It was time to go under. We slid our spades beneath the squares of turf that Imar designated, and dug — until we heard the clink of metal upon metal. A trapdoor was located, prised open, lifted. We lowered ourselves, feet scrambling for the rungs of a ladder, into the clammy darkness. We advanced, hesitantly, inch by inch, through unconvinced puddles of light afforded by my pocket torch. We found ourselves, at last, inspecting an icehouse, in which time itself had been chilled, slowed, handicapped. Even in the breath of our heightened expectations, the bunker remained obstinately less than it was.
The antechamber was steepled so high with industrial fallout that the only entry to the inner sanctum (the heart shrine) was by way of an obstacle course, perilous enough to deter any respectably mercenary tomb robbers. ‘I let an old rag and bone man stash his stuff,’ said Imar. ‘He asked if he could leave a couple of things here — just for a few days: then came back with a pantechnicon.’ What was on offer? Washing machines so ancient they must have been pedal-driven; useless slices of bicycle; sodden briquettes of paperbacks, congealed into twelve-deckers; enough folding chairs to sit out a square dance; Marcos-rivalling collections of single shoes; artificial limbs for dogs; gas stoves; lavatory bowls; columns of rusting paint tins: a fully-stocked museum of folk memories. We picked our way, admiringly, among the exhibits. And, as we stumbled blindly forward, we snapped off the spears of occasional stalactites; limey droplets plicked irregularly on to the flooded tile floor. In the torchlight the low ceiling shone like a dome of radium-licking insects (about to become stars). An eidetic cinema.
The secret inner chamber had been successfully dammed, mopped, dried, polished. The walls had been scoured of bureaucratic symbols and the blood oaths of cadet gangsters. The chimney pipe had been cleared of dirt, dead birds, rags: it was possible, once more, to light a fire. ‘You should see them heave shut their curtains, when they see smoke rising, without apparent cause, from the old grass hump,’ said Imar. ‘Legends are spreading. Civilians keep well clear. They think some berserker mob are incinerating inconvenient human evidence.’
Oozing goodwill, and cackling with pleasure at his own strategies. Imar was no ‘divine light’ zombie: his vision could have been realized only through an immensely powerful self-belief (and many man-hours of vein-popping muscular effort).
‘I determined, when I first heard rumours of this heretical Silvertown monument,’ he announced, ‘to counter it with one of my own. To work faster than they could work. To start digging while they were still farting around with brochures and flogging the circuit of merchant banks. Look at the blasphemy of it.’ He jabbed fiercely against a projection of Crosby’s river, pinning it to the wall; then swept an avenger’s hand over this plucky attempt to align such reservoirs of the eternal spirit as the Museum of Design, Tower Bridge, and HMS Belfast.
‘Can you believe it?’ he stormed on. ‘These people want to erect their obscene stack, a heap of inert and spiteful weaponry, upon the most potent site on the aetheric highway between Greenwich Hospital and St Paul’s Cathedral. They actually intend to deflect the path of light, opened and acknowledged by Nicholas Hawksmoor; the ley that runs down from Blackheath — without drama or fuss — exactly through the gap between the twin domes, across the river, over the malign Isle of Dogs, to circle and recharge at the Tower of St Anne, Limehouse. As the light travels, it fades from our sight, but its influence does not pale: the Jews’ Burial ground, Whitechapel… King Cole’s eucalyptus, the caterpillar dreaming tree, Meath Gardens… Victoria Park fountain… Well Street. It blesses and touches all those unacknowledged and marvel-provoking enclosures; a spine of hope. How dare Crosby misread Turner’s “View of St Paul’s from Greenwich” (the Maze Hill eidolon)? Turner is careful to place an antlered deer in the foreground, and also a buck — so insubstantial that you can see the canvas beneath. These are the animal familiars, the spirit guides. Turner must never be dragooned into the enemy’s camp.’
