Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘Oh dearie dearie me,’ he said. Disturbed by areas where pylon forests, mobile phone masts and shooting ranges had the bath plug spinning. ‘Sewage is prolific.’

  My stomach rumbled.

  ‘Don’t take this wrong,’ he patted my shoulder, ‘you might be asking too much too soon.’ The pendulum reeled over Rainham Marshes like a drunk from a Clerkenwell club hitting Sunday morning sunshine.

  Folgate was tall for the Estuary, but hunched from years in the machine shop, the noise. Track with her excited hair towered over him. Beady rain, which had been falling for days, the kind Londoners don’t notice or acknowledge, did wild things to her rampant thatch: it knotted, curled. Red as a Purfleet dawn over the soap factory. It kept the drizzle off the collar of her donkey jacket. She was smiling, as always. Moist-lipped, a Styrofoam beaker of coffee in her hand. The diluted aroma nudged us on towards the road, that phantom Americana of multiplexes (you can’t access), burger joints (where Lee Bowyer hurled chairs) and Wal-Mart imitations with permanent fire sales.

  ‘Danny, Hannah. Track, Alan,’ I blurted. Introducing the already introduced. And getting it completely wrong, confusing Track with my second wife and Danny with a correspondent from Romford who had been very helpful in downloading Essex material from his computer: the Bascule Bridge over the River Roding at Barking Creek, Hadleigh Castle, conspiracy stuff about Templars at Danbury. Facts kept leaking into my fictions, the borders were insecure. Ask me how I recognised Track, what made her unique, and I couldn’t tell you. The story required her presence and she obliged.

  Is it a common experience? You come across an unexplained boulder in an urban backwater and you think: ‘This needs a dowser,’ You get home, there’s a letter waiting on the mat – lined paper, blue Biro.

  I have been told by a friend youre thinking of doing the A13 next can I help. I am a dowser I will meet and show you its very simple. I’m not working everyday next week is good. I must say Andy I enjoy your books about London when they are real and not too fancyful. Anyway Andy good luck mate.

  Ponder a local mystery, the locked room of David Rodinsky, and the phone will ring: a woman with the death certificate, the location of the grave. It gets to the point where you daren’t make a note, jot down a bright idea. That’s why I gave up, years ago, any attempt to publish fiction. I understood that you had to be an established journalist, dictating a column, inventing contrary opinions, faking outrage, to get a novel published. I hung around too long doing the inches on pit bulls, CCTV, gangsters’ tailoring. Novelty’s the game, fresh blood. Ten years of sponsored discontent, sub-Orwellian engagement with society and its ills, sidebars on Big Brother and the Millennium Dome, left me in limbo. Commissioning editors lost interest. Hacks I’d trashed took their revenge. I should have recycled decades of research, foot-slogging expeditions up the Lea Valley and along the Thames, as fiction. But it was too late. I was as old as I looked. No serious convictions, no previous. No family. Never appeared on TV.

  I envied Track. She did what she did, not caring if anybody came to the studio, if there were no exhibitions, no sales. The woman couldn’t stop grinning. The only problem was finding space in which to work, putting up with constant relocation; being dispersed, deeper and deeper into Essex. Brick Lane to a Portakabin on Rainham Marshes in three years.

  Danny Folgate, master of apparatus, was another contented human. His art was a craft, no editors or producers to appease. No foremen, union reps, cards to punch. Dowsing was an explanation of a liminal world that commuters and salaried slaves had no time to notice.

  I read the A13 as a semi-celestial highway, a Blakean transit to a higher mythology, a landscape of sacred mounds and memories. (And endured the derision that brought.)

  Danny smiled. ‘The road’s an irritant, really. More noise and nuisance than anything else. When you live on it.’

  I had to interrogate the Nicholson myself, Danny insisted. ‘Controlled subjectivity’ was the name of the game.

  ‘Don’t take the map too personal, mate. Picture yourself walking through the symbols. Ask the right questions and the answers will come.’

  The only question that came to me, quartering pp. 58–9 of my Greater London Street Atlas, was: ‘why?’ Why was the A13 as green as the artichoke from Hannah’s dream? Crossroads, running south towards the Thames, were yellow. Understandably. Piss troughs. Rhomboid parks and playing fields were diamonds dropped in a swamp. And, south of the road, was an ice cap, blank as Antarctica. The terra incognita of Beckton and the Eastbury Levels. Waiting for the spoilers, the exploiters, spivs and politicians who couldn’t abide white space.

