Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Cruelty: they call the A13, at the point where it insinuates itself into the Southend diaspora, ‘London Road’. Because, it is obvious now, the bias is out – west. Aspirational. Hadleigh is Mill Hill translated: Jewish colonial mansions, fancy ironwork, security cameras, multiple garages, gardeners. Pillars. Porticoes. Steps. Houses for retired dictators: Saddam Hussein, ‘Baby’ Doc, Idi Amin. (No, that’s too fanciful. I’m imposing my riffs on the perceptions of the walkers. They see new things – absence of people, of noise, litter. They notice Shipwrights Drive, a striking Thirties modernist house. The quality of light and air owing something to river and hill and the long road that has snaked all these miles from the grime of Aldgate.)

  Track’s notebook is almost full. Her miniaturist grid: windows of colour. Half a page, she reckons, for Southend. With one left over for the sea. Tiny photographs smudged with blues and yellows. Words. And parts of words. A union flag at a leaded window: THE CON. (SERVATIVE CLUB deleted.) A mobile phone mast rearing above an A13 sex shop (with awning): INTIM (Eurostyle). FOR ADULT SINGLES & COUPLES.

  Monumental sky with lowering cloud base, over the Estuary, the power station on the Isle of Grain.

  Jimmy is still looking for prospects, cold irony, something to replace the warmth of booze, the missing madness. He spurns this entire run, the hobble from Leigh-on-Sea to Chalkwell: dull street patterns, too many garages, not enough dereliction. He lines up the Southend sign, deep blue on a bed of daffodils – then let’s it go, too soft. WELCOME-TO-SOUTHEND, TWINNED WITH THE POLISH RESORT OF SOPOT. Too many words. Too many letters to paint. Too much hassle.

  Two hours in, London Road endless, small shifts between swallowed villages, ill-founded optimism, they rely on Danny, his black bag, his brass instruments. Is this still the A13? Can Danny confirm the vein of heat running back to Aldgate Pump? This walk, with its false starts, detours, interruptions, dramas and fictions, does it play? And where is the wolf?

  Humans were back: twitching junkies, pavement smokers, ponytails who walked very fast, with black bags, bumping into lost old folk on sticks. SEAFRONT RAPE TRIAL COLLAPSES. Frying fish, petrol, hyacinths, sea breezes.

  Suburb to pre-urb to urb (sizzling like spit on a hot plate). Then suburb again, broad avenues, fields for sale (development plots), first rumours of the military (MOD).

  Track spotted it and Jimmy took the photograph. He had been preoccupied, mid-afternoon, by jailbait, scarlet-mouthed on mobiles, mobbing bus stops, waiting for pick-ups, the family car. Blackcurrant outfits, loose ties and short skirts – like one of the pubs he used to patronise on the edge of the City. Swish, swish. The cars were good too. Large, shiny. German, Japanese, American. A few vintage pieces. All his fantasies congealing in this unlikely nowhere, Thorpe Bay to Shoeburyness. End of the line.

  A pale-blue people-carrier parked in the driveway of a crumbling Art Deco house – the twin of the vehicle O’Driscoll was piloting into Kent – offered for sale. And on its side, Track registered the significance, calling Danny, was a hand-painted art work: the wolf pack. These were louche beasts, yawning seasiders, paying homage to their pack leader: the brass wolf of Aldgate Pump. (Jack London meets London Road, Southend.)

  Message received, chase over.

  It only needed Danny to confirm, after they crossed the railway, drifted into Shoeburyness, that the A13 had finally given up the ghost. Nothing dramatic. A zebra crossing, a bend, a turn-off down Campfield Road – vanished. Rebranded as the B1016. Who has heard of that? Who cares?

  They kissed. Danny’s beard. Track’s scratchy red hair. Jimmy combing his bald spot. Shoeburyness Outdoor Leisure, Camping Showroom: they flopped into picnic chairs. They examined fire-sale flying jackets (£9.99) and laughed over Diesel boots at £39.99. This was MOD territory. A pub named after a character in Dad’s Army. A railway station. Barracks. A bleak shore. Oil tankers blocking the horizon. Track searched for an unbroken shell, to be inked for the last slot on her grid, but she didn’t find one.

  They didn’t know it, but they were out of the story: liberated. Danny and Track, no marriage, stayed together, private vows in St Mary’s Church, East Ham. One on either side of the scarlet ley line. Under the restored wall painting.

  Jimmy made his vows too, a betrothal to fame and property. (He got one of them.) The walkers, from this point, were on their own.

