Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Radinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital; and Dining on Stones. He lives in Hackney, East London.

Three flies, they might have been there all winter, exhibiting themselves on my kitchen window. Doing what they do, trying to get inside. Stuck to stickiness, salt. A low-level irritation, between my headache and the view of the roofs and brightly painted terraces, that drove me, almost immediately, into the other room. Where I pressed, in perverse imitation of my tiny, blood-sucking cousins, against the cool panel of the sliding door. If I was inside anything, it was glass.

So much experience, I thought, and so little of it experienced, lived through, understood. The sea, early light on grey water, does that, makes us melancholy in the morning, dissatisfied with our satisfaction. So many years on the clock, despite surreptitious winding back, the reinventions, the lies. Obliged to go over the details of a dull history, for a man sprawled in a chair, whisky glass in hand, you invent. A journalist worried about train times, his dinner. You smooth over unforgiven betrayals, hide shame. Jealousy. Impotence. Or boast of it. Bad reviews, which I pretend not to read, are quoted verbatim. The mike isn’t picking up my whisper. The journalist booms and cackles.

‘Tell me about the auditory hallucinations.’

I was waiting for something. And it was slow in coming. I’d done the walks, bought the local newspapers, sat in afternoon bars with an empty notebook. Pass sixty, sixty-five, and you can’t sustain an erection beyond eight and a half minutes. So I read. Is that a promise? Eight and a half minutes, of the right intensity, sounds good. Novelists have managed books on less. Eight and a half minutes is epic to a minimalist (no flashbacks permitted). There were no women on my stretch of the coast, not for me. No car, few clothes. Finite resources and small knowledge of the set on which I found myself: no more excuses.

Joseph Conrad managed three hundred words on a good day. There weren’t many of those. The atrocious misery of writing,’ he moaned. A few miles to the east of here in a rented farmhouse. Labouring over Nostromo . The manuscript had elephantiasis. He was sick, sweating, characters mumbled in his ear, stalked him on afternoon walks.

Light is all memory, but it’s not my memory. Nothing personal. A concrete shelf above the busy coast road. Furniture from an Essex warehouse. Fresh paint. Screaming gulls. Shingle shore. The English Channel.

Standing, nose against that cold surface, was the extent of my attempt to break down conventional distinctions between dream life and real life — if such distinctions could be said to exist outside London, beyond the hoop of the motorway. On the south coast. Do we have free will? Is it our choice to give up choice, to ape our grandfathers? The same retreat, getting away from debt, from creditors and family. Aberdeen in his case, Hackney in mine. The compulsion to write.

I came here in pursuit of a Greek woman, a photographer who only worked at night. It was a commission. Which I couldn’t fulfil. I lost myself in the prints. She was an extraordinary storyteller and then she took the narrative out. Her photographs were the residue: colour, texture, neutralised gravity. So that specifics become universal. The tenderness she had for the world shocked me. Love letters that always said the same thing: ‘Goodbye’. When you spend time somewhere with an artist (a thief) of her quality, you can’t go home. I didn’t think of it that way, at the beginning, but the task I’d given myself was to put the fiction back into Efiie’s documents. To pick up the stories that she abandoned. Her theatre of the coast was perfect. Deserted. A place of heavy drapes, shapes beneath tarpaulin, lit windows of empty rooms. Clubland calligraphy turning puddles of piss into blood.

Effie wasn’t part of the story. That much was clear. She introduced me to a location she had a thing about once; she’ll return as a friend, a tripper.

‘So the first time I ever came here,’ she said, ‘it was by train, at night. I walked from the station to the main part of the town. Everything was deserted, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I kept walking, hardly anyone to be seen. The restaurants were getting ready for the night. But who are they preparing these tables for? The ghosts? The dead? At night everything is transformed. Anything can happen. Nobody will blink, nobody will hear you.’

I was ready to audition. I could become one of those ghosts. I saw Effie to her train and I stayed put. The next morning I walked into an estate agent’s office in the Old Town: the woman was preoccupied, servicing the thick tongue of a rubber plant with a Slavic thoroughness. You could hear the rubber squeak. The man, jacketless, tilted heavily onto one elbow, was giving handshakes on the telephone. Amused eyes weigh me up: timewaster. They know I don’t have the equity, but they slide, without breaking away from plant or phone, through the motions.

‘What are you looking for — exactly? Low forties? Sixty ceiling? We specialise in cheeky offers. Never know your luck.’

‘A second chance,’ I wanted to reply. New birth certificate, clean passport. Less pressure around the skull, fewer bills. And I’d like to meet the woman described to me by another woman. A writer, artist of sorts, whose name is mentioned, with awe and affection, in an off-highway shack, a breakfast bar in West Thurrock. Red and green sign — THE LOG CABIN — reflected in rainwater on the indented lid of a blue tin drum. Oily beads plipping from hanging basket, the bar had style: rusticated Americana. Estuary ambiguous: the flavour of the times. Perfume from the soap factory infiltrated our damp coats. We felt — as a consequence of walking, through successive rain curtains, along the riverbank in the direction of the bridge — as if we’d taken a warm shower in a gay bathhouse. I watched bright prisms in the bubbles that formed along the seam of the shorter girl’s shiny black jacket. Her smooth cheeks, pink from the hike, were sticky with curls of dark wet hair.

Jimmy Seed brought us out here, two of his girls, mature students with charm (and, I guessed, private or undisclosed sources of income) and myself. He was grafting his way down the A13, from Aldgate to Southend — like those old-time economic escapees from the Whitechapel ghetto. You know the sort, two sweatshops, bit of property, revised stationery. The move I would make, a couple of years later, trading in one brand of dereliction for another. Drug-dealers in fancy cars for drug users in hooded sweatshirts. Dead grass for dead sea. The same desperate survivalists with bricks in their bags. The same ambulances and sirens.

Seed had the eye, no question. Native intelligence and the steady hand of a good painter, painter and decorator. Like Hitler: without the compulsion to have women shit on him, the urge to invade Poland. Jimmy let Poland come to him, by way of Rainham Marshes: Europe’s last great apocalyptic highway, rumbling trucks, discontinued firing ranges, spoilt docks, poisoned irrigation ditches, mounds of smoking landfill and predatory seagulls. Property and prophecy, that was Jimmy’s game. Nosing into territory with the vagrants who are about to be moved on. So paint the vagrants, the canal bank lovers. The drinking schools. Whores. Night footballers. Dogs on chains. Sell a painting, buy a share in a slum. Sell the renovated flat and option a burnt-out pub. Photograph the pub, copy the photo. Sell the painting to the hustler who risks a wine bar on the same site. Sell heritage as something to hang in the Gents.