Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Ruth Alsop. The original. My one and only.

Ruth liked hotels: the anonymity. The simple fact of not being in a place of laundry baskets, ironing boards and shopping lists. A house where she was responsible for sheets, bills, toilet rolls. She loved, and kept, those little complimentary wrappers of soap. But, most of all, she loved the view from the hotel window; being able to sit and watch the town square, the river, somewhere she would never again visit.

Hannah was very different. Her home was the heart of things: the setting of the table, the polishing of furniture, the arrangement of books. In theory. In practice, domestic space was cramped and chaotic, tumbles of papers, clothes, meals begun, abandoned, preserved, forgotten. When the cleaning had been done and the room was tidy, cut flowers, music, she relaxed, relented, became affectionate. I was rewarded, confirmed in my human mess, surprised by the hunger she unfailingly located somewhere within me.

The Docklands Travelodge was never going to be right. It reminded Hannah of her internship, a hospital in West Texas. Troubled strangers, about to go through some bad experience, wondering if they could meet the bill. Would it be easier to die under the knife? Leave their hated relatives digging up the garden to find the cash.

I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to move. Hannah was brisk. She ripped off her skirt, strode into the bathroom (a cupboard), pissed loudly with the door open, ran the tap for a moment, came to bed.

I took a shower, but it didn’t help. She was sleeping in white T-shirt and black bra (she never bothered with colour coordination). I wanted to talk, nibble, come at the business obliquely, as if by accident — but that was impractical. She was comatose, snuffling, and I was painfully priapic. Her bare legs and great thick bush excited me. I stroked, I nuzzled.

‘In the morning,’ she mumbled. Without turning to face me. ‘Much better then.’

I loved the way her lips thickened, muscle, rind; thickened and became moist. As I was. In a state to crack windows, stop the traffic.

‘Too tired.’

She rolled away, curled up. And there was absolutely nothing, I knew from long experience, to do about it. The road was out there, a few yards from our bed, I concentrated on that: remembering, step by step, every yard I had walked from Aldgate Pump. I anticipated the next day’s march, Beckton, Rainham, Thurrock. I called up markings on oil tanks, graffiti on the river wall. Somewhere between Chadwell St Mary and Mucking Marshes, I fell into a shallow and troubled sleep. I floated out on a slack tide, pressed against Hannah, dreaming of Ruth.

Begin with a hollow laugh. I am walking in a south-easterly direction, at pace. Tin noticeboard on sewage outfall path. The oxymoron: ‘Recent History’. Taggers, spray-can bandits, and their idiot revisions. How far back do we travel before ‘history’ kicks in? Allen Ginsberg, I remember, was very excited when the huge poet Charles Olson announced, on the crest of one of his more messianic episodes, that history was over. A summerhouse near Regent’s Park. A middle-aged Jewish man with a beard. Being interviewed by a nervous youth, his first paid assignment. Ginsberg scratches, grooms, worried about his lover’s breakdown, back in New York, smashed windows, incarceration in madhouse. A dark-green T-shirt rides over gently protuberant belly. Buddhist breathing, English cigarettes.

‘Olson says that now everyone can select their own images, everyone is on to the fact that language is controlling them on a massive electronic scale. Olson is saying that history is ended in the sense that not only the old means of manufacturing history are called into question, but also the population explosion, the electronics information network, the fact of our leaving the planet, the atom bomb, the shortage of food, the ecological disturbance caused by heavy metal industries, have all changed the environment so much that the old conditions of history are changed. They are no longer like they were during what we know of as history, a place where the skies are open, where the sky is the limit.’

Wide skies over Newham, the valley of the Roding: wild skies. London shit running in torrents under my feet. I didn’t expect, with my present duties (narrative and ethical), to be thinking of Ginsberg, 1967. Career journalist reporting on the underground scene, his own impotence. Poets sitting around: electing themselves as unac knowledged legislators, listening to scientists and street politicians, conmen, visionaries, state spooks in disguise. Drug-brokers, hustlers, innocents. Language still a weapon. The phrases of that time, after weeks of editing, looping, replaying, stayed with me.

History has ended. It was (and remains) a TV channel: shuddering videophone image from the war zone, desert or mountain cave. Ginsberg in heaven, yakking, scraping hair from his mouth, trying to make sense of it. But, if there is any history left, it is on a noticeboard, alongside the Northern Sewage Outfall. On the road to Beckton (aka Basra). Roads have to go somewhere (apart from the orbital M25, which carries you outside time, back to H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker). History, by definition, is ‘a continuous, systematic narrative of past events’. Events that remain, are allowed to remain, in the thin air of our present.

Ginsberg’s clear skies. Early mist. Cocktail of pollution. A man walking, creaking, stiff back, loose grip, wobbly knee — but lustful, hungry as an adolescent: hungry, in the absence of the desired object, the dark woman, for place.

‘A giant public tolerance of all forms of madness and perversion,’ screamed Ginsberg. I transcribed the tape, fingers blistered: stop, play. It was the beginning of the word thing, before documentation gave way to the easier path, fiction. On that long thin page (my first self-published prose work), I can see the text now: a photograph of Ruth Alsop . She’d come up from Soho, Frith Street (where she was typing out translations, Godard scripts), to join us, the TV crew, on Primrose Hill; carrying bananas, milk, bread, cheese.

‘Who’s that ?’ Ginsberg asked.

‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A good friend of mine. She’s brought some lunch.’

And there she is, the pain fresh after thirty-five years: that history doesn’t behave as it should. You can’t re-enter the frame, repair old mistakes. Ruth Alsop aged twenty-two, short blue-and-white spotted dress, straight-cut, bought in a Paris flea market. Long smooth brown legs. Long hair. And the look she gave: which I hadn’t, back then, the wit to interpret. The look of Isabella Jones in Hastings. The woman writing in the Bo-Peep Inn. A face divided: easy smile, a gaze that goes on for ever without coming into focus.

The private woman and the public man, Ginsberg, united for one instant — when Ruth hands the compulsive journal-keeper a banana freshly bought, that morning, in Berwick Street Market, in Soho.

Primrose Hill lost. Beckton Alp achieved. Engorged, I walked with difficulty. I came alongside two razorheads, amateur Futurists spray-painting a stretch of brick wall.

‘More purple — in the eye sockets?’

‘Maybe. A squeeze.’

‘More scarlet on the muff?’

Carrier bags clank with cans, paint not lager. Two artists, loaded down, on the road to Beckton Alp. Two aesthetes: tame, savage. The liminal places, across the Lea, beyond Abbey Creek, were loud with them; characters determined to revamp the landscape. That’s why I kept off the A13.I could shadow Norton, Seed and the others from the high ground, from a distance. I knew exactly where they were going. No avoiding the golgotha of Rainham. The TV dramas of the ibis hotel. But the road itself, since my first pass, the fictional version in which the pilgrims ascended the alp and detoured to witness the wall-paintings of St Mary Magdalene at East Ham, had changed. For the worse. (As we, recent historians, always assert.) Respect for the three Es: Ecstasy, Entropy, Essex.