Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Danny held his book at arm’s-length. And he growled.

Leaning on a creosoted railing, London makes sense. There is a pattern, a working design. And there’s a word for it too: Obscenery . Stuttering movement on the road. Distant river. The temporal membrane dissolves, in such a way that the viewer becomes the thing he is looking at. Green rays of the setting sun strip flesh from the bone. He’s done it, vanished into a Jimmy Seed apocalypse, an epic painting, an intensity that the writer knows he will never achieve. So he settles for quotation, echoes of other men. For photographs. Documentary retrievals. Memory prompts. Useless. We are still on the inside of the outside, searching for fissures. Trapped in an envelope of diesel dust. From the summit of Beckton Alp, view is raw and absolute and unappeased.

‘Is there an author?’ I asked. ‘For this flannel?’

‘Yes,’ Danny said. ‘A Mr Norton. A.M. Norton. Dead, I believe. Car crash on the M25. He was trying to read and drive.’

The cold did things to Track’s hair, despite the pins, combs, clips. The Polynesian rescue kit. She was obliged to notice it, deal with it; pat, pluck, wrestle (like ironing seaweed). Her hair helmet was crisped with frost, dead weight. She was fit, strong-necked, but the mass of curls and knots was a nuisance, a burden. And, when the day, the adventure, reached that stage — self-conscious hair — it was time to quit. Regroup. Return home.

She had had enough for now, more than enough (of Norton and Beckton); she wanted to be in the studio with the heaters that didn’t work. Her table: yellow pencils in a blue jar, black notebooks, tray of reduced (stamp-sized) colour images. Green ink and pens with nibs. The fuss of the road ordered, laid out in columns, pictographs, glyphs. Her words.

Quit. Right now. Norton’s narrative was unravelling in a potentially ugly way. Sticking with him would be a folie à deux, collusion in his madness. The Vietnam film stuff, the mutterings about his fictitious grandfather in the jungle: it clogged the frame. Norton had his uses — as an unreliable guide, dredger of oddball facts and fables — but, in his mulish way, he wanted to take over the lives of those who accompanied him, the road itself, the weather. This nose-pinching cold was his doing: that line about ‘fake alp under real snow’.

Track was sick of his consciousness: of being involved with it, implicated in its traumas. Everything that had happened to them, since that first afternoon walking to Aldgate Pump, had been refracted through Norton’s fiction, his voice. The unplaceable accent. The half-truths. The bending and warping of a simple event, a walk.

She was unprepared for echopraxis. The mindless repetition of another person’s moves and gestures. His road, her road. Their road. It didn’t work.

She wanted to consider other things. Would she, for example, go back to Seattle in the summer? Her mother? The drapes, the net. A mistake? She’d been thinking of that place by the sea in Bergman’s film Persona . Another male fantasy. Barbecued monks. Dykes on heat. But a good clean house in which to work. Should she go with Ollie to Sweden? Was she more like Liv Ullmann (height, lips, weight of hair)? Or Bibi Andersson? Apparently practical, actually out of it, on the edge: a reader of other women’s letters. She’d read Ollie’s diaries. The boy, Reo Sleeman, didn’t send letters. Sweden might be good, expensive. One of the islands. Ollie had stolen her mac. That’s where it had gone. Like Bibi Andersson, much too big for her. Never using her specs, except in the studio. Ollie’s little vanities. She was one of those people. It was easier to talk to her, properly, on the phone. If she couldn’t get a show, sell a couple of things, they’d have to give up the lease. There might be a message, at home, from Ollie. There would be, for sure. Ollie at the seaside.

‘I think I’ll walk back, up the Green Way. You know? To Victoria Park?’ Track said.

Norton would come with her. He’d run out of steam. He said something about following up on Marina Fountain’s story, a train. Danny would try to find the Miller’s Well in Central Park. They might meet, on the road, in a week or two. Nobody knew anything about what happened between Tilbury and Southend, a catalogue of oil smears and marshes (Fobbing, Bowers, Hadleigh). And, inland, out of the way, the National Motorboat Museum.

There was a light in the church. We went over the wall, Danny with some reluctance, Track leading the way. She rapped on the heavy door. And we were let in — by the older woman from the East Ham café. The other two, the Italian boy (now in white overalls) and the redhaired girl, were up some scaffolding, picking away at the plaster of the rood screen. To reveal, after hours of intensive labour, a few inches of medieval wall painting, a tracery of leaves and vines; a tempera Book of Hours.

‘Hey, that’s it. What I want,’ Track said.

Floating, rough-edged fragments, paradise echoes of the wilderness that enveloped the church, the wild garden. Tiny squares of colour on the dim, whitewashed wall. A burning bush. A bunch of grapes. A starved saint peering, like a fox, through a thicket of bloody thorns. A sprung locust. The Norman church was an enlarged page from Track’s blackbound album.

Danny, tests completed, told us about the narrow, red (east-flowing) ley line with its deep-green (north-south) cross-strut: marking the place of the original altar.

‘Immortal, that line. Even if the church is demolished. Shadowing the road, church to church. Dagenham, Rainham, Aveley. The route we have to take.’

The church in which we found ourselves, so unexpectedly, intrigued Track — but she didn’t know how to behave. Museum stroll with fixed grin? Or synagogue awkward — under parental gaze? The Jacobean monuments were a small theatre of mortality, pink cherubs, grave-digging spades; love, death and plenty of gilt.

POSTERITATI: ‘To those who come after.’

DIIS OMNIBUS MANIBUS: ‘To the Gods in all the Shades.’

Norton admired a black horse’s head nailed to the wall, the negative of the A13 post-decorations from Newham Way.

‘Which movie?’ Track challenged, coming up beside him — as he watched the redhaired girl, goggled against the dust, scratch with tender persistence at the plaster.

‘Don’t Look Now . Not the restoration, collapsing cradle, the scaffolding: the photograph that bleeds. Sutherland’s eye, magnifying glass, contact sheet. It’s like Danny says: “the persistence of red”. A mother with drowned child in a red coat.’

‘And did they?’

‘What?’

‘Do it. The dressed/undressed, going-out-for-dinner scene? Did Sutherland and Julie Christie actually fuck?’

‘Nobody actually does anything on film. That’s the point. We re-edit, according to taste, leave out the bits that don’t matter. Film is vulnerable. It rots, mush in the can. Words stick and burn.’

This dialogue between Norton and Track in the church of St Mary Magdalene at East Ham never happened. Not then. No humans talk like that.

Norton, silent, walking beside Track, in the twilight, temperature dropping, replayed his fictional day. He improvised. Track had touched his arm (she wanted to show him the monument to William Heigham and his wife Anne). True. They looked up at the scaffolding and thought: Don’t Look Now .

Norton said (to himself): ‘Nic Roeg.’

Track said (to nobody): ‘Donald Sutherland. Would you fancy him if you had to go to his hotel room to show one of your paintings?’

Clean cut or lap dissolve?

They were passing the silted creek at Channelsea. Norton remembered one shot (static) in Patrick Keiller’s London . Fade to darkness. Before we tune in to the deranged precision of Paul Scofield’s voice-over. Fade to smell. Two figures, hands in pockets, on a long straight path.