Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

No incendiary devices, no biological weapons. Worse: a novel or set of linked fictions, crudely typed on some charity-shop Remington. From that much-discussed person, Marina Fountain.

This is the book that the angel made John eat.

A hefty sandwich and a jug of coffee. I took them out to the balcony. My eyes hurt, the glare of the midday sun. The sea, with its reversed-loop sound, was all skin: wrinkled, feathery. Petroleum jelly on which gulls skidded.

I started to read. Words swam. Obstructions floated across my field of vision like ectoplasm in one of Fred Judge’s nocturnal London prints. I fetched a magnifying glass — progressed, slowly, with agonising difficulty, a line at a time. Much harder this, interpreting alien fiction, than walking barefoot around the M25.

Blind first. Then light, a quiet drizzle through dirty muslin. He sits, head throbbing, head in hands, back against wall. Trapped in the window frame, a fishing boat. Movement taken on trust, on previous experience … before he risks it, draws back the sliding door. Experiences: a new day.

Who else, Stephen brooded, would appreciate this thing? Appreciate it enough to commit it to memory. Restless wavelets. A boat, riding the swell, circling back towards the red pier, the smudged sunrise.

A privileged viewpoint on the broad sweep of the bay, the English Channel. Keep it as a picture, in chalk and crayon. A composition in noisy segments. Colour independent of line.

That’s all. Nothing else worth retaining. Last night’s full moon displacing a thin coin’s depth on his memory-screen. Satellite hung on wire over a lifeless sea. Two scenes, then, moon and morning. Equally painful, equally persistent.

The first thing that hits you, walking out of the station, is the light, the light of the coast, the sea. Warrior Square, it says. But there is no sign of a square. Or of a warrior, an equestrian statue. A deserted piazza in which you might expect to find taxis, touts, runners sent out by hotels. Nothing of the sort. Distant shufflers moving off, rapidly, to avoid eye-contact with this alien life-form; a person from elsewhere. A woman.

You don’t need to be told where the sea is, you start, without considering other possibilities, in that direction. The ground in front of the station organises itself into a single street, the usual hopeless non-enterprises. Ghost architecture. Benevolent obituaries in which the posthumous casualties of contemporary life find shelter. And purpose. A daily round for the desperate: the circuit of charity shops and indulgent cafés.

Marine speculations, station to seafront, have gone wrong, but they’re not bitter. There’s nothing sour about this street. The balcony of the station hotel, encrusted with seagull shit, is crumbling. Hungry vines eat into sick plaster. ALES & STOUTS: faded script on washed-over brickwork. The town could go either way, development (poop-scoops, heritage) or entropy. She hasn’t decided, this traveller, how to cast her vote. The citizens — exiles, inbreeds — don’t recognise her. Don’t understand that she holds their fate in her pocket. That her slender, unostentatious elegance is immortal.

The railway pub has beautiful, syrupy-brown tiles, a foot-bath. She laughed aloud. SHOPLIFTERS BEWARE! CCTV INSTALLED. On premises that stock nothing except dog baskets and rusty tins. She stopped, hand on hip, and cackled. Moorish arches, obliterated in generations of paint (canary yellow, burnt orange), jungled in greenery. Tobacconists coming to terms with dope culture. Graveyard of the antiques trade. Milk bars with subdued chrome and greasy Formica. Calendar views of Turkish beaches.

Huge gulls, incognito albatrosses, scream the news. They know she is in town. They shriek and warn, skid on roof slates, bombard bald skulls with white-green droppings.

One or two locals, clinking carriers keeping them in balance, assessed the incomer: smoke suckers. They swallowed blue-grey clouds: anachronistic residue of the age of steam, belching locomotives, care-in-the-community casuals encouraged to take up the weed. As a substitute for everything. They leered, politely. Without dissimulation.

She was something new, heat. A different smell. Beneath travel-dust, exotic combinations of body sweat and precious golden essences. The remote possibility of future sexual congress did not concern them — fantasies of the fed and fallible, the eros of employment. Congress. Fresh blood. Novelty. Repetitive playlets of seduction or seizure: not for the seasiders. Drinkmoney. No point, down here, in begging openly. Sitting pathetic on the curb, propped against a shopfront, the wall of a bank. Banks operated without cash-dispensing hatches. Marksmen on roofs waiting for the next raid; a shooting-gallery with live targets. Wall machines, if they had them, would choke on cancelled plastic, chewed-up fakes, revoked credit.

The woman was too tall for the watchers. Her eyes too sharp, all pupil, no cornea. Black. Then grey. Then blue as everything that’s been forgotten. The vagrants withdrew their minimal interest. They knew when they were out of their league. They valued blood deposits they hadn’t yet sold. They pinched pulses in their necks. Her long stride, childless, took her so rapidly along that straight street, down the retail canyon, towards the sudden slope that led to the sea. She was unimpressed, they understood, by charity bazaars, dealers who peddled versions of the same necrophile stock, price-ticketed refuse. Nothing of now, today, was on offer, everything had an erased history. Some of the shops were innocent of product, giveaway paperbacks in a plastic tray, empty video cocoons with misleading labels.

The town was its smell. Fried fish, dead clothes, seagull shit on windscreens. She didn’t belong, among the professional scavengers, the bag carriers; too many fingers, feeling, stroking, pinching sour nylon, testing the stretch in wool, sniffing lycra.

‘Cora’ — she picked the name at random from a label — would do. For the moment. More than an alias, a fresh chapter. Anyone who steps from a train becomes, with that first breath, a character in a novel. Here was a good town and a good season in which to lose yourself; to stay lost, that was the pitch. Cora wasn’t buying. Wherever she washed up, that was the story.

A location where her crimes were beyond the imaginative capabilities of the inhabitants — and the authorities.

Shoes were difficult. The skirt, the pale linen jacket. Easy, accommodating. Appropriate to the sticky, unsettled weather. She didn’t need stockings or underclothes. A green canvas satchel with yellow leather straps. She changed, screwed up her old things and forced them into a plastic bag, which she left in a refuse bin. Where it attracted the immediate attention of a group of rag-pickers.

She was thirsty, suddenly, for milk. The idea of it. Creamy moustache, elbows on table. Milk and biscuits. Nursery food. Nursery food in an empty nursery.

She went into what might have appeared (to a writer of guide books) as a period piece, an old-time bakery with marble tabletops and wooden benches, frosted partitions; lovely galumphing girls, in white overalls, talking among themselves, ignoring the crusties, brandishers of single coins. You could conjure up, if you pushed it, a cow in the yard.

Pensioners, unculled, day-released from hostels, hanging on in dowdy seafront flats (owned and operated by teenage villains), hoped they were unnoticed. They mobbed and clustered, heads wobbling, knuckles swollen, joints creaking. The girls behind the counter couldn’t hear what they said. Cuppa. Cuppa. No choice about it. Cuppa to grow cold on a ledge at the back, out of sight, away from the street. The tolerated at the limits of their liberties.