Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Give Joey a bell,’ Snip said. ‘He was there, the service. Me, I can’t stand phones.’

I’m waved towards a Battle of Britain instrument. The kind you have to crank. Joey knows. Voice weak, distant. He has the letter and the number, off by heart. I have to get out of that office. The year of death — 1975 — is missing from the file. The binding is loose, a few pages have vanished. The official is perplexed. I don’t need directions. I know exactly where the grave will be. I’ve dreamt it, time and again. Joey standing beside me, smoking a cigarette.

Near the end of a row, grey — morning shadows from Brick Lane made solid — the same right-angled triangle. Headrest. Portland stone pillow.

IN EVERLASTING MEMORY OF DAVID LITVINOFF. SON OF THE LATE SOLOMON & ROSE LEVY. BORN 3rd FEBRUARY 1928. DIED 8th APRIL 1975. SADLY MISSED BY HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS. SHALOM DAVE.

Shalom. I add my pebble to the pattern already on the grave. Six small stones, local, sandy, arranged at random; four in a group, centred, and two away at the edge.

A quiet and ordered place, unnoticed behind high walls, padlocked gates. Uniform memorials, nothing excessive. A tractor preparing the ground, to the west, for future burials. A faint blue line of pylons revealing the position of the A13. Bare trees. High thin clouds in a bright sky. The temperature beginning to drop. Time to get Snip back to the train.

He’s gone . Not there. Wandered off. He was standing alongside me when I took the camera out — perhaps that offended him? There might have been other relatives, friends, he wanted to visit; pay his respects.

Snip isn’t a big man, not as tall as the gravestones. I walk up and down the central avenue, checking the aisles and tributaries: no Snip, no visitors, nobody. The sound of the tractor. I’ll have to try the office.

The coincidence of a name catches my eye: Silverstein. IN LOVING MEMORY OF SAMUEL SILVERSTEIN. DIED 23rd DECEMBER 2002. MAY HIS DEAR SOUL REST IN PEACE.

The skullcapped official, overwhelmed by his allergy, racked with sneezes and splutters, is still brushing through the pages, running a thick finger up and down the columns. He won’t give up.

‘One day, God willing, all this will be in the computer.’ He waves me to the phone, holding up a hand to refuse my offer of payment.

‘Joey,’ I said, ‘listen. I’m really sorry. I seem to have mislaid your father. He can’t have gone far. I won’t come back till I’ve found him.’

Joey’s voice is very faint. He says something about how cold it is, he can’t go out until the weather improves.

‘My dad, man. He died just before Christmas. He came out of Rossi’s, sat down on the pavement, died. Gone before they could call an ambulance. I still can’t believe it.’

Gulls take flight, hundreds of them, from the field that’s being improved by Tarmac Quarry Products, wheeling against the sinking sun. Long shadows on a narrow, mud-spattered lane. I have to go on. I made my promise to Joey. The perimeter road, between cemetery and gravel pits, loops back to the old A13, and then, by a complicated junction, to the new. I would walk, no choice, towards West Thurrock; maybe link up with Jimmy and Track at the ibis hotel.

If Snip was a fetch, a fictional device to get me moving, he had served his purpose. I’ll risk the Sleeman brothers and their territory: Purfleet pubs showcasing darts, Lakeside retail park, new maisonettes in Chafford Hundred where they butcher unlucky associates with electric carving knives. After Basildon, the heat was off. I looked forward to a Canvey Island detour, a pedestrian circumnavigation of the flood defences and caravan parks. Then: Southend. The finish. Thorpe Bay, Shoeburyness. A heritaged nuclear power station.

Lurching lorries spill toxic waste in clouds of yellow-grey dust. Poisoned hedgerows. Bark peeled from trees. The only vegetation is the ubiquitous plastic sheet, stained viscera crucified on thorn bushes.

Think: Hell Drivers .

Stanley Baker, Patrick McGoohan, Herbert Lorn, William Hartnell. Lumberjack-shirted realism (British homage to Warner Brothers B-features). Rattletraps jockeying on short-haul tours to quarries — much like these: Havering Aggregates. Didn’t O’Driscoll (and Mocatta) own a fleet? They worked the golf-course scam. Planning permission for leisure developments leading to apocalyptic war zones of landfill holes and steaming bunkers. (Blacklisted American leftist Cy Endfield, the director of Hell Drivers , had to be credited as: C. Raker Endfield. 1957. Another era entirely. Available only to those prepared to risk Launders Lane.)

Reunited with the displaced A13, its verges, walking was once again a possibility: a glorious spread. Horses. Transport caff with net curtains.

Think: James Curtis and They Drive by Night .

READY FOR WORK. TAXED & TESTED. Resprayed Transits at £225. Tinkers’ camp (on a traffic island). A roadhouse, supporting the firemen, and offering: LIVE GAELIC GAMES.

The new, improved, slipstreamed A13 is up on stilts, an elegant preamble to the M25 and the QEII Bridge. Traffic at a standstill. Nothing unusual in that. Silence . A few cars out of Rainham, burning rubber, not knowing what’s ahead of them. Then … nothing. Ticking engines. I swear I can hear running water — a hose in the lorry park, the Ingrebourne?

An evening panorama. Frozen like a dream. Oneiric omnipotence: the stalled circuit of the M25, London’s heartblood. Everything, it’s clear, plays into the loop. That motorway circuit is the great contemporary narrative, track it if you can. All the tributaries, arterial roads, dual carriageways, links and runoffs, are supplementary chapters, additional files. Dreams born of dreams.

Then I hear, in the distance, in stereo, the sirens. Police cars coming from both sides of the river. Converging on some unknowable accident. The mess of blood and oil, shattered glass. Wind in the wires.

Ebiz. E-biz.

‘I’m not going to talk about it,’ Livia said. ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve nothing to say, nothing.’

Ebiz?

The asylum-seeker, the one with the moustache, followed them into the street. He was knuckling the nearside window. ‘Ebiz?’ He tapped his gold watch, held up five fingers.

Ebiz, Ebiz.

Reo Sleeman was a nodding dog, the spring gone in his neck. He beat his head against the wheel until there was a red groove in the skin, a sort of McEnroe headband.

For Livia, a decision taken. The last time, the very last time. She would take this ride, back to London, see Track.

‘I am never ever getting in a car with you again.’

Seeing the Basildon boy on the coast, in daylight, was quite a shock. Livia twisted the driving mirror to check her hair. The moustache, the irate man from the pasta place, wouldn’t disappear. He gestured with a bent arm, his watchface thrust at Reo. He shouted, with greater urgency. ‘Ebiz.’

In the soft cell, the padding of the American car, Reo’s body heat was oppressive, syrup. Like burnt hair in honey. Long hours on the road, held up by lights, diggers, accidents, weight of traffic, left a stringent sourness in his denim jacket. Stiff on him, freestanding, a skinny boy bulked by weights and steroids.

His face, there, in the mirror strip, staring at itself, through itself, eyes like pinholes. Cheekbones. Hatchet-shaped. Julia Margaret Cameron’s Iago , Livia thought. The Italian model, Angelo Colarossi, used as the cover image for the catalogue, the recent Cameron show at the National Portrait Gallery.

Old brown leather, slightly tinted windows. Reo’s car had a period varnish. The interior was beautiful, curvy, plush as a customised hearse. Reo was beautiful too. The mask of him, pale flesh stretched over a hot light bulb, stubbled. The effect Cameron achieved, inadequate lenses, sunbeams through shutters, of focus loss, slippage. A concentration so intense that it blurs and becomes painterly. The intimate portrait. Human face as landscape.