Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Nightsweats

  Nightsweats. Noises.

  The woman, Katherine Cloud Riise, known as Track, lay in her cold bath (no water) and thought autopsy. Thought: photographs. Dead ones, females, in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields, their names: Mary Jourdan, Mary Ann Pontardant, Mary Pearson, Mary Loader, Mary Tufnell, Mary Tagg, Mary Leese, Mary Ann Ball. Bones spread across the floor of the church. Persons in white, masked. The flash of: reality.

  Nashville corpses, victims, in the coroner’s office. A powder of fine snow on the fins of huge cars. Two Hispanics discussing Patricia Cornwell in the documentary a friend worked on, viewed in Bow. The radio in the next room: ‘You can run but you can’t hide.’

  Wisconsin Death Trip: the book, not the film. Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Her Norwegian, German grandparents, great-grandparents. Everybody comes from somewhere. From photographs. The clothes and the eyes, how they argue; respectability and terror. Territories where death holds sway and warm-bloods trespass at their peril.

  ‘How do you pronounce that name, Riise?’ Jimmy had asked, their first tutorial. ‘Like Ben Johnson in One-Eyed Jacks, in the cantina: “Greaser”? Nobody drawls like Ben.’

  So she’d become Track. For her own reasons.

  Scouring powders left their imprint on the smooth enamel of the Travelodge tub. No lid, no stars. Smell soap, think sugar. Think Silvertown, the Tate & Lyle factory on the river. One stroll down that marine high street and you’ll never take sugar in your tea; solid air, a curtain of sticky droplets clogging the pores, filling the grooves of your fingernails, blackening them.

  No sleep for Track, except this sleep, her life. What was she doing out on the road with mad old men? Her business, her choice. It amused her. This landscape, their failing memories. Sounds came through thin walls. She saw herself from above. As a photograph: Woman in Bath. She lay very still.

  Jimmy’s daughter calling, calling for him. The son for the mother. Jimmy snoring. The wife singing. Bedside clock ticking: a red heart. And on the other side, wild gasps, groans through the air duct, Norton howling in a way that shouldn’t be heard, no connection with the man in daylight, his awkward amiability, his stories.

  In the slit beneath the door, the light came on. The little girl: a pee, a drink of water. A chat. ‘I like you.’ Track wasn’t asleep. She didn’t want to dream about Ollie, Livia, her friend, getting into a car with Reo Sleeman. About the way Sleeman wouldn’t talk or touch, how he drove with that unblinking, thousand-yard stare, full-beam headlights, away from the coast. Back to London.

  One photograph, when Track fixed it, carried her from reverie to unconsciousness. Chest heaving, pupils chasing spectres, hands clenching and unclenching. Mouth agape, wine breath. The cold bath becomes the boat in that studio portrait, a family. From Wisconsin Death Trip. From River Falls, 1899. Inauthentic memories, her memories. Hatchet-cheeks, the man. Elegant eyebrows. Black, pin-hole eyes that won’t stop. Hunger, winter diet. Woman in tall hat. Child – soft gaze – the only one looking directly at the camera. A painted craft in a painted landscape. Single oar: spike in the father’s left hand. Water lilies. Wyatt Earp moustache drooping with gravity, black straw boater. Priestlike male with stiff white collar. Wavelets frozen mid-ripple. This phantom Europe – stairs, parks, ruined temples – conjured in a photographer’s studio in the Midwest. Fierce father. The child, a girl, young enough to see what has been left behind. The woman, dressed in her finest outfit, necklace, high neck; an expression of tragic subtlety – ironic, wise, forgiving. Left hand, hard-used, exposed on the rim of the fictitious craft. Naked fingers. Ring lost, left to the fish.

  Track sleeps. Jimmy sleeps. Norton and Hannah sleep; she is curved into him, her arm across his chest. Life continues, revived and resuscitated, until the next time. If they never share a house, it might still work, this argument of affection.

  Lamps along the avenue, fuzzy haloes of riverdamp, illuminate a pedestrian passage between roadworks and mud creek.

  Danny the Dowser sat on a metal bench, waiting for the first streaks of pink over the Brunswick Power Station, blue shocks of the elevated railway. The zone of transition soothed him. Wind in the reed beds. Birds on the shoreline. Traffic ramping a passage into the A13 obstacle course. Land given over for centuries to dirty industry, gas, chemical, bone vats, distilleries, was now the gateway to the future: Dome, towers, airstrips, underpasses, multiplexes, eco-friendly superstores with little windmills, the largest empty parking space in London.

