London Overground (26 page)

Murphy waits for the sound of the bell from the prison
tower of Pentonville. He remembers a bench of refuge in a small public garden south of the Royal Free Hospital that now ‘lay buried under one of those malignant proliferations of urban tissue known as service flats'.

The ineradicable circularity of reference is undoing us. We are so much taken with figures projected out of fiction, with poets worrying at expeditions in quest of serviceable images of the quickening city, that we are quite incapable of knowing where, at any given moment, we are. The shadow-lines on Kötting's face are the acid bite of cross-hatched engravings. If we pause for a moment on the heights of Caledonian Road, somewhere between Holloway Prison and Pentonville Prison, female and male, force-fed suffragettes and waxwork murderers, Neville Heath and John Reginald Halliday Christie waiting for the rope, we don't appreciate stragglers heading for home, exhausted nightworkers: we are too busy flipping the carousel of quotations. Ill-assorted couples embarked on their voyages of derangement.

The Two Pilgrims at Highgate
. Doré's London expeditions begin with a vision of the twinned conspirators, writer and painter, at the start of their journey; silhouettes seen from behind, under the sails of the trees, paused, looking down on the rumour of a city. ‘We are Pilgrims,' Jerrold wrote, ‘wanderers, gipsy-loiterers in the great world of London … We are wanderers; not, I repeat, historians.'

Wanderers are amateurs of geography, literature, statistics; scavenging researchers, provokers of exploitable accidents. They behave like suspended detectives with no proper brief, going through the motions. They stalk other stalkers. Georges Simenon manages this alienation very neatly in his slim Maigret novel from 1931,
A Crime in Holland.
A monoglot French detective investigates a crime in a sombre Dutch town, where the rivermen and farmers have no other language. Walking is
the only tool of interrogation. ‘Maigret, by dint of walking in step with the other man, could literally sense his state of mind.'

Brewery Road was a boulevard of unexplained warehouses and distribution centres, but the new digital industries, the solicitors of commissions, were in evidence. One former storage space was now dressed with crimson carpet, apologetically thin furniture, and a large glass door with a slogan spelled out in red dots:
THIS IS NOT A DOOR
.

Pentonville Prison has not yet been rebranded as a boutique hotel; the sour bricks resist it. Churchy windows offer a view of the Overground tracks that no prisoners, locked in their hutches, lights out, will enjoy. The voodoo of capital, budget balancing, outsourcing, has found some bright navy paint to hint at blue-sky thinking. Pinned to the slatted panel is a sheet that mimics a notional window, behind which a skeleton rattles the bars of his cell.
HMP PENTONVILLE WAR ON DRUGS. WILL POWER IS REAL POWER
. When there are no solutions to a problem, invite the ad men to come up with a punchy image. That's the trick: sell the problem, not the answer.

Climbing up Offord Road, back on familiar territory, and reacquainted with the Overground, I know that it's almost done. We can hear the never-satisfied pre-climactic sigh of the trains. Highbury & Islington Station is a short step. Then it should be less than thirty minutes to our beds. The effect Simenon mentions, reading another person's mind by falling into step with him, or tracking behind and regulating your pace, has not kicked in. Andrew is at sea. There is a peak of exhaustion, chill creeping through leaky wetsuit, he associates with swimming for more than an hour on a turning tide. Achieving that state on land, he converts ground to mud, then brine. Mouth agape, he struggles to take an honest breath. He is making agonizingly slow, steady strides over waves of tarmac, hair stiffening
to thatch in anticipation of his future role as a Straw Bear in the film of John Clare's escape from the High Beach Asylum. And as he becomes more sculptural, more of an English scarecrow, I speed up, in the neurotic urgency to tell the tale, get all the connections in before we arrive in a Dalston that must have changed out of all recognition in the hours we've been away.

Andrew does not need this. But I can't stop; he has to know about what it was like to get inside the house on Royal College Street. The poet Anthony Rudolf offered me the chance to join a select group of Rimbaud enthusiasts on a visit arranged with the current owner of the property, Michael Corby.

