Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

What struck Cora, as she moved in on this futile episode of urban theatre, was that the gang with the loudmouth, the ones near him, waiting for a phantom bus, weren’t kids, but an orthodox middle-aged couple, man and woman, wearing the same shapeless, colour-uncoordinated leisurewear.

‘Kill you bitch you say you say you say that again kick your head in.’

The experience of the world for this dislocated trio came down to a traffic island and the capture of a phone kiosk, the only means of communicating with the outside, with other intelligences capable of giving judgement — or, at worst, listening to their complaints.

The object of the youth’s demented monologue, Cora saw, was a child, a young girl. Partner, possession? Incestuous lover? He was out of control, backing into the road, ignoring awkwardly swerving local traffic, smokers, without cellphones; cars grinding uphill, leaking oil, trailing exhaust pipes. He had to watch his step, onto the high curb, the slippery grass. He screamed at the cowering girl. Who was chewing on a strand of loose hair.

The older couple, at the edge of the island, one foot on the grass, one on the curb, kept their backs to the action, shamed by it. They stared down at a massive, ugly, unused church.

Cora touched the mad boy’s shoulder, and when he spun, disbelieving, mid-rant, she brushed the base of an outstretched hand against the ball of his throat. He jerked back, scalded, opened his mouth to scream and couldn’t, something blocking the airways, a knot of pain around which breath failed to find passage. He dropped to his knees, red-faced, humiliated by dry tears. She kicked him and he slumped, slithered, spark out, against the kiosk. Now the girl, trapped inside, head barely reaching the panel from which the phone hung, took up her defeated lover’s threnody, his screech.

‘Bleedin’ cunt. Mind your own bleedin’ business.’

She hammered the snotty glass, ranting, gesturing. But, even when Cora walked away, she wouldn’t step outside.

HEALTHY BOWELS? No problem in that department. Quite the reverse. Eyes: like looking out of week-old milk bottles. Ears clogged and sticky, nose broken. But bowels ticked like a German motor: Stephen X, age unknown: writer. Marine exile.

His walk, the colonnade. Wet suits for scuba divers. Yellowed wedding dresses. Black god franchises. Fast food. NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES. The shops, beneath the hulk of the Ocean Queen flats, dealt in negatives, prohibitions — fear. They kept no stock beyond instantly forgotten memorabilia, concrete floors. Stephen releases a clutch of bad wind.

He had never, before this night, considered taking a drink at the Royal Hotel. Imposing facade, late breakfasters noticed when he crept out for his newspaper (London evening tabloid — of previous evening). More of a temple than a pub. Steps up from street, revolving door. Disconcerting reception area, woman behind desk, dim lights, panels of illusionist glass doubling the stairs, throwing back an atrium of wilted greenery.

Krater was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the bar. The street-level Palm Court, to which ordinary drinkers were admitted, was closed. The upstairs cocktail bar, fairy lights and heavy carpet, was defunct. Approximately-French chairs, Louis-something, faced the sea, occupied by couples who had slept together without being introduced. Stephen couldn’t begin to read them. An ominously benign woman of the Rosemary West type, teacher in provincial comprehensive, who had run away with a pustular and hormonal fifth-former (incapable of sitting still): twenty years on. The mute afterlife of a misconceived romance. So Stephen, ex-author, improvised. Even the drinks were out of kilter, lager and pink gin, rum-and-pep against repeat orders of stout. Smokers, of course. All of them. Even the ones in uniform, veteran bellboys, smoke leaking from cupped fists as they hung around the lift, hoping to pimp for the definitively de-energised.

Stephen hid, close to a pillar, and watched the window. This sea town, as he reported it to himself, fictional enactments of each lost day, was his cinema. A narrative of clouds and surfaces, uncalibrated evolution: he lived in what he saw. As long as he himself was unobserved. When his consciousness froze … that was the painting: window/frame. This was such a moment. A painting based on cinema, reflections, cigarette smoke, lights of passing traffic.

Two tendencies, Stephen noted, from his own flat, the high balcony where he flinched from the morning air. Fitness masochism and elective cancer. Obsessive hard-track joggers, hitting against the wind, tough women (weights attached to wrists) and old, weathered men (fit paunches, curved but unwobbly). Tanned, stained, toasted: by hazy sunshine and nicotine. Active early, die late: the concept.

‘The motherfucker won’t read it, fuck him. We don’t need him, right? Script is king. He won’t fly to Hong Kong, fuck him. We take it elsewhere.’

Stone-bald, ungay, an American Jew. In black T-shirt, white trainers. Talking to — what? — a blond German accountant. Young, clean. Disturbingly good-looking. With overdefined, spookily well-distributed features. Actor turned to script doctoring? Executive producer (without product). A deal-maker in a third-class hotel with an optional view of the sea.

A patrol boat, out of Dover, the kind Charles Windsor once skippered, which had held its position, close in to shore, all day, was riding at anchor. Lights on the bow. Rocking gently on the evening tide.

‘We’re here, on the spot. We’ve wasted months in this craphole reading transcripts, interviewing witnesses, going through the goddamn files. What we got? The fucking story, man. The story. We got reality. This is a headline play. It happened, right?’

‘No, actually, I would not say so. I don’t for sure see that. He won’t buy. It is still, I think, too loose.’

‘Loose? Fuck you loose.’

The bald man tried to push back the table, spilling his untouched drink. He stood up, a stain (the shape of Cuba) in the lap of his sand-coloured shorts. He stormed the corner, disappeared from Stephen’s view. And was still swearing when he returned with a fresh cocktail, which he put down beside the other. He brought nothing for the German, who was scorning a cup of cold coffee. Pleased with his reflection in the long window, comfortable with his partner’s discomfort, the accountant lit a fresh cigarette. Long and very white. The atmosphere of the upstairs lounge was freshened by this novelty, American tobacco.

For the first time, Stephen couldn’t take the sea. Even of favourite things, you can have too much. The sea was a cipher. It was implacable. He’d interviewed, out at Pevensey Bay, the woman (without a dog) who had found the butchered clergyman’s arm. Stephen had been admitted to a beach hut on stilts that, miraculously, became part of the beach, the pepper-coloured shingle shelf.

An unbroken spider’s-web protected wooden steps that led up from a bare garden. This woman, quite evidently, had not been out for days. One of those non-eaters, non-movers, who find their place. And abdicate. Turn away, resolutely, from other potentialities. Sniff creosote and ozone, sit by a half-open door, freshening a large blue mug of tea.

The kitchen door was wide to the road and the marshes, the Pevensey Levels — where the crudely amputated limb had been discovered, lying across the path, dragged from the undergrowth by some animal.

She saw what it was, but she didn’t react. She listened to the noise the wind made in the reeds — and tried to think of a way to remember that sound. If she accepted the validity of the grand guignol token, she would have to do something. The blue arm was a barrier, that much was clear. But she was reluctant to abort her walk, the two hours in the weather that she allowed herself. On a weekly basis.