Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  There had to be better options than Grays. The pocked youth waited. The train, by this time, was unoccupied. He’d find a compartment and relieve himself, go back to his hole. You couldn’t see him surviving anywhere beyond the railway network. He was never going to present a ticket. He didn’t have the spring to leap a barrier. Or the clout to deck an official. He was a native, non-aspirational asylum denier. Not bright enough to compete with the car washers in the retail park, the ones with blue stubble who called themselves ‘Persians’. And always finished their swab-downs with: ‘Wanna sell? Very nice car. Very good in my country.’

  There was a moment when, despite their best efforts, this odd couple came face to face through the train window. The boy had a terrible suppurating wound running from below his right ear. He was clutching the gash with his left hand. Let it go and he’d spill out on the platform.

  Cora was doing it again. Responding to place by flattering fictional potentialities. The wound was the shadow of an arm. He was scratching, squeezing a spot. He wouldn’t take this train. He lived in the station. She could open her Conrad and impale herself, yet again, on the barbed wire of black print.

  The door hissed.

  In this way you live two lives. Over there, at Lublin, where life is hard, no doubt – and here in Stanford, Essex, on the banks of the Thames – under the spell of my words: for the one you have never seen, vous avez la douceur des Ombres et la splendeur de l’Inconnu!

  The stink of the swamp. It came with him onto the train, slept-in, sweat-stiff clothes. Cancelled adrenaline signals, fear.

  La douceur des Ombres.

  She wanted coffee to anneal the original perfume of the upholstery, the sprays the cleaning women used. Now she was nostalgic for that smell, furniture left too long in its own company – in too intimate a relationship with its protective wrapping. The boy was acrylic from the skin out, layered in accidents of fake wool, vests, waistcoats, rubber shoes with flapping soles.

  He took his place on the other side of the aisle and he muttered. He emptied his pockets of paper, scrumpled each item, individually; then lined up the paper balls and flicked them onto the seat that faced him.

  He mumbled. He swore. He shifted his position. Stood up, with nothing to put on the rack, sat down again. He reeked.

  Cora turned away. There was a vast block building, windowless, and a burning chimney pumping out white smoke. They had stopped again. Grass grew between the lines, delicate threads, tough clumps, bushes pushing through small yellow stones.

  This time she didn’t turn from the window. It couldn’t be worse. Any new passenger would improve the situation. The gibbering stopped, the smell reverted to an airline cocktail of dead air and randomly applied chemical agents.

  At last, as they pulled away, the river asserted its presence. New housing, yellowbrick estates. Yesterday there was nothing, now this: a town brought into existence by the happy conjunction of corrupt brownfield wastes and an orbital motorway. Flooded quarries were being colonised. Car parks like game reserves. Ribbon estates that looked exactly like the demolished asylums they had replaced. This is where urban exiles, divorced or otherwise damaged, come to roost. Who would pay good money to be incarcerated in a flatpack hutch? Cora, that’s who. Contracts exchanged, signature on cheque. Sight unseen. Purchased straight from the catalogue.

  Untitled, her book was taking shape. The research was on the laptop. Documents, files, interviews, photographs. Skeleton outline. It would write itself.

  She had to disembark. This was it, end of the line. A square brick tower, the word STATE stamped on it. She felt like reaching into her bag for a passport. Grays might work. It was more foreign than Poland. Disputed territory -like Gdansk. Grays belonged in the Baltic. All it lacked was the soundtrack, the verbigeration of the stinkhorn youth, the paper-crumbier.

  Doors stay shut until potential tourists do something about it, find the right button to press. She is ready to unzip her bag, put Conrad away. She waits for the other passengers to take themselves off, before walking into her new life.

  The bag wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t on the floor, under the table, on the rack. The freak from the quarry halt had lifted it. She had been suckered by that old muttering crazy routine. She shut him out and he’d timed it beautifully. Two stops, close together: on, off. Vanished into a nowhere of unmapped roads and poisoned creeks.

  She knotted the belt of her white raincoat, dug her hands into the pockets. The air was heady, soapy perfume from the factory, mud from the river. The sky was immense. All things considered, he had done her a favour. No baggage, no back story. A fresh set, a new chapter. The edge was there. She caught the ripple, fur growing down the sensitised ridges of her spine. The whiteness of her teeth. The horn of her nails, beneath that flaking black paint, curving into claws.

  She put on tinted glasses, to flatter the blood in her eyes. She prepared a smile for the ticket collector. It wasn’t required. He’d been replaced by non-functioning automated barriers. She strolled through, crossed the tracks, and headed for the Thames.

  I was never convinced that one of these nothing halts would have a bookshop. I overheard a conversation on the Saturday stall at Kingsland Waste, a runner flashing the contents of his bag to a punter, a woman in glasses. He didn’t drive. He scouted the same routes, Maidstone, Margate, Ramsgate, Deal, Southend Railway. Anywhere with plenty of stops, charity caves, old-folk-death dross. But what he showed, and the price he was letting it go for, made me think. He said: ‘Broadstairs.’ So I knew I should start on the other side of the Thames, mirror image. He wasn’t a very inventive liar. Simple code: Kent was Essex, Broadstairs meant Southend. Track down the line a couple of stops and I’d have it.

  Nada. Mid morning and I hadn’ t pulled out a single carrier bag. Books? I couldn’t find a shop. West Ham, Barking, Dagenham Dock. Shop? I couldn’t find the town, the centre. Who needed books? The entire zone was an obituary. Which was promising. The developers would be in soon, architects, glass hangers. When you locate trash Americana, you locate the road: burger pits, multiplexes, dealerships. But Essex/America has no history, no memory to recover. No disposables: pulp paperbacks, records, tapes, True Crime chapbooks. A landscape without text.

  I drank coffee, black, standing up in fast-food dumps with revoked franchises. I ran back to the railway. I was jumpy for a hit of print. I read bills of fare with random apostrophes. I cross-referenced graffiti. I scraped the shit off my trainers to find a label to interpret. I tried to make up words from broken matchsticks. This was a territory without a written language. I snatched crumpled betting-slips from the gutter and crammed them into my pockets to have something to read on the train. I paced the platform like a caged cougar.

  Dagenham was promising. The ghost of a town. Fat men in cars that aren’t going anywhere, parked on bricks. I don’t like cars. The hand on your head. The way you have to put your trust in a stranger. The certain knowledge that drivers don’t understand, in their locked-off trances, that every road is made up from discrete elements. It doesn’t fit together until you walk it. If you can drive to a bookshop, it’s not worth stopping. They’ll have caned it, the amateurs, the ones who pitch out, once a month, in Bloomsbury hotels.

  Dagenham had the elements, the dereliction, the deadbeats. The mix of Old Socialist estates, garden-city aspirations, cashmoney from the car factory. There were broad pavements, grease caffs, charity caves near the station. But it didn’t play. The town was waiting like a whipped cur for the next wave of exploitation. Two or three coffees, decaf diesel, and I was out of there.

  By Purfleet, I was desperate. To piss. To find one shelf of books. A random three yards of printed matter. Dust. Yellow paper saturated with cigarette smoke. The feeble annotations of failed writers. Keep your back to the suspicious owner – who can’t wait to engage you in conversation or to blank you. Laugh at your confounded expectations. Another sucker, hopping from foot to foot, wondering if he should carry on, or cut his losses an
d try elsewhere.

  I was running out of elsewheres.

  A train stopped. I hit the button, sprang aboard. Why didn’t it move? A woman had my seat. I almost jumped into her lap. I always swing left around the door, tuck in behind that glass shield. At worst, I can avoid the view from the window, read reflected script as it loops across the screen. The Estuary service is as close as I want to come to cinema. This woman had spread herself in my slot.

  I didn’t notice what she was reading. That’s how bad it was. I had to do something with my hands to stop myself grabbing for the book. It came from a library, most did, laminated plastic pressed over the original dust-wrapper.

  Fists knotting.

  I had to take out all the Dagenham refuse I’d collected, unwrap it, roll it up – as tight as it would go. Get rid. Flick flick flick. Paper bullets lodging in the sockets of her eyes. She had a smell that was the opposite of elsewhere. It made me dizzy. I had to breathe, gag on it. Bedroomy, lived in.

