Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  I was with Track on the sofa, a little drunk, very confused, pressing my face into her hair – while she, watching the sleeping Roos, the REM-flicker of eyes behind heavy lids, reached beneath the leather cushion for Livia’s postcard.

  Pevensey is a hinge place. Future and past balanced on the head of a pin. On Track’s decision: will she remove my hand? Which I have allowed, innocently, to rest on her thigh. Checking that Livia is still asleep, before bringing the postcard up close to her face, Track slides away – without discourtesy, otherwise occupied.

  The blonde in the black mac gets out of the car. She’s been trusted with a letter to post, her friend. She is going to break that trust and suffer the consequences. Swedish weather. Bad dreams. Sleepwalkers. A slap. Confessions of her own. Incidents on a quiet beach.

  I kept an eye on the flatscreen, that magic window.

  ‘Was it you?’ I said. ‘Who found the vicar’s head?’

  ‘It’s still out there.’ Track took a drag on her spliff. ‘Or it might be under Ollie’s dress. In her belly.’

  She rolled from the sofa, crawled towards the open door, the night air, calling after her friend.

  I stayed with the TV. Bergman’s women, Bibi Andersson (talkative nurse) and Liv Ullmann (mute actress), were on the rocks: dappled sunlight, cold rain. The generally intense, static, interrogatory momentum of the piece was interrupted by a lateral tracking shot, the calling of a name. A Scandinavian scream moment.

  ‘Don’t hurt me!’

  Track searching for tiny Ollie, her woozy and slightly pregnant chum. In the moonlight. Aware of the absurdity, the drama she should have left on the flatscreen, the false window.

  ‘Ollie! Ollie! Forgive me.’

  She means the confession about the head. It was never on the marshes, these marshes; it hadn’t crossed the river, left Rainham. The head was lodged in Ollie’s belly. A thing with gills. A ticking wonder.

  I was half in love with Ullmann. I admired Andersson. Serially wonderful, both. But I was suspicious of this performance, the showy silence brought on by newsclips, burning Buddhists. The story Andersson has to tell, the episode with the boys on the beach, the small orgy, is a gift to an actress of her intelligence. Most of all, I doubted the great manipulator, Bergman himself (growling stomach): dark Prospero on his private island. Guilts and calibrated ecstasies. The celibacy of true authorship. Hunger for wives.

  I was completely pissed, staggering. Had Ollie found the vicar’s head, out there, across the busy road, in the darkness of the marshes? And, if so, how did that advance our case – if she wouldn’t talk? If she wouldn’t supply the details – fingerprint bruises, maggot patterns -that would allow me to shape a convincing fiction.

  Ollie was sitting in a deckchair, nursing a bottle. The presence of the sea, as soon as you stepped out of the bungalow, was overwhelming: sound, weight, distance. Stones dragged, released, dragged again. Sorted and scoured. Beach defences bolstered by tons and tons of sand hosed from off-shore dredgers: the heroic attempt to retard the inward invasion, land piracy.

  To be here, child in womb, was heroic too. Swift transitions between dream and place, mother’s memories, the prompting of the curled unborn. All those ancient riddles that require no answers.

  Track and Jacky Roos, sturdy silhouettes at the tideline, found something to say to each other. We could hear them, over the shingle, the slithering stones, as they went out of sight, down behind the protective bank, in hot debate. Before they returned, in silence, to the bungalow.

  The women shared a bed. Roos helped himself to the sofa. I settled in the big chair, letting the film play itself out. Alma and Elizabeth, Bergman’s fictions. Alma and Lizzie. Anna and Ollie. Anna is the palindrome. Pevensey Bay, it struck me, is the palindrome of my unwritten novel: confusion behind it and confusion ahead. I took another drink.