  As the loving couple wandered up the hill towards Danny’s Plotlands chalet, in gentle twilight, rooks, midges, Track told him how she got her name. Katherine/Cat. A favourite film, favourite movie star: Bob Mitchum. Track of the Cat. Family drama with highly symbolic panther (like the wolf of the A13). Danny was happy to be entrusted with this secret, Track’s heart. The lie meant nothing to him. And Track was glad, after all this time, to be rid of it.

  As O’Driscoll’s motor came off the bridge, my eye went out. The stronger one: capped, lens-hooded. The familiar pattern of encroaching motorways, low hills, chalk quarries, was soft, grainy, Impressionist. The abdication of the middle ground finally achieved: ‘I can’t see.’ The windows failed. Bluewater became its celestial double, it shimmered. The salt mound at Swanley interchange was one of Monet’s haystacks. The fuzz of movement uncorrected. North Kent: a film by Stan Brakhage.

  ‘Could be worse,’Jos said. ‘Welcome to the company of one-eyed jacks. Movie directors have always understood the glamour of the piratical patch. It keeps them in work.’

  ‘Fuck you. The one-eyed jack, split Cyclops, is the penis. Brando chucking Kubrick off-set, out of America. On towards the black dust of Beckton, his Vietnam. One-Eyed Jacks is a gay western, written by Calder Willingham. Whipping, posing and moodying about with smashed fingers. A Hollywood Freudfest. Pat Garrett and Billy the kid in drag.’

  Take his mind off the eye thing, psychosomatic, thought kindly Kaporal. Compile a list: one-eyed directors.

  ‘I’ll start,’ he volunteered. ‘Raoul Walsh. A bird, wasn’t it? Smashed through the windscreen when he was driving to some desert location? Eye-patch adds character. The story Mitchum always told about Walsh spilling tobacco from his roll-ups. You can’t judge distance, sorry.’

  ‘André de Toth,’ I came back. ‘House of Wax. A 3-D horror flick made by a one-eyed director.’

  ‘Skiing accident. André started out covering the Nazi invasion of Poland, then married Veronica Lake. Can you tell, do you think, the before and after films? Binocular and monocular vision?’

  ‘Fritz Lang,’ I said. ‘He gives great eye-patch in Le Mépris. That might be cosmetic. Fancied himself in a monocle. His Westerns are good and camp, but they don’t do landscape.’

  ‘Wayne as Rooster Cogburn,’ Kaporal mused. ‘Think Hathaway was taking the piss out of Walsh? The Duke as a fat parody of an eye-patched rival director? Or was it the great Ford? Old John in his later years?’

  ‘Nicholas Ray. Guesting in The American Friend, he patched up.’

  ‘And Jarman,’ Kaporal trumped me. As we drove towards the coast, the fabled beach chalet in Dungeness, the rock garden. ‘He went blind. Blue. The screen itself as subject. Voice. Light of projector beam. Blue on blue. Transcendence.’

  We skirted Hastings on the high road, the Ridge, took to lanes and tracks between hedges. Ollie perked up at the reflected brightness of the sea. Kaporal’s lists didn’t help, the imminence of that mythical personality, Mr Mocatta, was overwhelming. I had nothing left to say. I experimented with partial and total blindness – without Jarman’s puckish spirit, his poetry.

  Fairlight. Good name. A Lookout Station. Military detritus. Country park. Olivia Fairlight-Jones. This was a sort of homecoming for Ollie, hyphen like an umbilical cord between present self and memories of childhood. Cliff walks and private beaches. Ships that had gone aground.

  Phil Tock rubbed his hand, nervously, in circles on his bald skull, warming the ridges. O’Driscoll whistled. The gates were opened by remote control, an unseen electrical eye. The drive descended, by steep and slithery curves, through woodland. It seemed as though nobody
had come this way in years.

  ‘You sure this is right?’ said Tock. ‘Ask a local.’

  ‘Oh yeah – and where you gonna find one?’ O’Driscoll sneered. ‘This has to be it. Rest of the village gone off of the cliff years ago.’

  Mocatta’s house was Manderley (Hitchcock’s version). Or Welles’s Xanadu. A fake. A fraud. A broken set (on which some schlock merchant would shoot a quickie over the weekend). A gothic monster still in development – with classical and Egyptian revisions. The only comparison, as an achieved structure, would be the front elevation of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields: that is, three churches or temples, different eras, piled one on top of the other (but staying, miraculously, vertiginously, in balance). Mocatta, as his own architect, was car-boot Hawksmoor. Doric columns from a demolished Midland bank. Granite steps from a Gents’ toilet in Bexhill. Landseer lions (repro). War memorial obelisks: erased names. A Mississippi mansion that was sliding, verandah first, into the English Channel.

