Downriver (48 page)

The surreal audition fades and we run for the fence. It has been disguised, in playful
trompe l'oeil
, with a painted forest. Uccello's ‘Hunt by Night' surrounds us: crimson tunics, spears, straining hounds pursue the unseen prey into the deepest realms of darkness.

The secret of the mural's perspective reveals a loose board. On the far side of the painted forest are living horses, chained to a stake, quizzical, coquettishly tossing their axe-shaped heads. A yellow Hazchem container has been converted into a dormitory for tinkers. A few men sit around a bucket of fire, cleaning their shotguns and drinking from unlabelled bottles.

‘Massive!' said Davy. ‘Canary Wharf to Cannery Row in the blink of an eye.' Curs were foaming on short ropes. None of the men looked at us, no movement was apparent anywhere; but, walking slowly towards the fire, we
knew
that we were covered from all sides. Shotguns nestled comfortably in laps, impatient fingers stroked trigger guards.

‘Where are the women?' Imar blurted. ‘Did you ever see a tinker site in daylight with men still on it? And where are the kids?'

‘That's right,' Davy mused. ‘Not a female to admire since we got on the Island. Even in the crocodile plodding to Mass. No
tribal mothers, vinegar spinsters, no repentant harlots. Not a single one.'

‘They're death in this place.' One of the tinkers spoke, without looking up from the fire. A long lank, shivering, red-haired dodgem-car jockey. He picked a crust of scab from his nose, wiping the silvery snot on to his sleeve. He hunched his coat-hanger shoulders, quivering in seizures of uncontrolled and unmotivated laughter. ‘Any bitch found here is taken. The black skirts can't stand the heat of 'em, the smell. Raw fish eggs.' He spat into the fire bucket and watched the spittle cook. ‘They bring in a few whores in an ambulance for the Bishop: the rest of 'em make do with
castrati
and the odd bout of solitary snake-strangling.'

He mimed an obscene and frenetic form of boxing-glove onanism. He giggled. ‘Keep women out of it and the black skirts'll leave you alone. Fuck your own fists, boys.' He nodded; his head loose as a dummy. He laughed until bubbles of lager ran out from his nose, to be lapped up on a pustule-decorated tongue. He gobbled a heap of downers from his open palm. His dog-yellow eyes were already mad as one of the coal-dancing damned.

‘They've got the enforcers,' Davy told us, ‘to make it stick. “Swiss Guards”, they call them, so they can pay them in cheese: lovely bricks of soft yellow gold. Far worse than the Tonton Macoute, these beauties. More dangerous. Psycho-police eavesdropping on your nightmares. They “anticipate” every outbreak of heresy. Dawn raids. The generators and the water baths are running before you hear the tap at the door. Torture as a fine art. They have no other interests.'

‘You've never been here before,' I mumbled, ‘how do you know the moves to make?'

‘Well Street,' Davy replied. ‘I discovered, by accident, the means of interrogating an empty room, holding an oracular séance with the voices trapped in its walls. I was drawn back, when it was all over and the photographs were taken, to the
place where the girl-junkie died. I slept there two or three times a week. It became obsessive. But it was never the same as dreaming. You can take any room where there has been some form of interrogation – torture cell, psychiatrist's study, confessional, lovers' afternoon hotel – and the activity does not cease simply because the participants withdraw. The true monologue (these exchanges are inevitably one-sided) soaks into the plaster. The interlocutor is unnecessary, gets in the way, clouds the issue with his feeble attempts at “drawing out” and giving unacceptable visions a rational form.'

Davy creased his knuckles, trying to depress his eyes into their sockets; forcing back the things he had seen. He only succeeded in bringing them into a sharper focus. He drew breath. He was shaking. But he went on.

‘I opened my hands. I ran my palms over the walls. I made them bleed. I circled, I squeezed. The voices were there. They came back to me. I asked nothing; I lay on the floor. The heart of her fear was opened to me. But it was held within another thing I could never understand, a hoop of sticky light: wasps, wax, corn-dust. I tried to touch it. It was playful, sliding across the walls. And then all her prints, maps, words came rushing out from the distemper. I had whitewashed over the crazed and panicking graffiti. But it
insisted
. It was immortal. And the horror was that…
it started to make sense
. You know the symbol they use? The jackal-headed guardians of the Island lingam? Dog Island, Isle of…'

‘Cunt!' The red-haired tinker was at Davy's throat, blade open: its tip pressing against the jugular vein. ‘Shut it. Can't be said. Nobody speaks it, the old name. Your tongue'll be ripped out like the page of a book. They'll do you up.'