  There was nothing, within reach, to read – except a battered Iris Murdoch. Under the Net. We were, all of us, hopelessly tangled: films with more substance than life. It was not of course that I had the slightest intention of looking for Anna, but I wanted to be alone with the thought of her… I had found Anna deep. I cannot think what it is about her that would justify me in calling her mysterious, and yet she always seemed to me to be an unfathomable being … Few things disgust me more than these pretended profundities.

  I yawned, groaned. Threw the book aside. Failed to sleep.

  The events I’d laid out with the help of Roos’s file – unsolved murder (perpetrator in custody, motive obscure), gangsters and property rackets, botched kidnapping – would exist on either side of this lost night: untouched by me. Reality was unstringing like a necklace. I could run the Bergman video backwards and forwards at whim (I did, I do). Livy’s pregnancy can’t be undone. The Pevensey landscape is an absolute (changing before our eyes). The rest depends on my mood as I sit down at my word-processor, inspiration or otherwise. I must talk to Hannah Wolf. I must play that scene again, try and make sense of it, our night at the Travelodge.

  Slatted light across the woodblock floor gave me fair warning: one of those days, so unexpected, so feared, so perfect. Impossible to live up to, impractical to celebrate. Gentle zephyr, kind haze. Soft air. Warm enough to take my coffee onto the stoop, doors wide. To read Track’s letter, while Roos tosses and snorts, dreaming of American breakfasts, hogs and grits, sunnyside-up yellow eyes winking from a blue plate.

  We decided your coming helped. We can’t stay any longer in Marina’s place. We’re very grateful, please tell her, and send our love – but we feel, talking it over, that living in Marina’s house is also living in her story, doing what she thinks we should be doing. So it’s back to Essex, to our unfinished project, the road exhibition. Canvey Island (you should read Behindlings by Nicola Barker) and Southend and Shoeburyness and wherever the A13 finishes.

  Please lock the door after you and leave the keys with Mrs Orwell in the papershop (Coast Road). Turn down the fridge (dial on right) to No. 2. Put the wine bottles in the green tray and carry that down to the gate.

  Jacky, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t fret. Well, it was your fault, but it doesn’t matter. It was my fault too. And not all bad. Yes, it was all bad. But no scars?

  love, Track XXX

  We returned, by the same route, to Hastings – and it was totally different, a different day. The road had shrunk, we marched, one behind the other, with our own thoughts.

  ‘What were you talking about, last night, with the redhead – on the beach?’

  ‘She claimed, she might have something, that we were married once,’ Roos replied. ‘Definitely familiar, that woman. I’m still paying the standing orders.’

  ‘Worth it though, would you say?’

  ‘No visible scars.’

  ‘Fancy following them, the station – Essex?’

  ‘Wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Right.’

  I tried to limit the damage, Roos’s cultural retrievals, but I had to let him function, to keep his mind off the hike. He said that J.G. Ballard called madness ‘an undeclared war’.

  Bexhill was sandbagged, pensioners and displaced persons worked on strategies for avoiding the sea. The De La Warr Pavilion, recalling happier times, other conflicts, featured grid paintings by a Norwegian – like pages of Track’s notebook (shown to Jacky) blown up to fill a wall.

  We sat on the balcony and imagined this place in more gracious days. Afternoon concerts, tea dances. From his satchel, Roos (recovering fast) dragged out a book: The Liturgy of Funerary Offerings by E.A. Wallis Budge. London, 1909. Light-brown cloth, minor foxing prelims, otherwise mint.

  ‘Shall I recite the Forty-Third Ceremony, “The Cake Offering”? Or would you rather treat me to a Full English?’

  The point of this reflex bibliophilia was the provenance. Book purchased Bexhill-on-Sea, April 1982: £6 (reduced, on demand, to £4.50). Bookplate of photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. White circle with arrow, black gates.

  Coburn retired to the seasid
e (Colwyn Bay) in 1918 and pursued other interests: Freemasonry and Buddhist meditation. Image-making, after the First War, was redundant. He was tracked down in September 1966 by poet Jonathan Williams. A stern old man in red-brown three-piece, watch-chain and insignia.

