Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I came down to breakfast with real hunger. The journalists had gone, Thurrock was returned to its customised obscurity: a pot of steaming coffee, full English — high sheen on the elevated motorway. It is always better, when lodging in such places, to eat out. A log-cabin transport café, a mile down the road, near the river. My favourite section: soap factory, pilgrim church, recovered wilderness. Grays, Tilbury, Canvey Island, Southend. The resolution to the outstanding question left to my novel: where does the A13 end?

The Old Invincibles, my Aldgate Pump casuals, reconvened after many dramas and diversions, recent history suspended, were eager to finish the job: walk the road until it disappeared under the North Sea. The painter Jimmy Seed, Track and Ollie, Norton, Danny the Dowser: the Famous Five (with their imaginary dog, Borges). One step to the east, one step beyond the bridge, and it was over: my connection with the south coast, that mistake, the flight to Hastings. Beyond Thurrock, the broad Thames spreads its legs, divisions between Essex and Kent are absolute: sandbanks, oil tankers, unpredictable currents. No way (if you discount the eccentric Gravesend ferry) of getting over, interrupting a linear flow of narrative. A travel journal with a beginning, middle and end (in the right order).

Jos Kaporal, somewhat white around the gills after his outing as ‘Jacky Roos’ put away a preliminary breakfast while filleting the broadsheets and scanning the vine-wrapped TV monitors (winter sports, traffic, shopping).

‘Jos.’

He flinched.

‘Norton?’

I confirmed it.

‘Any chance of a ride to — Hastings?’ he asked.

‘Sorry.’

‘I’ve got the dosh.’

He patted his chest; searched, with trembling fingers, for that one forgotten cigarette. The reward for good behaviour.

‘I’m never going back,’ I said. ‘The whole thing was a mistake, fiction. ‘I’m ready to accept the consensus: I can’t hack it. No talent for putting myself in other people’s shoes, ventriloquising the voices. Strictly realism from now on: roads, retail parks, bunkers. Books that can be summed up in a sentence. If critics have to wade through four hundred pages to tease out a storyline, they’ll kill you. And, oh yes, I’m thinking of getting married.’

Ollie, coming up quietly to our table, laughed.

‘Anyone I know?’

I blushed. The blood was still there when required, the heat. Her kindness, last night in the small bed, brought me back to myself. To my proper business, the recording and interrogating of unloved territory. The anticipation of coming horrors alongside the exposure and ridicule of those that were already apparent. It was celibate work, I admit. But that could change. Ollie was fit, young, a walker. She could provide the illustrations. There was something different about her this morning; in another woman you might call it gloating. Four hours after the event, she knew she was pregnant. I’d seen the phenomenon before: seven minutes post-coitus, a woman smoothing out a map of Scotland.

‘Shit.’

Refried beans, mushrooms, blood sausage. Kaporal let one rip: he browned it. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

Two men, busy eyes, were carving their way towards our table. Bouncer types in an excess of smart casuals: like ramraiders on the run from Matalan, Beckton Alp. New white trainers — on which the lightest spot of blood would register — replaced on a daily basis. Ikea wardrobes of cast-offs. Combat slacks with elasticated waists, too many pockets and no flies. T-shirts that strained around powerlift musculature.

‘Jos, my son, thought it was you,’

Mock punch, genuine gasp.

‘Mick-eeey.’

‘On the tele. Shocking. Poor young gel.’

‘Nothing to do with me, Mick. I live on the coast now.’

‘Big Alby, Jos. He’s in pieces. His little brother.’

‘Absolutely certainly, yes. I was ringing for flowers.’

‘Keep your hand in your pocket, Alby understands. We’re the transport. Introduce me to your mates.’

Time for a change of trousers? Kaporal was ankle-deep in it, his worst nightmare, schlock fiction.

‘Mickey O’Driscoll,’ he said. ‘The writer. Rettendon Roadkill . I helped with the editing. They made a film of that one. Mickey was played by Sean Bean. And Phil Tock. He’s —’

‘Doing a favour for an old pal. He wants a meet, Jos. Mr Mocatta. Bring the company. Make a day of it. Know what I mean? Nice run to the coast. Won’t cost you a penny. Right?’

The vehicle was one of those blunt-nosed space-cruiser taxis, silver, the kind that shuttle between Gatwick Airport and the satellite hotels. O’Driscoll, the haulier, former HGV man, drove, watching a satellite screen, maps of virtual traffic. His minder, Tock, gawped out of the window: the cinema of the clouds. A special morning, perhaps unique, no early accidents, suicides, bridge jumpers; no problems at Junction 29 (the A127 inflow), no traffic stacked up all the way round to Junction 27 and the M11. No panic-buying war-fever convoys heading for Bluewater, no water-hoarders draining the plastic-bottle lake at Thurrock. A lull in the natural order of things, remission for bad behaviour. Sunbeams dancing on khaki Thames. Glinting on metal drums, the bald domes of the Exxon storage tanks. Casting long shadows (soap-factory chimney) on the striped wall of a huge block building.

Tock babbled. ‘What’s he like then, your gaffer?’

‘Good as gold,’ O’Driscoll said.

With false authority: his style. He had met a man who might have been Mocatta — once: as an associate of an associate, making up the numbers. A pub near the Swanley interchange, not far from the racetrack: inscribed black-and-white photos of Mike Hawthorn, Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Peter Collins (dead heroes). Tasteful underwear spreads in the Gents, no beavers. Pink soap and a working blower. One of those country places improved by the fortuitous proximity of the motorway.

The club-owner from Basildon accepted Mocatta’s investment, his sponsorship of the coming motorway culture: noise like amplified heartbeats, mood-enhancers, lots of driving with no fixed destination. Rucks, at odd times of day, in fast-food facilities. Aggravation at coffee stalls. Butchery among pristine estates where sound carries through six identical houses. Double-glazing for amateur torture buffs.

‘True to form,’ O’Driscoll laughed, ‘Pat never paid him.’ He twisted his head to see if the passengers in the back seat were listening. Eyes (on the glass of the driving mirror): black sea slugs.

‘Pat Lyle? Haven’t seen Pat since … Hollesley Bay. Keeping well, is he? The old ticker. How is Fat Pat?’

‘Not too clever. Fell off a tower block in Dagenham. All the way.’

‘Big send-off?’

‘Ten cars, wreaths. The faces. Never got home for three days, did I? Filth waiting in the kitchen. Done for possession of a poxy firearm. I’m supposed to live in Laindon without a bit of insurance?

We had room to stretch out: Ollie was quiet but happy to be on the road again, heading south, to that promised weekend with Track in Pevensey Bay. Marina Fountain’s bungalow. The point of bad behaviour, a one-night stand with a manic depressive in an ibis hotel, is to have something decent to chew over with your mates (much the same mix as a Henry James novel). Pregnancy, if it takes, is a bonus. Life, for these bachelor girls, was an interval to be endured between emotional binges, tears, giggles, videos, wine, chocolate biscuits. Deckchairs on shingle. Warm breeze from the Channel. Lovers traduced, put to rights, before the Monday-morning return to London, their inadequate embraces.