Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

And she was. Leaving a long, closely argued, loving, vituperative letter behind her. I read the first dozen pages and put it aside. I didn’t deserve this. Hannah had too large a soul for me. I regretted Ruth (bitterly, bitterly), airbrushed Hannah from my CV. And wished her well in her trashed flat, her excrement-smeared, needle-carpeted corridor in Goldfinger’s tower block overlooking the flood pool of the A13.

By the time we crossed Bethnal Green Road and started down Brick Lane, I knew Track was a walker. The look, dress-in-the-dark potluck with stout boots and rucksack, was reassuring. She didn’t talk too loudly or make a fuss about curious details she’d noticed. She was alongside, on the move, keeping her own counsel. If she didn’t know what I was on about, she had the grace to let me run with it, uninterrupted.

I wanted to find out about that name, Track, where it came from, so I asked about her work instead.

‘I’m making a real change right now.’

What Seed told me about Track, his enthusiasm, set me off in entirely the wrong direction: Jimmy liked painters who ran variations on his own style and scale. Make it big . Loud. Expensive. I wasn’t used to disinterested patronage. Usually, when a Sixties veteran, survivor on the circuit, deigned to notice the work of a young painter, to call me over to visit the studio, there was a disguised agenda, a payoff. ‘I’ll get this old fart to write you up in Modern Painters and you’ll let me into your knickers.’

Track, by her own choice, nothing to do with Jimmy’s recent landscapes, operated on boards or canvases that could rarely be manoeuvred out of the locations where they were painted: fire stations, cooling towers, fish-packing sheds, municipal swimming pools. She slept where she worked. East London, Hackney to Poplar, Shoreditch to Stepney, had been colonised, peanut factories, fur warehouses, printworks, by self-described artists (ie., non-citizens). Transients. They incubated prospects for ‘socially responsible’ architects (stable conversions, brewery renovations, synagogue makeovers). Wolfish developers with collarless shirts and an interest in rewiring history.

Jimmy conformed, his best canvases looked like blow-ups from an estate agent’s digitally enhanced display panel. He used the cameras they used; he projected industrial ruins, cinemas, pool halls, onto a screen. And he painted by numbers. In New York, where the sites he favoured meant nothing, they loved his work: for the colour (absence of). So English! The space-filling potential. Possessing a Jimmy Seed was the best way to visit London, Europe. A price tag that guaranteed respectability.

Track recorded: manhole covers, curls of paint peeling from warm pink brick, Victorian tradesmen’s faded boasts. Graffiti. FUTURE EVENTS. ANGEL LETTING. FAT BOY/HUSBAND. RUHEL SUCK ON YOUR MOTHER. STOP DIRTY WAR IN KURDISTAN. FUCK MY HEAD IS MELTING. NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NOT CRICKET, SCREAM.

‘What really sucks in this neighbourhood,’ she said, ‘is the spray-can guys, they’re all pros.’

She was right. Brick Lane was a permanent exhibition of look-at-me graphics, stencils, retro-Situationism. Track did not, she announced, buy into the current Birkbeckian vogue for psychogeography. Goldsmiths, the RCA. That mob, over the river in Lewisham. They were awash with it. Stewart Home and his chums didn’t realise what a monster they were liberating when they started to rip off Guy Debord and the Lettrists. French philosophers have never played over here; not on their own terms, not in French. But they get their revenge, in the Brits they choose to honour. In Paris they adore the psychotic nightmares of novelist Derek Raymond (Edgar Wallace noir), a London of rain, festering meat beneath Catford floorboards, rats up the rectum, serial killers with Shelley on the brain; we suffer wankers spouting Baudrillard, Derrida, flannel about flâneurs.

Tiny, luminous panels. Miniatures too complex to read as discrete items. Words. Symbols. Tracings. That was Track’s current method: bring the work down in scale, a level of abstraction that can be accommodated in a moleskin notebook. Each page a block. Each block a world.

‘London won’t fit in my pocket? I’ll try someplace else.’

‘In my day,’ I said, playing the crusty (barbers were already offering pensioner’s discount), ‘self-respecting artists worked in the brewery as labourers, they didn’t sit around drinking espresso and fantasising about a show at White Cube. The only white cubes they understood were impregnated with acid.’

‘Right.’ She smiled. ‘I love the old standards too.’

From her rucksack, Track produced a fat book; a novel, written in the last typewriter decade, that described a walk down Brick Lane. The journey we were now making, a parallel tracking shot. A once-familiar dérive into Princelet Street, past the synagogue where David Rodinsky lived with his mother and sister in a small cluttered room. And then, alone, with fifty cases of books. Wind-up gramophone. Millet calendar. Bus tickets. London A-Z . Bundles of sodden newspaper.

They were queuing, school kids in beanies (David Beckham) and oversize battledress, outside the brewery, for a freakshow. Body parts. Plasticised, waxwork flesh: in all its contemporaneous, stop-frame banality. A Dr Strangelove franchise. The twenty-first-century equivalent of the Elephant Man, blanket around shoulders, huddled over a heated brick. Or, tidied away in his London Hospital apartment, visited by the great and good: the Exhibit.

In Track’s battered old novel, pages loose as a junkie’s teeth, Brick Lane was adrift in time, unanchored; much as it had been at the time of the Krays (the Ripper, Mayhew and the Quaker philanthropists). Two characters — Track detached the relevant sheet — set off to visit the Princelet Street synagogue, relishing the exoticism of the area, its connections to Polish ghettoes, shtetlach in the Ukraine.

The turn into Princelet Street, from Brick Lane’s fetishist gulch of competing credit-card caves, is stunning. One of those welcome moments of cardiac arrest, when you know that you have been absorbed into the scene you are looking at: for a single heartbeat, time freezes.

We are sucked, by a vortex of expectation, into the synagogue, and up the unlit stairs: we are returning, approaching something that has always been there. The movement is inevitable.

As is the prose. I could have written it in my sleep. I remember doing a very similar piece for the Guardian , commissioned by that wise man, Bill Webb: on Rodinsky. As usual, I took it far too seriously, months of research, nights sleeping on the floor of the weaver’s garret, cultivation of feline characters from the Spitalfields Heritage Trust. All for nothing. Webb retired to Oxford. The new people at the Guardian didn’t know what I was talking about. The guy who produced Track’s novel must have stolen my notes and given them a language spin. Words like ‘Vortex’ betrayed a background in Wyndham Lewis, a Cambridge connection. A post(humous)-modernist, cocky, slumming it for a season: straight out of Liverpool Street Station, research file bulging with John Rodker, Mary Butts, Isaac Rosenberg, Aleister Crowley. Ten minutes in Elder Street, curry pit-stop in Brick Lane, drink in the Seven Stars (Jimmy Seed sketching strippers), and they think they’ve cracked it.

Track pointed, with distaste, to a stencilled artwork on the mustard-yellow brick of the old brewery, a Thatcher figure embracing a bomb: the artist had signed his cartoon!

Shamed, we turned west into Princelet Street, self-consciously waiting for the hit the novelist described, the Wellsian time jump. And it was still there. Like a quotation. Brick Lane graffiti had itself been graffiti’d: base ground for ruder signwriters. A demonic dandy (heroin Goth, cockscomb) customised with a pair of purple wings. Awarded a chalk spliff. Tagged. Then made to spout political slogans. The level of visual sophistication was absurd. BNP / ROCK AGAINST RACISM polarities: faded as the boasts of defunct hairdressers, radio-valve salesmen, furriers and tailors. Posters peeled from posters. Cheap glue wrinkled torn paper like elasticated stockings on the ghosts of bin-searching old ladies.