Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Marina, cigarette in hand, waited to greet her, to shepherd her past the flat filled with pigeons, pigeon dirt, needles and spills of tightly rolled newspaper.

  They worked their way – borrowed pass key, charm applied to the old folk – through layer after layer of this crumbling cake; corridor by corridor, room by room. Seventy-six checked, 209 to go. Very close, no goldfish. Nothing fitted – precisely – the Keith Baynes transcription.

  And what, Livia wondered, would happen when it did? What then? Her print, whichever lens she opted for, however she messed around in the darkroom, could never replicate Baynes’s painting. There was no way of gouging out the middle ground, the space between camera and seascape. Vertigo and nausea always rushed in to fill the gap. The flats with their geriatric accretions, family snaps in silver frames, hothouse temperatures, phantom dogs (no pets allowed), left her dizzy.

  Marina was merciless. When photograph fitted over painting, like a Venetian carnival mask, she would step through. Into that space-time anomaly. The bit Baynes was so careful to leave out, the foreshortened something, between observer and horizon. That mysterious lacuna (the pictorial equivalent of the John Major premiership).

  She made it, ahead of her watcher, the man with the books, to her table near the bar (the kitchen, the coat-rack). Now she was comfortable, being here, being alone. She glanced sideways, profile in the mirror, good, lips glossed, hair holding, and surprised herself. She was waiting for the man in black, the one with too much skin; flesh folding like rubber – his reflex attempts, slapstick, to iron out the creases, erase experience, touch solidity beneath sag, a fading memory of cheekbones.

  ‘Has he been in?’ she asked Marina.

  ‘Today, no. Maybe later.’

  I am nothing like those women in Paris, she thought. Jean Rhys, was it? The drama of being misused, spurned (they solicited it), abandoned. In this place, at this time, Ollie was perfectly at ease. Ready, almost, for the flirtation with her lugubrious admirer. A reversal, as she saw it, of the Jean Rhys/Ford Madox Ford story: older man (shell-shocked), frayed beauty, an affair, abortion – a narrative told from both sides. A true fiction. Publish your revenge. The long, woozy aftermath of poverty excesses and provincial exile. See what you’ve done to me.

  He was there. In his usual spot. Eating her in the mirror. Getting quietly sozzled. She touched the rough canvas of the camera bag, stroked it. The man would make a good portrait – if she did portraits. But her technique was based on self-denial. Immerse yourself in floating matter – drunk man reading book, melancholy asylum-seeker at round table, tired waitress, photographer on run from unsatisfactory lover – and take it somewhere else: night town. The steps. The pattern of the tiled roofs. The panoramic window of the fishermen’s club as seen from the beach. Plastic swans, shrouded, on the paddling pool.

  Drama: the unexpected entrance of two exotic aliens in leather jackets. Nice-looking boys, fit. They know the bookman. They sit with him. He’s nervous. He won’t be able to make his move, his unsubtle (gently spurned) advance on the girl photographer with the Louise Brooks fringe. They’re behaving like pimps. They warn the older man off. They notice her, admire her. Who is this beauty?

  A car pulls up. An American car. So this is just another of Livia’s tales, her adventures at the seaside? She wished, so much, that she smoked, that she was wearing something more suitable. Collar turned up. Dark glasses: like the man. Very mean and hungry, slightly crazy. Coming straight at her. Brushing past the Adelphi Hotel boys, pushing one of them aside. Yelling, furious. A madman. Mad for her. One glimpse and he’s done for. She has him skewered. He’ll kill for a single glance. The woman of his dreams.

  ‘Get in the fucking motor, babe,’ Reo said. ‘We’re going home.’

  Fenchurch Street

  She was wrong, completely wrong – the Fountain woman – about Fenchurch Street Station. Clean. Spacious. Departure notices visible. Trains to the Estuary, Grays, Tilbury Town, Shoeburyness, every few minutes. Even the light (filtered through glass, bounced from white stone) was nicely managed, abundant. There was, this premature spring morning, no embargo on clarity: razor-cut shadows, splintered beams through mean windows.

  A lull in our argument with the city. This, I thought, is how it should be. A fiver for a return to Rainham? They were giving it away. The track, like a ladder of ice, rushed towards Limehouse; churches, warehouses, pre-war office blocks with quirky detail, Art Deco fans, orchestrated symmetries.

