Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

On the flatscreen, in morbid colour, someone had been killing sheep. A woman on crutches was having a bad time. And a cigar-smoker showed off an archive of gloomy photographs that he kept in a barn.

Jacky perked up at once. ‘The Passion of Anna . Great. Anything to eat in the fridge?’

‘I think we’ve finished the last packet but you’re welcome to look. And bring another bottle while you’re out there.’

I followed the waddling culture freak into the kitchen, a glassed platform on unequal stilts over a rough garden. I wasn’t in the mood for movies, Baltic angst (coals to Newcastle); mad women watching other women go mad. This pair looked just about capable of following the pictures in Rick Stein (pristine copy on shelf, along with the River Café thing). The only literature was a Zelda Fitzgerald biography and the grey Penguin of Nostromo — with nicotine-tanned pages. The girls were smoking their way through Conrad’s mythical South American republic of Costaguana. I checked. They’d reached the bit with the eyed-patched general, Barrios. Extraordinary night rides, encounters with wild bulls, struggles with crocodiles, adventures in the great forests, crossings of swollen rivers.

‘Shit.’

A dozen bottles of Pinot Grigio. A frond of black lettuce that was starting to sweat. A tub of margarine. Two bullet-like olives in the salad tray. Roos was furious. ‘We’ll have to use the phone. They must have an Indian takeaway in the village.’

I could hear low, miserable voices in the next room. And women laughing, gossiping, heart-to-heart: sisterly confession, moral support, futures mapped out.

Jacky wrestled with the cork. ‘We’ll get them pissed, right, then ask about the head. Who found it? Where? Human interest stuff. You can change a few details and call it fiction.’

When I came back, with the new bottle, the little one was shoving Marina’s postcard (which I’d placed, without comment, on the coffee table) under a cushion. She was wondering, quite reasonably, how we fitted in. The tall girl kept up a kind of rapid-fire commentary, the small one fell asleep.

‘Livy’s pregnant.’

‘Livy?’

Names offered. Ages withheld.

I wrote them down to keep the record straight. The little one is known, perversely, as Ollie. Livy, Livia. Olivia Fairlight-Jones. Border Welsh? Same background, I guess, as Tiggy Legge(over)-Whatever. The royal thingummy. Stan, the oversize Laurel, is Katherine Cloud Riise — or, more familiarly, Track. Got that? Friends, artists. The woman called Marina (who sent the card) is older, a benefactor, former teacher, something of that sort. She owns the Pevensey Bay bungalow — which she generously offers out, sanctuary for associates, damaged urbanites in need of R & R — while she rents a flat in Hastings, where she is supposed to be writing a book, a novel. Her first.

I felt some sympathy for those French hacks, nouveau roman , who didn’t bother with names: single letters were usually enough. R watched at the window as the woman undressed …

The Passion of Anna was winding down, the suspected sheepkiller had topped himself. The cameraman, so Roos informed us, was suffering from vertigo. Bergman was plagued with stomach ulcers. And Max von Sydow, commuting between the island location and Stockholm where he was doing theatre, was thinking wistfully of a Hollywood future and The Exorcist .

Anna wasn’t one of my names. Thank god. They can’t make a European art movie without her (character or star); it’s the symmetry, the loving gasp in the sound of the thing. I had my hands full with recurring Marinas, Ediths, Isabels. Annas were altogether too much. From the woman who disappears in L’Avventura to Jean-Marie Straub’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach . From Magnani to Karina: a terrifying absence of invention. Track had four or five names without resource to the Anna thing. I never met a bona fide Anna, which I’m sure you’ll agree, given the weight of potential cross-cultural references, was just as well. One Anna and I’d be lost for life.

The Marina person who owned the bungalow had produced a very fine series of images, seascapes, views from a speeding car, retail parks: video-pulls (hence the expensive kit) reworked with paint. In the tradition, so I thought, of all those anonymous women who laboured, retouching Fred Judge’s anaemic prints. Or the colourists of Apocalypse (1941–2) and Day and Dream (1946), portfolios for which Max Beckmann took all the credit.

The women made a pet of Roos, they had him smoking, doping. Instead of getting them drunk, he succumbed to herbal frivolity, descriptions of favourite meals. He was as high as a man of his bulk, stuck to quality leather, can go.

‘You have such a lovely lovely little moustache, Ollie. Like a lobster. Let Jacky stroke. Talk to me — about that nasty old head on the marshes.’

‘I’d rather talk about dreams.’

She cupped her belly, the hard round shape, no cushion, the restless foetus in its saline pouch.

Track, so Ollie whispered to her new best friend, was sticky with love, a man who taught her how to dowse, they slept together in the car park of a Travelodge. Now they were going off on a circumnavigation of Canvey Island, part of an art project, a walk down the A13.

Livia enjoyed the fruits.

It was illogical. Even in Jacky’s current free-associating state. Track feverishly conjoined and Livia pregnant? Another Bergman on the screen, black and white. Track was opening the door, sliding it across, letting in night air, the roar of the sea. Its throat of stones. Roos snoring, heavily. And Livia breathing hard, resting her head, tenderly, on Jacky’s soft, paternal shoulder.

I had a dream and this was it. Nothing made sense.

The new Bergman: a burning monk, a child caressing a projection of his mother, an actress struck dumb. Roos told us earlier that The Passion of Anna , conceived in a dream, was itself a dream: the only way of resolving the pain, by acting it out. ‘A landscape,’ the critic said, ‘is a state of soul.’

I was with Track on the sofa, a little drunk, very confused, pressing my face into her hair — while she, watching the sleeping Roos, the REM-flicker of eyes behind heavy lids, reached beneath the leather cushion for Livia’s postcard.

Pevensey is a hinge place. Future and past balanced on the head of a pin. On Track’s decision: will she remove my hand? Which I have allowed, innocently, to rest on her thigh. Checking that Livia is still asleep, before bringing the postcard up close to her face, Track slides away — without discourtesy, otherwise occupied.

The blonde in the black mac gets out of the car. She’s been trusted with a letter to post, her friend. She is going to break that trust and suffer the consequences. Swedish weather. Bad dreams. Sleepwalkers. A slap. Confessions of her own. Incidents on a quiet beach.

I kept an eye on the flatscreen, that magic window.

‘Was it you?’ I said. ‘Who found the vicar’s head?’

‘It’s still out there.’ Track took a drag on her spliff. ‘Or it might be under Ollie’s dress. In her belly.’

She rolled from the sofa, crawled towards the open door, the night air, calling after her friend.

I stayed with the TV. Bergman’s women, Bibi Andersson (talkative nurse) and Liv Ullmann (mute actress), were on the rocks: dappled sunlight, cold rain. The generally intense, static, interrogatory momentum of the piece was interrupted by a lateral tracking shot, the calling of a name. A Scandinavian scream moment.

‘Don’t hurt me!’

Track searching for tiny Ollie, her woozy and slightly pregnant chum. In the moonlight. Aware of the absurdity, the drama she should have left on the flatscreen, the false window.