Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Track shaking Norton. Jimmy flexing his cuffs.

  Stars are our eyes: Beckmann.

  ‘Take long walks,’ the painter said, ‘and take them often, and try your utmost to avoid the stultifying motor car which robs you of your vision, just as the movies do, or the numerous motley newspapers.’

  Falling Man (1950).

  Norton, naked, at the window. Two figures, clothed, behind him. The frame seen from the car park.

  If you revolve Beckmann’s painting, stand it on its head, it works. A swimmer plunging, arms outstretched, into a flower-strewn river. Feet like paddles. Out of the clouds: boats of angels, fires in windows. Down from heaven into the lifeless earth of a motorway hotel.

  Beckmann understood, better than anyone, the mystery of the middle ground: he abolished it. The falling man, painted in New York, in the last year of his life, has no middle ground. The naked figure, close to the window, losing his green robe, bath towel, dominates the foreground. Black hair like the painter’s favourite skullcap. The flying man – man who has forgotten how to fly, lost his wings – reaches out to touch, with thick, vegetal fingers, ‘unknown space’. His soul transmigrates into the absence of middle ground (a collar like the orbital motorway).

  4.13 a.m.: Track propelling Norton, wheeling him, stiff as a corpse, towards the liquefying barrier of the window.

  ‘Time,’ Beckmann wrote, ‘is the invention of mankind; space or volume, the palace of the gods.’

  Mitchum and Jane Russell: the posthumous embrace of mastodons. Macao. Lovers entombed in a block of Jell-O.

  Wassily Kandinsky: ‘Space is death.’

  Cameras pick up a running figure, a naked man; out of the ibis car park, over the fence, across wasteground. Up the long ramp, sliproad – logged on surveillance monitors. Through six lines of stationary traffic.

  The night of West Thurrock is not The Night (1918–19) of Max Beckmann; no bondage (except on digital channel, by supplementary payment); no Lenin, no pipe (smoking forbidden). No candles of lard in the electrified motel.

  A.M. Norton has found his muse: murder. She is upside down on his bed, red slippers, scarf around neck, voluptuously nude. Her hand rests on her own gently heaving belly. Hannah listens to his story: seaside, failing eyes, failure of imagination. Standing member, huge, aubergine-purple.

  Twin windows – sex rituals, falling man: side-panels of an unfinished triptych: The M25 Slaughter.

  A naked runner, exploiting the corridor of the middle ground, between actuality and fiction, arrives unmolested at the American car. He opens the passenger door and taking the woman’s hand leads her through the lines of stalled traffic to the ramp (an Expressionist motif).

  To Track. Who has run down the back stairs, out of the hotel, across the waste ground. To embrace her lost friend.

  So it is Norton that Reo Sleeman strikes (it always was). A clean cut. In the green glow of the dashboard. Norton: Green Knight. Spouting blood. Like a petrol pump gushing over the forecourt.

  The radio in Room 234 acts as an alarm. A wake-up call for the walk to Canvey Island. Capital Radio’s Flying Eye announces a twenty-eight-mile tailback, the worst in the history of London’s orbital motorway.

  Severed head in hand, grasped by a thin crop of neck hair, Reo Sleeman ran into the road. 4.14 a.m. It hasn’t happened yet. Night traffic in spate. Clubbers from Basildon. Reps from Chafford Hundred. Lakeside deliveries. A Dutch HGV loaded with plasterboard, watching out for a difficult turn.

  The impact barely felt. Driver in shock. Sweet tea. Sleeman tossed aside, crumpled. The head rolling, rolling, rolling. Eyes like fiery coals. Into scrubgrass. Down the embankment. Into the dark. The whole performance, captured on surveillance monitors, became a legend among snuff movies: the Citizen Kane of necrophilia, death of a nation.

  Sleeman’s funeral at Chingford Mount was well attended by men with shaven heads, sovereign rings, dark glasses and long black coats. Crocodile limos, nose to tail, stretched back as far as the North Circular. Florists were denuded. Notable among several highly inventive floral tributes were wreaths shaped like boxing rings, Mount Fuji, like jukeboxes. Respects were offered, upper-case carnations, by the serial mourners of gangland: Freddie Foreman, Tony Lambrianou, Dave Courtney (in charge of security), Kenny Noye, Bernard O’Mahoney (author of Essex Boys), Howard Marks and half the cast of EastEnders.

