Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Get rid, Ollie. Don’t fall for that sick-puppy routine. Reo’s trouble.’

Livia rubbed her Adam’s apple with a knuckled fist.

‘It’s finished, truly.’

She hadn’t thought about Reo until Marina brought him back. He didn’t matter. At a safe distance, he was a not-unpleasant memory: hurt boy, hard boy. Someone to rescue. Someone who said that he would die without her. Someone who lived through his indifference for the world: nothing touched him. Except Livia. His obsession. The way he saw her as a sister spirit. Incest and revenge. His dopey Egyptian mythology: reincarnation, animal familiars, terrible music. Love me or kill me. A double suicide, Mishima. Bent narcissism, bent history: straight to video.

‘I see why. Why you tried him,’ Marina said, ‘but, now …’

‘Well, what about you ?’ Livia came back. ‘What about you and Hastings? I can’t get my head around it. Track doesn’t … I haven’t …’

‘I’ve found the room.’

Marina took Ollie’s arm, guiding her.

‘The room where Baynes painted his View from My Window . I want you to make some tests, photographs. And one other thing, it’s important. Tell me honestly … did you get my manuscript to Norton?’

‘Track. I’m sure. She must have. Track had it. She understood. Track’s good at those things.’

It was agreed. They met, early, for breakfast, long before Kaporal surfaced, at the pasta place.

Marina had acquired — sublet, borrowed, bought — a flat in Cunard Court, a Thirties (De La Warr Pavilion era) block that looked like a beached ocean liner. At whatever time Livia pressed the buzzer on the voicebox, struggled with the doors on the old-fashioned lift, walked down that weirdly familiar carpet, the block was deserted. A nautical remake of The Shining . Glimpses of revenants, tourist class, on a ghost ship.

Marina, cigarette in hand, waited to greet her, to shepherd her past the flat filled with pigeons, pigeon dirt, needles and spills of tightly rolled newspaper.

They worked their way — borrowed pass key, charm applied to the old folk — through layer after layer of this crumbling cake; corridor by corridor, room by room. Seventy-six checked, 209 to go. Very close , no goldfish. Nothing fitted — precisely — the Keith Baynes transcription.

And what, Livia wondered, would happen when it did? What then? Her print, whichever lens she opted for, however she messed around in the darkroom, could never replicate Baynes’s painting. There was no way of gouging out the middle ground, the space between camera and seascape. Vertigo and nausea always rushed in to fill the gap. The flats with their geriatric accretions, family snaps in silver frames, hothouse temperatures, phantom dogs (no pets allowed), left her dizzy.

Marina was merciless. When photograph fitted over painting, like a Venetian carnival mask, she would step through. Into that space-time anomaly. The bit Baynes was so careful to leave out, the foreshortened something , between observer and horizon. That mysterious lacuna (the pictorial equivalent of the John Major premiership).

She made it, ahead of her watcher, the man with the books, to her table near the bar (the kitchen, the coat-rack). Now she was comfortable, being here, being alone. She glanced sideways, profile in the mirror, good, lips glossed, hair holding, and surprised herself. She was waiting for the man in black, the one with too much skin; flesh folding like rubber — his reflex attempts, slapstick, to iron out the creases, erase experience, touch solidity beneath sag, a fading memory of cheekbones.

‘Has he been in?’ she asked Marina.

‘Today, no. Maybe later.’

I am nothing like those women in Paris, she thought. Jean Rhys, was it? The drama of being misused, spurned (they solicited it), abandoned. In this place, at this time, Ollie was perfectly at ease. Ready, almost, for the flirtation with her lugubrious admirer. A reversal, as she saw it, of the Jean Rhys/Ford Madox Ford story: older man (shell-shocked), frayed beauty, an affair, abortion — a narrative told from both sides. A true fiction. Publish your revenge. The long, woozy aftermath of poverty excesses and provincial exile. See what you’ve done to me .

He was there. In his usual spot. Eating her in the mirror. Getting quietly sozzled. She touched the rough canvas of the camera bag, stroked it. The man would make a good portrait — if she did portraits. But her technique was based on self-denial. Immerse yourself in floating matter — drunk man reading book, melancholy asylum-seeker at round table, tired waitress, photographer on run from unsatisfactory lover — and take it somewhere else: night town. The steps. The pattern of the tiled roofs. The panoramic window of the fishermen’s club as seen from the beach. Plastic swans, shrouded, on the paddling pool.

Drama: the unexpected entrance of two exotic aliens in leather jackets. Nice-looking boys, fit. They know the bookman. They sit with him. He’s nervous. He won’t be able to make his move, his unsubtle (gently spurned) advance on the girl photographer with the Louise Brooks fringe. They’re behaving like pimps. They warn the older man off. They notice her, admire her. Who is this beauty?

A car pulls up. An American car. So this is just another of Livia’s tales, her adventures at the seaside? She wished, so much, that she smoked, that she was wearing something more suitable. Collar turned up. Dark glasses: like the man. Very mean and hungry, slightly crazy. Coming straight at her. Brushing past the Adelphi Hotel boys, pushing one of them aside. Yelling, furious. A madman. Mad for her. One glimpse and he’s done for. She has him skewered. He’ll kill for a single glance. The woman of his dreams.

‘Get in the fucking motor, babe,’ Reo said. ‘We’re going home.’

She was wrong, completely wrong — the Fountain woman — about Fenchurch Street Station. Clean. Spacious. Departure notices visible. Trains to the Estuary, Grays, Tilbury Town, Shoeburyness, every few minutes. Even the light (filtered through glass, bounced from white stone) was nicely managed, abundant. There was, this premature spring morning, no embargo on clarity: razor-cut shadows, splintered beams through mean windows.

A lull in our argument with the city. This, I thought, is how it should be. A fiver for a return to Rainham? They were giving it away. The track, like a ladder of ice, rushed towards Limehouse; churches, warehouses, pre-war office blocks with quirky detail, Art Deco fans, orchestrated symmetries.

I basked. I gorged on it, the suspension of hostilities. The non-arrival of my pal Joey. Joey Silverstein. Joey the Jumper. With his babble, his yap. Gnawed fingernails. Yellow fingers cupped, clawed, leaking smoke. Joey was my guide into Rainham, the Jewish Cemetery. He was taking me to the grave of a legendary urban character, David Litvinoff. Gambler, wit, ‘lowlife conduit’ to James Fox, Donald Cammell, Mick Jagger (and the rest of the Performance team), Litvinoff ghosted the transit between Whitechapel and Chelsea, appearance and disappearance, celebrity and crime. He left two things behind when he killed himself (across the river): a shoebox of reel-to-reel tapes (drunken improvisations, midnight rambles, quality jazz) and a memory stain. A diminishing band of friends and lovers, acquaintances and dupes, ageing relatives who couldn’t forget him, met to talk through his mischief, his stunts. The hurt. Wilting snaphots slide sideways into the underbelly of the culture (Ian McShane in Villain ); a man with his head shaved, throat slashed, suspended from a window in Kensington. Marchers on the street (Vietnam, CND, legalise dope), banners and whistles, they don’t look up. Nobody notices. It doesn’t register. In the margin of every great public event, some poor sod is catching it, sight unseen, a bullet in the teeth.