saw, the dog’s small-brained courage was such that — weighing the odds — it begged to accompany us. (A pathos that would have sent tears coursing down the sandblasted cheeks of crusty protection racketeers competitively hurling back firewater in the Grave Maurice, Whitechapel Road.)
Drawn by the noise, from their innocent game of hurling milk crates from a third-floor balcony, a gaggle of urchins gathered on the river wall. Silent harbingers of doom. Further back, in the shadow of the flats, tinkers in breakdown vans watched us, pricing the craft with greedy eyes, counting the salvage: unhurried bounty hunters. They could well afford to wait. They gunned their motors, prepared to track us all the way to the finish.
Kay hauled the trailer out of the water; climbed into the car; set the wheels spinning and smoking on the slimy ramp. He was allowed, this time, to escape the river. He parked. Leaving the dog behind, as guardian; locking its painted cage with an enormous bunch of keys. (The antelope curry smell of improperly slaughtered leather.) Kay rattled back to us. A ghost pirate: his bones were riveted brass.
We waited on the water. But before Kay had rolled aboard, the urchins were all over the Cadillac: chiselling at the hubcaps, bending back the wipers. The dog was snarling and foaming, hysterical with impotent rage. They would get to him later.
None of this mattered. We were afloat. Kay wrestled with the whipcord. The stubby craft swung its nose towards the money-magnet of the city. It was no more than a tub of baby-blue fibreglass, a tray with a cabin, an unplanted goldfish pond driven by an elderly forty-h.p. Evinrude outboard motor. The name on its rump was Reunion. With what, or whom, or where… we were not deranged enough to imagine.
Under instruction, I punted us out with a boat hook; churning up swirls of dark quag. Joblard ripped open the first can of lager. The engine fired. Kay took the wheel.
‘Which way, boys?’ he howled, above the rage of the spluttering outboard. ‘Just point me in the right direction.’
‘Don’t you have any charts?’ I asked, innocently.
‘Charts are for wimps,’ he sneered.
‘Haven’t you ever been to Tilbury before?’ demanded Joblard, increasingly convinced he was booked on an inspirational outing.
‘Tilbury? Tilbury? Where’s that? I go zubbing under Tower Bridge, skate up the Prospect, sink a dozen frosties, and float home on the tide.’
‘Stick her nose downstream and burn it until you smell the sea. You can’t miss it. A big green thing,’ Joblard instructed. It was almost as if he was going to be the one underwriting this excursion.