Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Otherwise known as: the East Ham mandala. Absence of water. The perfectly round granite cup is a memorial to a buried well. A fountain filled with bread. The raised octagonal island at the centre of the bowl: an aperture blocked by a stale loaf. The outer rim of the dish is packed with brown and white slices, mouldy wads, pitta bread, liver-spotted nan, chapati, waffles, pancakes. This dry fountain swam with dough, untouched pigeon offerings.

  And Barking Road, as I walked east in the soft twilight, shadowing Norton’s fictional pilgrims on the A13, confirmed Chris Street’s speculation: a busy pub, hanging baskets, gold lettering on deep blue. The Miller’s Well, Free House. Make the journey and the tracings will always be there, not as history, but as parallel motif, random survival: a boozer, a drinking fountain, a dowser with kit improvised from industrial debris.

  Barking Abbey, where teenage dealers make their moves among preserved ruins, offers spiritual benediction to a major retail park, a shopping city on the banks of the River Roding. The dead lie quiet. Gravestone craft, in relief, under full sail, make for the Thames. The Abbey was founded in AD 666 by St Ekenwald. A date whose ominous significance was justified by the pagan Danes: fire and sword. All the history that is worth retaining is etched into a tablet on an architectural fragment, a gateway known as the Curlew Tower.

  A fat sun dropped behind bare churchyard trees, behind the MFI block, Paul Simon’s Curtain Superstore, Powerhouse. 50 p.c. off everything. At the golden hour, I could follow Chris Street’s theoretical alignment: through St Margaret’s Church to Tower Hill, on to Southwark Cathedral. Nothing is lost, nothing is obliterated. No interlude in park or abbey could ameliorate the coming horror of West Thurrock. The nightmare at the ibis. Journalists and psychogeographers, urban planners and venture capitalists: what difference? Spin as many versions as you like, the road will have the final word: Barking. The umbilicus. One stop beyond terror, two stops beyond boredom.

  Ibis Hotel

  The ibis hotel, West Thurrock, was corrupted with watching. Journalists were embedded in the ground-floor bar, admiring themselves on television, stuffing their pockets with vouchers. When something bad happens, they are there to confirm it: places, previously innocent of news, are granted a heritage identity (black plaque). Houses are demolished: in the city of Gloucester, on the West Bank of the Jordan, Afghanistan. Concerned men in open-necked shirts, women in combat gear (with optional pashmina), they articulate the horror: Willesden, Hungerford, bleak moorland outside Manchester. Now, for one night only, Essex. The approach to the QEII Bridge: a double-header. Celebrity kidnap (botched, sold-out) + girl trapped in car with drug-crazed, sword-wielding psycho.

  Jos Kaporal, in his ambiguous identity as researcher/self-impersonator, had spent weeks in hotel bars, where the price of drinks leapt by regular increments as the journos poured in. He was usually there before the bad thing occurred (DV camera, Polaroids, tension-relieving duty-free cigarettes). A Belfast planner on an awayday to Birmingham. Being a figment of a desperate novelist’s imagination, he was comfortable in his discomfort. The noise. The heavy drinking. Multiple screens. The twitter of mobile phones. Dry fucks of the Mediadrome. Bursts of brilliant white light around a roped-off section of generic car park. Loudmouths fighting for rooms that look down on the action (double-glazed windows that won’t open).

  As a long-term sleeper, an agent manipulated by a remote and disinterested controller, Kaporal was in his element. Jacky Roos, his alter ego, the demi-Belgian, was less happy. He was the model, it’s true, for our binge-eating undercover man – but his cover was blown by this confrontation with the fictional double. If they find themselves in the same room at the same time, the world tilts on its axis. Rivers run backwards. And books are composed by clicking typewriters in empty rooms.

  I didn’t know where to begin. My instinct was to run upstairs, call room service; keep my door locked until it was all over. Roos was in custody (my fault). The Albanians were being helped with exaggerated courtesy into a police van. Drug-smuggling comedian Howard Marks was holding court like a rock star on sabbatical from the Priory: voice of Neil Kinnock, face of Bill Wyman.