Worse than the superstitions of theatricals, with their ‘Scottish Play', their ‘break a leg!': the same curse. The same treaty with the dark side. The same abdication of courage. ‘Don't say it!' To name is to cause, to set in motion. Once spoken, never recalled. The name lives: is independent of its begetter. A power these
people clearly understood. Titles out of the past were forbidden; bringing to mind, as they did, more honourable times. This was the treaty under which the tinkers made their camp. We were forced to comb our thesaurus of euphemisms and allude to the ‘Heresy-free Zone', ‘Capital-friendly Isthmus', ‘Islet of Saints and Savers'.

Imar turned his back on us and took out his penny whistle. And as he played, something crawled out from under the container; something white and snail-slow, a Permian reject, a dead man returning.

‘Him's better than any of your women.' The tinker grinned. ‘Got a bung'ole like a glove filled with garlicky butter.' He licked his broken teeth, and prodded the creature with a surgically-abbreviated shotgun.

The gelded monster crawled agonizingly towards the fire, and Davy recognized, with dread, the former Well Street landlord, Elgin MacDiarmuid. His condition, once boastfully reprehensible, was now terminally forlorn: broken, trembling, unshelled. Two damp peaks of sweat-soaked hair suggested the horns of a snail. He was naked under a grease-stiff gaberdine. His feet useless in layers of flapping bandage. They pulled him into the light on the end of a sharp pin. He had the fatal softness of a grub and the self-justifying mean spirits of the reformed drunk. He had swallowed his heart.

‘Blessed Mother of God, help me. Jesus, Holy Lamb, help me. Sweet Babe of Heaven, bless my suffering. I'm not ready.' Elgin supplicated, in tears; arms flailing like the flippers of a seal, sweeping sawdust in some ring of shame. ‘I
beg
you. Don't let them crucify me. I ran away once before. You remember? I was younger, I had my strength then. I could tear in half the telephone directory for the city of Cork. I went back, oh mothering bitch.
The nails!
Do you understand? They drive them through the wrists, not the soft palms. Hang me bleeding like Medhbh's pig? And for what? I was “pricked” once for the priesthood. Talk to the Christian Brothers. I could have been a Jesuit. Why do they
allow this thing? I was at home, holding on; gathering my thoughts, getting ready to write – until they put the accursed television into every bar from Stillorgan to Finglas. Couldn't get a drink for it. McDaid's, Toner's, the Pearl Lounge. “No no,” I screamed at them. The curate winked. “Right, sir, sure enough.” He switched the channel, thought I wanted the racing from Punchestown. I knew they were watching me out of that little spot that never goes away even when you switch it off. I needed a ticket out. Not too far gone to recognize the arch-blasphemer, Shamus Joys himself, sneaking in by the back door. On the steps of an aeroplane, with the pilgrims at Knock, sniffing good Irish air. The blackguard! Didn't he try it before? With his cinematograph? His Galway whore? Brandishing the blackthorn like the devil's own pizzle. Did he ape the Pole and put his lips to the sod? He did not. Come back, Elgin. They'll have you. They want to nail me to a Jew's tree.'

Elgin tried to rise from his knees, but he couldn't make it. Thick salt tears slid slowly down his gelid cheeks. Nothing could halt the flow of his keening lament. ‘One of us had to go. The country couldn't hold the both of us. I bummed the boat fare from the uncle. They were glad to see the back of me. Mother weeping. “All for the best.” Plenty of honest work on the other side. Kilburn? Did they think I was a common labourer, a paddy from the bogs? I had a year's heavy engineering behind me. UCD. Wasn't it founded by Cardinal Manning himself? I had commendations, letters from Tony Cronin. Don't lift me on to the golden throne. I don't want the Pontiff's crown. Can't eat, not here. Intestinal problems. Negroes masturbate in kitchens. They make the soup from it. Put drugs in your coffee. You wake in the Papal apartments, breakfast tray served by the nuns of the Congregation of Maria Bambina. Orgies. Filth. And they're measuring you for your shroud. They say it's a portrait in oils. That's a lie. The man's the official mortician. Look, listen to me. I didn't ask for any of it. All I wanted was an introduction to an intelligent middle-class woman. His wife, your wife. A graduate
with a taste for theatre, a bit of spending money and a double bed. Was it too much to ask? The time to finish my monograph on Douglas Sirk?'