  I basked. I gorged on it, the suspension of hostilities. The non-arrival of my pal Joey. Joey Silverstein. Joey the Jumper. With his babble, his yap. Gnawed fingernails. Yellow fingers cupped, clawed, leaking smoke. Joey was my guide into Rainham, the Jewish Cemetery. He was taking me to the grave of a legendary urban character, David Litvinoff. Gambler, wit, ‘lowlife conduit’ to James Fox, Donald Cammell, Mick Jagger (and the rest of the Performance team), Litvinoff ghosted the transit between Whitechapel and Chelsea, appearance and disappearance, celebrity and crime. He left two things behind when he killed himself (across the river): a shoebox of reel-to-reel tapes (drunken improvisations, midnight rambles, quality jazz) and a memory stain. A diminishing band of friends and lovers, acquaintances and dupes, ageing relatives who couldn’t forget him, met to talk through his mischief, his stunts. The hurt. Wilting snaphots slide sideways into the underbelly of the culture (Ian McShane in Villain); a man with his head shaved, throat slashed, suspended from a window in Kensington. Marchers on the street (Vietnam, CND, legalise dope), banners and whistles, they don’t look up. Nobody notices. It doesn’t register. In the margin of every great public event, some poor sod is catching it, sight unseen, a bullet in the teeth.

  I’d been tracking the Litvinoff story since 1975, the year that he died. Every lead a cul-de-sac. Every witness removed to Australia, South Africa, Golders Green Crematorium. The waters muddied by second-generation stalkers, media-studies victims with Sony MD Walkmans. They thought they could do it all on the phone, the net, in a couple of weeks: anti-scholars saturated in ‘genre issues, core components and dialectic exchanges’. The height of their ambition, 500 words, in a slack month, in Sight and Sound.

  The good thing about Joey, you could always rely on him: to be late. Time out, hard won, is golden. The worse the night, the better the morning’s walk. Run it backwards. I touched the dog. I lumbered across the road – twitching from traffic that wasn’t there – to press my hand between the sharp brass ears of the wolf at Aldgate Pump. Begin again, another excursion down the A13 – but, this time, by train; following the fictional paradigm – I can do media studies too – of Marina Fountain’s Conradian vampire tale. Fountain had been snacking, it was evident, on her namesake, the other Marina, Warner: freelance scholar, novelist, collector of folk tales, Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. Warner mainlined lamias and succubi, Keatsian narcoleptics, sleepwalkers with inadequate nightwear:

  The Lamia, Emblem strong of Sin,

  Does all her Charms employ;

  To draw the unwary Trav’ller in,

  And then the Wretch destroy.

  The Aldgate wolf was stressed today, by the absence of aggravation; it strained to break free from its stone trap. Some political chicanery with hyper-surveillance, invisible barriers, congestion charges, had emptied the streets, returned them to a period when it wasn’t compulsory to run a car. My walk from Hackney was unnerving: sun disk pulsing behind cloud, a hoop of bright beams, cold squeezing the lung. A silver sun (over Haggerston Park) duplicated the aureole of the inoperative brass nipple that floated above and between the wolf’s ears at Aldgate Pump: ‘press here’ for water that no longer gushes from the open mouth. The pattern of flaws in the stone, rust marks, removed iron, sets an agenda for the territory I want to explore. Maps made by accident are the only ones to trust: no agenda, no special pleading, no obligation to show anything that doesn’t matter.

  Morning shadows in Brick Lane shaped right-angled triangles: across Rodinsky’s loft in Pri
ncelet Street, across the marbled slabs in the premises of A. Elfes, monumental mason. An alphabet of symbols that might be withdrawn in an instant. A confirmation that this was the right day to be on a train.

  I went out into the garden, frosty, sharp underfoot. A full moon. I couldn’t pretend to sleep. Even if you don’t watch television, it leaks: it watches you. In pubs, minicab offices, Chinese takeaways. Through the windows of tower blocks. From the bedrooms and kitchens of railway cottages in West Ham, visible from the c2c train. This necklace of not-quite-simultaneous imagery: fear. Even if you avoid newsprint, its gets onto your skin. Pithy summaries on boards outside newsagents’ shops: LONDON THREAT ON SCALE OF SEPT 11. BLAIR FURY AT PEACE MARCH.

  Yellow tin and carpets of celluloid flowers.

  MURDER. A MURDER OCCURRED AT THE FOOTPATH BETWEEN THE FLOWER GARDEN AND THE CHILDREN’S PLAYGROUND. DID YOU SEE OR HEAR ANYTHING?

  Helicopters. Sirens. Car doors. Arguments. Slaps. Screams in the night. It leaks leaks leaks.

