Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  It occurred to me that – as the water was running – I should avail myself of the shower. It wasn’t unpleasant. I stayed there for some time. Until, despite the warmth of the water, I began to shiver. I wrapped myself in a towel and sat on the seat of the toilet. I could spend the night here. Take off as soon as it gets light, find a café in Grays. Hang around the shopping centre until the bookman turns up.

  I needed sleep. A few hours should do it. Shut my eyes, forget about the woman and the train. I’d worked myself up about the Stoker, a real book after all these months. I returned to the bedroom. The canvas bag was on the chair, zipped. I opened the cupboard. It was empty. The coverlet was back in place.

  I made myself a cup of coffee. It wasn’t bad. You could almost taste it, the genuine aroma. The cup in your hands, my hands. I lifted the bag off the chair, turned it to face the window. The quarry, at night, had a kind of beauty. Street lights where there aren’t any streets. An Umbrian hill town. A red glow, low on the horizon; the beams of cars driving through clouds towards the suspension bridge.

  I turned back the sheets. Slid in, naked. Tried to find a tolerable position in which to pretend to sleep. I twisted and turned on the nylon pillow. Something stuck to my cheek, a sheet of paper, a message from the management. I felt for the bedside lamp.

  It was a glove. A grey leather glove. I sat up, wide awake. There were two gloves, one on either side of me. Except that they weren’t gloves, not even the stretchy surgical kind. The condom-fingered ones with which forensic pathologists pick maggots from a wound. These gloves were marked with veins and downy hair. They had fingernails. Peeled hands. I pulled them on, the left first (weaker, female) and then the right. And they took, the graft took. My hands, up to the prominent bulbs of my wrist bone, were grey. And smooth. And cool as water.

  She misread him badly, the thief. Cora started when the bell rang. He should never have been let in. She was paying for security. These flats were supposed to be tighter than Paddington Green. He didn’t generate enough energy to register on CCTV. He was at the door, bag lifted in front of his face, to ward off the blow.

  ‘So sorry. Used to have one just like it. Your papers and stuff, inside. Address. Didn’t touch. Came straight round.’

  ‘I don’t have an address. I hadn’t decided to stay – until you stole my bag, leaving me no choice.’

  ‘I’m trying to explain. I’m a book-dealer …’

  It was the middle of the night, early morning. Neither of them had a watch. Dormitory noises from other units, snoring and snorting. The walls were cardboard. You could hear dogs fart in their sleep. Milk pouring into thick glass.

  She’d been quite wrong about him. He wasn’t young. Bad skin doesn’t fade with age, it weathers. Greasy hair stays greasy however many times you run your head under a cold tap.

  ‘Must be important, I thought, the computer.’

  ‘You said you didn’t touch the bag.’

  ‘Weight. I felt the outline. Had to carry it from – ’

  ‘You touched it? Felt it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Played with it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Open it now. Show me what you did.’

  Rocking on his heels, he hugged the bag. It had been a mistake coming here. No colour in his skin. Nightdirt sticky in the corners of his eyes. She was only wearing a shirt. She scratched at the inside of her thigh.

  ‘Take it out.’

  I shall see Mr Wells in a few days and I will ask him on your behalf for permission to translate The Invisible Man into Polish.

  For years, Conrad referred to his neighbour, Mr Wells of Sandgate, as L’Uomo Invisible. He never worked out how the front door at Spade House opened without the intervention of any human agency. As he stood there, with Hueffer, waiting to announce their literary collaboration.

  Cora didn’t want him here. She wanted to be invisible, to stay in this room for ever.

  Reluctantly, the man set the bag down. The floor looked as if it were made from wood, but it was wood-print linoleum. The riverscape had already been translated into Polish. Her hand closing around her wrist closed on nothing. She folded her arms, anticipating his furtive glance at her breasts. She ordered him, again, to open the bag.

  He lifted out the laptop. He wouldn’t touch her clothes. She raised the lid, activated it. Checked her files.

  ‘Go to the bathroom,’ she said. He froze. He had been backing towards the door. ‘Take the bag. Dress yourself in the clothes. And don’t tear them. Take your time.’

  Her hands on the computer keys, skin rough as an Aberdeen fishwife. A transplant that hadn’t taken. The sun climbing above low clouds, over Northfleet and Gravesend – where, in the old days, East Indiamen waited on the tide.

