He yawned, bored with the inevitability of it all. ‘The fat cats,’ he continued, ‘the boys in the red braces have packed away their cellular phones and departed. You can’t make a deal anywhere in the Corporation. It’s all accountable. I’m trying to get a hook on “The Last Show”, our latest attempt to put insomniacs on a culture drip. The rolling credits look hugely impressive — until you read the christian names. Strictly, “son of”. Kindergarten Athenaeum. But they do need plenty of fillers (they don’t use anything else). We can change the title of your treatment and resubmit. Take a few more snapshots, find some new faces. Pop in the odd cutting from the glossies. You’ll be on for a research fee. Your agent cops his percentage. Everybody’s happy.’
Without further debate we plunged recklessly into the streets, the broad channel of Bow Road. ‘I’m getting the twitch,’ screamed Sonny, above the traffic. ‘We’re on to an activated possibility.’
I agreed: it was my policy at that time to agree with everything, to play Russian roulette with whatever fate threw at me, to break — by paths I could not anticipate — into the madness of the city. I would lead Sonny to the redoubt of Imar O’Hagan, the secret Bracken Bunker. Sonny was beginning to see the shape I had already prepared for him.
‘I like it!’ he shouted, as he bounced a pensioner into the path of an oncoming 35cwt van. ‘It’s got realpolitik and balance. This solitary anchorite, O’Hagan, labouring in his cave. Modest, employing horizontal forms, working only with what is available to him — free of sponsorship. A re-enchantment of that which was never previously enchanted. Yes! And we set that against the state art of the Silvertown Memorial, those bragging vertical energies, laying claim to emotions they have not earned. The public river and the unregarded wasteland. God, it’s almost a title! We’ve got it. We’ve got our pitch.’
Sonny beat his hand against his side (altogether missing the historic tablet that stood with its Noah’s Ark, named Courage, to honour the memory of the match-girls). He was awkwardly squaring his fingers to screentest the statue of Mr Gladstone that rose out of the curve of the Gents on an island in the middle of the road, around which swept an enraged scum of drivers, catapulting from the flyover.
‘Who is that? What’s the church? Bow? The bells? You mean, this is it? The epicentre? We’re there, in there, there there, at it — we’ve arrived.’
He advanced at a run towards Gladstone, emitting idiocies like a froth of ectoplasm. The Grand Old Man’s right hand gestured prophetic scorn back towards the Bow Quarter, in bird-limed resignation.
‘Brilliant! This anonymous vision of the great liberal patriarch. It’s biblical. Decency. Authority — by respect. An earned authority. Feel the humanity burning in those eyes. My God, he’s actually supported by a cairn of books. What’s that? Dante? Of course, Juventus Mundi. And a third volume whose title is turned away from the spectator; thus preserving the essential mystery of personality. That’s us. The third force, the mediators between spiritual heaven and material hell. We must shoot our film with the same sense of unegoic communality espoused by the modest craftsman who created this statue. Come on, yes — do you see it? — let’s go.’
He vaulted the protective fence, to hurl himself among the hog-run of cars. I could not bring myself to point out the sculptor’s name, larger than life, cut into the side of the pedestaclass="underline" Albert Bruce Joy. Sonny spun past corrugated fences that surrounded soon-to-be-demolished municipal mausoleums: the fences were plastered with fly-pitched posters for rock groups whose names had all been lifted from the canon of modernist literature. A hyperactive collage of quotations; many from William Burroughs, some from Joyce, some even from Jean Rhys. Authors whose works would finally exist only as names on hoardings: memento mori to bands who went out of business before the paste was dry. The hallucinatory wave patterns of the fence metamorphosed a leering Derek Jameson into an avatar of the Elephant Man.
Devons Road opens to the north from a submerged precinct, half-developed, half-boarded for the bulldozers: nothing happens until you duck under the railway bridge. Sonny was rambling euphorically, pirouetting in tight circles: panoramas of blight — ‘yes, yes’ — grass humps, horizons of aborted social experiments. These were the final killing fields of the welfare state: bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Sonny’s camera/eye swept from the dead nettles of the embankment to the spark-grid of the south-flowing railway cutting, from the marshes to the distant docks. This island earth: a dab of infected lint helplessly staunching a terminal haemorrhage.
He chanted an ecstatic litany of road signs: Fern Street, Violet Road, Blackthorn Street, Whitethorn Street. ‘I can see for ever,’ he said, ‘an open vein, the lifeblood of London, a trail of light. Devons Road converting to St Paul’s Way, filtering and fading, dying as Ben Jonson Road. Do you realize that Ben Jonson’s first known work, The Isle of Dogs (1597), was suppressed by the Privy Council as “lewd, seditious and slanderous”? It earned him ten weeks in the Marshalsea, where he was plagued by two narks, government agents; one of whom, Robert Poley, was present at the death of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford. Now the play’s lost, only the record of the punishment remains.’
‘There’s something unlucky about the mere mention of the place,’I replied. ‘It probably vanished with Jonson. There’s no other reason to go there; you can leave the known world behind. Let it be struck from the maps.’
‘Poets knew how to live in those days,’ Sonny accused. ‘Jonson was branded, rope-scorched; an angry, sweating, pock-marked, ungodly man. He killed the actor Gabriel Spenser on Hoxton Fields with a sword. This empty arena lets all those things flood back. Do you feel it? It’s a flattened book, ready to snap shut, and kill us like flies. We’re there, and here. On it, in it. Found. A slice through the wedding cake of culture, a geological section: a self-preserved dereliction.’
It was true. We had stumbled into the Borderland, the space between the fortress developments of New Money to the north and the De Stijl colour-charts and pineapple-dressings of the riverside oases to the south: between the poisoned swamp of the Lea and the Limehouse Cut was one last slab of unclaimed territory.
Beneath the railway embankment was a wide allotment band, neatly tended, five-year-planned, baled with straw; a medieval strip system, generously sooted by the constant fret of passing trains. Commuters could glimpse this rustic scene and imagine a greening of the inner cities. The hospital barracks conveniently blocked out the uncontained acres of industrial graveyards. It was marvellous: we were floating between Empson Street and Purdy Street — the austerities of the Cambridge School and the fine baroque flourishes of homophile decadence.
Kids used the mud slopes to road-test their liberated BMX bikes, while barefoot freaks spun and stabbed in exotic Tai Chi ballets, like white-faced’ Nam vets exorcizing their trauma in some crummy Hollywood guilt trip: Nick Nolte, or the cheapest available beefcake. One solitary end-of-terrace pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, stood in the middle of the wasteland. It was somewhere for the demolition men to drink, while waiting for the loot to come through, so that they could step back on to the street as fully-fledged brickies for yet another motte and bailey canalside folly.
A pirate cable had been run over the wall from the Docklands railway to a fugitive scrapyard, where blue flashes from welding guns lit the gloom with nerve-destroying bursts, as they cosmetically sculpted new wrecks from a mound of old ones: spare-parts surgery.