It was going to take a superhuman act of will to break out of the equilateral triangle formed by Commercial Road, Whitechapel Road (Mile End Road), the Blackwall Tunnel Approach. Dead ground: London’s version of the Bermuda Triangle. Unwary voyagers breezed in and were never seen again. Tower Hamlets Cemetery: overgrown paths, erased memorials, obelisks. Jack London took photographs and Joseph Stalin lodged in Tower House, Fieldgate Street. The Elephant Man is still imprisoned in the London Hospital (albums of photographs, X-ray Martyrs). Hamlets Way. Ackroyd Drive. Empson Street. Jimmy Seed’s old studio in Turners Road. The unrecorded (and over-recorded) voices of Stepney and Bromley-by-Bow.
Commercial Road and Whitechapel Road begin as kissing cousins, but they soon part, moving further and further away: as upwardly mobile A11 (heading off to Epping Forest) and as our old friend, the sluggish east-flowing A13. Decisions, casually made, can never be undone.
Twilight, neon-licked, brought another sighting of our dowser. Posed against a window of decapitated humanoid models, he was heavier, slower, shorter in the leg. He limped, weighed down by a black bag that might once have belonged to a doctor or plumber.
We scanned the sign: HENRIQUES ST (FORMERLY BERNER ST). Our man was still on the trail, heading towards the railway and the river, quitting the A13, paying his dues to a Victorian crime scene; one jump ahead of the ghouls, the video tourists. Named-and-shamed ‘Berner’ might have been struck from the map, but they couldn’t let it go; this once-and-future killing ground was part of the heritage route. Working-men’s clubs, schools, debating societies. A red-brick mansion with breeze-block doors. TAFFY’S BARBERSHOP: the only going concern. Step away from the brightly lit boulevard of Commercial Road and you flounder in Miltonic darkness.
A man, soft-shoed in rubber, weighed down by a black bag. Sealed doors. Suspended charities. The first whiff of the Thames, unspiced, on chill evening air. We followed, keeping well back, staying in the shadows.
This was another London, occupied by invisibles, secret hordes in tenements, low-level flats with gauzy curtains. Cars, left on the street, winked with security lights. They outranked the rundown properties. Cars and ex-cars, accredited wrecks with shattered windscreens and no engines. The dowser dragged himself through this territory, eyes fixed straight ahead. A long way from Brick Lane’s curry houses with their touts and greeters, from leather wholesalers, minimarts, peddlers of slippers and virtual Meccas. Brick Lane was the Oxford Street of these obscure warrens. Obscure to outsiders.
Out of nothing came nothing: a dogpatch, tired carpet of theoretical grass, sodden at all seasons. A cliff of unrestored flats. A rank of devastated lockups.
Track loved it, this set. She saw it as a future art work. Her camera: she wouldn’t follow the dowser until she’d gathered evidence for a new grid. She didn’t say as much, didn’t say anything. This is how I read it (freelance journalist, collector of trivia). And I think now, sitting on my balcony by the sea, going over my notes, that I was wrong. Track’s behaviour was never calculating, she went with her impulses: hundreds of lit windows, the termite theatre of evening, this was something worth celebrating. For itself. As itself. Proper artists know how to wait.
Squelching, unable to see where I was putting my feet, I waded onto the grass. My actions, in response to the dowser, were influenced by the fact that we both fitted cosily within the spectrum of autism: obsessive, unpredictable, hoarding twigs, locks of hair, scraps of paper, cigarette packets, bus tickets. In black bags and awkward rucksacks. We laboured with kit. Faces of strangers, faces of friends, faces of celebrities, they were equally unfamiliar. Meaningless. We scarcely knew ourselves.
A rugged boulder. Glacial debris, fallen monument. The dowser, rods catching blue light from a television window, was circling a rock. What was it doing in this wasteland?
‘Like a try? It’s not difficult.’
The man was waiting for me, holding out the rods. It was a simple business, apparently, this dowsing. Easy grip, no clenched knuckles. Don’t rush it. When you pass over new material, cable in earth, dull coin, the rods cross.
Was this megalith one of the unrecorded wonders of London? It looked, in the half-dark, like a tumbled standing stone, a menhir in the wrong place. A blood table. It hummed and throbbed: booster for the journey on which we were about to embark.
