Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Blue plaques, boasting of poverty and benevolence, Jewish boxers, forgotten politicians, infested restored Georgian properties. Satellite dishes for the heritage classes (commissioned from Wedgwood). A kind of life — afterlife — had returned, behind the period shutters, the authentic doorcases.

‘Only in Spitalfields,’ said a local architect, stopping off between projects, ‘are householders, whatever their wealth, just two inches, literally, from ordinary folk. No porch, no barrier. We may have fine wines, furniture, libraries, but there’s absolutely no separation from … streetlife. We can smell the market, hear the voices of children.’

Princelet Street was deserted. The synagogue, which now enjoyed an ambiguous status as a potential display case of immigration, appeared to be closed. I imagined it, in a fever of impotent fury, as an archaeological museum in Baghdad, after the Second Gulf War, looted, cleaned up, handed over to an occupying power with no interest in deep-culture traces. It awaited funds (millions) for restoration. And, meanwhile, to pass the time, it hosted occasional, by invitation, media events. Rodinsky’s room had been scoured, the rogue scholar tidied away. The stairs were unsafe, visits were discouraged. A young artist, carrying out a memory project, eager to gain access, was required to put up a £2,000 bond.

My wife Hannah (whose status was even more ambiguous than that of the museum) knew Rachel Lichtenstein, the woman who uncovered the mystery, Rodinsky’s life, death, burial place. Hannah and Rachel grew up together in Southend. They clubbed in Hackney, worked on a kibbutz, attended conferences in Kraków. I visited the room with them. Saw poetry readings, heroically cold, orange flames wavering from the candelabrum in the draughty synagogue. Shots of pure Polish spirit laid out on a table in the entrance hall. Shrouded objects stacked in dark corners.

Skin like alabaster.

I tried, when Track lifted her arm, brushing warm brickwork, to scan the revealed flesh. Was mainline addiction the origin of that curious name? She saw me looking and pulled down her sleeve.

The peeling pink door, at the far end of Princelet Street, hadn’t changed. In appearance. Its continued existence, its knowing distress, was perverse: Wilkes Street (named after Nathaniel, brother of John, the radical, champion of the mob, editor of The North Briton ) gave shelter to Tracey Emin and a raft of merchant bankers and art moguls. ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’

The house sold itself by a strange act of impersonation, continuing to be what it never was — outside time. Wall panels, dark timber, candle-holders; the narrow, twisting staircase up which comic-book genius Alan Moore, backlit like a Dürer Christ, climbed to his fate: the discovery of a legendary magical primer, the summoning of those demonic entities, the Vessels of Wrath. A long-forgotten drama.

I’d been involved in a minor way with this film, directed by Jamie Lalage, at the point where he’d dropped out of features, out of Morse-type travelogues for the Tourist Board, into late-night TV. Taking me on, as untrustworthy guide to the labyrinth, was seen by his peers as a suicide note, a cry for help. Jamie was expelled from the Barbican and deposited in a carpet warehouse in Archway: the confirmation of their thesis.

I won’t bore you with full-frontal nostalgia. This is a slasher précis of the yarns I threw at Track. Spitalfields had worked its old magic, I rapped like a speed freak. Lalage’s film, The Cardinal and the Corpse — ‘Too many corpses, not enough cardinals’ ( Time Out ) — was a wake for Whitechapel, a party for the near-dead, a hooley for vampires who’d just heard that the blood bank was foreclosing. The best of the London writers: Derek Raymond (RIP), Alexander Baron (gone but not forgotten), Michael Moorcock (vanished into the Texas badlands). Mythic book-runners: Dryfeld (disappeared) and Nicholas Lane (relocated to another dimension). All present in that secular synagogue, the house with the peeling pink door.

