Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I liked Hannah’s voice, disparate elements of race and place had come together to form her disguise: Whitechapel, Hackney, Bow and the real east, Kraków, Kishinev, Kurdistan. Her eyes shone and her hands moved. Enthusiasm (too light a word): possession. The yielding up of self. Touch. Her hand alighting on my thigh. My arm closing, quite accidentally, around her shoulder.

In the long mirror above the bar I caught the other Norton’s eye: mean-spirited, voyeuristic. You looking at me? Another round: Kummel, lemonade and ice for Hannah, while I stayed with the whiskey. Norton pretended to be absorbed in the TV film — The American Friend ? Betrayal. Double-dealing, trains, sickness, borders. Fellow director Nicholas Ray guesting in an eye-patch. Avatars of death everywhere.

I asked the barman, a man who looked like an air steward who’d been found out, if I could get a room for the night. It was going to work with Hannah. She couldn’t, at this hour, walk back, alone, across the A13 into that estate. Talking made her affectionate. It might have happened too — but for Norton, the smirk with which he watched Dennis Hopper’s exploitation of Bruno Ganz. America and Europe. Revenge, I suppose, for the adaptation of an American original by a German: the disapproval of Patricia Highsmith. Her crooked mouth.

Wait for him in the Gents, then finish it, stuff his fat head down the bowl. Repossess my own story, clear the road. A night of love with Hannah — then, unbathed, a walk to the limits of the A13, Southend, the sea. Beautiful shifts of energy: fresh images, fresh prose.

Meanwhile, to pass the time, I told Hannah one of my dreams. Do you ever read the same book twice? And wonder at the changes? Hannah was always asking, if a film came on, late in the evening: ‘Have I seen this before?’ The answer is always ‘no’. You redirect, respond to trigger images, throwaway gestures, the clothes they wear. Dreams should never be recounted — because you shape them, smooth out glitches, apply logic, search for the kindest camera angles.

Hannah broke away, detached my arm. Took fierce spectacles out of her bag. She swept the room, as if seeing it for the first time. She noticed other drinkers, pulled down her skirt.

‘I dreamt that I cut off the little finger of my left hand.’

‘Please,’ Hannah said.

It did sound gross, banal. The first fascination of dream-revelation, like seeing yourself on television, soon fades.

‘And next morning, cutting bread, I really did slice the thing, to the bone. Here, look.’

‘Don’t. One more word and —’

‘A woman I met on the south coast recommended a novel set on Canvey Island, which involved a guilty walker — responsible for his brother’s death — feeding his fingers to an owl. I think it was an owl. I can’t imagine how he trained it to stop there.’

‘This is perfectly disgusting and quite pointless. I’m not and I never was your therapist.’

I stopped, of course. Stopped speaking. The trance of tender forgetfulness, between Hannah and myself, was shattered. But the finger theme wouldn’t go away. Gestures. First finger and little finger, outstretched, warding off the evil eye. Eye in the palm of the hand. Eye of Horus. Eye in a triangle: Aleister Crowley. Tattoo parlours of the Old Town. A barber on Cambridge Heath Road putting a new blade into his razor, missing digit, tight-skinned, raw.

My great-uncle (on my mother’s side), I’d forgotten him, a ghost in the attic, simple-minded but without harm. My grandfather shaving the old man, towel around neck, on a stool, outside in the sunshine. Soft bristles. Toothless, grinning, he shows me his stump.

And Struwwelpeter by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann. Those German doctors! Another nightmare. The smocked boy on the cover with his blond Roger Daltrey afro and fingers like branches. Brightly coloured woodcuts: masturbatory warnings.

The door flew open, in he ran,

The great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.

Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come

And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go:

And Conrad cries out — Oh! Oh! Oh!

Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast.

That both his thumbs are off at last.

Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza (1975). He hacks off his pinky, a point of honour, gangster-Samurai thing. I thought about continuity problems: how they’d keep the hand out of shot for the rest of the film. Somnolence and celibacy, Mitchum’s schtick. Japanese buddy (Ken Takakura). The symbolic castration helped.

The images kept coming. Hannah moved right away.

William Burroughs.

Bill took off the top section of his finger with poultry shears. (‘Stainless steel, sir. Never rusts or tarnishes.’) He set the sawtooth lower blade against his little left finger and squeezed. Blood squirted. He wrapped the joint (no longer part of the story) in Kleenex and went out to a bar for brandy. He brought the severed fingertip to his analyst, Dr Wiggers. Who was sure that Burroughs was undergoing a psychotic episode (as I was, now, by proxy).

The Beat Generation finishing school: Bellevue Hospital. His shrink, a lady’, taps a yellow pencil on her teeth.

‘Do you hear voices?’

‘When people talk to me, I can hear them talking, yes.’

‘No, I mean, do your hear voices talking inside your head?’

‘I suppose you could say I have a vivid imagination.’

‘Now, what about this self-mutilation?’

‘Oh that. Well, that’s part of an initiation ceremony into the Crow Indian tribe.’

People like to be photographed with Burroughs: celebrities, movie stars, aspirant writers, painters. Mick Jagger, David Cronenberg, Francis Bacon. It’s a genre: skull and flesh. Burroughs: memento mori to twentieth-century culture. I’d been snapped with him myself, beside the goldfish pond, a couple of weeks before he died. By one of the young men, the carers. You could hold that photograph in your hand and watch the lineaments of the face disappear (mine before his).

Hannah yawned, cumin and caraway seed. I could see the capillaries on her tongue, tiny hairs: rough pink fur. I wanted her to be my owl, claws and feather cloak. I wanted to feed my fingers into her mouth. But she was tired, preoccupied. It wouldn’t play, the scene I was scrambling to write.

Poor Conrad. How would he open his sauce bottle without thumbs?

Norton lurched after Jimmy Seed, out of the bar. I followed. Anger boiled in me: off-road rage, Travelodge temper tantrum. Smash his skull. Splinter his face. Stop the story right here. Cancel the stupid drama that is still to come at the ibis hotel; complex diagonals of action I’d never be capable of articulating — killer in car, watchers at window, Albanian kidnappers. (Are you sure they weren’t from Romania, Moldova? Mountain men. Catholics not Muslims? Economic migrants sending money home.)

‘What’s your game? Staring at a strange woman in a hotel bar?’

We wrestled. I drove his face against the mirror. I wanted to print the slogan — Pastis — backwards on his forehead. Absinthe. Absence. I wanted to push him through — into hyperspace. Let him splinter and fragment.

He vanished, I bled.

I filled a basin with cold water, splashed my face. Norton wasn’t a cancer that would perish alongside me in the crematorium. Nor a double, Xerox, trial run. He hadn’t filched DNA, grease from my poultry shears. Andy was certainly no parallel universe alter ego, fetch or substitute. Tanist. A simple grammatical error, shift of pronoun: he for I. Exit and out. Reality requires an even tone of voice. Fiction demands the courage to walk in other people’s dreams: regime change. Know how to steal and when to keep it buttoned.

Hotels are always aphrodisiac: the barely felt vibrations of constant traffic. Barefoot in carpeted corridors. Lifts like safes: the two of you, close, sharing air, not touching, not yet. I was aroused, in the old days, by the corruption of the city, wealth, power, institutionalised mendacity: so fuck it away.