London Overground (8 page)

Ian Mansfield, a blogger, reported back, after making a pilgrimage to view the sacred slab. ‘I doubtfully stood on the manhole cover and contemplated deep thoughts about how artists get away with such bollocks, and then darted swiftly away as this is a modestly busy road junction and standing in the middle of the street is a most unwise idea.'

Within days, the labyrinthine footprints, like blow-ups of a future crime, were gone. Some art fancier excavated the iron panel and took it away. The blogger came under attack, not so much for his adverb-heavy literary style, as for the injudicious identification of the site. The sewage hole was plugged by a standard Thames Water cover.

‘It's all your fault,' Kötting said. ‘
City of Disappearances
, my arse. Leave well alone. Justgone and hasbeen.
Adiós
.
Adieu
. Goodbye.'

We shook the tree but there were no angels today, just the exposed angles of well-kept paths along which leotard women, blonde hair tied back in swishing ponytails, were chivvied by personal trainers; slim professionals in waterproof make-up, with fit black instructors monitoring performance against the stopwatch. ‘Come on now, you can do it. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine …
Come on, last push.
Thirty!'

Threads of willow curtained the railway. Large houses, secure in the status of the hill, risked colour: dark bands of Arctic blue with a giant sun disk in marmalade orange, in salute to the Overground, the confirmation that a rail connection boosts property values. Height above sea level could be quantified in zeros on the asking price. Who's asking? The villagers of Peckham Rye are a community of morning athletes, yoga-improved, allowing few shops or commercial enterprises on the upper slopes: mother-and-buggy tea bars, choice vegetables, the latest electronic screens flashing behind work-from-home windows.

Among the imposing villas, copper beech groves, stucco, the views down long straight avenues to Camberwell – and the flicker of unease that comes with missing the moans of a railway muffled by discreet planting – the Kötting libido gives itself a good shake. He reminisces. Art-school days. Parties. Performances. Clattering and smoking around town, Penge to Putney, in a general dealer's van. Transporting some smitten, mascara-smudged student back to one of these hilltop houses. He recalls. Nests of flats with furniture under wraps, before
the paintwork was taken in hand. We are carving across the footfall of Andrew's memory-map, firing reflex stories of punkish warehouse madness with lights and sirens and shuddery loops of film.

‘I was a confusionist,' he said. ‘If I couldn't find a thing, I'd make it happen. Then I'd drop my trousers.'

Something about the settled harbour of silent and desirable uphill properties jolts Kötting. Lovings and leavings. Herb smoke going sour in dirty saucers. Scratchy vinyl sounds bouncing and repeating on the turntable. And the way that old London sunlight used to barge through naked windows, firing bedspreads made from US flags. Nicotine glow of ranks of orange paperbacks: Greene, Orwell, Huxley. And one shoe to be retrieved after the barefoot return from a shared bathroom with an explosive geyser and black rust beard under a dripping tap.

One of the posh clients for Kötting, our Deptford painter and decorator, was the film presenter, archivist, collector Philip Jenkinson. A Northerner from Sale, Jenkinson got his first taste of showbiz by way of delivering juvenile George Formby impressions in holiday camps. An asthmatic child, he diverted his swimming money to illicit cinema trips. Then rinsed his trunks in the Gents before returning home. While lecturing at St Martin's School of Art, he was talent-spotted by a BBC producer and given a slot on
Late Night Line-Up.

All of which served as useful preparation for becoming Kötting's front-room university, his inspiration. And eventually his patron. The growl of the 16mm projector, the cone of light on the wrinkled screen, taught the young director the value of creative befuddlement. He didn't know what he was watching, but it all meshed: Sam Fuller's bald-headed prostitute wielding a high-heeled shoe in
The Naked Kiss
and Russ Meyer's cheesy
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.

‘In
amongst the cacophony,' Andrew said, ‘was a story.' Finding that story and disguising it in discriminations of orchestrated babble became his signature method. And he never stopped giving credit for this to Jenkinson. Kötting's experience of chamber cinema in 1984 replaced the gilded and fading Alhambras still floating in my own memories of chasing down double bills in Streatham and Tooting and Stockwell in the early 1960s.

