From Michael Smith: ‘Dark Satanic Malls’ has never been published before, but I’ve been wanting to get it out there for a long time. I did a reading of it the night I met the folks at Caught by the River (must’ve been 2011), a great night on a moonlit barge on the Thames, and I’ve read it at several Caught by the River events since then.
‘Dark Satanic Malls’ eventually became the basis of an episode of my short film cycle ‘Stranger on the Shore’. I’ve left a link to the film at the end of the story so you can see how a piece of prose morphed into an essay-film. I hope you enjoy it in both of its versions.
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Dark Satanic Malls
The Slow Scruffy Train
The Indian summer had given way to a sullen, hungover winter sky. I no longer had anywhere to live. My life, and therefore my possessions, had been distilled down to what was immediately essential, the rest of it going into the back of my mam’s garage; what distinguishes man from the animals, I realised, is the accumulated junk he surrounds himself with, in the conviction it is essential to his wellbeing and even survival. But even after downsizing my snail shell from a flat to a travel bag, the parameters of my life were still defined by several seemingly indispensable products: five pairs of socks and duds and two spare shirts in the travel bag, along with a toothbrush and a notepad; in the pocket of my waterproof jacket were two similar-sized oblongs that facilitated my two basic needs – the first was a thin electronic device that enabled me to talk and text and make arrangements; the second was a plastic card that enabled me to convert the tail-end of my overdraft into paper cash, food, or travel on municipal transport. When everything else had slipped away, these were the tools essential to my passage through the civilization I found myself living in …
I went to visit my old friend Essex Lil, on the slow, scruffy train that snakes along the north shore of the Thames Estuary, to meet her after work. As we gathered pace over the Limehouse Basin viaduct, past docklands lofts and yacht marinas, I felt an unexpected sense of elation … the feeling of becoming slowly unmoored and untethered again, floating free with the tidal swell, all the way downriver to the Essex coast … my mind detangled itself as I stared at a rustic windmill marooned on a sagging hill above a council-brick horizon, an older archeological layer poking through miles of pebbledash as oppressive and vast and featureless as the low-lying shroud of winter cloud above them … the train stalled; an automated lady’s voice kept apologising that the train was delayed; I was happy to be stuck here, sat by the window, taking it all in, protected from the smatter of rain outside; I wanted to stare across the wide sweep of this slowly shifting pergatorial vista for as long as I could …
People shouted on mobiles in muscular African accents as the sprawl subsided and sank into the forlorn looking marshes of the Essex hinterlands. The rain came down stronger. Hundreds of bright, corrugated container units stacked like rusty Duplo bricks sped past the window, hundreds of units full of the stuff that makes the world go round, before it finally comes to rest, forgotten, at the back of my mam’s garage …
We arrived at a vast, city-size tumour of oil drums, cool stores, cargo ships offloading – a crazy sprawl clustered round the place, or more accurately the structure, where the Thames and the M25 intersect: white vans like tics across the hump of the colossal bridge, a bridge of such truly monstrous proportions it induces equal measures of wonder and dread, here at the co-ordinate of optimum transit and distribution, the place where all things gather and disperse …
The train stopped at Lakeside, a shopping mall at the heart of the tumour. Virtually everybody got off the train at Lakeside – the Nigerian night workers, the gingers in Reebok Classics, the mean-lipped Cockney grannies; the deserted train then sloped downhill past huge petrochemical works, and an army of funnels and electricity pylons messing up the toxic marshland horizon, almost blotting out the sour sky …
“Next stop, Grays,” the train’s posh sex android voice announced, as we approached nasty rows of pebble dashed two-up two-downs … a place where people actually live, in the thick of all this, called Grays? I thought, and followed the impulse to jump off the train prematurely, into the pissing rain, and a nasty argument between a weaselly slip of a ticket inspector and a methadone addict with sovereigned hands like shovels …
Grays
I had four hours to kill before my friend finished her shift at Basildon general hospital. A man my age sloped past me pushing a granny’s tartan wheelie-bag, sporting the strange sartorial combination of Adidas tracky bottoms and a double-breasted navy blue blazer with gold buttons. I decided to give the centre of town a miss, heading in the other direction, riverwards …
I saw a sign for “Grays Beach.” Grays Beach? You’ve gotta be kidding, I thought, and followed the signs to a riverside path, the sky and water an indistinguishable shroud of rainy despondency, power station chimneys barely poking through it on the far Kent bank … the towering architecture on this side – and I’m not sure architecture is technically the correct term – resembled landlocked oil rigs stranded on a muddy shore … less and less convinced, I followed the signs for Grays Beach to a little path that led down to a deserted sandy kiddies’ play area nestled below this architecture at the end of the oil wars … funnels and power grids and vast cylindrical drums dwarfed a spider’s web climbing frame, a pirate ship, wet sand, and nobody at all to be seen. Kids actually grow up here, I thought. It seemed incomprehensible.
