Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

They were coming out onto the streets, dazed fans, with that shriven, after-church look: mute, slapping their hands against their sides to get the blood circulating, clouds of pink talcum and flea powder. There were a surprising number of kids, blank generation slackers, arms hooped for missing skateboards. Was Max suddenly hip on the coast? Had he done an album with the Manic Street Preachers? I wanna tell you a story . Jos hadn’t kept up with the retro scene. He remembered Joan Collins in the early Fifties — The Square Ring , written by Robert Westerby — before she decided to stay there for the rest of her mortal span, fifty-three and holding.

This Bygraves thing needed somebody like Westerby (leftist, prole, strong on detail) to lick it into shape. Jack Warner, Robert Beatty, Maxwell Reed, Bill Owen, Sid James. Half of them economic migrants, colonials on the make. The other half music-hall turns. Men die, but Joan Collins is fifty-three for ever and doing Nöel Coward in the West End. A lamia in a black basque. With pink ribbons. Pinched flesh. Loose arms.

‘Now, now you go. Please .’

Achmed, smoking hard, waved him on. But Kaporal couldn’t move. A black road. Puddles of yellow light. Cypress trees on the cliff path. A sticky pine scent, after rain. Nasty looking razor-wire spinners. Meshed windows. A sudden block of light as the stage door opens.

‘I’ll be Maxwell Reed.’

Wasn’t Reed married to somebody? To Collins? Probably, most of them were. Or Diana Dors? Cuckolded, of course. Irish. Appeared with Dors in Good Time Girl . 1948. From a novel by Arthur La Bern. Night Darkens the Street . They don’t do poetry like that any more.

‘Go go go! You go!’

Was it based on a real newspaper event, that film? Yank in Britain on crime spree? GI and an English girl who saw themselves as Bonnie and Clyde? La Bern had a background in journalism. Bad karma in that loop between reportage and fantasy, Odeon sweethearts on a killing spree. Flashbacks. Through those wobbly, nitrous oxide visuals, a dying man revises a wasted life. In pin-sharp focus. Involuntary flashbacks: the story of the Forties. Of Kaporal.

Drin is shaking him. Achmed’s going mental. The streets are completely deserted and the celebrity, unaccompanied, is standing on the kerb, toking on a very fat cigarette. Kaporal remembers how to turn the key. Putting on the headlights is beyond him, Drin helps out. In the masterplan, Bygraves would be tucked away in the capacious boot of Reo Sleeman’s Dodge. This motorised bucket has no boot; enough space, at a pinch, to stack just one of the seven dwarfs — if you folded him, carefully, like an army blanket.

Achmed made his oblique approach. Bygraves listened. He didn’t seem fazed at finding his usual conveyance chopped in half. The man was tired, coming down from all that twinkling, storytelling, hoofing and crooning. A trouper. Old school. Singalonga Max: the prototype of mid-Atlantic man.

The Super Furry Animals T-shirt was unexpected — but, hey … Max was showbiz to the soles of his lifts. He had a reputation as a dresser, a pro who knew his value, brusque with underlings who couldn’t match his own high standards. This must be the chill hour: baggy denim jacket lettered with: TERRE HAUTE PENITENTIARY. HARD TIME / HIGH TIME. The sneakers were unlaced and none too fresh.

Max looked ten — fifteen? — years younger than Kaporal expected: thick hair, nice smile, walnut tan. He looked familiar in the way stars do, faces from tele who infiltrate your consciousness like thieves in the night.

They had a bit of a problem, the Albanians, working Max into the car. He took the seat next to the driver, to Kaporal, leaving the ledge at the back to Achmed and Drin — who squashed together like a Siamese Twin novelty act. Two heads on a single contorted trunk.

‘Nos da, Jos boy,’ Max said, offering Kaporal a hit on his herbal cigarette. ‘You still alive, bach? When was it, ’73? Blake’s Hotel? The interview for Time Out . So what happened, then, to the photos you promised to send?’

Max bilingual? Spanish picked up from his pool boy? Didn’t sound like Spanish. Albanian? Was there a living Albanian language, Indo-European? Nos da . Nos da was the wrong Max, Max Boyce. The clowns had got the wrong comic. Most of the population, this side of the Severn, would pay good money to get rid of Boyce.

Even the Balkan bandits looked shocked when Max started to fiddle with a three-paper roll-up. Kaporal knew about Bob Mitchum’s habits, brown bags of dope, intravenous tequila, tumblers of straight vodka, but that was Hollywood, Confidential magazine, a bad-boy franchise to maintain. One of the English elite, a diamond of family entertainment, practising the same self-destructive indulgences, was taking a mid-Atlantic stance too far.

‘Albi. The name you had to use at Blake’s. For the interview. Remember, Jos? Two rings, put the phone down. Ask for Albi. I loved all that.’

He cackled, coughed. Spat out of the window.

Albi.

The man with a dozen passports. Multiple-identity felon. Albigensian. Manichean: darkness and light. Anagram of alibi: I, Albi . The stupid fuckers. They’d misread the poster outside the White Queen, misunderstood the minicabber. Not Max but Marks . Achmed had grabbed Mr Geniality, the spliffhead businessman and all-round Celtic charmer, Howard Marks. The smoking man’s Tom Jones. Mr Nice.

Marks was Kaporal’s last gig for Time Out . The photos had been mislaid. Jos’s stories were always photo-led (polyfilling gaps between snaps). And not just the photographs, the camera. They tried to charge him. He moved on. Creative differences. Filed a couple of pieces for City Limits , unpaid, then relocated to outer-rim TV (Highways Agency — involuntary retirement after drink-driving charge). Unfairly, he blamed Howard. And that long, long afternoon in Blake’s Hotel.

The pitiless affability of a man who pleaded guilty to everything. With a twinkle in his eye.

There’s a point, Kaporal decided, beyond which nice is too nice, arteries fur up, your mouth tastes like you’ve barbecued your own tongue.

‘Kabul, boy,’ Howard said, ‘navel of the world. All my schemes start there. Lovely climate, lovely people. Statues of Buddha carved from the cliffs. Magic. A rocket-launcher under every market stall.’

The virus entered Kaporal’s system. And he had never, subsequently, shaken it loose. Marks as a spook. He kept a place on the coast, Sussex.

‘Know Nicky van Hoogstratten?’ Howard asked. ‘Everybody does. Nicky is Brighton.’

Kaporal, as soon as he got back to Streatham, checked the file: property man, sharp dresser. Old hippies, hanging around Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop, reckoned Nicky based himself on Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character ( The English Assassin ): a dangerous dandy. Or was it the other way round? Hoogstratten and the Weavers, they ran the town. James Weaver was old enough to have been sentenced to death: for kidnapping and murder.

‘Hoogstratten’s a thug, slum landlord. Stamp collector,’ Kaporal said, on the phone, getting back to Marks. Answering the unspoken challenge.

‘Oh aye, quite right. Keep clear.’

Hoogstratten was one of the reasons Kaporal settled further to the east, in Hastings, out of harm’s way — with the geriatric farms, charity shops, de-energized bohemians.

Kabul, arms, drugs, oil, John Lennon, van Hoogstratten, rogue IRA, Mexicans, MI6, phony films that were never made: Marks’s yarns (stand-up routines in rehearsal) were very like late-Mitchum, shrivelled-brain delirium, paranoid-visionary riffs, punctuated by inappropriate laughter. Reducing them both, interviewer and interviewee, to boneless husks.