Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Snip told me about a visit the pair of them made to David Litvinoff, when he was in hospital, after a savage and unexplained beating. Snip brought a bunch of grapes and ate them. Joey brought a second impression of Canetti’s Auto da Fé , which Litvinoff left in a drawer at his bedside, when he skipped. Never to be seen again, until he walked into a club in Stoke Newington with a floor-length vicuna coat and a Wykehamist film director in tow.

When we needed them, there were no caffs. Even the Market Café in Fournier Street, supported by Gilbert and George, much-photographed regulars, had folded. No market. Now everything was public, visible, self-conscious. You could sprawl on a distressed couch, sucking Pernod disguised as absinthe. The tweeting of cellphones replaced the Huguenot canaries, the birds in cages hung outside rookeries. A generation of narcissists transmitted miniature photographs of themselves, doing nothing, back and forwards across cyberspace.

Remembering Rachel Lichtenstein’s account of the hermit David Rodinsky playing the spoons, in a workmen’s café in Hanbury Street, we tried that. It was still there, hanging on, deserted in mid-afternoon. One little old man, his back to us, nursing an empty cup.

I couldn’t explain to Track how much the area meant to me, how inspired I was by the current changes: it was like regressing to those fondly recalled Thatcher days. Spectacular corruption, land piracy, North Sea oil revenues given away to underwrite arms deals. Wonderful stuff. For a writer. A jobbing dystopian. Blair and his gang were doing great business, bringing it back: horizon-to-horizon mendacity.

When you get into the zone, as sportsmen describe it, your book writes itself. Every phone call keys up the next chapter. Imaginary creatures, borrowed from Stevenson or Machen, beckon you from doorways. Succubi wink and flirt. London and the Estuary become extensions of your immune system. But you are not immune, you are wide open to all the viruses, syndromes, germ cultures: you twitch and fret, rant, sweat, ravish.

I had to prove my wild assertions. I took out a letter I’d received that morning from the poet Lee Harwood. Another escapee, another seasider. Lee belonged in the noble age when poetry and poverty were happy to acknowledge their blood ties. The same sound, the fatal contract: live it . Lee was in Brick Lane before any of them.

Strangely your writing of Cable Street, Wellclose Square, etc., took me off into memory land. I suddenly remembered lying in bed with my then wife Jenny in Brick Lane on New Year’s Eve 1961/62. (We had a top floor room and kitchen on the east side of the street a block up from the old synagogue/Huguenot church.) There came a loud low droning sound — and to me (forgotten childhood memory) it sounded exactly like the bombers flying over in the war. I thought our end had come. Then the noise suddenly stopped — and eventually I realised it was all the ships sounding their sirens in the docks to mark the New Year. That, of course, was when London was still a port and St Katharine’s Way and Wapping High Street were lined with spice warehouses, and not fancy flats and offices. That seems an age ago, though the number of years isn’t that many.

By the time I’d finished reading this letter — I’m an easy touch, it happens at the end of every chapter in Bleak House — my eyes were moist: conjured images of Hasids sleeping in stone coffins in the crypt of Christ Church. Photographs of the ‘Monster Doss House’ in Jack London’s People of the Abyss . Memories of Derek Raymond and Michael Moorcock (last seen limping out of the Princelet Street synagogue).

Tea swallowed, local colour entered in notebook, Track asked the cruel question. ‘What’s this stuff got to do with the A13?’

‘Every road,’ I improvised, ‘but especially one as unlucky as the A13, carries a freight of memory. It starts somewhere, goes somewhere, keeps on until it has purged its contempt. The A13 is Whitechapel in an open charabanc’

‘Aldgate Pump?’ said the man who was tapping his spoon against the rim of his empty mug. ‘Stand us a cuppa, guv, and I’ll show yer where that bleedin’ road starts. I’ll tell you a story you’ll never forget.’

I hadn’t recognised him. He was small ten years ago, now he’d shrivelled into his hairy overcoat like a ferret into woodchips. Snip had trimmed his banter and cultivated a nosegay of nostril hair. It took him a minute or two to get me into focus, to crank up to speed.

‘Blimey, it’s Joey’s pal. The book geezer. I fort you wus dead. Joey’s not too clever. Ain’t seen him meself — not since his mum’s funeral.’

The three of us, pace tailored to Snip’s canted hobble, headed sou’-sou’-west, navigating an uncertain path towards Lord Foster’s half-peeled gherkin, the Swiss Re tower. And Aldgate Pump.

White stone. A traffic island. Unexpressed water.

The Aldgate well was bricked up, cholera risk, but that didn’t stop freelance antiquarians searching for it. In Mitre Square, a hobbling, hunched man in excused-games windbreaker was chasing phantoms. That is: he hung on to L-shaped handles, golden rods, as he skidded, small feet in sections of black tyre, trying to keep up with the pull of the stallions of unreason. On the diagonal, corner to corner, he rushed and stumbled — until his rods crossed (the eyes of Ben Turpin). He mapped the dull square in a lined notebook, registering geological shifts (every stratum with its own acrylic colour). An urban dowser, cousin to the metal-detecting fraternity of the south coast, this man pursued his hobby with the vigour of a committed careerist.

‘In orf the pavement Jack went, dahn the stairs, pulls out a razor — whoosh, whoosh — stripes him, the blackshirt on the door. That was the start of it, Jack’s name. Put five of them bastards in ’orspital.’

Snip Silverstein saw history on cable, his own private channel. Instant replay. All time, one time: Jack Spot, Colchester barracks, fitting Matt Monro with a lilac three-piece, spin to Portsmouth (mob-handed in a borrowed two-tone Zephyr).

The afternoon was drawing in, vapours from heavy clay creeping through the mantle of paving stones. Snip, who had brought us through Whitechapel to Aldgate Pump, was running out of gas. He had returned to a place that was no longer there. Bones ached. His back was out of alignment. Shoes pinched. The angle of his hat was jaunty, but his nose dripped, faulty washer, long silver droplets absorbed in the greenish black of anachronistically severe lapels.

‘So long, son. Miss. I should be gettin’ indoors. Shalom.’

He shook my hand, winked at Track and left us to it: the point where Leadenhall Street meets Fenchurch Street, the prow of a boat cutting through waves. The fabled launch of the A13: Aldgate Pump. A heritage token shunted and shifted for the convenience of developers with greedy eyes on a steady march to the east.

A dog’s head reared from the stone. A titular spirit.

‘More like Jack London’s wolf,’ Track said.

Bronze: buffed like coffin handles. Erect ears. A flattened brow in which you could watch the traffic divide into two streams. The wolf, fangs bared, was road hungry. He tried to hurdle stone — and found himself trapped within it, a token of the wilderness that lay forever beyond his reach. He strained, struggled, snarled. In silence.

‘Let’s get out of here.’

Lord Foster’s smooth glass tower, the Swiss Re building, gave me vertigo. It pulsed provocatively, a sex toy someone had forgotten to shut off. A fishnet condom skinned over an Oldenberg vibrator. Foster’s gherkin dominated London’s approaches, reconfiguring the energy spirals of the labyrinth; it glowed like a sick bone in a soup of dollar bills. No wonder the dowser fled. No wonder Snip Silverstein scuttled home for EastEnders . Swiss Re, a reinsurance operation, were quitting their current premises, alongside Aldgate Pump, to occupy this retro-futurist blob, a misplaced salute to fibre-optic technology.