Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  If they could scrape together – milk money, kids’ piggy-bank – £42.95 (one night’s sanctuary). The Travelodge at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel, convenient for everywhere, was much favoured by reps and tourists who’d made the wrong booking for the Dome.

  I saw the attraction: anonymous Eurostyle. A peacetime barracks in Germany. Small square windows, which open on the tilt, masked in gauzy drapes. No entrance on the A13 side. Nothing to draw attention to itself. The Travelodge concept was: filling-station forecourt in which you are permitted to sleep. Refuel, pass water, watch television. Pick up a complimentary map – on which the next Travelodge will be marked. Britain had been invaded by numbered flags. Like a golf course. Alton (Hants) to York (Central). ‘A Travelodge for every occasion’: slogan, not a threat.

  Jimmy’s mob, surrounded by possessions, slumped in the otherwise deserted afternoon bar, with its banks of TV monitors and unsynchronised lounge Muzak. Danny was uncomfortable indoors and fiddled with the zip of his bag. Track smiled, unfazed, eager to occupy whatever chair she found herself in. I tried to locate someone prepared to serve up drinks. Dying sunlight poured through picture windows: panorama of parked cars, strategic bushes, amputated lamp-standards, other buildings with much the same design. The only notable feature in this landscape was an attempt to introduce poetry. A sequence of slate-grey slabs with upbeat messages (reprised in doodles above the bar).

  I watched, in the mirror, as an animated couple, impervious to the beauty of the car park sculptures, approached the Travelodge. The woman was familiar. At my age they all are. The lovers ambled into the bar, passing close enough for me to get the scent. Faces might not register, smell retains its potency. Hannah was never overfond of bathing – once a week, for an hour, a good soak, during which she read Laing, or took a hit of poetry – but she liked perfume. And was quite experimental about it, little bottles, picked up in transit to conferences, set out in a line on the mantelpiece. There was one bottle, squat, shaped like a glass eye, which gave off a rather heavy drench that reminded me of the Sixties, Gitanes and lemongrass. Hannah used that one whenever she expected sex. A Pavlovian trigger that never failed. So what was she doing doused with the stuff in a Blackwall Tunnel Travelodge? And who was the mouthy gimp in my father’s coat? The one with his arm around her waist.

  The Literate Jukebox

  Elis, the slender man in the air steward’s uniform, prowled the bar-zone on twinkly feet, staying within a ladder of imaginary lights that led to the emergency exit, his past life. He talked in semaphore (a second language), matching gestures to meticulously articulated words. Cheeks puffed, lips pursed around an emergency whistle, he kept back just enough breath for the inflation of a life-jacket.

  ‘The lady’s a regular, business class. You understand? She likes …’ – he leant forward, dropping his voice – ‘… the window seat, plenty of legroom. Plenty of leg.’

  ‘The man?’

  ‘Never flown before, not with us. Madame is alone, a little farouche. I set a dish of peanuts, roasted. Freshen her drink every forty-five minutes. She lives, they say, up in the clouds, by the Tunnel entrance. Comes over most nights. To unwind. Where else should she go, person like that, around here?’

  ‘She drinks?’

  ‘Not to cause a problem. Kummel with lemonade and ice, unusual. I had to order it in.’

  ‘You know her well?’

  ‘She likes to talk. Excuse me.’

  Hannah was due a refill. Her companion, back to me, was a lush. Heavy, morose. Going at it steadily, soft Irish whiskey with Czech lager chasers. A bad drunk, I’d guess. Hanging on to his Hoxton pretensions (black wool beanie) in the Travelodge, London Docklands.

  This A-road attraction, according to my complimentary coaster, was five miles from everywhere. Old Royal Observatory: five miles. Maritime Museum: five miles. Queens House: 5 miles. Royal Naval College: 5 miles. Cutty Sark: five miles. A13 (aka East India Dock Road): fifteen yards.

  Waiting for Elis to do his bit with tray, twist bottle, peanut pack, I watched twin monitor screens in the long mirror. An alternate world peopled by Dennis Hopper clones; by the worst Hopper imitator, Hopper himself. A short-arse in a dirty Stetson. A Hollywood coke-freak boozer who could no longer get the nuisance parts in Henry Hathaway westerns.

  Hopper on a train. Hopper on a mountain. Hopper crucified. Hopper out of it. No TV network would run these films. One of them, I knew, because I’d been chasing it for months, had been deleted twenty years ago.

