Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘You have licence?’ Achmed said. As they sat down, Drin and Achmed, one on either side of him. Close.

  ‘Not just now, actually.’

  ‘You drive?’

  ‘Oh sure. Of course. Always have.’

  ‘Theatre show finish ten. You drive car. Drin bring car, big car, the St Margaret, her road. You wait car. Drin and Achmed carry man, singing man. You drive.’

  There was no relevant book, no text for this, the absurdity. Achmed meant it. He had leaflets from the White Queen Theatre: Stephen Triffitt Celebrates Sinatra; Halfway to Paradise (The Billy Fury Story); Puppetry of the Penis (‘Two well-hung Aussies have turned playing with themselves into a hit show … A video camera projects every intimate detail of these incredible phenomena onto a large screen, ensuring little can be missed’). And. Highlighted box. Bermondsey’s own Superstar, direct from the London Palladium, MAX BYGRAVES. FAREWELL TOUR, FEATURING THE FABULOUS BEVERLEY SISTERS.

  He’s taken his time about it, Kaporal thought. Old Max must have booked on Connex. He won’t show, not in Hastings. It’s a wind-up. Like getting a knighthood, if your war record is a bit iffy: you have to be at death’s door to be booked by the White Queen. And, anyway, the Albanians will never lift a motor. They stand out in the town. Move away from Warrior Square and the seafront and they’ll be tapped, dispersed to Ashford, a plague hospital on Dartford Salt Marshes: shipped out.

  Drin, who was staring out of the window, grabbed Achmed’s arm. Reaching across Kaporal to do it.

  ‘He come. Mocatta send him. Is good.’

  Good move.

  The guy with the wheels, going for inconspicuous, had parked halfway across the pavement, right on the double yellows. A fat gull settled on the black roof, challenging the driver to shift him. Nobody would give this vehicle a second glance: in downtown Havana. A 1956 Dodge Coronet, two-tone. (Kaporal had seen the photo in an art book.) A smoke bucket. Delicious with chrome. Hastings cars were notable for their modesty, pre-owned Nissan Primera, Peugeot 309 5DR Saloon (£600 o.n.o.), Ford Fiesta. This thing, in the Old Town, by the shop that did jukeboxes and Jack Lord Hawaii Five-O shirts, might get away with it. Exposed here, on the Grand Parade, it was like taking a scarlet bubble car to a gangland funeral in Chingford Mount.

  The driver couldn’t even lock the door. He dropped his keys and spent five minutes crawling after them. He was totalled. He saw Achmed, through the window, standing up, waving. He ducked back into the car for cigarettes and dark glasses. Then, sniffling perniciously, rolling his shoulders, he made his pizza joint entrance.

  Reo Sleeman.

  Alby’s little brother. The crazy one. The wet dream his old mum scraped from the blanket. Reo was the reason Kaporal was on the coast. If he didn’t look him in the eye, the Essex boy might not remember. A London face in this setting. Reo was incapable of holding two concepts in his head at the same time. But here he was, on his feet, swaggering. Mocatta’s man. With instructions for the hired help, wops, redskins. The traditional wrappers of bodies in tarpaulin.

  The seagull.

  On the car roof.

  A steady gaze. Out of the window. That’s best.

  Kaporal knew just whose face it had borrowed. Supercilious, sub-aristo. Arsenic pale, awkward. A tourist and a local. The gull was a fugitive soul, a suicide. It might blink at the lowlife – or take off on the wing, swoop over the waves, return to the rock where the gang congregated, melting post-Permian stone with their acrid crap. Beautiful in a way. But trapped in the wrong species, wrong body.

  The gull had the face of Virginia Woolf.

  Night

  Night in the Old Town. Livia couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was being followed. In London – not her place – she was the follower, in control of the drama. Of her fear. Good fear, edge. She welcomed it. The purlieus of railway stations, parks under tungsten light, tower blocks in dark wildernesses. Queer domestic rituals, human glimpses, against a backdrop of monolithic alienation.

  For example: a man asleep, head sunk on chest, in an underground train. Windows like portholes in a submarine.

  Dusty curtains, folds on a sepulchre, framing the aperture of another window, half submerged, swallowed by the pavement, in a back alley of the City.

  An egg-shaped table-lamp (seen from inside the room). A high window. Diffused light, the nimbus: blue dawn breaking over a railed and frosty garden.

  A girl walking through an underpass. Three categories of illumination: wall lights (pearly as crushed aspirin), traffic (red/gold), night at a distance, in the tunnel’s mouth.

