Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Jos Kaporal, in his ambiguous identity as researcher/self-impersonator, had spent weeks in hotel bars, where the price of drinks leapt by regular increments as the journos poured in. He was usually there before the bad thing occurred (DV camera, Polaroids, tension-relieving duty-free cigarettes). A Belfast planner on an awayday to Birmingham. Being a figment of a desperate novelist’s imagination, he was comfortable in his discomfort. The noise. The heavy drinking. Multiple screens. The twitter of mobile phones. Dry fucks of the Mediadrome. Bursts of brilliant white light around a roped-off section of generic car park. Loudmouths fighting for rooms that look down on the action (double-glazed windows that won’t open).

As a long-term sleeper, an agent manipulated by a remote and disinterested controller, Kaporal was in his element. Jacky Roos, his alter ego, the demi-Belgian, was less happy. He was the model, it’s true, for our binge-eating undercover man — but his cover was blown by this confrontation with the fictional double. If they find themselves in the same room at the same time, the world tilts on its axis. Rivers run backwards. And books are composed by clicking typewriters in empty rooms.

I didn’t know where to begin. My instinct was to run upstairs, call room service; keep my door locked until it was all over. Roos was in custody (my fault). The Albanians were being helped with exaggerated courtesy into a police van. Drug-smuggling comedian Howard Marks was holding court like a rock star on sabbatical from the Priory: voice of Neil Kinnock, face of Bill Wyman.

The kidnap subplot collapsed because there was nowhere for it to go, the author lost his bottle. It was never much of a story in the first place and he was no Elmore Leonard. You pick up a paragraph, overhear something on TV, when you’re shifting your weight, easing your back, at a crowded bar. Like now. One thing journalists are good at is catching a barman’s eye. Waving a banknote and talking to the office at the same time. A gang of no-hope Albanians plan to kidnap Posh Spice. Stunt or scam? It ends, as these things inevitably do, in the parking lot of an ibis hotel (convenient for everywhere, a hundred yards from the orbital motorway).

A TV crew has been tipped off. The Beckhams, Essex to the core, up their security: CIA-approved bomb shields, blast-deflectors, for the limo. Higher-definition CCTV. A revised profile: more virtual, less actual. Body doubles (like Saddam). A shopping trip to Milan. MTV awards in Hollywood. Promo in Japan. Reassignment to Madrid. Economic migrants travelling club class with large men in suits and mirror glasses.

I logged the newspaper item, then, months later, in a weak moment, thought it might play with the Hastings novel (the gaudy necrophilia of the White Queen’s coming attractions). I didn’t have a clue how Albanians talked (even bandits, gangster associates), so I tried to keep them dumb: go with voiceover, the detached authorial overview. Manuel-speak (Jew playing Catalan): ‘I lov-a you, Meestah Fawlty.’

No real harm done, not yet. Andy Norton goes upstairs, knowing that Track will not join him, not knowing of her liaison with Danny the Dowser (a future in the Basildon Plotlands). A.M. Norton, whiskey and water, is waiting for Hannah Wolf (the promise that she would try and make it, make up for the previous night’s fiasco at the Travelodge).

Lights are coming on in the ibis. There is a car out on the road. A young man with a Japanese sword. A girl who wants to break with him. He drove her to the M25, near Thurrock, in 1989. It was on television. Breakfast radio explained the jams, miles of stalled traffic. Newspapers exposed links to Essex crime: drugs, protection, bent gyms, people-smuggling, record labels used for money-laundering, thefts of antiquities on the south coast, bullion robbery, timeshare in Spain, child pornography, massage parlours stocked from the Balkans, boarding houses given over to the involuntary exile of convicted paedophiles. The girl, decent, ordinary, bright, was granted an aura of sanctity. Her talent was talked up: hairier than Tracey Emin, more Mexican than Frida Kahlo. Beautiful of course. Radiant with future glory. And dead. Very dead.

The disturbed youth (steroid and ketamine habit) was, to the same degree, demonised: dole-bandit, psycho, expired road fund tax. He cut her throat, before running in front of a Dutch HGV which was ‘carrying 25 tonnes of plasterboard’. Trauma of driver, 42, family man (two families). Foreigner.

Hacks like nothing better than life snuffed out, blink-of-the-eye tragedy; characters straight from stock. Further revelations promised. More arrests. Pages and pages of photos: weeping mum at funeral, white T-shirts with tattoos and blankets over their heads, youths in dark glasses holding up newspapers to mask mean faces, baying mobs of the righteous (gobbing, hammering on the van). Cellophane floral tributes scattered over an elevated section of the M25.

This was a true event, embedded in recent history (forgotten by tabloid grazers): girl murdered, suicide of killer, horror of truck driver, valuable Japanese sword recovered. I couldn’t affect the outcome. It was a journalist who gave me the details, another Hackney narrative: he turned it into fiction, published the pain. The girl was his sister. So he was, at least by association, involved. He knew the participants. He understood the mechanics of the fateful night. It was his story to tell.

I had no such legitimate claim. But he inflicted it on me, lodging the details in my imagination, soliciting a new and revised version. ‘Save her, honour the memory.’ The unspoken agenda. As it appeared in my egotistical version of the world. A site to be written, blood and scorched rubber, rescued by language.

I failed. Two Nortons were never going to be enough. Andy in Room 234 with his files, his nostalgia. And his sterner, fiction-composing doppelgänger, A.M., sipping whiskey — and wanting, despite the unfolding horror, to make love again: with Hannah, the only woman to whom he had confessed his dreams. Severed fingers. Fantasies dressed as fact.

He didn’t tell about Ruth, those dreams. Memories that wouldn’t go away: a walk by watercress beds, clear pools from deep springs, May flowers on a Mediterranean island. A bed with rose-printed sheets, the bumps of her spine. His tongue tasting the skin. The crease of her bottom. Not a flaw. As she pretends to sleep, first light at the open window.

Now Norton’s third mind had broken cover, the writer, the watcher. The other two could never be reconciled. No treaty between marine light and the A13 corridor (the realpolitik of a manipulated future). No tricks or shifts can slow the passage of the American car, killer and victim.

When a natural climax arrives, a crisis in the narrative, subvert it: pick up a book. Go with the old modernist strategy, quotation. Eliot, Pound. Yeatsian dictation. I didn’t have a lot of choice, one paperback in each sidepocket of my poacher’s waistcoat. I had selected, to help make sense of the recent history business unfolding in Babylonia, Andrew George’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh . The map of the Ancient Near East worked better than the fancy graphics put out by TV networks.

‘Let us wage war!’ A martial illustration, Republican Guards advancing in formation, shields and spears.

when he arrives why be afraid?

That army is small and a rabble at the rear,

its men will not withstand us!

Judicious misinformation, chest-beating: patriotism. Better to hate well than to die carelessly. Make the people more afraid of the monster they know than the dust armies who will burst through their cinema screens.

‘Now make ready the equipment and arms of battle,

let weapons of war return to your grasp!