  The filling station, opened in anticipation of a promised fast-track future, was an oasis of artificial daylight in a desert of rubble, storm fences, tyre mounds, night security patrols.

  Danny tapped on the window, asked for a chocolate bar, slid his coins into the tray; a complicated transaction – like getting cash from a Mare Street bank. Cameras swivel. The Asian, red-eyed, snatches up the coins, checking them for fingerprints.

  Sticky Danny, choc crumbs in beard, returned to his creekside vigil.

  Helicopters low over jungle, over Norfolk coastal wetlands. Thudding blades. Shuddering bed.

  Hannah shook Norton, brought him out of his dream. They settled, folded in the old way, against each other, and very soon Hannah’s apologetic, mousy snores were puffing the short hairs on Norton’s neck. After love, boundaries shift, defensive reflexes are inhibited: the therapist dreamt and the hack, now alert, supersensitive to night’s noises, suffered the visions of his partner. Intravenous cable TV.

  ‘Most of you will go to Vietnam. Some of you will not come back.’

  Vietnam, England.

  English light.

  Waterskies with cloud wisps, black Fenland earth.

  Dreams don’t discriminate, we are everywhere at once. We give ourselves up to long-suppressed lovers whose names and faces we have deleted. (The headless man in the torn Polaroid from the Duchess of Argyll’s bathroom. A blow job. With pearl necklace.) We visit spine-tapped valleys, ocean depths of arterial blood, bone coral.

  Hannah, that most urban of women, floated over a desert road that ran for hundreds of miles towards sharply outlined mountains, irrigation ditches. She penetrated forests, ankles caught in undergrowth, wrists secured by lianas. Pressing herself against me, sharing body-warmth, she took on my obsessions, my vanished ancestor’s Peruvian expedition. Arthur Norton and the lost camera.

  She sampled films I had seen. And films I thought I had seen, sleep-edited from release prints, redirected by untrustworthy memory. Extracts from books. Lines of poetry echoing insistently when the names of the authors are past recall.

  Next morning we were up betimes, and, after settling la cuenta, which our ragged host seemed to have sat up all night concocting, we rode briskly off, leaving the lake, with its swarms of fat wild-geese undisturbed on the water, and the ill-favoured and milkless kine shivering amongst the coarse rushes on the margin. We zig-zagged over a preliminary ridge, had a smart canter for two hours over an undulating plateau, and reached by 9 a.m. the station called San Blas. Here there are extensive salt works in active operation, but no food for man nor beast procurable, so we pushed on.

  Lodged in her bath, Track dreamt of Livia, face shifting to another woman, also dark, also beautiful. To Marina Fountain, the writer who had taught them both, at college, at Chelsea. Marina’s championing of such mysteries as Canvey Island, Sheppey, the Isle of Grain, Tilbury Town, Deal, Thanet, carried Livia and Track into their current projects: perversity, cutting against the grain, travelling with strangers.

  ‘Pick a railway station,’ Marina used to say, ‘buy a ticket to somewhere you’ve never been, bring back the story.’

  Marina was always late, smoking, books and papers falling out of her satchel, dressed by committee: jumble sale, designer collectables (prize money), extravagant and wildly inappropriate presents from admirers (curators, rich students, both kinds of bookie, turf and lit). Marina did scarves, coats, fancy boots, rings – but wasn’t bothered with the rest, minimal suede or leather skirts on
long legs, laddered stockings (black, purple, green), loose tops (food-spilled, mended). Hats.

  The students, male and female, were in love with her. The schemes she proposed were never carried out, not by them. They were far too preoccupied with their grievances, getting from wherever to wherever, to have time for conceptual journeys.

  Marina understood this, her expeditions were not intended for public consumption. They were a way of talking, obliquely, about her own work. Which she wouldn’t, otherwise, expose. They were too lazy and impoverished to track down her unique published novel.

  She pitched extracts from writers she liked, Djuna Barnes, Jean Rhys, Mary Butts, Nicola Barker, Denise Riley – and left them to it. Fine artists couldn’t, for the most part, see the connection: what this had to do with a career, getting a first show. Track and Ollie shared a bottle with Marina, went to the cinema, but they never shared a train ride. Marina did that alone. So she said. If her trips to the coast weren’t fiction, a provocation to get them moving.

