Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Where was Joey? Had he bottled it?

The only other clients of c2c were French businessmen — trying to check out sites for a new Disneyland? They had complicated requests for the ticket-peddlers. Who ignored them. As improperly languaged and therefore invisible. There were no women of mystery on the concourse (Conradian commentaries in their hand luggage). No one-way vampires for Grays.

Up the long steps, head bobbing like a cork in a stream of piss, comes Joey. In a trilby, a belted tweed coat. Looking more mature, certainly, but frisky, alive; gesturing, spotting me, suppressed wave, other hand in pocket. That classic London noir swagger (a torpedo out of The Lowlife ): old Whitechapel, Middlesex Street, fast talking, fast thinking, dancing feet. Impossible to buy a suit or coat (postmortem) from one of these boys: wrong size. Broad in shoulder, narrow hips, no legs. Generations of humping sacks, in warehouses and wharfs, do that. Try a jacket, nice cloth, nice cut, and your hands won’t reach halfway down the sleeves. Short-armed, long-headed Scots, lousy teeth (poor diet), can’t aspire to Cockney schmutter. Even if they can wriggle into it, wrap it around them, it looks like fancy dress.

Joey in a hat?

Maybe it was a religious thing, for the cemetery. I knew a bit about that, I had a tribute for Litvinoff in my pocket, a black, limestone pebble. I wouldn’t embarrass myself like that television arts presenter who swept the debris from Chagall’s grave, complaining about the scandalous state in which it was kept. Kicking small stones, the marks of respect. Astonishing behaviour from a man of culture, a Jew (by inheritance and blood).

‘Sorry, son,’ the latecomer said, ‘Joey couldn’t make it. Got the tickets? Liberty what they charge. Any chance of a cuppa. I’m done in.’

Snip Silverstein, the dad. They were like brothers, these two, father and son. There were moments when light drained from their eyes, then back, at a rush, to language. The sustaining force: memory.

‘Joey’s not well.’

Not well? Joey was never what you’d call well’. Sniffles, smoker’s throat, lip sores, scars on the backs of his hands, it didn’t stop him. He should have been dead years ago, the energy he expended, the company he kept: the man was a promo for staying outside the system, unregistered, ex-directory, no library cards. If you’re wounded, walk. Joey, bunged to the eyeballs with viruses, public transport, crowds, kisses, needles, blood exchange, was immune to everything.

‘Heart.’

Impossible. Joey’s vessel was a leather pump. ‘All heart,’ the boys in the caff said. ‘That Joey, all heart. A diamond. Give you the shirt off his back.’ They meant: emotion. Rucks. Embraces. Tears at bedtime. Recollections, fondly delivered, of those known but currently inactive, out of circulation: Derek Raymond, Alexander Baron, Gerald Kersh — and, always, back to him, David Litvinoff (unpublished and therefore unfixed).

Joey had been sauntering down the Embankment, between bridges, this meet and that, so Snip reported, when he felt a bit dicky. Like his tongue, all of a sudden, was too big for his mouth. Jumped a bus. Some schwartzer kid was kicking off, screaming. Did his head in. High Street Ken, he got off, stumbled into a bank, Jock bank, Bank of Scotland. ‘Sit down. Loosen your tie. Have a toffee.’

Joey wakes up in intensive care.

‘Last time we was in ’orspital together, we was lifting a bottle to Joey’s mate, David. The scars on him, my life. Remember that little coloured girl, the nurse? I said to Joey, “If she only knew, right son? What you’re thinking.” He blushed. First time I seen it, red as the flag. Showing ’im up in front of David.’

The best of London: running away from it. Comfortable seats and a woman’s voice (recorded) to let us know the names of the halts, ahead of time. Snip dozed, hat over eyes. I spread Danny the Dowser’s notes, his A13 retrievals, across the table. Before West Ham, it was like a drowning man’s dream: my previous lives flicking past in a pale procession. The wilderness of Tower Hamlets Cemetery where I used to take my sandwiches when I worked for the Parks Department. There was a new (to me) chalk maze laid out on a grassy knoll. Then came the islet of poplar and willow in the muddy reaches of Channelsea Creek, near Three Mills, among the gas holders and sewage beds. The site was mythic, soliciting Tarkovsky (the Zone), or standing in for Bergman’s Fårö. But getting instead the ‘Big Brother’ concentration camp with its perimeter fence and thicket of CCTV cameras.

Danny had nothing much to say about Plaistow and West Ham. Dagenham aroused him. Dagenham and Rainham were remote villages, fisherfolk and esturine pirates settling on a gravel shelf, above the mudline, the fluvial slop. Chalk behind them, into which they burrowed. Lime kilns on the shore. Twin creeks exploited: the Beam at Dagenham and the Ingrebourne at Rainham. Bucolic survivalism, pigs and fertility rituals, to pass the time before Henry Ford took over and colonised the entire landscape. Detroit-on-Thames: rolling mills, dock, railway, major league pollution.

Dagenham: birthplace of Sir Alf Ramsey, Terry Venables, and the Dagenham Girl Pipers (Congregationalists, unsullied). See them march (courtesy of Danny’s video grab) through the Becontree Housing Estate ( c. 1932), in formation, cold knees lifted in perfect synchronicity on a damp Essex morning. Like a Highland regiment in drag — lipstick, aggressively bobbed and permed, stamping off to repel the invading Fascist hordes.

The parents of Byronic (club-footed) entertainer Dudley Moore were the very first tenants of 14 Monmouth Road, near Parsloes Park. They had been willingly exiled to England’s fastest-growing estate (precursor of Thames Gateway). Diseased slum to production-line Arcadia. Your own garden, broad pavements, easy access to Hainault Forest. Downtown Dagenham: childhood refuge of barefoot chanteuse, Sandie Shaw. There’s always something there to remind me . (Thanks, Danny.)

What is it with Dagenham and feet? Danny’s file carried a report from another Norton (A.M.), no relative, into a previously undocumented episode in the life of David Rodinsky (again again). This hack had got hold of Rodinsky’s London A — Z and walked over the feebly marked path through Dagenham. According to Norton, the town was almost entirely populated by hobblers, persons in invalid carriages (silent, deadly). Maybe that was part of the employment package, smashed feet meant more cars.

Everybody in Dagenham seemed to be on sticks, in electrified carts, padding down broad avenues in carpet slippers. The whole district was a homage to the car. Not as a method of transport, but as museum-quality relics. They parked, like votive shrines, along the pavements. Even mangled wrecks were lovingly preserved.

But this, apparently, was young Rodinsky’s Purgatory, his expulsion from Whitechapel. Sent into care, mother incapable, into old-village/new-estate limbo, he never forgot the childhood episode and traced his autobiographical routes onto a pulp-paper map. He made Dagenham a mystery. And Norton (the other one, the literary vampire) dogged his footsteps. Which led to a museum, Valence House, and a primitive artefact. (Photo enclosed.)

Here I discovered, among the portraits of the Fanshawes and the period rooms, a dark wooden figure, which I elected as my spiritual guide. It had been found in the marshes in 1922 and was known as ‘The Dagenham Idol’. It looked African, armless, with asymmetrical peg legs and a large, paddle-shaped head with deeply indented eye-sockets. It was thought to date from somewhere between 2350 and 2140 BC. The thin, diseased legs, good for hopping or punting on a stout stick, proved the authenticity of this figure: the primal Dagenham limper, the ur-gimp.