  In her bag, a smaller bag: lipstick, toothpaste, powder, tweezers, razor. An old-fashioned, barber-shop cutthroat.

  She unbuttoned her shirt, took it off. Wrapped it like a surgical dressing around her arm. He would be standing in the bathroom, wearing the grey dress and the grey shoes. Her things on the glass shelf.

  Her naked feet made a sucking sound. The acoustic memory of each footfall lingering in a brief interval of silence.

  She closed the bathroom door behind her. When the steam cleared from the mirror she would see her own face. Her face over his shoulder. The sharp bones. The lifted razor.

  On the laptop screen, in the empty flat, with the view of the river, words appeared. I must close,’ it is already late. I only hear the bells of the ships on the river, which remind me how far I am from you all.

  And then the photograph, the moist black eyes of the Polish writer. And then the river.

  The Highland Forest

  ‘What a freak show!’

  Start the day with a quote from the film Performance. Clear the throat, lower lip under upper teeth, tongue pressing: a rare line of dialogue attributed to David Litvinoff by cultural historian David Seabrook. Pertinent, I thought. On the button. As we wave goodbye to the Travelodge. Horizontal blight, vertical squalor. A rep’s face in every window.

  Breakfast skipped (no loss), burdens shouldered, we beat the road rats into the car park. Danny was waiting by the Volvo – where I left a note for Jimmy Seed, outlining our future plans (unreal as a premature synopsis punted to a publisher). Dagenham, Rainham Marshes, Purfleet and the M25: follow us. See you – camera, cash, car – at the ibis, West Thurrock. Book us in and I’ll treat you to enough soap factories, pylon farms, railways, dredgers, oil tanks, bridges, to buy up most of Margate (Cliftonville, if you’re picky).

  Movement was what Danny craved, brass rods pulling him eastward to the vortex of the alp, the triangulation of sacred sites nominated by the writer C.E. Street in his geomantic prophecy: Earthstars, The Visionary Landscape. Part One: London, City of Revelation. The key sites were: St Mary the Virgin (East Ham), Barking Abbey, the ‘lost’ Miller’s Well (top corner of Central Park). We didn’t have the photographer with us, the lanky skinhead who had collaborated on my Thames book, so we were spared that terrible old Cockney joke about Chris Street being ‘three stops beyond Plaistow’.

  Bow Creek – its backwaters, reed beds, uncivil engineering – was the mess, the metaphor. And metaphors were what I wanted to discuss with Track. Metaphors employed by the Fountain woman. But not yet, leave it until we get a few miles under our belts. I had to sort out my own difficulties: first, why Fountain’s story was so disturbing.

  She hadn’t written it without help, obviously. The tone was masculine, sure of itself, its pretensions; grammatically suspect, lexicologically challenged, topographically slapdash. A slash-and-burn stylist. But haunted: by missing fathers – Bram Stoker, S. Freud and Joseph Conrad. Clunky hints, based on autobiographical elements Track might be able to clarify, about writing and stalking, literary bloodsucking, gender, disguise. It was a tale that never worked through its confusions, never lifted from dirty realism to science fiction. Did Fountain understand, for example, the William Burroughs fixation with
‘grays’, as X File beings? Soft-skinned and seamless, the aliens among us. Returned dead. Doubtful, very doubtful. Her title, like much of the story, was accident.

  Fountain wrote like a man envious of the vim and attack, the linguistic inventiveness, of the new lesbian novelists from the Celtic fringe. The praise heaped upon them, the advances. The film adaptations.

  But it was the Conrad aspect that pricked me. Fountain had somehow got wind of my researched (incomplete, unpublished) essay on Conrad in Hackney. Her exaggerated prose, its shotgun sarcasm, jump-cuts, psychotic syntax, was an offensive parody of a manner of composition I’d left behind. But what I really wanted to know was where she’d come across the story of the Dracula first edition in Grays? Ruth was the only confidante who knew about that, pillow talk, table talk, kitchen chats while pots bubbled; gossip overheard one Saturday morning in Kingsland Waste Market.

  Ergo, Ruth knew Marina Fountain. Ruth was using the Fountain woman as a way of communicating with me. Love letters, if you like, at one remove. Fountain had been given my Conrad files. She had been dosed on newspaper cuttings, photocopied articles, bought a ticket into the Estuary. Now she was out there, ahead of us, inventing fictions that anticipated – and, in some senses, neutralised – my more measured psychogeographical reports.

