Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘You’re a fucking journo,’ said Jimmy, ‘and you never pull. That’s all wrong.’

I was uneasy about broaching the Gents, a plywood door with one of those symbols you have trouble working out, sober. But it had to be done. Relief was acute. I counted the seconds as a steaming arc dissolved the blue chemical cork — while keeping an eye on the dirty mirror, in case Jimmy barged in with another monologue.

Ruth always hated those scenes on TV, bits of business enacted at the trough, two tough cops nudging the plot, shaking the drips. Male-bonding sessions: media sharks snorting coke, lowlife spilling blood on the tiles. Television drama, without mobiles, laptops and lavatories, would fall apart.

There were two of me in the mirror. Nothing unusual in that, you might say: dodgy peepers, drink taken. ‘Photographs are mirrors with memory,’ someone wrote. Untrustworthy, promiscuous things. You never know when they’ll start to leak. But this was no Marx Brothers routine. The impersonator was wearing my father’s funeral coat, the one I’d lost on the coast. And the cleft of his Desperate Dan chin was pumping blood from the nick I’d given myself, weeks ago, before I’d driven to Rainham Marshes with Jimmy.

I grew perfectly sober in an instant.

That’s Poe. You didn’t think me capable of such a sentence? Even drunk.

There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement.

‘You think it’s clever?’

My mirror image shouted.

‘Dodging through Whitechapel? The Hoop & Grapes? Staring all night at a woman drinking with me in a hotel bar?’

His eyes were bloodshot. He’d lost it. But his grip was powerful.

‘What are you? Private dick? Journalist?’

He banged my face against the glass. The situation, if I accepted it, was absurd. The kind of novel that would never make it into the Travelodge display cabinet. The man was crazy, road crazy; nothing in the way of solid research to hold his world together. He’d come to believe that this portion of London, Docklands, A13, was his private fiefdom, personal property. Every splinter in the ground a nail in his hand. Every fast-food joint a trauma.

He wanted to shift, the insight came to me, as he hammered my face against the mirror for the second time, from being a character, someone I’d observed at the corner of the frame, to the teller of the tale. The author. Ugly word. Worse thought. There are places, the Docklands Travelodge in the small hours of the night is one of them, where fiction and documentary cohabit. Indiscriminately. Fetches appear and disappear in anonymous corridors. Dead actors work the bar. TV sets loop conspiracies. The future is optional — but it’s out there, beyond the double-glazing, full-beam on a restless road.

I drove an elbow into his Adam’s apple, loose cartilage in a flabby sock. John Fashanu would have been proud of the shot, blindside and very painful. When in doubt, go pulp, lift a passage from a forgotten book that has lodged, deep, in memory’s sediment.

He doubled over and had to sit down. He laughed until the punch line sucker-punched him — then he froze.

That’s James Ellroy. I downloaded The Big Nowhere from the book display.

Ellroy trumped Poe.

Ellroy plays the same game, he opens with a tag from Conrad: ‘It was written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.’ Heart of Darkness , what else? The only title available in California. Brando refused to sample the novella before he landed, whale-sized (wrong movie), in the Philippines for Coppola’s vanity project.

I polished my bruises. My impersonator had been sucked back into the glass — where, doubtless, a nest of spooks were recording the scene. Behind every mirror in every toilet in every Travelodge, ibis, off-highway motel, are ghosts. Succubi. Third Mind essences detached by acts of love. Road reverie. Tremors. Sweats. Karmic multiples, doubles of doubles, lost without trace, divorced from human congress. Eternally alone with the Muzak of the spheres.

I was wearing the other man’s dark coat, won back, when I returned to Hannah. We kissed and went upstairs to bed.

Nightsweats. Noises.

The woman, Katherine Cloud Riise, known as Track, lay in her cold bath (no water) and thought autopsy. Thought: photographs. Dead ones, females, in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields, their names: Mary Jourdan, Mary Ann Pontardant, Mary Pearson, Mary Loader, Mary Tufnell, Mary Tagg, Mary Leese, Mary Ann Ball. Bones spread across the floor of the church. Persons in white, masked. The flash of: reality.

Nashville corpses, victims, in the coroner’s office. A powder of fine snow on the fins of huge cars. Two Hispanics discussing Patricia Cornwell in the documentary a friend worked on, viewed in Bow. The radio in the next room: ‘You can run but you can’t hide.’

Wisconsin Death Trip : the book, not the film. Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Her Norwegian, German grandparents, great-grandparents. Everybody comes from somewhere. From photographs. The clothes and the eyes, how they argue; respectability and terror. Territories where death holds sway and warm-bloods trespass at their peril.

‘How do you pronounce that name, Riise?’ Jimmy had asked, their first tutorial. ‘Like Ben Johnson in One-Eyed Jacks , in the cantina: “Greaser”? Nobody drawls like Ben.’

So she’d become Track. For her own reasons.

Scouring powders left their imprint on the smooth enamel of the Travelodge tub. No lid, no stars. Smell soap, think sugar. Think Silvertown, the Tate & Lyle factory on the river. One stroll down that marine high street and you’ll never take sugar in your tea; solid air, a curtain of sticky droplets clogging the pores, filling the grooves of your fingernails, blackening them.

No sleep for Track, except this sleep, her life. What was she doing out on the road with mad old men? Her business, her choice. It amused her. This landscape, their failing memories. Sounds came through thin walls. She saw herself from above. As a photograph: Woman in Bath . She lay very still.

Jimmy’s daughter calling, calling for him. The son for the mother. Jimmy snoring. The wife singing. Bedside clock ticking: a red heart. And on the other side, wild gasps, groans through the air duct, Norton howling in a way that shouldn’t be heard, no connection with the man in daylight, his awkward amiability, his stories.

In the slit beneath the door, the light came on. The little girl: a pee, a drink of water. A chat. ‘I like you.’ Track wasn’t asleep. She didn’t want to dream about Ollie, Livia, her friend, getting into a car with Reo Sleeman. About the way Sleeman wouldn’t talk or touch, how he drove with that unblinking, thousand-yard stare, full-beam headlights, away from the coast. Back to London.

One photograph, when Track fixed it, carried her from reverie to unconsciousness. Chest heaving, pupils chasing spectres, hands clenching and unclenching. Mouth agape, wine breath. The cold bath becomes the boat in that studio portrait, a family. From Wisconsin Death Trip . From River Falls, 1899. Inauthentic memories, her memories. Hatchet-cheeks, the man. Elegant eyebrows. Black, pin-hole eyes that won’t stop . Hunger, winter diet. Woman in tall hat. Child — soft gaze — the only one looking directly at the camera. A painted craft in a painted landscape. Single oar: spike in the father’s left hand. Water lilies. Wyatt Earp moustache drooping with gravity, black straw boater. Priestlike male with stiff white collar. Wavelets frozen mid-ripple. This phantom Europe — stairs, parks, ruined temples — conjured in a photographer’s studio in the Midwest. Fierce father. The child, a girl, young enough to see what has been left behind. The woman, dressed in her finest outfit, necklace, high neck; an expression of tragic subtlety — ironic, wise, forgiving. Left hand, hard-used, exposed on the rim of the fictitious craft. Naked fingers. Ring lost, left to the fish.