Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

He wanted: an antidote for colour. A painterly funk of greys, crisscrossing vehicles, solitaries pursuing their ‘private diagonals’. Drama exaggerated by low-angle POV. The more you hide, the softer the focus, the better it plays. Bromoil soup against the clarity of coastal light.

Stop it . Jacky is trying to haul himself out of his chair, wondering if he’d better sort out some crisps for the walk to Pevensey, a family-size pork pie.

The lacquered surface of the bar, its puddles of spill. Brandy glass with one last swallow. The leopard woman’s postcard, her choice: ‘A Night Arrival at the Grand Hotel’. Very Thirty-Nine Steps . Very … Grand Hotel Garbo, Joan Crawford and a squelch of Barrymores. I approve the setting — cab with open door, mysterious stranger (collar turned up, leather bag). Illuminated triangle above dim entrance. Where is the photographer? What did society make of this provincial lurker? Private detective? Government snoop? When it was all over, did he slip away to the station?

STOP.

It was the bromoils that slipped, leaked. Go to Judge’s archive (Roos did) and they’ll tell you that prints can no longer be taken from those glass negatives. London has reverted to its original fog, memory devoured by fungi. The night city is an involuntary collaboration between what Judge saw and shapes like fingerprints. A superimposition of gas clouds, smears, phantoms of future terror. Soon the glass will be clear as water.

So turn the bloody card over. Read what she says.

Something’s dripping into my brandy. I could fill the glass in a minute. Vein pulsing like an over-generous optic. A new cocktail: ‘Bram Stoker’s Vortograph’. Mongrel blood, very fresh and red, with a shot of fine and a dash of Worcester sauce. The point of my chin, the old shaving wound, has spontaneously unzipped. I’m like a Romanov, a haemophiliac.

STOP IT.

‘Stop that right now. You can’t bleed here.’ The barman rushes me with an ice bucket. Try this.’

Don’t try it. Ice pinks as it melts, a fistful of cubes. Like a butcher’s bin. Splashing over the bar, the carpet. My shirt, my jacket. The colour is extraordinary, too rich for an old man. I must be fresher than I thought. I’m emptying, fast, in a lunchtime pub on the hinge of a seaside town that has seen better days: the road to Bexhill retail park.

‘You’ll have to go, mate. You can’t stand here bleeding. We don’t have a licence.’

I snatch up the Judge postcard. Swab it with a dirty rag. The woman has stamped it, ready to go, addressed it and written a few words.

Now you’re back — and when you’re ready — come and see me in Cunard Court. I’ve found out something very interesting about KB.

Love, Marina.

We could deliver the card by hand. The name of the addressee meant nothing — but she lived in Pevensey Bay.

It was almost dark by the time we got there, twilight thickened around us like a comfortable wrap, muffling the shame of the territory we had to cross. I’d been prodding and poking Jacky since Bexhill: an endless marine strip. Caravan parks for the expelled of Lewisham and Eltham (community orders). Beach huts. Martello tower. Railway line. Low hills. Marsh. You might consider this a proper location in which to debrief a Soviet spy, a double agent, but live here? They hadn’t heard, most of them, old ladies (fit as gibbons) peeping out from behind lace curtains and wooden shutters: the invasion was off. Hitler wasn’t coming this year. And Napoleon was doing a time-share on Elba.

A high shingle ridge that would never be high enough, Roos reckoned, to keep out the sea: mortgages refused on asbestos properties, strictly cash. A constituency therefore of Londoners (barbecues, beer, boats) of a particular stamp, sturdy individualists with interests in the motor trade, plumbing, taxidermy and other outreaches of the free market. World-class wet suits: wind-surfing, sewage-dodging, messing about on boards, in dinghies, making plenty of noise. Melancholics too. Non-commissioned documentarists, painters without galleries, writers who didn’t write. The holiday home of Peter Sellers (pre-Ekland and still the plump gadget freak with the 16mm camera): sober records of present malaise and future despair. A beach, a bungalow, a family. Spike Milligan hammered out a few episodes of The Goons between breakdowns.

It helped Roos to talk. If he couldn’t rabbit, he had to confront the reality of where he was, this ribbon-development POW camp — tolerated (for now) because there wasn’t quite enough land between sea and salt marshes on which to put a superstore. Pevensey lifers were the equivalent of the human shield in Baghdad. Donkey sanctuarists: dressed down and prepared to castrate invaders on sight. Feisty old dames who looked as if they swam over to Dieppe every morning for a cup of coffee. If a life sentence means what it says, Pevensey Bay has cracked it: a leathery immortality (animals included), clumps of sea kale, uninterrupted contemplation of the great fact of the English Channel.

We started to worry about house numbers. I tried to remember the address on the fugitive Marina’s postcard. Roos had his number, the home of the woman who found the clergyman’s severed head, written on his palm — but it was too dark to read. Buzzed by speeding cars that either travelled full-beam or didn’t bother with lights, we struggled to interpret the scrawl on the Belgian’s yeasty paw.

Snap! You guessed. Our numbers were the same. But impossible to make out from the road. Bungalows (three-deckers stacked one on top of the other, Spanish arches, papal balconies) were set way back, up on the shingle ridge. We had no view of the sea, but took it on trust, that rumble; wind howling through the narrow gaps between properties. Down where we walked, there was nothing to help us: garage doors, painted dustbin lids and a commendable absence of novelty nameplates. Pevensey Bay was strictly word of mouth.

Which meant that, every fifty yards or so, one of us (me) would open a garden gate, negotiate a set of steps, feel for numbers — or peep through an uncurtained picture window. I saw things that should remain private, between consenting adults and pieces of electrical equipment (television sets). I found the magic number: 147. (Like the catalogue entry for Max Beckmann’s Young Woman with Glass ). I knocked.

Luckily, Roos was following close behind on the slithery wooden steps, a plump cushion. I might otherwise have tumbled right back into the prickly plants.

Blaze of light. Glimpse of nightkitchen. Laurel and Hardy in bowler hats. With none of their celebrated slowburn gravitas. Wrong shape, wrong size: Hardy was petite but padded, very pretty — despite the grease moustache. While Laurel was tall and strong; anti-gravity hair, black bowler perched like rowing boat on sandbar. They did the walk quite well — for women. The tie-wiggling. With camply extruded digits. Voices too: like folk who had come late, and reluctantly, to sound.

Long jackets and smooth bare legs.

‘Another fine mess,’ Hardy, the little one, piped; after some fastidious pantomime, removing a speck of dirt from the corner of her eye. Geisha blink of a whiteface transvestite with padded belly. ‘What took you so long?’

‘Don’t say a thing,’ Roos whispered, ‘about the head. Not yet.’

The odd couple — each to his own — bowed us in: through narrow kitchen to sitting-room (cushions, clothes, boots, sandals, scarfs, flatscreen TV, leather couch, pyramid of video cassettes).

‘We’re having a bit of a Bergman binge,’ the redhead announced. ‘Girls-together weekend, pigging out. Wine, chocky biscuits, black Pak. Find yourselves a glass.’