The low sub-base rumble of the Chinese superfreighter bringing in all this year’s Christmas presents slid into dock like a shifting tectonic plate; I scrambled down to the shore to get a better look – again, I don’t know if the word shore accurately describes it, it was more a bank against the waters almost entirely made up of Tango bottles, Diamond White bottles, all the plastic by-products of the petrochemical complexes in the background. The river seemed dangerously high, like it wanted to burst its banks and wash all this away, the inevitable corrective to our wasteful ways that surely must be coming …
Back on the tarmac path, three tiny figures dwarfed by the backdrop had fishing rods perched over the concrete flood wall. What kind of supper they expected to catch, I can only imagine. The path ran alongside a Barratt estate, and walking down it I had the strangest sense that a shadowy someone was catching up alongside me, but when I turned to look – no one there at all … I walked on, spooked, wondering about the layers and layers of troubled history along this dirty river stretch, psychic dry rot whitewashed over by this Barratworld sleight-of-hand that we were in Merry Olde Essex, all weatherboarded walls and gabled clock towers, completely unconvincing next to articulated lorry sliproads and brooding technological structures no one knows the purpose of …
Barrattworld eventually thinned out into nettles, thickets, and the slow lap, lap of the brown mournful river … something approaching a wilderness, and a path that was less and less a path, which I persevered along in my soggy canvas pumps … I swung inland, towards the noise of something huge being rhythmically shredded … a factory belching out fumes with the strongest smell of soap you ever smelt, soap so strong it could easily dispose of the evidence of a body like mine, out here in the badlands, with no one ever the wiser … wave hello to Mr Magpie I thought, as I crossed through a suicide grove of silver birches, and then the really strange and scary bit: St Clements, a squat little medieval flint church brooding in the thick of it, and its dirty, mossy graveyard sinking into the toxic ground, dwarfed by the belching soap factory above … I found out later the cemetery became a mass grave for a Victorian prison hulk that sank in a storm … the whole thing seemed perverse, evil almost: life in this rotten borough is bracketed by a sandpit playground and a prison graveyard, both lost among leagues of industrial pipeline and belching funnels, and the constant subsonic background hum of the wheels of industry shearing at England’s drop off point …
Dark Satanic Malls
From the awful graveyard, I scrambled up a bank to Stoneness Roundabout, seeing a bus with “Lakeside” in amber electronic letters shining through the rain and gloom; I slipped, snagged my ankle, hobbled to the last place you’d ever expect a bus shelter, and somehow managed to catch it in time …
Shortly, the bus pulled into the terminus; I walked through automatic sliding doors that were a portal into another world; I was suddenly bemused to find myself the wettest person in the Debenhams homewares department … I walked, bamboozled, past cosy duvets and shower curtains, while the Beautiful South played lullingly, numbingly in the background …
I emerged from Debenhams onto the main drag of the mall, next to the West Ham United shop. I felt like Rip Van Winkle suddenly woken up and cast into the rituals of an alien civilisation. The thing that struck me the most: people. I hadn’t seen any all day, and here they were in their thousands: old folks and the disabled relaxing at the seating islands, passing the time people watching, skinny school-uniformed girls learning the art of shopping from their mothers, lads with boyband haircuts, lads from Barrymore’s pool; maybe community is the wrong word – no, community is definitely the wrong word – but there was comfort in the fact this mass of humanity came here to feel human again and enjoy its window of leisure/retail time … after the rain and the slip roads and the all pervading taste of industrial soap, the neon signs for Boots and Body Shop seemed to nurse and enclose and restore me. Crispy Kreme Donut stalls enticed me. Here was life again. I’d made it inside the castle walls of this strange estuarine civilization.
