Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘I think I’ll walk back, up the Green Way. You know? To Victoria Park?’ Track said.

  Norton would come with her. He’d run out of steam. He said something about following up on Marina Fountain’s story, a train. Danny would try to find the Miller’s Well in Central Park. They might meet, on the road, in a week or two. Nobody knew anything about what happened between Tilbury and Southend, a catalogue of oil smears and marshes (Fobbing, Bowers, Hadleigh). And, inland, out of the way, the National Motorboat Museum.

  There was a light in the church. We went over the wall, Danny with some reluctance, Track leading the way. She rapped on the heavy door. And we were let in – by the older woman from the East Ham café. The other two, the Italian boy (now in white overalls) and the redhaired girl, were up some scaffolding, picking away at the plaster of the rood screen. To reveal, after hours of intensive labour, a few inches of medieval wall painting, a tracery of leaves and vines; a tempera Book of Hours.

  ‘Hey, that’s it. What I want,’ Track said.

  Floating, rough-edged fragments, paradise echoes of the wilderness that enveloped the church, the wild garden. Tiny squares of colour on the dim, whitewashed wall. A burning bush. A bunch of grapes. A starved saint peering, like a fox, through a thicket of bloody thorns. A sprung locust. The Norman church was an enlarged page from Track’s blackbound album.

  Danny, tests completed, told us about the narrow, red (east-flowing) ley line with its deep-green (north-south) cross-strut: marking the place of the original altar.

  ‘Immortal, that line. Even if the church is demolished. Shadowing the road, church to church. Dagenham, Rainham, Aveley. The route we have to take.’

  The church in which we found ourselves, so unexpectedly, intrigued Track – but she didn’t know how to behave. Museum stroll with fixed grin? Or synagogue awkward – under parental gaze? The Jacobean monuments were a small theatre of mortality, pink cherubs, grave-digging spades; love, death and plenty of gilt.

  POSTERITATI: ‘To those who come after.’

  DIIS OMNIBUS MANIBUS: ‘To the Gods in all the Shades.’

  Norton admired a black horse’s head nailed to the wall, the negative of the A13 post-decorations from Newham Way.

  ‘Which movie?’ Track challenged, coming up beside him – as he watched the redhaired girl, goggled against the dust, scratch with tender persistence at the plaster.

  ‘Don’t Look Now. Not the restoration, collapsing cradle, the scaffolding: the photograph that bleeds. Sutherland’s eye, magnifying glass, contact sheet. It’s like Danny says: “the persistence of red”. A mother with drowned child in a red coat.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do it. The dressed/undressed, going-out-for-dinner scene? Did Sutherland and Julie Christie actually fuck?’

  ‘Nobody actually does anything on film. That’s the point. We re-edit, according to taste, leave out the bits that don’t matter. Film is vulnerable. It rots, mush in the can. Words stick and burn.’

  This dialogue between Norton and Track in the church of St Mary Magdalene at East Ham never happened. Not then. No humans talk like that.

  Norton, silent, walking beside Track, in the twilight, temperature dropping, replayed his fictional day. He improvised. Track had touched his arm (she wanted to show him the monument to William Heigham and his wife Anne). True. They looked up at the scaffolding and thought: Don’t Look Now.

  Norton said (to himself): ‘Nic Roeg.’

  Track said (to nobody): ‘Donald Sutherland. Would you fancy him if you had to go to his hotel room to show one of your paintings?’

  Clean cut or lap dissolve?

  They were passing the silted creek at Channelsea. Norton remembered one shot (static) in Patrick Keiller’s London. Fade to darkness. Before we tune in to the deranged precision of Paul Scofield’s voice-over. Fade to smell. Two figures, hands in pockets, on a long straight path.

  Coast

  At around 2.30 p.m., give or take, a woman with a child came through the door, to gossip with customers (maybe off-duty staff) at the back of the restaurant; coat on, holding firmly, right to the point of nuisance, to the tugging, excited kid – then passing her over to the manager (who had already put on his jacket). Tidied his hair in the mirror. They kissed – and the child, chattering now, securing a few fingers of her father’s large hand, led him through the close-packed tables, never looking back until they were safely outside, on the parade, when she turned to give her mother a wave, through a window, which had to be wiped and polished, daily, to counter the abrasive quality of the salt air. All of them, man, woman, child, notably, commendably, neat. Clean. Wholesome.

