Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I thought: fantastic. This situation. A library of sodden books stuck board to board. The missing wall. Brilliant light from the sea. Two characters, on the verge of hysteria, testing each other out, arguing over authorship — when they are both ghosts, deletions, figments of nobler writers’ fading imaginations. Skull talking to skull.

Mocatta was Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius (a character leased to many hacks and visionaries). I came to him late in the day, when Jerry was pretty much played out, cycle completed. (And not yet bought by Hollywood.) Moorcock, prolific composer of sword-and-sorcery epics, labyrinthine London tales, had retired to Lost Pines, Texas: cleaner air (so he thought), different prejudices, a gracious property (very much like this one). In his exile (compulsive consumer of British newsprint, addict of Radio 3), the great mythographer must have been amused by some piece I’d written. He made ‘Taffy’ Norton the bonehead sidekick of his ‘metatemporal detective’, Sir Seaton Begg. A muscular Christian pathologist in the tradition of Dr Watson. Norton puts dumb questions quite effectively and consumes hearty breakfasts.

‘Who does the graft and who gets the credit?’ said Mocatta. ‘Orson Welles and Graham Greene arguing over the provenance of a wisecrack about cuckoo clocks. Pathetic!’

He pulled a slim black volume from the shelf: Nicholas Delbanco, Group Portrait (Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and H.G. Wells).

A conscious and conscientious effort to subordinate his sense of self, the idiosyncratic diction that asserts identity. Or the opposed identities may have, momentarily, merged. It shows the degree to which collaboration can forge prose parts into a seamless whole. As Conrad was fond of saying, and Ford proud to report, ‘By Jove … it’s a third person who is writing.’

‘That’s what I require from you: the Harry Lime factor, the Third Mind. Keep me back in the shadows as long as you can, a cocktail of criminality and poetry. But stress my ability to notice the tonality of a marine sunset as I strangle a tart in an Eastbourne hotel.’

‘Is there a fee?’

‘Six months’ rent on Cunard Court, I control the property. No junkies on your floor, I guarantee. And I switch the drum and bass operation — persuading wrinklies to move on — over to D block. Reasonable? You give Hastings a bit of literary varnish and Hastings gives you a living — fair?’

‘Food, books, council tax, electricity?’

‘You’ll have to graft, bar work, minicabbing. The world doesn’t owe you a living, you ponce, just because you’ve knocked out four novels in thirty years scrounging off the generosity of publishers.’

I walked away from him: the edge of the room, the edge of the world. With one soft eye, I was no judge of distance. This was my moment of choice, keep walking or sign another, probably terminal, Faustian contract. Unable to appreciate the detail in the cloud, pinky-mauve behind grey, breaks in the flocculent membrane, I went with fine gradations of sound: unfathomable depths grumbling and shifting, small waves breaking and dragging on shingle, gulls, rustling leaves, footfall on gravel, distant shouts, children’s voices in the country park.

‘Let’s keep it simple,’ Mocatta said. ‘I see my story as a blend of documentary and hommage — what might vulgarly be called fiction. The model will be Conrad, Nostromo . Just call the book: Mocatta . Very much the Conrad feel. I’m the title part but I’m not always on stage, do the Harry Lime thing again — build me up through contradictory accounts, shreds of gossip, newspaper cuttings.’

‘Is there a plot, a structure?’

Mocatta laughed. ‘Brink’s-Mat,’ he said, ‘the Heathrow bullion blag. Gold for silver — geddit? How the robbery connects with the construction of the M25, Falklands War, ecstasy trafficking, asylum-seekers. The large picture — politics, media, business — I’ll fill you in. You can pick most of it up in one afternoon in the clubhouse of the London Golf Club in Swanley. They all belong: Denis Thatcher, Sean Connery, Kenny Noye, Kelvin McKenzie, Kerry Packer (overseas member, obviously).’

‘I don’t play, never have.’

‘Neither do they. Swanley’s much too civilised. Think of it as an eighteenth-century coffee house. Investments and sex.’

‘So gold is the motif. What about the characters?’

‘You can do the lowlife, villains, chancers, artists. I’ll point you in the direction of the serious players. And I’ll be there in the wings, glamorous, well dressed — but obscurely troubled. The secret wound.’

‘Which is?’

‘Your business to find out. Succeed and I’ll kill you.’

‘Location?’

‘South coast. The coastal province, the new republic: Pevensey Bay to Folkestone. Old freedom-fighters from the Balkans, bent doctors, retired mercenaries drinking away their guilt: it’s on a plate. My life, I don’t know what I’m paying you for. The Nostromo parallels write themselves. The search for the treasure? Coppers digging up builders’ yards in Hastings. You can plant the gold bars in … Canvey? Isle of Grain? By the Dungeness Lighthouse? No, I’ve got it, one of those off-shore forts, Thames Estuary. Perfect. You’ll sell hundreds of thousands, film’s in the bag. Give it plenty of that magic realism, coke-skewed actuality, fast-breeding metaphors, and I may chuck in another six months in Cunard Court, gratis. A year if you’re short-listed for the Booker.’

‘Where is the bullion? It might help if I knew which areas to avoid. You don’t want metal-detector freaks blundering over your property.’

Mocatta was gripping one of the shelves, his back again, spur of bone pressing on lumbar nerves. Interview concluded, time to be moving on. Why do we have to talk in the shorthand of comic-strip bubbles? Why can’t we be granted the dignity of Jamesian paragraphs, the unspoken, flicks of hair, turns around the garden, silent contemplation of art works?

‘You stupid, or what? There never was any bullion, cunt. Urban myth. Insurance scam from the off. Bit of business that grew out of the landscape of perimeter fences, bonded sheds, proximity to motorway. A fucking fiction. And we all did very nicely on it. Cops, customs, legit and semi-legit Kent and Essex entrepreneurs. Half the faces from the Elephant have brought property in Biggin Hill on the back of the Brink’s-Mat scam. The rest are in Cyprus.’

I was too dim, too slow to pick up the connections: a fossil from the age of paper. Paper was truth. Touch it, smell it, always faithful. I knew how to navigate those tides, that sea: novels, essays, travel journals, poetry. Everything said that needed to be said. The clues all in place. Names named. Hastings had played its part in the invention of television, the whoredom of electricity. Now they were up for broadband internet connections, the world in your lap. I was finished, doomed like those decent, backstreet bookshops. Corrupted by a sentimental attachment to a past that never happened.

‘I’ll do it,’ I lied.

He stared at my outstretched hand, a turd on a silver plate. He was a man of extreme, probably clinical, fastidiousness — camping in a ruin, a bombed-out palace: Blenheim as Butlin’s, Camber Sands.

The genre he proposed was provocative: South American multilayered fiction as practised by an alien (a thief). Revolution, colonialism, a fabulous harbour. Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (published in 1904) was not only the summation and synthesis of a number of white-world tendencies, but also a template for Marquez, Fuentes (pinch of Stephen Crane) and Jorge Luis Borges. (I remember the great Argentinian myth-maker being asked about his favourite films. ‘Westerns,’ he replied. Imagine that: a blind man in a half-deserted, afternoon cinema, confronted by widescreen prairies, mesas, buttes, rock chimneys. Films composed by directors with eye-patches, bandits. A theatre of sound, full orchestra and spare dialogue. West of the Pecos . Mitchum growling his way through Raoul Walsh’s Pursued .)