I met Rudolf – lean, professorial, engaged – as I stepped down from the Overground at Camden Road. Waiting on the doorstep of 8 Royal College Street was James Campbell, Francophile author and Beat Generation promoter. The big debate between the two scholars concerned the particular window from which Rimbaud watched Verlaine returning from the market with an undernourished herring for his tea: top floor or first floor? Rimbaud, the mannerless hoodlum poet, sniggered at the absurdity: the older man, in his silly pudding of a hat, carrying a fish in one hand and a bottle of oil in the other. Like a pantomime advertisement for their soured physical relationship. The tempers of narrow London beds in close, low-ceilinged rooms, oppressed them both. And the little ritual Rimbaud habitually indulged, of playing with a clasp-knife before engaging in obligatory acts of congress. More a poetic duty than a sexual imperative.

Verlaine plodded up the stairs. ‘Do you know how ridiculous you look?' Retaliation came with a slap of wet fish across Rimbaud's cheek. The brief London interlude of wandering and drinking and consorting with socialists and warming themselves in the Reading Room at the British Museum was over.

Campbell thought that the poets, who drank at the Hibernia
tavern in Old Compton Street,
might
have come across Karl Marx. Who might also have crossed aisles with Rimbaud in the British Museum. Late speculations provoked walks, as walks provoked essays. Like Patrick Keiller, Campbell relished the romance of disappearance, of seeking out the heat traces of poets and artists who passed through London suburbs, lodged in obscurity, leaving their marks in secret notebooks, posthumous
Illuminations.
‘Their heads lolling on the slopes of strange parks … their railways cut alongside.'

As sketched by Félix Régamey, as they argue through the streets, the French poets are a fugitive couple, so studied in bohemianism that they look like undercover agents. Behind the firmly inked outline of Verlaine with his papers, walking stick, cigar, and the vagrant farm boy, Rimbaud, with his clay pipe, is the ghost of a caped and helmeted London bobby. Verlaine's cultivated paranoia was an accurate prophecy of the modern city as a labyrinth of eyes, a surveillance state. Spies
were
tracking him. Divorce agents. Political police. Graham Robb in his biography
Rimbaud
says that the Paris Préfecture was ‘receiving high-grade intelligence' from London. A city so eager to launder the world's money, the fruits of colonial plunder, is ripe for the double-dealing of Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Agent.
In every discussion group of malcontents, there is at least one informer. And, as with Mr Verloc's grubby shop, pornography is the convenient medium of exchange. Poetry was a vice to be exposed and eliminated.

Detouring around an electrified disability carriage of Stephen Hawking proportions, we were admitted to the hallway of the Royal College Street boarding house. And confronted by a vast portrait of Lady Thatcher on her throne, hair burnished, toying with a bundle of state papers. The impact was like that slap of wet fish. Thatcher, taking pride of place, was accompanied by more modest renderings of Winston Churchill and Alec
Douglas-Home. Michael Crosby, a man with theatrical affiliations, and the ambition to present his property as a haunted set, caught my eye.

‘Don't worry, I'm not a Tory,' he said. ‘I'm Ukip.'

Facing Thatcher, on the opposite wall, was a poster for a play by Crosby,
Dracula's Dream.

We took off our shoes to make the ascent to rooms competing to supply the window from which Rimbaud watched his partner return from market. Crosby, in canary-yellow shirt, untucked, with large cuffs, sprawled in a bedroom chair, in a close cabin that was all bed and oval mirror. Rudolf's hawkish profile played nicely against a gilt-framed portrait of some fierce Scottish bird of prey. We peered down into a token garden arranged with obelisks and a cherub.

The house had history and Rudolf was just the persistent kind of poet-researcher to tease it out. He recalled a period when these rooms were squatted by ketamine-snacking veterinary students. The Rimbaud legend was then entrusted to local visionaries like Aidan Andrew Dun, whose poem
Vale Royal
namechecks the French visitors as elements in a new mapping of a mythology of place. Bob Dylan paid a visit. And Patti Smith put in an offer to purchase this chunk of countercultural heritage.

