‘Don’t. One more word and –’
‘A woman I met on the south coast recommended a novel set on Canvey Island, which involved a guilty walker – responsible for his brother’s death – feeding his fingers to an owl. I think it was an owl. I can’t imagine how he trained it to stop there.’
‘This is perfectly disgusting and quite pointless. I’m not and I never was your therapist.’
I stopped, of course. Stopped speaking. The trance of tender forgetfulness, between Hannah and myself, was shattered. But the finger theme wouldn’t go away. Gestures. First finger and little finger, outstretched, warding off the evil eye. Eye in the palm of the hand. Eye of Horus. Eye in a triangle: Aleister Crowley. Tattoo parlours of the Old Town. A barber on Cambridge Heath Road putting a new blade into his razor, missing digit, tight-skinned, raw.
My great-uncle (on my mother’s side), I’d forgotten him, a ghost in the attic, simple-minded but without harm. My grandfather shaving the old man, towel around neck, on a stool, outside in the sunshine. Soft bristles. Toothless, grinning, he shows me his stump.
And Struwwelpeter by Dr Heinrich Hoffmann. Those German doctors! Another nightmare. The smocked boy on the cover with his blond Roger Daltrey afro and fingers like branches. Brightly coloured woodcuts: masturbatory warnings.
The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.
Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go:
And Conrad cries out – Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast.
That both his thumbs are off at last.
Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza (1975). He hacks off his pinky, a point of honour, gangster-Samurai thing. I thought about continuity problems: how they’d keep the hand out of shot for the rest of the film. Somnolence and celibacy, Mitchum’s schtick. Japanese buddy (Ken Takakura). The symbolic castration helped.
The images kept coming. Hannah moved right away.
William Burroughs.
Bill took off the top section of his finger with poultry shears. (‘Stainless steel, sir. Never rusts or tarnishes.’) He set the sawtooth lower blade against his little left finger and squeezed. Blood squirted. He wrapped the joint (no longer part of the story) in Kleenex and went out to a bar for brandy. He brought the severed fingertip to his analyst, Dr Wiggers. Who was sure that Burroughs was undergoing a psychotic episode (as I was, now, by proxy).
The Beat Generation finishing school: Bellevue Hospital. His shrink, a lady’, taps a yellow pencil on her teeth.
‘Do you hear voices?’
‘When people talk to me, I can hear them talking, yes.’
‘No, I mean, do your hear voices talking inside your head?’
‘I suppose you could say I have a vivid imagination.’
‘Now, what about this self-mutilation?’
‘Oh that. Well, that’s part of an initiation ceremony into the Crow Indian tribe.’
People like to be photographed with Burroughs: celebrities, movie stars, aspirant writers, painters. Mick Jagger, David Cronenberg, Francis Bacon. It’s a genre: skull and flesh. Burroughs: memento mori to twentieth-century culture. I’d been snapped with him myself, beside the goldfish pond, a couple of weeks before he died. By one of the young men, the carers. You could hold that photograph in your hand and watch the lineaments of the face disappear (mine before his).
Hannah yawned, cumin and caraway seed. I could see the capillaries on her tongue, tiny hairs: rough pink fur. I wanted her to be my owl, claws and feather cloak. I wanted to feed my fingers into her mouth. But she was tired, preoccupied. It wouldn’t play, the scene I was scrambling to write.
Poor Conrad. How would he open his sauce bottle without thumbs?
Norton lurched after Jimmy Seed, out of the bar. I followed. Anger boiled in me: off-road rage, Travelodge temper tantrum. Smash his skull. Splinter his face. Stop the story right here. Cancel the stupid drama that is still to come at the ibis hotel; complex diagonals of action I’d never be capable of articulating – killer in car, watchers at window, Albanian kidnappers. (Are you sure they weren’t from Romania, Moldova? Mountain men. Catholics not Muslims? Economic migrants sending money home.)
‘What’s your game? Staring at a strange woman in a hotel bar?’
We wrestled. I drove his face against the mirror. I wanted to print the slogan – Pastis – backwards on his forehead. Absinthe. Absence. I wanted to push him through – into hyperspace. Let him splinter and fragment.
He vanished, I bled.
