River by Esther Kinsky

Author:Esther Kinsky [Esther Kinsky]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781910695302
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

XXII. HACKNEY WICK

The Wick lay like a shred of urban tatter in the crook of noisy roads. With only the rear of its crumbling factories backing onto the straightened river Lea canal, it peered through gaps at the thickets edging Hackney Marshes, its abandoned greyhound stadium like a hand shoved in under the overhead road bridges between the two waterways. As an area of town it had little to do with the river. Scarred and pitted by decades of experimenting with the small-scale production of chemicals, by the rise and fall of middle-sized factories with machines so loud they brought down their own works walls, by traces of hastily built and equally hastily demolished post-war housing, dwelling in the shadow of poverty and the twilight hope of prosperity, Hackney Wick was a place apart, an area left behind, bashed and bedraggled by the times and time’s passing, a site defined by its own rules of emptiness and wildness between junkyards, garages, warehouses and rubbish dumps, inscribed with its own alphabet of symbols that were crumbling, rusting, skewed and charred, yet still visible through more recent but no less damaged layers of paint, a palimpsest hard to decipher yet everywhere beckoning with glimmers of legibility, with promise of spoors and traces: from peppermint chocolates to Meldola blue, from automatic ticket machines to spare parts for motorbikes and leftovers of raw materials – copper, iron, steel in small quantities, variously bulky, also cables and rubber. Body Parts offered a repair workshop for car bodies, in front of which men wearing oily overalls would stand squinting idly into various categories of dismal weather, inevitably eliciting associations with divers searching for body parts in rubbery-smooth full-body suits, watched from the water’s edge by gawkers and waiting policemen on the weed-infested towpath. A slight stench of burning always hung over Hackney Wick. It was a domain of the kind of decay and semi-oblivion that every river to some extent gives rise to, or allows to reside on its banks, or even nurtures by contributing to its accumulation, which the tamer Lea, tranquil, brownish and impassive, did not. Deposits alien to its straightened channel could not expect to stay there long; waterfowl fished them out to line or shelter their nests, built in the reeds close in where the occasional recess in the concrete edge provided a home to forever wary long-beaked waders and fish-eating birds.

Once, after my walk along the tame Lea, I took a bus. A calm winter’s day under a white covering of cloud had given way to the sort of rain London was capable of at practically any time of year, with grey-brown, brightly lined clouds and the salty metallic smack of marshland at low tide, when the wind blew in from the estuary and covered everything in a fine film. On the seat in front of me sat two old men. Their jackets exuded every odour known to this part of town: the beer and nicotine smell of pubs, the reek of breakfasts in greasy spoon cafés, the fug of badly ventilated houses, bus exhaust, the rain.

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