Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Drin and Achmed, the Albanians, were in the usual place. Kaporal had an hour to kill. They greeted him warmly, shaking him by the hand, individually, then together, slapping him on the back, pummelling his shoulder. One of the Scotch boys was off on a fugue: Yus a grafter, grafter. Mmmah reet, Jimmy?’

This Jimmy, the universal Jimmy, smiled. A lovely man with one white eye. He spoke no English, less even than the Scot. The whole bunch of them, misfits and tolerated outlaws, women with kids in plastic-covered prams, gathered at beachside, above the shingle, under the promenade, in a sort of open-sided temple or viewing platform. They started drinking early, chucked their cans over the parapet, keeping their spirits up until darkness fell. Then they dissolved into the shadows. In half-decent weather, this side of hurricane, they made fires, cooked something, gull or scavenged meat, and slept on the beach.

The film director Stephen Frears can’t have taken an awayday to the coast when he said — of a lowlife romance he was promoting — that asylum-seekers and economic immigrants were ‘invisible’, the unseen of the city. If this lot had been any more visible you’d have to stick a preservation order on them; they made indigenous scroungers and petty crims feel good about themselves. Keep your eyes open and there is always someone to look down on, scapegoats for hire, giving a dull resort a touch of colour. Beach Boys, locals called them. Their timing was all wrong, they were asylum-seekers at a period when there were no asylums left. The Victorian and Edwardian mental colonies at the fringes of London had been made over into Barratt estates and gated oases for the upwardly mobile. But the tide was turning, forward-planners had decided to grant the supplicants their wish, access to the biggest asylum of them all. A great V-shaped barrack on the Dartford Salt Marshes was being converted into a holding centre, a place of detention for the men from Sangatte.

Achmed, short in the gum and long in the tooth (garlic chewer), gave Kaporal, who no longer smoked, a cigarette.

‘My friend, English friend, you come always at good time. We decide. To go. Of course to go back . What we are knowing. Tradition, you understand? Be again bandit.’

Drin nodded, stroked his moustache. He didn’t speak. He left that to his brother, his patron.

‘You also, Mr Joseph,’ Achmed continued. ‘With us. Take thing for money. Take thing, keep thing, sell thing.’

Kidnapping? Why not? Kaporal had tried everything else, as instructed, except Morris dancing and incest.

‘You mean kidnap someone, hold them for ransom?’

‘Kidnap — who is this?’ said Achmed. ‘We honourable men, banditti .’

‘Who? Who will you kidnap?’

By now Achmed was on his feet, affronted, patting his knife pocket. Drin put his arm around his brother’s shoulder. He too was disappointed in Kaporal, the Englishman’s obtuseness.

‘ Dog . Take dog, find dog. For money. You love dog, more dog than woman, sons. Take dog.’

So this was the great scheme. The drinkers were unimpressed, they listened to such boasts by the hour, fantasies of revenge, sudden wealth. But the communality of the underdeck was powerful. Post-terror families clung to their small span of allotted territory. Steaming, piss-soaked men with boiled faces. Women dropping ash into prams. Salt-scoured, wobbly on their feet, the tribe wouldn’t hear of any exploitation of canine dependants. If there was a barbecue going on the beach, a sausage to burn, stray curs took first bite.

Drin and Achmed hadn’t wasted their months on the coast. They made a careful study of local customs, how the English emerged from their houses and pinched flats to walk their animals — in all weathers, bent against the wind, clinging to the leash, shovelling warm faeces into a plastic bag (with a trowel they kept for the purpose). The Albanians were fascinated by this obsessive behaviour. They tracked one family for miles, west, till the promenade ran out, along with any attempt at civic revival; this was a savage landscape, as the bandits recognised. Broken metal pillars, cancelled cafés, broad concrete steps that led to nothing. Threadbare grass, a railway cutting, gulls congregated around the sewage outflow.

It was the dog that held their interest, a shaggy, spindle-legged, toast-rack-ribbed beast, part greyhound, part lurcher, taller than the kids. The dog galloped, ahead of its owners, zigzagging over the shingle path, scratching for dirt, straining unsuccessfully at stool, battering against the chainlink fence, returning to check on his tardy masters, and away again. Painful to watch. The costive animal had nothing to excrete, one heave and its intestines would be coiled on the path.

Dogs and Englishmen. The obvious career until something better came along, a move to the city. Kaporal, needing to shake off the Albanians, before his meet with the A13 writer, improvised a better plan. Kidnap a celebrity.

The White Queen Theatre, across the road from the pier, under which the drinking school passed the day, played host to a glittering roster of TV names. All dead. Or worse. Every Albanian from Dover to Margate had descended on the town when they thought Sir Norman Wisdom was going to do a turn. Kaporal had to explain, the White Queen featured tribute bands, fame Xeroxes, animate waxworks. Think Floyd in Concert. The Beatroots: ‘All You Need Is Lurve’ The Maori Elvis. The Yowling Stones. With a leavening of sharkskin spooks from Limboland, the once notorious, the Undead of Hello! (misremembered for the tabloid scandals that brought them down: Freddie Starr, Michael Barrymore). The White Queen showcased glove-puppets with replacement hands up their backsides. Impressionists, no sense of self, offering hit-and-miss caricatures of politicians nobody recognised. Some acts were compulsory, like National Service (but not as much fun). They appeared everywhere at the same time — Brighton, Blackpool, Cromer — sweat-soaked in frilly shirts. Yellow eyes frantic for cue cards. Panstick ghosts with a road-kill rictus. Caught in the headlights of involuntary amnesia: Jim Davidson, Chas and Dave, Mike Reid (‘Adults Only, Plus Support’). Slippage from soap operas, pensioners of the rubber chicken circuit. And one real star, Bermondsey’s own: Max Bygraves.

The name was on the bill. It couldn’t be the real one, Kaporal was sure of that, not here. Max had sold out the Palladium in his day, written books about it, done the chat shows, played the golf. So why not punt him to the Albanians? He must have retired to Australia years ago.

Achmed liked the sound of it, a superstar, heavy zeros on the ransom fax. The nation would demand Max’s return within days, hours. A cultural treasure. Drin could keep observation on the joint. They would stake out the pier, climb the rock from which the theatre jutted, check the stage door, the entrances and the exits. Pal up with roadies.

That should keep them quiet, Kaporal thought, as he cut through Warrior Square, faded glories and new scaffolding, and headed for London Road.

Print was getting smaller, areas of the map were blank: every page I tried to read reminded me of the A13. So much of London’s liminal territory, if you drove towards the rising sun, wasn’t there: pending, in abeyance, a future development site. That’s why the clapped-out arterial road was tolerated: it was somewhere to cook the future. A rogue laboratory in which to undertake high-risk experiments, mix-and-match surgery, retail facelifts.

The sea still worked. It had no fixed shape, it shone. I could feel the play of light on my face, even when I couldn’t bring distance, boats and cliffs, into focus. I knew they were there. Things got better when I gave up my spectacles (lenses greasy and scratched) and trusted to memory.