  Among rhododendrons and azalea, Coburn twists, reluctantly, for the snapshot: creased brow. The photographer’s shadow, afternoon sun, is a minor intrusion. Coburn knows all too well what the granting of this final portrait means.

  The view from the rise, by the coastguards’ house: Cunard Court and the double curve of the bay. Better than Naples.

  Closer to home, we noted Judge’s current premises, Italinate, an archive of postcards by the Bexhill Road. Then: ruins. Boats with burst ribs. Sewage outflow. A rough paddock where a lido had once been. A lockup, such as you might find under the railway arches in Hackney, stacked with canvases. Paintings of eyes. The solitary graffito on an abandoned concrete pavilion: I DONT BELONG HERE.

  A small boy on a bicycle, blowing a policeman’s whistle, calls after us: ‘In twenty-four hours, you’ll be dead.’

  We parted, gratefully, at Entrance A of Cunard Court. I wanted a shower, something to eat. The last thing I needed was the heavy package left at my door. Unstamped, personally delivered. You weren’t supposed to get in without permission. We paid a premium for security, service charges. Men in uniforms who smoked in a cubbyhole at night. I moved to St Leonards to escape unsolicited Jiffy bags.

  No incendiary devices, no biological weapons. Worse: a novel or set of linked fictions, crudely typed on some charity-shop Remington. From that much-discussed person, Marina Fountain.

  This is the book that the angel made John eat.

  A hefty sandwich and a jug of coffee. I took them out to the balcony. My eyes hurt, the glare of the midday sun. The sea, with its reversed-loop sound, was all skin: wrinkled, feathery. Petroleum jelly on which gulls skidded.

  I started to read. Words swam. Obstructions floated across my field of vision like ectoplasm in one of Fred Judge’s nocturnal London prints. I fetched a magnifying glass – progressed, slowly, with agonising difficulty, a line at a time. Much harder this, interpreting alien fiction, than walking barefoot around the M25.

  Blind first. Then light, a quiet drizzle through dirty muslin. He sits, head throbbing, head in hands, back against wall. Trapped in the window frame, a fishing boat. Movement taken on trust, on previous experience … before he risks it, draws back the sliding door. Experiences: a new day.

  Who else, Stephen brooded, would appreciate this thing? Appreciate it enough to commit it to memory. Restless wavelets. A boat, riding the swell, circling back towards the red pier, the smudged sunrise.

  A privileged viewpoint on the broad sweep of the bay, the English Channel. Keep it as a picture, in chalk and crayon. A composition in noisy segments. Colour independent of line.

  That’s all. Nothing else worth retaining. Last night’s full moon displacing a thin coin’s depth on his memory-screen. Satellite hung on wire over a lifeless sea. Two scenes, then, moon and morning. Equally painful, equally persistent .

  The first thing that hits you, walking out of the station, is the light, the light of the coast, the sea. Warrior Square, it says. But there is no sign of a square. Or of a warrior, an equestrian statue. A deserted piazza in which you might expect to find taxis, touts, runners sent out by hotels. Nothing of the sort. Distant shufflers moving off, rapidly, to avoid eye-contact with this alien life-form; a person from elsewhere. A woman.

  You don’t need to be told where the sea is, you start, without considering other possibilities, in that direction. The ground in front of the station organises itself into a single street, the usual hopeless non-enterprises. Ghost architecture. Benevolent obituaries in which the posthumous casualties of contemporary life find shelter. And purpose. A daily round for the desperate: the circuit of charity shops and indulgent cafés.

  Marine speculations, station to seafront, have gone wrong, but they’re not bitter. There’s nothing sour about this street. The balcony of the station hotel, encrusted with seagull shit, is crumbling. Hungry vines eat into sick plaster. ALES & STOUTS: faded script on washed-over brickwork. The town could go either way, development (poop-scoops, heritage) or entropy. She hasn’t decided, this traveller, how to cast her vote. The citizens – exiles, inbreeds – don’t recognise her. Don’t understand that she holds their fate in her pocket. That her slender, unostentatious elegance is immortal.

