Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

She progressed around the museum, among the seascapes. Provincial museums never fail to charm, bell jars of borrowed air: no expectations, no agenda, no obligation to inform. Time, in dusty columns, too lazy to advance.

Cora advanced, the sound of her heels (toes pinched and blistered) on the wooden floor, on soft linoleum, clicking against the metal trim of the rather pompous stairs. Culture for the edification of the unedified, the lost. The middle classes at a loose end, with children.

A woman, unevenly stained, hauled her partner in from the street. So that she could find a place in which to squat, pass water. And emerge, as Cora noticed, with talcum powder across her broad bottom, dark-blue denim — as if she’d been dusted for fingerprints.

‘Come on. Come on then, come on.’

The man, drawn on the leash of domesticity, was slow to respond; he had actually become interested, pricked by, this display of ration books, tickets, ribbons, tin badges. He tried to justify his queer enthusiasm for the cases of reserved, improved ephemera. But he knew better than to speak. His partner, cuffing one child, dragging another, was already returned to the fresh air.

The hall of paintings, upstairs, was deserted. The last visitors had tramped through, without pausing, completed their circuit, earnt their pit stop. Seaside places are big on memory, bits of wood dug from the sand, spars, fragments of pots rescued from the deep. Albums of dead sailors, faces peeled by experience, layers of wrinkles and ice-bleached whiskers. Piped and sweatered. Faces too strong for the technology.

Seascapes. Arty visitors to town: as a fishing village, a resort. Essence lost or absorbed. An accident of geology, a break in the cliff, a harbour. The Cockney Turner takes himself out to sea, looks back, across pitching waves, green-and-black peaks. The yellow cliffs are a barrier. Minor romancers and journeymen set up their stools at prominent places and limn the picturesque, an ordered landscape of small craft, pulled up on the beach; two men at the cliff’s edge, sheep daring the drop.

Rossetti drew sickness. Lizzie Siddal twisting her pain against a hard chair. Lucien Pissarro nibbling at particulars, a church, found something worth retaining in the haze of light; a premature pass at pointillism.

Then: Keith Tollund.

Gay in all seasons. Quarters of creamy colour, honey you can lick. The man didn’t paint, he dabbed at the canvas, using face powder and dry cosmetics. He waxed seascapes, as he waxed his legs. He made them up, pretty as a picture. He crayoned them with yellow lip gloss. Combed waves to curve like eyelashes. Cora loved what Tollund did. Chalk and green crayon: sand, sea, air. Blues, yellows, chocky browns, rouged keels. Self-portrait in seaside boudoir, attended by sailors (pulling limply on tarry ropes). Toy yachts sailing across a Thirties bathroom. Just enough puff to fill sails, stiffen flags. The squadron flounces west like a chorus line. A cargo boat, twelve miles out, on the horizon, contradicts Tollund’s speculative meteorology with the direction of its black smoke.

A scene observed from his balcony. Soft muscle under brown-and-green sweaters, the bare backs of fishermen. Sand like brown sugar.

But the picture Cora wanted, the one that would identify Tollund’s room, the flat where he lived before moving to Bath for the final phase, was missing. Stolen. Mislaid. Loaned out and never returned. The collection in the town museum couldn’t offer anything better than a monochrome photograph in the catalogue: window frame, armchair, yachts in a rectangle. Three panels of salt-smeared glass: three seascapes. A perspective she could judge, read back from, an elevation. At least five floors up with south-facing view.

This was the hint Cora had been looking for, a coded inscription on which she could work. She would check out the west end of town, along the front, under the hill on which the vicar lived — that friend of Tollund who had himself been quartered and dispersed, decapitated. Murdered by a lad who might have reached out of one of Keith’s sketches.

A stiff climb, if you weren’t used to hills, if you lived in cities, riverside places. Cora sweated lightly. It was not unpleasant, this absence of underwear. She paused to admire the eccentric detail of some ghostly Edwardian mansion. They didn’t build on this hill, they colonised it. Parks, crescents, balconies, sloping lawns, azaleas. The favourite set-up for future exploitation, quacks and charity cowboys. Those who used seaside property portfolios to fund fantastic palaces in the neighbouring countryside.

The vicar’s house had been Cora’s first choice for the room from which Tollund painted his View from My Window. Tollund, in his cups, could have been patronised, offered living space, by the unworldly philanthropist. He was, by that period, overplaying his acquaintance with Eddie Burra, the runs out from Rye in the Roller. ‘The last time I saw him,’ the barman at the Royal said, ‘he was dressed as a Marseilles gangster with a burnt-cork hairline moustache and toes painted on his shoes. He was swigging vodka.’

The two dead men, vicar and painter, were characters at a Chelsea Arts Club ball, entities brought together by their secret life: as aesthetes. As extrovert inverts, lovers of boy flesh. All the vicar wanted was to be allowed to watch his guests bathe. Tollund had different tastes, but he let himself be housed — for a time — by the wealthy clergyman. Of late, the retired C-of-E functionary, denied preferment (which, in truth, he had never solicited, too well-born for that), had lost his faith. In the town. In his ability to give shelter and support to the right sort. Boys, just now, didn’t want to be taught how to sail, to handle ropes and rudders. They weren’t interested in visiting galleries or looking through his albums of fine-art postcards.

He let the wrong sort in. The kind that didn’t know how to use a bathroom.

Cora identified the house: a mausoleum, Bates Motel in Aberdeen granite. Stone like the absence of love, grey as unwitnessed ice. Colour hadn’t been leeched by local conditions, it never had colour. There were livelier properties in Kensal Green Cemetery. Keith Tollund, sprawled in his armchair, chopping-board across knee, had stolen colour — by fixating on sealight, making regular trips to Dieppe. The vicar’s mansion was god’s obituary.

The view from the top-floor window, Cora recognised, turning before she reached the crest of the hill, was nothing more than a traffic island, fork in the road, telephone box. Terminal farms where melting flesh condensed on dirty glass. Memory hutches. Language schools. Suicide hotels.

Youths occupied this lozenge of grass, trees like mutated weeds. Broad avenues — of potential escape — radiated out from the scabby island, which became, by default, a place to chill. A suspended bus shelter. A vandalised phone kiosk: every call an unpunctuated emergency, single parents with scabbed and weeping arms trying to explain themselves before the coins ran out.

A bit of a ruck was occurring. With the kiosk acting as bunker, into which the victim retreated. Cora was close enough to be offended by sound as well as sight of this ugly affray. Stupidity annoyed her.

A tall thin lad, baseball cap, sporting goods for non-sportsmen, was ranting, headbutting the panel. Leaving gobs of yellow-white spittle, which slithered thickly down. He turned away, whipping himself up, before his next assault.

‘Talk to me talk to me like that knock you fucking out, spark out cunt. Truth. Cunt.’

He kicked, harder than his soft shoes allowed, copycat karate. Pain devilled venom. He stumbled into the road, as into a lava stream. He hopped, blistered, onto grass. Charged again, blaspheming, at the kiosk. The shuddering victim.