Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Tables and kitchens, so the architects say, are finished. Workers don’t have time to eat. Builders don’t have space for anything more cumbersome than a microwave. Kitchens are a design feature: to be admired, not used, somewhere to park a display of cook books by celebrity chefs.

‘Marina had to be sure you got this. I’m under oath. Put the bag, personally, right into your hands.’

Track was nothing like my caricature, less brash, less American. More Scandinavian. Freckles and a chipped tooth. Eyes that watched your eyes.

‘Would you read them, the stories? I mean really. Don’t just say it.’

She worked, hard, on her hair — with the best towel I could find, flecks of blue lost as she spun the rag into an improvised turban. Very little makeup, so far as I could see, translucent skin. The business of the hair dealt with, Track slumped in her chair, suddenly modest about her size. She talked softly, but she talked. Which suited me very well. I half listened, went back to my reverie: the pale table, coffee jug, two broad shallow cups with small red flowers painted around their border. The window. The sodden, shapeless garden in which no human had set foot in two years.

I slid the manuscript out of its yellow-and-blue Ikea shopping bag. It was thick, text hammered into cheap paper by some ancient portable. A book on the table, unopened . I got that far (first sentence) and let it go. The woman in the story was on a train, leaving London, heading off to the Estuary. Women and trains, I thought, quit while you’re ahead.

‘Marina, she didn’t … not in words. Just: “Stan, you know what to do.” And she walked up the steps into the train station, Fenchurch, and … I guess that’s it. No call, no message, nothing. That’s why I came in the car with Jimmy. Why I went off. Marina had all of your books in her apartment. Find her for me, please.’

Why not? The woman had the rucksack, the boots. Why not invite Track to come along, as a character? A foil for the A13 walk. The pain had shifted from my lower back, a fault in the lumbar region, old damage, to my left shoulder. A good omen for the coming adventure.

‘Would you like to see where the A13 is born?’

‘Sure,’ she said, reaching across the table, a gesture left in air. ‘What are you waiting for? Let’s go.’

Actually, now that I thought about it, this was not the original table. There had been at least three others. The first, at the period of brown rice and afternoon smoke, was chipped tin. Uneven legs, it rocked every time we sat down. The kind of cold surface on which dogs are castrated and tomcats have their wounds cleaned. The second, pine, was solid enough to take the weight of two bodies, love in the kitchen. This one, the last, came from Tottenham Court Road: it expanded, the immaculate central leaf was for the dinner parties that never happened, the children who stayed out there, refusing to be born.

At this point, if you are trying to picture the house, its layout, the way you walk in from the street past a bedroom door that won’t close (swollen timber), the storeroom (books, film cans, laundry) in which I worked, down a couple of crooked steps, kitchen (where I sat with Track), I should tell you about my wife. Wives. Historic. As I remember them. About the quirk of serial monogamy that I never managed, despite several never-to-be-repeated short-lived attempts, to suppress. I was faithful to the concept. And to the fact of the thing. There were no children, none that I was aware of, certified and living under my roof. But there was always a wife. The better part. A local mystery. Someone around, doing her thing, a steady beam of super-critical intelligence, unspoken support, to confirm as I woke in the marital bed that I was still the same person who fell asleep, book on face, the previous evening. Eight hours, precisely. Waking, to check the clock, at intervals that expanded incrementally through the night: forty minutes, one hour, one hour ten. Tossing, turning. Best sleep before dawn. Hearing her, whoever, enduring my horrors. Living my nightmares. That was the root of the trouble, out of sympathy (unfeigned), my wives walked in my sleep. Dreamt my dreams. They anticipated fictions and future territories — before, just before, I began to exploit them.

I would get on pretty well with my first wife, the writer, I was sure of it — as soon as I found the third. That seems to be the rule, checking around, lecturers with access to the gene pool, painters like Jimmy Seed (taxable income): by the time they get out of the registry office with a bride who is two years younger than their eldest daughter, they’re best chums with the original. The church-married one (fellow student). The second wife is demonised, the bitch. Thief. Nympho. Big mistake. ‘She’s barking,’ they say. Using the new, young wife’s money (old wrecks trade up, socially, financially), they will have her predecessor committed. Then let out, chastened, scorched around the temples, sedated, to look after the kids. Second wives have a very rough time of it. But they can work out OK if the sequence stops there, at two: early mistake, impulsive passion, smoothed over. Bruises slowly healed. Long and blissful union between suitably tempered and experienced lovers.

I was in that awkward stage of having lost one, mislaid another, and not knowing if I was going to have to go through it all a third time. Tempted, but wary, I wasn’t ready (yet) to dislike Hannah, my second, the psychotherapist. She might not have decamped, entirely; the stopover in the settlement-house in Bow might be no more than an overdue sabbatical. Problems to confront that were more dramatic than anything I could contrive. Space. A room of her own. And a view over the entrance ramp to the Blackwall Tunnel, the eastward sweep of the A13, the hallucinogenic glitz of Docklands. How could I compete with that? Erno Goldfinger’s grim tower block, once representing a beacon of blight glimpsed from the A102, now had a preservation order slapped on it; artists (video, light bulb) cohabited with media drones (cycling distance to Canary Wharf). One floor had been given over, by a council run with a sharp eye on public relations, to some of the more interesting dispersees from Victorian and Edwardian asylum colonies around the fringes of the M25 (Shenley to Belmont, to Horton and Long Grove in Epsom).

Hannah, on the phone, taking in that glorious view, above the brown pollution belt, high in the troposphere, quoted the poet Douglas Oliver. Holes in the bedazzled .

‘Holes in the bedazzled,’ she said. ‘Who needs Hackney? There’s not one solitary person walking through this landscape. The river, the road. And light . I’m falling into the bedazzled. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.’

My first time, with Ruth, was very much a case of falling into the bedazzled. We met at the Marylebone Magistrates’ Court. Upstairs, in the gallery. A dispiriting morning of pathetic hustlers, electrical-appliance thieves, sad prostitutes of both sexes. She had a friend up on a drugs charge (cannabis possession in Notting Hill, it was that long ago) and I was hanging about as part of a megalomaniacal project: I decided that I had to penetrate, or bear witness to, all the strands of urban society (mortuaries, abattoirs, law courts, Parliament, rag-trade sweatshops, white-lines-on-Hackney Marshes).

I’d recently dropped out of the Courtauld Institute. I was enjoying it too much; contemplating Cézanne slides, dozing through discriminations of Cubism, soothed by the weird precision of Anthony Blunt delivering, on gin and tranquillisers, his annual Poussin sermon. I was too dumb to realise that all I needed to form a picture of the city, its machinations, corrupt establishments, smoothly oiled liaisons between disparate social groups, was here, under the dome. From Blunt’s eyrie to the marble hall with its checkerboard floor, grand staircase and fine art, this palazzo of privilege, training ground for Sotheby’s shysters and culture brokers, had the lot.