  The bar stank: money burning into scratched light. No soundtrack. The narcoleptic of choice. Muzak: like piss fountains splashing on pink ice.

  ‘I’m having a little bitty Hopper season,’ Elis said. ‘Bootleg VHS tapes from a Paris dealer. The American Friend and The Last Movie. What happened to Robby Müller? Great photographer. But slow, they say. Took hours setting up if he didn’t like the cut of your shirt.’

  It was much too late for a wallow in anorakia. Film history had migrated to a generic Docklands hotel (a place without memory). Film (self-destructive stars) was the barman’s hobby. The manager didn’t care. He could run whatever he wanted, so long as he killed the sound. Other screens hosed in news footage, soaps, football. Colours unknown to nature, scarlet faces (every interviewee a potential Alex Ferguson), grass like Sinatra’s rug.

  For a man who didn’t drink, Jimmy Seed was having a famous session. Tabletop like a bottle bank. Jimmy and Track, notebooks out, talking tactics: who to hit on, which paintings to display, which ones to hide. Favours for favours. Philip Dodd, Tim Marlow, Jonathan Jones. Contacts to squeeze. Old lovers to reactivate. Curators with exploitable weaknesses, soft spots for rough trade.

  ‘ICA?’

  They both laughed.

  ‘The Whitechapel?’ Jimmy slurred. ‘It’s in the fucking charter, a modicum of exhibition space must be given over to gin-u-wine East London artists. Lifers like … me. Thirty years, man and boy, within sound of gunfire from the Blind Beggar.’

  Track snorted. ‘No chance.’

  ‘White Cube. They don’t give a fuck what you do. It’s who you do, you are. I am … IT! In-your-face truth, adherence to … mat-erial-ity. Matter. Paint on canvas. Got to come back. Am I right, babe?’

  Mrs Seed and the kids had cleared off, dragging their sacks, to argue over bed space in the single room they were to share. Danny Folgate, nursing his cordial, was unhappy.

  ‘I’ll kip in the motor. Keep an eye on it.’ He didn’t fancy spending the night in a place so bereft of spirit.

  Jimmy yielded a set of keys. I walked out with Danny, to clear my head in the damp night air. If I stayed in the bar, drink for drink with Jimmy, I was going to do something stupid. Make an outrageous suggestion to Track. Ask her to marry me. I hardly knew the woman, would have difficulty recognising her if we came face to face in the aisle at Tesco’s, but she had this vital quality: she was nothing like wives numbers one and two. Different era, different species. Different chat. That’s the most important element in any relationship, sound. Voice. Does it grate? Does it wear away at your reserves? Ruth didn’t say much, but you had to pin your ears back when she was on the phone to a relative or friend. Hannah talked fluently, aggressively, her words a challenge. I was forced to respond, drawn into the argument, made to perform when I wanted to hoard language, keep its potency secure.

  Ruth was and is a mystery. But I know absolutely everything about Hannah’s childhood, adolescent difficulties, flirtations, neuroses, sex triggers. Dreams. Nightmares. Fear of the sea crashing around the house. Fear of buttons. Fear of silence.

  I cracked it! Prompted by one of the TV monitors, it came to me, the puzzle of that name. Track reversed gives Kat. The big hair, eyes, attitude: one of the Slater sisters from EastEnders. Students probably got themselves up for a party. Ollie as the soppy one and Track as Kat.

  Riddle solved. Trouble was … I couldn’t claim my reward, sleep with her, Track, without a marriage certificate. Out of the question. And sleep was
so sweet a notion. Danny, yawning, rubbed his eyes, while we waited for a break in the late-night traffic flow.

  Jimmy’s Volvo, astonishingly, was still there. Unclamped. Nobody could be bothered. Danny, hunched over the wheel, was a smooth driver – by the standard of the journalists, painters and film-makers who gave me most of my rides. He understood this road and very soon, too soon (landscape a miracle of shapes and signs), had us back in the Travelodge car park. Where he folded his arms and nodded out.

  His only remark, before he swung across three lanes of honking maniacs, was gnomic. A quote. ‘Stones want to go on being stones.’ He took a hand off the wheel to squeeze my arm. ‘Remember that, Andy mate.’

  I don’t know if he meant it as a tease, something to sleep on. Or as a pensée that didn’t require an answer.