The redhead jerked on the chain and Elgin fell into the mud; lay where he fell. We could not insult our hosts by asking for his release. He was almost as valuable as a crippled horse. They would rather kill us all; ‘found floating'.

‘There
is
a way.' The tinker's conspiratorial grin reminded me of someone, years before, a book thief on the markets, who had vanished overnight into rumour, or Amsterdam, run off with a nympho speed-freak. ‘For a price, I could get you in. For a reasonable consideration. Right to the top, the Holy of Holies: the Magnum Tower. I deliver you to the building – the rest is your own business. But don't try and stop them, whatever you see. They'll shred you and feed you to the crows. The equinox is closing on 'em, they won't wait.'

Davy listened with intent, while compulsively squeezing the bulb of his nose. The redhead fumbled through cavernous pockets, pulling out lengths of string, apple cores, biscuits, coins – before he located the three badges. They were stamped with the inevitable symbol (the lingam and the water crosses), and they bore the legend, in ‘Perpetua Italic',
NIHIL OBSTAT
.

‘Of course,' yelled Davy, ‘the conference! The Jesuits cobbled it together, to prove to the world how open-minded they've become. All the cameras will be there. The international correspondents. It will go out, via satellite, at the very moment the secret ceremony is enacted in the pyramid of glass: the one that is intended to halt time, wound its membrane, and give them access to unimagined powers. This is good, very good. The long lenses will be tight as warts, in a phallic cluster, on the face of Stephen Hawking, as he lectures the princes of the church on cosmology. A classic example of the “divine illumination of intellect”. What paternalism, what benevolence! A new era of enlightenment is upon us. Dogma challenged by revelations from the furthest stars.'

‘Hawking
here
?' I gasped.

‘It's not so shocking,' Davy said. ‘They've already wheeled him in for an audience with the
Capo di Capo
; laid down the guidelines. “Anything you want, Professor – we're men of the world – up to, but
not
including, the Big Bang. That alone is God's affair. The instant of creation.” What do they think God is? A cosmic wind?'

I wondered if Sonny Jaques was on the bus. He would have loved this. What a scene was in prospect! The TV boys, the
hungans
in red braces, wetting themselves in anticipation. Hat-chet-faced video directors (with millennial razor-trim hairstyles) leased from the ad agencies. The Professor, the brain of the universe, wired to his special-effects voice-box, as he faces the tiers of expectant ascetic faces; skull caps, crimson robes.
El Greco!
Ten full days to work on the lighting. Simultaneous translation into every known language. The lecture already previewed in the
Listener
, so that the media vermin can get their pieces written before the programme goes out. ‘Space-time is finite,' Hawking states, ‘but has no boundaries.' Wow! Beautiful! When that little bombshell hits the fan the pyramid alchemy will be activated: we'll all be halfway to heaven.

‘No panic,' said Davy. ‘Hawking knows where it's coming from. He's sharper than any of them. It's not for nothing he was born exactly three hundred years after Galileo Galilei. He knows the risks he's running. He's well aware that they'll spray him in images of reincarnation, heresy, old mistakes made good. He can carry it. And we'll be right there with him. Three hard-boiled prime-time news hounds: collar and tie strictly optional. Let's do it, let's join the professionals!'

V

A bruised wind, frustrated, bounced the tall buildings, sibilating like a host of linkpersons struggling with the revised pronunciation of ‘Rushdie'. It chopped the slate waters of the dock into small waves, broken anvils. The light dropped to pewter, with glints of sick plum; martyr stains spreading an irrevocable wound. The evil silver-green hulks of decommissioned Polaris submarines rode the swell, converted to wine bars, the private dining facilities of Vat City news-laundering executives.

With his lupine features set into what he proposed as a clerical sneer, the drooling redhead waved us on. His rickety legs were trapped in tourniquet trousers that finished six or seven inches shy of his sockless ankles. He stabbled at the dirt with blade-sharp shoes.
Mycosis fungoides
erupted from the grassy duffle coat that enveloped him; conferring, he imagined, a miraculous respectability. We stalked his heels, indian file, cockily flashing our
Nihil Obstat
badges at the shuttered glasshouses.