He flicked open a scuffed sketchbook and gave his own interpretation of the defiant dogma of that utterly obscure sculptor, S. L. Joblard. He translated, with impressive fluency, these pages of frantic thaumaturgic doodling: the mineral metaphors, the pencilled ghosts, the chalky erasures, the leagues of angels.
Professor Catling, prepared to travel in the quest of visionary stimulation, had ‘discovered’ Joblard’s work in a remote gallery on the edge of London Fields, Hackney. An old drovers’ patch of no consequence whatsoever that was notable only for lending its name to a spirited work of lowlife fiction by John Milne. Joblard, it seemed, had conceived the idiot-simple notion of borrowing the ice-making machine from the Lea Valley Skating Rink to freeze the western dock, the second eye of the Silvertown skull, to create a polar ocean. In the ice would be embedded the salvaged wrecks of several whaling vessels. Fram, Terra Nova, and Discovery would be represented, however dubiously, within sight of the North Woolwich railway. The rubble of demolished riverside terraces would be dumped, then layered in foam or polystyrene chippings, to suggest Mt Erebus. Tattered canvas tents, war surplus (Brick Lane), would be despatched to the most far-flung regions, to double for Scott’s camp sites. A dart-nibbled builders’ shed would stand in for the shore base. Expenses would be minimal. There might even be a small profit to be earned in clearing such unexploitable relics. Outdated tins of bully beef, prairie beans, dog food, and pemmican could be buried in flag-marked cairns. Wind machines could guarantee a force-ten blizzard. Brave spirits, at the flash of a Euro credit card, could relive the noblest failure of them all — the dash to the Pole. Junior executives, under compulsion, would build their characters, hone their cutting edges, in a race against a team of Russian sailors from Tilbury (prepared, for the price of a night among the Soho slot machines, to fake it as Amundsen’s hardy Norwegians).
Joblard of course had other — darker — notions he would tack on behind this preposterous smokescreen: shamanistic ceremonies concerned with lunar eclipses, molten lead, horse skulls, brick ovens, ice spears, the invocation of animal ancestors. These, Professor Catling had the tact not to mention.
The thing was put to the vote. The Sh’aaki twins sniggered, took out an option, and accepted. The Film Producer was already on his way home, via the Limehouse nick, in a canvas sack marked ‘DOA’. The couple under the table, locked into writhing (and interchangeable) combinations of hunger and tumescence, continued to heave like huskies: they rose to the occasion, offering up tacit moans of approval. And so, to the sounds of feeding time in the wolf pen, a ribbon of pure madness was innocuously inserted among the footnotes. Professor Catling signalled for the waiter to summon a taxi.
VI
In that refurbished cattle truck, shuddering on some embankment ledge, above fenced mud fields, over paludal wastes into which sacks of paper credit had been tipped as ballast; in that rattling, enclosed space, pressed hard against the smeared, cold window — I began to understand the concept of breakdown. Complete, absolute despair. The ego extinguished. The power of the centre, the unviolated heart of my being, was tattered and frayed. I tasted vomit on my lips. And felt my angel shiver to be free. Sonny spoke aloud, but his voice was untrustworthy. It was my mother’s voice, calling out in the darkest hour of the night, addressing me with my dead father’s name.
The quality of the desolation outside the carriage’s window-screen altered; it shifted and shook, as I drove my knuckle against the ball of my eye, feebly opposing this accumulation of evidence with mere pain. I pulled my cheek from the dirty glass, leaving behind a negative frame: the portrait of a ghost, a man without moral substance. I had never confessed to being anything but a jaunty witness, a paddler in the narrative shallows. Now there was nothing else to look at. There was no ‘story’. The landscape had withdrawn its labour: an unsettled greyness. This heat-printed trace, this copied man, stared back into the train with an unfocused, autistic gaze; and saw Sonny sitting with some straw-stuffed bundle of laundry. Borrowed clothes, borrowed skin; the inevitable carrier bag of other men’s books.
