Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

A nasal grunt from Jamie, as if he had swallowed his tongue and not much cared for the taste. Broken-down grouse assassin, his plate-sized lenses so smeared and greasy that a pilot with 20/20 vision would have been white-sticked by them. Book ripper, bladesman, rapidly slicing the views, costumes, maps, gutting the colour or polishing the leatherware: books into furniture. Fuelled on whisky. Hands shaking on the wheel of sleep. Groaning. Tremens. Quite justified.

The narrator, feeling posthumous, thought of himself as the Late Watson. The secret hero who buries his own power in the description of other men’s triumphs. Dangerous ground. Flickering between modesty and blasphemy. Pinched into the co-driver’s seat, boxes and maps across his knees, polo-sucking, costive owl, built around a now firmly packed gut, cemented in guilt, involuntary retention of oat cake, porridge, turnip, energy trapped, red eye lidless with coffee, unable, away from home, to do anything more than break wind. Hair of the dog scratching at his scalp.

Dryfeld strode back from the phonebox, fists pounding at the driver’s window, cardiac flutter. Nine o’clock, an early December evening, black snow, his breath making frantic cartoons in the air; Mossy Noonmann would see us. He never closes to the trade. Or opens to the public. Who have been known to faint, gasp or curse, at the first sight of one of his pricings. He took a quiet pleasure, sucking wet lipped at his pipe stem, watching the innocents drop the book and try to get to the door before he could spear them with his ancient mariner eye, stone-fix them, stand casually across the door space, driving them back into the paperback shelves where they can make a token purchase of a few pounds and escape into the sunlight.

Nicholas Lane ran a line of badly adulterated Bolivian snuff across the top of his briefcase, rolled up a returned cheque, and took it in the nostril. Hammered the mucous membrane. Hit the brain jelly with a white dart. His eyes sharpened, his already twitching and prehensile fingers played with the combination of his lock, a soothing sequence of power-inducing numbers. Look out, Mossy.

The four horsemen were outside Steynford, and they were about to take the town.

Mossy Noonmann’s bookshop, if we afford it the courtesy of that title, was probably the only one open in the whole of the Midlands, from Wolverhampton to Boston, and out into the North Sea. And he was the least likely proprietor. How he had come here nobody knew and few cared to guess.

He stood, stooping, a few inches under the low ceiling of his ill-lit empire; lacquered in dry sweat, glistening. He had found a role to suit his height and he was quite prepared to play it. He affected the trappings of the trade as they might have been described in a 1930s detective novel: an unruly pipe, the stem almost bitten away, sucked, spat through, poked at, scraped, cleaned into the filthiest stick of tar, unlit, and frequently pocketed in a condemned floral waistcoat. His face had a shocked and naked quality, as if it had been covered for years in a helmet of hair and then suddenly, and judicially, exposed to the light. His skull was heavy, water-filled, and tended to come to rest on one or other of his shoulders.

It was impossible to believe that the stock in his shop had been selected with any notion of trading in it. It was as if every other dealer within fifty miles had been allowed to tip one sack of their most leprous and flaky dogs onto his floor. The shelves, being decent timber, had long ago been sold. There were typed cards announcing LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, POSTCARDS, CRIME, MOVIE STARS, WAR, FASHION; but these, having been so laboriously produced, were dropped anywhere, two good ideas in one day was too much to cope with, and the cards now bore no relation whatever to the heaps on which they lay.

Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced that the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself. He groaned. This had a somewhat uncentring effect on humans reaching for a copy of, say, Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man . They tended then not so much to drop the books they were holding as to throw them across the room, adding to the already generous measure of confusion.

Mossy’s nose was a thing to be admired. He admired it. He looked after it better than he looked after his family. He would pick at the lining with a match-stick, roll out an interesting lump, either of skin or of snot, even food, then gasp for breath after his exertions. He would mop himself with a shirt-sized handkerchief. Perhaps it was a shirt; it must have been a very old one. He was the only person to find Steynford tropical. He dripped with the effort of striking a match and let it burn out in his fingers.

Most of Mossy’s business had once been transacted on the telephone, until that instrument had been cut off. Literally. Mossy took his pocket-knife to the cord and severed it, tying a ticket to the bone. It was a realistic view. Everything has its price-tag and it might as well be visible.

Now Mossy took to appearing at Auction Houses; he haunted the rooms, watching the bidders, selecting a likely novice with a nervous arm, and begging a lift, ‘just up the road’. The road being the A1. His benefactor, in a state of hysterical paralysis, was persuaded to chauffeur Mossy to the very door of his shop. Then to enter, to carry in a box. The fact that it was the driver’s own box seemed always to be overlooked. The order of release could only be obtained by purchasing a decent heap of coverless odd volumes and first editions with additional printing histories thoughtfully erased, scarce issues put out by Book Clubs. It was always when Mossy threatened to brew up a large mug of coffee that the cheque books appeared and another neophyte was broken in.

Noonmann was a New Yorker, veteran of Peace Eye Bookstore, who, not fancying an engagement in South East Asia in the mid-60s, had returned to the Europe of his forefathers by way of Liverpool, then, briefly, the centre of the Universe. A single evening disproved this conceit: Noonmann found a mattress in Westbourne Grove. There were minor misunderstandings over rent books, social security paperwork, import/export regulations concerning self-administered resins from the Middle East; there was a misplaced briefcase of ounces, and Mossy decided to hit the road.

Two hours up the A1 and the Camberwell-domiciled holder of a Heavy Goods Vehicle Licence was ready to turn it in rather than carry Mossy another mile. He walked down the hill into Steynford. He’s been there ever since, and never walked so far again.

Jamie let the car roll silently down the main street, the Pelican Hotel on his left, passing it, with only the faintest and most wistful of sighs. A cheese-coloured town, slicked over with fen sleet, damp as an abattoir coldstore, distinguished by a profusion of moulting snail-horn churches, their steeples discouragingly set with sharks’ teeth. Over the river, a touch on the power-steering brings them into the yard adjoining Mossy Noonmann’s shop.

Before the others have got the doors open Jamie has been into the shop, seen that there are no books larger than tombstones, no leather left on the spines, no gilt, and he’s out again, uphill, hands in pockets, scratching himself, shirt tails flying back, into a narrow passageway, up some stairs, across a deserted shopping precinct, he’s never been to the place before, can smell the fermented grain inside the bottle, is ensconced in the saloon bar, coat collar up against the Lincolnshire winds that he does not trust to stay out of licensed premises, and is calling for a refill.

Mossy shifts his head from one shoulder to the other, hazarding no remark, as the others push past him, with like informality, down the step, and dive directly into separate areas of the shop. Naturally they ignore the books on the few remaining shelves, or those in what might once have been a glass-fronted cabinet — but immediately start to examine, with painstaking care, the loose sheets under tables, anything without a spine; they spill out the contents of boxes onto the floor.