Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Simon had been a Mirror journalist at Canary Wharf. A near-name. Busy, successful. With prospects. Before, as he explained (haltingly, painfully), he had the accident; and flew out of the shattered back window of a car. Simon wasn’t slim or lithe. That’s what stayed in my mind, the horror of being sucked from the window, backwards. Squeezed like a bladder of offal through the tight slit of a letterbox.

He recalls that frozen instant of time so vividly. One minute, a career journalist sitting comfortably — then nothing makes sense. Glass re-seals itself behind him, the road unfurls. His unprotected head strikes a lamppost: with the impact of something fired from a cannon. He spends a hundred days in a coma; fed by his mother with a spoon. That period isn’t lost, it’s always there like a story he’s been told. Deleted, mythical. He quits his damaged shell and inhabits another place. He speaks of it now as a ‘dream’; erotic, slightly saline. He saw a naked girl on a marble slab. There were pale encounters in a nether world. He remembers the moves he made. When and how he decided to return.

After such an experience, what does the bookshop matter? Other people’s words. Cancelled texts. Vanities from which a new life must be forged. The horror and the vision are both replayed: he has to make sense of them. The shop is a cave of random confessions, strangers’ voices. He is its curator. In perpetuity. When I give him his 20 p , he mutters: ‘Oh good, now I can have some lunch.’

Eynsford’s famous straight mile, the broad valley floor, made it attractive to planners: an east/west road (achieved) and a new airport for London (outflanked by powerful local interests). Metropolitan greed nibbles at this countryside: flour mills, tall chimney stacks. We pass under one motorway and on towards a railway and a viaduct.

As we cross the Darent at Horton Kirby, we meet with a fishing party that would have delighted Izaak Walton. True Kentish men (under the unimpressed eye of a Romany-dark woman) doing something illegitimate, robbing kingfishers of their prey. The poachers have the characteristic pallor of the interhighway settlements: turnip faces, thicker at base than crown, large ears, lank hair curtaining mercury eyes. The juveniles favour a Beckham fuzz, to save the prison barber work. Both types are stubbled, blue-chinned, it’s a medical condition. Loose mouths, tugged up at one corner, sneer. The teeth, surprisingly, are big and white and strong: the fisherfolk look like Hollywood actors playing backwoods cannibals.

They’re not angling for perch or pike or eel. A spotter crabs his way along a sewage pipe while his mate drops in the bright yellow line: with a large magnet on the end. They’re dipping for coin, or scrap; rings, crash helmets, bicycle wheels. The suspicion is: whatever is down there in the murky stream, they know about it. The fishing party is a none-too-subtle method of recovering swag. The booty from the day’s work, so far, is one hub cab and an empty tin can. The woman spits.

Shamed that our lives lack such commercial acumen, the spirit of self-help promoted by Lord Tebbit, we sidle off to the pub beneath the viaduct. Which turns out to be what passes on this turf for a sophisticated establishment — run by a female bodybuilder and her white T-shirt, gold bracelet, geezer-in-residence. Showbiz and steroids. Good-hearted folk, affable to damp strangers, happy to do a pie and pint. The pub has a gallery of erased celebrities around the walls: character actors who left EastEnders , only to discover that being called a ‘character’ was a euphemism for unemployed. After the motorway blowjobs and the destroyed septa, the tabloid frenzy, you were condemned to the northern clubs, Raquels in Basildon, sing-alongs under the viaduct. The remembered names, for those who watch daytime TV and do the quizzes, were: Gareth Hunt, Tessa Sanderson and magician Fay Presto.

Seated among this exhibition of the reforgotten, Kevin comes into his own; he’s a compulsive list-maker, a print and radio journalist, contriver of profiles, puffer of lost lives. Names, dates, stories. I don’t mean that being on the road, in movement, hobbles his style, or caps the outpouring of anecdote; but, necessarily, his audience is limited. To whoever is alongside him in boggy field-margin, splashing through fords, quizzing gravestones. The pub is a better forum. The small round table. And, beneath this railway viaduct in South Darenth, at the outer limits of Dartford, he has struck lucky: a fabulous display of the unrecognisable, reverse celebrities, unvarying variety acts, body-sculptors, freaks of withdrawn fame.

I love the innocence of these flock-wallpaper albums as much as he does. By such devices, monochrome gods and goddesses (dressed like bouncers), we can recover memory; who we were when the glamorous ghosts first appeared on the (bought-for-the-coronation) TV goldfish bowls of our childhood. Thorn EMI multiples of John Dee’s crystal. The rogues’ gallery in the viaduct pub is a challenge: remember the name and you’ll remember some part of yourself you’d rather let go.

Kevin talks of Epsom. The literary references have been stacking up: William Blake, David Gascoyne. Kevin reminds me that Tommy Butts, son of Blake’s patron Thomas, mentions in his diary (14 August 1809) that ‘Mr. and Mrs. Blake are very well… they intend shortly to pay the promised visit at Epsom.’

Gascoyne, in a memoir called ‘Oahspe’, unravels an episode that seems in a few pages to contain all the elements that distinguish his work: magic, derangement, a sleepwalker’s courage. An Edgar Allan Poe tale comfortably relocated to the English Thirties; polite, grey-brown, lethal. From a dusty shelf in Watkins Occult Bookshop, Cecil Court, Gascoyne acquires OAHSPE: A New Bible — glossed as ‘the most astonishing book in the English language’. It will, so he hopes, lead him to information about a cult called Kosmon.

‘For some years I continued to speculate intermittently about the possible existence of an underground organization concerned with an aberrant fake book of revelations purporting to expound the secrets of the visible universes and their cosmogonies. A time came when my mental state began to deteriorate to such an extent that eventually I underwent a series of nervous breakdowns.’

He notices: spectral messengers on underground platforms, their cheeks daubed by ‘sticks of anthracite’. Conspiracy theories and ‘parousial notions’ interbreed; the cults of Kosmon and Scientology are linked in Gascoyne’s mind. Drawing him towards Surrey, the foothills. As William Burroughs, chasing his own demons, checked into the L. Ron Hubbard franchise at East Grinstead (in the mid-Sixties), so Gascoyne found himself trapped in Epsom.

‘The disorder I was suffering from when admitted to a psychiatric establishment near Epsom was accompanied by a number of vehement convictions. I believed myself to be a vessel containing momentous insights that it was my boundless duty to impart… I believed intensely that there was a worldwide conspiracy going on, the intent of which was to rob us of our minds and souls. Scientology was allied with the adepts of Kosmon at the heart of the conspiracy.’

The conspiracy was rooted in the London suburbs, in parkland, in the Epsom colony. Madness and vision cooked and simmered. (The madness began with that argument between insight and duty. With being a poet. A condition for which there is no known cure.) Gascoyne was convinced that his fellow inmates would be susceptible to his message. Imagine then his horror when he discovered that the old man in the next bed, a silent, sunken ruin, ‘was actually a longstanding Kosmon initiate and official, and even had a copy of OAHSPE in a tin box under his bed’. Gascoyne willed himself to stay awake, to wait until his neighbour was snoring — so that he could liberate this dangerous text. He was, of course, caught in the act and forcibly sedated.