I struggled to focus on an author photograph that looked like a polished silver implant, a tiny mirror revealing … what? Awkward head, heavy, balding, wincing from the light, falling away to one side; lolling like an idiot. No question, it was my face. As I was then, in historical Hackney, when an American woman, New Yorker, walked me down to the canal for a photo shoot (results never used, filed as: ‘unlikely to help publicity campaign’). Wrong age, wrong sex, wrong race. Wrong shape: crinkled around the eyes, but somehow in shock, in recent receipt of a large brown envelope. Mouth buttoned. Lips sealed. Neck like a turtle. Like Ronnie Reagan (in The Killers). Norton had raided the album. Not content with pilfering ancient hackwork (good riddance), he was using my photograph. For all I knew he was out there now, taking the radio gigs, picking up cheques from the London Review of Books, banging on about congestion charges (thirty seconds) on Channel 4 News. I certainly wasn’t getting the calls.
These days, opticians don’t do white coats, or jackets, or those shiny disk things you used to see in American comic strips. I was a minor inconvenience: sit down, read the bottom line, chase the light across a vertical bar, keep your eyes open while they’re assaulted by puffs of cold air. The Asian man had an offhand elegance to his movements, crisp white linen, cufflinks that flashed.
‘For now, nothing to be done. Incipient cataracts requiring surgery in a year or two. See the receptionist on the way out.’
The phone bleeped in his pocket. He was soon rattling away. I was alone in the cubicle, listening to laughter in the next room. I thought of those black-and-white photographs of James Joyce with bandages around his head – like the Invisible Man (jaunty homburg and dark glasses). I thought of pain. Of reports I’d read of laser surgery which involved ‘having your eye clamped open and a flap cut from your cornea, which is then wedged under your eyelid so that a surgeon can carve up your eyeball’. The worst moment, the woman reporting on the experience said, was when she could smell her eyeball burning.
I thought of Un Chien Andalou. Weak simile, strong image: cloud across moon, razor across eyeball.
I thought of Ernest Bramah’s blind detective, Max Carrados. I thought of the film, The Dark Eyes of London, based on an Edgar Wallace story: Bela Lugosi (dope-fiend and former vampire) running a home for the unsighted. And wasn’t there – back to The Killers – an asylum peopled by blind folk? Where John Cassavetes waited for kindly fate in the form of Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager. The bullet.
Cataracts were for old men. I remember them, coming from my father’s surgery, shaken but brave. Born with a howl, assaulted by light, circumcised (on grounds of hygiene not religion), inoculated against this and that, tonsils out, teeth drilled, until daylight turns to milk. Worsdworthian cataracts foam, things lose their shape, outlines blur. ‘Cataracts most commonly occur in the elderly (senile c.), but some are congenital. Cataract is treated by surgical removal of the affected lens (c. extraction).’
I’d rather keep the details a mystery for now.
The man Kaporal was lurking outside, eyeing up a cashmere coat in the Blind shop (ouch). The cut was generous (it needed to be), but the price was steep: £6.
‘Any chance of a sub? The days are drawing in.’
I laughed and we set off together up the hill.
My one advantage, where unpleasantness was concerned, was my ability to put the future aside, as inconsequential, when I chased a story. Kaporal was in a teasing mood: he pointed out the dank premises, chipped busts, foxed prints, alopecic furs, of an antique dealer who was rumoured to fence. He was in on the Samurai weapons raid, the lorry hijack. I couldn’t summon much enthusiasm. The whole town was in hock, shops were either empty or crammed like Noah’s Ark (with all the animals stuffed). Cargo was in perpetual transit; men with blue chins, cheeks like the sides of matchboxes, staggered through the streets with bundles, cardboard coffins, roped rugs. Women pushed prams packed with shoes and empty LP sleeves.
For want of anything better to do, we climbed. The houses aspired to villa status, colonial (verandahs, sloping lawns). My great-grandfather, back from Colombo, en route to Tasmania, contemplating Peru, brought his family to one of these south coast cemetery rehearsals. The hillside, with its rundown squares, Regency terraces (restored at front, decayed at rear), gave me the creeps; a mortal fear of predestination, having to repeat, without script, some ancestor’s misguided life. Flagged passages plunged towards the railway station, Robert Louis Stevenson (who did time near Bournemouth) called them ‘wynds’. A good name. Suggesting twist, the labyrinth, with a chill breeze always at your heels. Steep steps vanished into the rain.
