Andrew Norton
THE MIDDLE GROUND
ALBION VILLAGE PRESS
Mr Norton knew that he must talk, and he and I spoke laboriously. It was a difficult duet …
– Virginia Woolf
Mr Mocatta
I came down to breakfast with real hunger. The journalists had gone, Thurrock was returned to its customised obscurity: a pot of steaming coffee, full English – high sheen on the elevated motorway. It is always better, when lodging in such places, to eat out. A log-cabin transport café, a mile down the road, near the river. My favourite section: soap factory, pilgrim church, recovered wilderness. Grays, Tilbury, Canvey Island, Southend. The resolution to the outstanding question left to my novel: where does the A13 end?
The Old Invincibles, my Aldgate Pump casuals, reconvened after many dramas and diversions, recent history suspended, were eager to finish the job: walk the road until it disappeared under the North Sea. The painter Jimmy Seed, Track and Ollie, Norton, Danny the Dowser: the Famous Five (with their imaginary dog, Borges). One step to the east, one step beyond the bridge, and it was over: my connection with the south coast, that mistake, the flight to Hastings. Beyond Thurrock, the broad Thames spreads its legs, divisions between Essex and Kent are absolute: sandbanks, oil tankers, unpredictable currents. No way (if you discount the eccentric Gravesend ferry) of getting over, interrupting a linear flow of narrative. A travel journal with a beginning, middle and end (in the right order).
Jos Kaporal, somewhat white around the gills after his outing as ‘Jacky Roos’ put away a preliminary breakfast while filleting the broadsheets and scanning the vine-wrapped TV monitors (winter sports, traffic, shopping).
‘Jos.’
He flinched.
‘Norton?’
I confirmed it.
‘Any chance of a ride to – Hastings?’ he asked.
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ve got the dosh.’
He patted his chest; searched, with trembling fingers, for that one forgotten cigarette. The reward for good behaviour.
‘I’m never going back,’ I said. ‘The whole thing was a mistake, fiction. ‘I’m ready to accept the consensus: I can’t hack it. No talent for putting myself in other people’s shoes, ventriloquising the voices. Strictly realism from now on: roads, retail parks, bunkers. Books that can be summed up in a sentence. If critics have to wade through four hundred pages to tease out a storyline, they’ll kill you. And, oh yes, I’m thinking of getting married.’
Ollie, coming up quietly to our table, laughed.
‘Anyone I know?’
I blushed. The blood was still there when required, the heat. Her kindness, last night in the small bed, brought me back to myself. To my proper business, the recording and interrogating of unloved territory. The anticipation of coming horrors alongside the exposure and ridicule of those that were already apparent. It was celibate work, I admit. But that could change. Ollie was fit, young, a walker. She could provide the illustrations. There was something different about her this morning; in another woman you might call it gloating. Four hours after the event, she knew she was pregnant. I’d seen the phenomenon before: seven minutes post-coitus, a woman smoothing out a map of Scotland.
‘Shit.’
Refried beans, mushrooms, blood sausage. Kaporal let one rip: he browned it. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’
Two men, busy eyes, were carving their way towards our table. Bouncer types in an excess of smart casuals: like ramraiders on the run from Matalan, Beckton Alp. New white trainers – on which the lightest spot of blood would register – replaced on a daily basis. Ikea wardrobes of cast-offs. Combat slacks with elasticated waists, too many pockets and no flies. T-shirts that strained around powerlift musculature.
‘Jos, my son, thought it was you,’
Mock punch, genuine gasp.
‘Mick-eeey.’
‘On the tele. Shocking. Poor young gel.’
‘Nothing to do with me, Mick. I live on the coast now.’
‘Big Alby, Jos. He’s in pieces. His little brother.’
‘Absolutely certainly, yes. I was ringing for flowers.’
‘Keep your hand in your pocket, Alby understands. We’re the transport. Introduce me to your mates.’
Time for a change of trousers? Kaporal was ankle-deep in it, his worst nightmare, schlock fiction.
‘Mickey O’Driscoll,’ he said. ‘The writer. Rettendon Roadkill. I helped with the editing. They made a film of that one. Mickey was played by Sean Bean. And Phil Tock. He’s –’
‘Doing a favour for an old pal. He wants a meet, Jos. Mr Mocatta. Bring the company. Make a day of it. Know what I mean? Nice run to the coast. Won’t cost you a penny. Right?’
