Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  The hair.

  The hair was the real story of Mitchum’s heroic anti-career. It out-acted him. He could do absolutely nothing, sharkmeat on a slab, better than any other leading man (Dean Martin, William Holden). Wrecked or sober, Bob could do the voices, the yarns, play it forensically cool, cervical nerves twitching in a lordly corpse. Great gift, sleepwalking through our collective memory. But the hair gave the game away, contradicted the pose. The hair was hot (Elvis loved that pompadour). Sculpted. An art work. A national monument. Somebody was employed, paid cash, to work on the hair, plough and water it, arrange for a single greased strand to fall in a fuck-you droop. Wayne and Sinatra, with their dinky rugs, couldn’t compete.

  Kaporal patted his male-pattern (Prince Edward) bald patch. Forget Mitchum. This kidnap caper was crazier than any of those quickies shot in Durango for Howard Hughes: spook script-doctors rewriting on set, juvenile lead in hock to the Mafia, bagmen paying off local cops, whores, pinkos who named names, faggots, junkies, astrologers, blind cameramen, rodeo riders, grips who worked once with Bill Wellman – and all of them, night after night, expected to drink until dawn. Drink and bull. Tequila and horseshit. Unstruccured monologues of global conspiracy, Illuminati, Jews, bankers, vampires, alien invasion of body parts.

  Who snags the worm?

  The Bygraves snatch should have been aborted as soon as Reo Sleeman lost it and took off for London. The girl was trouble. That was the thing that caught Kaporal’s eye, her penchant for romance. The way she sat at the back of the café like Jane Greer in Mexico. Willing him to make his move. But Achmed wouldn’t give up, he sent Drin to find a man with a lock-up, off the Bexhill Road. And now, in place of their lovely, roomy Detroit motor, the silent Albanian arrives with a two-door Verve (100,000 miles on the clock). He has to stick his head out of the window to drive. It’s like trying to pack a slaughtered steer in a tumble-dryer.

  Poor Kaporal was trapped in a Mike Leigh script – dysfunctional lowlife, bad food, wretched weather – directed by Michael Winner. The only part of it that played was the location. The theatre itself, Hollywood Chinese without Rin-Tin-Tin’s paw prints, was a relic of the Thirties: freshly painted red lacquerware, wavy orange roof tiles and pointy bits (like German helmets).

  The sea.

  The cliff with the tropical gardens.

  The hump of hill on which they were parked.

  A long straight road with views right back to St Leonards and down to the theatre, fire exit and stage door.

  Plenty of good directors had worked with less. If it was a question of waiting, watching – fine. Kaporal was up for that (if someone brought him coffee and burgers at regular intervals). But, sitting alongside Achmed, he couldn’t breathe without synchronising his intake of air (window wide open) with the Albanian’s openmouthed gasps.

  ‘Ebiz otel. You drive. Meet mens. Count money.’

  Simple. Kaporal stays in the car, alert, engine running. Achmed approaches Bygraves at the stage door, says he’s the driver. And, meanwhile, the real driver, official driver, another economic migrant, has been paid off. Away.

  ‘Where to? Who do we contact? Where’s the drop?’

  ‘Ebiz. I say you. Ebiz otel.’

  Drin, from the backseat, passes over a leaflet. A promo for Dagenham Gateway, a new riverside city on the ruins of the Ford motorplant.

  FUTURE PROSPERITY FROM PAST GLORIES

  England soccer stars, including 1966 World Cup winner Martin Peters and legendary Chelsea star Jimmy Greaves, were bom here. Punk band the Stranglers named one of their songs after a fan they called ‘Dagenham Dave’. Dagenham was the birthplace of comedians Max Bygraves and Dudley Moore.

  No photo of Max. They went with Sandie Shaw, long-legged, minimally skirted, on the bonnet of a production-line Ford with winking headlights.

  ‘Dig-en-arm.’

  Grab Bygraves – if anyone can recognise him – and on for a meet at the ibis hotel, West Thurrock, with Mocatta’s men. Kaporal (English-speaker) will make the calls. Return Max, drugged, to his birthplace, Dagenham: an industrial unit. Hold him until cash is forthcoming, counted and bagged.

  ‘You like?’

  Pick up the dosh at the ibis and then to Mocatta’s house, on the coast. Idiot proof.

  And they were proven idiots, all of them.

  Drin was nodding. Kaporal liked Drin. He never spoke. Achmed said something to him. Drin was nervous. He fiddled under his shirt, an amulet. Good-luck charm. Like a man unscrewing a prosthetic nipple.

