Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I didn’t notice what she was reading. That’s how bad it was. I had to do something with my hands to stop myself grabbing for the book. It came from a library, most did, laminated plastic pressed over the original dust-wrapper.

Fists knotting.

I had to take out all the Dagenham refuse I’d collected, unwrap it, roll it up — as tight as it would go. Get rid. Flick flick flick. Paper bullets lodging in the sockets of her eyes. She had a smell that was the opposite of elsewhere. It made me dizzy. I had to breathe, gag on it. Bedroomy, lived in.

We stopped in a flooded quarry. I had to move to another compartment, closer to our destination. Get a head start on her. She had one book, she might want more. She looked the kind, very sure of herself.

The doors hissed, I ran.

Secured my usual spot, unmolested, in the first carriage. My hand closed tight around the leather strap of my bag.

What bag?

It had been years since I’d travelled with such luxuries. Years since the weight of books had me leaning into the wind like a sailor. The bag had gone, along with its contents. I owned what I stood up in, borrowings, thefts, accidental purchases. The perfume had unhinged me. I’d lumbered myself with a bag I couldn’t keep, didn’t want. And I couldn’t conceive of any way to get shot of it.

As soon as the train stopped, squealing, stink of brakes, I was away. Tensed finger on release button. I ducked behind a toilet Tardis and waited. She stood out, she knew where she was going — over the tracks and down towards the river. Unaccompanied by railway officials. There weren’t any on this line. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. That’s how I lost my own bag. On a train. It was only, three or four days later, when I tried to pitch a few of the items I’d picked up in Hastings, that I remembered. I never replaced the bag, never made it to that level of operation.

Bookshops, if any, will be parasitical on the station. I legged it, as fast as I could, in the opposite direction to the one the woman had taken. Away from the river. Even by Estuary standards, this was a hole. A labyrinthine shopping centre, a rat run for lab rats. Dead light. Blue chemical floods washing away piss streams. Wheelchairs and mechanised cripple-carriers surrounding an empty stage. Cardboard cutouts of forgotten entertainers.

I found the right street: bent solicitors, West African dentists, table-tappers. Curtains drawn against daylight. Linoleum polish and cheap massage oil. An open door with access to a loan shark. A cracked glass panel, wired over, through which I could see the books — tightly packed, triple-stacked on rickety, freestanding units. The glass was too dirty to make out individual titles. A phone number on a card, but the ink had run.

Out in the street, twisting my neck, I tried to see if it was worth kicking the door in. The owner would be taking the usual long lunch. He might be back to watch the sun go down behind the oil storage tanks.

Among the ratty paperbacks and Book Club ballast, photocopied topographic views, was the unmistakable yellow cloth of an early printing, perhaps even a first edition, of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’d had dingy, exhausted copies through my hands but never dreamt of one as pristine as this. I didn’t need to read the red lettering. I knew. The only copy in Essex, in England, had come back to source, to the fringes of Purfleet, Count Dracula’s Carfax Abbey.

Thursdays and Sundays Only. 12.30 to 5 p.m.

I had arrived on the wrong day. I would have to come back another time. Or stay over. Find somewhere to kip, sleep rough. This was it. My one chance to get back on the ladder. In a cold sweat of excitement, I started walking. Keeping away from the river, heading out of town. Twenty-four hours to kill. Twenty-four hours to survive in Grays and environs.

Very new bricks, yellow. Buildings in blocks. Rooms where no sentient being ever lived. Rooms without ghosts.

Running water, the river. A hot shower needling flesh, splashing on tiles. Cora twists, contorts, trying to get her mouth around the tap. The muck and ooze of the shoreline. Lines of white globes, glowing palely, illuminating the empty avenues. Pools of light: the spaces between posts, along the perimeter fence, in a political prison.

She swallows, greedily. The taste is metallic, silver. Her mouth furred with gritty deposits. But skin, wet from the shower, is unblemished. The grey she discovered, looking at her hands in the train, has faded; hot pink. She bares her teeth to the bathroom mirror and the bite is regular, no wolverine incisors, no fangs. The prickle of fur down the length of her spine was an illusion. A fiction.

The thief had done her a favour. Taking possession of her clothes, documents, money, he became responsible for her memory. The laptop. Notes, translations, extracts. Everything had been transferred to that slim box. Now she was released from it, relieved of her past. Naked, in a room in which no human had ever slept, a riverside apartment, she slipped the envelope of identity.

Her successes, such as they had been, derived from an unusual psychopathology. An over-intense identification with books she read, authors and their characters. Cora, the woman: emanation of place. That’s why she wanted to be close to Conrad, to the landscape in which he had lived.

It is still more painful and hard to think of you than to realize my loss; if it was not so, I would pass in silence and darkness these first moments of suffering.

She suffered. And it was bearable. Grays was the manifestation of anonymity. Her clothes were heaped on the floor. Not a stick of furniture. No blankets, no bed. No towel. She dries herself on her slip. The room is warm. She has no control over the heating, the voices. Still damp, she puts on a man’s white shirt. She can’t remember where it came from. She holds it up to her face. She sniffs, flinches. She sits, arms around knees, looking out of the window. At the darkening river. The river which is becoming darkness, becoming itself.

From the river, midstream: one by one, lights in scattered windows go out. Faked balconies shine.

Most of the afternoon, and the early evening, was spent on the road; backwards and forwards between the bookshop and the housing development on the lip of the quarry. If anyone wants to update William Hope Hodgson’s horror tale, The House on the Borderland, this is the place: pit, swamp, congeries of red-brick hutches under a massive sky. A puff of wind and they’re gone.

I stayed out of the town centre, a chance of bumping into the woman — but I couldn’t risk letting another runner get at the bookshop before I snaffled the Stoker, the gold brick Dracula. So I trudged alongside heavy traffic, chemical works chucking out filthy smoke, flags shredded by wind, storm fences protecting the wildlife of a quarry; protecting the new development. Three or four cul-de-sacs went up while I walked. The Grays satellite was turning into a garden city without gardens. Every time I reached the first house, it was closer to the centre. It was new but it looked the same as all the others. There were more burnt-out cars on the verges of deserted avenues. Nobody bothered with ‘Police Aware’ notices.

Suddenly, I was exhausted. I had a bag, I was respectable: I could try for a room in a pub. The choice was easy. There was only one, Mexican/Californian; desert plants stripped by salt, battered by river winds, sticky with oil droplets. They took my money, in advance. They gave me a key. And a hard look. The manager said something to the barmaid and they laughed.

I went out later to look for food, chips, burger, a foil carton. The settlement was inhabited by youngish women with dogs, children at an awkward age. There were no men, no families. No shops or fast-food outlets. ‘Try Lakeside,’ a kid told me. But I didn’t have time for fishing.