‘Concrete, I’d say,’ the dowser replied. ‘Could be, like, an art thing. Without the holes. Or debris builders left behind.’
I stroked the surface and felt extremes of temperature, microwave heat and cold that would freeze your tongue to the rock. Parts, it’s true, were rough as concrete, fissured, fuzzy with moss -but speckled veins ran through the rest, Peterhead granite transformed to gneiss, fractures of pure obsidian. The thing was a geological anomaly, a freak. A rock designed by committee.
Quietly, without fuss, a revamped Stone Age culture was creeping across East London. We couldn’t erect circles or astronomically aligned spirals, so we tipped rubble into small parks, left boulders in places where nobody would notice them. When the dowser swept out, in wider and wider circles, dogging this rock, I had a comic vision of municipal stone floating through the sky, Magritte-fashion, like loaves of bread.
‘It’s getting a bit late, last train. Sorry. We could meet again if you’re minded. Or the lady. Tomorrow morning, tenish. I’ll show you how to dowse. Most people can. My pleasure.’
He gave us his name, as security, a parting gift: Danny Folgate. Laid-off, voluntary-retirement paintshop man. Ford’s at Dagenham. Dowsing and local history, facts, provided Danny with a new life, a reason to get out of bed. He kept his books indoors. He had hundreds. And could lend us a few.
We might, this first day, have achieved a mile and a half, in parallel with the A13. It was going to be a long haul – if I couldn’t learn what to leave out, which estuarial lives to ignore.
Danny limped off. Track disappeared. I picked my way between fences boxed in asbestos and garages that barked. To Amazon Street. A source place, left out of Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas, but found, by those who need it, at the back of Hessel Street (caves of lurid vegetables, loud meat, its reek).
This, wrote my great-grandfather, is the source of the Huallaga, or, as some geographers say, the real source of the Amazon. The Huallaga is at least one of the chief tributaries of the king of rivers, and our immediate object was now to follow this streamlet until it became a mighty flood, upon whose bosom steamers of considerable magnitude may safely float.
Hackney
Putting our first day on the road behind me, I went to bed – but couldn’t sleep. I thought about Ruth. Then Hannah (whose shape I could feel in the mattress). Whose smell was still in the sheets. Ruth, Hannah. Hannah, Ruth. Hannah was sex. Fear, respect. In that order. Ruth was sex too, on both sides of a deeper affection, shared experience; the unshakeable belief that we were meant, had known each other always and, after this time of testing, would again. Death and beyond. The hollow romanticism of an empty house and an empty fridge, a Brick Lane bagel eaten on the hoof. A washed-up writer without a muse.
I tried reading, American crime capers, Florida, New Mexico, New Orleans; it didn’t take. The women. Men came in all shapes and sizes, steroidal cartoons, pondlife, scammers, scalpers, bigots and psychos; the women, young or old, were uniformly frisky, good-hearted, wisecracking, independent – an unholy blend of Howard Hawks and E. Annie Proulx. That and the ecology, the dolphins, bears, horses. The cats. Show me another alcoholic, living alone with his moggy, writing poetry, listening to the hip tracks, in an on-off relationship with a semi-reformed black prostitute, and I’ll choose to stay awake, staring at the ceiling.
Thinking about Ruth.
Who was always there, like a nodule in the armpit. I thought about what Ruth was thinking. And about what she thought I thought (thinking about her). And what I thought she thought I thought when she walked away. I didn’t understand, I’d never understand, where it went wrong. It wasn’t Hannah, was it? The n
ovel? It was something I was never going to touch, the look in her eyes, the place women go, when they’re driving a car, in the kitchen, out for a walk: sudden unexplained absence.
‘What did I wear?’ she would say. ‘Last Thursday?’
Meaning: did you like it? Can you remember?
Ruth’s was the only face I carried in my head, the only woman I would recognise in a crowd (I did it most days, street, bus, bank). But it was Hannah’s voice that shared my bedroom. Hannah slept in costumes that mirrored the cultural diversity of her background: naked with football socks (cold feet), a black slithery thing (mother’s gift), thin strings that slipped off the shoulder, combined with a buttonless pyjama jacket I’d long since abandoned. She wore spectacles in bed, reading for hours, but took them off when patients called. (Ruth rested an open book on her belly, staring into space: ‘Did we do that walk from Narrow Street on Friday or Saturday?’)