Crosby points out that Royal College Street was where the taxidermist had his premises in Hitchcock's
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
He didn't say which version.

After Highbury, we levitated. The railway was an old rib. It seemed to work best to stay off Ball's Pond Road. And to come down the handsomely proportioned Mildmay Grove with the tracks always alongside, singing us into harbour.

There were more dead Christmas trees lying on the pavement. Andrew, gripped by some primitive reflex, rolled himself
over a low wall, to piss at prodigious length in the bushes of a block of flats.

When we came to the bridge over the railway, I decided to detour down Kingsbury Road, to identify the house where my early books, and the Albion Village Press publications by Brian Catling, Chris Torrance and J. H. Prynne, had been printed.
Back Garden Poems
, from 1970, featured a map of the locality on the fixed endpapers, a register of persons and landmarks drawn by Renchi Bicknell. Many of the named presences were now decamped, others were dead. Buildings had been demolished, public houses converted into flats. Ted's radio-repair shop on Kingsland Road was a distant memory.

The print shop is indicated with a directional arrow. But, curiously enough, there is no railway. Or bridge over Middleton Road. Or so I thought, until I got out a magnifying glass for a closer inspection. And then I realized that what I took for a decorative flourish down the spine of the book was in fact shorthand for the line running down towards the City. The railway was the armature supporting all the words and images. New flats were going up on Holly Street. ‘Anna was cheered by these signs of human habitation,' I noted at that time. ‘But I am uneasy: the height, the isolation, some of the windows already broken.'

Why hadn't I investigated this burial ground before? Between the narrow house where the books were printed and the railway was a small, enclosed Jewish cemetery. I had been told by a rabbi with literary ambitions that the ground in which a Jew is buried belongs to that person until the end of days. Through the bars of the gate, it was possible to make out ranks of railway-facing slabs, obelisks like stone trees dwarfed by London planes and draped in ivy.

The buzz of youth on Kingsland Road, the nocturnal energies of nail bars, pubs, Turkish grocers, knew nothing of the
contemplative silence of the Jewish burial ground. Electrification made the street into a carnival of loud talk, laughter, and tablets tweeting and spitting universal gossip. Smokers in overexcited pavement knots. ‘Like like like,' they shrill. The world is a simile; nothing is fixed and solid. The laughter of whippets: rains of shiny grey nitrous oxide cylinders. Inspiration for Gilbert & George as they march towards their chosen Hackney restaurant.

Returned to the ginger glow of the Overground at Haggerston, the station that was our end as well as our beginning, I took the obligatory photograph. Andrew flexed his muscles. Rubbish was black-bagged around the bin.
EXPECT DELAYS
said the latest sign.

I was amused by the names they imposed on the latest reefs of development in ground-zero Haggerston, the tired public housing that had to be swept away to create post-architectural performances worthy of the orbital railway: sleep-shelves sold on the promise of the time it takes to get to Liverpool Street (‘18 minutes'), a better class of station. Those old brown blocks, like a congress of mechanics in nicotine overalls, were given mysteriously elegant calling cards derived from Samuel Richardson, father of the English novel: Clarissa Street, Pamela Street, Richardson Close, Samuel House, Harlowe House and the rest. The first wave of regeneration, between substantial, community-orientated blocks and the elevated railway, featured modest units, bits of garden, an imported urban-suburban estate. When they looked for a suitably inspirational name for a canalside ‘Close', they picked Mary Seacole. Of Scottish and Creole descent, Seacole provided for wounded soldiers from the battlefields of Crimea. She managed a recovery station behind the lines and achieved great popularity through her reputation for generosity with allowances of alcohol. She returned to England, funds exhausted. She had no connection with Hackney. And never lived in the borough.