  ‘What’s he got?’ Kaporal asked.

  ‘Air,’ Achmed said. He gestured. Drin reluctantly fished out the private talisman: a circlet of golden hair.

  His wife.

  His luck on speedboats, trucks, trains, containers. His luck in England. His memory, stroked and savoured. Tasted.

  Kaporal liked Drin. Loss, hurt, he knew about those things. Exile. The researcher had never lived in a place he owned for longer than six weeks. Wives were messy, they got involved with other men. They never learnt how to sit still, to wait. Drin knew. He twisted the hair ring around his little finger.

  They were coming out onto the streets, dazed fans, with that shriven, after-church look: mute, slapping their hands against their sides to get the blood circulating, clouds of pink talcum and flea powder. There were a surprising number of kids, blank generation slackers, arms hooped for missing skateboards. Was Max suddenly hip on the coast? Had he done an album with the Manic Street Preachers? I wanna tell you a story. Jos hadn’t kept up with the retro scene. He remembered Joan Collins in the early Fifties – The Square Ring, written by Robert Westerby – before she decided to stay there for the rest of her mortal span, fifty-three and holding.

  This Bygraves thing needed somebody like Westerby (leftist, prole, strong on detail) to lick it into shape. Jack Warner, Robert Beatty, Maxwell Reed, Bill Owen, Sid James. Half of them economic migrants, colonials on the make. The other half music-hall turns. Men die, but Joan Collins is fifty-three for ever and doing Nöel Coward in the West End. A lamia in a black basque. With pink ribbons. Pinched flesh. Loose arms.

  ‘Now, now you go. Please.’

  Achmed, smoking hard, waved him on. But Kaporal couldn’t move. A black road. Puddles of yellow light. Cypress trees on the cliff path. A sticky pine scent, after rain. Nasty looking razor-wire spinners. Meshed windows. A sudden block of light as the stage door opens.

  ‘I’ll be Maxwell Reed.’

  Wasn’t Reed married to somebody? To Collins? Probably, most of them were. Or Diana Dors? Cuckolded, of course. Irish. Appeared with Dors in Good Time Girl. 1948. From a novel by Arthur La Bern. Night Darkens the Street. They don’t do poetry like that any more.

  ‘Go go go! You go!’

  Was it based on a real newspaper event, that film? Yank in Britain on crime spree? GI and an English girl who saw themselves as Bonnie and Clyde? La Bern had a background in journalism. Bad karma in that loop between reportage and fantasy, Odeon sweethearts on a killing spree. Flashbacks. Through those wobbly, nitrous oxide visuals, a dying man revises a wasted life. In pin-sharp focus. Involuntary flashbacks: the story of the Forties. Of Kaporal.

  Drin is shaking him. Achmed’s going mental. The streets are completely deserted and the celebrity, unaccompanied, is standing on the kerb, toking on a very fat cigarette. Kaporal remembers how to turn the key. Putting on the headlights is beyond him, Drin helps out. In the masterplan, Bygraves would be tucked away in the capacious boot of Reo Sleeman’s Dodge. This motorised bucket has no boot; enough space, at a pinch, to stack just one of the seven dwarfs – if you folded him, carefully, like an army blanket.

  Achmed made his oblique approach. Bygraves listened. He didn’t seem fazed at finding his usual conveyance chopped in half. The man was tired, coming down from all that twinkling, storytelling, hoofing and crooning. A trouper. Old school. Singalonga Max: the prototype of mid-Atlantic man.

  The Super Furry Animals T-shirt was unexpected – but, hey … Max was showbiz
to the soles of his lifts. He had a reputation as a dresser, a pro who knew his value, brusque with underlings who couldn’t match his own high standards. This must be the chill hour: baggy denim jacket lettered with: TERRE HAUTE PENITENTIARY. HARD TIME / HIGH TIME. The sneakers were unlaced and none too fresh.

  Max looked ten – fifteen? – years younger than Kaporal expected: thick hair, nice smile, walnut tan. He looked familiar in the way stars do, faces from tele who infiltrate your consciousness like thieves in the night.

  They had a bit of a problem, the Albanians, working Max into the car. He took the seat next to the driver, to Kaporal, leaving the ledge at the back to Achmed and Drin – who squashed together like a Siamese Twin novelty act. Two heads on a single contorted trunk.

  ‘Nos da, Jos boy,’ Max said, offering Kaporal a hit on his herbal cigarette. ‘You still alive, bach? When was it, ’73? Blake’s Hotel? The interview for Time Out. So what happened, then, to the photos you promised to send?’

