Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Read online

  By the same author

  FICTION

  White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

  Downriver

  Radon Daughters

  Slow Chocolate Autopsy (with Dave McKean)

  Landor’s Tower

  White Goods

  Dining on Stones

  DOCUMENTARY

  The Kodak Mantra Diaries

  Lights Out for the Territory

  Liquid City (with Marc Atkins)

  Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein)

  Crash (on Cronenberg/Ballard film)

  Dark-Lanthorns

  Sorry Meniscus

  London Orbital: A Walk around the M25

  The Verbals (interview with Kevin Jackson)

  Edge of the Orison

  London: City of Disappearances (editor)

  Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

  POETRY

  Back Garden Poems

  Muscat’s Würm

  The Birth Rug

  Lud Heat

  Suicide Bridge

  Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems

  Jack Elam’s Other Eye

  Penguin Modern Poets 10

  The Ebbing of the Kraft

  Conductors of Chaos (editor)

  Saddling the Rabbit

  The Firewall: Selected Poems

  Buried at Sea

  Postcards from the 7th Floor

  Ghost Milk

  Calling Time on the Grand Project

  IAIN SINCLAIR

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2011

  High Rise copyright © J. G. Ballard, 1975. All rights reserved. Vermilion Sands from ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ copyright © J. G. Ballard, 1971. All rights reserved. ‘What I Believe’ copyright © J. G. Ballard, 1984. All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-141-90262-3

  In memory of the huts of the

  Manor Garden Allotments

  Contents

  LOSTLAND

  Abraham Ojo

  A Pretty Average Mess

  Chobham Farm

  Tom Baker

  Manson is Innocent

  PARKLAND

  Fence Wars

  Raids

  Funny Money

  Resurrection

  Not Here

  Retribution

  Dilworth in Mallworld

  Westfield Wonderland

  China Watchers

  Yang Lian among the Hasids

  PRIVATELAND

  Crisis

  River of No Return

  Against the Grain

  Future History: Allhallows to the Dome

  Northwest Passage

  Upstream Pavilions

  The Lemon on the Mantelpiece

  Fools of Nature: To Oxford

  NORTHLAND

  In the Belly of the Architect

  Freedom Rides

  Listening for the Corncrake

  Chinese Boxes

  Kissing the Rod

  FARLAND

  Ghost Milk

  Berlin Alexanderplatz

  The Colossus of Maroussi

  American Smoke

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Alas! poor ghost’

  ‒ William Shakespeare

  Lostland

  Abraham Ojo

  It was my initiation into East London crime. If Stratford can be called East London. A bulging varicose vein on the flank of the A11, which fed somehow, through an enigma of unregistered places, low streets, tower blocks, into the A12. The highway out: Chelmsford, Colchester. A Roman road, so the accounts pinned up in town halls would have it, across brackish Thames tributary marshes. A slow accumulation against the persistence of fouled and disregarded rivers.

  Stratford East. The other Stratford. Old town, new station. Imposing civic buildings arguing for their continued existence. A railway hub that, in its more frivolous moments, carried Sunday-supplement readers to Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, for provocations by Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney, Frank Norman. For pantomime Brecht. Carry On actors moonlighting in high culture. That was about as much as I knew, when the person at the desk in Manpower’s Holborn offices told me I would be going to Chobham Farm.

  ‘Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford. Right now. This morning. If you fancy it.’

  This is how it worked: when I was down to my last ten pounds, I would take whatever Manpower had to offer. Employment on the day, for the day. Bring back the docket on Thursday and receive, deductions made, cash in hand. An office of Australians living out of their backpacks, woozy counterculturalists and squatters from condemned terraces in Mile End, Kilburn, Brixton. It was a dating agency, benevolent prostitution, introducing opt-out casuals to endangered industries desperate enough to hire unskilled, dope-smoking day labourers who would vanish before the first frost, the first wrong word from the foreman. There were always characters at the Holborn desk, justifying themselves, whining about the hours they spent trying to locate the factory in Ponders End where they would be invited to scrape congealed chocolate from the drum of a sugar-sticky vat with a bent teaspoon.

  Everybody knew, on both sides of this deal, that it was 1971 and it was all over. The places we were dispatched by the employment agency were, by definition, doomed. From my side, beyond the survivalist pittance earned, there was the excitement of being parachuted into squares of the map I had never visited; access was granted to dank riverside sheds, rock venues in Finsbury Park, cigar-packing operations in Clerkenwell.

  ‘The social contract is defunct,’ I muttered. I had been dabbling in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not listening to politicians. Rubbish strikes and rat mountains enlivened our 8mm diary films. If the post didn’t arrive, bills wouldn’t have to be paid. We collaborated with civic entropy.

