Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Snip told me about a visit the pair of them made to David Litvinoff, when he was in hospital, after a savage and unexplained beating. Snip brought a bunch of grapes and ate them. Joey brought a second impression of Canetti’s Auto da Fé, which Litvinoff left in a drawer at his bedside, when he skipped. Never to be seen again, until he walked into a club in Stoke Newington with a floor-length vicuna coat and a Wykehamist film director in tow.

  When we needed them, there were no caffs. Even the Market Café in Fournier Street, supported by Gilbert and George, much-photographed regulars, had folded. No market. Now everything was public, visible, self-conscious. You could sprawl on a distressed couch, sucking Pernod disguised as absinthe. The tweeting of cellphones replaced the Huguenot canaries, the birds in cages hung outside rookeries. A generation of narcissists transmitted miniature photographs of themselves, doing nothing, back and forwards across cyberspace.

  Remembering Rachel Lichtenstein’s account of the hermit David Rodinsky playing the spoons, in a workmen’s café in Hanbury Street, we tried that. It was still there, hanging on, deserted in mid-afternoon. One little old man, his back to us, nursing an empty cup.

  I couldn’t explain to Track how much the area meant to me, how inspired I was by the current changes: it was like regressing to those fondly recalled Thatcher days. Spectacular corruption, land piracy, North Sea oil revenues given away to underwrite arms deals. Wonderful stuff. For a writer. A jobbing dystopian. Blair and his gang were doing great business, bringing it back: horizon-to-horizon mendacity.

  When you get into the zone, as sportsmen describe it, your book writes itself. Every phone call keys up the next chapter. Imaginary creatures, borrowed from Stevenson or Machen, beckon you from doorways. Succubi wink and flirt. London and the Estuary become extensions of your immune system. But you are not immune, you are wide open to all the viruses, syndromes, germ cultures: you twitch and fret, rant, sweat, ravish.

  I had to prove my wild assertions. I took out a letter I’d received that morning from the poet Lee Harwood. Another escapee, another seasider. Lee belonged in the noble age when poetry and poverty were happy to acknowledge their blood ties. The same sound, the fatal contract: live it. Lee was in Brick Lane before any of them.

  Strangely your writing of Cable Street, Wellclose Square, etc., took me off into memory land. I suddenly remembered lying in bed with my then wife Jenny in Brick Lane on New Year’s Eve 1961/62. (We had a top floor room and kitchen on the east side of the street a block up from the old synagogue/Huguenot church.) There came a loud low droning sound – and to me (forgotten childhood memory) it sounded exactly like the bombers flying over in the war. I thought our end had come. Then the noise suddenly stopped – and eventually I realised it was all the ships sounding their sirens in the docks to mark the New Year. That, of course, was when London was still a port and St Katharine’s Way and Wapping High Street were lined with spice warehouses, and not fancy flats and offices. That seems an age ago, though the number of years isn’t that many.

  By the time I’d finished reading this letter – I’m an easy touch, it happens at the end of every chapter in Bleak House – my eyes were moist: conjured images of Hasids sleeping in stone coffins in the crypt of Christ Church. Photographs of the ‘Monster Doss House’ in Jack London’s People of the Abyss. Memories of Derek Raymond and Michael Moorcock (last seen limping out of the Princelet Street synagogue).

  Tea swallowed, local colour entered in notebook, Track asked the cruel question. ‘What’s this stuff got to do with the A13?’

  ‘Every road,’ I improvised, ‘but especially one as unlucky as the A13, carries a freight of memory. It starts somewhere, goes somewhere, keeps on until it has purged its contempt. The A13 is Whitechapel in an open charabanc’

  ‘Aldgate Pump?’ said the man who was tapping his spoon against the rim of his empty mug. ‘Stand us a cuppa, guv, and I’ll show yer where that bleedin’ road starts. I’ll tell you a story you’ll never forget.’

  I hadn’t recognised him. He was small ten years ago, now he’d shrivelled into his hairy overcoat like a ferret into woodchips. Snip had trimmed his banter and cultivated a nosegay of nostril hair. It took him a minute or two to get me into focus, to crank up to speed.

  ‘Blimey, it’s Joey’s pal. The book geezer. I fort you wus dead. Joey’s not too clever. Ain’t seen him meself – not since his mum’s funeral.’