  Trees. Livia loved her trees. City trees. The isolation. Sodium glare on crinkled leaves.

  Livia was good, better than her mentor. Better than Jimmy Seed. The photograph, in this case, outperformed (in subtlety, in heart) the mechanical intelligence of the artist’s hand. Jimmy calculated, measured up, delivered. Livia waited.

  Olivia Fairlight-Jones. Aspirational Celtic hyphen. Known to her associates as ‘Ollie’. Father dead? According to rumour. Mother wasn’t talking. It took Ollie years to tease out the real story. The reason for reverting to (and revising) mother’s maiden name. A stepfather with marine-factoring business in Brightlingsea, sold up at the right time. Retirement to Portugal. Ollie also had a husband (acquired and lost at the University of Essex). The photography came later. As did Jimmy. The work as an assistant. Nights clubbing in Dalston and Shoreditch. Information of no great consequence to Livia, she left it out of her gallery biogs: date of birth, list of shows.

  But these are the facts that should, in a proper work of fiction, be scattered decorously through the text; revealed, oh so casually, in oblique conversation. By letter, phone call or fax. Engendering necessary suspense, admiration for the technical skill, the discretion, of the author. There should be an element of uncertainty, tease. Let’s get it out of the way. Norton, in his narratives, was a premature ejaculator. By conviction.

  Know it, tell it. Blabbermouth.

  Livia rather fancied doing a Julia Margaret Cameron. In reverse. Giving up photography when she lost her spark, when she was old (around forty) – moving to Sri Lanka. To marry and settle down with a planter (if they still had them), or scholar (Sanskrit, Pali). Children. And trees. Plenty of trees.

  Warm thoughts on a cold night. Her visibility, despite the dark, gender-unspecific clothes, heavy boots, coming away from the railway station, was alarming. London didn’t care. It was busy, preoccupied, on the edge of breakdown. Once the beggars, and the smiling, excuse-me-do-you-have-a-minute clipboard tarts, the chuggers, had packed it in, bedded down in doorways, the city belonged to anyone who walked it. The coast was a very different proposition, a half-life of tranquillised opportunism, reflex crimes enacted for the benefit of (out-of-service) CCTV cameras.

  Glue-sniffers without the energy to sniff.

  Scrawny youths who headbutted their way into already vandalised cars.

  Ram-raiders who hit depressed video outlets. Without the car. And made their getaway with an armful of empty cases.

  Coastal lowlife were under no obligation to disguise their interest, their fingering of the imaginary weft, the smooth pelt of this fragrant newcomer.

  Their prey.

  A young woman from elsewhere with a large bag. A bag loaded with readily puntable kit.

  Jackal signals. Red eyes in the shadows.

  Hastings had a tradition to uphold. Photoshops. Cameras. Racks and racks and racks of rectangular views. Self-regarding images of picturesque beauty. Hastings was the operational base of postcard magnate Fred Judge. And the amateur lensman George Woods. Who, with his unwieldy plate camera and sturdy tripod, did some useful stalking of fisherfolk and excursionists.

  Hastings, Ollie recognised, was seductive. Arriving by car or by train, the same sudden hit: light. Shore and sky. Cliffs and steep streets, unexpected angles. Reflections in windows.

  With his liking for half-plate negatives, Mr Woods was never less than half conspicuous. He favoured (as a subje
ct) working men, their portraits being taken by somebody else. A local hack. Artisan in a cricket cap. The camera seen by the camera. Dissociation of sensibility.

  The prints, unrecognised in Woods’s lifetime, established a marine franchise, The Cockney Day Out’. Traditions have to be invented. The scenes he captured are the ones that disappear first: a quality in the live / dead faces, nakedness, exposure to that cyclopean eye. Vulnerability. As they ignore the monster, unconvinced by its potency. The pathos of this respectable man of business, bearded photographer, Victorian, trousers rolled up, standing in the sea, on a rock – so that he can catch the promenade, the loungers on the beach, the cliffs. Girls who have lifted their skirts to reveal voluminous underpinnings.

  Three young ones, wild-haired. You can hear what they’re saying. One of them looks at the camera, at Woods. The oldest girl, spotty ribbon on straw boater, is issuing instructions: her tragic spectacles and serious knees. Senior sister or young mother? Mind your manners. Don’t stare.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, as Livia (diligent student) appreciated, it was a very different game. The camera was part of the spectacle: visible apparatus wedged on its prongs, hydrocephalic, fixing time. Fixing: the Occasion. As unique, once-and-forever. The camera artist arranging his actors in poignant tableaux – in which they are invited to impersonate themselves. With heroic awkwardness and dignity. Self-consciously natural, hardly daring to breathe.