  It was decided, after consultation with the family, a visit to Alby Sleeman in Maidstone (two counts of life imprisonment, armed robbery, assault on security guard), that the song for the crematorium, to play Reo out, would be Wheels (Keep A-Rollin) from the album That Man Robert Mitchum … Sings (Monument Records).

  Forensic examination of Reo’s Samurai sword led to the capture of the perpetrators of a south coast raid on a van of antiques, ‘mainly from China and Japan’, conservatively valued at half a million pounds. A subsequent search of Alby’s London Fields lock-up recovered three kilos of cocaine, 7,000 ecstasy tablets and numerous bundles of very damp cannabis resin.

  Of Norton, his head and his torso, there was no trace. The man had vanished. Some commentators doubted that he had ever existed. There was no entry in the register at the ibis. Katherine Cloud Riise (32) and Olivia Fairlight-Jones (30), despite substantial offers from the tabloids, were not giving interviews.

  All too late. Norton was destined not to discover the thing that troubled him most – as he ran, naked, up the ramp: where Track got her name.

  A. M. Norton

  ALLEGORIES OF INSOMNIA & CONTINUOUS SKY

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  naked in the sea air and amongst the dead

  – Catherine Millet

  Cunard Court

  So much experience, and so little of it experienced, lived through, exploited. So many broken phrases. Failing windows, failing eyes. The moon is a suicide’s eye. The missing eye of Rooster Cogburn.

  The way we repeat ourselves, dust down the same lifeless metaphors: discovering old notebooks with abandoned versions of new stories. Too late to be picky.

  There is a certain pathos, a degree of comedy, to be wrung out of physical decay, stalled ambition, inappropriate lust: the skeleton propped on the balcony like a wind chime. Hollywood contrives an upbeat ending, dignity for the carcinogenic gunfighter who has to be winched onto his horse. The south coast is crueller, more practical. Home helps in the lift, the compost of memory packed away in hutches for the elderly, Edwardian and Victorian mansions on high ridges – the sound of the sea fading away by barely noticed increments.

  The glass is smeared, clean it as often as you like. Something wrong with my eyes: no middle distance. Heavy clouds coming in on the curve. Toy boats, twelve miles out, on their superhighway voyages.

  There were other rooms. From the kitchen I could gaze back on the Old Town, the cliffs, the pier; the sun, on good days, rose over that skeletal structure, polishing its black bones. Every new morning, light returned, a golden rule across the crests of wavelets. I stood at the sink for hours, at the day’s end, when the fading sun had moved on towards Pevensey Bay and Beachy Head. I watched the lines of traffic, red lights and dirty gold. I noticed windows, shadows of people, blue television screens; the occasional solitary came out to test the evening air. There were always couples, all ages, moving along the seafront. Drinking schools kept their heads down, in caves and shelters beneath the promenade, unrowdy, working hard at the complex business of taking the edge off things.

  You see? It’s impossible. Flaccid prose dragging itself across the page. The Conradian era is over, leisurely paragraphs, tracking shots punctuated by elegantly positioned semi-colons. English as a third language, after Polish and French. Time to read Flaubert, Turgenev.

  Conrad did. And Henry James. They lived around here, down the coast. I remember something Iris Murdoch wrote (in character) about liking women in novels by James and Conrad because they were ‘flower-like’. And miles from reality, anyone met or kn
own. ‘Guileless, profound, confident and trustful,’ say the writers. Deep as the sea. ‘Inarticulate, credulous and simple,’ replies Murdoch. ‘Unbalanced by the part they have to act.’

  I can’t do local colour, topography, scene setting. I’m just not interested. A room is a room. The ‘film essayist’ Jamie Lalage, who tried his best to synthesise one of my baggier fictions into twenty-seven minutes of deathwatch television, limitation as the sincerest form of flattery, told me that he moved house, an arc around north London, on a regular basis. ‘You can get one book out of anywhere. Even Willesden. Especially Willesden.’

  He’s right. Consider London Bridge (no UK edition) by L.-F. Céline. House of mad inventor in suburbs. Wild trajectory, through Soho, to the still-functioning chaos of the docks. Or, bypassing the drudgery of writing the thing yourself, you can always inspire books in others: Dennis Nilsen, Scottish conceptualist, body sculptor, mass murderer. Show-stopping footage, from the fat-clogged drain, by a miniaturised camera on wheels. Unedited, it would have walked away with the Turner Prize. That’s more Willesden than any reasonable culture is ever going to absorb.

  Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? Read the press. ‘Bohemian Atmosphere Attracts Literary Gent’. The Observer, 17 January 2003. The Hastings and St Leonards Observer, that is.

  And that’s where I’m going now. Down to the corner shop, the Purser’s Cabin. To pick up a copy for the scrapbook.

  Five rooms: kitchen (overlooking Old Town), sitting room (table, deckchair, combined TV/video – for video only), bedroom (mattress on floor), work room (table, antique word-processor, orange boxes filled with books), shower cupboard. The Cunard is a Thirties liner, part of the package that comes with the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea and much of Frinton: alien notions imported by exiled Germans and Russians, Mickey Mouse Bauhaus. Crumbling, expensive to maintain, destructive of the original fabric, rapidly adapted to proper Englishness: sticky brown paint in lifts, Ali-Baba-on-acid unmagic carpets, deck walk (around flat roof) given over to radio masts for minicabs and cellphone boosters.

  Easy to negotiate. Easy to remember where you are (waking to traffic noise, sea on shingle, gull scream). Easier to leave behind.

  By lift or on the stairs (seven flights), I never met another human. Cunard Court, as they always say, the visiting journalists, would give the off-season resort from The Shining a run for its money. Steadicam corridors through which the undead can’t be bothered to promenade. Viewpoints, on each landing, looking straight into the rusty cliff face.

  Hiding out in just such a place, mad Jack Nicholson got to spend quality time at the typewriter. Hammering out his Borgesian finger exercises, his concrete poetry repetitions. (In my opinion, nobody’s asking, Cunard Court is more like Rosemary’s Baby. Brownstone satanism gone white with shock, generations of seagull shit.)

  My morning stroll, under the columns, was a delight. Sticky piss stains in doorways. Oddball commercial enterprises: furniture that looked as if it would eat you alive (Naugahyde recliners to be buried in), wedding dresses for American-size brides, leaky wet suits (reduced), fundamentalist electrical repairs, incense, bowel remedies, cheap booze and a boarded-up (rates refusenik) Dr Who ephemera franchise. An unfunded heritage operation that peddled the back story (mouse mats with maps of James Burton’s St Leonards), lectures on local history (Monday mornings only, Easter to September) by a whistling lay preacher.

  RESPECT OUR WRECKS.

  BLOOD LUST – A NIGHT OF VAMPIRE GOTH. ADMISSION FREE, EXIT OPTIONAL.

  LIVE FOOD. REALLY CHEAP PRICES: CRICKETS, LOCUSTS, MEALWORMS & WAX WORMS.

  KEVIN CARLYON: WHITE WITCH, HEALER, TAROT CONSULTANT, EXORCIST. FREE ADVICE.

  The ads in the newsagent’s window were an accurate reflection of local culture: benevolent occultism, used white goods (wreckers’ plunder), New Age exercise bicycles.

  I don’t know what I’ve done to rate a mention in the fright sheet, a slack week between machete raids on offies, pitched battles -Russians and Afghans – down by the pier (homage to Mods and Rockers, Qnadrophenia), wrong-man-shot-in-drugs-raid and Tories call for probe into property sales.’ I hadn’t enjoyed such a mix of high-baroque actuality (rendered in two-finger prose) and shotgun morality since the golden era of The Hackney Gazette. Pit bulls and property supplements.

  This is how it happened. Hastings is an elephants’ graveyard for science fiction and fantasy writers. I’ve heard the names of the famous living ones (the published): Storm Constantine (a Moorcock collaborator) and Christopher Priest (aka John Luther Novak, Colin Wedgelock, etc.). A town of slippery identity, clearly. A place for disinvention, winding down, cultivating writers’ block as a definitive condition. Earlier romancers included: Aleister Crowley (Moonchild), Sir Henry Rider Haggard, George MacDonald and the aunt-visiting Lewis Carroll. I discount the excursionist Charles Dickens. He went everywhere.

  A sharp-eyed journalist, contacts in outer limits websites and subterranean genre magazines that specialised in not appearing, caught on to the fact that I’d been forced to abandon London. He was too young to remember anything I’d published, but the relevant information could still be dredged up in a long morning on the telephone.

