Walking away from it all — escaping — the house, the desk; a Saturday morning, down the Waste, for old time’s sake. And I found in a box on the floor a curious, awkward, Germanic engraving: ‘Descent from the Cross’ by A. H. Winter. It was very cheap. I bought it to resell, as I hoped, at the next Book Fair. But succumbed to temptation and held on to it, hung it on the wall. A slumped Christ; maimed, extinguished beyond all hope of resurrection. The peasant disciple, mongoloid with shock, fingers hooked beneath the lifeless shoulders, struggles with a dead beast-weight. The twisted neck, the veins of the kneeling woman. It was unutterably bleak.
I recognized the cross, a monstrous concrete tree, as we turned off the motorway and down the private slip-road to the crematorium. Red furnaces against an overcast sky. Perimeter fences of the steelworks. Out of the window of the Silvertown train the whole reel was available, now, today, at this moment, the film of life: event by event, second by second, a procession of single frames. It is all there, all within reach; birth to grave — and beyond: it requires only the courage to stop everything and to look.
I pushed the heel of my hand against my ear and succeeded in muffling the pulse of pain. Held firm by the gravity of sick pride, I remained exactly where I was — and nowhere else. There was no further expenditure of stolen time. The trauma was safely frozen.
Sonny is nudging me, opening the door: Silvertown platform. It is as mauve, silky, stocking-filtered, fey, day-for-night as Delvaux’s ‘Nightwatchman’; used on the dustjacket of the American edition of Julio Cortázar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. Obscure, semi-official buildings. A snake’s nest of rail tracks. Hills in the distance — across the river? And the river itself, that self-renewing avenue of escape? Denied to us. I grant no credence to this preposterous set. If this is reality — pass me a paintbrush.
We have to arrange, somehow, to re-enter our narrative, to advance; or stand for all eternity, shivering in this dogmatically transitional limbo. (I flashed to John Clute’s warning of my ‘not remarkably powerful grasp of narrative syntax’. But I am powerless to act. It is like being handed a plague card.) I allow myself to be dragged, club-footed, a storm anchor behind Sonny’s still bustling pilot boat.
Silvertown, sadly, makes little attempt to live up to the glory of its name. It would have to be acknowledged even in the most optimistic auctioneer’s catalogue as ‘distressed’. Subdued by the deconsecrated ziggurat of the Sugar Factory, the thin main street — once active in the field of nautical exploitation — now reluctantly let chaos greet chaos; it tumbled into more and more boisterous characterizations of squalor and decay. The once fire-stormed hamlet was now a glittering beach of sugar. The air was thick with a viscid sweetness; inspissated droplets fell, without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia. As you smiled, charmed by this version of the picturesque, the enamel of your teeth was stripped to the nerve roots; the periodontal membrane dissolving into black lace.
We crossed and recrossed deleted railway bridges, trying to find our way to the City Airport, the Royal Docks, the site of the almost completed memorial to the Widow’s Consort (known locally as ‘Dirty Den’s Knob’). The tracks always petered out among the same tangles of wire, giant wheels of extinct machines, columns of treadless tyres.
A mustard-plaster Victorian Gothic church, St Mark’s, primed with a terrifying bestiary of gargoyles, oversaw and dominated this principality of unemployed apparitions. S. S. Teulon’s masterpiece, with its hollow ceramic blocks, was caged in wire and no longer approachable. Soon it would be returned to the populace, the eager communicants, with a new identity — as a storage shed for the local history collection of the Passmore Edwards Museum. An unneccessary conceit: the entire canton should have been under a bell jar, with a neatly engraved sans-serif label. Even the inevitable First War cross was beyond our reach. I pressed against the fence, striping my cheek: a refugee from the razor gangs. The words (Courage, Remembrance, Honour) exulted the dead ‘whose names shall live for ever’; but not here, where the sugar-smog has already eaten the gilt from the sandstone, and erased the lost squadron of claimants on our sympathy.
It was long past the time to look for a drink.
VII
The kids leant in wonder on the antlers of their BMX bicycles, as Imar O’ Hagan walked inside the wicker head across the Bow wastes. He disappeared into a shallow pit and — for a few minutes — they saw nothing but the crown of the great head itself, the shell-crusted eyes, floating towards them. They mounted up, cowboy fashion, standing on the pedals to race back to a safe distance. The Wicker Man and his double were within a breath of life.
Lacking honest, friable Dorset chalk, Imar had whitewashed the x-ray of the Cerne giant on to one of his lesser mounds. The creature’s arm was stretched out in a gesture of reconciliation; not grasping a warrior’s club, but a shamanistic twig that resembled nothing so much as a favourite niblick. The face was decorated with a pair of Rotarian-approved spectacles. His vertical manhood fell short (by several yards) of the generative potency of his two-thousand-year-old rival.
When the wicker head was lifted into place, the revenging Twin, the basket case, stood ready on his scaled-down Silbury. He stared fiercely across an empire of compressed slurry towards the southern horizon and the coronation of his Silvertown rivaclass="underline" this false sibling with its feet set in concrete.
With a hoe Imar raked up the living grass, the mud and the worms; he stuffed his creation (his Adam, his angel) as he would a cushion. Balls of old newspaper (carolling wars, disasters, corporate raids, rape, surveillance, child abuse) were fed through the cage of his curved white ribs. He kissed the head full upon its lips. He aimed a sharp blow at its paper heart. The physical work was done.
Sitting at the foot of the mound — with slowed breath — Imar opened his sandwich box and gently lifted the twelve snails from their leaf. He was prepared to follow their instruction. Their silver threads would set the destiny of the monster.
VIII