Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘Endless,’ he said. It said. ‘I have had a good life.’

Cora sat down, back against the wall, wrapping Stephen’s coat around herself, searching the pockets for a match with which to light a fresh cigarette.

This was the place: Schizophrenia. A New Labour council window-dressing Old Tory corruption: holes in the road, burnt-out wrecks, hooded tollers on bikes, red cones for four-wheel drives. Mid-Victorian squares blithely ignoring bandit estates. Pubs demolished. Cop cars screeching. Old folk, unminded, trying to navigate a passage through boarded-up, council-funded enterprises — Kurdish wine bar, Nigerian financial services, nail-extension parlour — that disguised a Sixties piazza, one of those slabs of awkward geometry that operate as rat runs (war-zone rehearsals) for accidental criminals.

How to play inconspicuous among so many professional exhibitionists, the casualties of peace? Mid-road pedestrians. The voices-in-the-head brigade (who now have mobile phones to excuse them). Plotters. Twitchers. Watchers (sponsored and amateur). Skip-raiders. Natty tourists (the shoes give them away) with black cases and clipboards. Those who live far from the action but are paid to find a solution. Taggers who get CUNT back on walls before the whitewash masking their offensive slogan has dried.

Hackney, a Romance. A lifelong affair for the naturally monogamous Mr Norton.

This was the house Hannah Wolf occupied with her paramour, the journalist. The so-called ‘London writer’. A front garden with burger cartons and holes from which bay trees had been lifted. She had left him and moved on, I knew that, further east — Poplar, Bow? I was meeting Hannah at the Docklands Travelodge. I needed to talk. Marina Fountain’s View from My Window typescript was the last straw. It was obvious that the woman had somehow broken into my flat — key from porter? — and found the preliminary notes for my Hastings novel. Then typed them out, fast. The old Borges trick: reproduction as composition. My work became her work — if she was prepared to take that much trouble. She couldn’t resist a few flourishes of her own (the hotel bar I’d never patronised), but what really bothered me was the account of the visit to the women in Pevensey. Fountain must have written it before it happened. Much of the rest felt uncomfortably like dictation, poorly transcribed, from a long-distance telephone call. The marine painter Keith Baynes was nakedly pantomimed as ‘Keith Tollund’; the hints I intended concerning his sexual preferences (Jamesian and oblique) were exposed as Carry On crudity.

I was angry. The victim who had been watched, for so many months, would spy on the person responsible for this web of conspiracy: my namesake, Andy Norton. I had found his house. (Address in phone book. Can you believe it?) If I strolled up and down the road, day and night, mumbling to myself, nobody would notice. I’d fit right in.

No lights, no sign of occupation. Milk hasn’t been delivered. Nor post. The only postman I spotted left his sack on the street, let the buggers sort it out for themselves.

I copied Norton. I tried the walk.

Within seconds, I was hit on for bus fares, taxis for partners who were seriously ill in Tottenham (cash returned within the hour). The time was demanded (no watch) by gum-chewing jailbait in vestigial skirts. Cigarettes were solicited by pre-school toddlers. Lights for beslippered outpatients. I understood all too well where Norton, lazy as most of his profession, found his material. He found it, but didn’t know what to do with it: let it breathe, let germ cultures form their patterns, shape a coherent narrative.

Later that evening the man returned, limping. Rucksacked. With female company. Back from one of his walks. I had him . It was so simple. Try and remember the order of events plotted for my aborted A13 novel: a drift through Whitechapel, a secret stone, Sebald-influenced meditation on Conrad ( Heart of Darkness and Hackney’s German Hospital), with mini-climaxes (patterned after Basil Bunting’s mountain range diagram, drawn for his long poem, Briggflatts ) at the Travelodge and Beckton Alp — before the big finish (comedy and tragedy, sex and surveillance) at the ibis hotel, West Thurrock.

I agree: predictable, linear, boring. That’s why I abandoned the scheme and took off for the coast, new images. But knowing now that Norton — through some freakish space-time anomaly — was able to read my mind, anticipate my imaginings, steal my glory, I resolved to play him at his own game. I would use insights gained from the Pevensey women, the Bergman films, and rewind the tape: travel back down one of my spiked narrative’s tributaries. Road as river. Walking as the only method of escaping from fate’s gravity.

Through willed remembrance, I could anticipate (and prevent) Norton’s crude plagiarism. What had happened once would happen again: but not necessarily in the same order. Different storyteller, different story. I should have attended more carefully to what Bunting said. He proposed a work in four sections (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter), but arranged for the symmetry to be dislocated by an ambiguous central passage, the equivalent of my Pevensey hinge.

‘Take the middle out of it,’ the moustached and bespectacled poet told me, eyes glinting, when I interviewed him for a radio programme (never broadcast). ‘It’s a different thing. The middle one is a nightmare or a dream or whatever you fancy. But once you’ve got that, of course, the chronological structure is obvious.’

I’d worked most of this out on the train from Warrior Square Station to London Bridge (not appreciating that this would involve a tour of Kent and the Isle of Thanet, a two-hour halt in Ashford, a section travelled by bus, change of engine and lengthy halt within sight of our destination). Time enough to think. With nothing to read but the newspaper left by the provocative Marina Fountain (avatar of John Keats’s Isabella Jones) at the window table of the Bo-Peep Inn, Bulverhythe.

You’d forgotten? My obsessive-compulsive desire to hoard scraps of paper (for future interrogation)? The conviction that a coherent explanation of the contemporary world might be assembled from news-clippings, video-pulls, buried quotations. Marina Fountain’s abandoned newspaper was a holy relic.

Bunting too was much on my mind. His lifelong allegiance to shape. Old rogue. He had to play at journalism (alongside the teenage prodigy, Barry MacSweeney): the Newscastle Chronicle . They watched shipping, boats coming up the Tyne. They filed tide times. Bunting was meticulous. MacSweeney learnt the value of getting the smallest details absolutely right. No compromise with reality.

Poets and war. Newspapers and their contraries. Deep truth, the only kind I cared about, belongs with the poets. Basil Bunting, prisoner of conscience in the First War; Quaker, skipper, spy. He worked for The Times in Persia. You want to know about Baghdad? Forget rolling TV reports, fixed documentaries. False authority. Read Bunting’s translations from Firdosi, Rudaki, Hafez. Read The Spoils :

When Tigris floods snakes swarm in the city

Appreciate the vulgarity of the present conflict, study that ancient poem, Gilgamesh . The rivalry and love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.

‘Even if I write about brothels in Baghdad,’ Bunting said, ‘they are brothels I’ve been in.’

Beyond the train window, a field.

I could learn from the poets, rigour, discipline, attack. Secret structures of rhythm (my ear was tin). But most I could appreciate how, by intense concentration, seizure of the moment, they moved ahead of time: to tell it as it should be . Read the Denver man, Ed Dorn, on the Bush boys, the sleazy politics of compromise, perpetual Balkanisation (trashing of memory). Poems are memory-systems. Dorn, on the cone of time, sees what is coming: