Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Roos made lists. He passed them on to his sponsors. Left alone, he would draw up charts and paste postcards, newspaper cuttings, around his walls: the past was optional, subject to revision. I exploited Roos, I admit it, putting him into a novel about the Jeremy Thorpe murder trial (in the character of ‘Jos Kaporal’). It took Roos to run the barrister George Carman to ground, in a Dean Street drinking den, boozing on credit, shoulder to shoulder with petty villains, pimps, existential novelists. Roos unpicked the mazelike complexities of the financial scams set up by Thorpe’s ill-chosen associates, Peter Bessell, David Holmes and their offshore bagmen. Without leaving Streatham, Jacky found me the address of Thorpe’s Somerset hideaway.

  I did the driving, the hard miles. The door-to-door stuff. To no purpose. Three years’ graft and what are you left with, strip away the tricks of language, the narrative games? Jacky Roos’s list. Thirty pages of unconnected facts. My novel was greeted, if at all, with well-deserved apathy (derision from old acquaintances who picked up the occasional nostalgic gig from the Guardian).

  Three strikes and you’re out, three duds and you’re back to self-publishing, creative-writing classes in Southampton, book fairs in Bloomsbury hotels that look as if they’re fronts for the Russian mafia. That’s what it used to be like in the old days, lunches kept alive until it was time for a drink before dinner. Literary agents (male) of a certain age still make their phone calls between five and five-thirty (returned to the office for a jug of black coffee). They can barely remember who they’re talking to. ‘Waiting on … the cheque, the contract, the call from New York. They’re all in Frankfurt this week. Spanish holiday. Divorce courts. Paris closed down. Strikes wars Easter Christmas.’

  The Hastings book was my one and only. I refused to have any truck with novelists who lost their nerve and tiptoed into non-fiction, dinky little things about Regency snuff-dribblers, science as anecdote, First War diary, madhouse meditation, incest recovery affirmation, swimming to Scotland. Or, worse than those counter-grabbing booklets (which won’t spoil the line of your suit), baggy horrors about stinky, seething, Elizabethan/Victorian London, poverty porn – illustrated from archive. Wormy history cooked up to make us feel good about the thin air of the present. Books about pain: crimes reinterpreted, battles refought. Books about roads (for those who will never have to use them).

  Jacky Roos was part Belgian. A rim of brown froth around a fancy beer glass. I liked that about him, his strip of otherness; the time he spent, between projects, in melancholy resorts among the sand dunes (locations favoured by Essex smugglers with their high-powered dinghies). On unlucky weekends, the Belgian coast played like a rerun of Dunkirk, in reverse, an invasion of random craft, disqualified crews, amateurs with attitude. Wounded men. The casualties of misunderstandings with Euro-scum people-smugglers and drug barons.

  Not Roos. He favoured the quiet life. Hastings suited him, greys and browns. Polyester and corduroy. (He should have been a literary agent.) His Belgium was like Max Beckmann’s Holland, a tragic vacation, a sliced view through a convalescent window. Think Beckmann’s Scheveningen (1928) and know Hastings (2003). Deserted promenade, pedestrian crossing, beach swept of pebbles by spring storms, merciless sea. Two panes of glass, soul-trapping, between painter and world. A high view into a dark bedroom (the absence of J.R.).

  Even Jacky had to eat. Think: Beckmann’s The Artists with Vegetables (1943). Grim concentration, contemplation of improbable foodstuff – which contemplates right back. Artists with trap mouths (gone in the teeth). More of a séance than a convivial interlude. Tense exiles, in an occupied country, waiting for the midnight tap on the door.

  I met Jacky in the pasta place on the front. He was going hard at his second breakfast, a glazed pizza the size of a cardinal’s hat. He was sweating and swilling from a carafe of iced water. He flinched, pushed back his chair, tried to get up, as I approached his table.

  ‘No formality, Jacky. Long time.’

  It didn’t take much to get him on the payroll. We never socialised, or made phone calls. Once a week we ate in silence, watching the window, manoeuvring to avoid the mirror. Jacky drew up his list of local prospects: decapitated vicar (got that), Aleister Crowley’s final boarding house (check), Brink’s-Mat bullion buried in builder’s yard (yawn), property scams and the BNP (dead TV), rumours about an Albanian plot to kidnap an unnamed celebrity at the White Queen Theatre (too preposterous for fiction), the woman at Pevensey Bay who had found the lost clerical head, while walking on the marshes. She might be prepared to talk.

