Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I’d been tracking the Litvinoff story since 1975, the year that he died. Every lead a cul-de-sac. Every witness removed to Australia, South Africa, Golders Green Crematorium. The waters muddied by second-generation stalkers, media-studies victims with Sony MD Walkmans. They thought they could do it all on the phone, the net, in a couple of weeks: anti-scholars saturated in ‘genre issues, core components and dialectic exchanges’. The height of their ambition, 500 words, in a slack month, in Sight and Sound .

The good thing about Joey, you could always rely on him: to be late. Time out, hard won, is golden. The worse the night, the better the morning’s walk. Run it backwards. I touched the dog. I lumbered across the road — twitching from traffic that wasn’t there — to press my hand between the sharp brass ears of the wolf at Aldgate Pump. Begin again, another excursion down the A13 — but, this time, by train; following the fictional paradigm — I can do media studies too — of Marina Fountain’s Conradian vampire tale. Fountain had been snacking, it was evident, on her namesake, the other Marina, Warner: freelance scholar, novelist, collector of folk tales, Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. Warner mainlined lamias and succubi, Keatsian narcoleptics, sleepwalkers with inadequate nightwear:

The Lamia, Emblem strong of Sin,

Does all her Charms employ;

To draw the unwary Trav’ller in,

And then the Wretch destroy.

The Aldgate wolf was stressed today, by the absence of aggravation; it strained to break free from its stone trap. Some political chicanery with hyper-surveillance, invisible barriers, congestion charges, had emptied the streets, returned them to a period when it wasn’t compulsory to run a car. My walk from Hackney was unnerving: sun disk pulsing behind cloud, a hoop of bright beams, cold squeezing the lung. A silver sun (over Haggerston Park) duplicated the aureole of the inoperative brass nipple that floated above and between the wolf’s ears at Aldgate Pump: ‘press here’ for water that no longer gushes from the open mouth. The pattern of flaws in the stone, rust marks, removed iron, sets an agenda for the territory I want to explore. Maps made by accident are the only ones to trust: no agenda, no special pleading, no obligation to show anything that doesn’t matter.

Morning shadows in Brick Lane shaped right-angled triangles: across Rodinsky’s loft in Princelet Street, across the marbled slabs in the premises of A. Elfes, monumental mason. An alphabet of symbols that might be withdrawn in an instant. A confirmation that this was the right day to be on a train.

I went out into the garden, frosty, sharp underfoot. A full moon. I couldn’t pretend to sleep. Even if you don’t watch television, it leaks: it watches you. In pubs, minicab offices, Chinese takeaways. Through the windows of tower blocks. From the bedrooms and kitchens of railway cottages in West Ham, visible from the c2c train. This necklace of not-quite-simultaneous imagery: fear. Even if you avoid newsprint, its gets onto your skin. Pithy summaries on boards outside newsagents’ shops: LONDON THREAT ON SCALE OF SEPT 11. BLAIR FURY AT PEACE MARCH.

Yellow tin and carpets of celluloid flowers.

MURDER. A MURDER OCCURRED AT THE FOOTPATH BETWEEN THE FLOWER GARDEN AND THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND. DID YOU SEE OR HEAR ANYTHING?

Helicopters. Sirens. Car doors. Arguments. Slaps. Screams in the night. It leaks leaks leaks.

I shut my eyes and see a river of cars, stalled. Tanks surrounding airports. Runways on marshland. Drills, earthmovers, pile-drivers under flyovers. Mountains of landfill. But that’s not it. That’s commonplace, nuisance. All sentient beings live with inconvenience, irritation, sudden death (for the few, the others). The nightfear I suffered was more personal (it carried on through the day): someone was stealing my material, ahead of me at every turn, subverting my wives. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster. And he was bringing criticism down on my head — for being what I was. Played out, hackneyed (in every sense); editors couldn’t stifle a yawn. Feisty young women peddled appalling rumours (no matter if they were true).

Then the phone rang. When my defences were down, blood sugar at its lowest level. Ruth? In trouble? Hannah wanting to clarify a year-old argument? Did I say what she thought I said she said and did I mean it — still ?

‘Hey, man. Listen, right. You stitched me up, man.’

Joey.

That was one of his standard 2 a.m. riffs (but not this time). Drug paranoia, the lack of it, kicking in. Joey Silverstein was one of the resources of London, omnipresent, ever-moving, edge of the frame, out of focus: longish hair (a year or two after it went out of fashion), good clothes, proper cut (borrowed, gifted by a friend). The story. The word. Hot . Gossip. He’d read everything, seen all the films. Monster, monster . He never bought a newspaper, but always knew what was in them. You couldn’t slip a reference to Joey into a book of poems, vanity-published in an edition of three copies in Finland. He’d be straight onto it, onto you.

‘Listen, man. I was really hurt …’

His eyes. They showed the hurt, his age, the years on the clock. Otherwise: he was twenty-two. For the duration. Along with his handsome partner, Patsy. Swooping on markets, working the margins, at the party. A chipped glamour. Collars up, lipstick tidemark on American cigarettes. Peake, Punk, Portillo: Joey was there. The new in New Worlds , the young in The Young Ones . And he’d been playing it for thirty years. Production offices, fashionable clinics, scandal for gift and never for sale: Joey the Jumper. Wired. The conduit to the conduit.

‘Let’s do a walk, man.’

That’s how Joey signed off. It didn’t mean a thing.

‘Couple of weeks, right? I’ll give you a call.’

Sometimes it happened. Once every six or seven years. Smithfield. Spitalfields. Fleet Street. Anywhere with coffee stops (regular hits of sugar). Bookshops, monuments. A story. London was a spoken autobiography, told in fragments. ‘That guy in the café, my dad. You’ll have to meet him next time.’

Next time was now. Joey didn’t deal in anything further ahead than three days: which was when he wanted to meet me at Fenchurch Street. I was honoured. He knew somehow, before I’d worked out the details, that I was attempting a book on the A13. We’d discussed David Litvinoff for decades, the scams, the stunts with the tramp Pinter used as a model for The Caretaker , the trips to the country. Now, out of nowhere, Joey was offering to take me to the grave. In Rainham.

Rainham. The marshes. The definitive middle distance between human and non-human landfill. The better life promised for slum-dwelling East Enders. The industrial dereliction visited on ancient riverside villages. I knew the car park, behind the railway station, the villains who used it as a convenient meeting ground: fabulous sightlines, roads spilling off in every direction. I remembered the threats some of them made, if I ever went back.

There’s no copyright on paranoia: where is Joey? Fenchurch Street Station was too good to be true, it was a set, an advertising shoot for Railtrack. Joey had been webbed up with music-business hustlers, pill-peddlers — wouldn’t he have come across the Sleemans? Mocatta owned a recording studio in Harrow Road. Joey probably owed him, favours for favours. Why, suddenly, out of the blue, in the early hours of the morning, would he suggest a trip to Rainham? Mickey O’Driscoll’s favoured disposal ground, black bags on the marshes, heads in ponds. It was on the news, it must be true, they’d just found a man without hands in a park in Dagenham.