Downriver by Iain Sinclair

rung brought nuts and chocolate drops. Pieces of their brain were cut away. And still the tasks were performed. Further excavations; cells burnt with hot wire. The performance was slower, but it was completed. The skull, finally, was a hollow membrane, litby torches: ‘memory’ was active – and unlocated. The landscape is destroyed, but the dream of it is everywhere.
    I heard the urgent click and drag of Todd Sileen’s approach. A troubled leathern creaking, nautical and obscure: like wind in the riggings, or the pull of an unoiled wheel. You felt Sileen’s presence, before you could find him. The temperature dropped, and plants died. ‘Baron Saturday’, the urchins called him – from a safe distance, crouching, heads in caps, from terror of his unpupilled eye. They saw him in their fevers. He put stones under their tongues. He slept on a mattress of skulls. He cast no shadow. Breathing heavily, he lowered himself on to the step beside me: a damaged manifest. His leg thrown out, stiff as a plank.
    â€˜We’re in, boss.’ Sileen spoke from the throat: abrupt, punched sentences. He coated each syllable in phlegm, like a craftsman varnishing a dubious ‘Old Master’. His shifty glance checked the corners, frisked me for a hidden microphone. ‘He’ll see us at twelve o’clock, “railway time”. One minute out, either way, and the deal’s off.’
    He pushed himself up. He was away, and motoring. His exaggerated roll – a man dancing on logs – swept him forward at a pace I could hardly match. He cornered on one heel, and hopped over kerbs. But living within a gentle full toss of Wapping Stairs had not helped his style. The damp had got at him, rusted his humour. Too close an association with water has always worked on the physiology of the darker strain of fictional hero. And the lower limbs are the first to suffer. The literary icon finds himself turning, from the feet up, into a carved figurehead. Todd Sileen was another Ahab, a forked man lurching on a single prong. As a skilled carpenter, he might easily have whittled himself a trusty peg – but that was another country, another life. Time was against him. He was against time.
    Sileen had a guilty secret: he was gathering about him the works of Joseph Conrad. All of them; every envelope, every (certified) drop of ink.
Why
he was doing this was a thornierquestion. Let’s skip the psychology and call him a run-of-the-mill headbanger: the kind of pest who sleeps outside the post office to get his catalogue before you do. We were together because he had a use for me. He wanted me, in my capacity as a bona fide crook, to front him; to work the discounts, list the remnants, and speed the duplicates on their way to California.
    Whenever Sileen chose to leave this rancid backwater, it would be finished. He was the last human. Scandrett Street would never again be what it was, on this day, in this light, on this square of pavement.
    We entered the Cuckoo, Wapping Lane, in an elegiac mood, touching the tables to make sure they were solid; keeping a weather eye on the door, in immediate expectation of a demolition squad. When we had secured our pints and a bowl of depilated prawns, we reviewed our tactics. The public bar was empty; sunlight filtered through the frosted window, picking up the heraldic colours, to spill them, recklessly, over the floor. The moment was eternal: whoever spoke first was damned.
    It appeared that one mile downriver, in a studio apartment, Dr Adam Tenbrücke of Narrow Street was hoarding a shelf of Conrads he had painlessly amputated from the David Garnett Collection. Tenbrücke specialized in ‘Judaica’; with sidelines in Holocaust mementoes, the more saline Expressionists, and anything occult, involving ritual sacrifice – preferably human, young, and female. He had his own vineyards on the Rhine, and he always wintered in the Cape. He favoured cigars