  Max bilingual? Spanish picked up from his pool boy? Didn’t sound like Spanish. Albanian? Was there a living Albanian language, Indo-European? Nos da. Nos da was the wrong Max, Max Boyce. The clowns had got the wrong comic. Most of the population, this side of the Severn, would pay good money to get rid of Boyce.

  Even the Balkan bandits looked shocked when Max started to fiddle with a three-paper roll-up. Kaporal knew about Bob Mitchum’s habits, brown bags of dope, intravenous tequila, tumblers of straight vodka, but that was Hollywood, Confidential magazine, a bad-boy franchise to maintain. One of the English elite, a diamond of family entertainment, practising the same self-destructive indulgences, was taking a mid-Atlantic stance too far.

  ‘Albi. The name you had to use at Blake’s. For the interview. Remember, Jos? Two rings, put the phone down. Ask for Albi. I loved all that.’

  He cackled, coughed. Spat out of the window.

  Albi.

  The man with a dozen passports. Multiple-identity felon. Albigensian. Manichean: darkness and light. Anagram of alibi: I, Albi. The stupid fuckers. They’d misread the poster outside the White Queen, misunderstood the minicabber. Not Max but Marks. Achmed had grabbed Mr Geniality, the spliffhead businessman and all-round Celtic charmer, Howard Marks. The smoking man’s Tom Jones. Mr Nice.

  Marks was Kaporal’s last gig for Time Out. The photos had been mislaid. Jos’s stories were always photo-led (polyfilling gaps between snaps). And not just the photographs, the camera. They tried to charge him. He moved on. Creative differences. Filed a couple of pieces for City Limits, unpaid, then relocated to outer-rim TV (Highways Agency – involuntary retirement after drink-driving charge). Unfairly, he blamed Howard. And that long, long afternoon in Blake’s Hotel.

  The pitiless affability of a man who pleaded guilty to everything. With a twinkle in his eye.

  There’s a point, Kaporal decided, beyond which nice is too nice, arteries fur up, your mouth tastes like you’ve barbecued your own tongue.

  ‘Kabul, boy,’ Howard said, ‘navel of the world. All my schemes start there. Lovely climate, lovely people. Statues of Buddha carved from the cliffs. Magic. A rocket-launcher under every market stall.’

  The virus entered Kaporal’s system. And he had never, subsequently, shaken it loose. Marks as a spook. He kept a place on the coast, Sussex.

  ‘Know Nicky van Hoogstratten?’ Howard asked. ‘Everybody does. Nicky is Brighton.’

  Kaporal, as soon as he got back to Streatham, checked the file: property man, sharp dresser. Old hippies, hanging around Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop, reckoned Nicky based himself on Mike Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character (The English Assassin): a dangerous dandy. Or was it the other way round? Hoogstratten and the Weavers, they ran the town. James Weaver was old enough to have been sentenced to death: for kidnapping and murder.

  ‘Hoogstratten’s a thug, slum landlord. Stamp collector,’ Kaporal said, on the phone, getting back to Marks. Answering the unspoken challenge.

  ‘Oh aye, quite right. Keep clear.’

  Hoogstratten was one of the reasons Kaporal settled further to the east, in Hastings, out of harm’s way – with the geriatric farms, charity shops, de-energized bohemians.

  Kabul, arms, drugs, oil, John Lennon, van Hoogstratten, rogue IRA, Mexicans, MI6, phony films that were never made: Marks’s yarns (stand-up routines in rehearsal) were very like late-Mitchum, shrivelled-brain delirium, paranoid-visionary riffs, punctuated by inappropriate laughter. Reducing them both, interviewer and interviewee, to boneless husks.

  The joke had soured. Kaporal went to work for Norton, a burnt-out ghost in a seaside flat. Who wanted him on the case, ear to ground. Hanging out in pubs. Gathering intelligence the hack could cobble together into a book that would sell enough copies to get him back to town. Instead of which, Kaporal found a sweating wheel in his hands. The car, heady with sweet smoke, was driving itself through the Dartford Tunnel.

  Under the river. River of no return.

  What did Mitchum say, the one time he refused a brawl? ‘Never fight when you see death in the other man’s eye,’ Kaporal caught, and was transfixed by, a vision of Norton – an old man staring blankly out to sea, death lodged in the corner of his one good eye, waiting. Waiting for a call in a room with no phone.

