Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

‘We could be cousins then.’

‘Cousins?’

‘Name banned: MacGregor, Mocatta. All the proper Scots dispersed to the colonies,’ he said. ‘Ceylon, Canada, Panama. Why not? Haven’t you come across coal-black Nortons, Nortons in skullcaps? I’ve heard rumours, put about by envious scum, that Mocatta might have a drop or two of the Semite, generations back. We’re both Hebrews in denial, who knows?’

I was away, breathing rich moist earth, when he called out. The curse of having been a bookdealer left me with perfect recall of the shelves of his library. (The way we can walk into a shop, after three years, and know just where to put a hand on that second edition of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky with the perfect dustwrapper.) There was a gap in the M section: one volume missing between Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter , first English in scuffed d/w, and Julian Maclaren-Ross, The Weeping and the Laughter ( A Chapter of Autobiography ), first edition, nice copy, slightly faded on spine. Lavish presentation inscription to David Garnett. (I checked.)

‘Norton. Wait!’

He was shouting, but I was around the first bend, out of sight, house gone for ever. I felt the hard shape of the brown parcel he’d given me: a book. A curse. I didn’t want it but I couldn’t throw it away. The provenance was too rich.

Sleep knuckled from eyes. Doors thrown wide. And still the town wouldn’t come into focus: so it wasn’t all bad. Women lost. Threats from psychopaths. Bills, bailiffs. A tray of begging letters from maniacs who want a free ride into the writing game. Life as I knew it. Naked feet on rail, coffee cup in hand.

The sun rises quietly over the pier, a golden triangle dissolving across sleepless waters: the stern-wake of a white stone liner that only travels backwards. Paul McCartney (on Concorde) boasted of witnessing two sunsets in one day; at the rail of Cunard Court (last of the Atlantic queens), the sun never goes down, it solicits admiration — fetch that camera. One more panoramic view of the bay and Beachy Head.

If another person has been in the flat while I’ve been away, so what? They’re not here now and they left no mess.

What seas what shores what grey rocks. What is this face, less clear and clearer?

Not Ollie, surely, not here? The day’s first promenader: scuttling, slowing, breaking into a jog. The mysterious woman from the Bo-Peep Inn? A hot flush, memory spasm: stuck like a wet leaf to the window of a train. Except that trains, as we saw on our walk to Pevensey Bay, don’t move; parked in sheds, in sidings, ancient, dirt-encrusted, with bright new logos.

Mistah Kaporal — he dead.

Unsecured tartan dressing gown, flipflops. Grumbling belly, manky hair: Norton aged sixty dripping from the shower. If he doesn’t sit at his desk, six hours straight, what purpose to the man?

Coffee with just enough Colombian in the blend to make me long for a last cigar. Can I contemplate this temperate seascape with equanimity — and, at the same time, pay my dues to the horrible murder (car over cliff) of an associate I’ve exploited for so many years? Poor Jos. Poor Kaporal. Poor Jacky. Adiós, Ollie (you’re not responsible for your father). Another unrinished book. Draconian penalty clauses for non-delivery. Involuntary amputation, eyes on a skewer.

I’ll slip out for a croissant, a newspaper. I’ll open Mocatta’s package before I drop it in the bin. I’m too superstitious to dump a book while it is still safe and snug, embryonic in its protective sac. A scarce Ford? An inscribed Conrad? Mocatta is sure to tell me later, when he knows the Jiffy bag has been discarded: he’ll savour my anguish.

Kaporal’s attic. A blue light. There is always a light — like a TV set that can’t be shut off. Preserve it as Mr K’s memorial. I’d be happy to pay his rent, lock the door, leave the room untouched for years. His legend.

The book’s a dog. A demonstration of Mocatta’s weakness for genealogical research (last refuge of the snob, the social climber). David Sinclair: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Land that Never Was (The Extraordinary Story of the Most Audacious Fraud in History).

Why not? I’ve nothing else to do, I’ve run out of characters (dispersed into more promising narratives). A morning on the balcony, feet up, picking at a book, watching a line of yellow plastic birds, strapped to the rail, spinning for their lives — and, away, away, in the gauzy distance, tiny white yachts. The reassuring hum of traffic, sirens. It takes me a few minutes to realise what’s missing. Mocatta has been as good as his word: the rhythm of drum and bass, two floors down, has stopped. The bleepy silence of intensive care.

The point my Fairlight patron was trying to make, it soon became clear, was this: Conrad’s Sulaco, a fictional republic based on substantial research, was anticipated in this person MacGregor’s topographic scam. The Scottish adventurer (my relative) invented a real country. He commissioned a guide book and shipped boatloads of the gullible (who paid for the privilege) out of Edinburgh to the swampy and largely uninhabited shores of Poyais on the Mosquito Coast. Like Conrad, he drew from his imagination a coastal province with harbour, public buildings, churches, libraries, grand squares, distant hills.

Sir Gregor appointed himself General and Cazique, military and political ruler, a combination of the functions of three or four Conrad characters. City bankers backed him, South America in the period after the Napoleonic Wars was fashionable: the Imperium, glutted on military success, was greedy for profit. Sir Gregor MacGregor was the author the times demanded, a literate Archer with a fragrant wife and a fluid sense of actuality.

I ripped through Sinclair’s book: this was personal . Should I look on myself as a Norton (old Arthur lost in Peru)? Or a MacGregor (sitting comfortably in London conjuring up a fabulous Central American colony and persuading others to invest in it)? Amateur travel writer or professional fraud? In the fevers of these contradictory Highland bloodstreams lay the genesis of my delirium, my schizophrenia.

As I studied Sketch of the Mosquito Shore , the book MacGregor commissioned (with its engravings of the port of Black River), the final barrier between truth and fiction dissolved. MacGregor (coward and hero) fought in the South American wars of Liberation. He knew Bolívar and enjoyed the privilege of friendship with the legendary General Francisco de Miranda. He betrayed them both. MacGregor was no Garibaldino in honest retirement. And he was certainly not the model for Conrad’s Giorgio Viola. The man who kills Nostromo.

MacGregor devised a form of fiction that paid, a premature assignation between Bruce Chatwin and get-rich-quick TV. The man was a genius. Poor Arthur Norton, botanist, gold-hunter, vanished into the jungle. His justification, if it lay anywhere, was hidden inside that early Kodak camera: the undeveloped film. Kaporal (on my behalf) had been chasing old ladies, second wives of third cousins, through the net: nothing. The trail was cold. No more Nortons. No relicts dreaming away their twilight years in coastal retirement homes, villas and follies left by Scottish colonialists returned from Ceylon and South Africa.

I put Mocatta’s book aside: a Japanese flatpack table that threatened to buckle under the weight of a single volume. Nothing to be done. Close my eyes, feel warm breezes from the south-west. Brood on: James Burton (inventor of St Leonards), his pyramid tomb, white hotels, Masonic lodges, parks and crescents. He was as crazy as MacGregor (or so his family thought). Carving a town, a resort patronised by royalty, out of the cliffs: a vision (of fame, loot, immortality).