  The three of us, pace tailored to Snip’s canted hobble, headed sou’-sou’-west, navigating an uncertain path towards Lord Foster’s half-peeled gherkin, the Swiss Re tower. And Aldgate Pump.

  Aldgate Pump

  White stone. A traffic island. Unexpressed water.

  The Aldgate well was bricked up, cholera risk, but that didn’t stop freelance antiquarians searching for it. In Mitre Square, a hobbling, hunched man in excused-games windbreaker was chasing phantoms. That is: he hung on to L-shaped handles, golden rods, as he skidded, small feet in sections of black tyre, trying to keep up with the pull of the stallions of unreason. On the diagonal, corner to corner, he rushed and stumbled – until his rods crossed (the eyes of Ben Turpin). He mapped the dull square in a lined notebook, registering geological shifts (every stratum with its own acrylic colour). An urban dowser, cousin to the metal-detecting fraternity of the south coast, this man pursued his hobby with the vigour of a committed careerist.

  ‘In orf the pavement Jack went, dahn the stairs, pulls out a razor – whoosh, whoosh – stripes him, the blackshirt on the door. That was the start of it, Jack’s name. Put five of them bastards in ’orspital.’

  Snip Silverstein saw history on cable, his own private channel. Instant replay. All time, one time: Jack Spot, Colchester barracks, fitting Matt Monro with a lilac three-piece, spin to Portsmouth (mob-handed in a borrowed two-tone Zephyr).

  The afternoon was drawing in, vapours from heavy clay creeping through the mantle of paving stones. Snip, who had brought us through Whitechapel to Aldgate Pump, was running out of gas. He had returned to a place that was no longer there. Bones ached. His back was out of alignment. Shoes pinched. The angle of his hat was jaunty, but his nose dripped, faulty washer, long silver droplets absorbed in the greenish black of anachronistically severe lapels.

  ‘So long, son. Miss. I should be gettin’ indoors. Shalom.’

  He shook my hand, winked at Track and left us to it: the point where Leadenhall Street meets Fenchurch Street, the prow of a boat cutting through waves. The fabled launch of the A13: Aldgate Pump. A heritage token shunted and shifted for the convenience of developers with greedy eyes on a steady march to the east.

  A dog’s head reared from the stone. A titular spirit.

  ‘More like Jack London’s wolf,’ Track said.

  Bronze: buffed like coffin handles. Erect ears. A flattened brow in which you could watch the traffic divide into two streams. The wolf, fangs bared, was road hungry. He tried to hurdle stone – and found himself trapped within it, a token of the wilderness that lay forever beyond his reach. He strained, struggled, snarled. In silence.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Lord Foster’s smooth glass tower, the Swiss Re building, gave me vertigo. It pulsed provocatively, a sex toy someone had forgotten to shut off. A fishnet condom skinned over an Oldenberg vibrator. Foster’s gherkin dominated London’s approaches, reconfiguring the energy spirals of the labyrinth; it glowed like a sick bone in a soup of dollar bills. No wonder the dowser fled. No wonder Snip Silverstein scuttled home for EastEnders. Swiss Re, a reinsurance operation, were quitting their current premises, alongside Aldgate Pump, to occupy this retro-futurist blob, a misplaced salute to fibre-optic technology.

  Track wanted to record the thing. It would play much better as a photograph. She stood foursquare in the road, a sturdy figure dwarfed by recent buildings, slabs of light; offices in which figures sat, or rose from their desks to talk to other seated figures, to stare at the windows, not out of them. There was no out, a moving screen, a future that belonged
to a religion still waiting to be defined; a priesthood honouring the City’s persistent duality, a Manichean creed of darkness and light. Greed and fear. Flesh and spirit. Love and death.

  London, I thought, regretting Snip, and sensing that I would never see him again in this world, belongs to barbers, tailors, gamblers. Cut, stitch, risk. Shave and shampoo. Send the corpse down the chute in best pinstripe, clean underwear, polished shoes. Accidental survivors like Aldgate Pump filled me with an inexpressible melancholy. Better let them rip the relics out, burn John Stow and his surveys, dismiss scholars and memory-men, Bill Fishman and his ilk. Characters like our Mitre Square dowser worried at a rind of pain, made lists, catalogues of the lost. Track was more sensible, no truck with nostalgia. She trotted beside me, headset pumping out Jah Wobble’s anthem to the A13 as celestial highway, a benediction to sales reps and Ikea warehouse persons in bright overalls: a smile on her face and a notebook to be filled.