  We stopped in a flooded quarry. I had to move to another compartment, closer to our destination. Get a head start on her. She had one book, she might want more. She looked the kind, very sure of herself.

  The doors hissed, I ran.

  Secured my usual spot, unmolested, in the first carriage. My hand closed tight around the leather strap of my bag.

  What bag?

  It had been years since I’d travelled with such luxuries. Years since the weight of books had me leaning into the wind like a sailor. The bag had gone, along with its contents. I owned what I stood up in, borrowings, thefts, accidental purchases. The perfume had unhinged me. I’d lumbered myself with a bag I couldn’t keep, didn’t want. And I couldn’t conceive of any way to get shot of it.

  As soon as the train stopped, squealing, stink of brakes, I was away. Tensed finger on release button. I ducked behind a toilet Tardis and waited. She stood out, she knew where she was going – over the tracks and down towards the river. Unaccompanied by railway officials. There weren’t any on this line. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed. That’s how I lost my own bag. On a train. It was only, three or four days later, when I tried to pitch a few of the items I’d picked up in Hastings, that I remembered. I never replaced the bag, never made it to that level of operation.

  Bookshops, if any, will be parasitical on the station. I legged it, as fast as I could, in the opposite direction to the one the woman had taken. Away from the river. Even by Estuary standards, this was a hole. A labyrinthine shopping centre, a rat run for lab rats. Dead light. Blue chemical floods washing away piss streams. Wheelchairs and mechanised cripple-carriers surrounding an empty stage. Cardboard cutouts of forgotten entertainers.

  I found the right street: bent solicitors, West African dentists, table-tappers. Curtains drawn against daylight. Linoleum polish and cheap massage oil. An open door with access to a loan shark. A cracked glass panel, wired over, through which I could see the books -tightly packed, triple-stacked on rickety, freestanding units. The glass was too dirty to make out individual titles. A phone number on a card, but the ink had run.

  Out in the street, twisting my neck, I tried to see if it was worth kicking the door in. The owner would be taking the usual long lunch. He might be back to watch the sun go down behind the oil storage tanks.

  Among the ratty paperbacks and Book Club ballast, photocopied topographic views, was the unmistakable yellow cloth of an early printing, perhaps even a first edition, of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’d had dingy, exhausted copies through my hands but never dreamt of one as pristine as this. I didn’t need to read the red lettering. I knew. The only copy in Essex, in England, had come back to source, to the fringes of Purfleet, Count Dracula’s Carfax Abbey.

  Thursdays and Sundays Only. 12.30 to 5 p.m.

  I had arrived on the wrong day. I would have to come back another time. Or stay over. Find somewhere to kip, sleep rough. This was it. My one chance to get back on the ladder. In a cold sweat of excitement, I started walking. Keeping away from the river, heading out of town. Twenty-four hours to kill. Twenty-four hours to survive in Grays and environs.

  Very new bricks, yellow. Buildings in blocks. Rooms where no sentient being ever lived. Rooms without ghosts.

  Running water, the river. A hot shower needling flesh, splashing on tiles. Cora twists, contorts, trying to get her mouth around the tap. The muck and ooze of the shoreline. Lines of white globes, glowing palely, illuminating the empty avenues. Pools of light: the spaces between posts, along the perimeter fence, in a political prison.

  She swallows, greedily. The taste is metallic, silver. Her mouth furred with gritty deposits. But skin, wet from the shower, is unblemished. The grey she discovered, looking at her hands in the train, has faded; hot pink. She bares her teeth to the bathroom mirror and the bite is regular, no wolverine incisors, no fangs. The prickle of fur down the length of her spine was an illusion. A fiction.

  The thief had done her a favour. Taking possession of her clothes, documents, money, he became responsible for her memory. The laptop. Notes, translations, extracts. Everything had been transferred to that slim box. Now she was released from it, relieved of her past. Naked, in a room in which no human had ever slept, a riverside apartment, she slipped the envelope of identity.

  Her successes, such as they had been, derived from an unusual psychopathology. An over-intense identification with books she read, authors and their characters. Cora, the woman: emanation of place. That’s why she wanted to be close to Conrad, to the landscape in which he had lived.

