When he makes portraits, he’s dowsing for a late bloom, evidence of a well-spent (or misspent) life. It’s not that he’s an ambulance chaser, but he appreciates experience as a cosmetic of revelation. He talks to his victims, draws them out. With that unnerving height (shaved skull, dark glasses), the request for a photographic session is not always welcome. It’s like collaborating with an obituarist. He might tell you more than you want to know.
Industrial units replace farms. FRUIT DISTRIBUTION CENTRE: a white flag pole garlanded with barbed wire. A faded Union Jack. We’re closing on territory where Englishness is a threat, faces painted with red crosses. The Darent is nudged aside by the thrust of the M25 — as it races towards the Thames. Wat Tyler, famously revolting peasant and local hero, lends his name to profoundly conservative pubs. Top man: the most popular Dartford heritage token. Before the advent of Mick Jagger.
Flooded gravel pits, desultory fishermen, fade into empty meadows. The scabby planting of the M25 embankment. On the hard shoulder, we stop to repair Kevin’s feet. A true English gentleman, of the Captain Oates type, Moose has made no complaint. A steady stream of self-mockery yields to clammy browed (but unadmitted) desperation: will this day ever end? When he bares the ruined feet, we blanch. ‘Last time,’ he announces, with a slightly hollow laugh, ‘the nails went black and fell off. I squelched when I walked.’
It was fortunate that Renchi (who stayed overnight in Hackney) had helped himself to the various antiquated packages of plaster from our medicine cabinet: waterproof, quilted, smooth and smelling of matron’s room. The Quaker carer gets to work. He binds the abused flippers like Christo wrapping the Reichstag. Each foot has twenty short muscles primed to flex, extend, abduct and adduct the spindly toes: all shot, screaming. The horn of the nail is black (the burnt crisps you find at the bottom of the bag). Epithelial tissue oozes pink, no longer capable of securing nail to toe. It’s probably time for Kevin to step outside, into the fast lane. Do the decent thing.
Marc’s camera hovers, an inch above the insulted flesh. When he’s satisfied that he’s got the shot, Renchi supplies fresh socks. The rest of us are bearing up quite well; we can live with Kevin’s pain. Somebody on these occasions has to take the bolt, pay the ferryman’s fee. It’s noble of Kevin to volunteer.
But it’s not just Moose Jackson who is on his way out, the M25 abdicates at Junction 2; its title is not returned until it manages to cross the Thames. Panic strikes. Roads spin off in every direction. Powder mills, pumping stations, flooded sports fields will have to be negotiated before we reach town. The Darent is no longer a Kentish stream, it’s a canal, a dirty ditch between rat-grey banks. A drudge. The force of the river labours to drive cog wheels and grindstones. Dartford is the property of Glaxo-Wellcome, global pharmacists: insulin for diabetes, digoxin. A strong dose of reality to counter pastoral sugar, the saccharine of Samuel Palmer. Speed to whip the heart’s tired muscle.
*
It’s wet and light is draining from the sky. Kevin locates a phone kiosk, near the splendour of the Dartford Public Library. He has to call a copy-editor in New York. He’s flogged out, gone in the feet, and he’s arguing commas with Bill Buford. It’s a bad day when Kevin doesn’t turn in a page for the Independent, an interview with some broken spar of cultural flotsam, a radio show. Greasy phone tucked under chin, striped shirt sticking to a heaving chest, he sweats like a broker on Black Monday. Moose has been reduced to writing pieces for the New Yorker (the media equivalent of debating doctrine with Torquemada). Obscure (Eurocentric) references are culled, paragraphs ironed out, minor witticisms exorcised. Ten minutes of this treatment and Kevin is ready to confess: he’ll do anything for cash.
Dartford is a town that can’t be negotiated on foot. Watling Street sweeps through, but the old pilgrim routes have been realigned: nobody walks to Canterbury, they stick with the Darent Valley Path (as laid out in the Kent County Council guide). Commercially, riverine Kent is Third World, mid-combat Balkan. Bluewater has stolen the action, leaving a rump of charity shops, fast food outlets and aggrieved pubs. Experience teaches: pedestrian walkways are not for pedestrians. They are magnets for car parks, open-air malls. They define themselves in negatives: no motor traffic, no access to the town at large (side streets, canals). Dull flagstone paths are a compulsory shopping experience for people who don’t shop; a zombie treadmill furnished with stone benches on which only the most dispirited transients (lager schools, outpatients, the dispersed) ever perch.
But Dartford hasn’t thrown in the towel. Lottery Funds have gifted the town with £2.25 million: for the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger — Jerry Hall, three of the kids and Jagger’s octogenarian parents, Joe and Eva — turned out for the dedication. The Duke of Kent pulled the velvet rope, unveiled the plaque; then Mick climbed on stage to read a speech to the assembled dignitaries. The centre is part of Jagger’s old school, Dartford Grammar.
Like any other crusty returnee, Mick banged on about combining performing arts with maths, science and Latin, a well-rounded education. He was modest enough to wonder why he had been selected for this tribute, rather than other notable Dartforders; such as General Havelock who relieved the siege of Lucknow — or Wat Tyler. Generals, he supposed, were no longer PC. And revolutionaries unacceptable as role models. ‘I won the honour by default.’ (Nobody considered fellow townsman Keith Richards.) Tyler and Havelock will have to be satisfied with seeing their names on dodgy pubs. Jagger, who had the sense to get out of Dartford, early and often, fronts the overendowed assembly hall.
Finding Dartford station means battling across fenced roads, dropping into pedestrian underpasses, detouring the long way around civic centres, coping with the river. Having got you, they don’t want to let you go: but a return to Cambridge, a night of revisions for the New Yorker, is suddenly very attractive to Kevin. A bone-deep drenching in torrential rain, as we try to pick up Dartford Creek, to navigate across the marshes to the Thames — by moonlight, if necessary — is an experience he is happy to imagine. As he settles back in a comfortable railway carriage.
We shake him warmly by the hand, wave him off — then spend forty minutes, trekking through dereliction, drifting west towards Crayford, snarled at by yard dogs, blanked by citizens, splashed by motorists; until we reconnect with the swollen and unrecognisable Darent. The river is tidal as far as the town bridge. Industry, on one side, pumping in noxious additives; tough vegetation on the other.
Heads down against the storm: the great moment comes when the last of the town is cleared and we swim out, exposed and ridiculous, into the apocalyptic erasure of Dartford Marshes. Buildings, road, river: revoked. Indistinguishable. We lean into the rain and navigate by touch and smell. My golf umbrella! I set it down to shake hands with Kevin. It’s still there, outside the station; a flag stuck in a cairn of stones by some doomed expedition.
On this black night, the loss is meaningless. It would be like hanging on to a parachute. It’s too dark to distinguish either of the rivers, Darent or Cray. Or the river gate that stands like the entrance to a forbidden city, turning pedestrians back for a detour of several miles across the marshes.