Twitching and tossing, unable to find a position in which to settle, I started – shortly before dawn – to work my way through Hannah’s bedside library. The books she didn’t need in her tower block: Clancy Sigal’s Zone of the Interior, R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self and Sanity, Madness and the Family, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Foucault, Jung and Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin (Overpowering Conformism). A slim volume of poetry by someone called Anna Mendelson.
I read the poetry. It squeezed the pap out of me (until my eyes bled): Hannah’s intensity brought to a flamelike pitch, scored and scoured. High lyrics of hurt. Everything I couldn’t answer. The riptide of this verse, Slavic and unforgiving, sealed me in a sweating carapace. I was language-stalled and guilty. Impatient for death.
Look my coat is threaded thin. I’m not robust,
I don’t know where life ends and dreams begin.
Two lines was all I could take. I tried Laing. Couldn’t get it into focus, the print was too small. I remembered a story Hannah told, when she had a bunch of therapists and crazies around for dinner, about Laing’s ‘expert evidence’ at the trial of former Postmaster-General John Stonehouse. Stonehouse was premature New Labour. He associated with bent businessmen, teased the media, groomed himself for the cameras, at a time – before Cecil Parkinson – when that wasn’t done. With the Fraud Squad closing in, Stonehouse faked suicide by drowning (like a bad situation comedy), before skipping to Australia.
Laing’s performance – substance-enhanced? – mystified the jurors and contributed to a guilty verdict. Stonehouse, he said, was unusual in that ‘his two personalities were not really aware of each other, but were joined by an umbilical cord’.
I know that cord. It is wrapped around my neck: a lifelong obsession with twins, astral doubles, doppelgängers.
Poe’s William Wilson, a moral conscience, a stalker, manifesting at moments of crisis, was a very different case. Wilson’s etheric twin was horribly familiar, while Stonehouse lived in ignorance of his other self. Laing was sympathetic to the pain this caused. He suffered from the same syndrome. A residue of Scottishness. The Glasgow hardman (and suffering child) travelled with the charismatic psychiatrist to London. To fame and doom. To Hampstead.
Sleep wouldn’t come. I worked on compensatory fictions: long boozy lunches and longer afternoons. Slats of sunlight across a blue bed. Ruth’s face shifted. Ollie (the lost Livia of Hastings) auditioned in her place, arriving windblown from the beach. Hitching her skirt to climb into a small red car. Riding over the QEII Bridge, oil refineries, power stations, tractors for export, reed beds. Smoke and clouds. ‘Don’t do it,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t trust a man with a ponytail and an Old Town tattoo. A snake with an inoculation scab for an eye.’
Dreaming was strictly competitive in the days when Hannah was in residence. Mug of black coffee in a pistol grip, she awaited my appearance – stiff-backed, shuffling, fiddling with pyjama cord – at the breakfast table. (Could I could reach the milk bottle before a spasm stopped me in my tracks?)
‘Why, why, why,’ Hannah started right in, tapping the rim of her mug with a purple nail, ‘would you present me with a withered artichoke? Then inform me, as a matter of great moment, that you found it on a walk through … Dagenham?’
Setting the mug in a ring of stain, her spot, she reached under the table for a handbag, tipped out the contents, searching for loose cigarettes. Flashing green eyes. Like a cat? She marched across the kitchen, opening drawers, slamming cupboards, shunting tins. Matches. Fine, smooth hands (nibbled nails). I admired the style with which she dragged the matchhead, away from her, across its thin brown strip (smooth, printed with honeycomb design, not like the bristling, crushed-glass of old, that picture of a ship). Twice, three times.
Rush to the sink, rinse a wineglass, swallow water; back to the table where I am waiting, mouth filled with crunchy stuff, gaps in my bite wedged with detritus. Milk on the turn.
‘Why? Why was that – do you think?’
‘What?’
‘The vegetable. Which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a head. Yes, head. Which then, as I watch, grows a body. Arms very thin and legs like … dental floss. This male creature is around three feet tall but has a very large presence. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘I haven’t the first idea.’
‘Last night, a dream.’
‘Did it say anything?’