  Kaporal, undomestic, incomplete in his bachelor state, sentimental as Ford Madox Ford (banished from Kent), approved. He liked family restaurants, chrome and Formica, paper napkins and pale-blue plastic tablecloths. With, freshly rinsed, every morning, artificial daisies in narrow, green-glass holders. Or daisy-type flora (Kaporal didn’t do flowers). White and yellow, anyway.

  ‘Allo, mister. You want sal-mon and broccoli? Chef don’t ’ave broccoli today, very nice spinach.’

  The broccoli was always off and the spinach never really worked (too bitter), but Kaporal didn’t care. Warm, soft food on a pasta base. The woman was charming, the mother.

  ‘Maria,’ he said. For the pleasure of it. Having her name in his mouth. She smiled, came back.

  ‘Which pasta?’

  ‘I think … spaghetti.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Always spaghetti.’

  She touched his hand, lightly.

  ‘Something to drink, mister?’

  ‘Carafe. Red.’ ‘Another … litre?’

  ‘Litre.’

  No hint of disapproval in her voice. Admiration. If he didn’t fool himself. Collusion in her voice, her smile. All things being equal, she’d sit down. Help him to dispose of the second carafe (bevelled glass, hospital retort, sample).

  Light and fruity (pink mouthwash), blushful Hippocrene. Purple-stained lips. Maria’s fingerprints on the curve of the dusty glass.

  Trying not to burn, mopping his brow, being decent about the cigarettes (limiting himself, two to the hour), Kaporal gazed out of the window.

  Should I sit at the big round table and catch the lowering sun in my eyes? Or shift further inside – and risk scalding my back on a radiator? These were decisions, strategies, to be deferred. Indefinitely.

  Pasta joint, seafront. Out of season. Tony Hancock in The Punch and Judy Man? Certainly not. Hancock was hopelessly exposed on the big screen. Black-and-white face like a map of Australia, blank with wrinkles. A radio face. Better to imagine than to see. Kaporal was John le Mesurier, afternoon bars. Cuckolded. Kaporal was the afterlife of Oliver Reed (The Damned, Losey not Visconti, Weymouth). Ollie Reed in his pomp: The System. Michael Winner with Nic Roeg as DOP. A between-movies actor wintering in Guernsey, cheap booze, empty annex of money-launderers’ hotel.

  So Kaporal romanced. Playing with the masks, ransacking buried memory files. A life lived by proxy.

  David Hemmings, he was in it, The System, 1964. Two years before Blow-Up. Mike Winner to Antonioni. Culture shifts: beach photographer, marine melancholy (I Vitelloni re-made by Ken Russell), to urban chancer with studio and agent and primitive car phone in open-top Roller. Lunch with bundles of prints, a book about to be published, in a fashionable trattoria. Tasting sauce in the kitchen. (Kaporal could do that. He was five years younger than Hemmings.)

  It could still happen. With Maria. If not Antonioni.

  He was pissed, rambling. Muttering to himself. He fitted the environment. Non-judgemental, easygoing (plastic tablecloth). Noisy kids tolerated, reps and scammers (jackets off). Women getting squiffy on a succession of single glasses.

  Open all day. Always busy. Not now.

  The guy from the Adelphi Hotel at the window table (seats six): alone. Single coffee. It’s like a uniform for those guys, black leather blouson, dark trousers, ne
w trainers. Six-o’clock shadow three hours early. Mobile phone and cigarette packet on display. They’re not allowed to take paid employment for six months after coming ashore, checking in to the Warrior Square hostel (decorative wrought-iron balconies, permanent building work).

  The economic migrant protected his coffee cup with an arm, whenever Maria approached – another table, the door. He wouldn’t let her view the brown stain, all that was left of his refreshment. Edgy, bristling. Missing a newspaper.

  It was the mildest of environments: cup of tea, chocolate and pineapple bombe, meatballs and tomato sauce, any combination you fancy, no hierarchy of values for Maria. Eat or sit. Chat or stay silent. Smoke or sniff the plastic flowers.

  The pink ones on the migrant’s table, the vase he moved disdainfully, making room for his phone and fags, were carnations. Kaporal sported those in his buttonhole at one of his weddings – Kentish Town? Carnations, pinks. A froth of candy petticoats. Stiff petticoats, layered. Broderie anglaise. Gingham. Ponytails. Bardot. Annette Vadim (née Stroyberg). Mylene Demongeot: in an over-coloured pin-up postcard. On a swing? Gillian Hills (a Brit) in Beat Girl.

