The Sea Inside

stain from its river. I descended into gloomy basements made glamorous by punk and all that came after, caverns in the dreariness, sparking into energy and abandon. I learned to drink and take drugs and dress for each night as if it was the first and last. I wanted to relive the posters on my wall, to escape my origins. And yet I always wanted to go home.
    London, skewered on its own waterway, represented containment. But to set yourself free you had only to get on a bus, one of the routes that might have been running since the city began, carrying ghostly passengers through the ever-changing, never-changing streets, immemorial generations told off in bus stops. From the top seat of a trembling double-decker the familiar panorama unfolds: Old Street to City Road, the Bank to St Paul’s, Blackfriars to the Thames. New shops and new skyscrapers rise, high-water marks of the city’s fortunes. One morning I was all but thrown out of bed in my flat by an IRA bomb; now the steel and glass has grown even higher over the ever-erased, ever-rebuilt city.
    From this jerky eyrie you see everyone undone. The bus creeps through the streets, its obstinate slowness a rebuff to the manic movement around it; the sclerotic traffic in its blue haze; the people on their way to work, briefcases and coffee cups in hand, sneaking surreptitious cigarettes in illicit clouds of smoke.
    Along this ramshackle route lies my history, too: Bunhill Fields, a green refuge on a summer’s afternoon, though under its turf lie the bones of William Blake and thousands of victims of the plague; Barts Hospital, in whose Victorian interior I was operated on for a strange white patch that had begun to spread along my spine, elaborately diagnosed as
Lymphangioma circumscriptum
as if it were written on my back and which, once excised, left a scar running like a thread knotted through my vertebrae; the newspaper offices in Fleet Street where I worked shifts wearing a cheap suit in the last empire of typewriters and alcohol; and Holborn Hill, where, in the opening of
Bleak House
, Dickens fantasised about a muddy city ‘as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth’, with ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard’, fresh from the Thames’s ooze. All along the way are monuments to forgotten men, their dreams disguised by voluminous beards, and muscle-bound tritons, their scaly thighs rising out of the water that runs beneath the streets. It is strange to live in a place where rivers are forced to flow underground: Holborn itself means hollow bourne or brook, one of the streams that fed into the river Fleet.
    An artist, who also happens to be a diver, told me how, some years ago, he’d lived in a dank basement in Pimlico. The atmosphere of the place was almost oppressively cold and damp; he was reduced to wearing blocks of polystyrene on his boots to keep his feet warm, with a similar layer under his bed. One day he looked outside and saw that a large portion of the brick pavement had fallen away, like a piece of jigsaw puzzle, to reveal free-flowing water; not in a drain or a conduit, but with gravel like a proper river bed. It was as if someone had punched a hole in the city’s carapace.
    Like so many cities – Venice or Hong Kong, New York or Amsterdam, St Petersburg or Mexico – or sacred sites such as Winchester, whose cathedral foundations were saved by the Edwardian diver William Walker, or Ely, the ship of the fens, sailing on the marshes through which slither its eponymous eels – London is an illusion; it only floats on sand and clay. Nowhere is beyond the tidal reach; the river brings the sea into the city. Sometimes it might even be invited in, as it was at Sadler’s Wells, whose Aquatic Theatre, which opened in 1804, was fed by the New River – itself a diverted waterway – and boasted a sunken tank measuring ninety feet long, twenty-four feet wide, and three feet deep.
    Here one could witness the Siege of Gibraltar and Neptune’s chariot drawn by seahorses, along with other ‘perilous and appalling incidents’: a woman falling from the rocks to be rescued by her lover; sailors leaping from a vessel on fire; a child thrown in by its nurse, who had been paid to drown it, only for the infant to be rescued by a Newfoundland dog. So affecting were these scenes that at the end of a performance, members of the audience would jump into the water to assure themselves it was real. A