  Mocatta had builders instead of friends. They decamped, unpaid, when he went inside (eighteen months on remand). Much of the roof was missing, tiles stripped. Rain left puddles in the hall.

  Tock stayed by the car, O’Driscoll lit a cigarette. Kaporal worked on his list. While Ollie, taking my hand, led me down an epic corridor; oil paintings in ornate frames turned to face the wall. She looked into many empty rooms, shrouded furniture, undraped windows. Expensive carpets into which sheep pellets had been trodden. Brisk bushes growing through the boards, strangling white statues of naked gods.

  Deep in what might have been, in one of the establishments on which this folly was loosely based, the servants’ quarters, Ollie located an occupied space, a kitchen: an old biddy, fag in mouth, gin bottle within reach, stirring a reeking pot. Carpet slippers, wrinkled stockings. Winter coat (coney collar) over flowered pinafore. A pale-green Aga, the only warmth in the place. And standing stiffly, well within thermal range, was a man playing cards. Playing with himself, Patience. Double pack spread across a marble counter: click click click. He didn’t take his eyes from his apparently endless game.

  ‘Hello, Nan,’ Ollie said. ‘Lunch ready?’

  ‘Chicken soup,’ the cook replied. ‘Made with rabbit. Fowls sick, lost their feathers. Fox got most of them.’

  The cardplayer, moving painfully (to studied effect), advanced on the stove, turning his head to evaluate, in turn, the intruders, half-blind old man and bright young girl.

  ‘Daddy!’ Ollie rushed at him. ‘I’d like you to meet my fiancé.’ There was a long, tense silence. And then, right on the beat, they both laughed. And went on laughing as my legs gave way.

  Fairlight

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Mocatta said, tenderly massaging the small of his back. ‘Or his.’

  Brown suits, in the country, if inherited, are acceptable – but the Fairlight magnate had miscalculated both the cut (near Vorticist) and the depth of brown (Nuremberg, 1934). The effect, coupled with elastic-sided Chelsea boots, was contradictory and sick-making: Fascist mufti with Tin Pan Alley tailoring, Aldgate sweatshop ripping off a P.G. Wodehouse dustwrapper.

  ‘Don’t tease,’ said Ollie, slipping her arm through her father’s and leading him to the table, where he refused to sit.

  He winced. ‘This idiotic court case. Do I look stupid enough to hire a hitman aged seventy-five who lives above a launderette in St Leonards? A pensioner who sees a vision of Our Lady in a damp patch on the ceiling and walks straight round to the cop shop. Confesses, implicates me, and asks for seven other stiffs to be disinterred, Hastings to Horsham. I’ve been on my bloody feet since they let me out last Friday. Playing Polish Patience. You need two packs. Take my mind off the sheer fucking agony.’

  ‘Poor Daddy.’

  ‘So which of these cunts got you up the duff? Porker or egghead? Fetch O’Driscoll and sort the dirty little sod out, then we’ll have some of Nan’s soup. God help us.’

  Kaporal’s clenched buttocks were squeaking in the style approved by Sir Alex Ferguson: unlubricated penetration of a rubber woman. He couldn’t eat a thing, even if Granny Mocatta fed him with a silver spoon.

  And it was worse for me, the guilty man. I was quite prepared for a shotgun wedding: so long as they didn’t pull the trigger. I find a third wife, new home, ready-made family, and it ends in farce: clownish dialogue, tumbledown set, pantomime villains. And just when I’m kidding myself, a totally novel experience, that my Shakespearean symmetries are working out. Established world collapses into chaos (blood, madness, storm), before order is restored: winter into spring. Lovers pared off by hierarchy: king with queen, duke with duchess, peasant with peasant (comedy turns).

  Mocatta fouled it up.

  I tensed for Ollie’s kiss of betrayal, my last. Under her father’s stern gaze, she hugged the shocked Kaporal. Pecked his cheek. Winked.

  ‘You know Jos Kaporal, the film-maker? You must. We’re very much in love. And hope you’ll help us buy a flat in Brighton. Eastbourne, if you’re a meanie. Deal at a pinch. They’re all gay there and Jos is trying to reform, stay off the booze.’

  ‘Oh yes, I know Kaporal,’ Mocatta sneered. ‘I pay good money to have that fat whale write a book, he thinks it gives him carte blanche to speak the truth. Facts mean nothing, I told the cunt, what I want is style. Front, swagger. Not fucking statistics downloaded from the internet, gossip from disgruntled geriatrics in the Conquest Hospital.’