Appreciating Kötting's first primitive and energetic short film,
Klipperty Klopp
, Jenkinson dosed the youthful painter/decorator on shorts by Dick Lester and Bob Godfrey. Andrew did it all: running, jumping and standing still. He bullocked in and out of abandoned shipping containers, mounds of British rubbish, wearing silly hats and trawlerman's oilskins. Honouring the tradition of Bruce Lacey and the traction-engine survivalists of Philip Trevelyan's
The Moon and the Sledgehammer
, Andrew scavenged war detritus and relics of dying riverside industries. Over film stock shocked into silence, he imbecile-soliloquized, contradicting himself, scoring chaos into accidental poetry. Funny voices, warped sentiment and Millwall bluster lift and enhance the fogged footage of what would otherwise be an orthodox art-school product. The finished film looks like a rough cut.

‘He'd run round and round in circles. He'd run round and round all the time. He'd wreck the grass and he made a terrible mess of himself.'

Andrew is rag-and-bone shamanic. With the emphasis on manic. A horseless rider of Mudchute steppes. He gallops around a spiral vortex laid out among overgrown bomb craters on the Isle of Dogs. Scorched lines look like a Stone Age premonition of the coming of the railways. ‘He came out of this place where he was. And he wasn't at another.'

Jenkinson, tucked away on Kötting's side of the river, mentoring the spray of umlaut humour, opened doors. As we
tramp towards Denmark Hill, Andrew stresses again the debt he owes to the man who knew just what to show him; what he needed to extend his ambitions. David Lynch's
Eraserhead
with the monster worm-baby, industrial-apocalyptic sets, the smoke. Frederick Wiseman's savage 1967 documentary,
The Titicut Follies
, shot in a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane. The inmates put on a talent show. It was hard to watch.

Kötting talked about these Friday-night screenings as ‘The Strap'. ‘It really felt as if we had been strapped in and weren't allowed to leave until Philip had shown us just one more film. All my early film noir experiences were there.'

The Kötting troop would straggle from the council flat in riverside Deptford to elegant Blackheath. Jenkinson was an uphill media figure; he danced in sailor suit on the
Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show
. He laboured through an interview with the professionally irascible and eye-patched John Ford, who behaved like an admiral pulling rank on a chorus-boy seaman.

Blackheath is not on the Overground. It doesn't need it. It's too long established in its village status, its green spaces saturated with historic traces of Wat Tyler and the rest. Tyler's betrayal by the young Richard II is a useful demonstration that this meadow is as far as revolting peasants are going to be permitted to march before they're turned back. Blackheath is part of that whalebacked line of Surrey hills, where white houses perch in safety above flood risks and riverbank piracy and the railway din of immigrants and street markets: Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Denmark Hill, Wimbledon, Richmond. A ridge from which to observe distant plagues and fires.

The right to trespass, to sprawl on Jenkinson's sofa with the grinding gears of the 16mm projector, confirmed Kötting on his life's trajectory: art, struggle, expulsion. Posing now beside a pickup truck –
SCRAP CARS
&
MOT FAILURES WANTED
– the sweating, heavy-suited film-maker highlights a path not
taken. Or not for long. The Del Boy years of the other Peckham,
Fools and Horses.
We are reluctant to let go of our own myths. Through misremembered and improved autobiography, Andrew retrieves archival footage of a past capable of validating this long day's trudge. There are footprints in the ash.

He made films only to provide backdrops for performance. He called his act
Being Kärnal.
He supported himself as a market trader. He sold shoes to Derek Jarman. After he had put in a bid for a pitch at Camden Market, he would take himself off to the Scala in King's Cross for an all-night screening. That was the geography of cross-river London: constant transit, scavenging, cashmoney. Drawings made on flapping canvases with sump oil. ‘This is where it began, all round here. It takes you right back.'

His destiny begins to make sense. He detects the faintest outline of a coherent narrative. So he leaves for South America with Leila. He is beside himself, he says, he is in love. Leila tells him so. And he knows it is true. They sleep rough and eat nettles in the New Forest. They're ready. They ship out. They find a ruined mining settlement in the middle of the Atacama Desert. He takes photographs. Then they come home to Deptford, Pepys Estate.

Denmark Hill reminds us that all the asylums, or factories for processing damaged psyches, are not on the outer fringes of London. They are not all decommissioned and converted into gated enclaves with cod-pastoral names and easy access to the orbital motorway. Will Self brought Friern Barnet, just outside the North Circular, back to life with a jolt in
Umbrella
, an immersive seance on modernism. One of the features of that grim hospital, recalled and reviled in so many memoirs, a hive of bad dreams and compulsive disorders, is the central corridor: a pedestrian circuit tramped into pilgrim smoothness by
generations of white jackets and patient prisoners. A London loop for tranquillized hikers sandwiched between the M25 and the North Circular.