  In the twilight, Woods walked back home (incomer), wife dead (breast cancer), living with his daughter at Mount Pleasant Road, on the heights above the Old Town. Chapel-going family. No question of a night shoot. Episodes of the afternoon, sun-blessed mornings. Quietly epic representations of the actual (contrived, unforced). The photographer was still a cancelled presence, without irony, no epiphanies, yet, of the instant (lightweight camera attached to head, one-eyed blink).

  George Woods, gentleman. Fixed lens. Gleaming brass instrument. Human mass. Crowds going about their business. Which, in Hastings, as he represented it, was pleasure: watching others as they watched hawkers, peddlers, fishwives, performing dogs. As they were helped on and off boats. The black jackets. The hats. The polished boots.

  Livia’s heel rubbed. Time to kill. She couldn’t, far too late, emulate Woods. Her abstractions – nocturnal beach as thread of green running towards black horizon, in which (after minutes of concentrated staring) pinpricks of boats might appear – would have mystified him. She had to hang about, waiting till the drinking schools dispersed, the last bonfire was extinguished. Therefore: she was tracked by naughty boys, cusp hormonals offering to carry the camera satchel. To place their hot, fast twigs in her mouth. Bracken-smelling yobs.

  Darkness, which she relished, was tardy; confused by lagoons of artifice, neon, blinking signs, green-and-red spill on wet pavements. Arcades. The yawning mouths of pubs. Tarot and tattoo displays. The pier. It took hours for the town to shut down, cool off, decant. And, in that interval, Livia stalled, fumed, wave-watched. Like the others. She was distinguished only by the ferocity of her attention. Eyes burning. An addict of otherness. Connoisseur of the unsayable.

  Incident.

  Up among the layers and levels – narrow steps, skewed chimney pots, secret gardens, bowed fronts, terraces – Livia saw a hunched figure, early hours of the morning, pushing a funereal contraption the size of Mother Courage’s handcart. An ancient (non-antique) perambulator. A thing sitting in it, stiff but alert. A child. An infant. A doll.

  Livia and the old woman pass. They meet again, in other parts of the town, at different watches of the night. The doll grows. The old woman must have a collection, rags for each of them. Routes to walk, never resting. C-shaped spine, warped like driftwood.

  This narrative is too baroque. Livia photographs a single lightbulb, unshaded, visible through the thin curtains of a terraced house. Peach-coloured wardrobe. Candlewick bedspread.

  Incident.

  Drinkers (hypersensitive to the click of cameras) spot her. Invite her to join them, around the fire. They become aggressive, threatening, when she (waving) declines. One man follows her, shouting.

  Photograph: blue searchlights casting a pyramid shape on the rounded stern of the Cunard Court flats.

  Incident.

  The dead hour, two or three in the morning, Livia needs to take a pee, positive discomfort. And, at the same time, feels pangs of hunger. Desire for coffee. Nowhere open. A gay club she doesn’t risk. Lurkers around every possible bush or concealed alley. A burger joint in a bad street. Five men upstairs. The toilet, reluctantly ceded, in an unlit basement at the foot of some narrow, rickety stairs. Heart beating. Stairs creak as one – more? – follow her down. To offer a fresh bar of carbolic soap, a clean towel.

  Photograph: sodium light reflected in fissure of black limestone rock, its crumbling tobacco-cake texture.

  After two months of minor nocturnal excitements, recounted in letters to Track, Livia found the pasta place on the seafront. Made it her base, straight from the train; food when she was flush, coffee; leave some of her equipment with Maria. ‘’Allo, darlin’.’ Avoid the baggy-featured man who stared at her with eyes like a sad walrus. She didn’t dislike him, or worry that he would do anything more than trail after her as she killed time in the late afternoons; she had to avoid dissipating her gaze, getting sidetracked into conversation. If he kept to his own territory, steady drinking, unsteady sexual fantasy, she could live with it. But she would not accept his seeing her seeing, the sprung paranoia she needed to achieve, before walking into the night.