‘Do you know about Marcel Sulc?’ Kaporal asked.
I read the local paper with its list of random killings – ‘Man, 33, charged with murder of ex-soldier’ – rapes, affrays, pages of colour photos of holiday flats and investment properties. Sulc was a regular topic.
Mr Sulc, 40, owns over 50 properties in Hastings and others along the south coast and in London, Manchester and Liverpool.
It was claimed he used ‘shady business practices’ and intimidation in building his property empire.
He said he legally took possession of the leaseholds after owners refused to pay outstanding bills and ground rent due to him.
‘It’s called peaceful re-entry,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know Sulc. He owns my building.’
‘Well, forget him. Small potatoes. The real man’s called Mocatta. M-o-c-a-t-t-a. Mocatta runs everything. He started in short trousers with stamps and Old Boys’ magazines. From his mum’s back bedroom in Norbury. And he doesn’t, until you get very close, look a day older. The Dracula of Winchelsea.’
‘Promising.’
‘Better than that. The loose ends you left in your A13 book, I can tie them into a noose. The girl on Rainham Marshes? Mocatta supplied paedophile porn to the guy who killed her, the uncle. The road-rage killing? The kid was running Mocatta’s pills. The decapitation in Thurrock …’
What decapitation? I don’t remember writing about that. Missing girls, there were so many. And girls who appeared from nowhere with preposterous tales to tell. Without that art student at my door in Hackney, I might never have started on Estuarial Lives, the A13 walk. I’d have logged it as another potential project, a book sold to a small publisher in the expectation that they’d go belly up before delivery date. I had dozens of phantom titles all over London. I lived on the pitiful advances.
If the girl hadn’t brought that packet, if she hadn’t been so persuasive, I’d never have got into this. I’d be at home where I belong, in London, and not beating through the rain with a madman on the south coast.
We trudged a road, splashy with evening traffic, that they called, for obvious reasons, the Ridge. It was in every sense the end of civilisation, the end of the town; a drizzle of headlights, beaded beams, between hospital and woodland. Kaporal led me down a gravel drive to the saddest house in England. It was his Psycho moment, I suppose. Urban Gothic. Turrets, dark windows and the steady drip of water on our bare heads from an overreaching chestnut tree.
‘You know where this is?’
‘The Hammer House of Horror?’
‘This,’ said Kaporal, doing his Edgar Lustgarten bit, ‘is where he lived. And died.’
‘Who?’ I said. ‘The vicar they chopped in pieces and scattered around the county, the one who collected marine paintings by Keith Baynes?’
‘Vicar of a kind, yes. Vicar of Satan. East Sussex’s authenticated Antichrist. When he came to “Netherwood”, he was on his last legs. A Patrick Hamilton boarding house. His guests sucked Brown Windsor soup, pushed cold tongue around the plate, while he excused himself to take a shot. By the finish he was up to eleven grains of heroin a day, enough to kill a clubload of Hoxton revellers.’
I remembered the book, gilt dustwrapper and a pair of demonic, Tony Blair eyes. Lights out. The Great Beast skulking coastward to die. Letting the final programme play out as bleak comedy, tapioca and congealed cus
tard. The notice the landlord placed in every tall, cold room: ‘Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts. Breakfast will be served to the survivors of the Night. The Borough Cemetery is five minutes’ walk away (ten minutes if carrying body). Guests are requested not to cut down bodies from trees.’
Slow walks to the chemist’s shop (where they still treat cash customers like al-Quaeda suspects); long, lonely evenings not reading Walter Scott. And wishing that he’d learnt to play solitary chess. A deathwatch from a deep armchair. In a brown room where magick doesn’t work.
‘Aleister Crowley,’ Kaporal said. ‘He came here to shift dimensions. “The Wickedest Man in the World”. The trick of invisibility rubbed off on horsehair sofas and tasselled tablecloths. He’s gone, the house remains. A holding pen for incontinent geriatrics.’
