Sonny did not know how to handle this. He kept twisting, grandmother’s footsteps, muttering: an aide-mémoire for his ‘Last Show’ synopsis. ‘Gladstone… City of Towers… the sump… anarchist aubergines… Colin Ward.’ He did not recognize what stood directly before him, what I myself had only vaguely sensed, until Imar O’Hagan, the anchorite, the snail painter, had pointed it out to me. This dim field had been, very slowly, and very precisely, rendered as a scale model, smoothed and graded, of the Silbury Hill-Avebury-Windmill Hill complex. Imar, alone, had worked for years, digging and measuring, planting out. So that now Sonny stood, arms raised, on the East London Silbury, the burial place of kings: he trumpeted aloud his brazen affirmations of everything that was not here.
IV
Bracken House was the kind of set you encounter only in radical documentaries about ‘Chasing the Dragon’, or in reruns of ‘The Sweeney’. These places had no official existence; they had been wiped from the books, transferred from the housing list to some directory of naff locations. Unpeopled balconies, madly angled, relished their independence — beyond the reach of stairs that went nowhere, connecting only with other stair systems. Numerology had run riot: doors and walls were defaced with columns of figures (like equations that would never come out, predicting a sun-swallowing black hole). Every dustbin was numbered, many of them several times over. After slashing your way through a yard of booby-trapped motors you can enter the labyrinth, and never be seen again. Your finger bones discovered in the foil of a Chinese takeaway. Rabid infants snapped the wipers from the vans of social prowlers, or set fire to the rags that fluttered on the wire washing lines, from which some trainee psycho suspended the occasional cat.
Imar O’Hagan had converted his flat into a stunning workshop/cave, a vibrant green cell, the walls electric with a Baconian brew of fish oil and reconstituted snot. It was heaped with piers of axed firewood, gathered from the wilderness of Tower Hamlets Cemetery. An abandoned mangle had been transformed into an etching press. One glimpse of Imar’s wild-eyed charms and Sonny was filling in the application for his Equity card.
Trays of lascivious snails betrayed one of Imar’s current obsessions. A visit to the fridge revealed the other: blocks of frozen vampire bats, shipped in from the German labs (like an airline breakfast of compressed leather gloves), fought for space among the melting sparrow hawks and other assorted dead things that friends charity-faxed from the Dorset backwoods.
Sonny timidly refused the offer of a carton of blue-green yogurt, uncapped among this ice-furred carnage. We voted instead to broach an interesting bottle that contained either Monte Alban worm-water, or turpentine.
A postcard self-portrait of Chaim Soutïne honoured Imar’s master. The Bracken hermit had successfully brought Minsk to Bow. Notebook flashing, Sonny gazed longingly at the dark curls, the high cheekbones, the profile chiselled and chipped by adversity. Fired by our interest, Imar’s predatory smile broadened: he shone in an aureole of red-gold light, as he piloted us through his portfolio of deformity: the darkly etched abortions, the pathology crayons, the quattrocento dementia of snails and hands.
Finger-drumming, Sonny stared — with a costive pout — into the courtyard. He had almost completed the draft treatment he would offer, as soon as he could reach a telephone, to the top corridor of teenage producers. ‘The FRIDGE as Storehouse of Magical Possibilities (cf. Joseph CORNELL). Any chance of working in Eli LOTAR’s slaughterhouse photos for Bataille’s Abattoirs? (Check with Sofya.) Outsider Art. MUD location (Voice over: Eliot reading from Wasteland). Studio; Talking Heads — Januszczak? Ignatieff? Some woman??’
(The prime advantage of these jokers with the outlandish monikers is that your godfearing Englishman will only accept that something is ‘cultural’ if it comes with a music-hall accent. Foreigners may be an inferior product, lacking true spunk, but they do know about art and cooking.)
Sonny would not sit: a mistake. He refused the luxury of another era, a row of salvaged tip-up cinema seats. He could not let the moment breathe; he was impatient to drive on, impale all the facts, achieve some grand conclusion. He began to read aloud from his preparatory notes. ‘The bunker?’ he blurted. ‘I thought there was a bunker. I need a definite bunker for our title: “The Bunker and the Monument”. That essential contrast of vertical and horizontal energies, the secret and the showy: the glitz of Silvertown and the modesty of Bow. All those nightland images. I want some of the great Henry Moore drawings on our rostrum. Tilbury Shelter Scene! The sleepers and the dead. What a metaphor for the condition of English kultur. Epstein’s pietaà attached to the Headquarters of the London Underground. Thick-lipped mothers of gloom!’
‘It’s bad karma to watch people sleeping,’ Imar frowned. ‘Better to put your eye to the keyhole and watch them fuck. It’s especially bad to watch a pregnant woman sleep. That’s taboo. The whole quality of the experience is so intense.’
‘No, no, no,’ Sonny yelped, ‘I want the heroic side. People taking action for themselves, capturing their own space; taking their destiny, forcibly, into their own hands. That blitzed community of sleepers, dreaming their archetypal dreams, recapturing previously excommunicated territory — railway tunnels, sewers, bridges. Photographs by Bill Brandt evoking communal memories: lovers nestling against each other… the face of an old hag in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields… timeless!.. she could have known the Ripper. Or those orthodox Jewish fathers in the Brick Lane shelter. The dignity! Undisturbed, carrying on their work, Books of the Law. What Brandt does… here, look.’
He shoved a photograph towards Imar.
‘What? A shed of gassed chickens?’ I mar responded. ‘Mouths agape, toothless, arms flung out — they are nothing but victims.’
‘I see the shelters,’ Sonny persisted, ‘as a “concrete armada”. This is one of the highs of our history, a time for the people, and we’ve got to link it with what you’re doing now — not with the madness of Crosby’s Tower of Babel.’
If the Silbury Mound field was a strong, though imperceptible, public statement, then the Bracken House bunker was one of the most notable single-handed achievements I have ever encountered. Imar, in the guise of a remedial gardener, had been granted access to a stark exercise yard, imprisoned on three sides by tall blocks of windows. Every move he made was viewed by the other tenants; and yet his master plan went unremarked, if not exactly a state secret.
Beneath the grass-flecked clay of this sombre garden was the formal geometry of a wartime bunker, harmoniously divided into four self-contained chambers. Platonic truths had been reasserted in these gnomon-activating depths: invisible passages between the world of elements and the race of life. Imar had excavated the entrances, one by one; had listened carefully to the oracle of falling water. He waited for clusters of eolithic light to break from the tainted darkness.
We sat on a log at the bunker’s edge and let the night swallow us: solitary windows flared, glimpses of movement, opera snatches muffled in rapidly drawn curtains. This welfare rookery had fallen into the hands of the only people prepared to relish a Soviet-style glamour: students, archivists, state-sponsored artists. A gibbous moon slid from its cloud cover, offering — in the unwalled southern sector — a carnival vision of the most outflung of the Docklands studio-bivouacs; a pointless flurry of trapped waves, portholes and marine quotations. A pleasure boat grounded one nautical mile from the river.