  I shut my eyes and see a river of cars, stalled. Tanks surrounding airports. Runways on marshland. Drills, earthmovers, pile-drivers under flyovers. Mountains of landfill. But that’s not it. That’s commonplace, nuisance. All sentient beings live with inconvenience, irritation, sudden death (for the few, the others). The nightfear I suffered was more personal (it carried on through the day): someone was stealing my material, ahead of me at every turn, subverting my wives. He impersonated me with a flair I couldn’t hope to equal, this thief. Trickster. And he was bringing criticism down on my head – for being what I was. Played out, hackneyed (in every sense); editors couldn’t stifle a yawn. Feisty young women peddled appalling rumours (no matter if they were true).

  Then the phone rang. When my defences were down, blood sugar at its lowest level. Ruth? In trouble? Hannah wanting to clarify a year-old argument? Did I say what she thought I said she said and did I mean it – still?

  ‘Hey, man. Listen, right. You stitched me up, man.’

  Joey.

  That was one of his standard 2 a.m. riffs (but not this time). Drug paranoia, the lack of it, kicking in. Joey Silverstein was one of the resources of London, omnipresent, ever-moving, edge of the frame, out of focus: longish hair (a year or two after it went out of fashion), good clothes, proper cut (borrowed, gifted by a friend). The story. The word. Hot. Gossip. He’d read everything, seen all the films. Monster, monster. He never bought a newspaper, but always knew what was in them. You couldn’t slip a reference to Joey into a book of poems, vanity-published in an edition of three copies in Finland. He’d be straight onto it, onto you.

  ‘Listen, man. I was really hurt …’

  His eyes. They showed the hurt, his age, the years on the clock. Otherwise: he was twenty-two. For the duration. Along with his handsome partner, Patsy. Swooping on markets, working the margins, at the party. A chipped glamour. Collars up, lipstick tidemark on American cigarettes. Peake, Punk, Portillo: Joey was there. The new in New Worlds, the young in The Young Ones. And he’d been playing it for thirty years. Production offices, fashionable clinics, scandal for gift and never for sale: Joey the Jumper. Wired. The conduit to the conduit.

  ‘Let’s do a walk, man.’

  That’s how Joey signed off. It didn’t mean a thing.

  ‘Couple of weeks, right? I’ll give you a call.’

  Sometimes it happened. Once every six or seven years. Smithfield. Spitalfields. Fleet Street. Anywhere with coffee stops (regular hits of sugar). Bookshops, monuments. A story. London was a spoken autobiography, told in fragments. ‘That guy in the café, my dad. You’ll have to meet him next time.’

  Next time was now. Joey didn’t deal in anything further ahead than three days: which was when he wanted to meet me at Fenchurch Street. I was honoured. He knew somehow, before I’d worked out the details, that I was attempting a book on the A13. We’d discussed David Litvinoff for decades, the scams, the stunts with the tramp Pinter used as a model for The Caretaker, the trips to the country. Now, out of nowhere, Joey was offering to take me to the grave. In Rainham.

  Rainham. The marshes. The definitive middle distance between human and non-human landfill. The better life promised for slum-dwelling East Enders. The industrial dereliction visited on ancient riverside villages. I knew the car park, behind the railway station, the villains who used it as a convenient meeting ground: fabulous sightlines, roads spilling off in every direction. I remembered the threats some of them made, if I ever went back.

  There’s no copyright on paranoia: where is Joey? Fenchurch Street Station was too good to be true, it was a set, an advertising shoot for Railtrack. Joey had been webbed up with music-business hustlers, pill-peddlers – wouldn’t he have come across the Sleemans? Mocatta owned a recording studio in Harrow Road. Joey probably owed him, favours for favours. Why, suddenly, out of the blue, in the early hours of the morning, would he suggest a trip to Rainham? Mickey O’Driscoll’s favoured disposal ground, black bags on the marshes, heads in ponds. It was on the news, it must be true, they’d just found a man without hands in a park in Dagenham.

  Where was Joey? Had he bottled it?

  The only other clients of c2c were French businessmen – trying to check out sites for a new Disneyland? They had complicated requests for the ticket-peddlers. Who ignored them. As improperly languaged and therefore invisible. There were no women of mystery on the concourse (Conradian commentaries in their hand luggage). No one-way vampires for Grays.

