Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Things were dead, just after midnight, and only the first two or three vans had pulled in to the Vallance Road end of Cheshire Street. Men in jackets like aircraft fitters stood around the vans doing their best to look as if these vehicles had nothing to do with them — until anyone moved in to take a look, when they suddenly reappeared, inside the tailboards, looking very much as if it was everything to do with them and that any citizen who disputed it would get a toecap up his adam’s apple.

These were the legendary backs of lorries that things fell off of, John. Including torch-holders, with yard long torches, demonstrating their success with vicious cigars, their expertise by economy of language, all of it foul. Conversation is not a requirement, neither is a cheque book. American Excess cards can be bought by the fistful, but not used, except for forcing locks. Books, naturally, do not feature high on the list of desiderata for this fraternity. They won’t make a show until a couple of hours before first light, along with the pocket-torch dealers, with a poke no bigger than a couple of hundred, who are permanently scuffling around trying to borrow, or sell what they have already found, to buy-in the real stuff which has just surfaced, in rumour, on the next corner. The general junkmen don’t buy books but are, grudgingly, prepared to take them for free. And start them at fifty. By the time the punters appear at half-eight they’re down to a tenner. Take ’em away for a dollar by opening time.

Dryfeld growls through the vans, pokes into sacks, storms among the sheds of rag pickers, elbows over terminal wastelots, where old bones have been spread out to dry, more for exhibition than with any serious expectation of a sale. He snarls back at the caged animals, bird yelp, rancid fish tanks, heavy-jaw’d fighting beasts dealt, as they have been for over a hundred years, under the railway arches. The sentiment of the local inhabitants flattered by having some creature whose existence is even worse than their own. There is no sighting of Nicholas Lane. He’s gone underground so deep he’ll come up with mud on his nose.

The narrator locks his car in Palissy Street; wail of high pipe mountain music, with sewing machine percussion, from single lit window in the block of minatory tenements. They put up these dreadnought hulks to replace the dustheaps of the Nova Scotia rookery. Arnold Circus a-twitter with bird frenzy, the stones limed with droppings.

Stop off for onion rolls and croissants, then down the Lane, cut into the first left turn, wall painting faded, an historic quotation, ‘ I’m going home / to my / BACON STREET / radio ’; merest glance over a drain of paperbacks, records, amputee dolls, single shoes. It’s too late, the Outpatients are already twitching into every crevice.

Seasonal plague. Spring surprises them: they emerge, pale, clutching their giros, rucksacks at the ready, to deal paper. They scavenge the scabby lots and burn down the charities. Buy at the bottom and polish the prices, always rubbing, scratching out the originals; cycle back to Camden Passage and Camden Lock with ever-growing bags, cases, sacks of half-respectable waste, the Penguin Classics: strictly for penguins. Who waddle up to the stalls with numbers to check in their notebooks. Books for bingo callers.

At high summer the mania speeds: the valium stash is running low. They shift to amphetamine mania. Bug-eyed, they shovel through the diseased end of Portobello Road on a Friday, competing with a triad of moon-faced Hong Kong hustlers, ready to deal anything, quantity is what they’re after: the dealers at the bottom get more and more and more stock, meaning that they can’t or won’t sell it, while the dealers moving up have less and less, which gets progressively more expensive, until they’ve got nothing but a chair, a telephone, and a West Coast phone-number. Saturday, Bell Street, plus ten jumble sales, Fulham to Finchley, more and more territory, faster and faster, to find less and less, no time to look, grab anything, fill the bag, until you can hardly walk, dipped shoulder: by Thursday the stress has really begun to bite. They’ve been known to crack wide open, slap the face of some innocent walking down Essex Road to catch a bus to work. ‘It’s gone, it’s gone! Oh Jesus, oh God! My Waterland’ s been stolen; oh no, oh Christ!’ Sobbing on the floor, tearing fingernails in a shriek down the glass walls of Mr Carrier’s Restaurant. Holiday’s over, back to the funny farm.

The Outpatients, also referred to as Neck-Breathers, angry, puffed with thyroidal angst, love Brick Lane, but they’re not to be confused with the Scufflers or the Stoke Newington austerity freaks, the glums. The Scufflers have their pretensions: have seen books change hands for money, have hoarded catalogues, from which they never order (not realising that the catalogued books are the ones that the big boys can’t sell, sour stock). They want top dollar.

The Scufflers attach themselves, if they can, to radical charities. It’s a great scam, collecting first editions for the Sandinistas, wheedling letters of support from John le Carré, town hall courtesy of Nuclear Free Islington: flog it all off, top wack.

The Scufflers mainly like to fight over tables. To hell with books. They’ve got to get the best pitch and the most tables. If something doesn’t sell it’s because the table isn’t big enough. They’ll kill for the longest stall.

They fan out through the market like a commando unit: booted, combat gear, hands like hooks, despising the old street-traders and loudly arguing over every price. The panic doesn’t set in until they do actually find something; then comes the terror, they might have to sell it and GET THE PRICE WRONG! Better to bury or burn it.

They’ve come wholly into their own in the bleak days of enterprise zone capitalism, lame dogs, mad dogs, and the weak to the wall. All the floating street literature has been trawled-in and priced out of the range of any remaining students who might like to sample it. A cultural condom has been neatly slipped over the active, the errant and beautiful tide of rubbish.

Dryfeld and the Late Watson spot Nicholas Lane at the same moment, converge, each grabbing a bone elbow. They’re lucky to find him. He’s altogether too good a dealer for what this place has become. The generations of street dealers, like mayflies, can pass in weeks, days; a trip out of town, it’s gone, and it never comes back. When the Scufflers have found it, Nicholas Lane is no longer there. If you hear his name — it’s too late.

One last nostalgic circuit; he’s not even buying books, his amazing radar has homed on a photograph of T. S. Eliot presenting a Wyndham Lewis portrait to some Canadian academics who look as if they’ve fallen off a totem pole. It’s inscribed, of course. If Nicholas Lane is around, there’s something worth finding. He’s an alchemist, turning shit to gold, and gold straight back to shit again.

We can hear the Scufflers beating down some tattered Colin Wilsons from 20p to 5p: unsuccessfully. Overpriced at nothing.

The coffee in the grease caff is very slightly preferable to the tea: it hits like a hammer, a mild concussion, instead of permanent kidney damage. The dead egg slides off a damp white sheet of bread.

Nicholas Lane’s emaciation is extraordinary and active, like a cancer inherited from a centuries old act, now flowering. Some dead man’s crime shines in his face. He is high on enthusiasm, pinched with cold, shivering in his black, wild with speculations and futures. A Study in Scarlet was yesterday and the word is, ON.

The word with Dryfeld is murder . And now is too late. He wants a sale and he wants a share. The creditors of his creditors have grown old waiting, the machete blades are blunt that once had the ambition of kneecapping him, but the cry of neglected treasures in remote provincial bookshops is too piercing and insistent. He wants to get there: in a first-class compartment.