  That’s more like it, I thought, a trip out, fresh location.

  ‘Fix it for tomorrow. We’ll walk over.’

  ‘Walk?’ Roos flinched. He’d given up planes (research on crashes, terrorism, corporate malpractice). He wouldn’t go near a train (fifteen box files prophesying and confirming disaster, criminal incompetence). But he was wedded to his car, like a soft green snail to its shell. Antennae quivering in the breeze. Eyes shut.

  ‘Nine-thirty. By the fountain in front of the Royal Victoria Hotel,’ I said. ‘Be there. I’ll write it down for you. On the back of your hand.’

  Sunlight in rough patches, like spilled solder. A grey sea. The curve of the bay, towards Bulverhythe and its wrecks, the small cliff at Bexhill. I sat drinking on my balcony. I had no idea how the disparate elements would fit together, but the heat was on me. Voices were beginning to whisper. Lies were warping towards their own fraudulent conviction.

  I opened my great-grandfather’s book (gone in the hinges) and began to read.

  There was a legend in the family that Arthur Norton’s portrait had been taken by Julia Margaret Cameron, in Ceylon, somewhere about 1877. Arthur, I knew, because I’d seen the letters they’d exchanged, was a friend and colleague of the botanical painter, Marianne North. Could he have met the Camerons through North? He had included Julia Margaret’s husband, Charles Hay Cameron, in his list of ‘Extraordinary and Eccentric Personalities Met During the Course of my Life as a Planter in Ceylon’. But although he took the story right back to the P&O liner and the voyage out – ‘What do you think of Aden?’ I said to a Yankee tourist whom I had observed stalking over the place for half a day without opening his mouth. ‘What do I think of Aden? Why, I guess Satan must have somewhere to throw out his cinders!’ – his tendency to digress, chase any detour that might lead to a terrible joke, meant that Cameron’s potted biography (after the style of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives) never appeared. We have to make do with a procession of forgotten Scots, drunks, gamblers, rogues who went native or, worse, became Papists. The man had a fatal addiction to the picaresque.

  I can’t confirm it, but I’m sure there was at least one meeting with old Charles Hay Cameron, a man who spent years in Freshwater (on the Isle of Wight) without quitting his room. He lived in a quilted blue dressing gown, brooding on his abandoned Ceylon Estates; white-haired, affable, preoccupied, up for a cameo as King Lear. I believe that, like my great-grandfather, Cameron lost a fortune in the coffee blight of 1875. Certainly, Arthur Norton would never touch the brown stuff after that date. We thought once that it was South African gold that ruined him and sent him off on his fatal expedition to Peru. On consideration, I believe it was something much closer to home.

  In his journals Norton compares the fever of speculation in coffee with the Californian gold rush. I think he is describing a meeting with the venerable husband of Julia Margaret Cameron, a dire weekend party at Little Holland House in Kensington.

  Yes! I well remember meeting in London an old gentleman who had suffered much by this wild rush. His reminiscences of Ceylon were evidently anything but pleasant to himself and certainly were not encouraging to those about to embark. To change the subject from coffee planting, a young friend, with antiquarian proclivities, enquired if there were any interesting relics there, such as tombs of the Kandian Kings. ‘I don’t know,’ was the curt reply, ‘but there are the graves of many a good English sovereign!’

  A frayed pos
tcard among the pages of Arthur Stanley Norton’s travel journal, his portrait: author as bookmark. A reproduction from Mrs Cameron’s albumen print? The slackness of focus, which we had taken for incompetence, might now be interpreted as the signature of the style, the intensity of gaze Julia Margaret inherited from her one lesson with David Wilkie Wynfield. Her cyclopean engine, the great camera box, driven close against the subject. Weak eyes, they reckon, a family trait among the Camerons. Damage inflicted on the print by the tropical climate.

  Arthur’s bright eyes. Out of the sepia fog, cold blue.

  Laughter lines. Despite the effort of endurance in sitting motionless in that heat. (Marianne North moaned about the noonday sun, a faint breeze stirring the breadfruit leaves.) Norton retains his good humour, Aberdonian scepticism for highborn ladies and their art. (A thumbprint floats over his right shoulder like an ectoplasmic double.)

  Arthur’s beard, greying, was too well trimmed for Mrs Cameron’s purposes. More Professor Challenger than Alfred Tennyson as ‘dirty monk’. No cloak, a heavy jacket.

