Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Nobody more alone,’ muttered the fresh-faced journo. Who reported that rundown hotels and boarding houses were being exploited as holding pens for special-category prisoners released from Maidstone and Albany. The Wonderland child-porn ring, recently broken, had been traced back to emails sent out from a Hastings computer. Hastings, in receipt of various improvement grants and Euro funds, saw its future in terms of media enterprises attracted by the provision of broadband internet providers.

I fed him, in return, some tired stuff about drift bohemia, labyrinthine streets, cheap and none-too-cheerful bookshops, periphery as centre.

‘Will Hastings become the new Brighton?’ he asked.

‘God forbid. With luck it might become old Hackney.’

Here was the article:

A once familiar name in the literary world is living in St Leonards after falling in love with the town.

A.M. Norton, 60, is making a new life on the coast after buying a flat in stylish Cunard Court.

Mr Norton is the author of several novels, hailed by the critics, and set in the smoky streets of London, where he uncovers layers of the capital’s dark history.

Mr Norton first visited Hastings as a book dealer in the 1970s and has been attracted to the town since then.

He said: ‘I need a new beginning, virgin territory. In London, I am written out. I’m sure that Hastings will provide an abundance of mysteries among its steep steps and narrow alleyways.’

Although Mr Norton is not entirely convinced by the town’s ambitions to become a media centre, he does think the future for Hastings is bright.

He said: ‘The potential for regeneration is massive.’

Mr Norton’s current project, untitled, is partly set in Hastings and takes in everything from the history of Victorian photographers and painters to the killing of the Reverend Freestone, the friendly vicar who was dismembered in 2001.

A.M. Norton, 60. Sixty miles out. Leaning on the balcony at the stern of the white boat, Cunard Court, staring at the long, slightly bent road; at dog-walkers, cyclists, stern-featured joggers (yes, he has a pair of binoculars). It’s good, he thought, to have someone to look down on: the television researcher Jacky Roos, his attic room in a hotel favoured by kitchen staff from other hotels (seasonal) and economic migrants freed from their six-month prohibitions. Roos, in his turn, could look down — in a physical sense — on the Hastings Observer journalist (escapee from Rainham), who lodged in a pretty, but overshadowed, undercliff terrace. The hierarchy was in place: blocked author, troubled researcher, perky legman (too young to know better).

They all needed one thing: a story.

When everything else fails, fall back on doctored autobiography: audition friends and acquaintances as fictional monsters, twist facts, push them as far as they’ll go, distort evidence, leaven the mess with half-truths, public scandals, real landscapes. I’d tried that before and it hadn’t played. Roos, a master at retrieving documents, a whiz at the keyboard, was my precise contrary: he never, if he could help it, left his room. He could find anything he wanted on his computer. He collected wives like air miles and then lost them. He loved art and respected artists. He had a tenderness for the world, moist eyes (sober). No memory, none at all: yesterday didn’t exist unless he made a hard copy.

Facts sucked from the Mediadrome, the aether, excited and oppressed him: congenital paranoia. Conspiracies everywhere. Nobody who couldn’t be reached in three phone calls. The web breeds its own cancers, cancers of the eye. A torched warehouse in Shoreditch. A man in a white suit pissing against a Californian redwood. A nervous Libyan buying six identical shirts in a tourist shop in Malta. An election address, by a Liberal politician in Taunton, ghosted by a bankrupt sword-&-sorcery author. A ringing phone. Roadside kiosk, no house within two miles. A golden torc, La Tène period, recovered from a peat bog in the Isle of Harris, during the search for a black box flight-recorder.

Roos made lists. He passed them on to his sponsors. Left alone, he would draw up charts and paste postcards, newspaper cuttings, around his walls: the past was optional, subject to revision. I exploited Roos, I admit it, putting him into a novel about the Jeremy Thorpe murder trial (in the character of ‘Jos Kaporal’). It took Roos to run the barrister George Carman to ground, in a Dean Street drinking den, boozing on credit, shoulder to shoulder with petty villains, pimps, existential novelists. Roos unpicked the mazelike complexities of the financial scams set up by Thorpe’s ill-chosen associates, Peter Bessell, David Holmes and their offshore bagmen. Without leaving Streatham, Jacky found me the address of Thorpe’s Somerset hideaway.

I did the driving, the hard miles. The door-to-door stuff. To no purpose. Three years’ graft and what are you left with, strip away the tricks of language, the narrative games? Jacky Roos’s list. Thirty pages of unconnected facts. My novel was greeted, if at all, with well-deserved apathy (derision from old acquaintances who picked up the occasional nostalgic gig from the Guardian ).

Three strikes and you’re out, three duds and you’re back to self-publishing, creative-writing classes in Southampton, book fairs in Bloomsbury hotels that look as if they’re fronts for the Russian mafia. That’s what it used to be like in the old days, lunches kept alive until it was time for a drink before dinner. Literary agents (male) of a certain age still make their phone calls between five and five-thirty (returned to the office for a jug of black coffee). They can barely remember who they’re talking to. ‘Waiting on … the cheque, the contract, the call from New York. They’re all in Frankfurt this week. Spanish holiday. Divorce courts. Paris closed down. Strikes wars Easter Christmas.’

The Hastings book was my one and only. I refused to have any truck with novelists who lost their nerve and tiptoed into non-fiction, dinky little things about Regency snuff-dribblers, science as anecdote, First War diary, madhouse meditation, incest recovery affirmation, swimming to Scotland. Or, worse than those counter-grabbing booklets (which won’t spoil the line of your suit), baggy horrors about stinky, seething, Elizabethan/Victorian London, poverty porn — illustrated from archive. Wormy history cooked up to make us feel good about the thin air of the present. Books about pain: crimes reinterpreted, battles refought. Books about roads (for those who will never have to use them).

Jacky Roos was part Belgian. A rim of brown froth around a fancy beer glass. I liked that about him, his strip of otherness; the time he spent, between projects, in melancholy resorts among the sand dunes (locations favoured by Essex smugglers with their high-powered dinghies). On unlucky weekends, the Belgian coast played like a rerun of Dunkirk, in reverse, an invasion of random craft, disqualified crews, amateurs with attitude. Wounded men. The casualties of misunderstandings with Euro-scum people-smugglers and drug barons.

Not Roos. He favoured the quiet life. Hastings suited him, greys and browns. Polyester and corduroy. (He should have been a literary agent.) His Belgium was like Max Beckmann’s Holland, a tragic vacation, a sliced view through a convalescent window. Think Beckmann’s Scheveningen (1928) and know Hastings (2003). Deserted promenade, pedestrian crossing, beach swept of pebbles by spring storms, merciless sea. Two panes of glass, soul-trapping, between painter and world. A high view into a dark bedroom (the absence of J.R.).