  The kidnap subplot collapsed because there was nowhere for it to go, the author lost his bottle. It was never much of a story in the first place and he was no Elmore Leonard. You pick up a paragraph, overhear something on TV, when you’re shifting your weight, easing your back, at a crowded bar. Like now. One thing journalists are good at is catching a barman’s eye. Waving a banknote and talking to the office at the same time. A gang of no-hope Albanians plan to kidnap Posh Spice. Stunt or scam? It ends, as these things inevitably do, in the parking lot of an ibis hotel (convenient for everywhere, a hundred yards from the orbital motorway).

  A TV crew has been tipped off. The Beckhams, Essex to the core, up their security: CIA-approved bomb shields, blast-deflectors, for the limo. Higher-definition CCTV. A revised profile: more virtual, less actual. Body doubles (like Saddam). A shopping trip to Milan. MTV awards in Hollywood. Promo in Japan. Reassignment to Madrid. Economic migrants travelling club class with large men in suits and mirror glasses.

  I logged the newspaper item, then, months later, in a weak moment, thought it might play with the Hastings novel (the gaudy necrophilia of the White Queen’s coming attractions). I didn’t have a clue how Albanians talked (even bandits, gangster associates), so I tried to keep them dumb: go with voiceover, the detached authorial overview. Manuel-speak (Jew playing Catalan): ‘I lov-a you, Meestah Fawlty.’

  No real harm done, not yet. Andy Norton goes upstairs, knowing that Track will not join him, not knowing of her liaison with Danny the Dowser (a future in the Basildon Plotlands). A.M. Norton, whiskey and water, is waiting for Hannah Wolf (the promise that she would try and make it, make up for the previous night’s fiasco at the Travelodge).

  Lights are coming on in the ibis. There is a car out on the road. A young man with a Japanese sword. A girl who wants to break with him. He drove her to the M25, near Thurrock, in 1989. It was on television. Breakfast radio explained the jams, miles of stalled traffic. Newspapers exposed links to Essex crime: drugs, protection, bent gyms, people-smuggling, record labels used for money-laundering, thefts of antiquities on the south coast, bullion robbery, timeshare in Spain, child pornography, massage parlours stocked from the Balkans, boarding houses given over to the involuntary exile of convicted paedophiles. The girl, decent, ordinary, bright, was granted an aura of sanctity. Her talent was talked up: hairier than Tracey Emin, more Mexican than Frida Kahlo. Beautiful of course. Radiant with future glory. And dead. Very dead.

  The disturbed youth (steroid and ketamine habit) was, to the same degree, demonised: dole-bandit, psycho, expired road fund tax. He cut her throat, before running in front of a Dutch HGV which was ‘carrying 25 tonnes of plasterboard’. Trauma of driver, 42, family man (two families). Foreigner.

  Hacks like nothing better than life snuffed out, blink-of-the-eye tragedy; characters straight from stock. Further revelations promised. More arrests. Pages and pages of photos: weeping mum at funeral, white T-shirts with tattoos and blankets over their heads, youths in dark glasses holding up newspapers to mask mean faces, baying mobs of the righteous (gobbing, hammering on the van). Cellophane floral tributes scattered over an elevated section of the M25.

  This was a true event, embedded in recent history (forgotten by tabloid grazers): girl murdered, suicide of killer, horror of truck driver, valuable Japanese sword recovered. I couldn’t affect the outcome. It was a journalist who gave me the details, another Hackney narrative: he turned it into fiction, published the pain. The girl was his sister. So he was, at least by association, involved. He knew the participants. He understood the mechanics of the fateful night. It was his story to tell.

  I had no such legitimate claim. But he inflicted it on me, lodging the details in my imagination, soliciting a new and revised version. ‘Save her, honour the memory.’ The unspoken agenda. As it appeared in my egotistical version of the world. A s
ite to be written, blood and scorched rubber, rescued by language.

  I failed. Two Nortons were never going to be enough. Andy in Room 234 with his files, his nostalgia. And his sterner, fiction-composing doppelgänger, A.M., sipping whiskey – and wanting, despite the unfolding horror, to make love again: with Hannah, the only woman to whom he had confessed his dreams. Severed fingers. Fantasies dressed as fact.

  He didn’t tell about Ruth, those dreams. Memories that wouldn’t go away: a walk by watercress beds, clear pools from deep springs, May flowers on a Mediterranean island. A bed with rose-printed sheets, the bumps of her spine. His tongue tasting the skin. The crease of her bottom. Not a flaw. As she pretends to sleep, first light at the open window.