  I dowsed with a milky-green serpent stone, dangling on a bath chain, while they hired professionals to interrogate satellite scans, the virtual Estuary. The final frontier: Thames Gateway. New London: stilt cities, excavated chalk quarries, airstrips, amnesia. The beginning of the ultimate exodus. When the centre implodes and the fringes are populated with the Undead, dreaming of lottery wins and bright-blue seas.

  ‘I’m concerned, you know. For Ollie. I mean, what kind of place is Hastings? At night? For a woman with a camera?’

  I dropped back alongside Track, allowing Danny to follow his W-rod down the broad pavements of Commercial Road; she was off the pace, hands in coat pocket, no camera. I caught her staring at a bald mannequin in a wholesaler’s window. The product was much more eccentric than anything on Brick Lane: no leather, no leopard spots, no Gulf War T-shirts.

  The payback for movement, the launching of our quest, was a break in the cloud cover, low sun over the river, splintering on tall buildings, reflected in glass: tired stone brought to life. Warmth in the blood. A glint of silver where the grey paint was wearing away on Danny’s colour disk.

  ‘White is very strong here,’ he said. ‘Holy water. A chain of churches and statues. Virgin Mary, Clem Attlee.’

  Water, apparently, was the medium of memory. Molecules of memory remained even when water had been purified. Like a beam of sunlight, I thought, passing through a stained-glass window.

  ‘I tried calling Ollie last night,’ Track said. ‘And again this morning, nothing. She’s hooked up with that freak, I’m sure of it, the gangster boy.’

  Socialist ghosts for Danny. His childhood: rubble and unexploded bombs. A world without fruit and colour. Without cars. Lorries from the docks, the rumble, as the remembered soundtrack. The benevolent invasion of the borough by social planners, visionaries inspired by Abercrombie’s 1943 County of London plan; foldout maps as pure as anything by Ben Nicholson or Mondrian. Neo-Romantic abstractions in thirsty greens and purples. Open Space plans. Diagrammatic proposals. Ring roads. Hospitals. Schools. Allotments. London squares: The squares should be open to full public use. The removal of the railings, as a war-time measure, has brought them into the life of the community and destroyed their isolation.

  Space around buildings. Segregation of housing from industry. Combining rest with culture: The Russians have adopted this principle of combining mental and physical recreation in what they call Parks of Rest and Culture. The largest one in Moscow is particularly noteworthy for its children’s section, which includes a children’s theatre, cinema, experimental workshops and a large-scale village.

  River-front amenities. Direct action in deficient areas. To conclude: a main task in the immediate post-war years will be to provide new open spaces in those areas which at present have an amount totally inadequate for the needs of the inhabitants – the East End, Islington, Finsbury and the south bank boroughs.

  The Las Vegas pyramid on the summit of Canary Wharf tower winked at such aspirations. Its near neighbour, HSBC, stole sunlight. But the names were still there, embedded in low-level flats, schools, projects: Lansbury, Toynbee. A black statue of Attlee outside Limehouse Library. They mean nothing to Docklands commuters for whom the distance between this and that is so much dead time; place as an irritant, figures ticking on the clock. Only grizzled socialists like Danny paid their dues, a wistful nod in pa
ssage. Limehouse topography, swept up in the dirty backdraught of the A13, was profoundly schizophrenic.

  When I kept pace with Danny, I saw this stretch of Commercial Road as a tracking shot from one of the Soviet realists, a camera train, Dziga Vertov: sailors’ dormitories, reading rooms, padlocked swimming pools (with an Eisenstein montage of culture hero statues, cranes, demolition balls, high-contrast clouds).

  If I fell back to chat with Track, I saw threat in hooded lurkers in doorways, opium dens out of Sax Rohmer, needles underfoot, wrecked bus shelters, burnt-out cars.

  Left to myself, I lifted my camera to record graffiti: RIPPER VICTIM WAS VICE GIRL. DRAMATIC ESCAPE IN GUN SIEGE. Long shadows behind a chainlink fence: a discontinued car-valeting operation, where a group of camera-shy Balkan men were doing something suspect with a white van. Indoctrinated by TV cop shows, you might read the situation as: kidnap, body cargo, kiddie prostitution.

  My camera lacked a long lens. I could go wide or panoramic but I couldn’t do close-ups. I logged saints, angels, madonnas, north-facing, on the roofs and pediments and porticoes of ugly, brick churches. Irish immigration was strong here and the traces remained in neighbourhood politics and pubs.

