Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Like manic t’ai chi, Kaporal thought.

‘Is time. The café. We find you one hour,’ Achmed said.

Time for what? Had he signed up for some mad scheme? Drin and Achmed were good company. They didn’t drink. They smoked their own cigarettes. And they had nothing to say. His local research, loosely commissioned by Norton, wasn’t advancing. The asylum-seekers didn’t really do anything. They hung about, on the porch of the Adelphi, taking photos of each other. They walked, in pairs, groups, or alone, through the gardens. They made calls on their mobiles. They looked at the sea. Achmed punted some mad kidnap plot, but that, Kaporal decided, was a misunderstanding. Achmed was giving his version of what he’d seen on TV the previous night, a video. No Orchids for Miss Blandish? The Collector? The Black Windmill ?

Snatch a celebrity from the White Queen Theatre — then what? How to transport him? Where to hold him? Who would pay money to get Max Bygraves back? Who would even notice he’d gone awol? The tabs would think it was a stunt, Max Clifford. News of the Screws doing one of their agent provocateur numbers, bunging a tame crim. The Grissom Gang. Touch of Evil. It was always a woman, a woman misappropriated. Baroque, rotten fruit. Armpits. Frying fish. Motel laundry. The King of Comedy . Who would be crazy enough to kidnap Jerry Lewis (apart from the French)? Take that doomed Scorsese flick as a warning. We’ll all finish up in a dumpbin on London Road. £3.99. No film in the case. No takers.

On London Road, Kaporal found two books. Bookends of a sort. A themed pairing: Paris, bohemia. Between wars. American writers with cheques from home. An English first edition of A Moveable Feast , lacking dust-wrapper. Now sitting, boldly, on the table, the blue plastic cloth, alongside the blind daisy.

Kaporal, two inches remaining in his carafe, caught Maria’s eye. He hadn’t really grasped the concept of the ‘all-day breakfast’. He thought it meant that you breakfasted all day.

‘Mademoiselle. A fine à l’eau . Big brandy, small water.’

She laughed, came over. ‘What?’ Touched his arm. Nice quizzical gesture, hand on hip, waiting for the joke to be explained, tossing her hair, glancing over her shoulder to see if the chef, smirking at the kitchen door, was in on it.

‘Just a brandy, Maria. Please. And coffee. Black.’

He flicked through the musty pages.

Hemingway on Ford Madox Ford (a neighbour, Winchelsea, Hythe): ‘I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.’

The guy from the Adelphi smelt good, from three tables distance; Kaporal got the duty-free, the splash of intimate aroma. The clean zone. UnEnglish.

Outside the window, not reading the unchanged menu — pasta pasta pasta — were two men, Achmed and Drin (hair wet, swept back, tango dancer). The other asylum-seeker, when he saw them, jumped up, left a few coins on the table, walked out. Nodding to Achmed, shaking hands with Drin. Gone. As if he had been employed to keep the table, keep the seat warm.

Or maybe, Kaporal thought, the room sliding away, panels of the Aztec mirror offering alternate scenarios, the studious migrant was studying him . A watcher. A snoop. A reassigned secret policeman from Tirana. Working for Achmed. Making sure that Kaporal was in place, primed to take on the role offered to him in the coming melodrama, the illegal seizure and forcible sequestration of Max Bygraves. Money with menaces. Ten years minimum. Parkhurst, Durham. The perfect opportunity to get reacquainted with O’Driscoll or Alby Sleeman. A nice double, one up, one down, with the gay psycho (Phil Tock).

The glitzy mirrors, the underoccupied (mid afternoon) restaurant, indulged Kaporal, let him think of Brassäi, of Robert Doisneau. It was worrying, this inability to take anything on its own terms, treating the south coast like a Monday morning conference at Radio 4, broadsheets on the table. Nothing was, everything was like . Referenced, analogous. Parodic. Two men from the Balkans (might be Algerian in the earlier Parisian model) standing in the doorway. One woman, back in the shadows, keeping her own company — waiting ? — with a canvas bag, camera bag. A woman who came to the pasta place on two or three days a week, always with the bag, always tired — as if she’d been walking the streets all night.

Kaporal remembered the first time he saw her. It was late afternoon, he was a newcomer, a stranger to the restaurant. His arms were overloaded with books. He had received an unexpected royalty cheque from America, a film about plane crashes.

She was waiting. He was waiting. She looked around quietly, appraisingly, but without obvious effort to attract attention. She was discreet and dignified, thoroughly poised and self-contained. He was curious to see who she was waiting for. After a half-hour, during which period he caught her eye a number of times and held it, he made up his mind that she was waiting for anyone who would make the proper sign with the head or the hand and the girl would leave her table and join him.

Kaporal, feeling what he felt then, troubled, hot-necked, legs in (theoretical) plaster of Paris, was quoting piecemeal from the second book he’d picked up on London Road. As you will have recognised. The previous para. A straight steal, twitched from first to third person, Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy . Nobody reads Miller. Kaporal could get away with transposing chunks of the old rascal into Bohemia, Hastings.

A good title.

( Quiet Days in Clichy. Not Bohemia, Hastings .)

There was another bit in the book (green covers, white starburst letters) on surveillance. Stalking. He’d done that too. Which was when he realised that the girl with the shoulder bag was exhausted, not from her night’s exertions, but from the train journey, down from London — the standing, the unscheduled (but anticipated) halts. The fear, well-promoted, of terrorist attacks, bugs, gas, bombs.

Coffee, soup. They fixed her up, before the walk started. The walk was night. The walk was the mystery.

Once he followed her for a whole afternoon, just to see how she passed the time. It was like following a sleepwalker. All she did was to ramble from one street to another, aimlessly, listlessly, stopping to peer through shop windows, rest on a bench, feed the birds, buy herself a lollypop, stand for minutes on end as if in a trance, then striking out again in the same aimless, listless fashion.

A dark girl, petite. With a sort of Louise Brooks, even Djuna Barnes, hair helmet — Sapphic? Eyelashes. Bright lips, pouty as the mouth of a red balloon.

‘You have licence?’ Achmed said. As they sat down, Drin and Achmed, one on either side of him. Close.

‘Not just now, actually.’

‘You drive?’

‘Oh sure. Of course. Always have.’

‘Theatre show finish ten. You drive car. Drin bring car, big car, the St Margaret, her road. You wait car. Drin and Achmed carry man, singing man. You drive.’

There was no relevant book, no text for this, the absurdity. Achmed meant it. He had leaflets from the White Queen Theatre: Stephen Triffitt Celebrates Sinatra; Halfway to Paradise (The Billy Fury Story); Puppetry of the Penis (‘Two well-hung Aussies have turned playing with themselves into a hit show … A video camera projects every intimate detail of these incredible phenomena onto a large screen, ensuring little can be missed’). And. Highlighted box. Bermondsey’s own Superstar, direct from the London Palladium, MAX BYGRAVES. FAREWELL TOUR, FEATURING THE FABULOUS BEVERLEY SISTERS.

He’s taken his time about it, Kaporal thought. Old Max must have booked on Connex. He won’t show, not in Hastings. It’s a wind-up. Like getting a knighthood, if your war record is a bit iffy: you have to be at death’s door to be booked by the White Queen. And, anyway, the Albanians will never lift a motor. They stand out in the town. Move away from Warrior Square and the seafront and they’ll be tapped, dispersed to Ashford, a plague hospital on Dartford Salt Marshes: shipped out.