  Now Norton’s third mind had broken cover, the writer, the watcher. The other two could never be reconciled. No treaty between marine light and the A13 corridor (the realpolitik of a manipulated future). No tricks or shifts can slow the passage of the American car, killer and victim.

  When a natural climax arrives, a crisis in the narrative, subvert it: pick up a book. Go with the old modernist strategy, quotation. Eliot, Pound. Yeatsian dictation. I didn’t have a lot of choice, one paperback in each sidepocket of my poacher’s waistcoat. I had selected, to help make sense of the recent history business unfolding in Babylonia, Andrew George’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh. The map of the Ancient Near East worked better than the fancy graphics put out by TV networks.

  ‘Let us wage war!’ A martial illustration, Republican Guards advancing in formation, shields and spears.

  when he arrives why be afraid?

  That army is small and a rabble at the rear,

  its men will not withstand us!

  Judicious misinformation, chest-beating: patriotism. Better to hate well than to die carelessly. Make the people more afraid of the monster they know than the dust armies who will burst through their cinema screens.

  ‘Now make ready the equipment and arms of battle,

  let weapons of war return to your grasp!

  Let them create terror and a dread aura,

  so when he arrives fear of me overwhelms him,

  so his good sense is confounded and his judgement undone!’

  The ibis wasn’t suited to poetry. It prized its anonymity too much, company credit cards, the cleanliness of a Belgian service station – Roos was quite at home. Menu from Poland.

  In Gilgamesh the dead return. But they are too discreet to gossip about their experience of the afterworld. Ollie, throat slashed, windpipe severed, can’t speak. There is an eloquence in the position of her body, the way it has fallen and stopped falling. Eyes shut. Head turned from the road, back towards Rainham.

  ‘I cannot tell you, my friend, I cannot tell you!

  If I tell you what I saw of the ways of the Netherworld,

  O sit you down and weep!’

  You have a place, off-highway, on the borders of everything. You have the Thames. The road east, the A13. And the orbital motorway. At the ibis decisions have to be taken, difficult choices: meat or fish, red or white? Express or Mail? Lies have to be shaped. Time must be hobbled. It’s a holding zone, a customs post with no customs, no form.

  ‘If your eyes are of no more use to you than this, I shall have them put out.’

  My second book, the spare: Nostromo. You recognise it? The copy liberated from Pevensey Bay? Where Ollie was slightly pregnant and drinking white wine. Now she isn’t. That would be too much. I can’t inflict further distress on the unborn. I stole the Penguin Conrad from the kitchen of the beach chalet. A weekend visitor had left it behind. The two women were never going to read it, were they? Small print, brown pages, thickets of lush South American prose (penned on the south coast). Verbiage. Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowksi (naturalised Englishman): godfather of magic realism, cousin to Dostoevsky and Flaubert.

  Appalling arrogance, I admit. Horrible attitude. The American girl (Track) might, for all I know, have a doctorate in post-colonial studies: The reassembly of chaotic events into a causal sequence exposes an author swimming against the tide, caught between a Western view of a non-Western world and a desire to reconstruct, as a mirror image, the Polish conflicts of his childhood.’

  In Nostromo, that masterpiece of movement, shifting perspectives, romance, rebellion (intelligent, frustrated women and good black cigars), nothing affects me so much as the agony of its composition. The research, the libraries devoured. Maps, charts, engravings. Financial pressure. Small farm near Hythe (rented from colleague). Author (creased brow) knowing he has a vast undertaking on his hands, long, complex, laboured: it must seem easy, free-flowing as a swift stream in chalk country. It must divert a dull-witted readership. The pain of those paragraphs! Sentences. Syllables. Mots justes. Money money money. To entertain. Ford at Winchelsea. Henry James at Rye. Wells at Sandgate. Stephen and Cora Crane at Brede Place. Food on the table. Wine. The creaking study door. Forbidden entry. Family excluded. Nightwork.

  A short story that got its claws into him, cells breeding like a cancer. It swells, unnoticed, into a novella: 60,000 or 70,000 words. Three months at the outside. Telegraph Pinker.

  Six months in: ‘Nostromo grows; grows against the grain by dint of distasteful toil… but the story has not yet even begun.’