  The trick she worked so often: mortality. A stare that empties the soul. Arthur’s barely suppressed smile breaks the spell. A failure. On the artist’s terms. Portrait of an Unknown Man (Ceylon). 1875–9.

  My challenge was to integrate the private, family story – unattributed photographic portrait, collapsed investments, fatal expedition, lost camera (with Peruvian film still inside) – with the material Jacky Roos was gathering for me in Hastings. And then to find a suitably Scottish form for this double tale. I rejected the alternate chapter technique, much abused by recent practitioners: historical pastiche interspersed with unconvinced passes at contemporary life. Those exhausted tropes: miraculously discovered journals, photos in shoebox, invented poems (in strict imitation of the period pieces they parody). Tick tock. Then now, now then. Until you end up with Nicole Kidman in a putty nose. The past as a website you can access for a small fee. Password: Metafiction.

  And there was one other minor irritation: I was going mad. Nothing serious, a single, recurrent delusion. Another writer, with my name, my face, was trailing me; stealing my research and peddling it as documentary truth, a short film here, an essay there. That’s why I left London. The creature had ruined my reputation, invading and capturing (so far as the critical consensus was concerned, Radio 4, Channel 4, the four broadsheets) my territory. He had forced me to flee to the coast, to begin again from scratch. At my age. Knowing nothing. No contacts. No money. And the fear that one morning he would be there, grinning, standing over my mattress, watching me as I slept.

  Beach

  Do I partake in the existence of gulls? High gloss, yellow beak, fishbreath? Timid dance at tideline, a sudden swoop, catching the wind, wings outspread, bones light as drinking straws? Up and away. Out over the Channel. Do I fuck.

  The discomforts of childhood, itchy wool, sunburn, they never disappear. Half drowned by a hairy man teaching me to swim – by letting me sink. The sea was always cold, salty, opaque. You couldn’t breathe and it hurt to try.

  My first photographic portrait: perched on a stuffed lion on the promenade in Paignton. Brass rule between the animal’s front paws. Disney cruelty, I thought. Hobbling the beast when it returns to life. Glass eye: the colour of vinegar. Mane that came away in your clammy grip.

  I took Ruth to the seaside once, in the early days. Things weren’t going well. You know women. I couldn’t begin to figure out the source of her discontent. It was my fault, obviously: something done or undone, a grievance nurtured and unsmoothed. Actually, it occurs to me now, there was no single reason (unpaid bills, failure to alert her to a change of time for Coronation Street, bad sex), no unaired grudge: she didn’t like me, simple as that. I was a mistake about to be rectified.

  I asked her to drive (another black mark), so that I could film the full moon bouncing, a pingpong ball on a water jet, over the endless rooftops of the A12, the apotheosis of ribbon development (aspirational suburbia masking country parks and cabbage patches). We stayed at Orford, a gloomy choice in the circumstances. I wanted to check out the tower where Mike Reeves filmed the climax of Witchfinder General: Ian Ogilvy going nuts and butchering a faintly shocked Vincent Price – who realises, too late, he’s in the wrong movie. The tower was shut, out of season. Autumn storms off the North Sea rained frogs and stones.

  We drifted on to Southwold, where the white lighthouse, seen from an attic bedroom, over a Cubist scatter of red roof tiles, might have been an unfortunate symbol. We breakfasted, like all the other English couples, in a silence broken only by the chomping of dry toast and the ruffling of the Telegraph.

  I still have the snaps. Ruth on the beach. Ruth among the stilt-shacks of Walberswick. Ruth in a pine forest. Such things, eventually, become a fetish. Long hair, long coat. Long legs. Why is this beautiful young woman alone? Who is stalking her? It hurts, seeing what she was, and what I was too stupid to notice at the time: resignation, distaste for the camera’s obsessive attention. The tightness in her shoulders, how she draws herself into her coat. The futility of fixing the present moment, instead of experiencing it – experiencing it, always, with one eye closed.

  I get the same feeling from Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits of housemaids and compliant relatives. Let them be. Leave them to their fate. A commentator, writing about a subsequent Southwold pedestrian, the late W.G. Sebald, said that photographs were a device ‘whereby the dead scrutinise the living’.

  Edouardo Cadava (in Worlds of Light): ‘Photography is bereavement.’

  Young Ruth lost to old Norton. It requires her physical death to bring my grey images back to life. Ruth, my one and only passion (unrequited), left early. And it still hurt. Not the fact that she’d gone (if I’m honest, I provoked it), but the manner of her exit. A trip to the magistrates’ court, in support of a friend. And she never returned to the basement flat in Chepstow Road.