What struck me when I set out, the Overground walk completed, to see what had happened while I'd been away, was how unreal everything was. A single day's tramp had smoothed my eyes to porcelain eggs: like those of John Clare, in his distress, when he believed that he had lost his pupils. Stones had been set in his head. Rays of invading light brought no fresh
intelligence. Identity had dissolved. The long walk from High Beach in Epping Forest to ‘rescue' by farm cart in Werrington left Clare ‘homeless at home'. He had completed a futile circuit, from village to London, obscurity to exposure, with a delusional trudge back to a memory-place that was no longer there, a muse who was already dead. Patty, his earthly wife, tried him for a few months and found him wanting. The written account of the walk was a letter to Matthew Allen, his keeper. And a letter to Mary Joyce, his imaginary childhood love, chiding her for dying. He is done with living women. ‘The worst is the road to ruin and the best is nothing like a good Cow.'

At a time when careers are scuppered over private emails (which are never private), and when councils are appointing guardians, salaries reflecting the dignity of their status, to prosecute ill-judged language in public office, it was something of a surprise to find the gleaming avenue through the latest railway flats being named after a notorious rapist.
LOVELACE STREET (PRIVATE ROAD)
. Richardson's Robert Lovelace keeps the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe for many months in a brothel. Assisted by the madame and the other whores, Lovelace drugs and rapes Clarissa. The madame is called Mrs Sinclair. But nobody has named a passageway, cul-de-sac, or excrescence of designer flats, after her. Not yet. Railway satellites are going up so fast, and selling off-plan before completion, so there is still a chance. The potential for exposure in the
Hackney Citizen
is very much alive. It's like dedicating a crèche to Jimmy Savile.

How those namers give themselves away! The Haggerston Baths swimming pool, opened in 1903, and once a much-loved local resource, has been boarded up for years, blind-windowed, allowed to decay, so that funds could be siphoned into more glamorous projects. Imagine the tightness of my smile, when I discovered on this ramble of reorientation, that the path
alongside the pool has now been declared a protected right of way:
SWIMMERS LANE (PRIVATE ROAD)
. No apostrophe. No irony. The boast is not heritage, it's outrage. Private Road! The public footpath to a public facility, swimming pool, slipper bath, laundry, is doubly stolen. Along with all established rights of passage through the flats. Not for nothing is the glass block at the end of Lovelace Street (which is no street) called Spinner House.

Negotiating the canyon between the Overground and the parasitical bicycle-rack flats is to drift, sometimes on original cobbles, sometimes on an interim carpet, through a gallery of toxic Me-ism: the constantly revised doodles of spray-stencil egotists with their crews and bag-carriers. Along one hidden stretch, just off Whiston Road, where a single sprayist had assembled a series of oblique satiric panels, some joker trumped him by composing art-speak critiques and sticking them up like those explanatory cards from Tate Modern. The illegitimate show lasted a couple of days, before wrecking balls, improving the image of destruction, took them out.

Another graffito –
IF YOU CYCLE, RING TWICE FOR BORIS
– was gone in an hour. A neat white rectangle of civic redaction. Which local taggers instantly defaced with script that looked like knitting with barbed wire.

My rather melancholy tour of reintegration with locality, after the turbo-thrust of a day hiking with Kötting, was broken by a coffee stop at the flat of a film-maker with whom I had collaborated in the past. Managed gloom was this man's métier: days could be productively disposed of in calculating the precise degree of stubble required for an appearance before a dedicated handful of enthusiasts, at some post-educational bunker in the Elephant & Castle, where he would slump, cosh-microphone in hand, raincoat collar up, pronouncing, like a radio voice
letting us know the bomb has dropped, on the death of cinema. Nothing was being commissioned. His respected producer was laid up in Germany after a back operation. There had been a fantastical forty minutes on the phone with Christopher Walken, coming to the realization that this was it.
The call was the film.
The status of being unfunded was the world as it was always going to be. Films without film. Novels that degrade into research files: names, numbers. Everything is archive; nothing is live. Committed activists are out there making collections of abandoned shopping lists. And photographing plastic bags caught on security fences.