‘That it's movement that's essential for the formation of memories,' Self writes. ‘That memory is a somatic phenomenon, and so if a mind can no longer manipulate its body in space, it loses the capacity to orientation within time …' And he goes on: ‘The ward is hot, the angled casements seem not to vent the sodium hypochlorite vapours and ruinous eddies, but only draw in the far-off shushing of traffic on the North Circular.'

The corridors ran for a mile around the intestines of the hospital. Agitated skeletons progressed, sleepwalked, snow-walked, crawled, crept, jerked, wall-touched, step-counted – like those outside, but without mobile phones – until their shot nerves demanded medication or the penance of reheated institutional food.

Self identifies the problem we face, as we collect graffiti, photographs of spray-can murals, fragments of torn advertisements. The catalogue of visual trophies, laid out, becomes the chart of a particular day, a journey. To stitch it together requires concentration. But the map can never be more than the map of a further map. Tighter and tighter, maps within maps, until our skulls split and we come to a dead halt in the middle of an attempted portrait of Kötting beside the sign for Denmark Hill Station in its Overground guise. The orange strip is the colour of the regular methadone prescription picked up by William Burroughs in Kansas City: medication for commuters. You
can
get away.

The rail halt, with its Xanax'd café, feels like a service hatch for the Maudsley Hospital. Paul Merton, a comedian who took his name from the district of London in which he grew up, checked in for a six-week stay, suffering from the side effects of Lariam, a drug taken in tablet form for the prevention and
treatment of malaria. The active ingredient is mefloquine hydrochloride. Merton said that he was ‘hallucinating conversations with friends'. Which was, despite the pain and loss of control, not a bad preparation for
Have I Got News for You
, where he became a regular panellist shortly after his release.

He no longer believed that he was a target for Freemasons. But he stayed in the cross hairs of Will Self, a luminary of the show, who told the
Mirror
that it was time for Merton and Ian Hislop to quit. ‘All due respect … they're multimillionaires, plump middle-aged men sitting behind a desk making cracks about Clive Anderson's hairstyle.' The last time the TV show was any good, Self reckoned, was when he guested and ‘ripped the tits' off Neil Kinnock.

The acknowledged side effects of mefloquine, leaking into the Denmark Hill landscape, and away down the Overground circuit, are anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, feelings of persecution, unmotivated weeping, aggression, forgetfulness, agitation, restlessness, confusion, nightmares, hallucinations. Apart from that: fine. The shakes are just swamp fevers, Deptford tremors, property envy.

Kötting's fingers were twitching so much he began to text, spattering predictive runes in the hope that some domestic crisis back in St Leonards would give him the excuse to pull out of the rest of the walk without losing face. He started rambling about the quality of blowjobs he had received in his alpha-male days as a
Being Kärnal
headbanger, supporting the Weather Girls at the Fridge in Brixton. Like having the marrow of your spine siphoned, he said, through a glass straw. He thought this had something to do with altitude: high-ceilinged rooms with big windows at the top of the hill, the upper reaches of Camberwell Grove.

The best advice, the Maudsley quacks reckoned, was: avoid being bitten. And sleep under mosquito nets. Kötting, I'm sure,
had a set in his miracle pouch, along with energy bars, shards of rosy, sea-smoothed brick, crow feathers, comedy spectacles, a coverless copy of Beckett's
Happy Days
, and a slab of Kendal Mint Cake.

Mosquito madness was contagious. In January 1942 Heinrich Himmler gave the order for the creation of the Dachau Entomological Institute, with the covert intention of using mosquitoes as biological weapons. The protocols of the institute, ostensibly set up to find remedies against diseases transmitted by lice and other insects, allows no other conclusion. The master plan, never carried out, was to release malaria-infected insects into enemy territories.

Ruskin Park, with its wooded slopes, tennis courts, its outline like a dog's head (Disney's Goofy without the ears), belongs in a chain of soulful South London spaces, the captured gardens of grand houses offering relief from the endless grid of residential streets. In my first, confused days at film school in Brixton, I came on these green reservations with contained excitement: Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec Common, Streatham Common, Norwood Grove Recreation Ground. My attitude was provincial, a dawning recognition of the mysteries of gravel overlaying London clay. Maryon Park, downriver in Charlton, identified and exploited by Antonioni in
Blow-Up
, was the prime example of just such a site: a natural amphitheatre soliciting mime and ritual.