  Coming from Wales (birthplace) and the West Country (education), I was lazy. I settled in West London; first Paddington, then South Ken (schoolfriends) and (mid Sixties) Notting Hill. It was the era, before the film, when it was just about possible to read Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners, without wrapping the book in brown paper. A teenage snapper and his verbals (penned by an old queen from Spitalfields). Street kids could be photographed without a visit from the sex police, a one-way ticket to Hastings.

  Joey Silverstein, who was knocking about with Mervyn Peake’s daughter, knew MacInnes (knew everybody). He was my first contact with London literature (humped in a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag): Gerald Kersh, Alexander Baron, Patrick Hamilton, Sarah Salt, Robin Cook, Robert Westerby and James Curtis. Joey wore a belted coat, summer and winter, he didn’t sit down. As soon as he finished talking, he moved on. ‘I’ll call you next week, man. We’ll do a walk.’ I never saw him actually read a book, but he knew where to find them (Bethnal Green to Friern Barnet). He also knew, by touch, what was inside. And what it was worth.

  It was years before I met a published author. The closest I came was watching Heathcote Williams spray Michael Moorcock graffiti around the borough, giving away the reclusive celebrity’s current address. Bringing Hawkwind fans and geeks with typescripts to his door. Future wives. Dealers of every stamp. I was too proud to join them.

  There was something about the concentration with which Ruth made up her face that morning, it troubled me. It was like watching Lucian Freud through a two-way mirror. One mask, attempted, revised, scratched off. Begun again. I should have guessed. (And now, years later, I can imagine where those little chats in the café with Freud led.)

  Women, as well as men, were always congratulating Ruth on the smoothness ofher skin – achieved without the use of powder or paint. If they’d known! The hours it takes to produce the natural look. You’d think they might have noticed eyelashes thick as flea combs, the black rings (Mandrake Club pallor on eight hours’ dreamless kip). Her model: Anna Karina in Vivre sa Vie. Ruth took up smoking, French, unfiltered. She cult
ivated that slightly goofy, shortsighted stare that lends itself to misinterpretation: the spirituality of glycerine tears.

  I met Karina once, with Godard at the Academy, Oxford Street. Permission to translate an interview. Quite a hefty lady, actually, in the flesh, nothing like Ruth. I thought: Sandie Shaw in Dagenham, much more like. Long legs, large feet. Slight stoop, curvature of the spine, from hunkering down to hear what short men with hairy backs and heavy gold identity bracelets were proposing. Secretary to a music publisher in Denmark Street – so she said. Could I believe her after what happened?

  Ugly suspicions. I broke off my work, mid-morning, couldn’t concentrate, a film treatment going nowhere; Cliff and the Shadows. They wanted a hip new image, Dick Lester jumpcuts, newsreel camerawork, South London one-liners – as a response (a rip-off) to Hard Day’s Night. I slaved, uncredited and pretty much unpaid, for a composer of advertising jingles who wanted to go legit, screenplays, production. With one drawback: he was illiterate. Couldn’t fill a speech bubble in a Sergeant Rock comic.

  I started walking, jogging, around Paddington Station, up Praed Street, towards Marylebone Road. A group of them were coming down the steps, outside the court, laughing, heading off, so I imagine, to the pub for a celebration. One of the men, a longwristed String Band-type freak, was puffing away on a monster joint. Ruth, hanging back, not wanting to be associated, publicly, with such excesses, was being tracked by a very nasty piece of work. My mirror image. Same clothes, same Buddy Holly spectacles, same squint. It was the first time I encountered my double, the other Norton. The one who put the hack into Hackney.

  You can imagine the rest. Ruth came back one Saturday afternoon, when she knew Chelsea were at home, and removed all her things. Two suitcases and the Dansette. I couldn’t keep up the rent. I shunted, by way of Park Royal and Cricklewood, to West Hampstead – where I finally lost it, went into therapy. I was convinced that Harrow was the site of a holy mountain, a radiant city, the temple of the west: dappled light in a churchyard overlooking the valley through which the M25, London’s orbital motorway, would one day pass. I suffered a pre-vision of this river of gold. I wandered the streets around the shopping centre, the wrong part of town, asking if anyone could direct me to the lodgings of the Cockney-Welsh mythographer and poet, David Jones.