  New buildings meant old bones. Without development, Quatermass pits in London clay, there would be no hard evidence of plague deaths, helmets, brooches, Elizabethan theatres, coins, rings, oyster shells and broken clay pipes. The yellow dead, in their gaudy, would sleep for ever in the choke of claggy earth. Bulldozers fetched them out. More to display, more skulls to house. A louder story to narrate.

  We were on the outside of the City gate where Geoffrey Chaucer was Keeper of Customs, a salaried bureaucrat. The original Swiss Re building housed, in its basement, a section of wall, a medieval arch from Holy Trinity Priory. The arch had been constructed from stone salvaged from Jewish houses, demolished after the expulsion ordered by Edward I in 1290. Or so the sign said. Swiss Re decorated their prize exhibit, all that was left of ‘one of the most powerful institutions in the Capital’, with prompt cards, genealogies, checklists of significant dates.

  Track read aloud facsimile extracts from Victorian newspapers, pre-tabloid horror stories based on the Whitechapel Murders. The invention of that entity now known as Jack the Ripper. A more recent cutting must have been placed here because of its casual references to Swiss Re and the Holy Trinity Priory. This was a review of the film From Hell, in which the journalist argued that US global capitalism had nowhere left to invade – except the past. Regime change in Mitre Square and Berner Street was the preferred option.

  History is there to be captured and colonised by a commando unit of highly trained and skilled professionals, using the most advanced technology known to the Western world. The military/industrial state sees film as an efficient way of burning (laundering, reinvesting, alchemising) money. Great Britain, that drifting, off-Europe aircraft carrier, is tolerated as a generator of exploitable myths: Dracula, Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter and the runic menagerie of J.R. Tolkien.

  The arch in the basement of the Swiss Re building, close to where the body of the murdered prostitute Kate Eddowes was found in Mitre Square, is preserved – as a conversation piece. The arch belonged to one of the ten side-chapels where masses were sung for the souls of the City’s dead. Its provenance is explained on boards hung alongside Ripper caricatures and expressions of horror that such events could occur in the world’s greatest and most civilised metropolis.

  From Hell, as a film, returns us to source, the penny-dreadful, the shilling shocker: a marketable product crafted to compliment the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.

  ‘Standard riffs,’ I snorted. I’d used them myself, more than once. The problem, at my age, is that every statement sounds like an echo of something written or read. The worst of it, for journalists who stick around too long, is that we self-plagiarise to the point of erasure, quote our own quotes, promote fresh new talent, buried for years in Kensal Green or Nunhead. The madness of seeing London as text. Words. Dates. Addresses. No brick that has not been touched, mentioned in a book.

  In a gloaming of wheelspray, wet light eddying around Aldgate Pump, we navigate a complex system of pedestrian crossings, underpasses, islets on which you could perch for a moment, reeling from fumes, before hazarding a rush at the next high kerb. Yellow fences, too tall to vault, have been designed specifically to balk random hikers. There never was a landscape so much factored on confusion: LOOK BOTH WAYS. Double red lines. Contradictory arrows. Taxis hauling business folk a hundred yards between meetings. Creased suits returning, flushed, from wine bars. Repmobiles trundling back from the dirty worlds of Dagenham, Rainham, Basildon. Sports commentators in loud shirts, airfixed hair, hoarse from calling the. arrows in the Circus Tavern, Purfleet: ‘One hundred and eighty!’

  The Hoop & Grapes public house is a marker on the old road. We spotted the Mitre Square dowser coming out, unintoxicated, crackling with crisp packets like a Bacofoil-swathed marathon runner, in danger of imminent dehydration. Lips crusted with salt. The signboard swung, a heavy vintage of green grapes caught in a golden hoop, like another Ripper prompt. A nifty back reference to Stephen Knight’s eccentric notion of chief suspect, Sir William Withey Gull, feeding doped fruit to compliant Whitechapel whores, while they jolt over the cobbles in a closed hansom.

  So indulge that theme for a moment, if you will. Old man (ex-hack) buying wine (white and sour) for young female artist, as the lights of the City come on and haloes form around the hot bulbs of streetlamps. The stolen hour when Track, three drinks in, remembers a story her mother told about trying to retrace the steps immigrants took, after coming ashore near Tower Bridge, walking to Heneage Street in Whitechapel.