The vehicle was one of those blunt-nosed space-cruiser taxis, silver, the kind that shuttle between Gatwick Airport and the satellite hotels. O’Driscoll, the haulier, former HGV man, drove, watching a satellite screen, maps of virtual traffic. His minder, Tock, gawped out of the window: the cinema of the clouds. A special morning, perhaps unique, no early accidents, suicides, bridge jumpers; no problems at Junction 29 (the A127 inflow), no traffic stacked up all the way round to Junction 27 and the M11. No panic-buying war-fever convoys heading for Bluewater, no water-hoarders draining the plastic-bottle lake at Thurrock. A lull in the natural order of things, remission for bad behaviour. Sunbeams dancing on khaki Thames. Glinting on metal drums, the bald domes of the Exxon storage tanks. Casting long shadows (soap-factory chimney) on the striped wall of a huge block building.
Tock babbled. ‘What’s he like then, your gaffer?’
‘Good as gold,’ O’Driscoll said.
With false authority: his style. He had met a man who might have been Mocatta – once: as an associate of an associate, making up the numbers. A pub near the Swanley interchange, not far from the racetrack: inscribed black-and-white photos of Mike Hawthorn, Jim Clark, Graham Hill, Peter Collins (dead heroes). Tasteful underwear spreads in the Gents, no beavers. Pink soap and a working blower. One of those country places improved by the fortuitous proximity of the motorway.
The club-owner from Basildon accepted Mocatta’s investment, his sponsorship of the coming motorway culture: noise like amplified heartbeats, mood-enhancers, lots of driving with no fixed destination. Rucks, at odd times of day, in fast-food facilities. Aggravation at coffee stalls. Butchery among pristine estates where sound carries through six identical houses. Double-glazing for amateur torture buffs.
‘True to form,’ O’Driscoll laughed, ‘Pat never paid him.’ He twisted his head to see if the passengers in the back seat were listening. Eyes (on the glass of the driving mirror): black sea slugs.
‘Pat Lyle? Haven’t seen Pat since … Hollesley Bay. Keeping well, is he? The old ticker. How is Fat Pat?’
‘Not too clever. Fell off a tower block in Dagenham. All the way.’
‘Big send-off?’
‘Ten cars, wreaths. The faces. Never got home for three days, did I? Filth waiting in the kitchen. Done for possession of a poxy firearm. I’m supposed to live in Laindon without a bit of insurance?
We had room to stretch out: Ollie was quiet but happy to be on the road again, heading south, to that promised weekend with Track in Pevensey Bay. Marina Fountain’s bungalow. The point of bad behaviour, a one-night stand with a manic depressive in an ibis hotel, is to have something decent to chew over with your mates (much the same mix as a Henry James novel). Pregnancy, if it takes, is a bonus. Life, for these bachelor girls, was an interval to be endured between emotional binges, tears, giggles, videos, wine, chocolate biscuits. Deckchairs on shingle. Warm breeze from the Channel. Lovers traduced, put to rights, before the Monday-morning return to London, their inadequate embraces.
Kaporal, also delighted to be getting out of Essex, crossing water, was in a more troubled state of mind: escaping the poisoned territory of his past, but returning to marine exile in company with the very elements he had moved south to escape, Mocatta’s goons. His belly ru
mbled, loudly.
O’Driscoll smoked, prison-style, but he wasn’t offering. Jos licked nicotine stains, snacked on fragments of fingernail.
I asked him about Mocatta, what he had in the files, anything to keep him occupied.
‘The astonishing performances,’ he said, perking up, ‘were in those early, black-and-white interviews. World in Action. Never shown. The height of his infamy – when the underground press were demonising him as a teenage Rachman and Private Eye kept banging on about his links with the National Front, connections with African despots. He was like an air-guitar, street-hustling imitator of Tiny Rowland. Carnaby Street not Savile Row.’
‘Premature New Labour, then,’ I responded. Tony Blair, thirty years ahead of his time. The nerd who blows up the world because he fails his Brian-Jones-replacement audition.’
‘Vanity as style,’ Kaporal reckoned. ‘Hard-lacquer narcissism. Religion. The chosen one: untouchable, inviolate. Flicking invisible particles of dust from his lapels. Buttoned to the neck with high collars, stiff white, slashed wide. Thick silk tie. Waistcoat like Flashman. The dandy, the sadist.’