  How well this pizza place represented itself. The kitsch Aztec mirror with the angular panels. The golden sunburst clock. The purple/red/blue Mediterranean seascapes: tame Fauve, unwild Derain. Matisse with an ulcer, painting in snow mittens while chained to a chair in a Beirut cellar. A sense of non-specific celebration: light, gilt, summertime, well-meaning but hopelessly unsympathetic bands of colour (sour yellow with loud pink, red trim like an aspirational migraine). The music, borderline Muzak, was getting at him now, film themes, tribute bands. Times when he’d nursed a second drink in a Streatham wine bar, waiting for a woman to text-message the fact that she wasn’t coming: not today, not ever.

  Football. Coming over, walking the promenade, Kaporal had perched on the railings to watch a kickabout. Balkan boys. On the lower promenade and then, when the tide retreated, on a scraped section of beach, a few yards of only slightly tilted sand.

  Achmed watched with him. Drin played, participated. Kaporal never had much time for organised sport, team games, but even he recognised that the Albanians didn’t go at it like, say, the black or Turkish or black Irish or doughwhite Scrubs locals. The inner-city tarmac firms and fence casuals, the red dirt-and-weed oafs. Arsenal and West Ham tops with baggy, many-pocketed bottoms. Or tight jeans, name trainers, steelcaps, loafers. Only the young kids had the full kit. All ages swore and shouted. From the off. Screamed.

  The Albanians on the pebbled beach never made a sound. They took their jackets off (some of them), but otherwise played as they were. The pattern was neat, discernible (even by Kaporal). A few paces, short steps, neutralise opponent, pass. Move. Receive, pass. In silence. With terrifying intensity and concentration. Triangles. Back to defender, foot on ball. Pass, pass, pass. No shots on goal. No hoofing. Tripping, shirt-tugging. No action in the penalty box. An unwritten rule. Advance until you achieve a position from which a shot might, speculatively, be taken, then let the ball go to the opposition – who will return the favour as soon as they see the whites of your goalkeeper’s eyes. Backwards and forwards, slowly, then at pace. Up and down. Without a word being said. Without appeals to an imaginary referee. Without elbows in the windpipe, shirt tugs, spitting, shin rakes, instep stamps, theatrical collapses, or any of the sophistications of the English game.

  Like manic t’ai chi, Kaporal thought.

  ‘Is time. The café. We find you one hour,’ Achmed said.

  Time for what? Had he signed up for some mad scheme? Drin and Achmed were good company. They didn’t drink. They smoked their own cigarettes. And they had nothing to say. His local research, loosely commissioned by Norton, wasn’t advancing. The asylum-seekers didn’t really do anything. They hung about, on the porch of the Adelphi, taking photos of each other. They walked, in pairs, groups, or alone, through the gardens. They made calls on their mobiles. They looked at the sea. Achmed punted some mad kidnap plot, but that, Kaporal decided, was a misunderstanding. Achmed was giving his version of what he’d seen on TV the previous night, a video. No Orchids for Miss Blandish? The Collector? The Black Windmill?

  Snatch a celebrity from the White Queen Theatre – then what? How to transport him? Where to hold him? Who would pay money to get Max Bygraves back? Who would even notice he’d gone awol? The tabs would think it was a stunt, Max Clifford. News of the Screws doing one of their agent provocateur numbers, bunging a tame crim. The Grissom Gang. Touch of Evil. It was always a woman, a woman misappropriated. Baroque, rotten fruit. Armpits. Frying fish. Motel laundry. The King of Comedy. Who would be crazy enough to kidnap Jerry Lewis (apart from the French)? Take that doomed Scorsese flick as a warning. We’ll all finish up in a dumpbin on London Road. £3.99. No film in the case. No takers.

  On London Road, Kaporal found two books. Bookends of a sort. A themed pairing: Paris, bohemia. Between wars. American writers with cheques from home. An English first edition of A Moveable Feast, lacking dust-wrapper. Now sitting, boldly, on the table, the blue plastic cloth, alongside the blind daisy.

  Kaporal, two inches remaining in his carafe, caught Maria’s eye. He hadn’t really grasped the concept of the ‘all-day breakfast’. He thought it meant that you breakfasted all day.