And then, out of nowhere, a mirage, a solar bounce of fool's gold: Boris Johnson in the flesh at Old Street, barking like a seal, shaking the straw of his signature fringe from cold eyes. He is in full cry, stuttering with mangled emphasis, saluting the economic boosterism of Silicon Roundabout. London's celebrity mayor lumbered and swayed, finding his land legs after leaping down from the bike, before marching with intent towards a knot of summoned journalists. Boris is a canny hick, a street-smart bumpkin. The on-message symbol of the sacred bicycle, the chosen steed that will save our city, is creatively framed by tame camera crews, to keep out the caravan of back-up taxis, black-windowed people carriers required to service tonight's newsclip.

Dull pavement chaff, such as myself, along with fast-food dribblers and snackers from Whitecross Street, are suckered in towards the pool of boosted light. Johnson, a stocky figure in a tight Sunday-grey chapel suit, deploys his yellow cycle helmet like the Plexiglas shield of a TSG policeman on kettling duty. He is childishly greedy for credit, loud in his approval of the viral pace of transformation of an ugly junction into a thriving nest of Internet hornets. The crowd love him, love the way he is just what he appears to be on television: a turn, a force of
nature. You could bottle his sweat and sell it to a mid-morning mob frantic for selfies. ‘It's really him,' a woman phone-shrieks to her partner, who is running down the road from Hawksmoor's obelisk at St Luke's, to catch this precious moment.

Remounting, photo-op concluded, chosen entrepreneurs dismissed, Boris wobbles into the maelstrom of the Old Street roundabout, trouser cuffs flapping, naked ankles exposed, helmet wedged tight enough on golden thatch to obscure vision, while HGV drivers honk and motorists jeer, some swerving as they feint to bag this headline trophy. The mayor is immune, without shame, protected by a combination of innocence and feral cunning. I don't know if he pauses, once he's out of range of the cameras, to be picked up by one of the petrol-guzzling taxis, but my instinct is that he stays on the bike. That he takes it all the way back to the river.

‘He's dead, but he's still breathing.' A quotation I have used from time to time, and scribbled across a set of photographs of Andrew Kötting perched in a thorn tree, became one of the phrases the film-maker looped and tested, soundlessly, as he swam up out of the sump hole, the fathomless abyss at the base of consciousness.

He wasn't dead on the Old Kent Road, but it was a close thing. He left half his body's ration of blood sprayed across cockney blacktop. When I was plodding out, assembling material to discover what the oracle of the Overground walk had told me about the present condition of London, Andrew simply scrubbed off the experience and deflated his blisters with salty wallows in the winter sea, and delirious motorbike swoops across the mist-shrouded Romney Marsh to his professional job at Canterbury. He raided London, beating on reluctant funders, shaking coins from the stitched pockets of arts bureaucrats, bear-hugging friends, doing funny voices for
Bangladeshi waiters, visiting the sick, performing at the Purcell Rooms on the South Bank. After a session with his favoured sound designer and audio engineer, the monkishly bearded Phillipe Ciompi, Andrew leathered up and fought to manhandle his bike through the evening traffic towards Old Kent Road and his usual pilgrim route back home to St Leonards.

The hit came at 9 p.m., at the junction with Rotherhithe New Road. ‘The route which I would normally have taken back to the Pepys Estate.' Andrew was snaking down the inside lane and then –
crunch
– he
was
light: thunderflashes, starbursts, neon ants spelling out idiot equations. The metallic ring of detached phrases spat against white tiles: ‘Get up, you maggot.' ‘He's dead!' ‘It's a crime reconstruction in a different place.'

The left elbow was mangled, facing the wrong way. The heavy machine came down on top of him. The silver spear of the wing mirror pierced his thigh. He fountained, he leaked. He was already out of it, lifted from London. He was fortunate in his choice of an accident spot: Old Kent Road was lively with traditional bother, yowling with squad cars. A competent Polish policewoman got to him very quickly and did all the right things.

