The fates were in the mood to indulge him. The skies darkened, lost all muscle tone, and fell. They pressed on the horizon, leaving us with nothing to admire but a thin mercury column. We were imprisoned in a radiation helmet, a black chimney of soot. We were blinking at what was left of the world through the slit of a visor. A wind of hate rushed past us, spitting and gobbing, kicking green water over our bows. A sheet of rain (a rain hoarding), solid as steel, swept towards us from the open sea.
‘Can’t we pull ourselves out of here?’ I asked, bright-eyed as a Rover Scout. ‘Isn’t there a rope?’ Kay cackled until he shook. His eyes were rolling like lubricated bearings. His single lid shorted and twitched. He drooled. He knew it was all over. This was the image he had spent his life searching for; driving through deserts, begging for mayhem. This was IT! To run aground with two blustering inadequates in the middle of the widest stretch of the Thames, the tide on the turn, head-on to a gathering storm. A storm? A storm among storms. The storm.
The winds were the Vessels of Wrath, named vortices of bad will — self-inflicted, and gaining in strength. Rushing (fleeing) into the vacuum of our fear. They did not hesitate to expose all our defects: greed, violence, jealousy, hatred. We had left behind the safe harbour of boredom and complacency, we were defenceless. We saw, in this personalized weather, all the things we had never quite dared to imagine.
Rain stripped us in a hail of blades. Our shirts were rags. Joblard’s orange (distress flare) jacket stuck to him like an acid-attack skin. We were drowning where we stood. But I didn’t want Jon Kay for company on that journey. I decided to go over the side. I pulled off my sodden corduroys, and jumped.
The water came halfway up my things, and the sand was firm. Joblard, lurching like King Kong with a migraine, followed me. He had lost his spectacles and was blind to the horrors that surrounded him. He could have gone under and never noticed it. He grabbed a boat hook, wrapped the tow rope around his shoulder and took off in the general direction of Norway: a deleted icon of St Christopher as a sumo wrestler. I shoved at the stern. The boat had taken plenty of water: rain was filling it like a moulded birdbath. But it moved. It shifted.
Jon Kay sat on the cabin roof, tailor-fashion, and watched us. The calm epicentre, the target. He was crossing the desert again. (Sand to water. Water to sand.) The rope stretched out. Joblard vanished, deep among canyons of rearing swell. Waves broke over his head. He roared. He shouted something we could not hear. For a moment, we glimpsed him again, clinging crazily to his staff: blowing and swallowing and gasping for breath. Broken spears of lightning pitched from the black skies. Antlers of white fire. Cracks in the glass. Sounds of rending and tearing; ripples of thunder. The night guns were all blazing, booming and echoing. Stereophonic shock waves tagged the mucoid dome: bringing to life the theoretical fire pattern of the shore defences. They fizzed and short-circuited in sprays of pinball madness.
One of the horses, driven to risk everything, smashed free of its pen and plunged from the side of the pitching container ship. It was immediately lost in deep water: swimming or drowning. The elements were all assembled for a minor apocalypse. They posed, daring some fool to try and describe them.
I left the Reunion and fought my way towards Joblard. The sea was now the darkness of ignorance. I saw Jon Kay in a sequence of flash frames, lit by strokes of lightning. Electrical anomalies played tricks with my vision. I saw two men in the boat. Kay was crouched in the stern, trying to coax the outboard into life, frantic to escape from the thing confronting him on the cabin roof: a second, and more convincing, portrayal of himself. This minatory being was cross-legged, webbed in a graft of inky shadows. His wet hair rose into stiffened peaks, horns. His finger pointed in accusation at the heavens. Kay saw himself as the Beast, the Other: the Stranger in the cutter, Okeus, John Smith, Spring-heeled Jack. The names meant nothing. He had run out of aliases.
The stranger’s long arm hung over the side, obliterating the ‘E’in the boat’s title. Jon Kay had undisputed command of the motorized ashtray, Runion. He cowered like the sailor’s wife with chestnuts in her lap. From the Scottish play. He waited on the coming of the witches, the bearded women.
Then the lightning found its target. The irritation of the matchbox television, still flickering its feeble interference, guided the jagged discharge towards Jon Kay’s trouser pocket. The Runion was a fireball. Cheap plastic wrinkled, and contracted like an anteater’s mouth. Kay was on his feet, naked, winged with flame. Wrestling his double. He was magnificent. He soliloquized defiance. Holding and damning. The scorched skin justified, at last, its pensioned deformity.
‘So there you have it,’ as Fredrik Hanbury would say on ‘The Last Show’, wrapping up some number on how water resists all attempts at privatization. Is provoked. To answer back. With an anti-commercial, in which we have a featured role. Bottomless budget. The camera becomes an industrial vacuum cleaner, sucking down the skies, draining the sea — and all its flotsam.
I was holding a limp rope. I was attached to nothing. I called out for Joblard. I listened. I was standing in the middle of the estuary, neither in sea, nor on the river: somewhere uncharted between Canvey Island and St Mary’s Marshes. It was too far to walk, and too shallow to swim. The direction to follow was the erased track of a panicked horse. The guide whose whims no pilgrim could anticipate.
XII. The Sexing of Stones
‘I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs!’
It’s so hot the Indians have dragged their mattresses on to the flat roof. Lloyd warned us never to set foot on it. ‘That roof’s as strong as a fistful of wet twin-ply toilet paper,’ he said. ‘Stroll out with your post-prandial cigar — and you’ll drop straight through into the supermarket.’
This was probably no exaggeration. I’d witnessed one of them, in his best suit, during the last of the spring storms, pouring wet concrete feebly into a crack the size of the Californian fault. His best boy respectfully held a ladies’ plastic umbrella over his head. When torrents of rainwater (sky scum, washed dirt) gushed through the ceiling, fusing the strip-lights, the cashier had broken open a special offer of candles: then, when the shop was quiet, climbed to the roof and stuffed the holes (mine-shafts, UFO craters) with Pampers and sanitary pads.
The Bengalis know I’m watching them (some of the time), but they don’t care. They noticed me at once. There are no curtains over our window. It means nothing to them. They are wholly absorbed in their own affairs. Video, jacket, cassette. Cassette, jacket, money. The shifts change, but the lights never dim. The noise of sewing machines, an infernal river, never falters. Day and night. Winter and summer. I think we’d miss it. This avian tide of chattering, fulfilled voices. Money, money, money, money.
Some of them, young boys, male with male — even solemn married couples — are spirited enough. If the roof can stand their devotional humping, it can stand anything. Straight off shift and on to a very recently occupied, still steaming mattress: hot for it. Uncovered acts of love, without emotion. Graciously conducted. Few words, fewer blows. Other men — solitaries — lie there among the chaos (the heaving, the groaning), staring up at a narrow rectangle of sky. An older man, a grandfather, drops at once into bottomless slumber. His territory will be claimed soon enough. He does not enjoy the luxury of dreaming his own dreams. He shares whatever is left in the horsehair: laughter, delight, the music of the gods. Inky leather jackets (welded and creaking), polished skirts (in scarlet nail varnish), cattle coats: they pour from the building in a perpetual haemorrhage. A blood circuit, a wound path. Down the twist of stairs, into the open-mouthed vans: away. Up West. Gone.