Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Ollie! Ollie! Forgive me.’

She means the confession about the head. It was never on the marshes, these marshes; it hadn’t crossed the river, left Rainham. The head was lodged in Ollie’s belly. A thing with gills. A ticking wonder.

I was half in love with Ullmann. I admired Andersson. Serially wonderful, both. But I was suspicious of this performance, the showy silence brought on by newsclips, burning Buddhists. The story Andersson has to tell, the episode with the boys on the beach, the small orgy, is a gift to an actress of her intelligence. Most of all, I doubted the great manipulator, Bergman himself (growling stomach): dark Prospero on his private island. Guilts and calibrated ecstasies. The celibacy of true authorship. Hunger for wives.

I was completely pissed, staggering. Had Ollie found the vicar’s head, out there, across the busy road, in the darkness of the marshes? And, if so, how did that advance our case — if she wouldn’t talk? If she wouldn’t supply the details — fingerprint bruises, maggot patterns — that would allow me to shape a convincing fiction.

Ollie was sitting in a deckchair, nursing a bottle. The presence of the sea, as soon as you stepped out of the bungalow, was overwhelming: sound, weight, distance. Stones dragged, released, dragged again. Sorted and scoured. Beach defences bolstered by tons and tons of sand hosed from off-shore dredgers: the heroic attempt to retard the inward invasion, land piracy.

To be here, child in womb, was heroic too. Swift transitions between dream and place, mother’s memories, the prompting of the curled unborn. All those ancient riddles that require no answers.

Track and Jacky Roos, sturdy silhouettes at the tideline, found something to say to each other. We could hear them, over the shingle, the slithering stones, as they went out of sight, down behind the protective bank, in hot debate. Before they returned, in silence, to the bungalow.

The women shared a bed. Roos helped himself to the sofa. I settled in the big chair, letting the film play itself out. Alma and Elizabeth, Bergman’s fictions. Alma and Lizzie. Anna and Ollie. Anna is the palindrome. Pevensey Bay, it struck me, is the palindrome of my unwritten novel: confusion behind it and confusion ahead. I took another drink.

There was nothing, within reach, to read — except a battered Iris Murdoch. Under the Net . We were, all of us, hopelessly tangled: films with more substance than life. It was not of course that I had the slightest intention of looking for Anna, but I wanted to be alone with the thought of her … I had found Anna deep. I cannot think what it is about her that would justify me in calling her mysterious, and yet she always seemed to me to be an unfathomable being … Few things disgust me more than these pretended profundities.

I yawned, groaned. Threw the book aside. Failed to sleep.

The events I’d laid out with the help of Roos’s file — unsolved murder (perpetrator in custody, motive obscure), gangsters and property rackets, botched kidnapping — would exist on either side of this lost night: untouched by me. Reality was unstringing like a necklace. I could run the Bergman video backwards and forwards at whim (I did, I do). Livy’s pregnancy can’t be undone. The Pevensey landscape is an absolute (changing before our eyes). The rest depends on my mood as I sit down at my word-processor, inspiration or otherwise. I must talk to Hannah Wolf. I must play that scene again, try and make sense of it, our night at the Travelodge.

Slatted light across the woodblock floor gave me fair warning: one of those days, so unexpected, so feared, so perfect. Impossible to live up to, impractical to celebrate. Gentle zephyr, kind haze. Soft air. Warm enough to take my coffee onto the stoop, doors wide. To read Track’s letter, while Roos tosses and snorts, dreaming of American breakfasts, hogs and grits, sunnyside-up yellow eyes winking from a blue plate.

We decided your coming helped. We can’t stay any longer in Marina’s place. We’re very grateful, please tell her, and send our love — but we feel, talking it over, that living in Marina’s house is also living in her story, doing what she thinks we should be doing. So it’s back to Essex, to our unfinished project, the road exhibition. Canvey Island (you should read Behindlings by Nicola Barker) and Southend and Shoeburyness and wherever the A13 finishes.

Please lock the door after you and leave the keys with Mrs Orwell in the papershop (Coast Road). Turn down the fridge (dial on right) to No. 2. Put the wine bottles in the green tray and carry that down to the gate.

Jacky, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t fret. Well, it was your fault, but it doesn’t matter. It was my fault too. And not all bad. Yes, it was all bad. But no scars?

love, Track XXX

We returned, by the same route, to Hastings — and it was totally different, a different day. The road had shrunk, we marched, one behind the other, with our own thoughts.

‘What were you talking about, last night, with the redhead — on the beach?’

‘She claimed, she might have something, that we were married once,’ Roos replied. ‘Definitely familiar, that woman. I’m still paying the standing orders.’

‘Worth it though, would you say?’

‘No visible scars.’

‘Fancy following them, the station — Essex?’

‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

‘Right.’

I tried to limit the damage, Roos’s cultural retrievals, but I had to let him function, to keep his mind off the hike. He said that J.G. Ballard called madness ‘an undeclared war’.

Bexhill was sandbagged, pensioners and displaced persons worked on strategies for avoiding the sea. The De La Warr Pavilion, recalling happier times, other conflicts, featured grid paintings by a Norwegian — like pages of Track’s notebook (shown to Jacky) blown up to fill a wall.

We sat on the balcony and imagined this place in more gracious days. Afternoon concerts, tea dances. From his satchel, Roos (recovering fast) dragged out a book: The Liturgy of Funerary Offerings by E.A. Wallis Budge. London, 1909. Light-brown cloth, minor foxing prelims, otherwise mint.

‘Shall I recite the Forty-Third Ceremony, “The Cake Offering”? Or would you rather treat me to a Full English?’

The point of this reflex bibliophilia was the provenance. Book purchased Bexhill-on-Sea, April 1982: £6 (reduced, on demand, to £4.50). Bookplate of photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. White circle with arrow, black gates.

Coburn retired to the seaside (Colwyn Bay) in 1918 and pursued other interests: Freemasonry and Buddhist meditation. Image-making, after the First War, was redundant. He was tracked down in September 1966 by poet Jonathan Williams. A stern old man in red-brown three-piece, watch-chain and insignia.

Among rhododendrons and azalea, Coburn twists, reluctantly, for the snapshot: creased brow. The photographer’s shadow, afternoon sun, is a minor intrusion. Coburn knows all too well what the granting of this final portrait means.

The view from the rise, by the coastguards’ house: Cunard Court and the double curve of the bay. Better than Naples.

Closer to home, we noted Judge’s current premises, Italinate, an archive of postcards by the Bexhill Road. Then: ruins. Boats with burst ribs. Sewage outflow. A rough paddock where a lido had once been. A lockup, such as you might find under the railway arches in Hackney, stacked with canvases. Paintings of eyes. The solitary graffito on an abandoned concrete pavilion: I DONT BELONG HERE.

A small boy on a bicycle, blowing a policeman’s whistle, calls after us: ‘In twenty-four hours, you’ll be dead.’

We parted, gratefully, at Entrance A of Cunard Court. I wanted a shower, something to eat. The last thing I needed was the heavy package left at my door. Unstamped, personally delivered. You weren’t supposed to get in without permission. We paid a premium for security, service charges. Men in uniforms who smoked in a cubbyhole at night. I moved to St Leonards to escape unsolicited Jiffy bags.