Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Track and Seed were waiting for guidance from a man who might never arrive. The ibis was a frontier post (like that town of prostitutes on the borders of the old Czechoslovakia).

  Walking down what had once been the A13, and was now a detour, a wrong decision at a roundabout, a penitential drudge into Purfleet, Norton lost the arch of the QEII Bridge, the lights of the cars. Tonight’s accident had brought the road to a standstill. Nothing untoward in stasis. London’s orbital motorway had absorbed the congestion-charge refuseniks of the city. A satellite band of black cabs making their circuit between Epping Forest and the great metropolitan railway termini. A necklace of hammered metal around the throat of London, its ugly sprawl.

  For a short, good time, Norton enjoyed river breezes: rough grass, Armada fire beacon, cargo sheds. Gliding tankers, midstream, out in the darkness.

  Then: helicopters, sirens. Something exciting in the way of meat and carnage, roadside mayhem, was being enacted, up there, on the concrete pier of the motorway.

  Norton relished: the silence of the marshes.

  Cross the tracks at Purfleet Station, enter the principality of Count Dracula (oil tanks, razorwire, pulp paper yards), and you are implicated. In on the crime, the highway accident. A photofit monster. A suspect in the event that brought the nexus of roads (M25, A13, West Thurrock Arterial, Purfleet By-Pass) to a troubled immobility.

  Andy Norton, broken pedestrian, the only moving cog in the wheel of transcendence. Another return to nineteenth-century gothic, he thought, to scientific speculation: invisible men, post-apocalyptic survivors, mutants, suspect prophets condemned to live out their own fictions.

  Horror on the motorway: an event horizon. The dimly lit block of the ibis, the port hotel, is an anchored space platform.

  Walking, limping, out of the darkness that shielded and protected him, Norton blinked, closed his eyes against the shock of this overpowering ring of torches and tungsten. Paramilitaries. Rapid-response units had surrounded, with their usual excesses, one small, dirty, over-occupied car.

  ‘I don’t have any papers.’

  He lied. To the officials. The half-hearted challenge. Preparing his response to a question that hadn’t been asked. They weren’t interested. They were acting for the cameras, tipped-off news crews. Something was being done about terror and Thames Gateway, about roads and men with moustaches who pitched up, uninvited, outside respectable Essex hotels.

  Norton had nothing but papers. A rucksack ballasted with pulp. He had Danny the Dowser’s copious files: Rodinsky and Dagenham, Captain Amies and Rainham, Sandie Shaw and Terry Venables. Ford’s motorplant and Ford Madox Ford on The Soul of London.

  Great fields are covered with scraps of rusty iron and heaps of fluttering rags; dismal pools of water reflect on black waste grounds the dim skies. That all these things, if one is in the mood, one may find stimulating, because they tell of human toil, of human endeavour towards some end with some ideal at that end. But the other thing is sinister, since the other influences are working invisible, like malign and conscious fates, below the horizon …

  He will almost certainly not know that, in the marshes round Purfleet, he has factories larger, more modem, better capitalised, more solvent, and a landscape more blackened and more grim.

  He was tired. A bed, any bed, would do. Better to dream this place, Purfleet, Thurrock, than experience it.

  So much experience and so little of it experienced, lived through, understood. Nights, like this, when he couldn’t sleep and came naked from bed, to pee or to drink, walking unsteadily to the window. Nose squashed against cold glass, former novelist, A.M. Norton, watched the bad cinema of the arrests in the car park.

  He laid aside the book, his personal Gideon bible; he took it everywhere: Beckmann. Heavy-paper catalogue edited by Sean Rainbird (good name), from an exhibition visited, for the duration, on a daily basis. Beckmann and the ibis hotel were made for each other.

  Norton sipped watered whiskey. There had been something of the sort, cars, guns, on television – news show, cop show. Time was running, counterclockwise, down the plughole, navel fluff, cigar butts, the oaty bits your digestion can’t dissolve, washed from shitty fingers.

  ASYLUM-SEEKER GANG SNATCH CELEB. The plot had been sold out, obviously. A farce. Albanians under observation from the off. “That’s why I gave up fiction,’ Norton thought. ‘The banality. Everything’s been done. Realism, such as it is, reprised as a game show. Big Brother at the Adelphi Hotel, Hastings. One lucky immigrant gets a passport, the rest go back to Sangatte.’