I filled a basin with cold water, splashed my face. Norton wasn’t a cancer that would perish alongside me in the crematorium. Nor a double, Xerox, trial run. He hadn’t filched DNA, grease from my poultry shears. Andy was certainly no parallel universe alter ego, fetch or substitute. Tanist. A simple grammatical error, shift of pronoun: he for I. Exit and out. Reality requires an even tone of voice. Fiction demands the courage to walk in other people’s dreams: regime change. Know how to steal and when to keep it buttoned.
Hotels are always aphrodisiac: the barely felt vibrations of constant traffic. Barefoot in carpeted corridors. Lifts like safes: the two of you, close, sharing air, not touching, not yet. I was aroused, in the old days, by the corruption of the city, wealth, power, institutionalised mendacity: so fuck it away.
Ruth Alsop. The original. My one and only.
Ruth liked hotels: the anonymity. The simple fact of not being in a place of laundry baskets, ironing boards and shopping lists. A house where she was responsible for sheets, bills, toilet rolls. She loved, and kept, those little complimentary wrappers of soap. But, most of all, she loved the view from the hotel window; being able to sit and watch the town square, the river, somewhere she would never again visit.
Hannah was very different. Her home was the heart of things: the setting of the table, the polishing of furniture, the arrangement of books. In theory. In practice, domestic space was cramped and chaotic, tumbles of papers, clothes, meals begun, abandoned, preserved, forgotten. When the cleaning had been done and the room was tidy, cut flowers, music, she relaxed, relented, became affectionate. I was rewarded, confirmed in my human mess, surprised by the hunger she unfailingly located somewhere within me.
The Docklands Travelodge was never going to be right. It reminded Hannah of her internship, a hospital in West Texas. Troubled strangers, about to go through some bad experience, wondering if they could meet the bill. Would it be easier to die under the knife? Leave their hated relatives digging up the garden to find the cash.
I didn’t know what to do, what to say, how to move. Hannah was brisk. She ripped off her skirt, strode into the bathroom (a cupboard), pissed loudly with the door open, ran the tap for a moment, came to bed.
I took a shower, but it didn’t help. She was sleeping in white T-shirt and black bra (she never bothered with colour coordination). I wanted to talk, nibble, come at the business obliquely, as if by accident – but that was impractical. She was comatose, snuffling, and I was painfully priapic. Her bare legs and great thick bush excited me. I stroked, I nuzzled.
‘In the morning,’ she mumbled. Without turning to face me. ‘Much better then.’
I loved the way her lips thickened, muscle, rind; thickened and became moist. As I was. In a state to crack windows, stop the traffic.
‘Too tired.’
She rolled away, curled up. And there was absolutely nothing, I knew from long experience, to do about it. The road was out there, a few yards from our bed, I concentrated on that: remembering, step by step, every yard I had walked from Aldgate Pump. I anticipated the next day’s march, Beckton, Rainham, Thurrock. I called up markings on oil tanks, graffiti on the river wall. Somewhere between Chadwell St Mary and Mucking Marshes, I fell into a shallow and troubled sleep. I floated out on a slack tide, pressed against Hannah, dreaming of Ruth.
Barking
Begin with
a hollow laugh. I am walking in a south-easterly direction, at pace. Tin noticeboard on sewage outfall path. The oxymoron: ‘Recent History’. Taggers, spray-can bandits, and their idiot revisions. How far back do we travel before ‘history’ kicks in? Allen Ginsberg, I remember, was very excited when the huge poet Charles Olson announced, on the crest of one of his more messianic episodes, that history was over. A summerhouse near Regent’s Park. A middle-aged Jewish man with a beard. Being interviewed by a nervous youth, his first paid assignment. Ginsberg scratches, grooms, worried about his lover’s breakdown, back in New York, smashed windows, incarceration in madhouse. A dark-green T-shirt rides over gently protuberant belly. Buddhist breathing, English cigarettes.
‘Olson says that now everyone can select their own images, everyone is on to the fact that language is controlling them on a massive electronic scale. Olson is saying that history is ended in the sense that not only the old means of manufacturing history are called into question, but also the population explosion, the electronics information network, the fact of our leaving the planet, the atom bomb, the shortage of food, the ecological disturbance caused by heavy metal industries, have all changed the environment so much that the old conditions of history are changed. They are no longer like they were during what we know of as history, a place where the skies are open, where the sky is the limit.’