‘What were the interviews like?’
‘Amazing, electroplated ego. Mocatta boasts of anything they want to throw at him: Nietzsche, Colin Wilson. Beethoven on record sleeve, Hawkwind LP inside. He gets a real kick from saying the unsayable: “I am a superior being. Those who stand in my way will be destroyed.” He relishes the tremors of shock that run through the liberal/left, dope-smoking camera crew. He admits, with a flick of his cuffs, to despising inferior races, using his heavies to shake out unwelcome tenants, killing and torturing associates who let him down.’
‘So why isn’t he in prison?’
‘As soon as the editing is done (three days of wild excitement), advance teasers being prepared, his lawyers turn up with an injunction. No release forms have been signed. The interview was a wind-up, a piss-take. “Mr Mocatta is a respectable businessman with a substantial property portfolio and sensitive (government-approved) interests abroad.” Forget it. Dead in the water.’
‘Never shown? Even after the recent trial?’
‘No chance. The last time I worked for Channel 4 they wouldn’t let me say that the Bush family saw the Gulf War as a rerun of the cattle-versus-sheep business. Cowboy fantasies enacted on a global scale. Old George, the CIA man, in construction with the bin Ladens? Sorry, lads. Mocatta has lawyers like the rest of us have fleas. If he’s gone down for arranging the death of a Hindu shopkeeper (fifty-four shops), so what? He’ll be out on a technicality before Archer. That interview is buried, probably destroyed. I tracked down a pirate tape, warehouse in Archway. One viewing in the middle of the night, no copies, no transcripts. The owner hasn’t worked since, can’t get arrested. He’s down on the coast, writing thrillers under a pseudonym.’
Movement, at this pitch of comfort, even allowing for O’Driscoll’s choice of music (Irish showband and late Sinatra), is time travel – the warp; bright air parting in waves on our sleek prow. I could have crossed the Dartford Bridge for ever. My problems lay on the far shore. So junk them. Shift modes. Channel hop. Try documentation, a walk.
I was never going to reach the promised land: Canvey Island. Oil and caravans.
I could see the A13 pilgrims, Jimmy, Track and Danny, down there, far below, tiny figures on the river path, heading east, to answer my riddle: what happens after you take that last step?
They slept, our hikers, in Danny’s Plotlands chalet. Most of the original structures, built by naturists and fresh-air buffs, had disappeared under tarmac, new estates. A breath of the countryside in the Langdon Hills for those decanted from East London by war or ambition: put up whatever you fancy, a small patch of ground. Walks, grass-cutting, singsongs. By motorcycle and sidecar, or train (with a hike at the end), they came in their hundreds. Woods and secret hills with a view of the coming A13 and the distant Thames. Paraffin lamps, chemical toilets, board games and burnt sausages.
Track, up early, photographed the survivors. She dowsed living traces. As Danny dowsed fossils, minerals, electricity and crime. They filled their plastic bottles at a tap, placed (in the Twenties) at the top of the lane, the unmade road. And they came over the hill and through the country park to join the A13 at Stanford-le-Hope.
Clouds of hawthorn blossom. Skylarks twittering. Heavy-bellied sheep. Then the diesel zephyrs, hammering traffic. And the decision (by Track) to detour to Canvey Island by way of homage to Nicola Barker’s novel, Behindlings – which she was reading for the second time. She had the sense, again, of walking in a stranger’s sleep, enjoying no free will, being fated to follow a path trampled flat by earlier, better-informed artists.
‘The walks book,’ Doc announced, sounding justly proud of his coup, ‘the section on Canvey. All that crazy stuff about boundaries. I never understood a word of it …’
Barker, Hackney-based, wrote about islands (Hackney being the first). She had a thing for English eccentrics, decent but damaged, behaving oddly in small communities, navigating a slant through a warped topography. Canvey was the paradigm.
‘On foot? Are you crazy?’ she scowled over at him. Smoke in her eye again. ‘It’s a piss-ugly walk. Nothing to see.’
‘I like to walk,’ he said, ‘I like the fact of walking.’
Nicola was right, Canvey was piss ugly and also beautiful. The beauty of accident. Isolated chalets organised into rows and ranks, a timid colony waiting for the return of the tide: the famous 1953 flood that did its best to scour the riverbank of unsightly human mess.
