Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

But why, I wanted to know, was Kaporal waving? Looking up at my balcony, waving his arms as extravagantly as the propellers of the yellow plastic bird.

The house had changed. It wasn’t the house to which the journalist had brought me. This section of outer-rim Hastings, the Ridge, was dedicated to obscurity, anchored in failure: empty hospitals, retirement homes that had themselves retired. Laurel and bay. Ivy creepers. Planting strategies that screened detached properties, sparing them spectacular views of a glassy sea; saving them from the curiosity of the vulgar.

‘Are you sure it’s this one?’ I asked.

Kaporal’s black T-shirt was several shades blacker around the armpits, an inverse pyramid of bodydamp on his broad back: sticky and steaming. We were so close, I didn’t want there to be any mistake. Close to resolution: a set of photographs to spread on the table. Those are the finishes to which I aspire — pictures, not words. Pictures taken by another hand. Found footage. The shock of recognition. Broken sentences knitting together like a stop-motion Polish cartoon.

‘That’s what the woman said. Stonestile Lane.’

Expectation, the rush, carried us to the top of the hill, more than an hour’s hard walk-but Kaporal’s interpretation of his phone conversation made me feel that there was no time to spare. This was a very old lady. The trawlings on the net, adverts placed in local papers along the south coast, the printed leaflets he had distributed in retirement homes and dying farms, had paid off. A relative of Arthur Norton, in possession of an early Kodak camera, had made contact. She refused the reward. She wanted to meet — in person — the last male Norton, to take tea with him. She lived in Hastings.

That’s why Kaporal waved at me with atypical vigour when I stood on the balcony. Not, as I thought, because he was still alive. Nor because Ollie had chosen him . (He couldn’t be sure they hadn’t been married before, mislaid each other. Somewhere between the language student and the lost weekend in Las Vegas.) The researcher was ecstatic, he had found the final piece of the jigsaw, Arthur Norton’s Kodak. He was off the case. He could return to London.

O’Driscoll wouldn’t bother him now. Alby Sleeman was banged up. Phil Tock had decided on a sex-change operation, relocation to Thailand. They weren’t killers. Like everybody else in Essex, they had ambitions to make it in the media (red letters on black gloss, hardmen doing the Look). When you’ve been banned for life from the Basildon Festival Park there’s nowhere to go, not really, it’s all downhill.

Mickey kept Mocatta’s motor. He was intended to use it running passengers between the City Airport (Silvertown) and the ibis hotel (Thurrock). A circuit of Travelodges. Mocatta had lost the plot. The guy who wrote his scripts, back in the Sixties, had skipped the country, opened a breakfast bar in Corpus Christi, Texas — where he growled his way through sentimental border ballads and recited cowboy poetry. Without the paperback mythology, the romance of his career as hired assassin, rock star, property developer and cross-dresser, Mocatta was just another anal retentive who lived in retirement with his old mum.

Jos and Mickey parted on the best of terms. Kaporal promised to deliver the numbers of a documentary director, a production company, a literary agent. There might be a part, funeral scene, in a two-hour thing they were doing on the Swanley road-rage killing. A definite maybe, as talking head, in the reconstruction of the Rettendon Range Rover slaughter.

This climb was different. Kaporal, if he could help it, never walked; he waddled to the pasta place, sat on a bench and stared at the sea. With Ollie beside him, the man bustled like Werner Herzog on the snowy road between Munich and Paris. Up from the park through suburbs of quirky, non-regulation housing stock: villas, bungalows, castles, haciendas. Towers, conservatories. A restaurant that converted a Tudorbethan pub into the set for 55 Days at Peking . There were allotments (memories of Roy Porter), football grounds carved out of the high ground (Machu Picchu). A long leafy lane that weaved alongside properties customised by a benign plutocracy: the secret serenity of swimming pools, decks, pension funds paying off, golden handshakes for shamed quango vermin.

I couldn’t help myself, I yapped about the Nostromoners: my theories. The former Kaporal had a taste for conspiracy. Now he frowned, let Ollie take his arm — as if she needed his strength to get her over the rough stones.

‘So they’re all male, your Nostromoners?’ she said.

I was still a little raw, after our broken engagement, but I did my best to disguise it.

‘Females and gay men use Virginia Woolf in the same way — as a portal. Headaches, seasonal tensions and so on. Hypersensitivity to loud-print dresses, vulgarity, the lower orders. Fondness for untipped cigarettes, hats, cottage gardens, painted furniture. They call them, Virginia’s camp followers, the Wolverines.’

A silly revenge for my lover’s desertion. Ollie was unimpressed. She had as much trouble as I did in sitting through stream-of-consciousness, multiple-narrative, death-by-drowning, putty nose Bloomsbury necrophilia.

‘Was Kurtz a Jew?’ Kaporal asked. The politics of colonialism, race and gender had, of late, called Conrad’s status into question.

A good question. Conrad’s Marlow, we know, was an Englishman. He was drawn from the novelist’s sailing partner and fellow cigar smoker, George Fountaine Weare Hope.

‘All Europe,’ Marlow said, ‘contributed to the making of Kurtz.’ The anti-Semites of High Modernism ran with Kurtz, the upriver trader, as man of straw, stuffed guy, symbol of defeated capitalism and its blood-drenched voodoo. Was Kurtz based on Klein, the chief of the ‘Inner Station’, met by Conrad at Stanley Falls, on his own Congo expedition? Or on a fellow lodger in Stoke Newington? One of the Undead taking possession, slipping through at a time of weakness and malarial fever. Dark stains in the glass of the German Hospital. Stains shaped like a river.

I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration … The glamour’s off.

Kurtz with his mongrel blood, his terrible end, troubled me. What images were waiting in Arthur Norton’s camera — if that film had not already turned to mush, ink, mud? Kurtz was too close to the lovingly described horrors of the death of poor Hirsch (‘a little hook-nosed man’) in Nostromo . Hirsch is white-world Jewish, irritating, a leather peddler scorned by the silver mine magnate. A coward, a blabbermouth. A victim. The shadow of his broken body, swinging in the torture chamber, strung from a beam, beaten, brutalised, shot.

‘The strange, anxious whine’ of Hirsch (the third man in the lighter) wouldn’t leave me alone. Arthur Norton met many such tradesmen and percentage-cutters on his travels, along with Jesuit missionaries and debauched Franciscans; his humour in these circumstances made me uneasy. It was too close to my travesty of Hastings.

The house was like Balmoral, but bigger and in worse taste: turrets, heraldic shields, French hipped roofs with conical spires and a flurry of exposed black beams. We stood at the top of the drive, looking for an excuse to give it up, turn tail.

‘What did the old bird say?’

‘Come to tea. Bring your young lady,’ Kaporal replied.

They couldn’t find stone as grim as this outside a Glasgow necropolis. The lawns, light stolen by dense hedges, were some consolation. A gardener was resting on his rake, staring at us in a manner that verged on autism.