  I had a powerful urge to get on a train. Marina Fountain on the platform at Fenchurch Street, a copy of Conrad’s Polish Background, edited by Zdzislaw Najder, in her shoulder bag, setting off for the great unknown, for riverside Grays, is a very seductive image. The opening of a film. Red eyes, dark glasses. White raincoat. Isabelle Adjani. Anna Karina. Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. André Delvaux’s Rendez-vous à Bray. Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (‘A series of train rides, a series of tales … A moving eroticism stemming from the everyday’). The woman had hooked me. I would follow her, vamped, vampirised, into the badlands. Into yellowback fiction. Just as soon as I could get shot of my fellow Beckton Alp pilgrims.

  Danny drew our attention to a gateway. This, he informed us, was the true beginning of the non-metropolitan section of the A13. Grey concrete, flattened obelisk slabs with inset panels: the gate looked like the entrance to a forbidden city. The panels, I noticed, featured the caduceus symbol (my symbol, Mercury): twin serpents writhing around a magician’s staff. Arthur Norton, my great-grandfather, left me his gold caduceus tie-pin (stolen in my first burglary, two weeks after arriving in Hackney). Three of his sons, by way of Aberdeen University, became medical men. Was this miraculous survivor, Babylonian fragment among craters and future walkways, a Crowleyite token from the chthonic city?

  ‘Brunswick Power Station,’ said Danny. ‘Their logo, Mercury for energy. The rest’s rubble. Derek Jarman, he was fond of this stretch, Canning Town, Silvertown. Helped him, didn’t I, find locations for The Last of England? The Millennium Mills, remember? From the free train, Dalston to Woolwich North?’

  I remembered the photograph, Jarman’s production still. Hooded figures, holding flares, out on the river. I remembered the river. Long shadows of bomber squadrons coming in from the Estuary. The credits for EastEnders spontaneously combusting: water on fire, exploding gas-holders at Beckton.

  Conrad, according to Ford Madox Ford, who tended to exaggerate these things, arrived in London by river; awed by wealth and dirt, miles of deep-water docks, spice warehouses, Portland stone steeples, the cargoes of the world. London was two cities, riverine development, narrow and dense, and that late addition, the City. Offices in which to pick up your wages, sign on for the next voyage out.

  In fact, Conrad arrived by train. Lowestoft to London; first steps on English soil, 10 June 1878. Rivers and railways, they never fail: there is no better method of penetrating the mysteries of our Mithraic capital. The privileged stutter of privatised transport, views from embankments into secret spaces; constant metamorphosis, industry to park, synagogue to satanic tower. The breeze, the light, the stink of the slurry-coloured Thames: history too rich to be trashed by developers and explainers.

  From his first marital establishment at Stanford-le-Hope, downwind from the Travelodge, Conrad liked nothing better than messing about in boats, dressing as an old salt, powerful shoulders, long arms, buttons and beard; out on the river in company with the former merchant seaman George Hope (dedicatee of Lord Jim). Hope, one of the exile’s few English friends, brought him to the Estuary. Now a director of several companies, the officer who had sailed on the Duke of Sutherland, three years before Conrad, offered financial advice to the newly married immigrant: the impoverished author (word-slave) who was, as yet, unreleased from his status as a French-speaking, Polish-born, Russian subject. And premature Essex man.

  A semi-detached villa in Victoria Road. Forget the Thames. Victoria Road, Stanford-le-Hope, offers unrivalled prospects of the A13 (the Gas Valve Compound) – and the A1014 (Manorway) as it swerves from the junction to the Shell Haven Oil Refineries at Coryton. Stanford-le-Hope has declined, since Conrad’s day, to a huddled extension of St Clere’s Golf Course; a strip of meaningless ribbon development at the margin of the fabulously named Balstonia (a petrochemical oasis).

  Ever restless, anxious and melancholy, subject to gout, Conrad relocated from his jerrybuilt rabbit hutch’ to Ivy Walls Farm on the edge of Mucking Marshes.

  The glamour’s off.

  ‘The glamour’s off,’ Marlow says in Heart of Darkness. Maps have lost their attraction (since they found their way, as a metaphor, into the mouth of George W. Bush). But Conrad appreciated them, their fictional possibilities. A shop-window in Fleet Street. Author peering over his character’s shoulder, nudging him aside to get a better look at ‘the biggest, the most blank’ space on the map of Africa. A space now filled by busybodies and exploiters, the riffraff of Europe. Filled with rivers.

