Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Nothing is happening here and happening very fast. A soap opera badly mangled in an editing suit. Vital plot lines have been lost or suppressed, leaving a non-specific aura of panic that seems to hinge on the missing tyre technician. Alternate frames of EastEnders cut against structuralist slomo.

While I’m watching all this free television, Jimmy Seed is tapping a coin on the pad that cushions his hobbled electric window. The unofficial armrest has a groove fitted precisely to the shape of a pound coin, leading me to assume, by the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he keeps a mistress, or hideaway, on the south coast. The coin is the fee for the QEII Bridge, Purfieet to Dartford. But I was wrong. He did cross water on a regular basis, but his purpose was speculation: ex-industrial properties in the Thames Gateway zone. Bounty-hunting with a Polaroid. Jimmy had a talent for sniffing out units that would otherwise be wasted on housing economic migrants or Balkan sex slaves.

The girls on the back seat didn’t talk much, the only still points in an edgy scene. They lounged: I stole a surreptitious glance in Jimmy’s driving mirror. They whispered, tracked the tight-skinned youth who circled the Volvo on his bike, before looping back to the pub. This was an establishment where punters stayed outside, anyone who drank at the bar, in a jacket, a shirt, was a nonce. Or a fixture. Under-age lads played pool. Strays, remnants, the unlanguaged: they stared at a large screen that showed 24-hour football from elsewhere. The cyclist was their outrider, snaking into the world, bringing back news. Which he kept to himself.

‘Explain again exactly where we’re going.’

The tall young woman who asked the question might have been American, once. She had the kind of face in which you could trace the history of a solitary child coming to terms with life, haunted by atavistic fears, standing at the edge of town, watching a river. Thick red hair bravely unattended. An embargo on cosmetic enhancement. Her friend — I made that assumption on very little evidence — was English, ex-established. The woman she would one day become vividly present in her features; an inherited smoothness that would remain, points of colour on sculpted cheeks, dark lashes and a small pert mouth: the limits of her tolerance of Hackney inadequately disguised. They were both attractive. To me. To Jimmy (childlike and paternal in his off-hand courtesies). And also, perhaps, to each other.

‘There’s no exactly about it,’ I said (when Jimmy stayed shtum, measuring the mother with the dark-brown aureoles). ‘The A13 is a tributary of London’s orbital motorway, the M25. But unlike the M25 it goes somewhere. If you can call Southend somewhere.’

‘I thought,’ Jimmy mumbled, ‘Dagenham. For starters. Well, Ford’s. Sheds, warehouses. Then the marshes, for Livia, engines buried in mud, all kinds of stuff. Ditches, channels. It’s mysterious. The fiddly details you like to enlarge and … Sorry, that woman. I can’t believe her.’

‘Her what ? said the American, sharply.

‘Stance. Attitude. The gate and the dog. If I did people, I’d have the camera out. That’s prime, that is. Absolutely fucking amazing.’

I listened, I looked, but I wasn’t part of it. I was reporting on something I’d left behind years ago and could barely remember. We met, early, in Jimmy’s studio, under the arches, striplight, stacked with wine bottles, racks of prodigious canvases, estate agents’ brochures. Three or four paintings were always on the go. He was a traditionalist, a hardworking artisan. Want a petrol station, on Burdett Road, to fit a space on your wall? He’s your man. He’ll do it. Better than the real thing. Call back Thursday. Chop off a couple of inches? Certainly, sir. A different car? No problem, give you a bell as soon as the paint dries.

Jimmy had this pitch he always came out with when he ran up against artists who wanted to talk art: ‘If you were fixing the wing of a Cortina, you wouldn’t leave brush strokes in the body filler, now would you? Fibreglass sticking out to show how fucking clever you are?’

Jimmy solicited: absence of signature, a solid frame around an innocent chunk of the world. His truth was thin as prison soup, smooth as satin. More real than the real. Rattle of trains overhead. Car alarms. A private world.

In this studio, which Jimmy had taken over, so he said, from a crew of over-ambitious crack cocaine dealers (blood on the walls), was a record of everything that was missing from East London: grandiose cinemas, open-air swimming pools (Lansbury’s lidos), Underground stations. There were no people, people gave away the secret, they belonged in a particular time frame. Jimmy’s graffiti-dense canvases, layered in carbon, cheap emulsion, virtual and actual mould and moss, didn’t represent anything; they were that thing. Ugly, mute.

Here was the source of Jimmy’s unease, his coin-tapping reflexes at the gate of the Hackney tyre yard. All his metaphors belonged to the period when he’d laboured in a garage in Derby. His art confirmed his failure to become a body-shop craftsman, covering up flaws, respraying insurance scam motors. Jimmy, who was short and damaged and hungry for fame and status and property, modelled himself on Steve McQueen: do the art stuff, yes, then get back to a man’s business of bikes and cars, stunting, dirt-tracking. Playing chicken with the Grim Reaper.

The exiled Scottish painter was one of those unfortunates who had reached the stage of giving up everything that mattered (drink, cigarettes, bad behaviour with women). He felt better, was able to get out of bed in the morning — with absolutely nothing to get out of bed for. Work was never more than work. The steady accumulation of paintings that stood in for a past that was no longer visitable. Good things, houses, families, food on the table: none of it meant as much as the feel of that first glass in the hand, the sudden whiff of cinnamon from the spice warehouses, the muddy drench of the river.

Lines of cars on Hackney Road stretched back to the boarded-up Children’s Hospital.

A West African, in a business suit, with his daughter, white ribbons on her pigtails.

Two geezers taking turns to roll a monster tyre.

A lad with a beaker of steaming coffee and a bag of rolls.

He has been tipped off about the arrival of the mechanic. Who leaps from his car, talking: ‘You wouldn’t believe the fucking A13, artic gone off of the ramp at Thurrock, gridlock. Roadworks. Three hours, no word of a lie, from Billericay.’

Estuarial Lives : the newsreel.

We wait. The American woman is scribbling in a notebook. Livia is staring out of the window in a freeze-frame reverie. Jimmy’s whistling. I get out, stretch my legs, amble across the yard: steepling walls of tyres, all shapes, sizes and conditions, pressing back, bowing out the brickwork. Mud and oil. Old canvas so gone in colour that Jimmy could chop it into units, nail it onto stretchers, flog it to his collectors without adding a brushstroke. I lift the tent flap over a rickety lean-to, revealing a clean, well-maintained, top-of-the-range powerboat. A craft that would have you across the Channel, from Maldon to the Dutch dunes, in a short night, no questions asked. Fishing trip. 150 hp Yamaha engine, the sort Jimmy would admire. Work being done on extra fuel tanks. No wonder the man in the shed didn’t have time to waste on punctures.

By now, most of Hackney is waiting. It’s what we do, what we’re good at: post offices, doctors, Town Hall. This little mob, with their various punctures, gathered at the gates, amuse themselves on their mobiles, sending out for coffee, making a run for the pub. Tribal scars. Moustaches and stubble. Hoods. Bleached blondes in loud leather. Chinese families on outings. All with cars slowly sinking into the slurry. Waiting, patiently or otherwise, for the solitary mechanic — who wants to be rid of them, with their favours and credits and promises, so that he can get back to his boat.