Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Shepperton was sun-dappled, leafy, bleached. The Asian community, if it existed, were all out at Heathrow. The streets were as white as the Suffolk littoral, as Shenley. Ballard, when I interviewed him in Shepherd’s Bush, spoke of a malaise, the death of affect. ‘Rather than fearing alienation,’ he said, ‘people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That’s the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we all embrace.’

I don’t know where we are. None of the landmarks relate to anything in my past. As a motorist, I’ve kept clear of this section of the M25. My world has been turned upside-down: the Thames is now at the back of me, a lost ceiling.

Renchi clips along (tales of a painter friend who offers spirit-guided walks around sacred sites; who paints, under mediumistic instruction, hundreds of canvases). Kevin sheds his jacket and puts away his notebook. We stick with the motorway.

Thorpe is undistinguished. Low-level warehouses, industrial estates: ALPHA WAY, PRIVATE ROAD. Across still-green cereal fields, I notice a spectacular Italianate tower. One of our orbital acupuncture needles. We’re back on track. Through the long lens, I can make out a red brick chateau, crenellated parapets, too many windows. This hilltop fantasy, Renchi tells me, is the Royal Holloway College. The tower isn’t Italian: it’s loosely modelled on the Cloth Hall at Ypres. Belgian Gothic as interpreted by the architect William Crossland, under the patronage of patent medicine magnate Thomas Holloway.

There was of course a story, an anecdote connected with the college. A relative of Renchi’s had been at Royal Holloway, briefly, studying drama. An end-of-term party. Drink taken in the cloisters. A marble hand broken from the statue of Queen Victoria, removed. This dark token was now buried in a country garden. Should it be located and returned? The college was too much of a detour, we let it go.

In deep lanes you come on parked vans. I assembled, in the course of our walk, quite a collection: men slumped over wheels, sleeping. Away from the science parks, the railside enterprises, drivers take time out: a folded newspaper, a tattooed arm hanging against warm metal, cigarette smouldering in a two-fingered grip. Dashboard as travelling mantelpiece. An indented tray for the tupperware lunchbox. A slot for ciggies and plastic lighter. Family portraits: wife and baby in hospital, girl-child and large doll in bed. Pulling away from the M25, the puff goes out of motorists. On the road there is a communal energy, flight chemicals, petrol fugues. Green lanes are private dormitories, windows wide to birdsong, pesticide; a sewage farm beyond the Junction 12 interchange (‘a two-level cyclic design, close to the 164 feet high St Ann’s Hill’).

In the next village, Kevin flashes his notebook. All sorts of interesting things are happening: a group of chefs in tall hats, white jackets and checkered trousers are hanging out with dangerous looking schoolgirls. Alice in Wonderland revisited. Among rose-red brickwork, white window frames, yew hedges, is an American/Swiss school. With appropriate catering. Three cooks to every pupil. Moneyed Americans and international Swiss, when they get together, look for security, security and security. Exclusion of undesirables. Food that doesn’t knot in your throat, explode in your belly. Thorpe Village, Eastly End, Virginia Water: these places are perfect. Convenient for the airport. They look like Agatha Christie. Behave like Bern or Basel, Orange County (California).

Wild girls, experimentally made up, wearing customised chalet-school outfits, are smoking. They don’t have bike sheds in Thorpe. But they do have the Monk’s Walk, which carries us out among the grey lakes you see from the M3 (as you head out of London, for Winchester and Southampton). Trees, rounded like broccoli crowns, reach to the water’s edge.

The sudden absence of notable features, the quietness of the lake, is very appealing. People take up fishing as an excuse for standing all day in just such a place, doing nothing. Our modest view disguises an important conflux of energies: the M25 beginning to pull to the east, St Ann’s Hill (with ruined chapel), Great Foster’s Hotel (talked up by Mary Caine) — and, on the horizon, another red tower, the Holloway Sanatorium.