  ‘Beckton Alp tomorrow,’ I said. Patting the roof of the car. ‘Early start.’

  Elis had retired. The screens were playing visual Muzak to go with the sound: waves breaking repeatedly on a golden beach. I’d missed my chance with Track, she was going to sleep in Jimmy’s bath. So he said. Four or five brandy miniatures on the table, the bar shuttered.

  I helped myself, before Jimmy arranged the rest on a tray. He was turning in.

  ‘How would you rate this evening?’ I asked. ‘Average session? No dinner and a dozen stiff ones?’

  ‘I can’t do it anymore. Cholesterol, grease caffs. I find, if I’m working, I don’t use food. A cheese sandwich or a chocolate digestive now and then. Plenty of water.’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Oh yeah, back then, sure. The hair, the cowboy boots. Running off to strip clubs in Spitalfields with featured writers. I’d cover Bond Street openings, fizz in flute, and watch the clock. I had to make it back to Limehouse, Blade Bone in Three Colt Street, for the eleven-thirty lock-in. Serious drinkers, great crack. We were down there every night.’

  ‘This was when you still painted humans?’

  ‘Sure. Critics called me an Expressionist, school of Bellany. Bollocks. I never touched a drop before breakfast. Unlike John. Bottle packed on each hip at the bus stop, going to college, Chelsea. I painted what I saw from my window. Actuality, first to last. If I couldn’t get the women, I’d dress up. That’s why they stand that way, legs like croquet hoops.’

  Animated, in the second flush, Jimmy swished brandy, using the liquor as a filter against subdued lighting. We had more in common than I realised: place not people, topography instead of narrative. Human figures treated like caricatures, rude cartoons. I’d junked fiction (and my soul mate, Ruth) around the time Jimmy treated his canvases to a thorough ethnic cleansing: no freaks, crips, dogs. No tarts propping up walls. A self-denying ordinance: no booze.

  ‘First wife sent me to the quack, round the corner from here,’ Jimmy confessed. ‘You might have known him, London writer, old Trot, name of Widgery. “I’m a bit concerned about my drinking, doc.” I said it with a straight face.’

  ‘Any use?’

  ‘Good bloke, but busy. Got me to write down my daily intake -seven or eight pints of an evening, couple of bottles of wine at lunch. Like we all did. A brandy, maybe, to get me on the road.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Practically teetotal, Widgery reckoned. Wasting his time. He had real problems on his patch. Diseases unrecorded since the Middle Ages. Call myself a painter? I wasn’t trying. That’s when I shifted to landscapes. No mad eyes staring back at you.’

  Tumbler in each hand, Jimmy lurched from the room, crashing against a slot machine that dispensed books. I followed, bladder burning, the night’s drinking catching up with me. And nothing ahead, the wasted expense of a solitary Travelodge bed: ‘Due to problems beyond our control, we have had to remove all telephones from rooms.’

  Jimmy, shameless about these things, saw the book-dispensing machine as a future painting: the literate jukebox, cabinet of curiosities. Thirty-two portraits, cover designs, to be remade: melancholy woodland pools, waifs on rain-drenched jetties, barbed wire, skulls, cars, minimalist abstraction. In silver and gold. England, the culture, reduced to essence: a catalogue of favoured tropes, iconic views.

  ‘Contemporary fiction,’ I said to Jimmy, ‘is either pod or ped. Left-hand rack, you’ll observe, begins with J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes. Pod-meister. Suburban solipsism: world in a windscreen. Right-hand rack is ped. The walkers. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn. Sit at your PC as you sit in the car: pod person. Lose yourself in the rhythms of the walk: pedestrian. Stately prose, Sebald.’

  ‘Stephen King?’

  ‘Pod. By instinct. He tries to walk down a road, a redneck runs him down. Know your limitations. Stick to genre.’

  ‘P.D. James?’

  ‘Pod. Outing to flint church. Body in ditch.’

  The vision was sharp: Jimmy and I, stooping forward, superimposed over the glossy books in their display cabinet. It went all the way back through literature. Peds: John Cowper Powys, Gerald Kersh, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Dickens, De Quincey, Bunyan, Blake, Rousseau. Pods: DeLillo, Updike, Flaubert, Proust. No precedence. Different strokes. I was far enough gone to appreciate the conceit, too sober to write it down. Another inspiration that would never see the light of day.

