Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Vicar of a kind, yes. Vicar of Satan. East Sussex’s authenticated Antichrist. When he came to “Netherwood”, he was on his last legs. A Patrick Hamilton boarding house. His guests sucked Brown Windsor soup, pushed cold tongue around the plate, while he excused himself to take a shot. By the finish he was up to eleven grains of heroin a day, enough to kill a clubload of Hoxton revellers.’

I remembered the book, gilt dustwrapper and a pair of demonic, Tony Blair eyes. Lights out. The Great Beast skulking coastward to die. Letting the final programme play out as bleak comedy, tapioca and congealed custard. The notice the landlord placed in every tall, cold room: ‘Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts. Breakfast will be served to the survivors of the Night. The Borough Cemetery is five minutes’ walk away (ten minutes if carrying body). Guests are requested not to cut down bodies from trees.’

Slow walks to the chemist’s shop (where they still treat cash customers like al-Quaeda suspects); long, lonely evenings not reading Walter Scott. And wishing that he’d learnt to play solitary chess. A deathwatch from a deep armchair. In a brown room where magick doesn’t work.

‘Aleister Crowley,’ Kaporal said. ‘He came here to shift dimensions. “The Wickedest Man in the World”. The trick of invisibility rubbed off on horsehair sofas and tasselled tablecloths. He’s gone, the house remains. A holding pen for incontinent geriatrics.’

Let me call myself, for the present, Andrew Norton. Call me Norton (never Andy). But call me, summon me into existence. Distinguish me from the sprawl of the city, the winter grey. Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

‘Not at home. Nothing to report. No message.’ Said the answer-phone. In another voice (female). Nobody called.

I sat in the house, alone, in the tragic heap of things, not writing. Taking exercise by climbing the stairs to the attic, picking out an old paperback, stealing a sentence. Scribbling quotations in a ruled notebook, composition by default: elective affinities. Surrogates.

I reread and it was never the same book, Simenon, Highsmith. A chapter, a couple of pages, a sentence. Highsmith quoting Kierkegaard in her journal (1949). ‘The individual has manifold shadows all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.’

A photograph, cut out of a magazine, used as a bookmark: Highsmith, aged twenty-one, naked. The eyes don’t change; the fat lower lip, the lipstick. Raised arms, shaved armpits, no surrender. Small breasts. Dusty pucker of body pores like sand on a wet sunbather. Shocking. The writer exposes herself: as a secret.

I thought about doubles, duplicates, fetches. I dipped and filched, wrote letters to myself in a tiny, indecipherable hand. Remember the poet George Barker in Chelsea? Footsteps behind him, speeding up? Don’t look now . He was my age, crow’s-feet of mortality biting into the once-arrogant profile (lip chewed off by fractious lover). Aches in the knee, twisted spine. The two sides of the body working against each other. Left leg longer than right. No stalking shadow, Georgie boy, a black dog. Seasonal melancholy. That dog is fate, London. The thing that has no contrary.

A loud ring at the door. Gasman, bailiff? I don’t move. I can’t move, my back is in spasm.

I made notes for Estuarial Lives , the A13 book: Aldgate, Limehouse, Dagenham, Rainham. Blank chapters. Headings on empty pages. No characters, no story, no narrative push. Pedestrian in every sense. I read my Stevenson, my Poe. How did they do it? What possible connection was there between those masters of prose and Essex, the road out?

Ford’s water tower.

I love that tower, its great white bowl, up in the air; blue lettering. Romanticism of the badlands seen from the ramp, as the road climbs and the sky expands, moist air over Purfleet. Railway lines. The empty paddock where export vehicles once stood, gleaming and optimistic. The altruism of high capital: good for England, good for the world, sheen on metal, paint reflecting high clouds. This nation knew how to make things. Now the plug’s been pulled and the car park finished with a topdressing from the burning stacks of the London Waste Company at Edmonton. Bottom ash and fly ash mixed in a potent cocktail, one hundred times more powerful than the Vietnam defoliant, Agent Orange.

Dagenham. Ford’s. Ford Madox Ford. His book, The Soul of London , published in 1905 (three years after Jack London’s descent into the abyss of Whitechapel). ‘One may sail easily round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But only the most enthusiastic geographer … ever memorised a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks around it.’

Walking restores memory. So why was I hanging about? Bad back or no bad back, I needed to be in the weather, on the move. The ring at the door was repeated, finger held on button. I remembered. I was waiting for that girl, the photographer. Jimmy’s protégée, Livia. She made some excuse for invading my privacy, a manuscript she’d been asked to deliver. I had an excuse too. I wanted to see her again. My life lacked complication.

‘You got a towel?’

It was the wrong voice. And the wrong girl.

‘Pretty wet out there, right now. I walked from Jimmy’s place. We had a big night watching biker videos.’

She was taller than she should have been, broad-shouldered, dripping; a woollen cap and less hair than the first time. She took off her coat, hung it over my bedroom door and made her way, uninvited, undirected, to the kitchen. She seemed to know where the kettle would be. She dumped her sad rucksack on the floor, opened cupboards, the fridge, looking for something.

‘Not working?’

‘Preparation is work,’ I said. ‘Reading, research.’

‘Your icebox. Yurrgh.’

The ‘lost’ American from Rainham Marshes. What was the name?

‘Track,’ she said. ‘Ollie couldn’t make it.’

‘Ollie?’

‘Livia. A residency in Hastings, you know? Photographs. The town at night. In colour. Says, hi. Meet with you another time. She’s just awesome, Livia, but so petite. I’m pure Viking. Jimmy’s kids start calling us “Ollie and Stan”. The wrong way. Ollie’s down on the coast right now, finding locations where a dead guy made his paintings.’

Tall coffee, cold hands around a warm glass jug. Edible aroma. An interlude. Time and place frozen, slipping into other times at the same table. One of my wives wanted to do a book on tables. As a focus for the kind of life that no longer exists: post-Elizabeth David, country in town, cut flowers, blue-and-white bowls from the Algarve, black olives and Welsh dressers. Two cats. Slow cooking, shopping in street markets, conversations that ran into the night. Ever seen anyone peel chestnuts? This table still had the hieroglyphs carved into it by a Sixties painter who couldn’t quite make up his mind to paint. Or to give up painting and move on. I can never think of Elizabeth David without flashing to the image of her — in a biography (review of a biography) — naked, lashed to the mast, literally lashed, by a caddish lover, a loved wrong ’un. Cruising the Med, siren of the bedsits, necklace of garlic bulbs, illustrated by John Minton. ‘Another era altogether, John,’ as the villains say.

Prisms of remembered sunlight. Kitchen passions, summer parties. Old film, 8 mm, flickering on a dirty sheet. Prized babies crawling through uncut grass. Wine in wedding-present goblets. Cider in petrol-station beakers. Picnics under the cherry tree. Table as tent. Kids playing with squashed cardboard and sacks of oats. Table of meals and quarrels, friendships launched, renewed, cancelled. The central leaf, which was never needed, now that communal feasts were a thing of the past, was pristine, a lovely, honeyed yellow. The rest of that surface, with the join down the middle, greasy, scripted with nicks and stains, a patina of unearnt nostalgia.