He might have rewound the tape of our Overground march by taking a red helicopter to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. There wasn't time. They wanted, if they could, to save the leg. And everything that went with it. Andrew thinks he remembers some of the sentences they spoke as they drove him, sirens on, lights flashing, to Denmark Hill: King's College Hospital, right on the railway tracks. The place he swam to – beyond pain, beyond medication – was the park he had walked across a few weeks before the collision. Jeremy Harding, in his introduction to a new Penguin selection of Rimbaud's poetry, stressed the role that epic hikes play in the shaping of poetry. The walks ‘only stopped with the onset of a terrible pain in his right leg that presaged his death'.

Leila
McMillan kept friends informed of the victim's progress. ‘I haven't attached a picture this time as the last ones I took had his scary wound visible and that might just make you go weak at the knees!' It was a spectacular gouge, a sinkhole. The man had no modesty in his physical traumas. He wanted an articulate gash, a puncture that screamed. A bloody mouth in his thigh. He enjoyed the cocktail of morphine derivatives and approved highs dripping into the acoustic mash-up of memories, Herzog film fragments, and drunken English folk songs that kept him floating over Ruskin's lost Arcadia in Denmark Hill. But a few days was enough. The replays of our orbital circuit, sometimes on foot, sometimes mounted on a plastic swan, tightened the ligature that kept what was left of his blood in the scratched carapace of his biker's uniform. When they asked if he could wiggle his toes, he flopped from the bed and reeled away to the bathroom. ‘Not a pretty sight,' Leila said. ‘He has one of those bum-revealing gowns on.'

Andrew decided, as soon as he crept back to something like functioning consciousness, to come off the morphine and ketamine and the painkillers. Braced on the arm, his left leg stitched like one of the less attractive victims of
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
, he paid his respects to the doctors and nurses by freeing up a bed and being driven to the seaside. ‘The NHS is the saviour of all things civilized,' he emailed. ‘My flashbacks are black rectangles.' He arranged for the collection of bloodstained and shredded clothes that might prove the excuse for a gallery installation.

Mr Kötting, the future Straw Bear, was returned to his basement kitchen by the seaside, high on pain, not analgesics, and plotting the next moves. ‘I dabble with the vertical,' he reported, ‘but invariably remain horizontal.' One of his daughter Eden's helpers, brisking downstairs, came unsuspecting on the wound, the ankle-to-underpants flesh trough in all its pulsing red-blue exposure. She made it to the back door, to fresh air, just in time.

Cargo
cult offerings in the form of books, saucepans of chicken broth, DVDs, chocolates, flowers, cheeses, piled up at the door, in anticipation of a voodoo sacrifice. By the time I paid a visit, a week or so after he had discharged himself from the hospital, Andrew was on his foot. The spare leg looked like the debris of a shark attack, stapled to his swimming shorts as a token rudder. His left arm, fetishized in black straps and pads, was robotic, prosthetic. Who would have thought the young man had so much tarmac in him? His head, the blunt bone helmet of it, had done considerable damage to the kerb. He doesn't really know what happened and witnesses at that time of night on the Old Kent Road are not famous for coming forward with statements.

Four days of the mind map had vanished and there was no recovering them. He went somewhere else. The film of the ambulance ride, the surgery, the trauma ward, muttering doctors, alarmed family, was not of his making. The chosen location for the collision alarmed me, provoking memories of the morning of the Overground walk, when we paused, at the point where the railway crosses the A2, and looked down Old Kent Road to the place where the accident would happen; before moving on to Peckham Rye, Denmark Hill and King's College Hospital. And I couldn't help dredging, beyond that, fuzzy recollections of nights reeling home to Hackney after dining too well and drinking too much at the home of Brian Catling, on the other side of this road. A couple of hundred yards from the blood-soaked junction. There was a notebook poem from that time called ‘A Handshake on the Telephone'. It began with a quote from Genesis P-Orridge, about dreams being descriptions of how things really are. ‘They are accurate. As real as a car smashing a cat in the road.' I associated this Camberwell territory with shifting focus, inebriation, rucks, roadkill. ‘Consciousness extinguished on a wheel,' I wrote.
‘You do not / die of it or lose one single life. And where the beams cross / an accident awaits the supplicant.'