PENGUIN BOOKS
WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLET TRACINGS
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor’s Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital; and Dining on Stones. He lives in Hackney, East London.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
IAIN SINCLAIR
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published in Great Britain by Goldmark 1987
Published by Granta Books 1998
Published in Penguin Books 2004
1
Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 1987
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–04093–6
‘…then I tell you what change I think you had better begin with, grandmother. You had better change Is into Was and Was into Is, and keep them so.’
‘Would that suit your case? Would you not be always in pain then?’ asked the old man tenderly.
‘Right!’ exclaimed Miss Wren with another chop.
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
for
B. Catling, there before me
and
Martin Stone, always ahead
BOOK ONE
Manac
1
There is an interesting condition of the stomach where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus: a condition spoken of, with some awe, by the connoisseurs of pathology as ‘hour glass stomach’.
Waves of peristalsis may be felt as they pass visibly across the upper half of the abdomen, left to right, as if conscious of diurnal etiquette. Friends of surgeons have watched mesmerised, gawping, with the empty minded rapture of plein-air sunset smudgers, at this revelation of secret tides. A boring pain recurs, beaks in the liver, even the thought of food becomes a torture; a description that starts at discomfort is refined with each meal taken until it colonises the entire consciousness, then copious vomiting, startling to casual observers, brings relief.
Nicholas Lane, excarnate, hands on severely angled knees, stared out across the dim and featureless landscape, then dropped his gaze to the partly-fermented haddock, mixed with mucus, that poured from his throat, that hooked itself, bracken coloured, over the tough spears of roadside grass. Lumps, that were almost skin, split and fell to the ground. New convulsions took him: his bones rattled with their fury. Patches of steaming bouillabaisse spilled a shadow pool across the thin covering of snow.
‘Toads!’ remarked Dryfeld, ignoring the event. ‘The females carry the males on their backs across these roads. Or die in the attempt. Like Shetland fisherwomen. Wet skirts tucked into their belts. Out through the breakers. Husbands. Drinking all night. Cling to their necks.’
He broke off, scribbled a few lines into his ring folder, in stiff blue capitals; then, unprompted, relaunched his monologue.
‘If the A1 had anticipated itself, Darwin would never have needed to leave these shores. It’s all here, Monsieur. Only the fittest and most insanely determined life forms can battle across that river of death to reach the central reservation – but then, ha! They are free from predators. They live and breathe under the level of the fumes. They stay on this grass spine, leave the city, or the sea-coast, escape, feral cats and their like, and travel the country, untroubled, north to south. The lesser brethren die at the verges. And are spun from our wheels, flung to the carrion. Grantham’s daughter, this is your vision!
‘And when the cities are finished, abandoned, life will steal back in down this protected tongue. The new world will evolve here.’
Nicholas Lane’s stomach having emptied itself he climbed back into the car, found that he still had one cigarette stashed, called for a match. Nobody had one. He sniffed, drew his hand across his nose, and left the cigarette dangling like a piece of torn lip.
To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.
The mid-England dark, torpid and thick, a kind of willed ignorance, was wide about them. A heavy but sluggish motorcar facing south, mudded hubs, filthy windows. The kind of car that is common in the antiques game, strong enough to take plenty of potential Welsh dressers. Not so common in the book trade. See one and you see a villain. Call it a Volvo. A case of sealed heats, old smoke, sweats, bags, fears, papers, coffee nerves, sleepless, questing, never willing to call it a day.
They had spent a gentle half-week motoring from London to Glasgow, to Stirling, to Edinburgh, to Newcastle, to Durham, with brief expeditions to Carlisle, Richmond, Ripon and many lesser centres, many a rumour chased, and after nothing more interesting than used books.
The car was indeed filled with them. Elephant folios, loose, sets of bindings, sold by the yard, carrier bags of explosive paperbacks, first editions packed into cardboard boxes, leaflets on fireworks, golf novels, needlework patterns, catalogues of light fittings, vegetarian tracts, anything that could be painlessly converted into money, so that they could get back out on the road again.
Jamie, known to many an auction ring as ‘the Old Pretender’, was at the wheel, for it was his car, asleep, his near horizontal forehead sunk onto his arm. Septic skin, a tropical pallor, old planting family, liver already counted out, and suffering a slightly inconvenient dose of the clap. Useful man. Plenty of relatives with decayed mansions, inhabited by domestic animals and uncontrolled vermin. Be lucky to see his thirtieth birthday. When he wasn’t drunk, he was asleep. And he had not, as yet, been allowed his sundowner; Dryfeld would not permit the car to halt in daylight, until the threat of a lapful of Nicholas Lane’s week-old breakfast, and the vision, across the road, of a phonebox, gave him pause.