  Tough to live, aged sixty, in a culture dedicated to trashing memory, elective amnesia – the back catalogue of Norton’s Hollywood classics raided for remakes, ghost shows with grinning imbeciles, feelgood conclusions. You have to travel to somewhere as obscure and uncooked as the ibis hotel at West Thurrock to exist in real time: the right-hand panel of one of Max Beckmann’s gloomier triptychs.

  West Thurrock is where bad things happen, limbs hacked off, chained women, bondage corsets, stinking fish. Beckmann’s myth stuff, kings and golden children, is out on the river. Past, present, future: three windows on the third floor of the ibis hotel. Revolve your head, slowly: river, motorway, chalk quarry. When society matrons came calling, wives of Party members, directors of I G Farben, Beckmann would only show them the river panel of his triptych, the one based on Shakespeare, The Tempest. The side-panels, in their articulated cruelty, were left in the cupboard.

  Where was Hannah? Norton’s conscience, his lover.

  He’d come to the ibis for an assignation, a meet in the cafeteria, a bottle of chilled wine among the potted plants, a conversation. Hannah could, so she’d intimated that night at the Travelodge, help with his blockage, his inability to put pen to paper. A nice situation for a young photogenic millionaire novelist, moved sideways into three-page film outlines, no use to Norton. Silence, poverty. Too much world, not enough words. No time.

  Hannah arrived late. Road at a standstill. Cab abandoned. Train from Rainham. Walk from West Thurrock. Hopelessly lost. Stockings torn, shoes ruined. Propositioned by unidents and glue-sniffers. No food left: lifeless sandwiches, lettuce like a bin of snotty tissues.

  ‘Could we go to your room? You do have a room?’

  She asked.

  She couldn’t get back to London. The gridlock scenario had finally happened. Norton gave her the number, went upstairs for a shower – to wait while she made a phone call. The cafeteria had been taken over by a family of transients, black bags, rattled husband, exhausted kids, two women. One of them with a camera.

  Norton, abandoned by the muse, scoured his body, drank weak whisky, stroked the glossy cover of his Beckmann, fell asleep. No Hannah. Hours later, painfully tumescent, he waddled to the window.

  A shock to himself – and probably to the cops, out there in the cold night, at the scene of the non-crime. The car. The spread-eagled miscreants. The pressmen.

  He saw: that other Norton creature, the one with the purple rucksack. The pest from the Travelodge. His double, his doppelgänger. His uncommissioned portrait. The ugly walker who ram-raided Dorian Gray’s attic. The fetch who sodomised his inspiration. Foreclosed his memory bank. Ripped off his research. Stole his women.

  He’d warned the clown in Docklands, tried to shove his mendacious reflection back into the mirror. Thurrock was the end of it, the end of London. By the time he returned to the coast, the second Norton would be buried on the marshes. Death would have his eyes.

  I saw the man with the cock standing at the third-floor window. But I didn’t believe him. Do you know about tulpas, psychic offprints? My malignant duplicate was associated with cheap, off-highway hotels. He didn’t walk, he didn’t drive. He hung about, picking up women, eavesdropping on other people’s conversations: flogging my stories before I could finish them. One question: was he the tulpa? Or was I?

  Tired, hungry, confused, I found Jimmy at the bar, checking his wristwatch by pretending to fix loose cuffs, waiting, thic
k-tongued, for the first drink. His wife rounded up the kids. Track made annotations in her notebook.

  ‘We’re meeting Danny tomorrow. In the Plotlands. He’s taking us to Canvey. You coming?’

  I drank with them. I watched the screen, weather systems, blocked roads, terror rehearsals. Tibetans believe that it is the mind that creates the human body. We move among masses and shadowy shapes that are not mere hallucinations, they float, they subscribe to the theory of gravity. They obey natural laws. They are as real as the mind that forms them. The body we delineate does not vanish at the moment we recognise that it has been brought into being by an act of mind. I am here. I will hold this glass in my hand, even if the man upstairs refuses to allow me into his world.

  When Jimmy returned to the bar with our written orders (that’s how they worked it, knowing that the worst drunks would be incapable of scribbling legible instructions), I took Track’s hand. Surprising her. Causing her to laugh and cover her mouth.