Jimmy Seed, excited by pristine bungalows named after shopping centres, started to sketch. Only in Canvey would you find a citizen prepared to boast of living in a dwelling called ‘Lakeside’. Little lawns. Low walls. Tall aerials.
The island divides into two zones parasitical upon an imported high street (imported from the Fifties, Leytonstone). Charity caves, nail extensions, quick food. The Thames-facing section is oil tanks, a disused gas works, sewage and caravans. The strip that backs onto Benfleet Creek is recreational, golf and yachts. With the golf course doubling as a walk-through cemetery, bunkers with headstones, sand traps with memorial plaques to permanent 19th-holers: festooned in floral tributes.
Our trio of A13 walkers sat on a bench to look at maps (no help). Banks of buttery daffodils waved. The tide had retreated, beached wrecks faced a horizon on which flames from the Shell Haven and Coryton oil refineries never went out.
Danny dowsed and voted for immediate evacuation, Benfleet: a steady ascent, the high ridge, Southend and the finish. Jimmy, weary, agreed. Track, in a minority of one (but red-haired), triumphed. ‘An hour,’ she said, ‘tops.’
A promotional poster for a film called A Man Apart, pasted to the side of the bus stop, featured a shaven-headed mercenary (scowling like Argentinian midfielder Veron on his way to an early bath). Smoking ordnance in one hand, badge in the other. Trucks on fire. Another burning city. Regimes laundered. Long march to the minarets and towers of Coryton. The above-title name: ‘Vin Diesel’ – dyslexic notice at service station? Mr Diesel wasn’t happy. This shoreline – inlets, refineries, clusters of religious fanatics (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Primitive Methodists, Latter-Rain Outpouring Revivalists) – was where invasion would come. Had come. Romans, Dutchmen. King Alfred’s tussle with the Danes at Beam Fleote, the ‘tree-lined creek’.
In my extended reverie on the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, my disinclination for a meeting with Mocatta, I tried to invade the consciousness of the most susceptible of the walkers, Katherine Cloud Riise (known as Track). I wanted to force them across their bridge, into Canvey. Please allow me to bask – while O’Driscoll searches his pocket for a pound coin, the bridge toll – in the exhaustion and triumphs of your epic march.
Without blisters. (Where did she get that name?)
WELCOME TO CANVEY, TWINNED WITH COLOGNE (DIST 3), ROMAINVILLE, ROSCOMMON.
That sounded about right: a traffic island. A raised strip of grass that s
ummarised all any traveller would want to know about the estuarine settlement. Shark fin embedded in thin soil (silver bright): metaphor for lost fleet. Armada beacon. Loose rocks representing prehistory, Mudhenge. A beach of bird seed and broken shells. Drive around it in twenty seconds, appreciating the distant refineries, the big skies. A red rectangle planted by the sponsors: McDONALD’S EXIT.
Trapped in O’Driscoll’s silver space-cruiser, my eyes bled with envy for that Canvey traffic island, the quiet climb through the village of Benfleet with its church (St Mary’s), its graveyard and ‘licensed’ Dickens restaurant. Broad verges, bare trees coming into flower. The long curve to the red tower with its booster mast, the glimpse of the river and the sudden remembrance of the A13: back on the road.
The pilgrims – Jimmy, Danny, Track – ploughed on in grim silence. The job had to be completed, miles of suburban sprawl, half-towns, broken country. Shops and cafés they won’t have time to enter. A day’s walk. Shoulders chafing under the straps. Heads clear, eyes bright …
My own are failing. I blink hard against the repetitive bridge supports, the hawsers. Too much floating matter, too many scratches. Like film-stock from the year of my birth: 1943. Robert Mitchum and William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy) in Riders of the Deadline. There are gaps in the fog, clear pools of vision (the illusion that I can still make out the Southend walking party). The rest is completely lost.
Tock is staring at me, mouth open. They say he can catch bullets in his teeth (which might explain the state of them). A wad of gum like a cancerous growth on the pad of his tongue. ‘Arright, son?’
Track’s walk is right. But I’m not on it. Not with her. I can’t hold O’Driscoll’s cab much longer. In the clouds. Above water. Between Essex and Kent. The one section of London’s orbital motorway that is not acknowledged as the M25, different rules, different space-time continuum.
Dining on Stones Page 36