Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Cora, in her charity-shop outfit, shoes pointy and pinching, linen impregnated, not unpleasantly so, with another woman’s cheap scent, opened her satchel. Took something out and laid it, between a mug of milky coffee and a large, sugar-glued oat biscuit (dry as hemp and half as appetising). She dipped and nibbled, flakes lodged between sharp white teeth.

She tapped the edge of the postcard against the marble, tested it to see if anything would fall from the picture. A seascape: yellow, blue, green, orange-red on the sail. A signature in the bottom-left corner: Keith Tollund. This was a Keith who painted like a Raoul, breezy, confident. Beach boys stripped to the waist, fishermen in brown trousers straining at the rope. Wavelets jaunty as wind-in-corn.

Befriended by Dufy. Holidays in Dieppe, so they said. Keith Tollund, dead and forgotten, honoured in a municipal gallery (that nobody visited). Keith was her project. Cora would comb the junks pits of the Old Town, talk to pickled men in blue jerseys, haunt dealers, hoarders, guardians of backrooms: in search of Tollund. Some word, whisper, of a man who had lost his reputation. Another life to be rewritten, invented. Another skin to occupy. A room to be found. Cora traded in discontinued biographies, a cultural bounty-hunter.

Barging in mobhanded. Trampling evidence into the carpet. Setting up blue and white ribbons. Noises in the press, Londoners. Cockneys on expenses. Day at the seaside.

‘Bloody mess, boy. Take my word.’

Stephen wasn’t listening, he revolved the narrowed base of his thick white cup against the saucer. Spill of weak tea. Squeak of protest. The bent copper liked the place, his choice. Stephen was easy. Cups rather than mugs, fine with him. A touch of class, his informant, the shamed DS, reckoned.

‘Old bugger was purely asking for it. Key in lock? Kids all knew, knew him. More cash than corduroy. Dressed like tramp. Bloody disgrace, man of the cloth.’

‘Anything of value?’

‘Druggies had him over. White goods, not worth fencing. Microwave his daughter gave him, never took it out of the box.’

A woman, walking past the window, the open door, took Stephen’s eye: purpose in her stride. She stood out. She knew where she was going. The rest of them, street flotsam, were unanchored, they floated. Stephen watched and didn’t listen, using the vision of this woman to detach himself from the copper’s drone. He pressed a dirty tissue into his saucer, stared fascinated, as it changed colour, soaking up the tannin spill.

‘Old sod like that, wants putting down. Asking for it, boy. Didn’t know if he’d shaved that month, scraped one side left t’other. Parkinson’s. Cornplaster dripping blood on dog collar. Odd socks. Piss-stained cricket flannels, pyjamas underneath. Give him his due, had some fair gear. Before the kids got in.’

‘Do you have a list?’

Stephen waited until the ashtray was full. The detective was fat but he didn’t eat. Or sweat. Cold grey skin under one of those calculated haircuts. Untrustworthy on TV: loud-stripe suit, Masonic ring, brutal slash of collar.

DS Krater, who kept cigarettes for professional purposes, non-smoker in his married days, was now addicted. He hated the taste, but liked the risk. Giving god the finger. His hairy digits were yellow as permanent bruises. The old tricks were second nature — shove the packet towards the child molester, then grab his wrist when he reaches out to take one.

The bent vicar, the one they’d chopped into segments and scattered over half of Sussex, knew Tollund. Both poofs, brown-hatters. Small town. Not enough talent to go around, shirtlifters relied on runaways, Balkan gippos. Stephen wasn’t prejudiced, he didn’t care what they got up to. There might be a story in Tollund. Krater’s homophobic rants were reflex, they didn’t mean much. By the standards of the force, down there, he was a liberal. He was talking to Stephen, wasn’t he? His former colleagues wouldn’t wipe their boots on him.

The others, the outpatients in the café, the freaks? Stephen couldn’t avoid the long mirror. Prime examples of the tattooist’s art, blue mermaids, dragons, barbed-wire hearts. Grafts and erasures. They held an absolute fascination for the displaced Londoner. Stephen saw these exhibitions as phantoms brought to life in the smoke of Krater’s cigarettes. Women, more sensitive, went in for removal, discarded lovers, names sandpapered from a fleshy forearm.

Thin gold necklaces, rings, piercings. Orange skin: part weather, part stain. An illusion of well-being, health — as you see them walking towards the marine parade. Dealers from the hill carried a cellphone in one hand and a packet of ciggies in the other. Dark glasses, collar turned up. One of them, Stephen believed, would have a cache of unrecorded Tollunds.

Seasiders spat at cancer. Down here, in all probability, they hadn’t heard the rumours. Cell damage. They smoked as they drank their tea. Smoked as they tweezered ice buns from the display case. Smoked as they passed water. They woke in the night and lit a fag. They smoked instead of breakfast. They smoked as they swam. Or jogged. Or cycled. Or went to the surgery, the school. They lit up every time they got behind the wheel. They dragged deep when they spoke on the phone. They didn’t share. They nursed a pack in the hand, spare in pocket.

But the thing that intrigued Stephen, on the coast for six months now, was the oddity of the couples. He couldn’t imagine how they got together. They didn’t fit, any of them, men with men, men with women, old with young. Midwives and garage-mechanics in desultory conversation. Pill-peddlers and Joan Collins matrons who flogged painted plates, sepia nudes in pine frames. One very dapper gentleman, seventy-plus, carnation in buttonhole, was escorting a black female body-builder in a leopard-print sheath, worn off-the-shoulder. Nothing made sense. Like Stephen and Krater. Different cultures, different origins. Different exiles. They both, if it came to the pinch, had East Sussex addresses. Neither of them belonged.

Krater shot a smalltime drug-dealer in his own bed. The wrong man. At the wrong time. When the council was going progressive, Euro-friendly: white paint and teams in orange jackets cleaning the beaches. Wrong house, wrong day. Head throbbing, breath like ullage. On early call after a weekend’s boozing. The nationals picked up on it. One-day filler on the inside pages.

‘Something and nothing, boy. Should have been sorted. Queer vicar, big house, takes in your average teenage psycho. Wants to teach him — about art. Gaff stuffed with portables. Strangled with the cord of an electric iron while he’s lying in the bath. Butchered like the Sunday joint. Blood all over. Kid tries to flog the paintings in Bohemia. Vicar keeps boat, over in Eastbourne. That’s where they find the torso. More prints than Fleet Street: oars, tarpaulin, arsehole. Hands and feet on Pevensey Levels, chewed up by sheep. Head still missing. Like the paintings. Nobody gives a flying fuck, tell the truth.’

‘What did the boy say, when you got hold of him?’

‘Sod all. Topped himself on remand. End of story.’

A hooded woman, old, twisted in the spine, dwarfish, stared in at the window. Hanging on the crossbar of a large, dirty perambulator. The infant, Stephen was horrified to notice, to notice himself noticing, was dead. Skull like a bunched fist. Close-swaddled in rags. Cholera case. The glass in the café window, the barrier between them, turned woman and child into an exhibit. The woman wasn’t looking at him, but at Krater, her lips mimicking the movement of the disgraced copper’s slack mouth, pursing to blow out spittle in place of cigarette smoke.

When Krater lifted his gaze, she turned away, moved off down the hill. Stephen, throwing a few coins on the table, got up to follow. When he came alongside, wondering if, despite himself, he would say something, he saw that the dead child was a doll. A doll that was propped up, staring at him, holes for eyes.