Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Quietly, without fuss, a revamped Stone Age culture was creeping across East London. We couldn’t erect circles or astronomically aligned spirals, so we tipped rubble into small parks, left boulders in places where nobody would notice them. When the dowser swept out, in wider and wider circles, dogging this rock, I had a comic vision of municipal stone floating through the sky, Magritte-fashion, like loaves of bread.

‘It’s getting a bit late, last train. Sorry. We could meet again if you’re minded. Or the lady. Tomorrow morning, tenish. I’ll show you how to dowse. Most people can. My pleasure.’

He gave us his name, as security, a parting gift: Danny Folgate. Laid-off, voluntary-retirement paintshop man. Ford’s at Dagenham. Dowsing and local history, facts, provided Danny with a new life, a reason to get out of bed. He kept his books indoors. He had hundreds. And could lend us a few.

We might, this first day, have achieved a mile and a half, in parallel with the A13. It was going to be a long haul — if I couldn’t learn what to leave out, which estuarial lives to ignore.

Danny limped off. Track disappeared. I picked my way between fences boxed in asbestos and garages that barked. To Amazon Street. A source place, left out of Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas , but found, by those who need it, at the back of Hessel Street (caves of lurid vegetables, loud meat, its reek).

This , wrote my great-grandfather, is the source of the Huallaga, or, as some geographers say, the real source of the Amazon. The Huallaga is at least one of the chief tributaries of the king of rivers, and our immediate object was now to follow this streamlet until it became a mighty flood, upon whose bosom steamers of considerable magnitude may safely float.

Putting our first day on the road behind me, I went to bed — but couldn’t sleep. I thought about Ruth. Then Hannah (whose shape I could feel in the mattress). Whose smell was still in the sheets. Ruth, Hannah. Hannah, Ruth. Hannah was sex. Fear, respect. In that order. Ruth was sex too, on both sides of a deeper affection, shared experience; the unshakeable belief that we were meant, had known each other always and, after this time of testing, would again. Death and beyond. The hollow romanticism of an empty house and an empty fridge, a Brick Lane bagel eaten on the hoof. A washed-up writer without a muse.

I tried reading, American crime capers, Florida, New Mexico, New Orleans; it didn’t take. The women. Men came in all shapes and sizes, steroidal cartoons, pondlife, scammers, scalpers, bigots and psychos; the women, young or old, were uniformly frisky, good-hearted, wisecracking, independent — an unholy blend of Howard Hawks and E. Annie Proulx. That and the ecology, the dolphins, bears, horses. The cats. Show me another alcoholic, living alone with his moggy, writing poetry, listening to the hip tracks, in an on-off relationship with a semi-reformed black prostitute, and I’ll choose to stay awake, staring at the ceiling.

Thinking about Ruth.

Who was always there, like a nodule in the armpit. I thought about what Ruth was thinking. And about what she thought I thought (thinking about her). And what I thought she thought I thought when she walked away. I didn’t understand, I’d never understand, where it went wrong. It wasn’t Hannah, was it? The novel? It was something I was never going to touch, the look in her eyes, the place women go, when they’re driving a car, in the kitchen, out for a walk: sudden unexplained absence.

‘What did I wear?’ she would say. ‘Last Thursday?’

Meaning: did you like it? Can you remember?

Ruth’s was the only face I carried in my head, the only woman I would recognise in a crowd (I did it most days, street, bus, bank). But it was Hannah’s voice that shared my bedroom. Hannah slept in costumes that mirrored the cultural diversity of her background: naked with football socks (cold feet), a black slithery thing (mother’s gift), thin strings that slipped off the shoulder, combined with a buttonless pyjama jacket I’d long since abandoned. She wore spectacles in bed, reading for hours, but took them off when patients called. (Ruth rested an open book on her belly, staring into space: ‘Did we do that walk from Narrow Street on Friday or Saturday?’)

Twitching and tossing, unable to find a position in which to settle, I started — shortly before dawn — to work my way through Hannah’s bedside library. The books she didn’t need in her tower block: Clancy Sigal’s Zone of the Interior , R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self and Sanity, Madness and the Family, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind , Foucault, Jung and Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin ( Overpowering Conformism ). A slim volume of poetry by someone called Anna Mendelson.

I read the poetry. It squeezed the pap out of me (until my eyes bled): Hannah’s intensity brought to a flamelike pitch, scored and scoured. High lyrics of hurt. Everything I couldn’t answer. The riptide of this verse, Slavic and unforgiving, sealed me in a sweating carapace. I was language-stalled and guilty. Impatient for death.

Look my coat is threaded thin. I’m not robust,

I don’t know where life ends and dreams begin.

Two lines was all I could take. I tried Laing. Couldn’t get it into focus, the print was too small. I remembered a story Hannah told, when she had a bunch of therapists and crazies around for dinner, about Laing’s ‘expert evidence’ at the trial of former Postmaster-General John Stonehouse. Stonehouse was premature New Labour. He associated with bent businessmen, teased the media, groomed himself for the cameras, at a time — before Cecil Parkinson — when that wasn’t done. With the Fraud Squad closing in, Stonehouse faked suicide by drowning (like a bad situation comedy), before skipping to Australia.

Laing’s performance — substance-enhanced? — mystified the jurors and contributed to a guilty verdict. Stonehouse, he said, was unusual in that ‘his two personalities were not really aware of each other, but were joined by an umbilical cord’.

I know that cord. It is wrapped around my neck: a lifelong obsession with twins, astral doubles, doppelgängers.

Poe’s William Wilson, a moral conscience, a stalker, manifesting at moments of crisis, was a very different case. Wilson’s etheric twin was horribly familiar, while Stonehouse lived in ignorance of his other self. Laing was sympathetic to the pain this caused. He suffered from the same syndrome. A residue of Scottishness. The Glasgow hardman (and suffering child) travelled with the charismatic psychiatrist to London. To fame and doom. To Hampstead.

Sleep wouldn’t come. I worked on compensatory fictions: long boozy lunches and longer afternoons. Slats of sunlight across a blue bed. Ruth’s face shifted. Ollie (the lost Livia of Hastings) auditioned in her place, arriving windblown from the beach. Hitching her skirt to climb into a small red car. Riding over the QEII Bridge, oil refineries, power stations, tractors for export, reed beds. Smoke and clouds. ‘Don’t do it,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t trust a man with a ponytail and an Old Town tattoo. A snake with an inoculation scab for an eye.’

Dreaming was strictly competitive in the days when Hannah was in residence. Mug of black coffee in a pistol grip, she awaited my appearance — stiff-backed, shuffling, fiddling with pyjama cord — at the breakfast table. (Could I could reach the milk bottle before a spasm stopped me in my tracks?)

‘Why, why, why,’ Hannah started right in, tapping the rim of her mug with a purple nail, ‘would you present me with a withered artichoke? Then inform me, as a matter of great moment, that you found it on a walk through … Dagenham?’