Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

The glass is smeared, clean it as often as you like. Something wrong with my eyes: no middle distance. Heavy clouds coming in on the curve. Toy boats, twelve miles out, on their superhighway voyages.

There were other rooms. From the kitchen I could gaze back on the Old Town, the cliffs, the pier; the sun, on good days, rose over that skeletal structure, polishing its black bones. Every new morning, light returned, a golden rule across the crests of wavelets. I stood at the sink for hours, at the day’s end, when the fading sun had moved on towards Pevensey Bay and Beachy Head. I watched the lines of traffic, red lights and dirty gold. I noticed windows, shadows of people, blue television screens; the occasional solitary came out to test the evening air. There were always couples, all ages, moving along the seafront. Drinking schools kept their heads down, in caves and shelters beneath the promenade, unrowdy, working hard at the complex business of taking the edge off things.

You see? It’s impossible. Flaccid prose dragging itself across the page. The Conradian era is over, leisurely paragraphs, tracking shots punctuated by elegantly positioned semi-colons. English as a third language, after Polish and French. Time to read Flaubert, Turgenev.

Conrad did. And Henry James. They lived around here, down the coast. I remember something Iris Murdoch wrote (in character) about liking women in novels by James and Conrad because they were ‘flower-like’. And miles from reality, anyone met or known. ‘Guileless, profound, confident and trustful,’ say the writers. Deep as the sea. ‘Inarticulate, credulous and simple,’ replies Murdoch. ‘Unbalanced by the part they have to act.’

I can’t do local colour, topography, scene setting. I’m just not interested. A room is a room. The ‘film essayist’ Jamie Lalage, who tried his best to synthesise one of my baggier fictions into twenty-seven minutes of deathwatch television, limitation as the sincerest form of flattery, told me that he moved house, an arc around north London, on a regular basis. ‘You can get one book out of anywhere. Even Willesden. Especially Willesden.’

He’s right. Consider London Bridge (no UK edition) by L.-F. Céline. House of mad inventor in suburbs. Wild trajectory, through Soho, to the still-functioning chaos of the docks. Or, bypassing the drudgery of writing the thing yourself, you can always inspire books in others: Dennis Nilsen, Scottish conceptualist, body sculptor, mass murderer. Show-stopping footage, from the fat-clogged drain, by a miniaturised camera on wheels. Unedited, it would have walked away with the Turner Prize. That’s more Willesden than any reasonable culture is ever going to absorb.

Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? Read the press. ‘Bohemian Atmosphere Attracts Literary Gent’. The Observer , 17 January 2003. The Hastings and St Leonards Observer , that is.

And that’s where I’m going now. Down to the corner shop, the Purser’s Cabin. To pick up a copy for the scrapbook.

Five rooms: kitchen (overlooking Old Town), sitting room (table, deckchair, combined TV/video — for video only), bedroom (mattress on floor), work room (table, antique word-processor, orange boxes filled with books), shower cupboard. The Cunard is a Thirties liner, part of the package that comes with the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and much of Frinton: alien notions imported by exiled Germans and Russians, Mickey Mouse Bauhaus. Crumbling, expensive to maintain, destructive of the original fabric, rapidly adapted to proper Englishness: sticky brown paint in lifts, Ali-Baba-on-acid unmagic carpets, deck walk (around flat roof) given over to radio masts for minicabs and cellphone boosters.

Easy to negotiate. Easy to remember where you are (waking to traffic noise, sea on shingle, gull scream). Easier to leave behind.

By lift or on the stairs (seven flights), I never met another human. Cunard Court, as they always say, the visiting journalists, would give the off-season resort from The Shining a run for its money. Steadicam corridors through which the undead can’t be bothered to promenade. Viewpoints, on each landing, looking straight into the rusty cliff face.

Hiding out in just such a place, mad Jack Nicholson got to spend quality time at the typewriter. Hammering out his Borgesian finger exercises, his concrete poetry repetitions. (In my opinion, nobody’s asking, Cunard Court is more like Rosemary’s Baby. Brownstone satanism gone white with shock, generations of seagull shit.)

My morning stroll, under the columns, was a delight. Sticky piss stains in doorways. Oddball commercial enterprises: furniture that looked as if it would eat you alive (Naugahyde recliners to be buried in), wedding dresses for American-size brides, leaky wet suits (reduced), fundamentalist electrical repairs, incense, bowel remedies, cheap booze and a boarded-up (rates refusenik) Dr Who ephemera franchise. An unfunded heritage operation that peddled the back story (mouse mats with maps of James Burton’s St Leonards), lectures on local history (Monday mornings only, Easter to September) by a whistling lay preacher.

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LIVE FOOD. REALLY CHEAP PRICES: CRICKETS, LOCUSTS, MEALWORMS & WAX WORMS.

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The ads in the newsagent’s window were an accurate reflection of local culture: benevolent occultism, used white goods (wreckers’ plunder), New Age exercise bicycles.

I don’t know what I’ve done to rate a mention in the fright sheet, a slack week between machete raids on offies, pitched battles — Russians and Afghans — down by the pier (homage to Mods and Rockers, Qnadrophenia ), wrong-man-shot-in-drugs-raid and Tories call for probe into property sales.’ I hadn’t enjoyed such a mix of high-baroque actuality (rendered in two-finger prose) and shotgun morality since the golden era of The Hackney Gazette . Pit bulls and property supplements.

This is how it happened. Hastings is an elephants’ graveyard for science fiction and fantasy writers. I’ve heard the names of the famous living ones (the published): Storm Constantine (a Moorcock collaborator) and Christopher Priest (aka John Luther Novak, Colin Wedgelock, etc.). A town of slippery identity, clearly. A place for disinvention, winding down, cultivating writers’ block as a definitive condition. Earlier romancers included: Aleister Crowley ( Moonchild ), Sir Henry Rider Haggard, George MacDonald and the aunt-visiting Lewis Carroll. I discount the excursionist Charles Dickens. He went everywhere.

A sharp-eyed journalist, contacts in outer limits websites and subterranean genre magazines that specialised in not appearing, caught on to the fact that I’d been forced to abandon London. He was too young to remember anything I’d published, but the relevant information could still be dredged up in a long morning on the telephone.

We met in a pub in the district known as Mercatoria — pleasant, unthemed, big tables, all the real ales required and requested by the smocks and beards. This was a two-way thing, he might fill a corner of the page and I might acquire a useful contact, background information on some of the crimes, corruptions, local mysteries that I would attempt to shape into a saleable narrative. We came together, therefore, with no great expectations on either side. He was on time, nursing a pint of orange juice and lemonade, and I, panting, was ten minutes late, after a detour around a set of steps that were up for renovation.

A vicar strangled in the bath and then butchered (axe and saw) by his teenage lodger. The paedophile riviera: the Observer , London version, revealed that ‘as many as 30 child sex offenders live in the Hastings area alone’.