  Jimmy tried to find the stairs. If there was a lift he’d never manage to summon it. He didn’t fancy sleeping overnight in a stalled tin box.

  ‘Tell me’ – he jabbed my chest – ‘are you gay?’ His hands clutched my shoulders, then slipped. Boneless, he fell to his knees. I looked down on a bright ring of male-pattern baldness, freckled scalp and rusty wisps of wool.

  ‘Not now, thanks.’

  The night porter, an economic migrant, slid back into her cubbyhole. A redhaired Scotsman gripping another man’s thighs, head in crotch, mumbling incoherently, after midnight, was rather too much.

  ‘You’re a fucking journo,’ said Jimmy, ‘and you never pull. That’s all wrong.’

  I was uneasy about broaching the Gents, a plywood door with one of those symbols you have trouble working out, sober. But it had to be done. Relief was acute. I counted the seconds as a steaming arc dissolved the blue chemical cork – while keeping an eye on the dirty mirror, in case Jimmy barged in with another monologue.

  Ruth always hated those scenes on TV, bits of business enacted at the trough, two tough cops nudging the plot, shaking the drips. Male-bonding sessions: media sharks snorting coke, lowlife spilling blood on the tiles. Television drama, without mobiles, laptops and lavatories, would fall apart.

  There were two of me in the mirror. Nothing unusual in that, you might say: dodgy peepers, drink taken. ‘Photographs are mirrors with memory,’ someone wrote. Untrustworthy, promiscuous things. You never know when they’ll start to leak. But this was no Marx Brothers routine. The impersonator was wearing my father’s funeral coat, the one I’d lost on the coast. And the cleft of his Desperate Dan chin was pumping blood from the nick I’d given myself, weeks ago, before I’d driven to Rainham Marshes with Jimmy.

  I grew perfectly sober in an instant.

  That’s Poe. You didn’t think me capable of such a sentence? Even drunk.

  There was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement.

  ‘You think it’s clever?’

  My mirror image shouted.

  ‘Dodging through Whitechapel? The Hoop & Grapes? Staring all night at a woman drinking with me in a hotel bar?’

  His eyes were bloodshot. He’d lost it. But his grip was powerful.

  ‘What are you? Private dick? Journalist?’

  He banged my face against the glass. The situation, if I accepted it, was absurd. The kind of novel that would never make it into the Travelodge display cabinet. The man was crazy, road crazy; nothing in the way of solid research to hold his world together. He’d come to believe that this portion of London, Docklands, A13, was his private fiefdom, personal property. Every splint
er in the ground a nail in his hand. Every fast-food joint a trauma.

  He wanted to shift, the insight came to me, as he hammered my face against the mirror for the second time, from being a character, someone I’d observed at the corner of the frame, to the teller of the tale. The author. Ugly word. Worse thought. There are places, the Docklands Travelodge in the small hours of the night is one of them, where fiction and documentary cohabit. Indiscriminately. Fetches appear and disappear in anonymous corridors. Dead actors work the bar. TV sets loop conspiracies. The future is optional -but it’s out there, beyond the double-glazing, full-beam on a restless road.

  I drove an elbow into his Adam’s apple, loose cartilage in a flabby sock. John Fashanu would have been proud of the shot, blindside and very painful. When in doubt, go pulp, lift a passage from a forgotten book that has lodged, deep, in memory’s sediment.

  He doubled over and had to sit down. He laughed until the punch line sucker-punched him – then he froze.

  That’s James Ellroy. I downloaded The Big Nowhere from the book display.

  Ellroy trumped Poe.

  Ellroy plays the same game, he opens with a tag from Conrad: ‘It was written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.’ Heart of Darkness, what else? The only title available in California. Brando refused to sample the novella before he landed, whale-sized (wrong movie), in the Philippines for Coppola’s vanity project.

  I polished my bruises. My impersonator had been sucked back into the glass – where, doubtless, a nest of spooks were recording the scene. Behind every mirror in every toilet in every Travelodge, ibis, off-highway motel, are ghosts. Succubi. Third Mind essences detached by acts of love. Road reverie. Tremors. Sweats. Karmic multiples, doubles of doubles, lost without trace, divorced from human congress. Eternally alone with the Muzak of the spheres.

  I was wearing the other man’s dark coat, won back, when I returned to Hannah. We kissed and went upstairs to bed.