Hackney
Let me call myself, for the present, Andrew Norton. Call me Norton (never Andy). But call me, summon me into existence. Distinguish me from the sprawl of the city, the winter grey. Having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
‘Not at home. Nothing to report. No message.’ Said the answer-phone. In another voice (female). Nobody called.
I sat in the house, alone, in the tragic heap of things, not writing. Taking exercise by climbing the stairs to the attic, picking out an old paperback, stealing a sentence. Scribbling quotations in a ruled notebook, composition by default: elective affinities. Surrogates.
I reread and it was never the same book, Simenon, Highsmith. A chapter, a couple of pages, a sentence. Highsmith quoting Kierkegaard in her journal (1949). ‘The individual has manifold shadows all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.’
A photograph, cut out of a magazine, used as a bookmark: Highsmith, aged twenty-one, naked. The eyes don’t change; the fat lower lip, the lipstick. Raised arms, shaved armpits, no surrender. Small breasts. Dusty pucker of body pores like sand on a wet sunbather. Shocking. The writer exposes herself: as a secret.
I thought about doubles, duplicates, fetches. I dipped and filched, wrote letters to myself in a tiny, indecipherable hand. Remember the poet George Barker in Chelsea? Footsteps behind him, speeding up? Don’t look now. He was my age, crow’s-feet of mortality biting into the once-arrogant profile (lip chewed off by fractious lover). Aches in the knee, twisted spine. The two sides of the body working against each other. Left leg longer than right. No stalking shadow, Georgie boy, a black dog. Seasonal melancholy. That dog is fate, London. The thing that has no contrary.
A loud ring at the door. Gasman, bailiff? I don’t move. I can’t move, my back is in spasm.
I made notes for Estuarial Lives, the A13 book: Aldgate, Limehouse, Dagenham, Rainham. Blank chapters. Headings on empty pages. No characters, no story, no narrative push. Pedestrian in every sense. I read my Stevenson, my Poe. How did they do it? What possible connection was there between those masters of prose and Essex, the road out?
Ford’s water tower.
I love that tower, its great white bowl, up in the air; blue lettering. Romanticism of the badlands seen from the ramp, as the road climbs and the sky expands, moist air over Purfleet. Railway lines. The empty paddock where export vehicles once stood, gleaming and optimistic. The altruism of high capital: good for England, good for the world, sheen on metal, paint reflecting high clouds. This nation knew how to make things. Now the plug’s been pulled and the car park finished with a topdressing from the burning stacks of the London Waste Company at Edmonton. Bottom ash and fly ash mixed in a potent cocktail, one hundred times more powerful than the Vietnam defoliant, Agent Orange.
Dagenham. Ford’s. Ford Madox Ford. His book, The Soul of London, published in 1905 (three years after Jack London’s descent into the abyss of Whitechapel). ‘One may sail easily round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But only the most enthusiastic geographer … ever memorised a map of London. Certainly no one ever walks around it.’
Walking restores memory. So why was I hanging about? Bad back or no bad back, I needed to be in the weather, on the move. The ring at the door was repeated, finger held on button. I remembered. I was waiting for that girl, the photographer. Jimmy’s protégée, Livia. She made some excuse for invading my privacy, a manuscript she’d been asked to deliver. I had an excuse too. I wanted to see her again. My life lacked complication.
‘You got a towel?’
It was the wrong voice. And the wrong girl.
‘Pretty wet out there, right now. I walked from Jimmy’s place. We had a big night watching biker videos.’
She was taller than she should have been, broad-shouldered, dripping; a woollen cap and less hair than the first time. She took off her coat, hung it over my bedroom door and made her way, uninvited, undirected, to the kitchen. She seemed to know where the kettle would be. She dumped her sad rucksack on the floor, opened cupboards, the fridge, looking for something.
‘Not working?’
‘Preparation is work,’ I said. ‘Reading, research.’
‘Your icebox. Yurrgh.’
The ‘lost’ American from Rainham Marshes. What was the name?
‘Track,’ she said. ‘Ollie couldn’t make it.’
‘Ollie?’
‘Livia. A residency in Hastings, you know? Photographs. The town at night. In colour. Says, hi. Meet with you another time. She’s just awesome, Livia, but so petite. I’m pure Viking. Jimmy’s kids start calling us “Ollie and Stan”. The wrong way. Ollie’s down on the coast right now, finding locations where a dead guy made his paintings.’