  ‘Could we go upstairs? There’s something I want to discuss – in private.’

  She slipped me a swipe card. I pushed back my chair, picked up the heavy rucksack. Made for the back stairs.

  The stairwell is cavernous, dark, unused. The steps are stone. Norton listens to out-of-synch sound, footfall, the feeling of touching the next step, quitting it, before sound reaches him. Vibration precedes confirmation. A fire door separates him from the corridor that contains Track’s bedroom.

  A sudden view of the road, up on stilts, heading for the river, tunnel space beneath it, the edge of the car park. Space sucked from the scene, a vacuum. Norton – gasping, toppling, hands on brass rail – is trapped in an air pump.

  He misses his copy of the Beckmann catalogue, stolen by one of Hannah’s more deranged clients. A multiple-personality journalist (who operated a bookstall).

  He calls up: Self-Portrait in Hotel (1932). The artist weighed down by a lead hat. Strangled in a scarf like a rubber tyre. Hands in pockets of coat. Space cropped, titled. Stairs like sheep hurdles. The back way, rear entrance. Keep off the streets, ugly things are happening. There is a woman upstairs, waiting, her wrappered nakedness playing against the painter’s hunched bulk.

  In the 1941 Double-Portrait, Max Beckmann and Quappi, there is another hat. The word LONDON visible on the brim. A secret message, coded desire. Love for the city of Blake, seen in 1938, never forgotten. The eros of a sweaty hatband.

  The view from the end of the ibis corridor is faithful to Beckmann’s interpretation of space: absolute, terrifying – if it isn’t blocked, doctored by verticals, dressed with telegraph wires, roads, railway lines, ladders. Space is the horror. No limits. Norton seeks relief in casual engineering projects, protective fences, thin trees, the tall chimney of the distant power station. Stalled traffic. Blue lights flashing. If the orbital motorway is fixed, then stars are fixed, gravity is suspended: Norton floats. The transients in the ibis hotel drift through the corridors like paper goldfish.

  He makes it: Room 234. Swipe cards never work, not for Norton. He usually sleeps in laundry rooms. He’s in: tight cabin, wall-to-wall bed, TV. Clean. Lovely view of the motorway. Save it. He unpacks his papers, Danny’s files. He fishes out the whisky bottle. Takes a shower.

  Under sharp needles of scalding water, Norton is descaled; blue flakes stick to plastic shower curtains. The fishiness of Rainham Marshes is boiled off, pores open, his scalp is massaged. The shower cabinet looks like something seen by a Beckmann fish-eye. Norton’s features sprayed on an expanding beachball, flaws magnified: elongated skull with indentations of the tongs with which he was dragged into the world, unforgiving light. His frequently broken nose. In the cloudy mirror, among the pharmacopoeia of complimentary soaps and unguents, a softness of vision flatters incipient cataracts: he looks bad, but it’s going to get worse.

  Stretched on the hard bed, whisky by his side, TV (silent), Norton is about to read, work through Danny’s files, preparing himself for the next stage of the walk. He knows Track isn’t going to come. She’ll bunk with Jimmy. He’s better for her career. A family man. Man of property.

  The film’s Macao. A post-war industrial flick made with funds syphoned off from aircraft kickbacks, Commie witch-hunts. Conradian white-suit dreams of the South China Sea exposed to rabid American colonialism: Howard Hughes. Giganticism in place of human imagination, personal fetishes inflated to the size of monstrous hoardings: an adventurer, a torch singer, a boat …

  And then they ran out of ideas.

  One of those projects where the hook is an interesting past, soul damage (where no past exists): false memories, holes filled with booze, paranoia, cigarette smoke.

  They sent for the wrong German (Vienna + Brooklyn): Joseph von Sternberg. Good old Joe. A ghost brought out of retirement. Replaced by Nicholas Ray (before the eye-patch). When all the time, it was obvious to Norton, they should have cabled Max Beckmann. Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix. An ocean liner. Think: Beckmann’s Departure (1932). Three screens. Live action. Beckmann and/as Mitchum. The woman with the exposed breasts in the right-hand panel. Max and Howard Hughes, they were made for each other. Hughes was putting all the loose Germans on contract, rocket-propulsion scientists, torture mechanics, men with black books.