  Howard had nodded out, joint still fixed between smiling lips. Achmed told Kaporal where to come off the motorway, down the ramp, Junction 31, circle back under the road, and straight into the parking bays outside the ibis hotel. By the flagpoles, the spiky plants in woodchip beds.

  Then they sat, nobody talking, timing the intervals between Marks’s gentle snores. Achmed texted a message on his mobile. Drin played with his hair charm. Kaporal watched the windows of the roadside hotel. He saw them as a chessboard. He worked on his moves – as lights went on and off.

  Checkmate. Endgame.

  The windows were like hundreds of TV monitors, playing realtime films, synthesising boredom. Sensors hidden in tarmac firing small dramas, sexual fantasies of long-distance hauliers enacted in a dream hotel. Reveries inspired by topshelf service-station novels: underwear models, whips, boots, brass beds, designed after the style of the New Orleans brothel photographer, Bellocq. Without the pain. The scratches. The gold brown of alchemised river mud, tobacco. The blood of slaves.

  A book by Michael Ondaatje.

  Who is Bellocq.

  He was a photographer. Pictures. They were like … windows.

  Louis Malle made a Bellocq film: Pretty Baby. With Bergman’s cameraman, Nykvist. Barbara Steele was in it. Kaporal met her once in Rome, nice girl. The profile was never written, he drifted on to a festival in Palermo. Then back with some German bums to Cologne. Malle wanted Mitchum for Atlantic City, but it was far too late. The point where elegy turns sour. Oxygen mask, emphysema, shrunken head.

  We know too much – of trivia, gossip of our gods, the lazy Valhalla of private members’ clubs, red plush, gold-plated spittoons. It would have been better, Kaporal thought, to have stuck with the image on the screen: young Mitchum in Out of the Past, old Mitchum in Dead Man, pained Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, sleepwalking Mitchum in much of the rest. The architecture of the thing. What happens outside the limits of the screen is none of our business. Kaporal wanted his ignorance back. No knowledge, false knowledge, of the actor’s life, the bile of racism, conspiracy theories. The day he first set foot in Bob Hope’s mansion. Alcohol is a bad voice when it gets out, takes over. Jack Kerouac’s wounded tenderness spilling acid, splashing solder in his own lap.

  Mitchum’s bulk turns to ash. They cook him. The family – plus Jane Russell (Howard Hughes’s most monumental engineering project) – put out from Santa Barbara in a rented boat. Dust on the waves, in the air. Gritty grey powder on water. Dispersed, brought to shore. A small contribution to the landmass of California.

  They were being watched, filmed. The conspirators. From behind muslin. From bushes. From that too-clean Transit van out in the road. Kaporal had an instinct for these things. T
reachery, he majored in it.

  A curtain, four floors up, twitched. A naked man – other figures, clothed, behind him – was staring down. Norton. Translated. In the wrong place. Staring at the motorway as if, somehow, without prior warning, his sea had frozen over.

  Harsh blue light. Loudhailers. Hooded men with flak-jackets, hair-trigger paramilitaries, surround the car.

  And limping into the frame, this brilliant pool of artificial day, is a man with a rucksack. Norton. Another Norton. Equally distressed. Ignored by the gun-toting heavies, men with cyclopean lamps fixed to their heads. Coalminers up from the underworld.

  Norton plods on, and through, into the shadows. Towards the hotel. Which never sleeps. Another chapter. Fate revised.

  Ibis Hotel

  Through a nightland more object-led than expressionist, Norton dragged himself, his purple rucksack. Emotions, his emotions, were unreachable: replete hunger, sweating cold, aching knee, sore spine. Black charcoal outlines defined stalled cars and lorries. Framed travellers profiled in their pods. Snaking columns of dead smoke. A slick sky made from shoals of lurid fish (river of soles): their eyes set too closely together, glass beads anticipating pain.

  Norton walked, walked.

  Necessary heat was conjured by images of misplaced wives (the lovely Ruth, the lively Hannah); by pre-visions of the carnival family of Jimmy Seed, their black rubbish bags, plastic trumpets, tin drums, layers of summer and winter clothing: orange fur over polyester, plastic boots, purple stockings.

  Norton walked towards the ibis, a roadside hotel. A museum of memory. A gallery where guilty artists were confronted by the evidence of their art.

  A brothel of the senses.

  Jimmy Seed: the tight skin of a former drinker, his trembling hand reaching out for an empty bottle. The artist, Track, a tall girl slumped in a hard chair, at the window table: nanny, pupil, surrogate mistress. Mistress of magic. Flaming hair. High, smooth forehead. Amused smile.