Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I was never going back. Easy as that. I wasn’t interested in houses, investments, potential. The night walk with Effie the photographer was all the confirmation I required. I snatched at the sheet the estate agent didn’t want to show me, a building that looked like a boat, a Thirties cruise liner. Such a monster would never be allowed again. They’d knocked down a hefty chunk of Regency development, so the man said, an archway and a hotel patronised by royalty. Balconies, windows, walkways. Looking straight out on the sea. One flat, old man taken into hospital, was on the market. But it wasn’t for me, not worth going down there. Wouldn’t waste my time. A mess of art magazines, tubes of paint, pigeon droppings, brown envelopes. Very nice properties in the Old Town. Catherine Cookson lived here for years.

The glass was smeared, clean it as often as you like, the same pattern of suicidal insects. As if there was something wrong with my eyes: no middle distance. I’d lost that register. Flies and clouds. Heavy sky-fleece mimicked the breaking-up of ice floes, seen from under deep blue water. On the horizon, twelve miles out, a procession of toy boats on their superhighway voyages.

There were other rooms. From the kitchen, I could gaze at the Old Town, cliffs, marine architecture, bourgeois and full-skirted in the French style (discreet behind flapping polythene); the sun, on good days, climbed out of the sea behind a skeletal pier. A bright rule across the crests of ever-shifting wavelets. I stood at that sink for hours — until the sun moved on towards Pevensey and Beachy Head. I watched, with autistic fascination, lines of stationary traffic, red lights and dirty gold. I noticed windows, shadows of strangers, blue television screens; the occasional solitary stepped out on a balcony, yawning, to test the evening air. There were always couples, all ages, moving along the seafront. Drinking schools kept to themselves, in caves and shelters beneath the promenade, out of sight, unrowdy, working hard at the daylong business of taking the edge off things.

The blight of vision: tide-race, scoured sand. Each morning the shingle combed like a gravel drive. A rattle of pebbles in the night. Weary mortals drawn to the shoreline. Resistance drained, they hooked themselves over the guard-rail, white-knuckled against the pull of the wind. Modest in bus shelters. Boarding houses. At high windows.

My reflection, in towelling bathrobe (think Joseph Cotten, age thirty-six, playing a sick old man in Citizen Kane ), is convalescent. Solid to the shoulder, a thick white ghost looking for its head. A reflection that stays lodged in the glass. I can’t move away until the job is done, the dreams of Hackney extinguished. Warm breath smears the gap where my face should appear. I creep, soundlessly, across rough matting, relishing the Weetabix texture. Down here, it’s all sea news, crinkles.

What was her name? The woman Jimmy’s students were always banging on about, their model: Marina? A bit of cultural freight there, be careful. A woman liked by other women, her attitude, her way of dressing. Fur hat with charity shop coat, fingerless gloves, workman’s boots. The feeling that she’d got away with something, taken risks they appreciated without daring to imitate.

To the west, a black stone table set in a flowerbed, opposite the hotel. Table or altar? I cricked my neck to find it, get it into focus. I would have to do something about my eyes, keep the appointment I’d made with the optician. And then on, no choice, to the meeting with Kaporal. Jos had been on the coast long enough to pass as a native: no papers, no previous, no attachments. A sleepwalker with no short-term memory, misinformation on everything. Kaporal was a human computer, redundant but functioning perfectly — if you treated him with respect. Cash in advance. Wedge folded inside a used paperback, a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett that he would never read. My first choice, a Patrick Hamilton, I decided to keep. The strolling pace of the narrative appealed, crimes were cruel but casual, fitted to a period and a location that solicited them. Stupidity was punished. The crimes Kaporal logged in my adopted seaside home were random and merciless: a vicar chopped into pieces and scattered over the county, a builder’s yard dug up to search for missing gold bars from the Heathrow bullion robbery, a shipment of Samurai armour hijacked on the coast road, lorry dumped in a retail park outside Bexhill.

Kaporal told his tales without animation, heavy features sagging, thick fingers grooming a bald spot. I felt like a monster for disturbing his hibernation. Seated alongside him in a bar or café — he wasn’t a drinker, but he perked up whenever he had a fork in his hand — I thought about a remark the critic David Thomson made about a ‘maverick’ American film director: ‘Henry Jaglom is not a good enough actor to play Henry Jaglom.’

It had been a long time (and several unearned advances) since Estuarial Lives , my meditations on borderland psychoses, land piracy. I had to come up with something fresh (more of the same). Sixty miles out, on the leash, still attached to the hot core of London, but far enough away to appreciate the red glow in the sky, I lost my soul. What I needed now was an easy strike — six weeks max — doctoring Kaporal’s research. New territory, salt in the air, small mysteries to unravel.

Coffee cup in hand, I limped down the corridor to my writing room; I cramped. Seizure of the bowels. Postpone the evacuation to catch that rush of energy and insight. Scribble notes — standing up, rubbing belly — in ruled notebook. Light a cigar, step out onto the balcony. Leave the smoking stub in an aluminium ashtray, scamper to the bathroom.

A necklace of stones, picked up from the beach, my morning swim, hangs from the wall. A yellow-beaked gull lands on the balcony rail. The screech of another gull, swooping on the jagged spine of rocks, now revealed by a retreating tide, dissolves into the urgent bark of a chained dog, a city beast. Sixty miles away, where the real story begins.

One dog barked but nobody heard it. The sound was part of the immediate acoustic landscape: aircraft circling, waiting for clearance, drills, sirens. A hair-trigger seethe of vehicles on Hackney Road (the only place in London where pedestrian crossings operate on a twice-daily basis). Restless humans. Groups forming, breaking, touching knuckles, outside the pub (the pool hall), grunting obscenities into unfamiliar mobiles.

The second dog, an Alsatian with dry snout and the eyes of Neville Chamberlain, was being teased, through the bars of the gate, by a young girl whose boredom was encroaching on hysteria. She poked, prodded, smooched endearments, made kissy-kissy sounds. The dog stayed aloof. But its smaller associate, given the run of the yard, went crazy: yelped, bounced off the wall of tyres, rushed at its tormentor, skidded, rolled, wallowed in mud, shook itself, backed away to the shed … leapt, snarling, at a frayed end-of-rope, hanging from a tarpaulin sheet: so that a puddle of trapped rainwater cascaded over its filthy fur. The girl, who might have been as old as eight or nine, turned her back on the spectacle, to bum a cigarette from her distracted mother. This woman, not dressed for outdoors, the weather, rattled a warder-sized bunch of keys … smoke-breathing, staring at her little pink phone: a powder compact mirror with the wrong face. The gates to the yard were open but the woman wouldn’t go inside, move out of sight of her vehicle. Chilled nipples, mature, prominent, the colour of rich chocolate, diverted a carload of excitable Brick Laners.

Parked across the ramp, neither in nor out, denying access to other potential customers, primed for rapid retreat, was a motor stacked with ostentatiously hormonal Asian males. Senior rude boys. Fat, white-wall tyres: the nearside front, detumescent. Windows like gun-ports. Loud anti-music: a challenge. The youths twitched, suffered, the cranked-up adolescent’s inability to sit still: three out, one in. All in, all out … And down the road towards the pub, back. Shoulder-shuffling, nudging. A quick dart to the shed at the end of the yard. No sign of the mechanic. Peep through dirty window, return to base, whack up the sound system. Scratch scrota. In unison.