Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

She twisted in her seat, turned to read the mesmerisingly banal loop. Welcome Aboard the c2c Service to Grays.

Sea to sea.

A New England spinster with cobwebs in the throat. And then the Windows failed — and then/I could not see to see.

Write it to know it. Use fear to stave off fear.

The point of this move was to be somewhere, somewhere feasible, in the region of Stanford-le-Hope. No, it wasn’t. The point was to disappear. The point was to get out, not to stay. To become invisible. To avoid anyone who knew her face, her history. To deflect conversation with promiscuous strangers.

Forgive my long silence: I have been ill.

Her enthusiasm for Conrad, did it endure? The advance had been pitiful; the commissioning editor, a friend, had moved on. They never talked about the project. They sat for hours in the pub — while the editor, in spelling out her hopes, confirmed disaster.

Cora smoked, gave up smoking, stubbed a ruff of butts into a cracked white ashtray. As a woman with lousy taste in men, could she trust herself with a merciless account of Joseph Conrad’s marriage? His life at Ivy Walls Farm. His wife’s health. His agonising drudgery, his pride. The muffled sound of bells from ships on the river.

I married 18 months ago and since then I have worked without interruption. I have acquired a certain reputation — a literary one — but the future is still uncertain …

First, she learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and began the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled, validated herself. Another country, another woman (the original staying put, carrying on as before). Being alone in a strange city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going at whim to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. A new name. She initiated correspondence with people she had never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. She set up meetings, back in London, that she had no intention of keeping. She avoided affairs, pleasured herself efficiently, without summoning the eidolons of previous lovers. She wrote to English authors of the moment, teasing them. She became a fiction. Solitude was an indulgence. Grays, she hoped, would be as melancholy as Kraków. As the sentimental bond that did or did not exist between Conrad and his childhood friend Janina Taube. The name was the colour, chalk and lead. A dull sky and a dead river.

Voluntary amnesia.

The moment she took her seat, turned up her collar, caught her reflection, Cora recognised that she was behaving as if she were still outside, with the sunshine and showers. Subdued artificial light left her slightly queasy. The cabin seemed pressurised. She forced herself to take slow, steady breaths. She blew on the window, signed ‘Janina’, rubbed it out with her sleeve. The emptiness of the long carriage was the end of a ghost story. Doors that weren’t doors. Opaque windows. A cancelled landscape. Everything in the wrong order.

‘Journey from hell, isn’t it?’

A Docklands drone in highly polished black shoes. A suit and an anorak. He gestured, as if to hold the door for the woman with the rings and the industrial hair. They must have been there all the time, in the far reaches, hidden by high-backed seats.

Exterior varnish failed to disguise the damage of a cleaning job, rough hands. Long ‘anti-social’ hours removing evidence of occupation from still-throbbing trains. Drudgery at the outer limits of a legal wage. Cora had been there. Manual work was actually quite social; as close as she wanted to get to society. To the sisterhood of the put-upon; cigarettes shared on first-light platforms, the day’s horrors rehearsed. A litany of cancellations, detours. Mechanically voiced apologies.

Wipe them.

Cora didn’t need characters. Acknowledging their existence, granting them space, led to unwarranted projection, the invention of other lives. Empathy. Eavesdropping. Romance.

Stay with the window, the slight stickiness of her palm on the book. Cold, damp glass. Exploited streams. Breakers’ yards. Miles of production-line cars that nobody wants. A water tower that belongs in New Jersey.

She was far enough out of London now to take off her gloves. She didn’t wear gloves. Her hands were grey. The low-intensity light of that riverside landscape, the sickly green of the carriage. She scratched, trying to peel skin from her hands. The skin had died. She was wearing skin gloves that she couldn’t unpick.

Conrad’s Polish Background.

An infection had been transmitted from the author portrait on the cover. Creases and mud tributaries beneath the writer’s tired eyes with their scrotal pouches. Spirals of hair around neat, bat-ears. Conrad’s face was a map of the Estuary. If she held the book at the right angle, her reflection and the reflection of the great writer would marry with the desolation of the marshes. Gull clouds. Mountain ranges of hot landfill.

It was working. When they passed under a motorway on stilts, she felt the rush. Displacement. Her senses given up to blight, erasure. She couldn’t remember who she had killed. Just where. The room. The position of the furniture. The sound of a running shower. The flattened shadow of a tumbler on a window ledge. She didn’t know why. Or when. It didn’t matter. She had everything she needed in the yellow bag — laptop, pills, a few clothes. The keys to the new flat could be picked up at the estate office in Grays. Meanwhile, she was happy to let it happen, shifts of geology, registers of light. The more sky the better. Keep moving and memories will be revised, reconstituted. The train window is the perfect screen. A cup of decent coffee and she can forget London.

A flooded quarry. The train had stopped. It didn’t concern her if the landscape drifted or kept still. Train travel worked very well, so long as you didn’t need to be anywhere at a particular time. The seat was comfortable. The view unobtrusive. She had a table and a book. Hunger was manageable — when you considered the alternative. A good strong coffee, the smell, the feel of the cup in her hand, was her dominant fantasy.

Cora could hear the driver, a woman, talking. Making excuses. The flooded quarry, with its abandoned industrial aspirations, was an official halt. A youth with ravaged skin was standing on the platform.

Don’t catch his eye. Don’t look. One client only. Why so many? White tongues hanging from the pockets of a tartan bomber jacket. He was unhinged. Don’t look. Tongues of white plastic. The guy looks like a dispenser for carrier bags. You wouldn’t say he suffered from eczema, that would be making light of the case. Inflamed skin shedding its ash in volcanic flakes: raw and scabbed. He couldn’t keep still long enough to get on the train, couldn’t commit to a destination. Also, it appeared from his writhing and hopping, his frantic groin-knuckling, he was in imminent danger of wetting himself.

There had to be better options than Grays. The pocked youth waited. The train, by this time, was unoccupied. He’d find a compartment and relieve himself, go back to his hole. You couldn’t see him surviving anywhere beyond the railway network. He was never going to present a ticket. He didn’t have the spring to leap a barrier. Or the clout to deck an official. He was a native, non-aspirational asylum denier. Not bright enough to compete with the car washers in the retail park, the ones with blue stubble who called themselves ‘Persians’. And always finished their swab-downs with: ‘Wanna sell? Very nice car. Very good in my country.’

There was a moment when, despite their best efforts, this odd couple came face to face through the train window. The boy had a terrible suppurating wound running from below his right ear. He was clutching the gash with his left hand. Let it go and he’d spill out on the platform.