Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Very affecting. They say a Norton — Henry of St Clere — handed an archer the fatal arrow. Hastings, battle of: 1066. Up on Battle ridge, where the toffs now live. Normans and Saxons in combat. Henry was one of the uninvited tourists from across the Channel, eye (pale blue) to the main chance. There’s always one of us about, a faceless Norton, putting a cynical spin on triumph or disaster. I inherited the temperament. The inability to take public art on its own terms. Nothing that a few drinks in the Bo-Peep couldn’t cure. If you can’t resolve an argument, photograph it: in the country of the blind, the one-eyed king is the proper symbol.

The lovely Edith: a white vampire ducking to get at that exposed neck. The fatal infection, love, that passes from generation to generation. Eros and Thanatos.

It didn’t seem to matter where he was, if Jacky had a plate in front of him, he was happy: he gobbled and yapped. He knew about Bo-Peep, the facts. Smugglers, wreckers. The nursery rhyme decoded: Bo-Peep as excise man, sheep as criminals, contraband. When the phone shrills at the bar, a man with tattooed earlobes, neck like a capstan, has to answer, in an embarrassed growl: ‘ Allo. Bo-Peep.’

Swallowed by Bexhill Road, umbilically attached to Hastings, Bo-Peep has ceded its outlaw status: rotting craft, decayed foreshore, cheap brandy. Or has it? Checking the bar, I’m not so sure. Solitary session-drinkers marking out their territory with plastic lighters and fresh packs of cigarettes. The bar stools have backs to them, to stop the punters sliding, unexpectedly, to the stone floor.

Women. A couple of near misses. Masses of hair, industrially bleached, teased and tossed. Healthy skin and tidy features. Full slap: as for studio lighting. One of the pair had been mistaken, so I overheard, for the TV weather girl: a boast? But sweet-natured too, talking of their kids, putting it back, licentiously, forking down cod platters with peas and chips. Plum suede: boots and token skirts. Hoop earrings. Dressed for the occasion, this lunch, where their companions, the men, stayed with T-shirts (clean), low-slung jeans — and comfortable silence.

Sunlight filtered by dirty muslin projected the pattern of the arched windows across the table. Roos and Norton: part of the spectacle. The general amnesty. Laughter. Families. Coins rattling in machines. Dogs sleeping under tables. Ordinary, contented humans at their leisure.

And one face that didn’t belong. A woman, by herself, writing at a round table. Postcards spread in a semi-circle. A large glass of yellow wine, untouched. Coup de foudre. Her full shape would all his seeing fill. John Keats, poet: Isabella (Or, The Pot of Basil) .

Keats, knife. The words went together.

‘ Knife? You want a knife?’ Roos offered. He hadn’t used his own, the one wrappered in a paper napkin. He’d forked, split, speared — licked up the last crumbs. His oval plate was so clean it didn’t need to be stacked in the dishwasher.

Lick. Stack. Dish. Split.

‘Keats. Know the story? Keats in Hastings, the woman?’

(Roos again, picking his teeth.)

All I wanted was for Jacky to shift himself, his imposing bulk, so that I would have a clear view of the woman at the window table. These things don’t happen every day. Ruth was the last time. I remember — stop it, stop it — having her pointed out to me at a poetry reading. (Robert Creeley, since you ask, an art school in Gloucester.) The poets I was with (self-published, private means) were obsessed (it had lasted three weeks now) with one of the students, a great beauty. They never exchanged a word with the woman, knew nothing about her, beyond her looks: her look , its potential. Mysterious — if you were hellbent on mystery. The youths, half crazy, hand-addicted, found her an irritation — of just the kind they thirsted for. Her inaccessibility (untried) was her charm. Dark, full-lipped. The sort of character they’d been told about in Wilkie Collins, Woman in White . Blonde = virtue, dusky = vice. A kind of masculine strength in female form. No form: they knew nothing about previous lovers, previous history. My take, I glanced away from the stage, was: analgesic, spiritual diamorphine, soul drip. Not even, not then, the beginning of something, a flicker in the heart’s muscle. The end, I didn’t know it, of one kind of selfishness, self-absorption.

I really was there for the poetry. Or the prose. The way Creeley, the Black Mountain man, paced his sentences. Husbanded tension. You could hear commas fall. He played the pauses with consummate technique.

And his eye. I was interested in that too, the missing one. Accident. Permanent wink. An asymmetrical Cyclops with a nicely considered beard. The Wyndham-Lewis-like Spanishness of Creeley’s portrait in photographs. The ‘wife’ mystique: always a handsome woman in the frame, wide-eyed to emphasise his loss. A language dandy folded around ocular absence. Le Fou. The Whip. For Love . Close things touched and distance properly registered: an exemplary career.

‘Another?’

It was the only way to see around Roos: by walking to the bar.

‘I couldn’t, not yet. Go another banger.’

‘Drink?’

‘Right.’

‘What?’

‘Tomato. Pint. Plenty of Worcester. Ice.’

While I waited (without annoyance), I turned towards the window, the source of light, the backlit woman who was scribbling in her notebook. Which was, of course, the biggest provocation of all. The amateur existentialists back at the Gloucester reading were driven to frenzy by their desire for women who wrote; they panted like Sicilians on heat, in the wake of a rich young widow in tight black.

Creeley, as he told us, had the thing all poets suffer in youth — and which I was enduring now. ‘My dilemma, so to speak, as a younger man, was that I always came on too strong with people I casually met. I remember one time, well, several times, I tended to go for broke with particular people. As soon as I found access to someone I really was attracted by — not only sexually, but in the way they were — I just wanted to, literally, to be utterly with them.’

J.G. Ballard has a nice line about characters moving through a crowd on their ‘private diagonals’. That’s me. I passed the table close enough to sneak a look at the ring of postcards: London. At night?

Jacky’s tomato juice is solid, pulped gruel, two blots of brown sauce floating on the surface like a bad conscience.

‘Pud?’

‘I think not. But thanks. I don’t really do puddings. Not often, not every day.’

‘Coffee then?’

‘I could try the cod. If you’re sure. It looks flaky and damp, the peas too. Proper wedge chips. OK, I’m on. And bring a couple of sachets of tartare. And maybe one of mayo.’

This time my diagonal sliced across hers, a run at the Ladies: our eyes (if mine hadn’t been afflicted with strabismus) might have met. Recognition. Challenge. An indication that the leopard-print top (sleeveless, straight neck) was a genuine artefact, Fifties, not like the rubbish the other Bo-Peep women found on a rack in Matalan. Scarlet mouth. Expensive smell.

Jacky Roos, his mouth filled with cod (a nasty silver tone in the white), was at his most Belgian: belly satisfied, tomato juice swilled with chasers of black coffee, he wanted to talk. Loosen his belt, strain the bracers. John Keats at Bo-Peep.

Let me summarise. JK, Book II of Endymion : 1817. Poet aged … twenty-two? Delusions (founded and confounded) of eternal fame. Actuality: funds stretched, uncomfortable in his skin, flogging himself from place to place (each worse than the last).

His conviction (the Romantic franchise): ‘I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination — What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not.’