Dryfeld sported a camelhair coat, with lumps of the camel still attached, more padded horse-blanket than coat: it was stretched well beyond its limits in accommodating the dealer’s rigid shoulders. His weight seemed all to have been compressed somewhere near the top of his spine, he had no neck. His skull was shaven, deathrow chic, and was so massive and burdened with unassimilated information that it tipped aggressively forward, almost onto his chest. He hunched his shoulders so that th
ey could support the weight, striding at reckless speed, taken for a hunchback. The thick skin of his face stretched into a permanent frown.
It was tragic that Max Beckmann died too soon to have a crack at him: the darkest self-portraits hint at something of Dryfeld’s flavour. But Dryfeld never posed, was never at rest.
His pockets sagged, tormented by the selection of coins needed for his hourly phone-calls. His business was all done through other people’s premises. He would ring his contacts day or night, from every caff, or garage, or railway station where he found himself with a crack of time. So that when he arrived back in London he could immediately pick up more money, cash in his cheques, drop a sack of recent purchases, and leave again.
He lived nowhere, was nobody. Made it his business to stay out of all the files, lists, electoral rolls. He took his name, and he had only one, from St Mary Matfellon, Whitechapel. The promise of an anarchist booksale in Angel Alley had drawn them into the labyrinth, but the sale, being run by anarchists, was naturally cancelled and moved, unannounced, to another location, at another time, changed from books to records. The moment was not to be wasted. Dryfeld plunged into the Whitechapel Library and stormed through the accounts of the eliminated church. Among the list of rectors he found, Tho. Dryfeld, 10 January 1503–2 March 1512. Nobody was using the name, it became his.
He was as well read as any railway cleaner with his pick of the first class carriages, pockets bulging with slightly corrupted newsprint, thick ink-stained fingers. He absorbed all the information by touch, a kind of idiot’s braille.
Nicholas Lane never read a newspaper, carried no cash. Paid for his tea with a crumpled cheque. He appeared as frail as Dryfeld was meaty. But it was an illusion. He hopped about like a stick insect, at a speed inconceivable to mere mammals. You could be talking to him on the street only to find, in mid sentence, that he had shot off at a tangent, down a side alley, across a road, into a bookshop that looked to all other eyes like a hair-salon or a boot mender’s.
He had a radar that was unequalled. Black skintight trousers displaying thin ankles in white socks, Brick Lane shoes, sharp as chisel points, a bargain, if his feet had been two sizes smaller. Beret, like a fruit-bat, his familiar, always on his head: nobody had ever seen him without it. Subterranean visionary. In this context the word genius could be applied without any fear of hyperbole. Brilliant possession of the martyred self.
A nasal grunt from Jamie, as if he had swallowed his tongue and not much cared for the taste. Broken-down grouse assassin, his plate-sized lenses so smeared and greasy that a pilot with 20/20 vision would have been white-sticked by them. Book ripper, bladesman, rapidly slicing the views, costumes, maps, gutting the colour or polishing the leatherware: books into furniture. Fuelled on whisky. Hands shaking on the wheel of sleep. Groaning. Tremens. Quite justified.
The narrator, feeling posthumous, thought of himself as the Late Watson. The secret hero who buries his own power in the description of other men’s triumphs. Dangerous ground. Flickering between modesty and blasphemy. Pinched into the co-driver’s seat, boxes and maps across his knees, polo-sucking, costive owl, built around a now firmly packed gut, cemented in guilt, involuntary retention of oat cake, porridge, turnip, energy trapped, red eye lidless with coffee, unable, away from home, to do anything more than break wind. Hair of the dog scratching at his scalp.
Dryfeld strode back from the phonebox, fists pounding at the driver’s window, cardiac flutter. Nine o’clock, an early December evening, black snow, his breath making frantic cartoons in the air; Mossy Noonmann would see us. He never closes to the trade. Or opens to the public. Who have been known to faint, gasp or curse, at the first sight of one of his pricings. He took a quiet pleasure, sucking wet lipped at his pipe stem, watching the innocents drop the book and try to get to the door before he could spear them with his ancient mariner eye, stone-fix them, stand casually across the door space, driving them back into the paperback shelves where they can make a token purchase of a few pounds and escape into the sunlight.
Nicholas Lane ran a line of badly adulterated Bolivian snuff across the top of his briefcase, rolled up a returned cheque, and took it in the nostril. Hammered the mucous membrane. Hit the brain jelly with a white dart. His eyes sharpened, his already twitching and prehensile fingers played with the combination of his lock, a soothing sequence of power-inducing numbers. Look out, Mossy.
The four horsemen were outside Steynford, and they were about to take the town.
Mossy Noonmann’s bookshop, if we afford it the courtesy of that title, was probably the only one open in the whole of the Midlands, from Wolverhampton to Boston, and out into the North Sea. And he was the least likely proprietor. How he had come here nobody knew and few cared to guess.