Wide skies over Newham, the valley of the Roding: wild skies. London shit running in torrents under my feet. I didn’t expect, with my present duties (narrative and ethical), to be thinking of Ginsberg, 1967. Career journalist reporting on the underground scene, his own impotence. Poets sitting around: electing themselves as unac knowledged legislators, listening to scientists and street politicians, conmen, visionaries, state spooks in disguise. Drug-brokers, hustlers, innocents. Language still a weapon. The phrases of that time, after weeks of editing, looping, replaying, stayed with me.
History has ended. It was (and remains) a TV channel: shuddering videophone image from the war zone, desert or mountain cave. Ginsberg in heaven, yakking, scraping hair from his mouth, trying to make sense of it. But, if there is any history left, it is on a noticeboard, alongside the Northern Sewage Outfall. On the road to Beckton (aka Basra). Roads have to go somewhere (apart from the orbital M25, which carries you outside time, back to H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker). History, by definition, is ‘a continuous, systematic narrative of past events’. Events that remain, are allowed to remain, in the thin air of our present.
Ginsberg’s clear skies. Early mist. Cocktail of pollution. A man walking, creaking, stiff back, loose grip, wobbly knee – but lustful, hungry as an adolescent: hungry, in the absence of the desired object, the dark woman, for place.
‘A giant public tolerance of all forms of madness and perversion,’ screamed Ginsberg. I transcribed the tape, fingers blistered: stop, play. It was the beginning of the word thing, before documentation gave way to the easier path, fiction. On that long thin page (my first self-published prose work), I can see the text now: a photograph of Ruth Alsop. She’d come up from Soho, Frith Street (where she was typing out translations, Godard scripts), to join us, the TV crew, on Primrose Hill; carrying bananas, milk, bread, cheese.
‘Who’s that?’ Ginsberg asked.
‘A friend,’ I said. ‘A good friend of mine. She’s brought some lunch.’
And there she is, the pain fresh after thirty-five years: that history doesn’t behave as it should. You can’t re-enter the frame, repair old mistakes. Ruth Alsop aged twenty-two, short blue-and-white spotted dress, straight-cut, bought in a Paris flea market. Long smooth brown legs. Long hair. And the look she gave: which I hadn’t, back then, the wit to interpret. The look of Isabella Jones in Hastings. The woman writing in the Bo-Peep Inn. A face divided: easy smile, a gaze that goes on for ever without coming into focus.
The private woman and the public man, Ginsberg, united for one instant – when Ruth hands the compulsive journal-keeper a banana freshly bought, that morning, in Berwick Street Market, in Soho.
Primrose Hill lost. Beckton Alp achieved. Engorged, I walked with difficulty. I came alongside two razorheads, amateur Futurists spray-painting a stretch of brick wall.
‘More purple – in the eye sockets?’
‘Maybe. A squeeze.’
‘More scarlet on the muff?’
Carrier bags clank with cans, paint not lager. Two artists, loaded down, on the road to Beckton Alp. Two aesthetes: tame, savage. The liminal places, across the Lea, beyond Abbey Creek, were loud with them; characters determined to revamp the landscape. That’s why I kept off the A13.I could shadow Norton, Seed and the others from the high ground, from a distance. I knew exactly where they were going. No avoiding the golgotha of Rainham. The TV dramas of the ibis hotel. But the road itself, since my first pass, the fictional version in which the pilgrims ascended the alp and detoured to witness the wall-paintings of St Mary Magdalene at East Ham, had changed. For the worse. (As we, recent historians, always assert.) Respect for the three Es: Ecstasy, Entropy, Essex.
Some clown, or cabal of clowns, had decided that the way to soften up the punters for the exploitation of Dagenham, Barking and the brownfield acres was to treat the dirt highway, the A13, as an art work. Grunge giving way to glamour: ‘Young Architect of the Year’, Tom de Paor, has been invited to reconceptualise the hard miles.
‘This is really charming,’ he said – of the views around the Ford factory – to the man from the Standard. ‘All roads lead to Barking. It’s the belly button of England.’