There were two stories: Moore’s magical primer that held the secrets of the city and a search for the journals (confessions) of a man called David Litvinoff, who had been ‘dialogue coach & technical adviser’ on the film Performance . Litvinoff, it seems, grew up in Whitechapel. He knew everybody, Krays, Lucian Freud, Jagger. And Joey Silverstein (we’ll come back to him). Joey the Jumper was definitely in the film, rueful at a Formica table as his long-suffering partner, Patsy — who had the lovely, brittle style of middle-period Christine Keeler — blew the whistle. Joey had the copyright on paranoia; bitten fingernails, hand through greying hair. Withdrawn smile. Another cigarette. Deep drag. Smacked lips.

There were no journals.

Joey had been Litvinoff’s lover, there at the finish, the suicide in the country. He admitted as much. There were reel-to-reel tapes, hours of them, covertly recorded telephone conversations, as Litvinoff worked his way through a cardboard box of vodka bottles. He wound up his victims, cruelly exposed their pomposity, greed, their ambition to get into Jagger or Nigel Weymouth or Christopher Gibbs. Then he yawned in their faces, fell asleep, phone in hand. He wasn’t well. He had money, cashmoney, the wad, and was flash with it. He had nothing. The kind of negative equity that had gangsters hanging him out of a window with a shaved head (useful research for Performance ). Litvinoff was the conduit, more runs (east-west) than the Circle Line. Just as unreliable. He died and must have been buried somewhere, the tapes with him. Nobody knew. Only a few film anoraks, paperback collectors in places like Canterbury and Hastings (great for charity shops), cared.

The house with the pink door twinned itself with Prague and started to appear in Dickens. When Alan Moore’s Victorian Gothic, Jack the Ripper deconstruction, From Hell , was filmed by a pair of black brothers (‘it’s a ghetto story’), a facsimile of the house, of Princelet Street, was constructed in Poland.

At the time of The Cardinal and the Corpse , Joey’s dad, Snip Silverstein, was still working (off the book) in an unrestored upstairs room in the Princelet Street house: smart suits for hoods, for City sharpies who strolled across from Bishopsgate — and parody ‘Fifty Shilling Tailor’ streetwear for Gilbert and George. Snip started as a barber, obviously, given his size (diminutive), his gift of the gab. When Raphael Samuel passed on, he was the last working Jew in Elder Street.

The little barber was the reason for my baldness. His stories, in the chair, were so enthralling, I kept coming back. I demanded a trim every afternoon: to find out what happened next. He’d learnt his trade in the army, during brief periods in camp, Colchester, Catterick. Most of the time he’d gone over the wall, getting away, not from the red caps, but from an irate husband or father. He took up hairdressing, so he said, to make sure he had an adequate supply of rubbers for the weekend.

Spielers were Snip’s undoing. The old Whitechapel double act, industry and indolence: periods of hustle (Hoffmann presser, gentleman’s outfitter in Shaftesbury Avenue, bookie’s runner) undone by lost Sundays gambling with Jack Spot: gangster, razorman, hero of Cable Street. Fabulist. Jack and Snip were like — that . Blood brothers. With one difference. Jack kept his loot, relocated, up west, south coast, abroad. Snip stayed put: dapper, shiny shoes, lemon waistcoat, trilby. He attended shul with small businessmen and television personalities he’d known since they were snotty-nosed kids thieving from the stalls in Middlesex Street.

‘I could kill for a tea,’ Track said.

I wanted a bacon sandwich. Thinking about Snip made me peckish. Snip and Joey, father and son, Pellicci’s in Bethnal Green Road, like refugees from Alexander Baron’s novel, The Lowlife . Joey was a voracious reader. Snip never got beyond the racing pages and the Torah. But Joey deferred, treated his old man with slightly shocked courtesy: he presented him to outsiders as a great wonder, an oracle from a vanished world. Battles with Mosley’s blackshirts, runs out to Brighton races, stitch-ups in Denmark Street. The fortunes Snip lost on a turn of the cards were replicated by the great books Joey held in his hands — before peddling them for a necessary pittance in Camden Passage or Cecil Court. Pre-war Faulkners in pristine wrappers. A beautiful run of early Waughs. The Colin MacInnes trilogy: all inscribed to Joey (a late friend).