Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Mocatta fouled it up.

I tensed for Ollie’s kiss of betrayal, my last. Under her father’s stern gaze, she hugged the shocked Kaporal. Pecked his cheek. Winked.

‘You know Jos Kaporal, the film-maker? You must. We’re very much in love. And hope you’ll help us buy a flat in Brighton. Eastbourne, if you’re a meanie. Deal at a pinch. They’re all gay there and Jos is trying to reform, stay off the booze.’

‘Oh yes, I know Kaporal,’ Mocatta sneered. ‘I pay good money to have that fat whale write a book, he thinks it gives him carte blanche to speak the truth. Facts mean nothing, I told the cunt, what I want is style. Front, swagger. Not fucking statistics downloaded from the internet, gossip from disgruntled geriatrics in the Conquest Hospital.’

O’Driscoll, with Tock behind him, was at the door. Not sure if they were invited to break bread or heads.

‘Chuck this rubbish in the boot, the pig. Bite his balls off first, for assaulting my little girl. Release the handbrake, run the fucker over the cliff. Then piss off. You can walk to town. Take the bus if you’re feeling flush.’

Nobody moved.

‘Which?’ Tock whispered.

‘Which what , maggot?’

‘Which town?’

‘Be my guest. Basra, Buenos Aires. Don’t hurry back.’

That tone, Norbury Wildean, hernia-in-the-throat: Kaporal placed it straight off. Camp aggression, passive sadism. Tortoiseshell cigarette holder and haemorrhoids. It wasn’t Nöel Coward in The Italian Job: John Osborne as unlikely Geordie gang boss in Get Carter . Plenty of scope for drawling menace. Cards in the kitchen. Fancy house. Kaporal, yet again, was in the wrong movie. An oversize Cockney git who has run out of sarky comebacks. A landscape he can’t read and raw nature hammering on the window.

O’Driscoll touched his shoulder. Sinews stiffened, he walked away down the long corridor (with the shadows of security bars). Jimmy Cagney in Each Dawn I Die. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye . Christopher Walken in King of New York .

Mocatta’s library: open to the weather.

The gentlemen had withdrawn and gran was catching up on the gossip, killing the gin. No cigars were on offer. But the bent plutocrat, understanding that Norton was a literary man, was keen to show off his trophies — packed shelves of pristine first editions, gleaming Edwardian bindings, good cloth. All of them feeling the effect of the rain, prevailing wind, the absence of a protective wall. That part of the house had collapsed, slithered into the sea. The books, acting as a final buffer, would go next.

‘I collect local topography, Romney Marsh, Cinque Ports. The miraculous cluster of talents that found refuge here, between the turn of the century and the First War. I was lucky enough to acquire — from a one-legged man in New York (he had the full complement when I met him) — the cream of David Garnett’s library. Henry James (you’ll notice the presentation inscriptions to Edward Garnett), H.G. Wells, yards of Ford and, of course, my great weakness

— Conrad. Recognise the suit?’

‘Suit?’

He opened his jacket like a set of wings.

‘The ultimate fetish. I’m wearing a sentence from Nostromo . I had it made up by a little man in Aldgate, Manny Silverstein. You might have come across his brother Snip, fund of information. Mostly libellous, all invented.’

‘No, never.’

‘Remember the quote? The vigour and symmetry of his powerful limbs lost in the vulgarity of a brown tweed suit, made by Jews in the slums of London . The chosen people are best incinerated, of course, but while a few of them hang on, rats in a drainpipe, civilised men should exploit the skills they possess: vents, cuff-buttons, linings and so on. I’ve stopped in Brick Lane for a bagel, I’m not ashamed to acknowledge, after a night on the town.’

Playing for time, I started to examine the shelves — with the reflexes of an old-time runner, rapidly scanning, left to right, highlights identified (with a faint clearing of the throat): the first English (1896 Heinemann) edition of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Ford’s first book, The Brown Owl , along with a lovely copy of The Shifting of the Fire . The better Conrads had been dispersed before Garnett’s library was catalogued by Michael Hosking of Deal. The copy of Nostromo , which Mocatta had rebound in rather showy full-Morocco, was undistinguished: ex-lib with a label from The Tabard Inn Library on front paste-down. Many annotations (not thought to be in author’s hand).

Morocco. Mocatta. Moorcock.

The letters of those words formed and reformed. Owlish 000s. My head swam. I couldn’t decide if my host, the preposterous figure in the brown suit, who clearly modelled himself on the fictional Jerry Cornelius, had been invented by Michael Moorcock in his pomp. Or if the exiled editor of New Worlds had based his gender-jumping, time-shifting star on someone he’d met while visiting his mother on the coast in … Worthing?

Moorcock’s Notting Hill, through the intervention of Mocatta and others, had migrated to the south coast: Brighton. Old hippies in the Lanes. Coke-snorting journalists wallowing in chichi flats. Resting actors. Peddlers of stolen property. Expensive restaurants with lousy food. Sad poets with leaking memories. Property sharks who learnt their lessons from Rachman: don’t sleep with upwardly mobile tarts and never mix with writers. (Tender-hearted Moorcock was more forgiving of Rachman than any of his former collaborators.)

‘I have … a thing … I want you to do,’ Mocatta rattled: as his back went into spasm.

‘I’m awfully busy just now,’ I said. ‘Fat novel months overdue. Publishers making unpleasant noises. You can’t rack up advances these days and forget about them. I used to make a tidy living inventing titles over lunch in Charlotte Street. Now they send in the heavies or take you to court.’

Mocatta cracked his knuckles: a Moorcock villain from a shilling-shocker. He was much more like Jerry’s evil brother, Frank. The wheel of fate had completed its spin: where Jerry Cornelius fought the Vietnam War in London (from the roof of Derry and Toms), Mocatta (arms dealer, land shark) brought Mesopotamia to Fair-light. Along with his flying boat.

Driving out of town, scarf blowing in the wind, Cornelius tuned in to Radio Potemkin, The Moquettes. See: A Cure for Cancer , first edition, p. 191. Moquette, Mocatta. Mock Hatter. The city was on fire.

Identity drifted. Titles were optional. Place was absolute. Mocatta saw himself as the direct inheritor of Ford and Conrad. A gentleman farmer who didn’t farm. A writer who didn’t write — but was the cause of writing in others (future memoirs). Mocatta, as a name, belonged in Conrad’s fictional country, Sulaco. The Occidental Province where Hamburg Jews, Italian freedom-fighters, Masons, mad priests and men in love with silver were welcomed and absorbed.

‘One question,’ Mocatta persisted, ‘before I make my modest proposal. Can two men write one book? I’m thinking of Ford and Conrad. The total collapse Conrad underwent with the completion of Nostromo — and how Ford stepped in, took dictation, even composing that pivotal section, the conversation between Martin Decoud and Antonia Avellanos, the dark spirit of place. Oh, the subtlety, the spaces around the couple, the shadows. The stage business with the lost fan. Ford’s technique, barely perceptible, injects one drop of blood into the ice. The pure adventure story, Treasure Island revised by Dostoevsky, is lifted to another dimension. And I want you to play the Ford role for me. Write my story. I have the words, obviously, but not the time. My daughter can help.’