  When she didn’t turn up one Wednesday, mid-term, November, they missed her. Track was jealous that Ollie had been entrusted with the folder of stories; Marina left them – by accident? – in her flat. She talked about giving the package to a journalist called Norton, a man who wrote about roads, urban Gothic, ill-favoured topographies. Norton was a brief vogue in London art schools, for those who lacked stamina for the real thing, Walter Benjamin, Baudrillard, Mike Davis.

  Ollie wouldn’t, and Track couldn’t, read the stories. Marina knew that perfectly well, otherwise she would never have trusted them with the folder. Now that Norton carried the burden in his A13 rucksack, Track’s duty was performed. She would stick with Norton, with the Jiffy bag, until Marina returned to reclaim her property. Until the typescript had been enacted in the Essex territory for which it was always intended.

  Sweating, Norton rolled from the bed. It was his turn to sit in the bathroom, sleep was denied him, no hint of dawn through the gap in the curtains. Cars on the road. The soft electronic hum that is London, headache-hammers on rooftops and spires, radio masts, photovoltaic scanners. The yammer of acoustic landfill, idiot conversations, text messages, broadband signals. Sleep? Whose sleep? The Docklands Travelodge was an open dormitory – a hospital in the Crimea – through which Norton drifted, perplexed by the nightmares of reps and adulterers, cleaning staff, kitchen staff, unseen servicers of the virtual city.

  Nothing to read.

  Baths were for reading. Why else would you take them?

  Not even a Gideon bible.

  He rummaged, deep in his rucksack, dug out the package that Track had landed him with, and – well aware what he was letting himself in for – began the first story by Marina Fountain. First sentence. First fateful words.

  A book on the table, unopened. Yellow canvas bag on the aisle seat. This was a woman who hadn’t travelled in recent times. A client who had never made the acquaintance of the c2c service into the Estuary. The carriage was empty, lime green, futuristic in its conceptual cleanliness. A golden script, made from unstable dots of light, floated mirror-reversed across a shield of protective glass. Rubber-lipped doors closed with an hydraulic sigh. The material on which she sat was coarse. It cat-scratched laddered stockings. The tabletop bruised her knees. She wriggled to find space for long legs. She hadn’t chosen her position with sufficient care. But she wouldn’t change. She ran one finger down the spine of a book. Her nail varnish, too dark, had chipped. But that was another life.

  She twisted in her seat, turned to read the mesmerisingly banal loop. Welcome Aboard the c2c Service to Grays.

  Sea to sea.

  A New England spinster with cobwebs in the throat. And then the Windows failed – and then/I could not see to see.

  Write it to know it. Use fear to stave off fear.

  The point of this move was to be somewhere, somewhere feasible, in the region of Stanford-le-Hope. No, it wasn’t. The point was to disappear. The point was to get out, not to stay. To become invisible. To avoid anyone who knew her face, her history. To deflect conversation with promiscuous strangers.

  Forgive my long silence: I have been ill.

  Her enthusiasm for Conrad, did it endure? The advance had been pitiful; the commissioning editor, a friend, had moved on. They never talked about the project. They sat for hours in the pub – while the editor, in spelling out her hopes, confirmed disaster.

  Cora smoked, gave up smoking, stubbed a ruff of butts into a cracked white ashtray. As a woman with lousy taste in men, could she trust herself with a merciless account of Joseph Conrad’s marriage? His life at Ivy Walls Farm. His wife’s health. His agonising drudgery, his pride. The muffled sound of bells from ships on the river.

  I married 18 months ago and since then I have worked without interruption. I have acquired a certain reputation – a literary one – but the future is still uncertain …

  First, she learnt Polish. Then she tracked down the letters and began the slow, painstaking, much-revised process of translation. She travelled, validated herself. Another country, another woman (the original staying put, carrying on as before). Being alone in a strange city, visiting libraries, enduring and enjoying bureaucratic obfuscation, sitting in bars, going at whim to the cinema, allowed her to try on a new identity. A new name. She initiated correspondence with people she had never met. She lied. She stole from Conrad. She set up meetings, back in London, that she had no intention of keeping. She avoided affairs, pleasured herself efficiently, without summoning the eidolons of previous lovers. She wrote to English authors of the moment, teasing them. She became a fiction. Solitude was an indulgence. Grays, she hoped, would be as melancholy as Kraków. As the sentimental bond that did or did not exist between Conrad and his childhood friend Janina Taube. The name was the colour, chalk and lead. A dull sky and a dead river.