And the hallmark of this civilization was that it was the land of plenty, the land of too much, the land of so much stuff they were literally giving it away: a man tried to bully me into taking a free loaf of Hovis bread at the Great Hovis Give Away; a woman tried to corner me into free AA membership; I laughed and nearly said, “I can’t drive; I walked here,” but stopped when I realised how suspect this most basic activity would seem to the natives …
I went to the toilets to perform another basic activity … they were tucked away behind the food court, and tucked away behind the toilets, I stumbled upon the Lakeside Prayer Room; it was a sad little room with furniture like the waiting room in a GP surgery; it was the only room with no one in it …
I went down the glass elevator, into M&S, which was heaving, and used one of my electronic oblongs to splash out on two sirloin steaks and a bottle of Barolo for me and Essex Lil. She had already phoned me on the other plastic oblong, and was waiting in her company people carrier, hassled, in the carpark. We drove off into Essex, slowly, up the industrial blockage of the unlucky A13 …
Mucking
The next morning, after the Barolo and some whiskey that had been lurking at the back of her cupboard, Lil was late for work, and dropped me off at the concrete verge of a Basildon roundabout, instead of dropping me off somewhere nice like she’d promised … I hadn’t had time for breakfast, and spying a big Tescos which I presumed would do a fry up, I walked across the traffic island and then scrambled down the opposite bank where a makeshift path through the foliage had created itself out of the accumulated desires of all the other pedestrians who couldn’t be arsed to go the long way round … I walked in; a David Guetta-style “Fame” dance remix blared out above the trolley zombie scrum; I walked straight back out again, back up the muddy makeshift path to the roundabout verge, and chose a side lane lorries thundered down, feeling trapped in a world that had no place for a moocher like me in it …
Funnily enough, I was relieved to find a picture postcard village on the other side of all that colossal infrastructure … according to a plaque, this particular village had been the crucible of the medieval Peasant’s Revolt … their descendants swept leaves off proud lawns, neutralised with bread and circus, anaethetised by Lakeside and Land Rovers on the gravel drives of their big, bright-bricked Lego houses on cul-de-sacs with names like “Gandalf’s Rise”…
I wandered away from it, down dale, towards the river and the spread of the flat marshy meadows, all cow shit and the crackle of electricity pylons, while petrochemical chimneys in the distance threw fire into the air … after a while I arrived at a new road, and luckily a deserted cycle path I could walk along next to it … it seemed pleasingly strange after that country footpath, walking that freshly laid tarmac curve through a perfectly featureless green marshland, shiny Shell oil trucks my only company, a scene so new and strangely over-simplified I felt like I was walking through a computer game … I realised how at home I felt in these overlooked places; I didn’t want to play with the other kids, and out here, left alone with my thoughts, with no network coverage, awake to this otherworldly land we sleepwalk through every day, I found a strange peace … I didn’t know what I was looking for and I didn’t care if I found it … in any case, what I was really looking for was whatever I stumbled across: every environment is interesting if we think of it like an anthropologist in the field might, a private eye shadowing the clues of a mystery that nobody’s paying him to solve …
Eventually I came to a burger van in the lay-by, and got a bacon sarnie to keep my strength up … the lass behind the counter had a nice way about her, and half a dozen truckers hung about passing half an hour in the pleasant company that congregated there … I always expected people to be as weird as the environment they inhabited in places like these, but I was generally surprised at their ease and warmth at the little oases where their paths crossed … I got chatting to a bloke with Elvis chops, and when he said, “Tarraa, mate,” he rolled the Rs in that lovely old fashioned Cockney way, and I headed off warm and happy with my bacon sarnie up the computer-simulated tarmac arc.
I took a wrong turn towards a place called Mucking. I think I just liked the name. You could see it, and smell it, glistening and shimmering in the distance. It looked like some strange natural volcanic formation on Iceland or the Galapagos Islands or somewhere. There were HGVs driving rubbish across its surface, diggers digging rubbish across its surface, bright yellow cranes hoisting rubbish across its surface, surrounded by a chaotic swirl of seagulls, a swarm of them circling in a huge whirlpool above the miasma. For all my romantic ideas about wastelands, this place was literally a wasteland. A pile of shit. It was huge. As I got closer, an Essex Heritage plaque told me all about Mucking: the strange thing was, it had been known as Mucking for over a thousand years, ever since the Saxons founded a long dead village on the site, as if, through some strange echo from the future, Mucking’s Dark Age inhabitants had predicted the eventual future of their village those long centuries before.
