The motor coughed, died, spat out a rinse of hot oil; fought for life. Jon Kay cursed. He flogged it like a mule. He kicked. He wanted to see our nose riding out of the water: lacy white furrows ploughing behind us. A steepling kerb of wash to drown the engrammic tracery of these mean bayous.
The teeth of the Thames Barrier were approaching: helmeted Templars, flashing with signals, arrows, red crosses — warnings. As soon as we negotiated this psychic curtain, we would quit the protection of the city. Kay tried to fire the motor, shame it into a more manly performance. He entrusted the wheel to Joblard. That decision alone convinced me: we were dealing with a man whose judgement made Humphrey Bogart, rattling his ball bearings and grinding his molars as Captain Queeg, look the very model of sound sense and marine probity. I hoped I would live long enough to stand witness at the Court of Enquiry; to pick up some punitive damages.
Joblard was hunched in concentration, peering dimly through thick, spray-smeared spectacles. His pathetic orange lifejacket was strapped across the bulk of his shoulders like a dowager’s paisley. It wouldn’t keep him afloat for a second. He’d wallow face-down on the tide, a cetacean Quasimodo, vividly targeted for the harpoons of Japanese whalers.
There’s something hideously familiar about Jon Kay’s face. You want to sneak away and check the illustrations in the latest Charles Manson biog. His whole persona is one that any sane civilian would take considerable trouble to avoid. The scab of some ancestral, suppressed trauma is waiting to be picked from his skin. He is a karmic experience of horror, buried alive in the psyche: a dodgy deal in the silver market, a newspaper-wrapped parcel oozing blood fat in the stall of a condemned urinal.
Then he half-turns, he asks for the time — he’s fiddling with a toy TV set, a flat miniature offering random interference, mantic sunstorms — and I remember. Remember it all; the whole squalid story.
Joblard and I, fifteen or so years before, were cutting the grass on the south side of St Anne, Limehouse, when we discovered the wreck of a boat (an Ark?) rising out of the jungle of a neighbouring yard. We sat on the wall. Took a blow. The thing was as unlikely as an helicopter gunship excavated from a Carthaginian amphitheatre. Joblard rolled a cigarette, while I fell to musing on images of flood, inundation, fire and lightning. I glanced up at the tower of the church. A man was swinging out of the octagonal lantern, attempting to lever the clock-face from its fixed position. He was loosely attached to the crumbling masonry by an umbilical length of rope. Old rope, frayed rope. Hangman’s twine. He was swaying nicely in the breeze: enjoying, simultaneously, nose-scraped close-ups of the fossils in the stone and wide-angle longshots of the river and the dying hamlets. His legs thrashed against the clock, predicting the hour of his self-destruction. We judged the distance to the ground, and we waited. ‘The things you see,’ commented Joblard, ‘when you haven’t got a camera.’
It’s a pleasing thing to sit on an old brick wall in the early-spring sunshine — the grass cut, the sepulchres cleared of weeds — and watch a lunatic wrestle with a clock. His heels kicked among the Roman numerals, causing them to crash like shrapnel on to the path below. The man persisted, against all nature. What was left was now worthless. But that did not quell him. He was in a man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball duel with time. And he was losing every round. He aged with every swoop of the rope pendulum. The creature they would siphon from the shrubbery would be less than the dust in a beaker of impacted cockleshells. No joy here for the resurrectionists.
Finally, the man snapped; put all his weight on to the minute-arm of the clock, and succeeded in forcing it out, horizontally — so that it pointed in accusation at the watchers on the wall. Time, which had been costive in Limehouse since the First War, now leapt into another dimension. It attacked. Smoking lines of longitude surged back towards the Greenwich meridian. The rulebook was shredded. The arm broke away. It plunged; embedding itself in the soft earth, like the lost Spear of Destiny. (Joblard had it wrapped in billiard-felt, and tied to his bicycle, before it stopped quivering.) But the defenestrated villain was left helpless, suspended by his ankles — an impatient suicide, a bungler — tangled in a web of sisal. He substituted for the missing clock-arm. He marked the scarcely perceptible passage of time for the citizens of the borough, the immortal community of vagrants. They studied him, furtively, through the dark glass of their liquid telescopes: brown apertures of serially emptied cider bottles.
These were still the good old days when the vicar chose to spend his afternoons hearing confession in the Five Bells and Bladebone. We had, wisely, taken the precaution of getting the church keys copied. We had access. We were the unofficial sextons and celebrants. Unhurried, we climbed the tower and hauled our man in. Jon Kay (aka, Paul Pill; aka, Harry Whizz) was not especially grateful. He did not allude to the affair or to his failure in it. He had moved on. The clock was history. And not, therefore, to be trusted. Winners wrote the story. Losers lived on lies. He thought we might be interested in humping the great church bell into his van. He’d worked out a way to shift it, with fresh ropes and a beam: swing it at the tall west window — right? — shatter the opaque glass, the pigeon shelves, the whole bloody crust of feathers. The bell was strong enough to survive the fall. It would float through any holocaust, like an acorn cup. We had only to lift it and loop the rope around its skirts. He’d see us right. There was definitely a drink in it. No danger.
Somehow we hustled the maniac down the narrow bore of the tower, skating in linseed curls of pigeon dirt as he went. He couldn’t be hushed. I dragged him from in front, Joblard kicked him from behind. He yelled as he trotted. ‘A few organ pipes, boys. I’ve got a blowtorch in the van. One angel then. Let’s do a couple of sodding stained-glass windows. I’ll shift them down the Passage first thing Wednesday. Be realistic. A bible! Who’d miss it? I’ll tear the plates out without moving it from the lectern. Gimme a break, fellers.’
As the most recent incumbent, the Rev. Christopher Idle, remarked to the Observer newspaper (5 June 1988): ‘Over the past twelve years we have suffered most when the church has been locked.’ Sneak thieves are the least of his problems. The Parish Magazine shudders with pulpit-thumping bulls denouncing pyramid-worshipping satanists, mendacious television producers (all television producers), occult tourists brandishing yellow-back Gothic Romances (in impenetrable verse), oil painters who think the church a fit place to exhibit twenty-foot snail portraits (waggling their horns like the legions of hell). All the dispossessed phantoms of lunacy are screaming at the windows. ‘Let us in. Give us a break, fellers. One angel. A piece of the action.’
Jon Kay. How had this prohibited life-form survived? What miracle had preserved him to rebuke these dark days? Some deathbat brushed its wing against his face. He was too far gone to be affected by mere memory. Electrical connections twitched and sparked. Red cells perished as a septic tide rushed into his cheek. Memory, for him, was a form of sympathetic jaundice. Veins collapsed (like landslides) in his mollusc eyes. He poured with sweat and clawed at his palpitating belly. There was a cure. He scanned the horizon (to check that he was unobserved) and announced: ‘I’m just popping below to write up the ship’s log.’ He bolted the cabin door, and left it to Joblard to bounce us over the boiled milk skin of the sun-polished waters, exuberantly to search out the wash from larger and more powerful vessels.