Tall coffee, cold hands around a warm glass jug. Edible aroma. An interlude. Time and place frozen, slipping into other times at the same table. One of my wives wanted to do a book on tables. As a focus for the kind of life that no longer exists: post-Elizabeth David, country in town, cut flowers, blue-and-white bowls from the Algarve, black olives and Welsh dressers. Two cats. Slow cooking, shopping in street markets, conversations that ran into the night. Ever seen anyone peel chestnuts? This table still had the hieroglyphs carved into it by a Sixties painter who couldn’t quite make up his mind to paint. Or to give up painting and move on. I can never think of Elizabeth David without flashing to the image of her – in a biography (review of a biography) – naked, lashed to the mast, literally lashed, by a caddish lover, a loved wrong ’un. Cruising the Med, siren of the bedsits, necklace of garlic bulbs, illustrated by John Minton. ‘Another era altogether, John,’ as the villains say.
Prisms of remembered sunlight. Kitchen passions, summer parties. Old film, 8 mm, flickering on a dirty sheet. Prized babies crawling through uncut grass. Wine in wedding-present goblets. Cider in petrol-station beakers. Picnics under the cherry tree. Table as tent. Kids playing with squashed cardboard and sacks of oats. Table of meals and quarrels, friendships launched, renewed, cancelled. The central leaf, which was never needed, now that communal feasts were a thing of the past, was pristine, a lovely, honeyed yellow. The rest of that surface, with the join down the middle, greasy, scripted with nicks and stains, a patina of unearnt nostalgia.
Tables and kitchens, so the architects say, are finished. Workers don’t have time to eat. Builders don’t have space for anything more cumbersome than a microwave. Kitchens are a design feature: to be admired, not used, somewhere to park a display of cook books by celebrity chefs.
‘Marina had to be sure you got this. I’m under oath. Put the bag, personally, right into your hands.’
Track was nothing like my caricature, less brash, less American. More Scandinavian. Freckles and a chipped tooth. Eyes that watched your eyes.
‘Would you read them, the stories? I mean really. Don’t just say it.’
She worked, hard, on her hair – with the best towel I could find, flecks of blue lost as she spun the rag into an improvised turban. Very little makeup, so far as I could see, translucent skin. The business of the hair dealt with, Tr
ack slumped in her chair, suddenly modest about her size. She talked softly, but she talked. Which suited me very well. I half listened, went back to my reverie: the pale table, coffee jug, two broad shallow cups with small red flowers painted around their border. The window. The sodden, shapeless garden in which no human had set foot in two years.
I slid the manuscript out of its yellow-and-blue Ikea shopping bag. It was thick, text hammered into cheap paper by some ancient portable. A book on the table, unopened. I got that far (first sentence) and let it go. The woman in the story was on a train, leaving London, heading off to the Estuary. Women and trains, I thought, quit while you’re ahead.
‘Marina, she didn’t … not in words. Just: “Stan, you know what to do.” And she walked up the steps into the train station, Fenchurch, and … I guess that’s it. No call, no message, nothing. That’s why I came in the car with Jimmy. Why I went off. Marina had all of your books in her apartment. Find her for me, please.’
Why not? The woman had the rucksack, the boots. Why not invite Track to come along, as a character? A foil for the A13 walk. The pain had shifted from my lower back, a fault in the lumbar region, old damage, to my left shoulder. A good omen for the coming adventure.
‘Would you like to see where the A13 is born?’
‘Sure,’ she said, reaching across the table, a gesture left in air. ‘What are you waiting for? Let’s go.’
Actually, now that I thought about it, this was not the original table. There had been at least three others. The first, at the period of brown rice and afternoon smoke, was chipped tin. Uneven legs, it rocked every time we sat down. The kind of cold surface on which dogs are castrated and tomcats have their wounds cleaned. The second, pine, was solid enough to take the weight of two bodies, love in the kitchen. This one, the last, came from Tottenham Court Road: it expanded, the immaculate central leaf was for the dinner parties that never happened, the children who stayed out there, refusing to be born.
Dining on Stones Page 7