Downriver Read Free

theenthusiasm to begin it all again. How could he avoid catching sight of last night’s partners? How could he avoid paying them? Always problems for the creative mind.
    As he crossed the path, he begged the single stones to pierce him. He relished the sluggish ripples of discomfort. It could have been an hour, or a day, before he reached the concrete steps of the redoubt, and hauled himself on to the river wall, the East Gun Line.
    â€˜Speer’s Theatre’, his friend the painter had called it; wistfully invoking the classical pretensions of the Third Reich. The steps were all that was left. A meaningless piece of something. The outer rim of a Temple of Atrocities. He wanted to lick bloodstains from the cold stone. He wanted to touch the water. The morning light on the river was his salvation.
    Wooden stumps in the mud. The ruin of a jetty. The tide was turning: a slime-caked causeway, plastered in filth and sediment, pointed at Gravesend. He often boasted, without much justification, that Magwitch faltered here, escaping from the hulks; and was brought to shore. The last pub in the world, the World’s End.
    From beyond the curve of the power station, Bobby saw them coming up on the tide: from the Hope into the Reach. The familiar nightmare. The early light followed, like an attendant; grey, crumbling, flaky. It broke them apart, into a flood of false lumber. They floated in never-connecting circles; going under, dipping from sight. They were all dead. They swam to fetch him. Wavelets, drowned angels; pale-green billows. There were women in hats, holding their children above the waterline. Infants slipping from their arms, slipping from sight. The river’s net was churned; and the ropes were cut.
    â€˜Not again,’ Bobby whimpered, ‘I swear on my life. I’ll never do it again.’ Hot tears bruised the kohl, blackened his eyes, inflicted damage.
    More ropes than faces. He knew it would be the same. It could not change. The living location imprisons incomplete instants oftime. Sex acts release demons. But the morning light would resolve it, sweep away the visible traces. Except the Indian woman. She was always there. Walking across the water towards him, daintily stepping from wave crest to wave crest: down from the church, court habit, throat hidden in a ruff of sea-bone, most severe.
    â€˜
You called him father, being in his land a stranger. And by the same reason so must I you. Fear you here I should call you father? I tell you then I will, and you shall call me child, and so I will remain for ever and ever your countryman
.’
    The mantic shine of fever. Sewage breath. Her voice in his mouth.
    Then the howl; the compressed madhouse shriek of the power station. Steam alarms. Whistle. Dread. The unrinsable taste of sperm in the throat.
    V
    The curtains were drawn. The doors of the pub closed against the vulgar world. The inner circle of the Connoisseurs of Crime paddled yet again through the shallows of forensic legend; traded atrocities. They dominated, complacently, a log fire powered by gas jets. Errlund, his desert boots on Hywood’s chair, was hogging the conversation.
    â€˜â€œSir” graciously took me along to the Beefsteak,’ he droned. ‘Too many flapping ears at the Athenaeum. The old pansy didn’t want his posh pals to catch him hobnobbing with a scribbler. Yes, he’d try the fish – a palsied scrape of cod. Difficulties with his choppers. Nearly spat them on to the plate every time he opened his mouth.
Une belle horreur
!’
    â€˜Spare us the complete rollcall of domestic details this time, old boy,’ Hywood yawned. He’d heard it all before. And it wasn’t improving. Some fool had mentioned Errlund in the same breath as Marcel Proust, and it had gone, quite disastrously, tohis head. The reviewer had, of course, been discussing types of morbid pathology, and not literary style.
    â€˜I followed him,’ Errlund continued,