Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Do I partake in the existence of gulls? High gloss, yellow beak, fishbreath? Timid dance at tideline, a sudden swoop, catching the wind, wings outspread, bones light as drinking straws? Up and away. Out over the Channel. Do I fuck.

The discomforts of childhood, itchy wool, sunburn, they never disappear. Half drowned by a hairy man teaching me to swim — by letting me sink. The sea was always cold, salty, opaque. You couldn’t breathe and it hurt to try.

My first photographic portrait: perched on a stuffed lion on the promenade in Paignton. Brass rule between the animal’s front paws. Disney cruelty, I thought. Hobbling the beast when it returns to life. Glass eye: the colour of vinegar. Mane that came away in your clammy grip.

I took Ruth to the seaside once, in the early days. Things weren’t going well. You know women. I couldn’t begin to figure out the source of her discontent. It was my fault, obviously: something done or undone, a grievance nurtured and unsmoothed. Actually, it occurs to me now, there was no single reason (unpaid bills, failure to alert her to a change of time for Coronation Street , bad sex), no unaired grudge: she didn’t like me, simple as that. I was a mistake about to be rectified.

I asked her to drive (another black mark), so that I could film the full moon bouncing, a pingpong ball on a water jet, over the endless rooftops of the A12, the apotheosis of ribbon development (aspirational suburbia masking country parks and cabbage patches). We stayed at Orford, a gloomy choice in the circumstances. I wanted to check out the tower where Mike Reeves filmed the climax of Witchfinder General : Ian Ogilvy going nuts and butchering a faintly shocked Vincent Price — who realises, too late, he’s in the wrong movie. The tower was shut, out of season. Autumn storms off the North Sea rained frogs and stones.

We drifted on to Southwold, where the white lighthouse, seen from an attic bedroom, over a Cubist scatter of red roof tiles, might have been an unfortunate symbol. We breakfasted, like all the other English couples, in a silence broken only by the chomping of dry toast and the ruffling of the Telegraph .

I still have the snaps. Ruth on the beach. Ruth among the stilt-shacks of Walberswick. Ruth in a pine forest. Such things, eventually, become a fetish. Long hair, long coat. Long legs. Why is this beautiful young woman alone ? Who is stalking her? It hurts, seeing what she was, and what I was too stupid to notice at the time: resignation, distaste for the camera’s obsessive attention. The tightness in her shoulders, how she draws herself into her coat. The futility of fixing the present moment, instead of experiencing it — experiencing it, always, with one eye closed.

I get the same feeling from Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits of housemaids and compliant relatives. Let them be. Leave them to their fate. A commentator, writing about a subsequent Southwold pedestrian, the late W.G. Sebald, said that photographs were a device ‘whereby the dead scrutinise the living’.

Edouardo Cadava (in Worlds of Light ): ‘Photography is bereavement.’

Young Ruth lost to old Norton. It requires her physical death to bring my grey images back to life. Ruth, my one and only passion (unrequited), left early. And it still hurt. Not the fact that she’d gone (if I’m honest, I provoked it), but the manner of her exit. A trip to the magistrates’ court, in support of a friend. And she never returned to the basement flat in Chepstow Road.

Coming from Wales (birthplace) and the West Country (education), I was lazy. I settled in West London; first Paddington, then South Ken (schoolfriends) and (mid Sixties) Notting Hill. It was the era, before the film, when it was just about possible to read Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners , without wrapping the book in brown paper. A teenage snapper and his verbals (penned by an old queen from Spitalfields). Street kids could be photographed without a visit from the sex police, a one-way ticket to Hastings.

Joey Silverstein, who was knocking about with Mervyn Peake’s daughter, knew MacInnes (knew everybody). He was my first contact with London literature (humped in a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag): Gerald Kersh, Alexander Baron, Patrick Hamilton, Sarah Salt, Robin Cook, Robert Westerby and James Curtis. Joey wore a belted coat, summer and winter, he didn’t sit down. As soon as he finished talking, he moved on. ‘I’ll call you next week, man. We’ll do a walk.’ I never saw him actually read a book, but he knew where to find them (Bethnal Green to Friern Barnet). He also knew, by touch, what was inside. And what it was worth.

It was years before I met a published author. The closest I came was watching Heathcote Williams spray Michael Moorcock graffiti around the borough, giving away the reclusive celebrity’s current address. Bringing Hawkwind fans and geeks with typescripts to his door. Future wives. Dealers of every stamp. I was too proud to join them.

There was something about the concentration with which Ruth made up her face that morning, it troubled me. It was like watching Lucian Freud through a two-way mirror. One mask, attempted, revised, scratched off. Begun again. I should have guessed. (And now, years later, I can imagine where those little chats in the café with Freud led.)

Women, as well as men, were always congratulating Ruth on the smoothness ofher skin — achieved without the use of powder or paint. If they’d known! The hours it takes to produce the natural look. You’d think they might have noticed eyelashes thick as flea combs, the black rings (Mandrake Club pallor on eight hours’ dreamless kip). Her model: Anna Karina in Vivre sa Vie . Ruth took up smoking, French, unfiltered. She cultivated that slightly goofy, shortsighted stare that lends itself to misinterpretation: the spirituality of glycerine tears.

I met Karina once, with Godard at the Academy, Oxford Street. Permission to translate an interview. Quite a hefty lady, actually, in the flesh, nothing like Ruth. I thought: Sandie Shaw in Dagenham, much more like. Long legs, large feet. Slight stoop, curvature of the spine, from hunkering down to hear what short men with hairy backs and heavy gold identity bracelets were proposing. Secretary to a music publisher in Denmark Street — so she said. Could I believe her after what happened?

Ugly suspicions. I broke off my work, mid-morning, couldn’t concentrate, a film treatment going nowhere; Cliff and the Shadows. They wanted a hip new image, Dick Lester jumpcuts, newsreel camerawork, South London one-liners — as a response (a rip-off) to Hard Day’s Night . I slaved, uncredited and pretty much unpaid, for a composer of advertising jingles who wanted to go legit, screenplays, production. With one drawback: he was illiterate. Couldn’t fill a speech bubble in a Sergeant Rock comic.

I started walking, jogging, around Paddington Station, up Praed Street, towards Marylebone Road. A group of them were coming down the steps, outside the court, laughing, heading off, so I imagine, to the pub for a celebration. One of the men, a longwristed String Band -type freak, was puffing away on a monster joint. Ruth, hanging back, not wanting to be associated, publicly, with such excesses, was being tracked by a very nasty piece of work. My mirror image. Same clothes, same Buddy Holly spectacles, same squint. It was the first time I encountered my double, the other Norton. The one who put the hack into Hackney.

You can imagine the rest. Ruth came back one Saturday afternoon, when she knew Chelsea were at home, and removed all her things. Two suitcases and the Dansette. I couldn’t keep up the rent. I shunted, by way of Park Royal and Cricklewood, to West Hampstead — where I finally lost it, went into therapy. I was convinced that Harrow was the site of a holy mountain, a radiant city, the temple of the west: dappled light in a churchyard overlooking the valley through which the M25, London’s orbital motorway, would one day pass. I suffered a pre-vision of this river of gold. I wandered the streets around the shopping centre, the wrong part of town, asking if anyone could direct me to the lodgings of the Cockney-Welsh mythographer and poet, David Jones.