  On Upper Thames Street, in a cellar under threat of inundation, I sorted and packed screws and bolts alongside a man in a tight, moss-green, three-piece suit. A Nigerian called Abraham Ojo. I remember that name because I inscribed it across th
e portrait I painted: Abraham Ojo floats a company. Steps dropping vertiginously to a sediment-heavy river. A schematic Blackfriars Bridge. Wharfs. Hoists. Black-windowed warehouses on the south bank. And a stern Abraham with his arm raised to expose the heavy gold wristwatch. Those long wagging fingers with the thick wedding band. Like many West Africans in this floating world, and the ones met, eight years earlier, in my Brixton film school, Abraham Ojo never dressed down. Smart-casual meant leaving his waistcoat on the hanger he carried inside his black attaché case (with the pink Financial Times and the printed CV in glassine sleeve). He might, with mimed reluctance, shrug a nicotine-coloured storeman’s coat over his interviewee’s jacket, but he would never appear without narrow silk tie, or fiercely bulled shoes. He favoured hornrim spectacles and a light dressing of Malcolm X goatee to emphasize a tapering chisel-blade chin. Like the Russians I’ve been coming across, in recent times, running bars in old coaching inns in Thames Valley towns, ambitious Nigerians made it crystal clear: I’m not doing this. Not now, not really. I am only here, on a temporary basis, because I have a scheme in which you might be permitted to invest: if you forget the fact that you saw me foul my hands with oily tools in a dripping vault.

  It was a privilege of the period to encounter men like Abraham. I was fascinated to witness how he patronized his patrons, sneering at them as a caste without ambition or paper qualifications. He refused to register where he was, the specifics of place meant nothing. The chasms of the City, the close alleys and wind-tossed precincts, were knee-deep in banknotes, he assured me. Loose change waiting for a sympathetic address. My mediocre literary degree qualified me, barely, to be a low-level investor in Abraham’s latest scam: the importation of cut-and-shut trucks into Nigeria. Documentation would be juggled. Sources of supply, in Essex and the Thames Estuary, were obscure. When we had enough in the fighting fund to tempt the right officials, cousins of cousins, we would be in clover.

  As we talked, in our lunch break, down by the river, he kept his back to my wreck of a street-market bicycle. When I invited him to Hackney for a meal, he came with folders of papers, financial projections, lists of contacts. He enthralled the others at the table, potless painters, students without tenure, the manager of a tyre-replacement operation in Leytonstone, with a vision of hot-ripe places, deals with Russian diplomats and shaven-headed entrepreneurs from Bethnal Green who were looking to reinvest surplus loot from the black economy. He spoke of new cities on the edges of old jungles, a vibrant economy hungry for reliable or prestigious European motor vehicles. The voodoo of capital. The madness. Pooling our resources, the whole Hackney mob might have raised the funds to rent a beach hut in Margate. Seeing or not seeing the hopelessness of his pitch, Abraham continued. Mopping his brow with a linen napkin, pushing away the wine glass. Maybe it worked, maybe he’s out there now, gold-plated Merc and bodyguards, in the oil fields of the Niger Delta. He never returned to the warehouse. His replacement, a man from Sydney, was a few inches shorter than me, but otherwise a Stevensonian double. The pure Aussie doppelgänger. Another Sinclair. I never found out the full story of my great-grandfather’s experiences in Tasmania, after his investments evaporated. He retired, came back from luxuriant Ceylon to bleak Banff on the North Sea, at the age of forty.

  ‘Now for the next ten years,’ he wrote, ‘I extracted as much enjoyment out of life as perhaps ever falls to the lot of ordinary unambitious mortals; but at the end of this time I fell among thieves, and as misfortunes rarely come single, the Hermileia must needs play havoc with securities in Ceylon at the same time, so that I began to look abroad again for investments and occupation, resulting in a trip to Tasmania, an adventure often talked of with friends now gone.’

  Looking back, the astonishing aspect of life in my late twenties was that I had time to paint Abraham Ojo’s portrait. The balance was still there, I suspect, between weeks lost to casual labour, that infiltration into the mystery of how a city works, involvement with a communal film diary, and the writing and publishing of invisible books. Fifty pounds of my wages saved from random employment in 1970 produced my first small collection of poems and prose fragments. The first shift towards separating myself from the substance that contained me, a living, working London. Its horrors and epiphanies.

