Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Setting the mug in a ring of stain, her spot, she reached under the table for a handbag, tipped out the contents, searching for loose cigarettes. Flashing green eyes. Like a cat? She marched across the kitchen, opening drawers, slamming cupboards, shunting tins. Matches. Fine, smooth hands (nibbled nails). I admired the style with which she dragged the matchhead, away from her, across its thin brown strip (smooth, printed with honeycomb design, not like the bristling, crushed-glass of old, that picture of a ship). Twice, three times.

Rush to the sink, rinse a wineglass, swallow water; back to the table where I am waiting, mouth filled with crunchy stuff, gaps in my bite wedged with detritus. Milk on the turn.

‘Why? Why was that — do you think?’

‘What?’

‘The vegetable . Which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a head. Yes, head. Which then, as I watch, grows a body. Arms very thin and legs like … dental floss. This male creature is around three feet tall but has a very large presence . You know what I’m talking about?’

‘I haven’t the first idea.’

‘Last night, a dream.’

‘Did it say anything?’

‘It moved towards the mirror, turning back to give me a very peculiar look.’

‘It stared — at you?’

‘It left. We sat down to dinner and my father joined us.’

‘Your father? He’s — ’

‘Dead, yes. So during the meal, one of your curries, I question him — to determine whether he knows he’s still alive. Of course, he sees right through my strategy. And is supremely disdainful.’

‘Was he alive?’

‘That depends on your definition of mortality. If he’s dead, we are dead too. He has a certain period in which to mediate the situation in which we find ourselves, our failing relationship. He can return three times, no more.’

Hannah had done it again, ruined my breakfast. I pushed the cereal bowl away, called after her as she strode from the room, leaving, as she invariably did, drawers open, tap dripping, oven on.

‘What’s it mean?’

‘It means that our praxis must be resolved. My father went into the garden, sat under the cherry tree, and your wife Ruth walked in. She led me to the bedroom, which was no longer a bedroom. It was decorated with ceiling drapes made from an ancient silk parasol that spiralled outward as it unfurled on the floor.’

‘Did she speak?’ I asked.

‘Not a word. Nothing. She kissed me on the lips.’

Walking through streets that were memories of streets, correct in some details, quite wrong in others, down through Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, to our meeting place (Track, Danny Folgate), the great stone that lay on the grass behind the Amazon Street flats, I slept. Dreamt. In micro-snatches. Dreams that night refused. Sleep I had missed.

By a dirty window, a closed shop that once sold surplus uniforms, daggers, calor-gas containers and rusty water-bottles, I stood alongside the man who had my face, who looked as I looked — in the days when I used mirrors to shave. Our eyes met, dream self and teasing double. Blood oozed from beneath a strip of plaster that curled from his chin. The stranger lost his nerve, first, dropped his gaze, moved off ahead of me, in the general direction of the Thames and Commercial Road. He never glanced back.

The stone hadn’t moved in the night. Danny Folgate was in watchful attendance, a light dew darkening the shoulders of his pale retail-park windbreaker. Presented with this scene, as ‘shot by amateur cameraman’, my first thought would have been: ‘Where are the blue-and-white ribbons?’ Then: ‘What did they find under that rock? How many bones?’

Folgate was a classic stalker: serial-killer beard (copyright Peter Sutcliffe), buttress nose supporting overhanging brow, worry lines like the aftershock of ECT, bottle-black hairstrands gelled over Klingon ears. Soft-strength, quivering hands and a rolling gait. A proper man, generous to a fault, courteous to strangers, prepared — without hope of reward — to talk me through the mysteries of dowsing.

While we waited for Track.

She would certainly show — if she managed to convince herself that yesterday’s Aldgate walk was an actuality, the same stone could be found twice.

‘Try this,’ Folgate said, passing me a strip of rough blue tape, the kind they use to secure oversize boxes of white goods. ‘A W-rod.’

Folgate’s kit, fished from the black bag, was salvage; pendulums contrived from bath plugs, bent coat-hangers, acrylic divisions painted onto a metal disk that had been carried home from Ford’s PTA (Painting Trimming Assembly) plant. In riverside Dagenham.

‘I never use hazel, not since that first time.’ Danny hooked back his upper lip to show me the missing lateral incisors. ‘Kick like a Lee Enfield. You’re much safer with brass or plastic.’

The W-rod, in Folgate’s candle-white hands, twisted and writhed, locating a series of quite distinct energy fields around the grey boulder (folded schist with mineral bands).

‘If we had the time,’ he said, ‘we might turn up —’

‘Grave goods? Human remains?’

‘Bicycle wheels. Foil dishes from the takeaway.’

Dowsing, in Danny’s scheme of things, was not unlike plumbing. You called him in to find a lost ring, a betting-slip. He didn’t charge. He had a notable collection of beer-bottle caps indoors. He kept hair in bottles. There was a model of Diana Dors made from scavenged watch-faces. Objects migrated but never disappeared. Black water, running beneath the city, affected those who lived above it, bringing cancers, blindness, loss of male sexual potency.

I spread my Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas on the stone table and invited Danny to take a reading from the A13. His pendulum, with its moonstone splinter, responded vigorously, the axis of oscillation favouring the east.

‘Oh dearie dearie me,’ he said. Disturbed by areas where pylon forests, mobile phone masts and shooting ranges had the bath plug spinning. ‘Sewage is prolific.’

My stomach rumbled.

‘Don’t take this wrong,’ he patted my shoulder, ‘you might be asking too much too soon.’ The pendulum reeled over Rainham Marshes like a drunk from a Clerkenwell club hitting Sunday morning sunshine.

Folgate was tall for the Estuary, but hunched from years in the machine shop, the noise. Track with her excited hair towered over him. Beady rain, which had been falling for days, the kind Londoners don’t notice or acknowledge, did wild things to her rampant thatch: it knotted, curled. Red as a Purfleet dawn over the soap factory. It kept the drizzle off the collar of her donkey jacket. She was smiling, as always. Moist-lipped, a Styrofoam beaker of coffee in her hand. The diluted aroma nudged us on towards the road, that phantom Americana of multiplexes (you can’t access), burger joints (where Lee Bowyer hurled chairs) and Wal-Mart imitations with permanent fire sales.

‘Danny, Hannah. Track, Alan,’ I blurted. Introducing the already introduced. And getting it completely wrong, confusing Track with my second wife and Danny with a correspondent from Romford who had been very helpful in downloading Essex material from his computer: the Bascule Bridge over the River Roding at Barking Creek, Hadleigh Castle, conspiracy stuff about Templars at Danbury. Facts kept leaking into my fictions, the borders were insecure. Ask me how I recognised Track, what made her unique, and I couldn’t tell you. The story required her presence and she obliged.

Is it a common experience? You come across an unexplained boulder in an urban backwater and you think: ‘This needs a dowser,’ You get home, there’s a letter waiting on the mat — lined paper, blue Biro.