Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘I’m supposed to find this fucking hotel? Yes, I can see it — on the other side of the dual carriageway, the crash barrier, you stupid bitch. No gap, darling. We’ve been through the Blackwall Tunnel twice . And over the Dartford Bridge. Get out, kids. All out, out. We’ll walk. Just leave it. Leave it . Let them tow the bugger away.’

Clutching black bags, rubbish sacks which dragged along the ground and split, depositing clothes and toys all over the A13, straggled a column of small kids. An attractively spacey mother in beach wear, two coats, pink boots, dark glasses. And Jimmy Seed: distraught. Refugee plutocrats. Unhoused.

As he explained. When we helped him with books and wine and PlayStation and marine watercolours by other artists. The family Seed were temporarily banished from their new home. Property millionaires without a pot to piss in and nowhere to camp. The market, paintings for riverside flats, had peaked, then plunged. Teams of builders (electricians, tea-brewers, fetchers of bacon sandwiches) had trashed their latest acquisition, a Bethnal Green synagogue. The roof was off. Rooms were filled with rubble. There was no water and plenty of sewage. The Seeds had been forced to emigrate to the Travelodge. Where Jimmy could knock out a road triptych to trade against a couple of Victorian terraces in Hull.

If they could scrape together — milk money, kids’ piggy-bank — £42.95 (one night’s sanctuary). The Travelodge at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel, convenient for everywhere, was much favoured by reps and tourists who’d made the wrong booking for the Dome.

I saw the attraction: anonymous Eurostyle. A peacetime barracks in Germany. Small square windows, which open on the tilt, masked in gauzy drapes. No entrance on the A13 side. Nothing to draw attention to itself. The Travelodge concept was: filling-station forecourt in which you are permitted to sleep. Refuel, pass water, watch television. Pick up a complimentary map — on which the next Travelodge will be marked. Britain had been invaded by numbered flags. Like a golf course. Alton (Hants) to York (Central). ‘A Travelodge for every occasion’: slogan, not a threat.

Jimmy’s mob, surrounded by possessions, slumped in the otherwise deserted afternoon bar, with its banks of TV monitors and unsynchronised lounge Muzak. Danny was uncomfortable indoors and fiddled with the zip of his bag. Track smiled, unfazed, eager to occupy whatever chair she found herself in. I tried to locate someone prepared to serve up drinks. Dying sunlight poured through picture windows: panorama of parked cars, strategic bushes, amputated lamp-standards, other buildings with much the same design. The only notable feature in this landscape was an attempt to introduce poetry. A sequence of slate-grey slabs with upbeat messages (reprised in doodles above the bar).

I watched, in the mirror, as an animated couple, impervious to the beauty of the car park sculptures, approached the Travelodge. The woman was familiar. At my age they all are. The lovers ambled into the bar, passing close enough for me to get the scent. Faces might not register, smell retains its potency. Hannah was never overfond of bathing — once a week, for an hour, a good soak, during which she read Laing, or took a hit of poetry — but she liked perfume. And was quite experimental about it, little bottles, picked up in transit to conferences, set out in a line on the mantelpiece. There was one bottle, squat, shaped like a glass eye, which gave off a rather heavy drench that reminded me of the Sixties, Gitanes and lemongrass. Hannah used that one whenever she expected sex. A Pavlovian trigger that never failed. So what was she doing doused with the stuff in a Blackwall Tunnel Travelodge? And who was the mouthy gimp in my father’s coat? The one with his arm around her waist.

Elis, the slender man in the air steward’s uniform, prowled the bar-zone on twinkly feet, staying within a ladder of imaginary lights that led to the emergency exit, his past life. He talked in semaphore (a second language), matching gestures to meticulously articulated words. Cheeks puffed, lips pursed around an emergency whistle, he kept back just enough breath for the inflation of a life-jacket.

‘The lady’s a regular, business class. You understand? She likes …’ — he leant forward, dropping his voice — ‘… the window seat, plenty of legroom. Plenty of leg.’

‘The man?’

‘Never flown before, not with us. Madame is alone, a little farouche. I set a dish of peanuts, roasted. Freshen her drink every forty-five minutes. She lives, they say, up in the clouds, by the Tunnel entrance. Comes over most nights. To unwind. Where else should she go, person like that, around here?’

‘She drinks?’

‘Not to cause a problem. Kummel with lemonade and ice, unusual. I had to order it in.’

‘You know her well?’

‘She likes to talk. Excuse me.’

Hannah was due a refill. Her companion, back to me, was a lush. Heavy, morose. Going at it steadily, soft Irish whiskey with Czech lager chasers. A bad drunk, I’d guess. Hanging on to his Hoxton pretensions (black wool beanie) in the Travelodge, London Docklands.

This A-road attraction, according to my complimentary coaster, was five miles from everywhere. Old Royal Observatory: five miles. Maritime Museum: five miles. Queens House: 5 miles. Royal Naval College: 5 miles. Cutty Sark: five miles. A13 (aka East India Dock Road): fifteen yards.

Waiting for Elis to do his bit with tray, twist bottle, peanut pack, I watched twin monitor screens in the long mirror. An alternate world peopled by Dennis Hopper clones; by the worst Hopper imitator, Hopper himself. A short-arse in a dirty Stetson. A Hollywood coke-freak boozer who could no longer get the nuisance parts in Henry Hathaway westerns.

Hopper on a train. Hopper on a mountain. Hopper crucified. Hopper out of it. No TV network would run these films. One of them, I knew, because I’d been chasing it for months, had been deleted twenty years ago.

The bar stank: money burning into scratched light. No soundtrack. The narcoleptic of choice. Muzak: like piss fountains splashing on pink ice.

‘I’m having a little bitty Hopper season,’ Elis said. ‘Bootleg VHS tapes from a Paris dealer. The American Friend and The Last Movie . What happened to Robby Müller? Great photographer. But slow, they say. Took hours setting up if he didn’t like the cut of your shirt.’

It was much too late for a wallow in anorakia. Film history had migrated to a generic Docklands hotel (a place without memory). Film (self-destructive stars) was the barman’s hobby. The manager didn’t care. He could run whatever he wanted, so long as he killed the sound. Other screens hosed in news footage, soaps, football. Colours unknown to nature, scarlet faces (every interviewee a potential Alex Ferguson), grass like Sinatra’s rug.

For a man who didn’t drink, Jimmy Seed was having a famous session. Tabletop like a bottle bank. Jimmy and Track, notebooks out, talking tactics: who to hit on, which paintings to display, which ones to hide. Favours for favours. Philip Dodd, Tim Marlow, Jonathan Jones. Contacts to squeeze. Old lovers to reactivate. Curators with exploitable weaknesses, soft spots for rough trade.

‘ICA?’

They both laughed.

‘The Whitechapel?’ Jimmy slurred. ‘It’s in the fucking charter, a modicum of exhibition space must be given over to gin-u-wine East London artists. Lifers like … me. Thirty years, man and boy, within sound of gunfire from the Blind Beggar.’

Track snorted. ‘No chance.’

‘White Cube. They don’t give a fuck what you do. It’s who you do, you are. I am … IT! In-your-face truth , adherence to … mat-erial-ity. Matter. Paint on canvas. Got to come back. Am I right, babe?’