Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

A sudden view of the road, up on stilts, heading for the river, tunnel space beneath it, the edge of the car park. Space sucked from the scene, a vacuum. Norton — gasping, toppling, hands on brass rail — is trapped in an air pump.

He misses his copy of the Beckmann catalogue, stolen by one of Hannah’s more deranged clients. A multiple-personality journalist (who operated a bookstall).

He calls up: Self-Portrait in Hotel (1932). The artist weighed down by a lead hat. Strangled in a scarf like a rubber tyre. Hands in pockets of coat. Space cropped, titled. Stairs like sheep hurdles. The back way, rear entrance. Keep off the streets, ugly things are happening. There is a woman upstairs, waiting, her wrappered nakedness playing against the painter’s hunched bulk.

In the 1941 Double-Portrait, Max Beckmann and Quappi , there is another hat. The word LONDON visible on the brim. A secret message, coded desire. Love for the city of Blake, seen in 1938, never forgotten. The eros of a sweaty hatband.

The view from the end of the ibis corridor is faithful to Beckmann’s interpretation of space: absolute, terrifying — if it isn’t blocked, doctored by verticals, dressed with telegraph wires, roads, railway lines, ladders. Space is the horror. No limits. Norton seeks relief in casual engineering projects, protective fences, thin trees, the tall chimney of the distant power station. Stalled traffic. Blue lights flashing. If the orbital motorway is fixed, then stars are fixed, gravity is suspended: Norton floats . The transients in the ibis hotel drift through the corridors like paper goldfish.

He makes it: Room 234. Swipe cards never work, not for Norton. He usually sleeps in laundry rooms. He’s in : tight cabin, wall-to-wall bed, TV. Clean. Lovely view of the motorway. Save it. He unpacks his papers, Danny’s files. He fishes out the whisky bottle. Takes a shower.

Under sharp needles of scalding water, Norton is descaled; blue flakes stick to plastic shower curtains. The fishiness of Rainham Marshes is boiled off, pores open, his scalp is massaged. The shower cabinet looks like something seen by a Beckmann fish-eye. Norton’s features sprayed on an expanding beachball, flaws magnified: elongated skull with indentations of the tongs with which he was dragged into the world, unforgiving light. His frequently broken nose. In the cloudy mirror, among the pharmacopoeia of complimentary soaps and unguents, a softness of vision flatters incipient cataracts: he looks bad, but it’s going to get worse.

Stretched on the hard bed, whisky by his side, TV (silent), Norton is about to read, work through Danny’s files, preparing himself for the next stage of the walk. He knows Track isn’t going to come. She’ll bunk with Jimmy. He’s better for her career. A family man. Man of property.

The film’s Macao . A post-war industrial flick made with funds syphoned off from aircraft kickbacks, Commie witch-hunts. Conradian white-suit dreams of the South China Sea exposed to rabid American colonialism: Howard Hughes. Giganticism in place of human imagination, personal fetishes inflated to the size of monstrous hoardings: an adventurer, a torch singer, a boat …

And then they ran out of ideas.

One of those projects where the hook is an interesting past, soul damage (where no past exists): false memories, holes filled with booze, paranoia, cigarette smoke.

They sent for the wrong German (Vienna + Brooklyn): Joseph von Sternberg. Good old Joe. A ghost brought out of retirement. Replaced by Nicholas Ray (before the eye-patch). When all the time, it was obvious to Norton, they should have cabled Max Beckmann. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix. An ocean liner. Think: Beckmann’s Departure (1932). Three screens. Live action. Beckmann and/as Mitchum. The woman with the exposed breasts in the right-hand panel. Max and Howard Hughes, they were made for each other. Hughes was putting all the loose Germans on contract, rocket-propulsion scientists, torture mechanics, men with black books.

The ibis hotel: Room 234. Beckmann’s address on East Nineteenth Street, Manhattan. His last exile.

Track isn’t coming. Beckmann would enjoy Track, her intensity, the camera (carried around like a musical instrument). Her solidity. The red hair.

Norton drinks. He reads. Basildon Plotlands . Then a few pages from a novel by a woman called Barker. Then the next manuscript in the Marina Fountain bundle: incomprehensible verbiage. Vampires in Chafford Hundred, a cannibal stalker (female) loose in the Ikea warehouse at Lakeside.

And, finally, eyes drooping, photocopied sheets attributed to Michael Fordham, but of distinctly ambiguous provenance: reportage or fiction? They called it ‘ the M25 Murder ’.

Norton flipped the page. A typo: dateline ‘April 2003’. The murder hadn’t happened yet. There was still a year to go.

A soft knock at the door. Norton’s attention was engaged, he kept on reading. The story had the ring of truth.

The predatory tabloid’s picture desk had rented a helicopter. They hovered so low over the scene that the tarpaulin which obscured the view had been blown away. The photographer must have used a polarised lens to capture the image through the windscreen of the large American car. It was big news that morning, because the police had shut down the entire north-east section of the motorway.

More knocking. The door — or something outside? From the window, Norton could see the helicopter, the vertical beam of the searchlight, the American car on the hard shoulder.

They had been going out for four years. Ever since they met at Epping Country Club one heady summer night in 1989. She’d seen this boy, absolutely caned, going for it on the dancefloor in his dungarees. He was lean, wiry — long dark hair in a ponytail. Kung fu kid, they used to call him.

The older brother, it appears, owned a martial arts club in Hackney Road and a pub in Woodford Green. The girl was an artist, an art student. A photographer.

Ecstasy was everywhere and it was mad. Twisted a lot of brains. Mates of theirs who had been strictly into lager and football, who had good jobs in the City, earning decent money, all of a sudden started wearing luminous long-sleeve T-shirts, tracksuit bottoms and beatific grins.

The boy, the kung fu kid, burnt his fuses, lost it. The lovers separated, tried again, before she got rid of him.

He helped his big brother put on parties. There had always been plenty of cash around. He’d do a few things at the boozer. Looked after the gym every now and then. Money was never a problem. He had never had anything of his own, except this beautiful young girl, the art student. He lived for training, the gear and the girl. In that order.

You can see it. You can hear the thump of the helicopter blades. You can anticipate the conclusion of a story that is both banal and terrible. The physical excesses, steroids, cocaine. Brain shrinking like microwaved chicken.

A bloke from Walthamstow he knew started a kendo workshop. That was when he got into swords. He started spending serious cash on swords and other ninja paraphernalia. He gave up drinking, started reading books on the codes of Samurai honour.

The door, he had to answer it, bollock naked. Track. Agitated. With Jimmy.

‘Switch channels, now . It’s Ollie. Out there, in the car, with that madman. With Reo.’

You can’t see much on the fuzzy porthole screen of the ibis TV set. They’re stretching a tarpaulin over the Dodge, roping it. The helicopter is staying overhead. The motorway is at a standstill. TV is just a mirror of what’s happening outside the window.