Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Track was a premature ghost. You couldn’t pull this number on Rainham Marshes. Nobody would notice.

Monica Vitti, so Track had informed us, when we sidled, collars up, around a breakers’ yard, got her start dubbing an actress called Dorian Gray in Antonioni’s gloomy Po Valley drama, Il Grido . Echoes of echoes of echoes. A counterfeit name for a forgotten performer. Oscar Wilde’s fable twisted: a production still staying forever young and enigmatic in a film buff’s attic, while the freckled sleepwalker Vitti (who always seemed to be taking instruction, a few beats after the event, from an earpiece disguised by a lustrous tumble of hair) succumbs, in gentle increments, to the pull of mortality.

Out on the road, Jimmy’s spirits lifted; he understood precisely how to play the part of the man at the wheel. Humming, tapping his coin, doing the voices: a replay of last night’s television, a documentary about a stuntman who’d broken every bone in his body, but who kept on pushing it, wilder and wilder outfits. Clenched fist, cigar in mouth, as they wheeled him away on the gurney; wink for the camera. Jimmy, his biker days behind him, was impressed by the fatalism, leather and tassels, of this once dirt-poor hillbilly. An Appalachian astronaut who jumped buses, took flight across canyons, hurtled to earth. A gravity addict. The absence of a helmet that would interfere with an exquisitely engineered hairstyle, raven black and aerodynamic, was a red badge of stupidity. But what Jimmy liked best in the film were the empty roads, dawn shots of a dusty nowhere, the clapboard whistlestop where the stuntman grew up. Coal heaps, coal dirt as a filter. Lone dogs picking at road-kill in the parking lots of drive-in convenience stores.

Half listening, I could tolerate Jimmy’s monologue, float it across the aspirant-Americana of the A13. New Jersey’s reed beds translated to Newham: sideflash of carney show Millennium Dome. Marginal enterprises (failed) giving way to hopeless future projects, retail suburbs, development scams, ski slopes sculpted from toxic waste, the inflorescence of entropy. (With his spare hand Jimmy snapped a high-rise trio on the outskirts of Dagenham, seen from a flyover, pale sun rising, downriver, beyond Ford’s water tower and the pylon forests.) Heroic English cottages, grace-and-favour for workers in the motor plant, were terraced hard against the sub-motorway, this sluggish tributary of London’s orbital hoop, the M25. Front windows were boarded over. The back gardens, in the days when these dwellings were habitable, concealed the front door, the way in. You learnt to live with noise, dirt. You looked north, away from the river, towards the slopes of the Epping Forest fringe, the Italianate tower of Claybury Mental Hospital.

Jimmy’s immodest canvases, stacked in his Hackney lock-up, were a memory bank for everything that was missing, damaged or destroyed: gangland pubs where retired dockers talked contraband with chalky villains, swollen knuckles, liver spots, back from a seven in Parkhurst. Carpets of scrunched up betting-slips. Metal ashtrays from which the ash could never be rinsed (nobody tried). Size implied defeat. Caverns for excursionists who weren’t there. Riverside palaces of ruined gilt occupied by two or three old men, leaking smoke and watching the door. If these pubs aren’t taken over by ravers, for all-night noise fests, they’re finished. Abandoned to Jimmy and his swollen replicas.

Track and Livia disregarded the low macho of the stuntman replays, they looked out of the window, passed soft-voiced comments, noticing things. Jimmy needed an audience, needed us with him: he switched to a Los Angeles murder mystery, the reinvestigation of a slasher crime. He did Nick Nolte, drunk, table-hopping with a bunch of homicide cops at a reunion in a Chinese restaurant; Nick’s fame-clubbed head too heavy for his shoulders. Jimmy did the obscenities, panty-sniffing creeps, masturbating peepers, Vice Squad jokes with canned laughter. And he did them with furtive glances in the driving mirror.

I suggested, feeling the first pangs of hunger, that we come off-road at Rainham. The Thames marshes, bordered by semi-legit businesses, Portakabins, slavering dogs, were a lacuna Jimmy could effortlessly exploit: a bit of fence, rubbish lorries hiccuping down an unclassified highway. A single striking object — concrete barge, bridge disappearing into the clouds, motorbike wheel peeking out of sluggish stream — would be enough, a focal point for the composition. The rest was suggestion. A sprayed undercoat, a bucket of emulsion, detail touched in with a fine brush.

‘Like welding,’ Jimmy said. ‘The garage. Everything comes back to that. Access boredom and march right through it.’ Five hours a day, radio blaring. Knock off in time to pick up the kids. Evenings free to network, go on the piss. Even if the binge lurched on for a week and Jimmy woke up in a flat above a barber shop in Portsmouth, he never failed to bring home the numbers. Mobile and ex-directory. Name, rank: neatly inked on the flapping cuff of his once-white shirt. Antony Gormley. Man from Tate Modern. That architect who does the long, thin glass coffins, shoehorned into cracks between Clerkenwell lofts. Woman from Modern Painters. Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Rowan Moore, the journalist whose brother is the editor of …

We pulled up broadside to a phone kiosk that some humorist had slapped down in the middle of nothing. The police car that had been trailing us, since the mountain of multicoloured container units (we clambered out with our cameras), cut across our bows in a whip of dust and rubber. The driver yawned, his oppo tapped on Jimmy’s window. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘What are you?’ ‘Where are you going?’ The second question being the tough one.

The uniform talked to Jimmy and stared at the girls. I did my halfwitted, middle-class TV researcher act, flashing a laminated ID card (Apollo Home Entertainment, Bethnal Green Road). They weren’t interested. What we hadn’t noticed — preoccupied with extreme manifestations of local colour — was the distant line of beaters working their way towards us across the mud flats. Wellington bootmarks filling with yellow squitter. Nuisanced crows perched on wire.

The search was now in its critical third day, a schoolgirl from Purfleet reported as missing: last seen at the bus stop, 8.30 a.m., grey flannel skirt, blue jersey, no coat. Fourteen years old: no form, no suspect connections. An occasional clubber at ‘Tuesdays’ in Basildon. Tuesdays: as in ‘shut on’. Apostrophe sacrificed in homage to Ms Weld, the peppy ingénue of Rally Round the Flag, Boys , the depressed mom of Heartbreak Hotel . Clubland in Essex had slithered down the fantasy casting couch from Marilyn (shaking it for Jack) to Raquel (fur bikini) to Teen Queen surf bimbos (sub-Corman). Weld deserved better. In her day she was pretty good. We were the same age, but we’d matured at different speeds. She got to play Scott Fitzgerald’s wife round about the time I was scratching dog shit from the base of the pyramid in Limehouse Church. In the film dictionaries you’ll find her between Johnny Weissmuller and Orson Welles.

Sad that Tuesday had become estuary slang, mouthed by groups of young males, on walls, on bikes, shouting after schoolgirls. ‘See you next Tuesday.’ C-U-N-T.

The Basildon club was the kind of place where they employed bouncers to chuck you in. To keep you wired. Blood flowed, at the burger stall in the early hours, when grudges were sorted; cold night air, big men with small psychoses, rucks over minicabs and gash. The local filth were so bent, there was no point in putting them on the payroll. They paid you , for part of the action. They stored excess stock, drugs and porn. You worked for them, if you were lucky, as a salaried distributor.