  I visited, every time I walked towards Tower Bridge, a window of my own in the Minories: nautical charts, oceans of numbers. The conjunction, mathematical symbols and river, was provocative. Voyages I would never make, voyages I remembered (without having experienced them): Arthur Norton sailing from Tilbury on The Albemarle, 1858, bound for Colombo. The map he drew, in blood-brown ink, each week concluded with an X: ‘Total distance 1,400 miles.’

  The white of the map, that’s what seduces us. Arthur’s speculative, foldout version of Peru, the Pampa Hermosa, white as meat in a bottle. Red lines representing Arthur’s route, Chicla, Banios, Cerro de Pasco, Huarica, Ambo, Huanuco. River-threads like skull cracks, brain fissures. The hours I spent poring over Arthur Norton’s unreliable chart. The days on the road, heading for Beckton Alp, Creekmouth, the Eastbury Levels, London’s empty quarter. Or so it appeared. At a distance. The map-makers found nothing to colour between the Royal Albert Dock in North Woolwich and Ferry Road in Tilbury. The last of England. The empty Custom House, railway terminal, disembarkation sheds. Deserted platforms and overgrown railway tracks.

  It’s not that there’s nothing of consequence in the white bits, geographers are too lazy to see it: rifle ranges, landfill mountains, wild nature enveloping concrete, oil-spill on the shoreline, rock pools in threadbare tyres.

  Conrad saw it, loved it. Going out on the river, in the yawl Nellie with G.F.W. Hope, kept him sane. (Fountain knew about this. That’s why she picked Grays. For the marina, the squadrons of sailing craft, riding at anchor, in the lee of that distant monster, the Tilbury Power Station. And Hope himself, she knew about him. His name: George Fountaine Weare Hope. Fountaine Hope! Weary Hope! Marina was writing me a letter in code. And I was beginning to crack it. As soon as possible, I would make for Fenchurch Street, repeat her fictional journey.)

  Hope and his friends, the accountant W.B. Keen and the lawyer T.L. Mears, we are told, become models for the frame-narrative of Heart of Darkness. Waiting on the tide at Gravesend, mother river, in the abeyance of twilight, spinning yarns. In parts of the map that are not overwritten, worked out, everything bleeds into everything, sea and sky, truth and legend; defences are down, faces merge
into protective beards. We confess, we lie. We make up stories.

  The essay I abandoned, as an act of homage, Conradian lethargy, elective malaria, opened in Hackney. Voice-over by Michael Caine at his most soporific. (Try for Caine, get Bob Hoskins.) Not a lot of people know that Joseph Conrad, taking London as the base for his life in the British Merchant Service, found lodgings in Stoke Newington. May 1880. Dynevor Road. Dynevor Road, a tributary running to the west of Stoke Newington High Street, is a near neighbour of Evering Road (running to the east). Hackney’s own heart of darkness: the basement flat of hostess ‘Blonde Carol’, where Reggie Kray butchered Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie. (Jack’s trilby as mythical as Conrad’s cannonball bowler.)

  The Lambrianous started scrubbing the carpet with hot water from the kitchen. When the worst of the mess in the living-room had been dealt with, McVitie’s body was wrapped in an eiderdown, dragged up the stairs and placed in Bender’s car. Ronnie told him to drive away. Then somebody remembered McVitie’s hat. It was his trademark and could easily identify him. When he dived at the window it fell outside. It was retrieved.

  When I dived at the window, Polish darkness imported to Lea Valley Congo, the theoretical structure of my Conrad-in-Hackney essay fell apart. Free-associating connections hissed like a badly wired tenement in a thunderstorm. Gravesend. The port of Boma. Conrad’s meeting with Roger Casement, the only sympathetic personality in a swamp of African madness and corruption. Dysentery. Fever. Soul sickness. Skeletons nailed to trees. Carpets of skulls. Broken in body and mind, branded with the mark of what he had witnessed, the future, Joseph Conrad returned to London.

  This is what I discovered, this is what amazed me, a mad, undigested narrative of colonialism and fiscal voodoo, earthed in Dalston. Heart of Darkness brought to ground. Joseph Conrad taken to the German Hospital, Dalston Lane, London N16, suffering from malaria, rheumatism, neuralgia. And worse. The Congo diaries, as fantastic as the black forgeries presented at the trial of Casement, were kept at his bedside.