Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

The joke had soured. Kaporal went to work for Norton, a burnt-out ghost in a seaside flat. Who wanted him on the case, ear to ground. Hanging out in pubs. Gathering intelligence the hack could cobble together into a book that would sell enough copies to get him back to town. Instead of which, Kaporal found a sweating wheel in his hands. The car, heady with sweet smoke, was driving itself through the Dartford Tunnel.

Under the river. River of no return.

What did Mitchum say, the one time he refused a brawl? ‘Never fight when you see death in the other man’s eye,’ Kaporal caught, and was transfixed by, a vision of Norton — an old man staring blankly out to sea, death lodged in the corner of his one good eye, waiting. Waiting for a call in a room with no phone.

Howard had nodded out, joint still fixed between smiling lips. Achmed told Kaporal where to come off the motorway, down the ramp, Junction 31, circle back under the road, and straight into the parking bays outside the ibis hotel. By the flagpoles, the spiky plants in woodchip beds.

Then they sat, nobody talking, timing the intervals between Marks’s gentle snores. Achmed texted a message on his mobile. Drin played with his hair charm. Kaporal watched the windows of the roadside hotel. He saw them as a chessboard. He worked on his moves — as lights went on and off.

Checkmate. Endgame.

The windows were like hundreds of TV monitors, playing realtime films, synthesising boredom. Sensors hidden in tarmac firing small dramas, sexual fantasies of long-distance hauliers enacted in a dream hotel. Reveries inspired by topshelf service-station novels: underwear models, whips, boots, brass beds, designed after the style of the New Orleans brothel photographer, Bellocq. Without the pain. The scratches. The gold brown of alchemised river mud, tobacco. The blood of slaves.

A book by Michael Ondaatje.

Who is Bellocq.

He was a photographer. Pictures. They were like … windows.

Louis Malle made a Bellocq film: Pretty Baby . With Bergman’s cameraman, Nykvist. Barbara Steele was in it. Kaporal met her once in Rome, nice girl. The profile was never written, he drifted on to a festival in Palermo. Then back with some German bums to Cologne. Malle wanted Mitchum for Atlantic City , but it was far too late. The point where elegy turns sour. Oxygen mask, emphysema, shrunken head.

We know too much — of trivia, gossip of our gods, the lazy Valhalla of private members’ clubs, red plush, gold-plated spittoons. It would have been better, Kaporal thought, to have stuck with the image on the screen: young Mitchum in Out of the Past , old Mitchum in Dead Man , pained Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle , sleepwalking Mitchum in much of the rest. The architecture of the thing. What happens outside the limits of the screen is none of our business. Kaporal wanted his ignorance back. No knowledge, false knowledge, of the actor’s life, the bile of racism, conspiracy theories. The day he first set foot in Bob Hope’s mansion. Alcohol is a bad voice when it gets out, takes over. Jack Kerouac’s wounded tenderness spilling acid, splashing solder in his own lap.

Mitchum’s bulk turns to ash. They cook him. The family — plus Jane Russell (Howard Hughes’s most monumental engineering project) — put out from Santa Barbara in a rented boat. Dust on the waves, in the air. Gritty grey powder on water. Dispersed, brought to shore. A small contribution to the landmass of California.

They were being watched, filmed. The conspirators. From behind muslin. From bushes. From that too-clean Transit van out in the road. Kaporal had an instinct for these things. Treachery, he majored in it.

A curtain, four floors up, twitched. A naked man — other figures, clothed, behind him — was staring down. Norton . Translated. In the wrong place. Staring at the motorway as if, somehow, without prior warning, his sea had frozen over.

Harsh blue light. Loudhailers. Hooded men with flak-jackets, hair-trigger paramilitaries, surround the car.

And limping into the frame, this brilliant pool of artificial day, is a man with a rucksack. Norton. Another Norton . Equally distressed. Ignored by the gun-toting heavies, men with cyclopean lamps fixed to their heads. Coalminers up from the underworld.

Norton plods on, and through, into the shadows. Towards the hotel. Which never sleeps. Another chapter. Fate revised.

Through a nightland more object-led than expressionist, Norton dragged himself, his purple rucksack. Emotions, his emotions, were unreachable: replete hunger, sweating cold, aching knee, sore spine. Black charcoal outlines defined stalled cars and lorries. Framed travellers profiled in their pods. Snaking columns of dead smoke. A slick sky made from shoals of lurid fish (river of soles): their eyes set too closely together, glass beads anticipating pain.

Norton walked, walked.

Necessary heat was conjured by images of misplaced wives (the lovely Ruth, the lively Hannah); by pre-visions of the carnival family of Jimmy Seed, their black rubbish bags, plastic trumpets, tin drums, layers of summer and winter clothing: orange fur over polyester, plastic boots, purple stockings.

Norton walked towards the ibis, a roadside hotel. A museum of memory. A gallery where guilty artists were confronted by the evidence of their art.

A brothel of the senses.

Jimmy Seed: the tight skin of a former drinker, his trembling hand reaching out for an empty bottle. The artist, Track, a tall girl slumped in a hard chair, at the window table: nanny, pupil, surrogate mistress. Mistress of magic. Flaming hair. High, smooth forehead. Amused smile.

Track and Seed were waiting for guidance from a man who might never arrive. The ibis was a frontier post (like that town of prostitutes on the borders of the old Czechoslovakia).

Walking down what had once been the A13, and was now a detour, a wrong decision at a roundabout, a penitential drudge into Purfleet, Norton lost the arch of the QEII Bridge, the lights of the cars. Tonight’s accident had brought the road to a standstill. Nothing untoward in stasis. London’s orbital motorway had absorbed the congestion-charge refuseniks of the city. A satellite band of black cabs making their circuit between Epping Forest and the great metropolitan railway termini. A necklace of hammered metal around the throat of London, its ugly sprawl.

For a short, good time, Norton enjoyed river breezes: rough grass, Armada fire beacon, cargo sheds. Gliding tankers, midstream, out in the darkness.

Then: helicopters, sirens. Something exciting in the way of meat and carnage, roadside mayhem, was being enacted, up there, on the concrete pier of the motorway.

Norton relished: the silence of the marshes.

Cross the tracks at Purfleet Station, enter the principality of Count Dracula (oil tanks, razorwire, pulp paper yards), and you are implicated. In on the crime, the highway accident. A photofit monster. A suspect in the event that brought the nexus of roads (M25, A13, West Thurrock Arterial, Purfleet By-Pass) to a troubled immobility.

Andy Norton, broken pedestrian, the only moving cog in the wheel of transcendence. Another return to nineteenth-century gothic, he thought, to scientific speculation: invisible men, post-apocalyptic survivors, mutants, suspect prophets condemned to live out their own fictions.

Horror on the motorway: an event horizon. The dimly lit block of the ibis, the port hotel, is an anchored space platform.

Walking, limping, out of the darkness that shielded and protected him, Norton blinked, closed his eyes against the shock of this overpowering ring of torches and tungsten. Paramilitaries. Rapid-response units had surrounded, with their usual excesses, one small, dirty, over-occupied car.