Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

He was unmarried.

When Norton — the other, living one — came out, booted and rucksacked, low morning sun over Hackney horizon, I was ready for him. I knew just how it went. There was a woman. I expected that. Andy never walked without a companion: he needed a stooge, someone to bear the brunt of his ‘humour’. She was strong-shouldered, tall as he was, long-striding. I pictured her, nude, in one of those photo-strip sequences by Eadweard Muybridge: Woman Sprinkling Water from a Basin . She had lovely thick red hair. She was, or rather she would be, the non-pregnant Pevensey woman, Track. The American. Jacky Roos’s former wife.

They came down Queensbridge Road and into the Bethnal Green labyrinth, Brick Lane. He was snapping away. She, a proper artist, waited. He missed the plaque for Bud Flanagan (‘Leader of the Crazy Gang’), high on the wall, above Rosa’s café in Hanbury Street. They took tea, chatted to a rather natty schnorrer. An old Jewish feller who fed them a succession of tall stories — which they lapped up.

I caught the name ‘Litvinoff’, the mention of Rainham. They were headed east. I anticipated every move, every move he made on her: an oblique advance on the golden wolf of Aldgate Pump. They were following, like sniffer dogs, a trail: pre-tarmac, post-development. The soul of the A13. And I was right with them, dictating the script. If I imagined a turn, a halt, a digression, they made it.

I don’t think Norton spotted me. Maybe once. In Whitechapel, on Vallance Road. Or a reflection among nautical charts in a shop-window in the Minories. If he did, it was a bad dream, footsteps on his grave. He was dragged forward by the epic gravity of the fallen standing stone, on that bald patch of grass, behind Commercial Road. Who should I throw in to greet them, a dowser? A dowser who just happens to have worked for Ford’s in Dagenham. Would you believe it?

Norton had no choice. I invented a bit of business to hold him back, while I scooted ahead to the Travelodge. My tryst with Hannah Wolf, lover and therapist. It was her story, really. The disentanglement of dream, reverie, landscape. Freud, Hannah said, was the first great novelist of the twentieth century.

It was in the car park of the Docklands Travelodge, as I paced, restlessly, waiting for Hannah, that I developed my notion of composite landscape (leading to composite time): skies from one exposure (Hastings) laid over another shore (Bow Creek). Characters from a deleted narrative could be given a second chance, revived in order to ‘rescue’ a dull passage of prose. The entropy of the road, the A13, invited this multilayered approach: documentation, in its absolute form, as pure fiction.

Give me a pen and a pad of paper and I would be totally incapable of sketching Hannah Wolf. My Identikit portrait was blank. She existed, if at all, in random memories: pouring water in a doll’s cup for her sister, the way she clung, even now, to the rituals of childhood; her unlooked-for liveliness at the seaside, the rush, screaming, at the waves. And how she bristled, clicked her tongue, when she opened an official letter.

Hannah wasn’t happy about this meeting. She had problems of her own. There was no question of letting me into the high tower, Goldfinger’s flats with the view over the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel. A quick drink at the Travelodge would have to suffice. We would meet, at twilight, in the car park (neither of us had cars). Hannah didn’t want to listen to my dreary confessions. She wasn’t a priest and she had no intention of dressing up, for my benefit, in a cassock. Or any other kind of frock. Of course she would recognise me: the one whose eyes shone in the dark like a photoflash vampire.

A procession of reps in grey suits (carrying other grey suits in protective wrappers), all going out , quitting the place, looking for action, gave way to nothing. Baffled road noise. Gritty breezes. A felt, but largely unheard, hum of bad electricity. Boredom would have to be redefined for the A13: it was no longer the precursor to retail terrorism, the void. Something worse. Shadows etched into tarmac. Hours and hours of CCTV footage rippling into orgasmic excitement: with the arrival of a crew of transients carrying black bags.

Like the Keystone Kops invading Tarkovsky’s ‘ Zone ’. The confirmation of my landscape thesis.

I ducked behind a car, a Nissan Primera. I had time to read, by braille, the letters in their circle, before this distracted man, his family, followers, children, hauled themselves into the lobby of the hotel.

He looked quite like the hyper-realist painter Jimmy Seed — about whose work I had once written a few thousand undistinguished words. We spent a long afternoon in his Hackney studio wrestling over a bottle. I wasn’t much of a drinker, up until then. And he was trying to quit. Most of his recent work was predicated on the absence of booze.

When Jimmy went dry, so he told me, he started leaving people out of his paintings: neck-biters, slags, dog lovers, derelicts. Women with fat legs, visible pantylines and rucksacks. Men pissing on fires. He was right on the money. Out of Hackney and Limehouse and onwards to the A13. Cinemas, bingo halls, drinking clubs: waiting for demolition. His canvases were too big for the studio. They belonged on hoardings, advertising things that had already been sold.

Jimmy was the death of narrative. If you saw a photograph of the painter, hands in pockets of raincoat, up against the wall, towpath of canal, white shirt buttoned to the collar, he resembled a political prisoner. A man in the wrong place, Belfast. Waiting for a bullet. Friendly fire.

So here they all are, the unpainted of lost London. I watch them stagger across the car park, my cancelled fictions: the American woman, Track, kid in one hand, black bags in the other — and sullen Andy Norton (fink, liar, thief). He fancies his chances. A new location, a road for the morning. Troop of bohemian vagrants (artfully introduced). A strong woman to temper his culpable misogyny. He can’t believe his luck. It’s almost as if somebody is pulling the strings. He talks about ‘tapping territory’, mediumship, ley lines, possession. He’s even come up with a tame dowser.

Hannah caught me by surprise. I think she’d been spying on me for some time. She kissed me full on the mouth. I tasted her. Then she broke away, skittering off towards the picture window, the bar.

It went well, the evening. I thought so. A place nobody would ever find us, dark alcoves, soft Muzak. We drank steadily. I learnt, with gritted teeth, how to listen. Hannah had access to material I knew nothing about: communal life, post-Laingian politics, Poland. Poplar.

The more she talked, the happier she was. Between fugues, we necked. I let her run. I was beginning to enjoy it, being an audience. Freud, she announced, was an artist, a myth-maker, a proto-novelist fixated on sexual drama (place him alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Bergman). Jung was a premature Californian. She had a postcard of a rather wonderful painting, Freud and Jung Leaving New York , by one of her clients (don’t call them patients, nutters). A beard called Rhab Adnam. Wild seas, off Manhattan, the great psychologists hand in hand on a slippery deck: tall towers trembling. Impossible not to read this naif apocalypse, painted thirty years ago, as prophetic (all good art begins there).

‘Either you make reality an object of pleasure, if you are powerful enough already.’ She quoted Jung. ‘Or you make it an object of your desire to grab or to possess.’

There was no difficulty in avoiding Jimmy Seed’s gang (it was him), they were getting loud and plastered. Jimmy was back on the booze, stress had driven him to it; taste and warmth on tongue and throat, glow in belly, welcomed him like an old friend.