Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Track sleeps. Jimmy sleeps. Norton and Hannah sleep; she is curved into him, her arm across his chest. Life continues, revived and resuscitated, until the next time. If they never share a house, it might still work, this argument of affection.

Lamps along the avenue, fuzzy haloes of riverdamp, illuminate a pedestrian passage between roadworks and mud creek.

Danny the Dowser sat on a metal bench, waiting for the first streaks of pink over the Brunswick Power Station, blue shocks of the elevated railway. The zone of transition soothed him. Wind in the reed beds. Birds on the shoreline. Traffic ramping a passage into the A13 obstacle course. Land given over for centuries to dirty industry, gas, chemical, bone vats, distilleries, was now the gateway to the future: Dome, towers, airstrips, underpasses, multiplexes, eco-friendly superstores with little windmills, the largest empty parking space in London.

The filling station, opened in anticipation of a promised fast-track future, was an oasis of artificial daylight in a desert of rubble, storm fences, tyre mounds, night security patrols.

Danny tapped on the window, asked for a chocolate bar, slid his coins into the tray; a complicated transaction — like getting cash from a Mare Street bank. Cameras swivel. The Asian, red-eyed, snatches up the coins, checking them for fingerprints.

Sticky Danny, choc crumbs in beard, returned to his creekside vigil.

Helicopters low over jungle, over Norfolk coastal wetlands. Thudding blades. Shuddering bed.

Hannah shook Norton, brought him out of his dream. They settled, folded in the old way, against each other, and very soon Hannah’s apologetic, mousy snores were puffing the short hairs on Norton’s neck. After love, boundaries shift, defensive reflexes are inhibited: the therapist dreamt and the hack, now alert, supersensitive to night’s noises, suffered the visions of his partner. Intravenous cable TV.

‘Most of you will go to Vietnam. Some of you will not come back.’

Vietnam, England.

English light.

Waterskies with cloud wisps, black Fenland earth.

Dreams don’t discriminate, we are everywhere at once. We give ourselves up to long-suppressed lovers whose names and faces we have deleted. (The headless man in the torn Polaroid from the Duchess of Argyll’s bathroom. A blow job. With pearl necklace.) We visit spine-tapped valleys, ocean depths of arterial blood, bone coral.

Hannah, that most urban of women, floated over a desert road that ran for hundreds of miles towards sharply outlined mountains, irrigation ditches. She penetrated forests, ankles caught in undergrowth, wrists secured by lianas. Pressing herself against me, sharing body-warmth, she took on my obsessions, my vanished ancestor’s Peruvian expedition. Arthur Norton and the lost camera.

She sampled films I had seen. And films I thought I had seen, sleep-edited from release prints, redirected by untrustworthy memory. Extracts from books. Lines of poetry echoing insistently when the names of the authors are past recall.

Next morning we were up betimes, and, after settling la cuenta, which our ragged host seemed to have sat up all night concocting, we rode briskly off, leaving the lake, with its swarms of fat wild-geese undisturbed on the water, and the ill-favoured and milkless kine shivering amongst the coarse rushes on the margin. We zig-zagged over a preliminary ridge, had a smart canter for two hours over an undulating plateau, and reached by 9 a.m. the station called San Blas. Here there are extensive salt works in active operation, but no food for man nor beast procurable, so we pushed on.

Lodged in her bath, Track dreamt of Livia, face shifting to another woman, also dark, also beautiful. To Marina Fountain, the writer who had taught them both, at college, at Chelsea. Marina’s championing of such mysteries as Canvey Island, Sheppey, the Isle of Grain, Tilbury Town, Deal, Thanet, carried Livia and Track into their current projects: perversity, cutting against the grain, travelling with strangers.

‘Pick a railway station,’ Marina used to say, ‘buy a ticket to somewhere you’ve never been, bring back the story.’

Marina was always late, smoking, books and papers falling out of her satchel, dressed by committee: jumble sale, designer collectables (prize money), extravagant and wildly inappropriate presents from admirers (curators, rich students, both kinds of bookie, turf and lit). Marina did scarves, coats, fancy boots, rings — but wasn’t bothered with the rest, minimal suede or leather skirts on long legs, laddered stockings (black, purple, green), loose tops (food-spilled, mended). Hats.

The students, male and female, were in love with her. The schemes she proposed were never carried out, not by them. They were far too preoccupied with their grievances, getting from wherever to wherever, to have time for conceptual journeys.

Marina understood this, her expeditions were not intended for public consumption. They were a way of talking, obliquely, about her own work. Which she wouldn’t, otherwise, expose. They were too lazy and impoverished to track down her unique published novel.

She pitched extracts from writers she liked, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Mary Butts, Nicola Barker, Denise Riley — and left them to it. Fine artists couldn’t, for the most part, see the connection: what this had to do with a career, getting a first show. Track and Ollie shared a bottle with Marina, went to the cinema, but they never shared a train ride. Marina did that alone. So she said. If her trips to the coast weren’t fiction, a provocation to get them moving .

When she didn’t turn up one Wednesday, mid-term, November, they missed her. Track was jealous that Ollie had been entrusted with the folder of stories; Marina left them — by accident? — in her flat. She talked about giving the package to a journalist called Norton, a man who wrote about roads, urban Gothic, ill-favoured topographies. Norton was a brief vogue in London art schools, for those who lacked stamina for the real thing, Walter Benjamin, Baudrillard, Mike Davis.

Ollie wouldn’t, and Track couldn’t, read the stories. Marina knew that perfectly well, otherwise she would never have trusted them with the folder. Now that Norton carried the burden in his A13 rucksack, Track’s duty was performed. She would stick with Norton, with the Jiffy bag, until Marina returned to reclaim her property. Until the typescript had been enacted in the Essex territory for which it was always intended.

Sweating, Norton rolled from the bed. It was his turn to sit in the bathroom, sleep was denied him, no hint of dawn through the gap in the curtains. Cars on the road. The soft electronic hum that is London, headache-hammers on rooftops and spires, radio masts, photovoltaic scanners. The yammer of acoustic landfill, idiot conversations, text messages, broadband signals. Sleep? Whose sleep? The Docklands Travelodge was an open dormitory — a hospital in the Crimea — through which Norton drifted, perplexed by the nightmares of reps and adulterers, cleaning staff, kitchen staff, unseen servicers of the virtual city.

Nothing to read.

Baths were for reading. Why else would you take them?

Not even a Gideon bible.

He rummaged, deep in his rucksack, dug out the package that Track had landed him with, and — well aware what he was letting himself in for — began the first story by Marina Fountain. First sentence. First fateful words.

A book on the table, unopened. Yellow canvas bag on the aisle seat. This was a woman who hadn’t travelled in recent times. A client who had never made the acquaintance of the c2c service into the Estuary. The carriage was empty, lime green, futuristic in its conceptual cleanliness. A golden script, made from unstable dots of light, floated mirror-reversed across a shield of protective glass. Rubber-lipped doors closed with an hydraulic sigh. The material on which she sat was coarse. It cat-scratched laddered stockings. The tabletop bruised her knees. She wriggled to find space for long legs. She hadn’t chosen her position with sufficient care. But she wouldn’t change. She ran one finger down the spine of a book. Her nail varnish, too dark, had chipped. But that was another life.