  It is still more painful and hard to think of you than to realize my loss; if it was not so, I would pass in silence and darkness these first moments of suffering.

  She suffered. And it was bearable. Grays was the manifestation of anonymity. Her clothes were heaped on the floor. Not a stick of furniture. No blankets, no bed. No towel. She dries herself on her slip. The room is warm. She has no control over the heating, the voices. Still damp, she puts on a man’s white shirt. She can’t remember where it came from. She holds it up to her face. She sniffs, flinches. She sits, arms around knees, looking out of the window. At the darkening river. The river which is becoming darkness, becoming itself.

  From the river, midstream: one by one, lights in scattered windows go out. Faked balconies shine.

  Most of the afternoon, and the early evening, was spent on the road; backwards and forwards between the bookshop and the housing development on the lip of the quarry. If anyone wants to update William Hope Hodgson’s horror tale, The House on the Borderland, this is the place: pit, swamp, congeries of red-brick hutches under a massive sky. A puff of wind and they’re gone.

  I stayed out of the town centre, a chance of bumping into the woman – but I couldn’t risk letting another runner get at the bookshop before I snaffled the Stoker, the gold brick Dracula. So I trudged alongside heavy traffic, chemical works chucking out filthy smoke, flags shredded by wind, storm fences protecting the wildlife of a quarry; protecting the new development. Three or four cul-de-sacs went up while I walked. The Grays satellite was turning into a garden city without gardens. Every time I reached the first house, it was closer to the centre. It was new but it looked the same as all the others. There were more burnt-out cars on the verges of deserted avenues. Nobody bothered with ‘Police Aware’ notices.

  Suddenly, I was exhausted. I had a bag, I was respectable: I could try for a room in a pub. The choice was easy. There was only one, Mexican/Californian; desert plants stripped by salt, battered by river winds, sticky with oil droplets. They took my money, in advance. They gave me a key. And a hard look. The manager said something to the barmaid and they laughed.

  I went out later to look for food, chips, burger, a foil carton. The settlement was inhabited by youngish women with dogs, children at an awkward age. There were no men, no families. No shops or fast-food outlets. ‘Try Lakeside,’ a kid told me. But I didn’t have time for fishing.

  I brought crisps and peanuts up from the bar. And I drank cloudy wate
r from a glass with a lumpy residue of Steradent or some other fixative on the bottom. Salty food left me hungrier than before and stung the raw sides of my cheeks, which I had the habit of chewing when I was nervous. The Grays bookshop had me spitting blood and gristle.

  I stretched out on the bed, the yellow canvas bag beside me. I didn’t take off my clothes or roll back the covers. I wouldn’t sleep. I put my arm around the bag, felt its bumps, tried to guess what was inside. Rather disturbing images assailed me, half-dreams. I always keep the light on at night – and also, in the unusual circumstances of finding myself in a hotel room, the television. Sound down. I like that blue glow and ignore the screen.

  Something inside the bag moved. The woman from the train. Her head. Talking. I could hear her banging on about pain and loss. Meanwhile, I could see one of the politicians, a minister, being grilled on television. Nodding, smiling. Using his hands. Dark rims under his armpits. And I could hear the woman’s voice: demanding to be let out. Let out? Keep this up and I’ll chuck her through the window of one of the trashed cars. Into the swamp.

  I touched the zip and it opened like a wound. Like, as I’m forced to picture, the back of a dress. The smell. Her presence is overwhelming. Underwear, nightclothes, a pair of skirts, stockings. Sponge bag, notecase. A metallic box that might be a portable computer. All of it grey. Every single item. I lay them out on the bed. I stand up, move away.

  I don’t like that box. I put it in the bag, zip it. Carry the bag to the cupboard. Close the door. I can still hear her voice: Before the sun rises, the dew will have destroyed the eyes.

  I turn up the sound on the television. I go into the bathroom and run the taps. When I come back to the bedroom, the voice has stopped – but her clothes are arranged with great precision on naked sheets. The coverlet has been folded and placed on a chair. The red blanket and top sheet stripped back. A grey dress, underclothes on top, Italian shoes. With ice-pick heels.