  O’Driscoll, with Tock behind him, was at the door. Not sure if they were invited to break bread or heads.

  ‘Chuck this rubbish in the boot, the pig. Bite his balls off first, for assaulting my little girl. Release the handbrake, run the fucker over the cliff. Then piss off. You can walk to town. Take the bus if you’re feeling flush.’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘Which?’ Tock whispered.

  ‘Which what, maggot?’

  ‘Which town?’

  ‘Be my guest. Basra, Buenos Aires. Don’t hurry back.’

  That tone, Norbury Wildean, hernia-in-the-throat: Kaporal placed it straight off. Camp aggression, passive sadism. Tortoiseshell cigarette holder and haemorrhoids. It wasn’t Nöel Coward in The Italian Job: John Osborne as unlikely Geordie gang boss in Get Carter. Plenty of scope for drawling menace. Cards in the kitchen. Fancy house. Kaporal, yet again, was in the wrong movie. An oversize Cockney git who has run out of sarky comebacks. A landscape he can’t read and raw nature hammering on the window.

  O’Driscoll touched his shoulder. Sinews stiffened, he walked away down the long corridor (with the shadows of security bars). Jimmy Cagney in Each Dawn I Die. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Christopher Walken in King of New York.

  Mocatta’s library: open to the weather.

  The gentlemen had withdrawn and gran was catching up on the gossip, killing the gin. No cigars were on offer. But the bent plutocrat, understanding that Norton was a literary man, was keen to show off his trophies – packed shelves of pristine first editions, gleaming Edwardian bindings, good cloth. All of them feeling the effect of the rain, prevailing wind, the absence of a protective wall. That part of the house had collapsed, slithered into the sea. The books, acting as a final buffer, would go next.

  ‘I collect local topography, Romney Marsh, Cinque Ports. The miraculous cluster of talents that found refuge here, between the turn of the century and the First War. I was lucky enough to acquire – from a one-legged man in New York (he had the full complement when I met him) – the cream of David Garnett’s library. Henry James (you’ll notice the presentation inscriptions to Edward Garnett), H.G. Wells, yards of Ford and, of course, my great weakness

  – Conrad. Recognise the suit?’

  ‘Suit?’

  He opened his jacket like a set of wings.

  ‘The ultimate fetish. I’m wearing a sentence from Nostromo. I had it made up by a little man in Aldgate, Manny Silverstein. You might have come across his brother Snip, fund of information. Mostly libellous, all invented.’

&n
bsp; ‘No, never.’

  ‘Remember the quote? The vigour and symmetry of his powerful limbs lost in the vulgarity of a brown tweed suit, made by Jews in the slums of London. The chosen people are best incinerated, of course, but while a few of them hang on, rats in a drainpipe, civilised men should exploit the skills they possess: vents, cuff-buttons, linings and so on. I’ve stopped in Brick Lane for a bagel, I’m not ashamed to acknowledge, after a night on the town.’

  Playing for time, I started to examine the shelves – with the reflexes of an old-time runner, rapidly scanning, left to right, highlights identified (with a faint clearing of the throat): the first English (1896 Heinemann) edition of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and Ford’s first book, The Brown Owl, along with a lovely copy of The Shifting of the Fire. The better Conrads had been dispersed before Garnett’s library was catalogued by Michael Hosking of Deal. The copy of Nostromo, which Mocatta had rebound in rather showy full-Morocco, was undistinguished: ex-lib with a label from The Tabard Inn Library on front paste-down. Many annotations (not thought to be in author’s hand).

  Morocco. Mocatta. Moorcock.

  The letters of those words formed and reformed. Owlish 000s. My head swam. I couldn’t decide if my host, the preposterous figure in the brown suit, who clearly modelled himself on the fictional Jerry Cornelius, had been invented by Michael Moorcock in his pomp. Or if the exiled editor of New Worlds had based his gender-jumping, time-shifting star on someone he’d met while visiting his mother on the coast in … Worthing?

  Moorcock’s Notting Hill, through the intervention of Mocatta and others, had migrated to the south coast: Brighton. Old hippies in the Lanes. Coke-snorting journalists wallowing in chichi flats. Resting actors. Peddlers of stolen property. Expensive restaurants with lousy food. Sad poets with leaking memories. Property sharks who learnt their lessons from Rachman: don’t sleep with upwardly mobile tarts and never mix with writers. (Tender-hearted Moorcock was more forgiving of Rachman than any of his former collaborators.)