Sonny’s frustration at not being able to take notes in the dark, and not knowing what the hell Imar was talking about, made him pathetically eager to escape our confinement. A smothering, claustrophobic sense of being ‘out of it’, beyond telephones — perhaps for ever — contributed to his unease. He was now quite certain that if we ever should re-emerge into the real world, there would be nothing left. The flats would be a cliff of termites, and the wasteland a robot-controlled industrial estate. Even his beloved Bow Quarter would have regressed to supplying matches to a phantom army of beggar girls. Surely, that was impossible. The Bow Quarter would never fail. But Imar’s voice had that quality: an undertow of mad humour that threatened to freeze into uncensored prophecy. He laughed aloud as he savaged Crosby’s demonology of bad faith.
‘How did you develop this concept of… lines of force?’ Sonny demanded, revealing, all too candidly, that his realpolitik was in tatters.
‘By watching randy molluscs. I was sitting on the wall in Island Gardens, sketching a snail (Helix aspersa), as it inched towards its mate: they can orgasm, you understand, for days at a time. It’s been suggested that the more advanced mesogastropods returned to the sea. I wondered if this couple — in their slow-motion ecstasy — were going to make a dash for the river.’ Imar smiled at the recollection. ‘I happened to notice, to my amazement, that the dome of the Royal Observatory, with its turreted brick body, suggested a perfect snail silhouette (Pomatias elegans?); and I had an immediate vision of these irradiating hoops surging across the entire country, knotting the globe in right-hand spirals. I saw a translucent shell of unexploited energies. The “lines of force”, as you call them, were created by the measured burn of mating snails, tracking each other down lucid paths of sticky seminal joy: a silver glide visible only to hermaphroditic life-forms. A condition to which I have always, subsequently, aspired.’
Sonny snapped — sure now that Imar was taking the piss — and bolted for the escape hatch. Our submarine was sinking straight to the bottom. We followed. Sonny cursed as he splashed, ankle-deep, through the flooded outer chamber. Paint tins clattered in his wake. We let the trapdoor fall into place behind us, and covered it once more with earth.
‘I’ve been given permission to take casts of angelic forms in the Fitzwilliam; so I shall surround this square with twenty-four winged beings, their fingers reaching to make a connection,’ Imar said. ‘I don’t want frozen salutes, baptized warriors holding their sword-arms out of the river. I’d rather amputate every limb. I want polysexual transcendent bliss — like snails, male and female together, mutually fucking and being fucked. I’ll be ready if they ever try to build that monument, that Beelzebub nob. My work of defence has already begun in the bunker’s unopened fourth chamber. When the time comes, I’ll turn it loose.’
I slurped through the mud on Sonny’s trail. The boundaries of his concept had burst, and the only solution was to wipe the slate, cut out, pick it up again in Silvertown. Another day, another notebook.
V
There comes a time in every successful meeting when the warring egos tire, and blanch towards the compromised satisfaction of having survived, intact, a potential trauma. The gathering at the London City Brasserie had mellowed through all the layers of port, stilton, champagne, strawberries, boredom, claret, gin and terror. Convulsing throats thirsted for silence. Inane fragments of conversation lay heaped on the floor like shattered saucers. The interminable afternoon had stretched into a star-bright evening. The Chairman, to general yawns of relief, had been stretchered out, choppered away to his next free meal. The atmosphere lightened up — to the extent that the Last British Film Producer tried to interest the fastidious Sh’aaki Twins in ‘doing a line’ of something. Professor Catling was stuffing his pockets with bottles of Armagnac and sniffing at bundles of cigars. Previously unstressed, but potently real ambitions were beginning to surface. Aware of his chamber reputation, as a ram among rose-spectacled bleaters, the Architect was pitching it strong at the Laureate’s Wife. He was quite indecently horny, his cream slacks bulging with overstated pistols. A gamy reek of hormonal secretions blended with the madeleine of meat-steam on the airport window: horse-radish, pestled garlic, basil, Gauloises Caporal.