Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Beyond the cordon of police and volunteers, searching the wetlands with their sticks and poles, we saw, as the rainbelt moved on, the full span of the QEII Bridge: a set of silver dentures. Traffic stalled on the M25. Incident, accident, weight of numbers overwhelming the Dartford poll booths.

The police car put on its siren and flashing blue lights. I watched it race away down the long straight road, shuddering over bumps, swerving and flashing to warn off the convoy of approaching landfill lorries. The secret cargoes of London.

Livia found a piece of engine, submerged in the claggy ground: cut hoses, valves, cables. The lumpy metal heart looked like something ripped from a living body, by surgeon or contract killer. The young woman brushed away mud. She stroked the proud letters of the manufacturer’s name with her naked fingers, before lifting the specimen up to her face and sniffing it.

‘Livia, no,’ Jimmy warned. ‘Use the camera. We’re artists, not dealers in scrap metal. The boot’s full.’

The formal description of this thing — size, weight, odour — went into a moleskin sketchbook. Hand-drawn panels. Like a Manga strip, an angry Japanese comic. A machine brought to life by a woman’s love. Oil for blood. The soul-meat of a murdered android. Only then did Livia use her camera. For the final rites, before Jimmy tossed the abortion into the creek.

‘Breakfast now. Ahead of that mob from over the river. That’s where Track will have gone, you’ll see. The café.’

The Log Cabin at West Thurrock was long and low, hanging baskets dressing a theme park timber facade. Narrow bays for rep cars out front, space at the back for the white vans and lorries that served the riverside industrial units: soap, petrol, paper.

The interesting thing, as the three of us faced up to the consequences of ordering up numbers, heavy platters of beans, bacon, airfixed sausage, blind egg, tin-flavoured tomato, grease raft of fried bread, was that Jimmy, in his PLASTERCASTER T-shirt and black leather waistcoat, was comprehensively discommoded by the scale and immediacy of the feast. The Glaswegian hardman, beetling eyebrows, red-gold fleece of thinning hair, hadn’t been inside a workman’s caff for years. And it showed. His hand trembled as he reached for a fork.

‘Christ,’ he said, puncturing the sawdust-and-pig’s-foot condom, ‘is this thing still alive? I don’t, I can’t, I mustn’t …’

Pink-cheeked Livia, having wolfed down the potent slop, salty strips of doctored meat substitute, was wiping her plate, a clover leaf of thick scarlet smear. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Very good.’ She burped. Jimmy amused her.

‘I sold my soul to join the fucking middle classes,’ the painter moaned. ‘You’re wiping years off my CV, I mean it. Dragging me back to the gutter. Phowarrr! Sorry. I’ve got to drop one. The beans. I haven’t seen one of those plastic sauce dispensers since I was in New York.’

‘You don’t seem very bothered about your friend, about Track,’ I said to Livia. While Jimmy lurched up the aisle, running the gauntlet of scornful tabloid-grazers who took their tea in pint pots. Signature flatus lost in the amnesty of rain-fug and fry-up, loosened belts and squeaky seats. A veil of cigarette smoke and steam from donkey jackets.

‘Happens all the time. She calls it: “my fugue”. Jimmy thinks it’s attention-seeking. He’s wrong.’

Livia didn’t look at me when she spoke. She was staring out of the window, head on hand, patterns made by raindrops in the accumulated grease, human leakage.

‘Why?’

Livia rummaged in her satchel.

‘I thought I had a photograph. Wrong bag,’

‘Of what?’

‘Marina. Marina is Track’s great passion. Marina is ahead of the game. A studio — in Dagenham? A residency in Grays, paid for by the riverside developers, to come up with an essay on Conrad in Stanford-le-Hope. A creative-writing fellowship at the Bloomberg Centre. You know that place in Finsbury Square? “London’s first post-paper environment,” Marina called it. Curtains of floating images. Live-feeds from the seaside washing under your feet. Banks of monitors in every pillar. 24-hour cable transmission into worldwide financial centres: liquid art. Bloomberg wanted writers without writing, text as presence. So Marina used books like computers. Slim, elegant ones: Beckett, Borges, late DeLillo. Flip the lid and read vertical word-columns as prophecy. “They saw his glasses melt into his eyes.” Marina filmed books. She would stand there, behind one of the pillars, watching them watching her work. DeLillo fables about men losing billions of dollars. No future. The poetry’s been left out. Marina is a poet.’

‘Marina who?’

‘Marina Fountain.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Postcard last week: a ship burning on a beach. Other than that, nothing. Could be anywhere. Track thinks that if she walks out of the story somewhere around the area where Marina was last seen, she’ll find her — by mimicking her actions. Psychogeographical possession.’

I sighed. Too old for this stuff.

‘Another coffee?’

Our chauffeur hadn’t reappeared. Jimmy was the latest disappearance, groaning in the Portakabin out back; horrified by where he found himself, an empty soap dispenser, a hot-air blower that didn’t blow. Piss stains on the soft suede of his desert boots. Holes in the floor.

‘Actually,’ Livia muttered, when I was already on my feet, heading for the counter, mugs in hand. ‘Marina used your road book’ — I sat down again — ‘for her Bloomberg piece.’

‘What road book?’ I hadn’t written about roads. What did I know about roads? The A13, it’s true, was a possible future project — but I’d kept pretty quiet about that.

‘The one about Lakeside, Chafford Hundred, Essex gangsters, Dracula’s abbey, bullion robberies. The walk.’

‘I’ve never, ever been inside the perimeter of Lakeside. Ikea is a four-letter word that brings me out in a cold sweat.’

It was crazy, this woman was describing a book I was incapable of writing. Another jolt of caffeine-scum on watered milk might do the trick.

‘Marina left a folder of stories. She asked me, when she heard you were doing a piece on Jimmy, to show them to you. I could bring them round if you like. To your house?’

This was altogether too much. The face, innocent of distinguishing features, of the woman behind the counter, was a relief. I basked in her aura. Her physicality. The way she moved and talked and knew herself. It went with the décor. Basic transactions: request, cash, ticket, coffee. Wet windows. Hiss of frying bacon. Steam from a kettle. Radiant horseshoe (white light within blue) of a shoulder-level heating device. Mute TV giving out pictures of traffic jams, rain on the road. Jukebox synthesising sunshine, beach bars, golden sands.

‘Hello, love. What’s it this time?’

‘Two coffees, please.’

‘Gone off of us? You ain’t been in this week. You found another woman then? You hear, Den? The prof’s found another woman.’

‘ What? ’

‘Research, your mate said. The TV. You’re going to put us on television.’

Openmouthed, she laughed. Shook.

‘I’ve never been in Thurrock before. I’ll be back for sure.’

Her Lana Turner bosom agitated the tight sweater. Hooped earrings jangled.

‘Hear that, Den?’ She said to the cook, the flame-eater in the string vest. ‘What never been in? That’s your second this morning, mate. I said to Den, “Where’s he bleedin’ put it?” Full English twice over. I thought you was back cos you fancied me.’

She turned to scoop three portions of freshly singed toast from the machine, to scoop margarine from a catering pack.