He’s done his research, this thiity-something Irishman. ‘The place is full of gangsters. The Gunpowder Plot was hatched here. Dudley Moore limped to this school,’ The project, de Paor’s makeover, will be called: Arterial. Drivers, drifting through the doctored ecosystem of recent history, alternating bands of colour-coordinated crash barriers, paths in green, white and gold, steel posts with blue landing lights on top (road as runway), will experience ‘a perpetual rhythmic form whose movements are all of a piece’.
I’m still mired in the recent future. The ‘shifting moiré pattern’ of the road is at a standstill, while preliminary civil engineering work is completed. The award handed to the young architect (angular specs and reddish Stephen Dedalus beard) was co-sponsored by steel company Corus, who are currently downsizing unsightly and unprofitable rolling mills in South Wales. We’re all advancing, like it or not, into projective time, visions that should never be realised. But this tops Gateshead, Glasgow, Liverpool, any of those cities of culture. No other spread of defunct industry and conceptual art, I must acknowledge, could offer a spectacle to compare with ‘the oldest metal flyover in Britain’ – alongside New Age geographer Chris Street’s sacred triangulation (East Ham Church, holy well in Central Park, Barking Abbey).
I sat on an excavated tump of earth (still slightly hot), on the north side of the A13, opposite Beckton Alp. I wished that I still smoked cigars, Burma cheroots. Why not? What is there to lose? The device that Conrad exploits in Nostromo – call it breathing space – a group of men, Anglos, high Latins in dark coats on the harbour wall lighting up. Good punctuation. Suspension of narrative bluster. Sunlight dancing on wave crests. Silver ingots in a lighter – riding low in the water. Gentlemen who know how to smoke.
I watched Norton’s troop, defeated cavalry, the mules shot out from under them, zigzagging (Herzog style) up the Alp; scrambling for footfalls, dowsing for heat. Was I responsible? Did I really write such nonsense? Norton, sweating, gasping for breath, trying to hold it together, this three-in-one narrative (great-grandfather, Joseph Conrad at Stanford-le-Hope, Stanley Kubrick), consoled himself with a single thought: it’s not true. This never happened. I’m not here.
But it is. True as Herzog’s films, as Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre, Wrath of God: recent history, recorded history, researched, re-enacted. They will build a boat and drag it through the jungle, over that slope. They will descend the precipitous path to the final river. Monkeys and arrows.
Wednesday, 26 March 2003: breaking off from writing, imagining this journey, a lovely warm, false spring afternoon, in a fug of rubber fires and yellow dust, I walk to Beckton Alp and on to Barking. It did happen, it is still happening – until I sit down at my desk to mar the purity of that day by straining after documentary truth. The unreasonable desire to convince strangers, editors, publicists, critics, readers.
I could do nothing about Track and Danny, a conversation I didn’t hear. I couldn’t help Norton. Or save Ollie from her fate at the ibis hotel. My only option was to swing away, let them complete their preordained trajectories, while I shadowed them, off-highway, through Central Park in East Ham and down Barking Road to the Abbey.
Central Park, unexpectedly, lives up to the brochure: out of the traffic, the nuisance, into urban tranquillity. A little Eden. Open railings, by some acoustic freak, muffle street noise. A limited green space expands as you walk into it. Elements, such as the standard war memorial obelisk, acquire an affecting gravity. Chris Street, promoting this obscure patch as a gateway to the stars, might be on to something. A celestial rival for the mundane visions of the politicians and city planners.
As promised, in the north-west corner of the park, I found a granite fountain that stood in for the lost ‘Miller’s well’. The fountain belonged in Hastings (it should have been filled with water). My twin tales were coming together: the fallen menhir of Amazon Street with the memorial slab outside the Royal Victoria Hotel in St Leonards, the Central Park fountain with the Castello fountain on the marine parade. Road and coast. Thames corridor and seaside: linked narratives. Maps of separate countries with the same symbols, the same plan.
If Hannah had been with me …
Young couples, Asians mainly, were canoodling, courting on benches. The park was shaded, discreet. Zones kept to themselves. Frutescent alcoves for lovers. If Hannah was with me … She’d snort – plupfff – at my notions of Jungian synchronicity. The psychologist’s famous dream in which Liverpool is also Basel. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the centre was a round pool.’
Dining on Stones Page 34