The catastrophic rump of Stratford and Plaistow, Canning Town and Custom House became, as the train moved, the blast furnaces of Margam, the rolling mills, the fire-tongued stacks belching their gritty deposits on to the salt breeze; creeping over low hills, to strip ancient damp oaks, or gift the valley folk with lush cancers and squamous growths; dying among the inhuman lightless depths of conifer plantations, in which foxes hid from squadrons of shotgun-toting foresters. I was back in Wales, being driven down the coast road, west, following the coffin. Pieces of that journey lodge, and overwhelm my lack of interest in yet another East London railway adventure. Salient flashes of the Thames, between wrecking yards and stiff-necked cranes, burn into the persistence of the broad flat Severn. I saw the shell of Margam Abbey, and the roofless chapel on the hill above the maze; while, all the time, we continued to jolt towards the business of Silvertown.
Sonny still danced to a self-inflicted cattle-prod tango. ‘If we can borrow a standby crew from “Local News” or “Blue Peter”,’ he said, ‘we’ll simply compose with their tired utilitarian footage. Exploit banal images that have no resonance, no sense of being inhibited by meaning. The method has distinct possibilities. Found art, construction by selection: editing is the really constructive stage anyway. Give us your raw material — formulaic establishing shots, over-emphatic close-ups — and we’ll electrify the air waves.’ He broke off to hammer at the walls of our designer-vandalized compartment. ‘An Art Train! Dziga Vertov! Kino-Eye! Montage is the true engine of the lyric. We’ll plunder those reservoirs of unconscious aspiration. Take whatever we are given, and cut/cut/cut to the heartbeat, to the rhythms of the breath: engines, wheels, statues falling, racing clouds, the quaking towers of the city. Futurists of a New Reality!’
Sonny’s lips were moving but the sound, mercifully, escaped from me; ran out into the overhead wires, leapt towards Canvey Island and Shoebury Ness, bearing false messages of revolution and hope. His gestures were wilder and faster. His teeth dazzled like Mexican bone dice. It was like watching a madhouse charade in which some flesh-scorched depressive mimes his remembered account of the Book of Deuteronomy. Without warning, I experienced an excruciating pain in my ear (how crude are the body’s metaphors!); as if Sonny’s irrepressible torrent of enthusiasm was splitting the incus, the anvil, with a tiny (and blunt) cold-chisel. Each blow projected a scarlet flash on to the ceiling of the carriage: cooling towers, the moulded angel on the side of the Custom House, the black and silted canal. I tipped forward to rest my head in my hands. Sonny was pouring the landscape, in the form of an ointment of honey and melted film stock, into my external auditory meatus. It was slipping, sticking, soothing; inwardly sealing my father’s voice, which prompted me towards actions I could not begin to understand.
Absolute madness! Sonny had no mandate from the Corporation. We were without cameras, crew, or recording equipment. We had no budget. We couldn’t raise a production number between us. Our epic looked certain to qualify as one of those masterpieces that exist only in the conversations of film buffs. The fewer people to see them, the fewer to contradict the legend. Eventually you have world rights on a cockney cut of Orson Welles’ It’s All True — and without exposing a single foot of film.
I was drowning in the psychopathology of obsession: the harder I drove myself in composing this account, taking down the voices (the intrusions from ‘elsewhere’), the more exposed those around me became to repeated and meaningless mischiefs. My lacerated ego puffed and swelled to a critical state: I began to believe that, by some magical trope, unwittingly enacted, I had moved ahead of the events I was describing. Or even, and this is hardest to swallow, by committing these fictions to paper, I had ensured they would occur. I found myself, a sandpaper-pored Richard Burton, opening my newspaper with palsied hand to have the latest atrocity confirmed. Vessels of Wrath: ‘angels that failed’, revengers, river-inhabiting, tied to the earth (but not part of it), deluding with false divinations, whispering into the wires, toying with stop lights. Light bulbs exploded as I touched the switch. The typewriter cut out as I pressed the first key (I considered shunning the letters ‘j’ and ‘k’, but that was insufficient penance). I fell prey to the temptation to destroy everything I had done — as if that would revoke it; to pitch the whole mess into the fire. As soon as I completed my narrative of the Whitechapel train-fury, typed the final paragraph, I slumped in front of the television set to receive equally distant, but more compelling, versions: blood, carnage, suffering. I began to wrestle with the present tale of widowhood, memorials, monuments, and I was telephoned with the news of my father’s death. If I moved on, as I proposed, to crucifixions, cursed motor launches, Islands of the Dead — what could I look forward to?