The weight of possibility, unsecured narrative taking off in every direction, hits Kevin. He makes no complaint, but he is starting to limp. That jacket drags like a lead poncho designed by Anselm Kiefer. He knows: it’s untellable. Memory is a lace doily, more hole than substance. The nature of any walk is perpetual revision, voice over voice. Get it done, certainly, then go home and read the published authorities; come back later to find whatever has vanished, whatever is in remission, whatever has erupted. Kevin has sunk into the trance state all hikers know: the initial excitement, the yarn-spinning of the Staines station cafe, is over. Books in the rucksack are dead weight, ballast he’d be happy to dump. The theoretical is overwhelmed by the actual. He knows what lies behind him — home, car, breakfast — but he has no idea what lies ahead. How am I going to get out of this ?

Movie references help. Conveyor belts of gravel crunch and moan. We speak of the end of Touch of Evil ; a bloated Orson Welles stumbling among derricks and nodding donkeys, bridges and gantries of an oil field. Black water, floating rubbish. Get Carter . That’s closer to home. A rig for sea coal. Rattling stones on a belt. An extraction system that plays into the aerial rides and thrills of Thorpe Park.

Walking beside the perimeter fence, we smell wild animals in their enclosures. They’re too bored and depressed to roar. Water sloshes against glass. Empty carriages trundle around their rickety circuit; a slow ascent, then the plunge through the water chute. Suspended excitement. A sorry piece of engineering that can only be brought to life by the screams of deliriously anxious punters.

A bridge over the M3, looking back to the junction with the M25: Renchi is busy with his camera, but Kevin has moved beyond transcription. Why would he want to prolong, to memorialise this agony? The leather jacket is hooked over a rigidly horizontal left arm, a struck flag. A trophy smuggled out of Saigon. Kevin poses dutifully; a light slick of sweat, smile contracted into a wince of discomfort, eyes on the ground. If he lifted them, he’d see where we are going, the short sharp hill — which, if he knows anything about it, will involve detours, diversions and a horrible, spine-twisting, corkscrew ascent.

‘We walk and walk and walk,’ Kevin wrote in his article for the Independent . ‘By this time almost five hours have passed, and the metaphorical tenderfoot is also a literal tenderfoot. I’ve chosen the wrong kind of boots, the wrong kind of socks; the soles of my feet are blazing, and by the evening will erupt into a gratifyingly spectacular crop of blisters.’

Hoping to postpone the assault on the conical hill, Kevin initiates a discussion of private estates; the sort that flourish unseen among these wooded slopes. We won’t go as far as to align ourselves with Charles Manson’s dune buggy berserkers, but five hours on the hoof has given a certain edge to our argument. The alienation that Ballard, safely bunkered in Shepperton, recommended as a device for firing the imagination, flourishes in territory trapped between motorways (M4, M25, M3).

Look west from St Ann’s Hill, beyond the restless levels of Junction 12 (of the M25), beyond Virginia Water, and you have Wentworth; land drops sharply away, property values climb into the stratosphere. CCTV estates concealed by managed stretches of ancient woodland. Nicholson’s map has nothing to say: white on white, private roads in an ex-directory reservation. A golf course the size of Rutland. Wentworth is a sand trap with satellite housing, Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsyth. Razor-smooth greens walked by men whose shoes are as bright as their sweaters, men in hair-hats. More rough on their heads than down the edge of the fairway. Superglued Shredded Wheat. White teeth in collapsed mouths. Crinkly tap dancers, rheumy with showbiz nostalgia: Windmill and Winter Gardens. December-tan comics who hack out their rounds, rehearse their schtick, mourning the defeat of Margaret Thatcher. They promise to quit Britain if another Labour government is voted in. And they honour that promise. Went-worth is another country. With its own golfing prince, Andrew. Its Dallas ranches. Winking security. The Wentworth zodiac, should Mary Caine find the time to compute it, is made from lizards, serpents, hammerhead sharks. The divisions of the woodland are militaristic, imperial: General’s Copse, Duke’s Copse, King’s Copse, Wellington Bridge, King George’s Field. And, in any case, Lew Grade’s veterans console themselves, the Conservatives might have been wiped out in successive elections, but the Thatcherite lineage is secure with Tony Blair. All that has happened is some discreet rebranding, less confrontation, better suits. Sex scandals lose their zest. Denials are issued with straighter faces.