Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Cora was doing it again. Responding to place by flattering fictional potentialities. The wound was the shadow of an arm. He was scratching, squeezing a spot. He wouldn’t take this train. He lived in the station. She could open her Conrad and impale herself, yet again, on the barbed wire of black print.

The door hissed.

In this way you live two lives. Over there, at Lublin, where life is hard, no doubt — and here in Stanford, Essex, on the banks of the Thames — under the spell of my words: for the one you have never seen, vous avez la douceur des Ombres et la splendeur de l’Inconnu!

The stink of the swamp. It came with him onto the train, slept-in, sweat-stiff clothes. Cancelled adrenaline signals, fear.

La douceur des Ombres.

She wanted coffee to anneal the original perfume of the upholstery, the sprays the cleaning women used. Now she was nostalgic for that smell, furniture left too long in its own company — in too intimate a relationship with its protective wrapping. The boy was acrylic from the skin out, layered in accidents of fake wool, vests, waistcoats, rubber shoes with flapping soles.

He took his place on the other side of the aisle and he muttered. He emptied his pockets of paper, scrumpled each item, individually; then lined up the paper balls and flicked them onto the seat that faced him.

He mumbled. He swore. He shifted his position. Stood up, with nothing to put on the rack, sat down again. He reeked.

Cora turned away. There was a vast block building, windowless, and a burning chimney pumping out white smoke. They had stopped again. Grass grew between the lines, delicate threads, tough clumps, bushes pushing through small yellow stones.

This time she didn’t turn from the window. It couldn’t be worse. Any new passenger would improve the situation. The gibbering stopped, the smell reverted to an airline cocktail of dead air and randomly applied chemical agents.

At last, as they pulled away, the river asserted its presence. New housing, yellowbrick estates. Yesterday there was nothing, now this: a town brought into existence by the happy conjunction of corrupt brownfield wastes and an orbital motorway. Flooded quarries were being colonised. Car parks like game reserves. Ribbon estates that looked exactly like the demolished asylums they had replaced. This is where urban exiles, divorced or otherwise damaged, come to roost. Who would pay good money to be incarcerated in a flatpack hutch? Cora, that’s who. Contracts exchanged, signature on cheque. Sight unseen. Purchased straight from the catalogue.

Untitled, her book was taking shape. The research was on the laptop. Documents, files, interviews, photographs. Skeleton outline. It would write itself.

She had to disembark. This was it, end of the line. A square brick tower, the word STATE stamped on it. She felt like reaching into her bag for a passport. Grays might work. It was more foreign than Poland. Disputed territory — like Gdansk. Grays belonged in the Baltic. All it lacked was the soundtrack, the verbigeration of the stinkhorn youth, the paper-crumbier.

Doors stay shut until potential tourists do something about it, find the right button to press. She is ready to unzip her bag, put Conrad away. She waits for the other passengers to take themselves off, before walking into her new life.

The bag wasn’t there.

It wasn’t on the floor, under the table, on the rack. The freak from the quarry halt had lifted it. She had been suckered by that old muttering crazy routine. She shut him out and he’d timed it beautifully. Two stops, close together: on, off. Vanished into a nowhere of unmapped roads and poisoned creeks.

She knotted the belt of her white raincoat, dug her hands into the pockets. The air was heady, soapy perfume from the factory, mud from the river. The sky was immense. All things considered, he had done her a favour. No baggage, no back story. A fresh set, a new chapter. The edge was there. She caught the ripple, fur growing down the sensitised ridges of her spine. The whiteness of her teeth. The horn of her nails, beneath that flaking black paint, curving into claws.

She put on tinted glasses, to flatter the blood in her eyes. She prepared a smile for the ticket collector. It wasn’t required. He’d been replaced by non-functioning automated barriers. She strolled through, crossed the tracks, and headed for the Thames.

I was never convinced that one of these nothing halts would have a bookshop. I overheard a conversation on the Saturday stall at Kingsland Waste, a runner flashing the contents of his bag to a punter, a woman in glasses. He didn’t drive. He scouted the same routes, Maidstone, Margate, Ramsgate, Deal, Southend Railway. Anywhere with plenty of stops, charity caves, old-folk-death dross. But what he showed, and the price he was letting it go for, made me think. He said: ‘Broadstairs.’ So I knew I should start on the other side of the Thames, mirror image. He wasn’t a very inventive liar. Simple code: Kent was Essex, Broadstairs meant Southend. Track down the line a couple of stops and I’d have it.

Nada. Mid morning and I hadn’ t pulled out a single carrier bag. Books? I couldn’t find a shop. West Ham, Barking, Dagenham Dock. Shop? I couldn’t find the town, the centre. Who needed books? The entire zone was an obituary. Which was promising. The developers would be in soon, architects, glass hangers. When you locate trash Americana, you locate the road: burger pits, multiplexes, dealerships. But Essex/America has no history, no memory to recover. No disposables: pulp paperbacks, records, tapes, True Crime chapbooks. A landscape without text.

I drank coffee, black, standing up in fast-food dumps with revoked franchises. I ran back to the railway. I was jumpy for a hit of print. I read bills of fare with random apostrophes. I cross-referenced graffiti. I scraped the shit off my trainers to find a label to interpret. I tried to make up words from broken matchsticks. This was a territory without a written language. I snatched crumpled betting-slips from the gutter and crammed them into my pockets to have something to read on the train. I paced the platform like a caged cougar.

Dagenham was promising. The ghost of a town. Fat men in cars that aren’t going anywhere, parked on bricks. I don’t like cars. The hand on your head. The way you have to put your trust in a stranger. The certain knowledge that drivers don’t understand, in their locked-off trances, that every road is made up from discrete elements. It doesn’t fit together until you walk it. If you can drive to a bookshop, it’s not worth stopping. They’ll have caned it, the amateurs, the ones who pitch out, once a month, in Bloomsbury hotels.

Dagenham had the elements, the dereliction, the deadbeats. The mix of Old Socialist estates, garden-city aspirations, cashmoney from the car factory. There were broad pavements, grease caffs, charity caves near the station. But it didn’t play. The town was waiting like a whipped cur for the next wave of exploitation. Two or three coffees, decaf diesel, and I was out of there.

By Purfleet, I was desperate. To piss. To find one shelf of books. A random three yards of printed matter. Dust. Yellow paper saturated with cigarette smoke. The feeble annotations of failed writers. Keep your back to the suspicious owner — who can’t wait to engage you in conversation or to blank you. Laugh at your confounded expectations. Another sucker, hopping from foot to foot, wondering if he should carry on, or cut his losses and try elsewhere.

I was running out of elsewheres.

A train stopped. I hit the button, sprang aboard. Why didn’t it move? A woman had my seat. I almost jumped into her lap. I always swing left around the door, tuck in behind that glass shield. At worst, I can avoid the view from the window, read reflected script as it loops across the screen. The Estuary service is as close as I want to come to cinema. This woman had spread herself in my slot.