  A Pretty Average Mess

  The first days were warm and, in spirit, close enough to the now remote and legendary Beat ethos to be comfortable. I mean that the short journey across Hackney Marshes to Stratford appeased, or held in check, our various demons: Tom’s projected expeditions to Nepal, Afghanistan, silk routes and hippie trails he would never take; Renchi’s testing of extreme psychic states in search of a sustaining vision and a way of life; paintings worked and reworked, or coming, direct and plain, as remembrances of episodes from a diary of walks and labours designed to capture the vanishing essence of place. Victoria Park. Pole Hill. Dancing Ledge in Dorset. As we drove in our communal blue van, we continued the debate. Was the movie of history, as I contended, lodged in the memory-bank, every cell and squeak of it, to be sifted and sounded? Or did past experience, as Renchi asserted, pulse in reflex spasms, unexpected flares brought forth as panels of shimmering light?

  Collective dreaming. A nagging monochrome film plays in the head as we load and unload slithering brown sacks of talcum powder in the autumn yard, alongside the promiscuous spread of Stratford’s railway lines. Dirty, weary, underpaid, we were inspired by this new location to flights of fancy, talking excitedly as we wrestled with those perverse sacks. Where we had come from, where we were going? What we could scavenge, this day, for supper?

  A self-published gathering, my first book, was the proof of Renchi’s thesis: prose Polaroids with no past and very little future. A spray of borrowed blood on my exposed feet, which were shuffling along in flip-flops, one green and one blue. While I wrote up a slashed-wrist suicide attempt, an Irishman sprawled in the street, gazing at the newly completed and unoccupied tower blocks of the Holly Street Estate.

  The road across Hackney Marshes was shadow-dressed, tree-screened. A warm breath, windows down, of a green morning. The 8mm film of those days, a confirmation that they actually happened, adopts the rhythms of a slide show by interspersing flashes of live action with black frames (lens covered by hand): domestic intimacies, breakfast-in-the-dark, bath and bed, cut with the mud yards of Stratford, stubby lorry-cabs backing into forced clinches with topless trailers. ACL. HAPAG-LLOYD. SEA CONTAINERS LTD. It took me a few weeks to find out what HAZCHEM meant. Chobham Farm was no inner-city pastoral interlude.

  Homerton Road and Temple Mills Lane were solid with traffic, white vans on the burn, the usual agitated stream. The road carried the weight of a working city; printers, breakers’ yards, food distribution. Temple Mills, once the corn-grinding mills of the Knights Templar, is a name that has retired from history. It has been trampled into the marshes like that sea of bottle caps into contemporary London Fields, where early walkers confront the hard evidence of spontaneous barbecues and picnics. A dun confetti of cigarette stubs around scorched rectangles of black earth. A summer-long garden party requiring no invitation, the overspill of Broadway Market. The lesson of London Fields is that you can’t legislate for how humans will decide to make use of territory. Council planners provide tables and benches and they are occupied, within hours, by a loose association of convivial drinkers who appreciate the solidity of the furniture. Anchored platforms in a tilting world. Foxes watch from bushes. Crows strut among the detritus of inadequate bins.

  I pick my way through half-naked bodies, fascinated by the books they are reading. Geoff Dyer in Venice. Retro-gothic of Sarah Waters. Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places. One morning I found a bunch of keys among the blue cans and took them to the ranger’s office, by the revamped lido. A glimpse at the pool was enough: exercise purgatory, goggled swimmers ploughing their roped lengths, tight-capped like a regiment of the bald, wrinkled by too much chlorine. ‘There is some provision, free access for senior citizens,’ the attendant
said. ‘But not here, we’re too popular.’

  Driving to Chobham Farm in 1971, employment cards at the ready, we were disconnected from local politics and objects of confusion to hardworking, established parents who had put us through the long and expensive haul of private education. We had failed, not only to follow in their footsteps, but to make visible progress in our alternative careers as independent film-makers. Tom Baker had received some critical visibility through his collaboration with Michael Reeves on The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General. But Reeves died in 1969, the year we bought a terraced house in Hackney. An accidental overdose in face of the pressures of success, having to do the thing he had pushed so hard to achieve, step out on the studio floor for a new feature film. Another fraught encounter with Vincent Price. A first shot at Christopher Lee. Reeves was Tom’s age, they had been to the same public school, Radley. Renchi, through similar contacts and connections, directed a neatly calculated programmer about his mother’s Cambridge ballet school, young girls and bicycles in the dappled sunlight of a perfect English summer, camera operated by future Oscar-winner Chris Menges. Unfortunately, the producers failed to secure music rights from Duke Ellington’s estate and the film was never seen. My own documentary career began and ended in 1967. Coming down the gentle slope of Homerton Road, beneath the hospital, past the Lesney Factory, over the Lea, we identified the right landscape in which to lose ourselves. To start again. With a wiped slate.