  Up the long steps, head bobbing like a cork in a stream of piss, comes Joey. In a trilby, a belted tweed coat. Looking more mature, certainly, but frisky, alive; gesturing, spotting me, suppressed wave, other hand in pocket. That classic London noir swagger (a torpedo out of The Lowlife): old Whitechapel, Middlesex Street, fast talking, fast thinking, dancing feet. Impossible to buy a suit or coat (postmortem) from one of these boys: wrong size. Broad in shoulder, narrow hips, no legs. Generations of humping sacks, in warehouses and wharfs, do that. Try a jacket, nice cloth, nice cut, and your hands won’t reach halfway down the sleeves. Short-armed, long-headed Scots, lousy teeth (poor diet), can’t aspire to Cockney schmutter. Even if they can wriggle into it, wrap it around them, it looks like fancy dress.

  Joey in a hat?

  Maybe it was a religious thing, for the cemetery. I knew a bit about that, I had a tribute for Litvinoff in my pocket, a black, limestone pebble. I wouldn’t embarrass myself like that television arts presenter who swept the debris from Chagall’s grave, complaining about the scandalous state in which it was kept. Kicking small stones, the marks of respect. Astonishing behaviour from a man of culture, a Jew (by inheritance and blood).

  ‘Sorry, son,’ the latecomer said, ‘Joey couldn’t make it. Got the tickets? Liberty what they charge. Any chance of a cuppa. I’m done in.’

  Snip Silverstein, the dad. They were like brothers, these two, father and son. There were moments when light drained from their eyes, then back, at a rush, to language. The sustaining force: memory.

  ‘Joey’s not well.’

  Not well? Joey was never what you’d call well’. Sniffles, smoker’s throat, lip sores, scars on the backs of his hands, it didn’t stop him. He should have been dead years ago, the energy he expended, the company he kept: the man was a promo for staying outside the system, unregistered, ex-directory, no library cards. If you’re wounded, walk. Joey, bunged to the eyeballs with viruses, public transport, crowds, kisses, needles, blood exchange, was immune to everything.

  ‘Heart.’

  Impossible. Joey’s vessel was a leather pump. ‘All heart,’ the boys in the caff said. ‘That Joey, all heart. A diamond. Give you the shirt off his back.’ They meant: emotion. Rucks. Embraces. Tears at bedtime. Recollections, fondly delivered, of those known but currently inactive, out of circulation: Derek Raymond, Alexander Baron, Gerald Kersh – and, always, back to him, David Litvinoff (unpublished and therefore unfixed).

  Joey had been sauntering down the Embankment, between bridges, this meet and that,
so Snip reported, when he felt a bit dicky. Like his tongue, all of a sudden, was too big for his mouth. Jumped a bus. Some schwartzer kid was kicking off, screaming. Did his head in. High Street Ken, he got off, stumbled into a bank, Jock bank, Bank of Scotland. ‘Sit down. Loosen your tie. Have a toffee.’

  Joey wakes up in intensive care.

  ‘Last time we was in ’orspital together, we was lifting a bottle to Joey’s mate, David. The scars on him, my life. Remember that little coloured girl, the nurse? I said to Joey, “If she only knew, right son? What you’re thinking.” He blushed. First time I seen it, red as the flag. Showing ’im up in front of David.’

  The best of London: running away from it. Comfortable seats and a woman’s voice (recorded) to let us know the names of the halts, ahead of time. Snip dozed, hat over eyes. I spread Danny the Dowser’s notes, his A13 retrievals, across the table. Before West Ham, it was like a drowning man’s dream: my previous lives flicking past in a pale procession. The wilderness of Tower Hamlets Cemetery where I used to take my sandwiches when I worked for the Parks Department. There was a new (to me) chalk maze laid out on a grassy knoll. Then came the islet of poplar and willow in the muddy reaches of Channelsea Creek, near Three Mills, among the gas holders and sewage beds. The site was mythic, soliciting Tarkovsky (the Zone), or standing in for Bergman’s Fårö. But getting instead the ‘Big Brother’ concentration camp with its perimeter fence and thicket of CCTV cameras.

  Danny had nothing much to say about Plaistow and West Ham. Dagenham aroused him. Dagenham and Rainham were remote villages, fisherfolk and esturine pirates settling on a gravel shelf, above the mudline, the fluvial slop. Chalk behind them, into which they burrowed. Lime kilns on the shore. Twin creeks exploited: the Beam at Dagenham and the Ingrebourne at Rainham. Bucolic survivalism, pigs and fertility rituals, to pass the time before Henry Ford took over and colonised the entire landscape. Detroit-on-Thames: rolling mills, dock, railway, major league pollution.