Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Kaporal, also delighted to be getting out of Essex, crossing water, was in a more troubled state of mind: escaping the poisoned territory of his past, but returning to marine exile in company with the very elements he had moved south to escape, Mocatta’s goons. His belly rumbled, loudly.

O’Driscoll smoked, prison-style, but he wasn’t offering. Jos licked nicotine stains, snacked on fragments of fingernail.

I asked him about Mocatta, what he had in the files, anything to keep him occupied.

‘The astonishing performances,’ he said, perking up, ‘were in those early, black-and-white interviews. World in Action . Never shown. The height of his infamy — when the underground press were demonising him as a teenage Rachman and Private Eye kept banging on about his links with the National Front, connections with African despots. He was like an air-guitar, street-hustling imitator of Tiny Rowland. Carnaby Street not Savile Row.’

‘Premature New Labour, then,’ I responded. Tony Blair, thirty years ahead of his time. The nerd who blows up the world because he fails his Brian-Jones-replacement audition.’

‘Vanity as style,’ Kaporal reckoned. ‘Hard-lacquer narcissism. Religion. The chosen one: untouchable, inviolate. Flicking invisible particles of dust from his lapels. Buttoned to the neck with high collars, stiff white, slashed wide. Thick silk tie. Waistcoat like Flashman. The dandy, the sadist.’

‘What were the interviews like?’

‘Amazing, electroplated ego. Mocatta boasts of anything they want to throw at him: Nietzsche, Colin Wilson. Beethoven on record sleeve, Hawkwind LP inside. He gets a real kick from saying the unsayable: “I am a superior being. Those who stand in my way will be destroyed.” He relishes the tremors of shock that run through the liberal/left, dope-smoking camera crew. He admits, with a flick of his cuffs, to despising inferior races, using his heavies to shake out unwelcome tenants, killing and torturing associates who let him down.’

‘So why isn’t he in prison?’

‘As soon as the editing is done (three days of wild excitement), advance teasers being prepared, his lawyers turn up with an injunction. No release forms have been signed. The interview was a wind-up, a piss-take. “Mr Mocatta is a respectable businessman with a substantial property portfolio and sensitive (government-approved) interests abroad.” Forget it. Dead in the water.’

‘Never shown? Even after the recent trial?’

‘No chance. The last time I worked for Channel 4 they wouldn’t let me say that the Bush family saw the Gulf War as a rerun of the cattle-versus-sheep business. Cowboy fantasies enacted on a global scale. Old George, the CIA man, in construction with the bin Ladens? Sorry, lads. Mocatta has lawyers like the rest of us have fleas. If he’s gone down for arranging the death of a Hindu shopkeeper (fifty-four shops), so what? He’ll be out on a technicality before Archer. That interview is buried, probably destroyed. I tracked down a pirate tape, warehouse in Archway. One viewing in the middle of the night, no copies, no transcripts. The owner hasn’t worked since, can’t get arrested. He’s down on the coast, writing thrillers under a pseudonym.’

Movement, at this pitch of comfort, even allowing for O’Driscoll’s choice of music (Irish showband and late Sinatra), is time travel — the warp; bright air parting in waves on our sleek prow. I could have crossed the Dartford Bridge for ever. My problems lay on the far shore. So junk them . Shift modes. Channel hop. Try documentation, a walk.

I was never going to reach the promised land: Canvey Island. Oil and caravans.

I could see the A13 pilgrims, Jimmy, Track and Danny, down there, far below, tiny figures on the river path, heading east, to answer my riddle: what happens after you take that last step?

They slept, our hikers, in Danny’s Plotlands chalet. Most of the original structures, built by naturists and fresh-air buffs, had disappeared under tarmac, new estates. A breath of the countryside in the Langdon Hills for those decanted from East London by war or ambition: put up whatever you fancy, a small patch of ground. Walks, grass-cutting, singsongs. By motorcycle and sidecar, or train (with a hike at the end), they came in their hundreds. Woods and secret hills with a view of the coming A13 and the distant Thames. Paraffin lamps, chemical toilets, board games and burnt sausages.

Track, up early, photographed the survivors. She dowsed living traces. As Danny dowsed fossils, minerals, electricity and crime. They filled their plastic bottles at a tap, placed (in the Twenties) at the top of the lane, the unmade road. And they came over the hill and through the country park to join the A13 at Stanford-le-Hope.

Clouds of hawthorn blossom. Skylarks twittering. Heavy-bellied sheep. Then the diesel zephyrs, hammering traffic. And the decision (by Track) to detour to Canvey Island by way of homage to Nicola Barker’s novel, Behindlings — which she was reading for the second time. She had the sense, again, of walking in a stranger’s sleep, enjoying no free will, being fated to follow a path trampled flat by earlier, better-informed artists.

‘The walks book,’ Doc announced, sounding justly proud of his coup, ‘the section on Canvey. All that crazy stuff about boundaries. I never understood a word of it …’

Barker, Hackney-based, wrote about islands (Hackney being the first). She had a thing for English eccentrics, decent but damaged, behaving oddly in small communities, navigating a slant through a warped topography. Canvey was the paradigm.

‘On foot? Are you crazy?’ she scowled over at him. Smoke in her eye again. ‘It’s a piss-ugly walk. Nothing to see.’

‘I like to walk,’ he said, ‘I like the fact of walking.’

Nicola was right, Canvey was piss ugly and also beautiful. The beauty of accident. Isolated chalets organised into rows and ranks, a timid colony waiting for the return of the tide: the famous 1953 flood that did its best to scour the riverbank of unsightly human mess.

Jimmy Seed, excited by pristine bungalows named after shopping centres, started to sketch. Only in Canvey would you find a citizen prepared to boast of living in a dwelling called ‘Lakeside’. Little lawns. Low walls. Tall aerials.

The island divides into two zones parasitical upon an imported high street (imported from the Fifties, Leytonstone). Charity caves, nail extensions, quick food. The Thames-facing section is oil tanks, a disused gas works, sewage and caravans. The strip that backs onto Benfleet Creek is recreational, golf and yachts. With the golf course doubling as a walk-through cemetery, bunkers with headstones, sand traps with memorial plaques to permanent 19th-holers: festooned in floral tributes.

Our trio of A13 walkers sat on a bench to look at maps (no help). Banks of buttery daffodils waved. The tide had retreated, beached wrecks faced a horizon on which flames from the Shell Haven and Coryton oil refineries never went out.

Danny dowsed and voted for immediate evacuation, Benfleet: a steady ascent, the high ridge, Southend and the finish. Jimmy, weary, agreed. Track, in a minority of one (but red-haired), triumphed. ‘An hour,’ she said, ‘tops.’

A promotional poster for a film called A Man Apart , pasted to the side of the bus stop, featured a shaven-headed mercenary (scowling like Argentinian midfielder Veron on his way to an early bath). Smoking ordnance in one hand, badge in the other. Trucks on fire. Another burning city. Regimes laundered. Long march to the minarets and towers of Coryton. The above-title name: ‘Vin Diesel’ — dyslexic notice at service station? Mr Diesel wasn’t happy. This shoreline — inlets, refineries, clusters of religious fanatics (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Primitive Methodists, Latter-Rain Outpouring Revivalists) — was where invasion would come. Had come. Romans, Dutchmen. King Alfred’s tussle with the Danes at Beam Fleote, the ‘tree-lined creek’.