Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Colvin didn’t live to enjoy his royalties. Drink taken, he fell off the Portsmouth-Fishbourne (Isle of Wight) ferry. That was when Kaporal decided his paranoia was justified, when he stopped reading newspapers, taking calls, watching TV. The one drawback with retirement to the south coast was the fact that minimarts run by Bangladeshis stocked the London Evening Standard . Cornershops didn’t bother, a dozen video boxes (tapes under the counter), a shelf of stale Eccles cakes and the weekly fright-sheet comprised their working stock. NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES. PREMISES PROTECTED BY CCTV.

The final story Kaporal transcribed, verbatim, before he left Streatham for the coast, concerned a small-time hustler by the name of Sid Rawnce. Rawnce had been in Chelmsford, later HMP Hollesley Bay, with Phil Tock and Alby Sleeman (‘built like Beckton Alp and half as bright’). Rawnce came out first, boasting of his connections, hanging around the door at Tuesdays in Basildon, cautioned for affray, a bun fight in a drive-through McDonald’s.

Rawnce started seeing Tock’s wife, Debs. Totally out of order. Tock wasn’t bothered, he was looking at another five. And happy with it. ‘Tick’ Tock, they called him, when he palled up with a pretty boy from Eltham, a semi-pro racist. Phil was a fatalist, Debs had never been much of a housekeeper. But Alby, he went mental. He lay on his bunk rehearsing scenarios of revenge, involving jackhammers, shower units, car batteries and drums of bad chemicals.

The debriefing — with Kaporal (car to car, window to window) — took place at Thurrock Service Station. Rawnce, giggling in terror, ranted, riffed. His teeth shipwrecked but very white. Despite the cigarettes, the American sticks.

Kaporal was shocked by the sight of Rawnce’s motor, scrapyard reject, Vauxhall Astra held together with mismatched paint and black-taped Cellophane. Three sessions, cash in hand, more promised, and still no lead to Mocatta. Rawnce couldn’t be persuaded to use that word, the name. He outlined, in tedious detail, cross-Channel runs to Belgium and Holland, the travellers’-cheque scam in Silvertown. Nights when the filth pulled them on the A13 ramp, Junction 31 of the M25: deal done, product transferred. Divvy up or jump sixty feet over the parapet.

Rawnce sniggered nose juice. Knuckled it.

It was always next time. Tomorrow. Dirt on Mocatta, photographs, files. Data that would finally resolve Kaporal’s unified field theory of everything: oil, blood, arms, property. M25. M for Mocatta. M for Murder.

Two Thursdays in succession, Kaporal slept in his motor. Waited all day at Thurrock Services (where every minute is a week anywhere else). Rawnce didn’t show. Seven months later the story made p. 20 of the Standard , five terse paras. MAN FOUND DEAD AT BEAUTY SPOT. July to February, he hadn’t budged. The A3, near Wisley (woodland favoured by sex cruisers, peepers, gays, suburban Satanists), he went off-road and into a ditch, ‘yards from a busy dual carriageway’. Headlights, full-beam, sweeping through the undergrowth, launched a Surrey myth: ‘Phantom Lights in Forest’.

The body was discovered by a green-lane hiker who had wandered a long way from the nearest pilgrim track. Rawnce was reduced to essence: a fat watch ticking on a skeletal wrist. He was like one of those Battle of Britain pilots dug out of a Kentish hop field. Bone-man lolling on red leatherette. Devoured by rodents, flies, picked clean: grin was in place, the fine strong teeth by which he was identified. Cheap trainers and rags of leisurewear. St Christopher medallion, the gilt gone from the holy man’s staff. Six cans of extra-strong lager, four drunk. In the glove compartment, Kaporal’s card stuck into a copy of the 50 Miles around London map. Along with a lump of something nasty — later identified as the indestructible plastic element from a cheeseburger. ‘I’ve seen more appetising mummies,’ said the DS from Guildford.

Kaporal drove straight to the coast, dumped his hire car, found a room. A good decision to quit the A13, the Sleemans, O’Driscoll, their crazed vendettas. Sooner or later the Essex boys would implode, destroy each other in a frenzy of steroid-induced rage. Ecstasy binges, with vodka chasers, didn’t do much for your short-term memory. Where better to hide than Mocatta’s backyard? The rarely seen dandy was rumoured to be building a grotesque mansion, ‘bigger than Blenheim’, somewhere near Paul Merton’s place on the Pett Levels. Mocatta had a marine property empire, ‘slums for bums’, that ran from Seaford to Hastings. Given his start by Rachman, he’d recognised, very early, that asylum-seekers and urban unfortunates (banished from the Smoke) were a major asset, the coming commodity. Better than oil. Better than — or twinned with — drugs. The coast would have died without his vision. A couple of dim heavies and a filing cabinet, two dogs, that’s all it took. To keep Declan Mocatta, dandy and aesthete, in crushed-velvet suits, snakeskin waistcoats, elastic-sided Chelsea boots. In gold-topped canes and car coats. Silly hats. Leave out Chris Eubank and Mocatta was the best-dressed male south of Croydon.

The view from the high window, on the semi-formal gardens, was soothing; no people. A town at the edge of Europe, in dim weather, container ships and oil spills just over the horizon. Or — it was that time already — small groups of bareheaded men in bright leather jackets, jeans, white trainers, being turned out of crumbling Victorian buildings (salt-eaten facades, loose window frames); turned loose to slouch on broad pavements. Knowing better than to occupy dew-damp park benches, or to hang about the bowling green. Unwelcome in seafront cafés. Suspect in post offices and charity shops. Pissing in doorways.

The council operated a regime of benevolent social control: keep out of the way of the paying punters and do what you like. We’ll put a roof over your heads and supply you with vouchers. You won’t starve. Want to work a number, off the books, with the builders who are patching up Mocatta’s ruined hotels and mid-Victorian terraces? Fine. No insurance claims, no additional benefits. Keep quiet, keep clear of the public streets and make your own sandwiches.

Melancholy men from the Balkans watched the waves. Kurds followed young women, silently, hungrily, at a respectful distance, never quite becoming a nuisance. Glaswegians and third-generation Paddies (expelled from Kilburn and Kentish Town) staked out the lower promenade and took it on themselves to get the drink in, to act as informal social secretaries, keeping the scene lively and open to all-comers (bring your own carrier).

Survival, the economic migrants had cracked it — why couldn’t Kaporal? Wrapped in a long scarf, letting rainwater seep through cracked shoes, he mooched among the naked beds of the out-of-season gardens. Cashmoney, where was it to come from? As he reached the seafront, he looked west towards the pale outline of Beachy Head, the double cliffs of Bexhill; no light shone from the A13 author’s kitchen. The building in which this man lived, trellised in scaffolding, roosted by predatory gulls, was a tribute to misplaced sentiment. Ugly as it was, a sort of marine cousin to Jack London’s ‘Monster Doss House’ in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, nobody had the bottle to pull it down. The exiled writer might, yet, prove a lifeline. Kaporal was to meet him outside the optician on London Road, ostensibly to give him the tour (actually to pitch the Mocatta book, to get someone else’s name on the cover).

Only the dead can help the dead. The writer was a back number. And the A13 book, Estuarial Lives , was ancient history. Transient fame, no royalty statements. London lost. You wouldn’t find a copy of the hardback in a year of combing through the charity shops that clustered around the station, preying on incomers. (It went out of print, modest expectations surpassed, shortly after J.G. Ballard gave it a plug as a Christmas selection.)