Choking spasms of language gushed from Triscombe’s mouth. Things he thought he heard. Voices on trains. ‘She’s a dog, mate.’ Dogmate. ‘On heat all the time, like a fucking dog.’ ‘Came home for his dinner, didn’t he, and gave her one.’ Dogfuck. ‘I know all the bouncers. Every time I borrow a few quid I say, “Cunt, shut your fucking mouth.” That’s why you never get any.’ Cuntmouth. He’s growling, rolling, hurt in his throat; biting at the fur on his wrist, pulling out the waxy skin in a red pinch of flesh. ‘She’s a fucking diamond, son.’
Triscombe is dribbling; grey bubbles of mucilage slather down his chin. Rasping, harsh breath: a file across his lungs. ‘Took ’er down the ’ospital.’ Horse spittle. Whore’s spital. Clap-shop. The bitch. ‘Fucking ’ore.’ The cunt. The dog.
He drops, stunned, into a black imageless sleep. A poleaxed carthorse.
And Edith writes, steadily and fast, her account of events that connect with these events; but which are not these events, and are not an account. She does not describe what has happened. She describes something else, which exists, independently, beyond the confines of this close room.
Naked, Edith looks into the bathroom mirror, and is — for the first time — troubled. She sees: ‘The eyes of a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable.’ She does not know herself. Her excitement is now as compulsive and primary as Triscombe’s was, when he watched her. She does not make more of this than her written structure can contain. She is satisfied. She has committed herself. She believes that, at last, she has gone too far: there is no way back.
Edith left him, stretched on the floor: she walked, unshowered, down the High Street to the hospital.
V
It is not known, and I do not know, what happened to Edith Cadiz. Some urgent sense of the mystery of the story, locked into her Fournier Street photograph, sent me once again along the railway line from Dalston/Kingsland to Hackney Wick. The Wick had now been relegated, by an unsightly forest of concrete conifers, to the status of the Liechtenstein of the Lee Valley: lacking only the advantages of a competent fiscal laundry service. Once it was a shopping centre, somewhere to travel towards, a destination: the name alone survives. A hoop of gutted enterprises caught between the East Way and the rat-infested river. A station platform boasts of easy access to the Marshlands; where, in the twilight mists, razor-blade-chewing loners wait for their victims to stroll out of domestic banality into a definitive hothouse fantasy. The elevation of the tracks offers a momentary vision — through nicotine-shadowed windows — of the hospital blocks; the Gormenghast on the hill, the Citadel of Transformation. Drawing my last optimistic breath, I suffer the familiar dank whiff of tranquillized dreams, flesh-burns, piss and mindless fear.
I toiled slowly uphill towards a site that I knew had been abandoned. I stared into wild gardens. I ran my knuckles over broken bricks. I photographed reflections in dusty daggers of glass. The trail was cold. All the narrative excitement had returned to its source: the silver-framed photograph in the basement kitchen in Spitalfields. Edith’s actions, the magick she had practised, had been translated into an indefinable quality of light. I was forced to invent and extend the fragments of plot her teasing sense of theatre had scattered over these wasted streets. She no longer had any connection with this place. The hospital was a dead set from which the principal actor had vanished: without her, it was unbearable in its implications.
At the Texaco Filling Station, a seventeen-stone black, Sumo-flanked, in yellow satin Bermuda shorts, was causing a little chaos: and rather enjoying it. Orwin Fairchilde. He was dominating the confessional-slit of the cashier’s window, puffing out his cheeks, like a finalist in a hot-water-bottle-inflating competition. The flesh of his face was a network of scars, some suppurating, some freshly self-inflicted with a Stanley knife. Orwin’s grime-encrusted spectacles magnified his eyes into menacing white balls. The cashier was fascinated. He could actually see the eyes inching out of their sockets. He found himself sliding a ‘free offer’ cocktail glass across the counter, to catch them. It was late afternoon and the door to his office had, thankfully, been security-locked. But the queue of angry punters was growing all the time. Horns were punched, and held. Those at the back, frantic to turn in from the kamikaze madness of the High Street, were more strident in their complaints than those close enough to take a good look at Orwin’s shoulders.
‘Gimme Rizla papers, man, an’ a box a matches.’ Orwin’s desires were as specific, and as irritable in their expression, as any dowager’s. ‘Not tha’one, stoopid. Take it back. I got tha’ picture, in’ I? Said wha’, man? How much? You crazee? Arright then, ’alf a box. Gimme ’alf a box a matches. Tha’s right. Count ’em. Count ’em all out where I see ’em. Don’ fuckin’ sell me short, man. Gimme Juicy Fruit. Jew-cee Fruu-t. Nooo, iz torn. Tha’ one, tha’ one. You deaf, or sumpin’?’
Now the petrol-freaks are ready to slash Orwin to ribbons with their credit cards. He doesn’t budge. He holds a bucket-sized fist in the air, saluting the world. He, very slowly, counts out the few coins he can dredge from his deep pocket: a common-market capful of busker’s droppings. But hold up here: something has caught Orwin’s jackdaw eye. This enterprising garage is lending its support to local arts and crafts by featuring a gravity-defying display of ‘exotic’ underwear, sculpted, with buckles and hooks, from pink rayon ribbons and panels of spray-black plastic. Rigid duelling suits for solitary posers. But Orwin would like — if the cashier has no objection — to fondle the merchandise. It might make a very suitable gift for his mum. She’s been a bit down, lately.
Orwin’s no mug. He knows exactly where it’s at. He’s foxy. He can anticipate to the second the little Paki’s decision to reach for the telephone. The catcher’s van will be summoned. There’ll be a brief, and pleasantly bloody, altercation. Then, it’s tea and medicaments. And a reserved armchair in the front row of the dayroom: fade into ‘Neighbours’.
Marsh Hilclass="underline" red walls of the secure compound. Internal exile. Shovel the flotsam into these hulks of stone. It’s the humane alternative to transportation. Better the lash, and the carcinoma-inducing sun. The ghosts fade from sight. Children, without speech, wake in empty flats, and creep, hungry, to school; wearing the clothes they slept in — not knowing if they are expected.
Edith Cadiz, as a nurse, no longer existed. There is no record that she was ever here. The turnover is too high. Doctors put in for a transfer before they drive, for the first time, through the gates. Nurses suffer breakdowns that would once have merited a chapter in any medical memoir. All I have learnt is that the quest for the woman and her journals — if pursued — will initiate abrupt retribution. It is safer to return to the photograph, which is itself a kind of death. I will speak of ‘composition’, ‘grain texture’, and the ‘magnificent eloquence’ of her flung-back arms. But is this a gesture of triumphant completion — or a dancer terminated by a sniper’s bullet?
VI
In 1868 an Australian Aboriginal, ‘King Cole’ (as he had been named by his sponsors), stepped ashore on English soil at Tilbury. Shaven-headed convicts, social defaulters, premature Trade Unionists, and supernumerary Irishmen had been regularly exported to the antipodean wilderness, in chains, from the far shore: shells of the hulks lay there still, rotting in the black mud, between Woolwich and Crayford Ness. Now was the time to trade, to exchange these criminals for good yellow gold and nigger cricketers.