Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Mrs Seed and the kids had cleared off, dragging their sacks, to argue over bed space in the single room they were to share. Danny Folgate, nursing his cordial, was unhappy.

‘I’ll kip in the motor. Keep an eye on it.’ He didn’t fancy spending the night in a place so bereft of spirit.

Jimmy yielded a set of keys. I walked out with Danny, to clear my head in the damp night air. If I stayed in the bar, drink for drink with Jimmy, I was going to do something stupid. Make an outrageous suggestion to Track. Ask her to marry me. I hardly knew the woman, would have difficulty recognising her if we came face to face in the aisle at Tesco’s, but she had this vital quality: she was nothing like wives numbers one and two. Different era, different species. Different chat. That’s the most important element in any relationship, sound. Voice. Does it grate? Does it wear away at your reserves? Ruth didn’t say much, but you had to pin your ears back when she was on the phone to a relative or friend. Hannah talked fluently, aggressively, her words a challenge. I was forced to respond, drawn into the argument, made to perform when I wanted to hoard language, keep its potency secure.

Ruth was and is a mystery. But I know absolutely everything about Hannah’s childhood, adolescent difficulties, flirtations, neuroses, sex triggers. Dreams. Nightmares. Fear of the sea crashing around the house. Fear of buttons. Fear of silence.

I cracked it! Prompted by one of the TV monitors, it came to me, the puzzle of that name. Track reversed gives Kat. The big hair, eyes, attitude: one of the Slater sisters from EastEnders . Students probably got themselves up for a party. Ollie as the soppy one and Track as Kat.

Riddle solved. Trouble was … I couldn’t claim my reward, sleep with her, Track, without a marriage certificate. Out of the question. And sleep was so sweet a notion. Danny, yawning, rubbed his eyes, while we waited for a break in the late-night traffic flow.

Jimmy’s Volvo, astonishingly, was still there. Unclamped. Nobody could be bothered. Danny, hunched over the wheel, was a smooth driver — by the standard of the journalists, painters and film-makers who gave me most of my rides. He understood this road and very soon, too soon (landscape a miracle of shapes and signs), had us back in the Travelodge car park. Where he folded his arms and nodded out.

His only remark, before he swung across three lanes of honking maniacs, was gnomic. A quote. ‘Stones want to go on being stones.’ He took a hand off the wheel to squeeze my arm. ‘Remember that, Andy mate.’

I don’t know if he meant it as a tease, something to sleep on. Or as a pensée that didn’t require an answer.

‘Beckton Alp tomorrow,’ I said. Patting the roof of the car. ‘Early start.’

Elis had retired. The screens were playing visual Muzak to go with the sound: waves breaking repeatedly on a golden beach. I’d missed my chance with Track, she was going to sleep in Jimmy’s bath. So he said. Four or five brandy miniatures on the table, the bar shuttered.

I helped myself, before Jimmy arranged the rest on a tray. He was turning in.

‘How would you rate this evening?’ I asked. ‘Average session? No dinner and a dozen stiff ones?’

‘I can’t do it anymore. Cholesterol, grease caffs. I find, if I’m working, I don’t use food. A cheese sandwich or a chocolate digestive now and then. Plenty of water.’

‘Water?’

‘Oh yeah, back then, sure. The hair, the cowboy boots. Running off to strip clubs in Spitalfields with featured writers. I’d cover Bond Street openings, fizz in flute, and watch the clock. I had to make it back to Limehouse, Blade Bone in Three Colt Street, for the eleven-thirty lock-in. Serious drinkers, great crack. We were down there every night.’

‘This was when you still painted humans?’

‘Sure. Critics called me an Expressionist, school of Bellany. Bollocks. I never touched a drop before breakfast. Unlike John. Bottle packed on each hip at the bus stop, going to college, Chelsea. I painted what I saw from my window. Actuality, first to last. If I couldn’t get the women, I’d dress up. That’s why they stand that way, legs like croquet hoops.’

Animated, in the second flush, Jimmy swished brandy, using the liquor as a filter against subdued lighting. We had more in common than I realised: place not people, topography instead of narrative. Human figures treated like caricatures, rude cartoons. I’d junked fiction (and my soul mate, Ruth) around the time Jimmy treated his canvases to a thorough ethnic cleansing: no freaks, crips, dogs. No tarts propping up walls. A self-denying ordinance: no booze.

‘First wife sent me to the quack, round the corner from here,’ Jimmy confessed. ‘You might have known him, London writer, old Trot, name of Widgery. “I’m a bit concerned about my drinking, doc.” I said it with a straight face.’

‘Any use?’

‘Good bloke, but busy. Got me to write down my daily intake — seven or eight pints of an evening, couple of bottles of wine at lunch. Like we all did. A brandy, maybe, to get me on the road.’

‘And?’

‘Practically teetotal, Widgery reckoned. Wasting his time. He had real problems on his patch. Diseases unrecorded since the Middle Ages. Call myself a painter? I wasn’t trying. That’s when I shifted to landscapes. No mad eyes staring back at you.’

Tumbler in each hand, Jimmy lurched from the room, crashing against a slot machine that dispensed books. I followed, bladder burning, the night’s drinking catching up with me. And nothing ahead, the wasted expense of a solitary Travelodge bed: ‘Due to problems beyond our control, we have had to remove all telephones from rooms.’

Jimmy, shameless about these things, saw the book-dispensing machine as a future painting: the literate jukebox, cabinet of curiosities. Thirty-two portraits, cover designs, to be remade: melancholy woodland pools, waifs on rain-drenched jetties, barbed wire, skulls, cars, minimalist abstraction. In silver and gold. England, the culture, reduced to essence: a catalogue of favoured tropes, iconic views.

‘Contemporary fiction,’ I said to Jimmy, ‘is either pod or ped. Left-hand rack, you’ll observe, begins with J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes . Pod-meister. Suburban solipsism: world in a windscreen. Right-hand rack is ped. The walkers. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn . Sit at your PC as you sit in the car: pod person. Lose yourself in the rhythms of the walk: pedestrian. Stately prose, Sebald.’

‘Stephen King?’

‘Pod. By instinct. He tries to walk down a road, a redneck runs him down. Know your limitations. Stick to genre.’

‘P.D. James?’

‘Pod. Outing to flint church. Body in ditch.’

The vision was sharp: Jimmy and I, stooping forward, superimposed over the glossy books in their display cabinet. It went all the way back through literature. Peds: John Cowper Powys, Gerald Kersh, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Dickens, De Quincey, Bunyan, Blake, Rousseau. Pods: DeLillo, Updike, Flaubert, Proust. No precedence. Different strokes. I was far enough gone to appreciate the conceit, too sober to write it down. Another inspiration that would never see the light of day.

Jimmy tried to find the stairs. If there was a lift he’d never manage to summon it. He didn’t fancy sleeping overnight in a stalled tin box.

‘Tell me’ — he jabbed my chest — ‘are you gay?’ His hands clutched my shoulders, then slipped. Boneless, he fell to his knees. I looked down on a bright ring of male-pattern baldness, freckled scalp and rusty wisps of wool.

‘Not now, thanks.’

The night porter, an economic migrant, slid back into her cubbyhole. A redhaired Scotsman gripping another man’s thighs, head in crotch, mumbling incoherently, after midnight, was rather too much.