  My most exciting discovery was a blue plaque for VICTOR ANDREW D’BIERE McLAGLEN. BOXER & OSCAR WINNER FOR THE INFORMER. One of john Ford’s troop of drinkers and Beverly Hills saddle-bums. The cavalry sergeant on the edge of retirement. Plum-nosed brawler, kisser of ladies’ handkerchiefs. The bully’s maudlin tears for the thing he has crushed. Victor McLaglen: honoured, unforgotten, beside a road of drivers wanting to be elsewhere.

  John Wayne, camping on a renovated minesweeper, was ferried to the set of his latest western in a military helicopter, to pistol-whip Dennis Hopper as a pinko fairy. Other sclerotic cowboys from the poker school – Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens – were busy gumming charred steaks at Richard Nixon’s benefit barbecue. And Victor McLaglen, god’s Irishman, got his blue plaque in Limehouse.

  A nice fable. Until I discovered that McLaglen had in fact been born in Tunbridge Wells. Print the legend.

  The Stephen Hawking Special Needs Primary, a collection of haunted huts set back from the road: that’s the next one into the notebook. Before Track comes back to life, back to the Ollie theme, when she spots a pub called the White Swan.

  ‘Gimme a camera. Quick.’

  An ordinary boozer, foursquare to the road, with a royal-blue turret addition, plasterboard windows.

  ‘What’s special about the Swan?’

  ‘Ollie used to hang out with that creep Reo. Reo Sleeman. Reo knew his brother and the big guy, O’Driscoll, wouldn’t show up in a gay bar.’

  The Irish and the gays weren’t mutually exclusive. I’d seen O’Driscoll and his mate Phil Tock, heavies I recognised from group shots in one of James Colvin’s books, drinking with art faces and Kray-chasers in black shirts. Limehouse families like the Cashmans had a foot in both camps.

  ‘I warned her, begged her, but she would give that scumbag another chance. The night Michael Barrymore came out. Tabloid guys three-deep at the bar. Reo was so panicky. Brother Alby was heading for a nasty shock with his cornflakes next morning. Ollie was oblivious of the whole scene.’

  All in all, Track reckoned, the Swan was a good thing. Jimmy Seed was a regular. Top cabaret. Great bands. Lock-ins every night. The East End as they like to sell it, a right knees-up. You didn’t know who you were shouting at over the decibels, hoodlum, painter, electrician, rapper or media drone slumming from Canary Wharf.

  Reo was jumpy. Sucking plastic water. Lifting his T-shirt, slapping his abs, tweaking his pecs. Rocking his head in his hands – trying to hear the sound of the sea inside. Ollie was dancing, by herself. Talking to anybody who talked to her.

  Ollie didn’t catch the incident.

  The bruiser, coming out of the Gents, rubbing a finger across his nose, zipping up, who smacked right into Reo, knocking him off his stool. He was about to stomp the little shit for disrespect – when there was a moment of hideous mutual recognition. Reo, reacting first, grabs Ollie, runs. The other man is too far gone to realise, immediately, what he’s done, who the slag is. Alby’s kid, his brother.

  The shirtlifter was Phil Tock, worst of the bunch. Reo clocks him, clocks his chums, a pair of fairies with big grins and milky moustaches.

  ‘What did you say to Ollie?’

  ‘I told her to put right in for the Hastings gig. Like now. No time to pack. The coast, I’d drive.’

  After Limehouse Church – neutralised, sandblasted to a heritage sheen – we tramped de Chirico avenues. Statues of forgotten men. The Evil Empire glittered on the horizon: cloud-reflecting panels on space-launch towers. Elevated railways. Diverted traffic. Inky black on the dowser’s colour disk. Danny trembled, his decency affronted by cities that appeared overnight, out of the swamp, offering nothing to the now isolated holdouts in their doomed terraces and council blocks.

  We were the kind, Danny and I, to give nostalgia a bad name. Track was amused by our growls and mutters.

  ‘You love this shit. Trading horror stories. Without Blair and Livingstone, Conran and Foster, the landscape rippers, you’d wind up sharing a couch in an old folks’ home, plaid rug over the knees, watching reruns of Fools and Horses.’

  She was right. Track was so much younger than we had ever been; alert, amused, ready and willing to be unsurprised. I might yet propose to her, wife number three. Treat her to a haircut. And a bar of soap.

