Free Downriver by Iain Sinclair Page B

waved. In that terrible moment, Joblard realized his own mortality.
He also could be seen
; his existence was no longer a secret, and never would be again.
    Later that morning, with his two cousins, he made the discovery of a ventilation shaft leading down into the Rotherhithe Tunnel. They spent the day scouring the streets for old nails and bolts, lockjaw-inducing lumps of rust; until they had stuffed to the brim several large brown-paper bags. They climbed up on to the grille that covered the mouth of the shaft, and skilfully aimed their missiles on to the huge fan-blades beneath them. The noise, in that enclosed space, was most gratifying. It was the Sands of Iwo Jima, Hamburg, the
Graf Spee
rolled into one. The scavenged shrapnel was hurtled into the tunnel; devastating the traffic, and maiming a solitary cyclist. The satisfaction they derived was that of the disinterested artist: it was wholly imagined. There were no curtain calls. The perpetrators were already out of Brunel Road and halfway up Clack Street; their socks around their ankles, chortling and punching, distrusting the shrill vehemence of their own laughter.
    VII
    From that moment, Tenbrücke felt better. He tilted the burden of his head. There was so much sky. Passengers on the river, glancing back at him, thought he had made a discovery: he was excavating a shard of Roman pottery from the shallows – with his teeth. While he looked over at the far bank, he forgot why he had come to this place. He had stopped trembling, and he felt light and, for the first time, a little frivolous. The river plashed, a soup of mud, swooshing the immortal rubbish, backwards and forwards, in a lullaby motion. He heard voices above him.
    â€˜Down there, girl. Just look at it. Fucking filth! Ignorant bleedin’ bastards. What happens? The tide shifts it off of ’ere. So they build a Thames fucking Barrier to stop it getting away. All right? Next morning it’s all bleedin’ back again. Fucking ridiculous.’
    This premature ecologist, sickened by the perfidy of the planners (and all the other ‘thems’ who never have to answer to the people for their actions), let his obsolete fag packet float from his hand to freshen the collage of neap-wrack. Uncertain footsteps in retreat: the wheeze of the pub door.
    Tenbrücke set himself to assess the riverscape on the far side of the choppy water; to fix the limits of his vision, and to make them final. Rotherhithe was not a place to which he had previously given much consideration. It looked foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself. The significance of this apparently random assembly of buildings awed him. He became aware of patterns, meanings, distributions of unexpended energy. His sense of colour was overwhelmingly
personal
. It hurt. It hurt his blood. The horrifyingly
soft
green spire of the Norsk Kirke flooded his throat with bile: of exactly the same concentration. Cheese-whey oozed from beneath his fingernails. The Famous Angel, the tower of St James’s, Bermondsey, were ancient offences that only he could redeem. Pubs and churches, derelictand decaying wharfs. A solitary odd thin building; a slab of something left behind from a previous incarnation. Tenbrücke thought he remembered a woman at a drinks party telling him Lord Snowdon had once lived there: before he was inducted into ‘The Family’, of course. Bachelor days. Clubs. Paragraphs in ‘William Hickey’. Demobbed photographers, models, gangsters, characters from the Rag Trade. All the big hooters and the weak chins: horse mouths, taffeta, fag smoke, suicide.
    He heard the muffled and distorted voices of pleasure-boat spielers, identifying the notable stones. They were talking under the water. They made no sense.
Silver Marlin, Captain James Cook
. Fins of sour lace froth followed in their wake. They tore the fabric of the river: pushing a false tide towards Tenbrücke’s inlet. The water was on