Trying to escape, I went off-road at muddy Mucking Creek, no more than a trickle through banks of silt, till eventually, far beyond the colossal rubbish dump, I hit the relief of the open river again, and after the racket of all the shit trucks and diggers shunting filth around, I was enveloped by the loveliest silence … now I’d found a wasteland in a nobler sense, a wilderness, reeds and placid brown waves slowly lapping the banks, where I stopped and rested a while … like I said, I’m not really sure what I was looking for – the nature of the Beast I think, the Body Economic whose veins we all course round – but by the lapping shoreline, the Beast was lulled to sleep, and I can only say for a time at least I found a certain quiet as well.
Tilbury
My lingering sense of peace was broken when Essex Lil rang, begging to come and pick me up so I could spend the rest of the afternoon in Basildon with her, helping her offload a truckload of talking koala teddy bears into a prefab storage unit behind the morgue of the New Town general hospital …
After shifting the koalas, she fucked work off, and we drove off into the golden hour, and back towards the Estuary … by the flat glow on the side of the giant Tesco oblong where all the food comes from, we noticed a solitary figure on the way to her nightshift, forlorn and out of place; she stood out because she was the only person we could see on foot – in this particular civilization, life is lived between the air-con environments of the car, the office, or the shopping mall – the world is always seen from behind glass, never al fresco, so to speak …
Essex Lil wanted to show me Tilbury. “You’ll like Tilbury,” she said … the boggy marsh itself seemed to sour as it approached this toxic place; we passed The World’s End pub; a gypsy encampment with ponies and portaloos; six teenagers straggling across the sallow marshy wilderness with two prams …
The first we saw of Tilbury was the thick concrete walls of its container port, walls so high you only got odd glimpses of ships’ funnels and the tops of stacked Maersk container units, and a hangar with “Uniserve: The World On Your Doorstep” emblazoned across it … next to the dock was the muscle to defend it: Tilbury Fort, its ancient Tudor battlements on top of castle walls decked out with anti-Nazi artillery guns, a bulwark between London and the sea that has withstood Armadas and Luftwaffe, a place that radiates power, the stronghold of a seaborne empire forged in blood and force … and brooding behind the ancient fortress, the colossal power station all the pylons march towards, the vanishing point of all the power cable perspectives, like lay lines converging onto some sacred and terrible place, its towering twin chimneys glowing in the dying blood-red sunset, and your gut tells you you are in the presence of a vast and dreadful mystery …
The road curved inland from Tilbury Fort towards Gunn Hill, and an ancient church on top of what looked like the stepped slopes of a prehistoric ancestral burial mound … there were troubled red and purple skies about us as we entered a tangled knot of winding country lanes … I couldn’t shake the vertigoey feeling I was entering into some kind of ritual consciousness, opening up to strange forces, falling into some kind of trance … the feeling mounted as we drove up the hill, until it hit its shocking crescendo – I still don’t understand this, and I’m sure I never will, but I shit you not, halfway round a blind, leafy bend, something shadowy, nasty & big stepped out of the bushes and lunged at the car! Lil screamed and swerved us out of the way instinctively; it happened so fast I didn’t have time to take it all in, but a moment later we were looking at each other, gobsmacked, shock giving way to confusion as we realised nothing was actually there … I have no idea what lunged out of those bushes at us, but I know it made both of us jump out of our skins at exactly the same time, and I know it wasn’t very nice … I got the sense it was the shape of a man, but it was bigger, and darker, and very, very old: a man-shaped presence made of leaves and darkness … who knows … the air is thick with bad vibes here, history is overcrowded, time overlaps, the past growls like a dog at curious annoying children when we forget our manners disturbing it …
Freaked out now, we forked off down a tunnel of old trees called “Love Lane,” back towards the river and the unlucky A13 … it got dark as we hit the motorway … driving through these estuarine lands at night, a fluid, insubstantial world of lights, a nebulous city of moving motorway headlights … the cathedral of light that is Lakeside, and in the distance upriver, the neon pyramid of Canary Wharf, governing the network with its blinking stare: a future civilization emerging, overlayed above the gaps and the wastes of the old … this stretch of the estuary has the air of a sacred site, in that it jolts us into an altered consciousness, in that it brings us face to face with the sublime: a certain unbearable intensity, the vastness of an unknowable something, the workings of an awesome and hidden hand … here at The World’s End, we come face to face with the Leviathan, we look upon the deep in which he dwells, the mighty works that he has wrought.
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Here’s a link the film version of Dark Satanic Malls on the BFI Player.
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