  Livia did not want, on any account, this arbitrary person with the books and the carafe, to register her with Marina Fountain. She hadn’t told Track, she hadn’t told anybody, about Marina. How they’d met. In the museum, the gallery. In front of the Keith Baynes seascape, in pastel, Harbour Scene with Yachts. Livia had an interest in Baynes. He’d lived in Hastings – St Leonards – in some sea-facing Thirties flats, and then in Warrior Square. Baynes delivered a Francophile panache that set him apart from the rest of the marine painters, the English topographers who liked nothing more, following Turner, than to gaze inwards, on shore, fishing boats, parade, cliffs.

  Baynes hung out with the very louche Edward Burra, at Rye, picnics in the Rolls, sailor boys in striped vests. He was known to the Charleston mob, the Bloomsbury home-decorators and pond sculptors (prophetic of TV makeovers of the New Millennium, farmhouse furniture ruined with sticky things, stencils, daubs). Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. White-skinned naturists, readers in deckchairs. Bored literary celebrities between mistresses or boyfriends. Sneezing, under the South Downs, in dappled sunlight.

  As life folded in on him, decrepitude, neglect, Baynes moved away from that vision of the sea, too much, too bright; he retreated to a cluttered room above the public gardens. No more of those heartbreaking recapitulations, View from My Window. Remedial. Convalescent. Gay. Forlorn. Signalling breakdown (like David Jones in Shoreham). Damaged Brits holed up at the seaside. Three panels of a window. A comfortable chair with three cushions. Yachts like clown caps. No middle distance. For Keith Baynes, there was never anything between here and there: a frieze, dance, a lively notation of the inessential, the debris of visual delight. He had money, private means, enough. A bottle under the bed. A window.

  The charity shops of St Leonards had been good to Marina. The district specialised in them. Livia was dazzled, remarked on it, by how well the coast suited the older woman, bright eyes, clear skin, colour in the cheeks. Her outfit, blind-selected as ever, worked; pillbox hat (rudimentary veil), ice-cream-pink duffel coat, black boho turtleneck, very short blue-black suede skirt, green stockings, crumpled red boots. The wardrobe, listed, reads like a menu of alternatives for an Albanian sex slave in a Finsbury Park massage parlour. In the flesh, the woody quiet of the Hastings Museum, it played.

  ‘Lovely rings,’ Livia said.

  On Marina’s long thin fingers, her thumb. Scarabs and twisted silver bands. Native American blue (the eyes of
Lee Marvin). Coral. But her hands betrayed her, freckles and small brown stains.

  ‘Is that Estuary gangster still bothering you?’

  ‘It’s over,’ Livia said. ‘Haven’t seen Reo in yonks. He doesn’t know I’m down here. He’s not looking.’

  Her fingers, teasing the new fringe, gave it away.

  ‘Get rid, Ollie. Don’t fall for that sick-puppy routine. Reo’s trouble.’

  Livia rubbed her Adam’s apple with a knuckled fist.

  ‘It’s finished, truly.’

  She hadn’t thought about Reo until Marina brought him back. He didn’t matter. At a safe distance, he was a not-unpleasant memory: hurt boy, hard boy. Someone to rescue. Someone who said that he would die without her. Someone who lived through his indifference for the world: nothing touched him. Except Livia. His obsession. The way he saw her as a sister spirit. Incest and revenge. His dopey Egyptian mythology: reincarnation, animal familiars, terrible music. Love me or kill me. A double suicide, Mishima. Bent narcissism, bent history: straight to video.

  ‘I see why. Why you tried him,’ Marina said, ‘but, now …’

  ‘Well, what about you?’ Livia came back. ‘What about you and Hastings? I can’t get my head around it. Track doesn’t … I haven’t …’

  ‘I’ve found the room.’

  Marina took Ollie’s arm, guiding her.

  ‘The room where Baynes painted his View from My Window. I want you to make some tests, photographs. And one other thing, it’s important. Tell me honestly … did you get my manuscript to Norton?’

  ‘Track. I’m sure. She must have. Track had it. She understood. Track’s good at those things.’

  It was agreed. They met, early, for breakfast, long before Kaporal surfaced, at the pasta place.

  Marina had acquired – sublet, borrowed, bought – a flat in Cunard Court, a Thirties (De La Warr Pavilion era) block that looked like a beached ocean liner. At whatever time Livia pressed the buzzer on the voicebox, struggled with the doors on the old-fashioned lift, walked down that weirdly familiar carpet, the block was deserted. A nautical remake of The Shining. Glimpses of revenants, tourist class, on a ghost ship.