  Black and bitter depression, fevers, troubled stomach. A condemned man writing against the clock to save his head from the executioner’s axe. Hand trembling, palsied. Focus lost: that terrible image of the eyes being put out. Eyes on hooks. Eyes of the dead.

  Two years from the start, the breezy, optimistic beginning, Conrad cracks: mounting debts, serialisation, finish the thing or starve. This obscure life, three miles from the sea, thirty miles from France. He scribbles by day and dictates by night: to Ford Madox Ford (his wife can’t stand the fellow, perpetual guest and benefactor). Gout and the other attendant demons conspire to unman him: Ford has to doctor one of the chapters. Dual authorship, they’d done it before. Half delirious, like a skeleton on a raft, tongue swollen till it fills his mouth, Joseph Conrad completes the draft by working through the heat of August for eighteen hours a day.

  Then what? Revisions, proofs, corrections. Editorial adjustments. Critical disapproval. Indifferent sales. Academic scavenging. Posthumous acclaim. Posthumous revisionism. The minutiae of books and life picked over by impertinent hacks. An overblown and wholly misguided television translation. A film that is never made, the obsession of David Lean in his Limehouse palazzo, brown Thames glittering outside the window. A man who does not know how to answer the phone. Scriptwriter Christopher Hampton banged up for weeks, months, years. A reprise of the original torment of composition. Finish it and die, Lean knows the story. And he strings it out: ‘a book largely constructed out of other books’. Hampton’s sequestration repeated by Norton – which Norton? – in the cabin-sized bedroom at the ibis hotel.

  Language voodoo, a book opened at hazard. Room 234, p. 234: ‘I spoke to you openly as to a man as desperate as myself.’

  Nostromo, the Capataz de Cargadores, a self-regarding adventurer, is also known to the females of the harbourside inn at which he lodges as Gian’ Battista. John the Baptist. Could I have been thinking of that? Prophet and road. The dark painting in some Maltese church, the execution in all its erotic theatre: man of the desert, half naked, glistening with sweat, decapitated for the delight of a courtesan.

  A.M. Norton, the fabulist, had collapsed into a boneless heap, so much dirty laundry. News happened, it was nothing to do with him. Wait and see. Like T.S. Eliot, as it was rumoured, he sought sexual congress, with all its implied difficulties, as prick to his muse. Margate convalescence and The Waste Land. Neurasthenia, incense and a decent suit.

  Andy Norton, urban topographer, blistered like one of those downland hikers of the Thirties, was more reckless: take the story as it comes. He sprung from the window, charged through the traffic, rescued the damsel. Who required nothing of the sort. It was her choice to be in the car, letting t
he high romance, of love and loss, play itself out. To be, once and for ever, rid of men and their fuss.

  I ran down the stairs. Jacky was drinking again. Essex had that effect on him. The book he’d published on the Basildon Ecstasy bandits: the possible consequences. He had to get back across the river, fast. To Hastings. He was prepared to validate my reconfiguring of history, cobbled together from a couple of chapters of Nostromo and a quick glance at the crib he downloaded from one of the hotel’s laptops.

  Gian’ Battista steals the silver. He pays court to the younger daughter of the lighthouse-keeper (the grand old Garibaldino), while he is betrothed to the elder. He is shot, killed. The critics call this ‘Conradian transference’. You get what’s coming to you, but you don’t know when.

  Hannah was still slogging from Thurrock Station, muddy, exhausted, when they brought Ollie in. Quite safe. Not yet pregnant. Rescued from her mad drive north: Reo Sleeman splattered across the tarmac with the stranger who stormed to her rescue – like Gilgamesh – and vanished into the night.

  Fiction conquers all: the Bush/Rumsfeld doctrine. Keep saying it. A new world order. A road map for peace. Reality is infinitely malleable (given the budget and sufficient force of arms). As the tanks rolled across the desert (same shots repeated, flexible commentary, on different nights), as Howard Marks yarned and laughed (receiving a commission to visit Panama on behalf of the Observer), I took Ollie upstairs. To rest and recover. I gave her my bed. I had learnt to listen to women and not to watch. My dreams were unashamedly Freudian (forgive me, Hannah). My mouth tasted of Ruth: blood and sugar. The evidence of Pevensey Bay, which lay both before and beyond me, confirmed the fantasy: I made love to the young woman who was like a daughter, but who shared my mother’s name. And through this intoxicating and stomach-tightening folly, I became my own father.