  Voluntary amnesia.

  The moment she took her seat, turned up her collar, caught her reflection, Cora recognised that she was behaving as if she were still outside, with the sunshine and showers. Subdued artificial light left her slightly queasy. The cabin seemed pressurised. She forced herself to take slow, steady breaths. She blew on the window, signed ‘Janina’, rubbed it out with her sleeve. The emptiness of the long carriage was the end of a ghost story. Doors that weren’t doors. Opaque windows. A cancelled landscape. Everything in the wrong order.

  ‘Journey from hell, isn’t it?’

  A Docklands drone in highly polished black shoes. A suit and an anorak. He gestured, as if to hold the door for the woman with the rings and the industrial hair. They must have been there all the time, in the far reaches, hidden by high-backed seats.

  Exterior varnish failed to disguise the damage of a cleaning job, rough hands. Long ‘anti-social’ hours removing evidence of occupation from still-throbbing trains. Drudgery at the outer limits of a legal wage. Cora had been there. Manual work was actually quite social; as close as she wanted to get to society. To the sisterhood of the put-upon; cigarettes shared on first-light platforms, the day’s horrors rehearsed. A litany of cancellations, detours. Mechanically voiced apologies.

  Wipe them.

  Cora didn’t need characters. Acknowledging their existence, granting them space, led to unwarranted projection, the invention of other lives. Empathy. Eavesdropping. Romance.

  Stay with the window, the slight stickiness of her palm on the book. Cold, damp glass. Exploited streams. Breakers’ yards. Miles of production-line cars that nobody wants. A water tower that belongs in New Jersey.

  She was far enough out of London now to take off her gloves. She didn’t wear gloves. Her hands were grey. The low-intensity light of that riverside landscape, the sickly green of the carriage. She scratched, trying to peel skin from her hands. The skin had died. She was wearing skin gloves that she couldn’t unpick.

  Conrad’s Polish Background.

  An infection had been transmitted from the author portrait on the cover. Creases and mud tributaries beneath the writer’s ti
red eyes with their scrotal pouches. Spirals of hair around neat, bat-ears. Conrad’s face was a map of the Estuary. If she held the book at the right angle, her reflection and the reflection of the great writer would marry with the desolation of the marshes. Gull clouds. Mountain ranges of hot landfill.

  It was working. When they passed under a motorway on stilts, she felt the rush. Displacement. Her senses given up to blight, erasure. She couldn’t remember who she had killed. Just where. The room. The position of the furniture. The sound of a running shower. The flattened shadow of a tumbler on a window ledge. She didn’t know why. Or when. It didn’t matter. She had everything she needed in the yellow bag – laptop, pills, a few clothes. The keys to the new flat could be picked up at the estate office in Grays. Meanwhile, she was happy to let it happen, shifts of geology, registers of light. The more sky the better. Keep moving and memories will be revised, reconstituted. The train window is the perfect screen. A cup of decent coffee and she can forget London.

  A flooded quarry. The train had stopped. It didn’t concern her if the landscape drifted or kept still. Train travel worked very well, so long as you didn’t need to be anywhere at a particular time. The seat was comfortable. The view unobtrusive. She had a table and a book. Hunger was manageable – when you considered the alternative. A good strong coffee, the smell, the feel of the cup in her hand, was her dominant fantasy.

  Cora could hear the driver, a woman, talking. Making excuses. The flooded quarry, with its abandoned industrial aspirations, was an official halt. A youth with ravaged skin was standing on the platform.

  Don’t catch his eye. Don’t look. One client only. Why so many? White tongues hanging from the pockets of a tartan bomber jacket. He was unhinged. Don’t look. Tongues of white plastic. The guy looks like a dispenser for carrier bags. You wouldn’t say he suffered from eczema, that would be making light of the case. Inflamed skin shedding its ash in volcanic flakes: raw and scabbed. He couldn’t keep still long enough to get on the train, couldn’t commit to a destination. Also, it appeared from his writhing and hopping, his frantic groin-knuckling, he was in imminent danger of wetting himself.