Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

I undressed quickly and waited, trying not to yawn, while Marina went through the familiar rituals of preparation: knickers chucked away, the struggle to unfasten the dress (that might require my help), the sitting on the edge of the bed to unroll her stockings, shoes back on, selects a fresh pair of knickers (drawer left open), walks to window, no urgency, curtains open, full moon over the sea, the same expectations, her feet so cold when she does climb into bed, under the sheets.

It would sort itself out, eventually. The Norton story. The film Ollie was processing didn’t matter. Emperor Norton never made it to Peru. The family fortune wasn’t lost to the sharks of the financial markets: he was the crook, the spinner of fictions. A ganef, a schnorrer. A tolerated joke. Walking to hide his shame in pretended madness — until that became the only real thing about him. Ruritanian uniform and antique bicycle. A near portrait by Eadweard Muybridge: a man who, like William Burroughs, kills his wife and gets away with it. Who changes his name more often than his socks (Muggeridge, Muygridge, Helios, Eduardo Santiago Muybridge). Who changes his personality, a double life brought on by a stagecoach crash.

I found a scar on my head. I had a double vision — saw two objects at once; had no sense of smell or taste; also had confused ideas … Then I went to London and consulted a physician named Gull.

Gull? Sir William. Royal physician and Ripper suspect. Gull specialises in injuries to the brain (Stephen Knight, who wrote a book denouncing the Masonic conspiracy, died of a tumour). Gull advises healthy outdoor activity, Muybridge begins to photograph landscape, cumbersome equipment dragged over the west, Yosemite. (Yo! Semite. Yo! Norton.)

Stereoscopic views that insist upon two good eyes. Middle ground vanquished. Panoramas that don’t quite fit.

No portraits. Portraits give access to the disappeared. Subject infiltrates consciousness of observer. A conspiracy of soul-theft: like psychoanalysis. Freud never made love after the age of forty.

Two pan-scrubber beards: Emperor Norton and Eadweard Muybridge. Naked men walking. A flick book. Frozen frames, stapled together, create the illusion of movement. But Muybridge wasn’t reliable, even with his motion-study sequences; he wasn’t above slipping in the occasional duplicate, a retake from another run.

I was Jewish not Scottish. My Highland blood, if any, came through that fraud, MacGregor. My expulsion and homelessness predated the Clearances. Emperor Norton’s San Francisco years, prophet without doctrine, living on his lack of wits, embroidering compensatory fictions, made more sense than the business with Peruvian jungles and undeveloped films. Muybridge’s cruel portrait told the true story: a broken man staring at the ground. Two broken men: one with a bicycle, one with a camera.

After lovemaking: language. I’d forgotten how it used to work, the poetry thing. The gift of words, whether you like it or not. Marina, camel hair coat around shoulders, long legs crossed, sat smoking at the window. She had Ruth Alsop’s habits, her gestures, perfectly imitated: thirty-five years lost. I struggled to invent our first meeting, the natural history of my destruction, the hole in my life. Those decisions are lightly taken, stupid argument, heat of the moment: one of you walks out. Thirty-five years before our narratives converge. If that’s what is happening. If that’s who she is. Who I am. Now.

The great stone liner, Cunard Court, was floodlit. My flat: the eye in a pyramid of yellow illumination. Marina pointed, thin wrist emerging from sleeve of charity-shop camel hair, to where the St Leonards pier once stood. So I had misidentified Hastings pier, visible in so many of Fred Judge’s postcards. And from this error many incorrect readings accumulated. Moon shadows on ruffled water brought the pier back as a ladder of light.

I put my arm around Marina’s waist.

‘Ruth?’ I said.

‘Touch it.’

The metal plaque with its braille lettering. I ran my fingers over proud script: useful practice for what was to come. Cunard Court: refuge of the one-eyed artist. A tribute to the demolished pier. How the English love things when they are no longer there. A nation of restorers: bodgers, destroyers, resurrectionists. Skeletal platform on rotten piles: memories of the good times nobody had (Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton).

The plaque commemorated the location ‘where the first moving picture was shown 7th November 1896’. Precursor of what-the-butler-saw flickers. Rows of devices, like those X-ray machines in shoe shops, capping the eyes. Moon path as projector beam: true cinema.

‘When did you realise?’ Marina asked, as we walked slowly, arm in arm, towards Cunard Court.

‘What?’

‘That I was Ruth Alsop. And I left you, after Southwold, because I was pregnant.’

Her moods. Those photographs on the beach. The conversation, I hadn’t taken it seriously, hadn’t responded, when she talked about wanting a child. The smell of the pine woods, resin and soft paths after rain. I was too busy with my camera.

‘And I was the one — dumping Jiffy bags on your doorstep.’

‘Why?’

‘They were your scripts. I was returning them, one by one. Hoping

‘ Mine? ’

Coincidence, accident. The kind that happens a million times a day, people who once knew each other take flats in the same building. But nobody met in Cunard Court. Old ones who no longer went out, weekend sailors, speculators who passed on without making wills. Talking to a stranger in the lift was like holding a séance. What if they replied?

‘Did you marry? What happened to the child?’

‘Sort of. For a time. It didn’t work out. She’s fine.’

Marina noticed me in town, followed on a whim; remembered me. So she said. It had been easy, cultivation of Cunard Court handyman, to borrow a key: surprise for old friend, lover. She read my notes, the pages and pages of names, facts, prompts, false starts.

She was writing a book of her own.

‘It was obvious you were blocked. I borrowed a couple of red notebooks and copied the stories out, your drafts. A provocation, really. A tease.’

‘Why?’

‘My own book wasn’t coming. I couldn’t find a form until you provided me with a title: TheMiddle Ground . It wrote itself-in weeks.’ She kissed me.

‘I owe you,’ she said. ‘More than you know.’

The smell was heady: dying hyacinths in a bed around a table of black rock. Bang in front of the Royal Victoria Hotel.

TRADITION SAYS THAT

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

LANDED AT

BULVERHYTHE

AND DINED ON THIS

STONE

‘You were never doing a novel. Barefaced topography. The names of your characters — Danny Folgate ? Wink wink. Dowser as spirit of A13? Check out the City/Shoreditch boundary: Norton Folgate, E1. Drin? A river in Albania. And Mocatta, the W.R. Hearst of Fairlight? His drinking fountain must be all of sixty yards from Aldgate Pump: “In honoured memory of FREDERICK DAVID MOCATTA. In recognition of a benevolent life.” People as spirit of place, Andy. The same old tricks.’

Not true. I had no idea. About Mocatta. The man’s in the newspapers, on TV. He owns this building. He has a mother, a daughter. A library.

‘And Marina,’ I said. ‘Marina Fountain. What about her?’

‘The last pub before you get to Bo-Peep, as you very well know. The one under the cliff workings, near the statue of King Harold and Edith Swan-Neck. Marina Fountain is a splash of cheap gold paint on a black background. A boozer with a narrow garden, a pit stop on the road to Bexhill.’