  The park adjoining Trinity Methodist Church in Poplar featured a ravished memorial that reminded Track of Elizabeth Frink. A double-Ozymandias: four vast and trunkless legs of cancerous concrete, peeled to the iron sinews, stood in the desert. On a shallow plinth. A wonder that required our full attention, an art work that had come into its own through its dissolution.

  ‘The Wrestlers,’ Track called it.

  The floor beneath the swaying gladiators was the kind of delicate green that calls for a decade of ill-directed piss. Feet were hooves, stripped of skin – as in an anatomical plate. The pubic thatch was grass. Acid rain, road grit and all-enveloping low-grade pollution had collaborated with the anonymous artist on an expressionist masterpiece, 3-D Grünewald: buboed, leprous, raw. Flesh as wood. As bone. Spraypaint leaked its black treacle from gashed groin and clenched rump.

  Two large men, dog walkers, told us that the sculpture was a tribute to the nobility of labour, to men who had given their working lives to the West India Docks. I didn’t need the lecture on the good old days of fiddles in export sheds, iffy manifests, contraband, insurance scams. I’d survived a cold winter, blacklegging, in railway yards at Stratford East, when container cowboys choked the last breath from dockers who had basked too long in restrictive practices. Enoch-supporting chants and inherited jobs for life.

  ‘We knew what graft was, mate.’

  So did I. ‘The acquisition of money, gain or advantage by dishonest, unfair or illegal means.’

  Graft? I’d shaved every inch of this park, along with the Catholic church behind it, madonnas on mounds. I’d shovelled dog dirt into black bags and harvested slippery condoms like so many fallen leaves.

  Back on the A13, now rebranded as East India Dock Road, we went with the romance, the myths. Anchors and hostels. Ghost ships in relief on granite plinths. Richard Green (1866) with bronze dog. Tamed, domesticated and sniffing at his crotch. (When ownership of the East India Docks was divided in 1842, the Green family took the whole of the Silvertown side.)

  Sunstreaks flashed from Erno Goldfinger’s tower at the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel. Approach roads spurned Poplar vernacular for the soulless Esperanto of US colonialism: off-highway blocks parasitical on Docklands. Buildings gave nothing away, sporting obligatory shades: Jack Nicholson returning to the Connaught in a cab.

  A crisp shadow slanted across herringbone flags, kerb, cambered tarmac: a curtain of brown dust between old London and the clip-on Blade Runner set (in which everything was pro
visional, subject to immediate cancellation). A yard or so of this division between darkness and light was taken up by a granite rectangle, set flush to the pavement (where nobody walked). ‘THE GREENWICH MERIDIAN LINE,’ it said. ‘ZERO LONGITUDE ESTABLISHED 1884.’

  ‘So this is all that’s left of it,’ I thought. ‘Enough thread to wrap a parcel.’

  Before I could stoop to capture the memorial tablet, my light was stolen by a large car. I waited. The car didn’t budge, it parked itself firmly across white paint that spelt out: A13. A mud-spattered Volvo, the kind I’d have described, seeing it in Whitechapel or Kingsland Road, as ‘short-haul Hasidic’. Solitary driver in black coat and hat, wholesale transport. Not this time. A major ruck was in progress. The driver, arms waving, leapt out into the traffic.

  ‘I’m supposed to find this fucking hotel? Yes, I can see it – on the other side of the dual carriageway, the crash barrier, you stupid bitch. No gap, darling. We’ve been through the Blackwall Tunnel twice. And over the Dartford Bridge. Get out, kids. All out, out. We’ll walk. Just leave it. Leave it. Let them tow the bugger away.’

  Clutching black bags, rubbish sacks which dragged along the ground and split, depositing clothes and toys all over the A13, straggled a column of small kids. An attractively spacey mother in beach wear, two coats, pink boots, dark glasses. And Jimmy Seed: distraught. Refugee plutocrats. Unhoused.

  As he explained. When we helped him with books and wine and PlayStation and marine watercolours by other artists. The family Seed were temporarily banished from their new home. Property millionaires without a pot to piss in and nowhere to camp. The market, paintings for riverside flats, had peaked, then plunged. Teams of builders (electricians, tea-brewers, fetchers of bacon sandwiches) had trashed their latest acquisition, a Bethnal Green synagogue. The roof was off. Rooms were filled with rubble. There was no water and plenty of sewage. The Seeds had been forced to emigrate to the Travelodge. Where Jimmy could knock out a road triptych to trade against a couple of Victorian terraces in Hull.