  ‘Mademoiselle. A fine à l’eau. Big brandy, small water.’

  She laughed, came over. ‘What?’ Touched his arm. Nice quizzical gesture, hand on hip, waiting for the joke to be explained, tossing her hair, glancing over her shoulder to see if the chef, smirking at the kitchen door, was in on it.

  ‘Just a brandy, Maria. Please. And coffee. Black.’

  He flicked through the musty pages.

  Hemingway on Ford Madox Ford (a neighbour, Winchelsea, Hythe): ‘I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.’

  The guy from the Adelphi smelt good, from three tables distance; Kaporal got the duty-free, the splash of intimate aroma. The clean zone. UnEnglish.

  Outside the window, not reading the unchanged menu – pasta pasta pasta – were two men, Achmed and Drin (hair wet, swept back, tango dancer). The other asylum-seeker, when he saw them, jumped up, left a few coins on the table, walked out. Nodding to Achmed, shaking hands with Drin. Gone. As if he had been employed to keep the table, keep the seat warm.

  Or maybe, Kaporal thought, the room sliding away, panels of the Aztec mirror offering alternate scenarios, the studious migrant was studying him. A watcher. A snoop. A reassigned secret policeman from Tirana. Working for Achmed. Making sure that Kaporal was in place, primed to take on the role offered to him in the coming melodrama, the illegal seizure and forcible sequestration of Max Bygraves. Money with menaces. Ten years minimum. Parkhurst, Durham. The perfect opportunity to get reacquainted with O’Driscoll or Alby Sleeman. A nice double, one up, one down, with the gay psycho (Phil Tock).

  The glitzy mirrors, the underoccupied (mid afternoon) restaurant, indulged Kaporal, let him think of Brassäi, of Robert Doisneau. It was worrying, this inability to take anything on its own terms, treating the south coast like a Monday morning conference at Radio 4, broadsheets on the table. Nothing was, everything was like. Referenced, analogous. Parodic. Two men from the Balkans (might be Algerian in the earlier Parisian model) standing in the doorway. One woman, back in the shadows, keeping her own company – waiting? – with a canvas bag, camera bag. A woman who came to the pasta place on two or three days a week, always with the bag, always tired – as if she’d been walking the streets all night.

  Kaporal remembered the first time he saw her. It was late afternoon, he was a newcomer, a stranger to the restaurant. His arms were overloaded with books. He had received an unexpected royalty cheque from America, a film about plane crashes.

  She was waiting. He was waiting. She looked around quietly, appraisingly, but without obvious effort to attract attention. She was discreet and dignified, thoroughly poised and self-contained. He was curious to see who she was waiting for. After a ha
lf-hour, during which period he caught her eye a number of times and held it, he made up his mind that she was waiting for anyone who would make the proper sign with the head or the hand and the girl would leave her table and join him.

  Kaporal, feeling what he felt then, troubled, hot-necked, legs in (theoretical) plaster of Paris, was quoting piecemeal from the second book he’d picked up on London Road. As you will have recognised. The previous para. A straight steal, twitched from first to third person, Henry Miller’s Quiet Days in Clichy. Nobody reads Miller. Kaporal could get away with transposing chunks of the old rascal into Bohemia, Hastings.

  A good title.

  (Quiet Days in Clichy. Not Bohemia, Hastings.)

  There was another bit in the book (green covers, white starburst letters) on surveillance. Stalking. He’d done that too. Which was when he realised that the girl with the shoulder bag was exhausted, not from her night’s exertions, but from the train journey, down from London – the standing, the unscheduled (but anticipated) halts. The fear, well-promoted, of terrorist attacks, bugs, gas, bombs.

  Coffee, soup. They fixed her up, before the walk started. The walk was night. The walk was the mystery.

  Once he followed her for a whole afternoon, just to see how she passed the time. It was like following a sleepwalker. All she did was to ramble from one street to another, aimlessly, listlessly, stopping to peer through shop windows, rest on a bench, feed the birds, buy herself a lollypop, stand for minutes on end as if in a trance, then striking out again in the same aimless, listless fashion.

  A dark girl, petite. With a sort of Louise Brooks, even Djuna Barnes, hair helmet – Sapphic? Eyelashes. Bright lips, pouty as the mouth of a red balloon.