  We met in a pub in the district known as Mercatoria – pleasant, unthemed, big tables, all the real ales required and requested by the smocks and beards. This was a two-way thing, he might fill a corner of the page and I might acquire a useful contact, background information on some of the crimes, corruptions, local mysteries that I would attempt to shape into a saleable narrative. We came together, therefore, with no great expectations on either side. He was on time, nursing a pint of orange juice and lemonade, and I, panting, was ten minutes late, after a detour around a set of steps that were up for renovation.

  A vicar strangled in the bath and then butchered (axe and saw) by his teenage lodger. The paedophile riviera: the Observer, London version, revealed that ‘as many as 30 child sex offenders live in the Hastings area alone’.

  ‘Nobody more alone,’ muttered the fresh-faced journo. Who reported that rundown hotels and boarding houses were being exploited as holding pens for special-category prisoners released from Maidstone and Albany. The Wonderland child-porn ring, recently broken, had been traced back to emails sent out from a Hastings computer. Hastings, in receipt of various improvement grants and Euro funds, saw its future in terms of media enterprises attracted by the provision of broadband internet providers.

  I fed him, in return, some tired stuff about drift bohemia, labyrinthine streets, cheap and none-too-cheerful bookshops, periphery as centre.

  ‘Will Hastings become the new Brighton?’ he asked.

  ‘God forbid. With luck it might become old Hackney.’

  Here was the article:

  A once familiar name in the literary world is living in St Leonards after falling in love with the town.

  A.M. Norton, 60, is making a new life on the coast after buying a flat in stylish Cunard Court.

  Mr Norton is the author of several novels, hailed by the critics, and set in the smoky streets of London, where he uncovers layers of the capital’s dark history.

  Mr Norton first visited Hastings as a book dealer in the 1970s and has been attracted to the town since then.

  He said: ‘I need a new beginning, virgin territory. In London, I am written out. I’m sure that Hastings will provide an abundance of mysteries among its steep steps and narrow alleyways.’

  Although Mr Norton is not entirely convinced by the town’s ambitions to become a media centre, he does think the future for Hastings is bright.

  He said: ‘The potential for regeneration is massive.’

  Mr Norton’s current project, untitled, is partly set in Hastings and takes in everything from the history of Victorian photographers and painters to the killing of the Reverend Freestone, the friendly vicar who was dismembered in 2001.

  A.M. Norton, 60. Sixty miles out. Leaning on the balcony at the stern of the white boat, Cunard
Court, staring at the long, slightly bent road; at dog-walkers, cyclists, stern-featured joggers (yes, he has a pair of binoculars). It’s good, he thought, to have someone to look down on: the television researcher Jacky Roos, his attic room in a hotel favoured by kitchen staff from other hotels (seasonal) and economic migrants freed from their six-month prohibitions. Roos, in his turn, could look down – in a physical sense – on the Hastings Observer journalist (escapee from Rainham), who lodged in a pretty, but overshadowed, undercliff terrace. The hierarchy was in place: blocked author, troubled researcher, perky legman (too young to know better).

  They all needed one thing: a story.

  When everything else fails, fall back on doctored autobiography: audition friends and acquaintances as fictional monsters, twist facts, push them as far as they’ll go, distort evidence, leaven the mess with half-truths, public scandals, real landscapes. I’d tried that before and it hadn’t played. Roos, a master at retrieving documents, a whiz at the keyboard, was my precise contrary: he never, if he could help it, left his room. He could find anything he wanted on his computer. He collected wives like air miles and then lost them. He loved art and respected artists. He had a tenderness for the world, moist eyes (sober). No memory, none at all: yesterday didn’t exist unless he made a hard copy.

  Facts sucked from the Mediadrome, the aether, excited and oppressed him: congenital paranoia. Conspiracies everywhere. Nobody who couldn’t be reached in three phone calls. The web breeds its own cancers, cancers of the eye. A torched warehouse in Shoreditch. A man in a white suit pissing against a Californian redwood. A nervous Libyan buying six identical shirts in a tourist shop in Malta. An election address, by a Liberal politician in Taunton, ghosted by a bankrupt sword-&-sorcery author. A ringing phone. Roadside kiosk, no house within two miles. A golden torc, La Tène period, recovered from a peat bog in the Isle of Harris, during the search for a black box flight-recorder.