Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘I don’t have any papers.’

He lied. To the officials. The half-hearted challenge. Preparing his response to a question that hadn’t been asked. They weren’t interested. They were acting for the cameras, tipped-off news crews. Something was being done about terror and Thames Gateway, about roads and men with moustaches who pitched up, uninvited, outside respectable Essex hotels.

Norton had nothing but papers. A rucksack ballasted with pulp. He had Danny the Dowser’s copious files: Rodinsky and Dagenham, Captain Amies and Rainham, Sandie Shaw and Terry Venables. Ford’s motorplant and Ford Madox Ford on The Soul of London .

Great fields are covered with scraps of rusty iron and heaps of fluttering rags; dismal pools of water reflect on black waste grounds the dim skies. That all these things, if one is in the mood, one may find stimulating, because they tell of human toil, of human endeavour towards some end with some ideal at that end. But the other thing is sinister, since the other influences are working invisible, like malign and conscious fates, below the horizon …

He will almost certainly not know that, in the marshes round Purfleet, he has factories larger, more modem, better capitalised, more solvent, and a landscape more blackened and more grim.

He was tired. A bed, any bed, would do. Better to dream this place, Purfleet, Thurrock, than experience it.

So much experience and so little of it experienced, lived through, understood. Nights, like this, when he couldn’t sleep and came naked from bed, to pee or to drink, walking unsteadily to the window. Nose squashed against cold glass, former novelist, A.M. Norton, watched the bad cinema of the arrests in the car park.

He laid aside the book, his personal Gideon bible; he took it everywhere: Beckmann. Heavy-paper catalogue edited by Sean Rainbird (good name), from an exhibition visited, for the duration, on a daily basis. Beckmann and the ibis hotel were made for each other.

Norton sipped watered whiskey. There had been something of the sort, cars, guns, on television — news show, cop show. Time was running, counterclockwise, down the plughole, navel fluff, cigar butts, the oaty bits your digestion can’t dissolve, washed from shitty fingers.

ASYLUM-SEEKER GANG SNATCH CELEB. The plot had been sold out, obviously. A farce. Albanians under observation from the off. “ That’s why I gave up fiction,’ Norton thought. ‘The banality. Everything’s been done. Realism, such as it is, reprised as a game show. Big Brother at the Adelphi Hotel, Hastings. One lucky immigrant gets a passport, the rest go back to Sangatte.’

Tough to live, aged sixty, in a culture dedicated to trashing memory, elective amnesia — the back catalogue of Norton’s Hollywood classics raided for remakes, ghost shows with grinning imbeciles, feelgood conclusions. You have to travel to somewhere as obscure and uncooked as the ibis hotel at West Thurrock to exist in real time: the right-hand panel of one of Max Beckmann’s gloomier triptychs.

West Thurrock is where bad things happen, limbs hacked off, chained women, bondage corsets, stinking fish. Beckmann’s myth stuff, kings and golden children, is out on the river. Past, present, future: three windows on the third floor of the ibis hotel. Revolve your head, slowly: river, motorway, chalk quarry. When society matrons came calling, wives of Party members, directors of I G Farben, Beckmann would only show them the river panel of his triptych, the one based on Shakespeare , The Tempest. The side-panels, in their articulated cruelty, were left in the cupboard.

Where was Hannah? Norton’s conscience, his lover.

He’d come to the ibis for an assignation, a meet in the cafeteria, a bottle of chilled wine among the potted plants, a conversation. Hannah could, so she’d intimated that night at the Travelodge, help with his blockage, his inability to put pen to paper. A nice situation for a young photogenic millionaire novelist, moved sideways into three- page film outlines, no use to Norton. Silence, poverty. Too much world, not enough words. No time.

Hannah arrived late. Road at a standstill. Cab abandoned. Train from Rainham. Walk from West Thurrock. Hopelessly lost. Stockings torn, shoes ruined. Propositioned by unidents and glue-sniffers. No food left: lifeless sandwiches, lettuce like a bin of snotty tissues.

‘ Could we go to your room? You do have a room? ’

She asked.

She couldn’t get back to London. The gridlock scenario had finally happened. Norton gave her the number, went upstairs for a shower — to wait while she made a phone call. The cafeteria had been taken over by a family of transients, black bags, rattled husband, exhausted kids, two women. One of them with a camera.

Norton, abandoned by the muse, scoured his body, drank weak whisky, stroked the glossy cover of his Beckmann, fell asleep. No Hannah. Hours later, painfully tumescent, he waddled to the window.

A shock to himself — and probably to the cops, out there in the cold night, at the scene of the non-crime. The car. The spread-eagled miscreants. The pressmen.

He saw: that other Norton creature, the one with the purple rucksack. The pest from the Travelodge. His double, his doppelgänger. His uncommissioned portrait. The ugly walker who ram-raided Dorian Gray’s attic. The fetch who sodomised his inspiration. Foreclosed his memory bank. Ripped off his research. Stole his women.

He’d warned the clown in Docklands, tried to shove his mendacious reflection back into the mirror. Thurrock was the end of it, the end of London. By the time he returned to the coast, the second Norton would be buried on the marshes. Death would have his eyes.

I saw the man with the cock standing at the third-floor window. But I didn’t believe him. Do you know about tulpas, psychic offprints? My malignant duplicate was associated with cheap, off-highway hotels. He didn’t walk, he didn’t drive. He hung about, picking up women, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations: flogging my stories before I could finish them. One question: was he the tulpa? Or was I?

Tired, hungry, confused, I found Jimmy at the bar, checking his wristwatch by pretending to fix loose cuffs, waiting, thick-tongued, for the first drink. His wife rounded up the kids. Track made annotations in her notebook.

‘We’re meeting Danny tomorrow. In the Plotlands. He’s taking us to Canvey. You coming?’

I drank with them. I watched the screen, weather systems, blocked roads, terror rehearsals. Tibetans believe that it is the mind that creates the human body. We move among masses and shadowy shapes that are not mere hallucinations, they float, they subscribe to the theory of gravity. They obey natural laws. They are as real as the mind that forms them. The body we delineate does not vanish at the moment we recognise that it has been brought into being by an act of mind. I am here . I will hold this glass in my hand, even if the man upstairs refuses to allow me into his world.

When Jimmy returned to the bar with our written orders (that’s how they worked it, knowing that the worst drunks would be incapable of scribbling legible instructions), I took Track’s hand. Surprising her. Causing her to laugh and cover her mouth.

‘Could we go upstairs? There’s something I want to discuss — in private.’

She slipped me a swipe card. I pushed back my chair, picked up the heavy rucksack. Made for the back stairs.

The stairwell is cavernous, dark, unused. The steps are stone. Norton listens to out-of-synch sound, footfall, the feeling of touching the next step, quitting it, before sound reaches him. Vibration precedes confirmation. A fire door separates him from the corridor that contains Track’s bedroom.