He stood, stooping, a few inches under the low ceiling of his ill-lit empire; lacquered in dry sweat, glistening. He had found a role to suit his height and he was quite prepared to play it. He affected the trappings of the trade as they might have been described in a 1930s detective novel: an unruly pipe, the stem almost bitten away, sucked, spat through, poked at, scraped, cleaned into the filthiest stick of tar, unlit, and frequently pocketed in a condemned floral waistcoat. His face had a shocked and naked quality, as if it had been covered for years in a helmet of hair and then suddenly, and judicially, exposed to the light. His skull was heavy, water-filled, and tended to come to rest on one or other of his shoulders.
It was impossible to believe that the stock in his shop had been selected with any notion of trading in it. It was as if every other dealer within fifty miles had been allowed to tip one sack of their most leprous and flaky dogs onto his floor. The shelves, being decent timber, had long ago been sold. There were typed cards announcing LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, POSTCARDS, CRIME, MOVIE STARS, WAR, FASHION; but these, having been so laboriously produced, were dropped anywhere, two good ideas in one day was too much to cope with, and the cards now bore no relation whatever to the heaps on which they lay.
Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced that the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself. He groaned. This had a somewhat uncentring effect on humans reaching for a copy of, say, Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. They tended then not so much to drop the books they were holding as to throw them across the room, adding to the already generous measure of confusion.
Mossy’s nose was a thing to be admired. He admired it. He looked after it better than he looked after his family. He would pick at the lining with a match-stick, roll out an interesting lump, either of skin or of snot, even food, then gasp for breath after his exertions. He would mop himself with a shirt-sized handkerchief. Perhaps it was a shirt; it must have been a very old one. He was the only person to find Steynford tropical. He dripped with the effort of striking a match and let it burn out in his fingers.
Most of Mossy’s business had once been transacted on the telephone, until that instrument had been cut off. Literally. Mossy took his pocket-knife to the cord and severed it, tying a ticket to the bone. It was a realistic view. Everything has its price-tag and it might as well be visible.
Now Mossy took to appearing at Auction Houses; he haunted the rooms, watching the bidders, selecting a likely novice with a nervous arm, and begging a lift, ‘just up the road’. The road being the A1. His benefactor, in a state of hysterical paralysis, was persuaded to chauffeur Mossy to the very door of his shop. Then to enter, to carry in a box. The fact that it was the driver’s own box seemed always to be overlooked. The order of release could only be obtained by purchasing a decent heap of coverless odd volumes and first editions with additional printing histories thoughtfully erased, scarce issues put out by Book Clubs. It was always when Mossy threatened to brew up a large mug of coffee that the cheque books appeared and another neophyte was broken in.
Noonmann was a New Yorker, veteran of Peace Eye Bookstore, who, not fancying an engagement in South East Asia in the mid-60s, had returned to the Europe of his fore
fathers by way of Liverpool, then, briefly, the centre of the Universe. A single evening disproved this conceit: Noonmann found a mattress in Westbourne Grove. There were minor misunderstandings over rent books, social security paperwork, import/export regulations concerning self-administered resins from the Middle East; there was a misplaced briefcase of ounces, and Mossy decided to hit the road.
Two hours up the A1 and the Camberwell-domiciled holder of a Heavy Goods Vehicle Licence was ready to turn it in rather than carry Mossy another mile. He walked down the hill into Steynford. He’s been there ever since, and never walked so far again.
Jamie let the car roll silently down the main street, the Pelican Hotel on his left, passing it, with only the faintest and most wistful of sighs. A cheese-coloured town, slicked over with fen sleet, damp as an abattoir coldstore, distinguished by a profusion of moulting snail-horn churches, their steeples discouragingly set with sharks’ teeth. Over the river, a touch on the power-steering brings them into the yard adjoining Mossy Noonmann’s shop.
Before the others have got the doors open Jamie has been into the shop, seen that there are no books larger than tombstones, no leather left on the spines, no gilt, and he’s out again, uphill, hands in pockets, scratching himself, shirt tails flying back, into a narrow passageway, up some stairs, across a deserted shopping precinct, he’s never been to the place before, can smell the fermented grain inside the bottle, is ensconced in the saloon bar, coat collar up against the Lincolnshire winds that he does not trust to stay out of licensed premises, and is calling for a refill.
Mossy shifts his head from one shoulder to the other, hazarding no remark, as the others push past him, with like informality, down the step, and dive directly into separate areas of the shop. Naturally they ignore the books on the few remaining shelves, or those in what might once have been a glass-fronted cabinet – but immediately start to examine, with painstaking care, the loose sheets under tables, anything without a spine; they spill out the contents of boxes onto the floor.
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