  The mother’s friend, a gentile from across the water, spoke ‘incessantly’ about the lavender fields of her youth, between Mitcham and Croydon. And how the smell stayed with her even now, through all the dirt and noise and bluster; it only took a pinch of lavender on her fingers to bring back the blue hills of Surrey.

  It had been raining that day, and coming towards Fenchurch Street, crossing Commercial Road, Track’s mother was delighted to find the speckled-granite basin of a drinking fountain filled with water. An old lady was washing herself, her face, her hair. And singing. And some of the vagrant drinkers, the ones she had seen earlier, angry, affronted, were singing with her. Track’s mother loved that moment.

  We were following the thread of the aboriginal A13, no question. Another leaping dog. Or, if you want to be pedantic, a South American jaguar. Jaguar. The bronze hound of Aldgate Pump transformed into a showroom token, guarding a display of £40,000 motors. (A direct swap, I thought, for one of Jimmy Seed’s paintings.) Vagrancy and conspicuous consumption loafed side by side in the tradition of this territory. Poverty and flash shacked up. If you haven’t got it, spend it. £62,725 will secure you a nice green car in a glass box (polished tile floor). Car as sculpture. You’d never risk one of these on the A13. Why trash your investment? Leave it in the gallery until it achieves its full market potential.

  This hinterland – river, ghosts – won’t let Gothic themes fade; everything zooms back to the karma of the Whitechapel Murders. Kelly’s Foodhall commemorates, for slasher freaks, the name of the final victim, Marie Jeanette. PLEASE PAY HERE. The Minories trigger spectral sightings of the unfortunate Montague Druitt, Ripper fall guy, stones-in-the-pocket Thames suicide.

  A red smear is sinking slowly, rubbing itself against the blind windows of an anonymous block-building on Commercial Road. We can’t move east without brushing against sticky webs of memory, a sense of being crushed, even on this broad highway, between the murder sites of the so-called ‘Double Event’ killings: Elizabeth Stride in Berner Street (ahead of us) and Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square. Sepia photographs of human figures: so stitched and blotched they look like representations of tribal trophies, shrunken heads from the Amazonian rainforest.

  The nicotine prints, that made such horrors acceptable, re-form on paving slabs like pools of dried blood. Sepia is an older weather. My great-grandfather spurned such impurities, favouring solid blacks and radiant whites for his Kodak portrait of the supposed s
keleton of a conquistador.

  The conclusion come to was that the identity of the body was absolutely established, not only by general indications, but by evidence of the wounds on the neck and elsewhere, which, after lying three and a half centuries, the mummified corpse clearly disclosed. The conformation of the cranium has a very marked resemblance to that of the typical criminal of to-day. The lower jaw protrudes abnormally, a certain sign of a brutal man. The chief peculiarity, however, is the knee joints, which are so unusually large as to look like a deformity. The total length of the mummy is fully six feet. After having been scrutinised, the precious relic was handed over to the care of the Metropolitan Chapter, who placed it in the Chapel of the Kings in the Cathedral of Lima, where the curious may now see all that is mortal of Pizarro resting on a couch of crimson velvet, the whole being enclosed in a marble tomb with glass sides.

  Another glass box lifted our spirits, a display of virtual reality, silver-thread, Bollywood/Motown outfits: Teddy Boy jackets in shimmering sequins, aluminium shirts with pearl buttons, brothel creepers in scarlet suede. Wedding outfits for a resurrected Messiah. A comeback by Michael Barrymore. The window, strobed with red and green lightbulbs, was a shrine to swank: the idea that dressing up, posing in front of a cheval glass, makes the world a better place. Travolta Scientology for a sugary Day of the Dead.

  And, boy, did Commercial Road need it. Rag-trade pizzazz (Kabbalah chic) to offset the gloom of housing offices (with no houses on offer), congealed commerce, economic slippage, offices that defined problems by getting you to tick the box for your confession of choice: substance abuse, social and antisocial diseases, convictions and offences (potential or achieved). And, over it all, the hammer of sewing-machines, hiss of presses, racks of chainstore-multiples shrouded in plastic (like a row of hanged flashers): bad air, thin light, rain you felt but couldn’t see.