  The ibis hotel: Room 234. Beckmann’s address on East Nineteenth Street, Manhattan. His last exile.

  Track isn’t coming. Beckmann would enjoy Track, her intensity, the camera (carried around like a musical instrument). Her solidity. The red hair.

  Norton drinks. He reads. Basildon Plotlands. Then a few pages from a novel by a woman called Barker. Then the next manuscript in the Marina Fountain bundle: incomprehensible verbiage. Vampires in Chafford Hundred, a cannibal stalker (female) loose in the Ikea warehouse at Lakeside.

  And, finally, eyes drooping, photocopied sheets attributed to Michael Fordham, but of distinctly ambiguous provenance: reportage or fiction? They called it ‘the M25 Murder’.

  Norton flipped the page. A typo: dateline ‘April 2003’. The murder hadn’t happened yet. There was still a year to go.

  A soft knock at the door. Norton’s attention was engaged, he kept on reading. The story had the ring of truth.

  The predatory tabloid’s picture desk had rented a helicopter. They hovered so low over the scene that the tarpaulin which obscured the view had been blown away. The photographer must have used a polarised lens to capture the image through the windscreen of the large American car. It was big news that morning, because the police had shut down the entire north-east section of the motorway.

  More knocking. The door – or something outside? From the window, Norton could see the helicopter, the vertical beam of the searchlight, the American car on the hard shoulder.

  They had been going out for four years. Ever since they met at Epping Country Club one heady summer night in 1989. She’d seen this boy, absolutely caned, going for it on the dancefloor in his dungarees. He was lean, wiry – long dark hair in a ponytail. Kung fu kid, they used to call him.

  The older brother, it appears, owned a martial arts club in Hackney Road and a pub in Woodford Green. The girl was an artist, an art student. A photographer.

  Ecstasy was everywhere and it was mad. Twisted a lot of brains. Mates of theirs who had been strictly into lager and football, who had good jobs in the City, earning decent money, all of a sudden started wearing luminous long-sleeve T-shirts, tracksuit bottoms and beatific grins.

  The boy, the kung fu kid, burnt his fuses, lost it. The lovers separated, tried again, before she got rid of him.

  He helped his big brother put on parties. There had always been plenty of cash around. He’d do a few things at the boozer. Looked after the gym every now and then. Money was never a problem. He had never had anything of his own, except this beautiful young girl, the art student. He lived for training, the gear and the girl. In that order.

  You can see it. You can hear the thump of the helicopter blades. You can anticipate the conclusion of a story that i
s both banal and terrible. The physical excesses, steroids, cocaine. Brain shrinking like microwaved chicken.

  A bloke from Walthamstow he knew started a kendo workshop. That was when he got into swords. He started spending serious cash on swords and other ninja paraphernalia. He gave up drinking, started reading books on the codes of Samurai honour.

  The door, he had to answer it, bollock naked. Track. Agitated. With Jimmy.

  ‘Switch channels, now. It’s Ollie. Out there, in the car, with that madman. With Reo.’

  You can’t see much on the fuzzy porthole screen of the ibis TV set. They’re stretching a tarpaulin over the Dodge, roping it. The helicopter is staying overhead. The motorway is at a standstill. TV is just a mirror of what’s happening outside the window.

  Norton remembered: the future tabloid story, how it turned out. Drug-crazed psycho, head filled with John Woo and Mishima, kidnaps former lover, an artist (journalists relish the implication). He drives out to the M25, parks up. Strips to the waist, produces a Samurai sword. Then blows it. Seppuku aborted: in favour of a merciless killing. Murder. The decapitation of the girl, the student.

  His stained shirt was found in bushes by the side of the carriageway, as was a Japanese sword dating from the Meiji-restoration period. The sword was estimated later to be worth over eighteen thousand pounds. The police identified the antique as part of a collection stolen in a hold-up on a famous antique house delivery van earlier that year on the south coast. During the post mortem a number of incisions were found in the stomach area of the killer’s body. His blood contained a massive amount of cocaine and amphetamine.

  The killer, Reo Sleeman, hacked off the woman’s head and ran into the road, brandishing it like a lantern.

  He stepped in front of a Dutch HGV carrying 25 tonnes of plasterboard. The time was 4.15 AM.

  4.12 on the bedside clock, red figures glowing.

  ‘Do – something.’