‘It moved towards the mirror, turning back to give me a very peculiar look.’
‘It stared – at you?’
‘It left. We sat down to dinner and my father joined us.’
‘Your father? He’s – ’
‘Dead, yes. So during the meal, one of your curries, I question him – to determine whether he knows he’s still alive. Of course, he sees right through my strategy. And is supremely disdainful.’
‘Was he alive?’
‘That depends on your definition of mortality. If he’s dead, we are dead too. He has a certain period in which to mediate the situation in which we find ourselves, our failing relationship. He can return three times, no more.’
Hannah had done it again, ruined my breakfast. I pushed the cereal bowl away, called after her as she strode from the room, leaving, as she invariably did, drawers open, tap dripping, oven on.
‘What’s it mean?’
‘It means that our praxis must be resolved. My father went into the garden, sat under the cherry tree, and your wife Ruth walked in. She led me to the bedroom, which was no longer a bedroom. It was decorated with ceiling drapes made from an ancient silk parasol that spiralled outward as it unfurled on the floor.’
‘Did she speak?’ I asked.
‘Not a word. Nothing. She kissed me on the lips.’
Walking through streets that were memories of streets, correct in some details, quite wrong in others, down through Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, to our meeting place (Track, Danny Folgate), the great stone that lay on the grass behind the Amazon Street flats, I slept. Dreamt. In micro-snatches. Dreams that night refused. Sleep I had missed.
By a dirty window, a closed shop that once sold surplus uniforms, daggers, calor-gas containers and rusty water-bottles, I stood alongside the man who had my face, who looked as I looked – in the days when I used mirrors to shave. Our eyes met, dream self and teasing double. Blood oozed from beneath a strip of plaster that curled from his chin. The stranger lost his nerve, first, dropped his gaze, moved off ahead of me, in the general direction of the Thames and Commercial Road. He never glanced back.
The White Stone
The stone hadn’t moved in the night. Danny Folgate was in watchful attendance, a light dew darkening the shoulders of his pale retail-park windbreaker. Presented with this scene, as ‘shot by amateur cameraman’, my first thought would have been: ‘Where are the blue-and-white ribbons?’ Then: ‘What did they find under that rock? How many bones?’
Folgate was a classic stalker: serial-killer beard (copyright Peter Sutcliffe), buttress nose supporting overhanging brow, worry lines like the aftershock of ECT, bottle-
black hairstrands gelled over Klingon ears. Soft-strength, quivering hands and a rolling gait. A proper man, generous to a fault, courteous to strangers, prepared -without hope of reward – to talk me through the mysteries of dowsing.
While we waited for Track.
She would certainly show – if she managed to convince herself that yesterday’s Aldgate walk was an actuality, the same stone could be found twice.
‘Try this,’ Folgate said, passing me a strip of rough blue tape, the kind they use to secure oversize boxes of white goods. ‘A W-rod.’
Folgate’s kit, fished from the black bag, was salvage; pendulums contrived from bath plugs, bent coat-hangers, acrylic divisions painted onto a metal disk that had been carried home from Ford’s PTA (Painting Trimming Assembly) plant. In riverside Dagenham.
‘I never use hazel, not since that first time.’ Danny hooked back his upper lip to show me the missing lateral incisors. ‘Kick like a Lee Enfield. You’re much safer with brass or plastic.’
The W-rod, in Folgate’s candle-white hands, twisted and writhed, locating a series of quite distinct energy fields around the grey boulder (folded schist with mineral bands).
‘If we had the time,’ he said, ‘we might turn up –’
‘Grave goods? Human remains?’
‘Bicycle wheels. Foil dishes from the takeaway.’
Dowsing, in Danny’s scheme of things, was not unlike plumbing. You called him in to find a lost ring, a betting-slip. He didn’t charge. He had a notable collection of beer-bottle caps indoors. He kept hair in bottles. There was a model of Diana Dors made from scavenged watch-faces. Objects migrated but never disappeared. Black water, running beneath the city, affected those who lived above it, bringing cancers, blindness, loss of male sexual potency.
I spread my Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas on the stone table and invited Danny to take a reading from the A13. His pendulum, with its moonstone splinter, responded vigorously, the axis of oscillation favouring the east.
Dining on Stones Page 11