Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Women like Ruth happen once in a generation.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re on.’

She gave me her answer in the pre-Colombian room at the Museum of Mankind. Grave goods: monkeys with spouts coming out of their heads, panther pots, shallow red-brown dishes, bloodstained idols whose concentrated malignancy shone through the glass. Through time. Aztec, Toltec, Maya. She said, yes. Yes . Against, I felt, the spirit of this place, the still-potent negation. The stopping of the sun’s pump. We kissed, opened our mouths. She came back, for the first time, to Hackney.

While she continued to take the bus to the architect’s office, everything was fine. I had the house to myself. I hacked away at film reviews for Time Out , research projects for published writers, uncredited script rewrites. Afternoon strolls to Mare Street Library or along the canal. We shared a glass or two of wine in the evening and I nodded over the horrors and humiliations of her day, before improvising a meal from leftovers. In summer, we sat out on the stoop, waiting for the stars. Friends came around for meals. Otherwise: we went to bed early and slept close.

It started to go wrong, I’m ashamed to say, when a shiny yellow Jiffy bag arrived; Ruth’s maiden name on the printed label of a respected independent publisher. She was at work. I opened the package, ‘in error’, and found a proof copy of her first novel. She’d written the book on the bus, travelling backwards and forwards to work. I was mortified at the betrayal, her secret life, and spent the rest of the day rehearsing my spontaneous enthusiasm at the wonderful news. I even bought a bottle of Spanish fizz.

Then we were both at home, writing. We couldn’t discuss our projects over the reheated spaghetti. Ruth was modest, superstitious of outlining a plot before it was properly cooked. I was blocked (Jack Nicholson in The Shining — without the Yukon shirt and wolf grin). I sat at my desk reading other writers, making collages of quotations.

Susan Sontag: ‘To quote from a movie is not the same as quoting from a book.’

The house shrunk around us. I assembled monster files of cuttings and photographs, everything that could be known about the worst of London, the A13. Company histories, geologists’ reports, traffic-flow statistics, gangland memoirs. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds over Plaistow. I walked the Northern Sewage Outflow. I haunted burial grounds. I cycled along scummy canals and lost rivers. If I found a good pub, a promising ruin, I came back with Ruth. I shared the best of my research, the bits you’d highlight in an off-beat guide book. And I suppressed the evil stuff. Hoarded it for use at some future date.

My spoiling tactics worked, no second novel appeared. I smothered Ruth in sympathy, let her waste the grit that might have made a pearl. She couldn’t lose face by returning to the office. She took on a series of short-term jobs: bus driver (outpatients and special-needs citizens), cook in a children’s hospital (she never tried it at home), tending flower beds in Victoria Park, compiling useless statistics for the fudging of government white papers. But this was worse than before. Ruth was out there, archiving the city, getting her hands dirty, acquiring at first hand information I had to dig from books and newspaper archives, depressed local libraries.

I started to hang out with a cell of leftover Laingians, remnants of the Kingsley Hall settlement, marooned in Bow — with no collateral beyond tall tales about the final excesses of David Cooper, face-down in a foil tray: game over. They fought like cats and dogs. Letters of resignation were waved around like final demands from Hackney Council. The psychotherapists and free-range social workers certainly knew how to hate. Tenderly, they cultivated discriminations of slight, never-forgotten gestures, insultingly positioned cups of tea. Their days were spent composing rebuttals for injuries that had not yet been attempted. They were always looking for worse properties, on the edge of chaos, in which to set up independent principalities (where they could strut like cardinals). They auditioned crazies. Nobody was mad enough. Shit-painters trumped by swallowers of cutlery. Spoon-chewers devalued by men who set fire to their hair and ran naked after buses.

I became a sort of unofficial freak-wrangler, shunting visionaries, poets and all manner of the urban possessed, towards these very unsafe havens. Hannah rewarded me, for the gift of a ketamine-addicted multiple-personality railwayman (who could — and did — recite the whole of Sax Rohmer’s 1919 shocker, Dope: A Story of Chinatown and the Drug Traffic ), with a bone-shuddering, marrow-sucking blow job.

Women in antique markets took Ruth for Jewish, she had a thing for jewellery, scarves, hats, pink or yellow stockings. Her colouring was slightly sallow, Mediterranean, and she had lovely almond eyes, a generous mouth. The faintest of moustaches. But she was turnip-belt England: peasant to tenant farmer, to gent, to over-educated middle-class unemployable, in three generations. Hannah, on the other hand, was the genuine article, a London mongrel: Jewish, German, Polish, Irish, Geordie. Every piece of her arguing with its neighbour, heart and soul, vendettas, battles for and against the dispossessed, slapping kicking gouging attacks — instantly healed in hot embraces. She danced in notorious breeze-block clubs, with Yardies and Rastas, until her feet bled.

There was no row. Ruth didn’t know about Hannah. Hannah didn’t concern herself with Ruth. Things muddled along as usual. And then, one evening, Ruth didn’t come home. There were no calls. I declined to check out the new hotels around Waltham Abbey (roundabouts off the M25), where she told me she was attending a workshop for health-food reps. A few weeks later, after I’d tidied away Ruth’s stuff, put it in storage, Hannah moved in. And madness became the stuff of my existence. Bigamy was the least of it.

I absolutely refused my new partner’s psychoanalytic overtures. I wouldn’t, couldn’t , on pain of death, reveal my dreams. The raw material of future books. ‘You operate,’ Hannah told me, ‘an extremely effective schizoid defence mechanism against exhibiting signs of your evident clinical depression.’ We could barely sleep in the same room: Hannah dreamt my unwritten narratives. She saw the Hackney house as a boat, washed over by giant waves — three weeks before my first trip to the coast. My deposit on the seafront flat. Hannah said that I lived too compulsively in the visible (boxes of photographs, paintings). She made me listen to music, gloom, moaning, Schnittke (as performed by the Kronos Quartet).

‘Spirit,’ she announced, ‘has no eyes. After death, in the cosmic stream, you’re blind.’ She touched invisible shapes, described biographies for my savagely repressed alternate lives. I felt like a child-killer, aborting better selves. I suffered from ontological insecurity. I used the false avatar of city-as-body as a way of avoiding a deep-rooted conviction of impotence.

Hannah didn’t read novels. Poetry and Marxism. She was fantastic in bed, generous and greedy — with a European dignity and relish for dirt that I had never previously encountered. But she would talk. She insisted upon equal use of my work room. For her therapy sessions. I could have 8.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Afternoons were hers. The walls, the floorboards, the curtains, the fabric of my chair: infected by hours and hours of deranged monologue. Lies. Confessions. Fetishes. Regressions. Rebirths. Language that drove me to the borders of alcoholism. Instead of taking off for my afternoon walk, I hung around the house, trying to eavesdrop on Hannah’s intimate séances.

Second-wife syndrome. This time I disappeared. Without a word. I hid out on the south coast. I knew that silence was the worst thing I could do to Hannah. Now there would be no dreams. She would have nothing to interpret, nothing to complain about. If I left it long enough, phased it right, before I came back to Hackney, she’d be gone.