Free Downriver by Iain Sinclair

me, it wasn’t easy to get those tickets. I’m sorry to say this, but we were conned. We won’t be back in a hurry, will we, Bob?’
    â€˜You are standing,’ said the guide, a little wobbly himself; his arm thrown affectionately around the gibbet, ‘on the very site of the infamous “hanging dock” that saw the execution of so many pirates; including, of course, Captain Kidd. You probably recall the name from the cinematographic version – 1945 – with Mr Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland…’
    â€˜Errol Flynn,’ said the Californian bookman. ‘Errol Flynn did all the pirates.’
    â€˜I beg your pardon. No, sir. Flynn was a colonial, son of the Empire. Born Hobart, Tasmania, circa 1909. There is some debate about that, I grant you. Two schools of thought. Tedd Thomey suggests… But I won’t bore you with scholarship. Flynn played Captain Blood in 1935 for Michael Curtiz (or,Mihaly Kertesz, if you prefer it), an extrovert Hungarian gentleman, later acclaimed for the film
Casablanca
, made in…’
    â€˜Randolph Scott only made Westerns,’ said Bob the bookman, grimly. ‘He was never in a pirate picture. I like Randolph Scott. I’ve got all his stuff on video.’
    â€˜Indeed, sir, the performer in question is widely admired, particularly by our European cousins, for the mythopoeic Western films made with that fine amateur of the
corrida
, Budd Boetticher. Some critics laud the cycle for its moral austerity in the use of landscape – while others, more cynically, put the bleakness down to Harry Joe Brown’s tight control of the budget. For myself, I would have…’
    â€˜Listen, jerkoff,’ screamed the Californian wife, edging ominously close to a full-blown attack of the vapours, ‘get your act together, or forget your gratuity.’ She wanted to be safely back in their own room at the Tower Hotel before she was forced to gamble on the facilities of the ‘Little Girl’s Room’ in a dockside public house selected, for the worst possible reasons, by their now discredited guide and mentor.
    â€˜You will notice, recently restored,’ the guide continued, unabashed, ‘the actual gallows on which maritime offenders were stretched for the entertainment of the local populace. They were left dangling, bowels vacated…’ (He had the godalmighty nerve at this point, as the wife recalled later, to leer directly into her face) ‘…before being suspended in chains, from that post, to be washed over by three tides.’
    â€˜Why three?’ said the woman. ‘Wasn’t that being a little excessive?’
    â€˜Reasons of arcane ritual, Madame, difficult for visitors from an infant culture to comprehend. The three tides symbolized the three branches of the awful machinery of state. First, there was the Executive. Next, the Legislature. And, finally… to make sure they had bloody snuffed it. Same thing up the road, wasn’t it? They staked the heart of the Ratcliffe Highway vampire. Simple insurance, lady. No snivelling about miscarriages of justiceafter three good black Thames tides. Bring it back, I say. The corpses looked like cuttlefish. And had about as much to say for themselves.’
    The Californian temptress turned her back on him, for a reviving snort of duty-free, Chanel No. 19,
Eau De Toilette
spray. She was beginning to hyperventilate; and was trying to regain control by essaying a sequence of prescribed facial exercises – leaving onlookers to assume she was about to suffer a quite interesting epileptiform seizure.
    The gibbet itself, now being quizzically tapped by the man from Soquel, was no more than an effete sample of contemporary piracy on behalf of the Town of Ramsgate public house. In season, for a couple of weeks in June, it was much snapped, taped, and committed to polaroid. It was located near enough to the true