TOPOS - 1

Unexplained death at the river’s edge in Greenwich, close to the old Royal Navy Academy – the yellow incident sign reads: A man’s body was recovered here on xx February and is believed to have entered the river at 1.20am – the wording is strange, that word ‘entered’ makes it sound like an exact action, premeditated, or that the man was void of life signs when it occurred, dumped and thrown away – the meridian calls and when it does time shifts and life leaves in all manner of ways – further along the bank something sinister in the huge disused jetty: between thick girders, an animal skin of some kind has been stretched like a sail, leathery, pale yellow, almost translucent in its degradation – are these disparate elements of the city, odd coincidences, or clues to the death further upriver? Something evil afoot? A representation of the city’s darkness, an essence given form as a monster or killer? Someone whose knowledge of the history and rituals of the river leads him or her to conjure old symbolism, archaic examples and thereby become another chapter in the criminal history of the city – an ancestor to Spring Hell Jack, or the Ripper? A ritual maker of simulacra? Hiding out among warehouses and abandoned power stations on the southern bank, the old hospital building built in 1616 for retired mariners overlooking Poplar and Canary Wharf across the wide curve of the river at the Isle of Dogs – the smell of the sea, the noise of canon fire, an admiral’s statue – There is the possibility that this body was another of the river’s cadavers whose deaths have never been solved – Roberto Calvi hanging from beneath Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets filled with stones, the conjecture being that he was killed by the mafia but has anyone ever been charged; the limbless torso of a child apparently used for witchcraft – Maybe this body at Greenwich was a simple suicide? A man driven to the action of drowning having taken a heavy dose of senecol, or Valium laced with alcohol to ease the cold and the fear once in the water?