  The railway pub has beautiful, syrupy-brown tiles, a foot-bath. She laughed aloud. SHOPLIFTERS BEWARE! CCTV INSTALLED. On premises that stock nothing except dog baskets and rusty tins. She stopped, hand on hip, and cackled. Moorish arches, obliterated in generations of paint (canary yellow, burnt orange), jungled in greenery. Tobacconists coming to terms with dope culture. Graveyard of the antiques trade. Milk bars with subdued chrome and greasy Formica. Calendar views of Turkish beaches.

  Huge gulls, incognito albatrosses, scream the news. They know she is in town. They shriek and warn, skid on roof slates, bombard bald skulls with white-green droppings.

  One or two locals, clinking carriers keeping them in balance, assessed the incomer: smoke suckers. They swallowed blue-grey clouds: anachronistic residue of the age of steam, belching locomotives, care-in-the-community casuals encouraged to take up the weed. As a substitute for everything. They leered, politely. Without dissimulation.

  She was something new, heat. A different smell. Beneath travel-dust, exotic combinations of body sweat and precious golden essences. The remote possibility of future sexual congress did not concern them – fantasies of the fed and fallible, the eros of employment. Congress. Fresh blood. Novelty. Repetitive playlets of seduction or seizure: not for the seasiders. Drinkmoney. No point, down here, in begging openly. Sitting pathetic on the curb, propped against a shopfront, the wall of a bank. Banks operated without cash-dispensing hatches. Marksmen on roofs waiting for the next raid; a shooting-gallery with live targets. Wall machines, if they had them, would choke on cancelled plastic, chewed-up fakes, revoked credit.

  The woman was too tall for the watchers. Her eyes too sharp, all pupil, no cornea. Black. Then grey. Then blue as everything that’s been forgotten. The vagrants withdrew their minimal interest. They knew when they were out of their league. They valued blood deposits they hadn’t yet sold. They pinched pulses in their necks. Her long stride, childless, took her so rapidly along that straight street, down the retail canyon, towards the sudden slope that led to the sea. She was unimpressed, they understood, by charity bazaars, dealers who peddled versions of the same necrophile stock, price-ticketed refuse. Nothing of now, today, was on offer, everything had an erased history. Some of the shops were innocent of product, giveaway paperbacks in a plastic tray, empty video cocoons with misleading labels.

  The town was its smell. Fried fish, dead clothes, seagull shit on windscreens. She didn’t belong, among the professional scavengers, the bag carriers; too many fingers, feeling, stroking, pinching sour nylon, testing the stretch in wool, sniffing lycra.

  ‘Cora’ – she picked the name at random from a label – would do. For the moment. More than an alias, a fresh chapter. Anyone who steps from a train becomes, with that first breath, a character in a novel. Here was a good town and a good season in which to lose yourself; to stay lost, that was the pitch. Cora wasn’t buying. Wherever she washed up, that was the story.

  A location where her crimes were beyond the imaginative capabilities of the inhabitants -and the authorities.

  Shoes were difficult. The skirt, the pale linen jacket. Easy, accommodating. Appropriate to the sticky, unsettled weather. She didn’t need stockings or underclothes. A green canvas satchel with yellow leather straps. She changed, screwed up her old things and forced them into a plastic bag, which she left in a refuse bin. Where it attracted the immediate attention of a group of rag-pickers.

  She was thirsty, suddenly, for milk. The idea of it. Creamy moustache, elbows on table. Milk and biscuits.
Nursery food. Nursery food in an empty nursery.

  She went into what might have appeared (to a writer of guide books) as a period piece, an old-time bakery with marble tabletops and wooden benches, frosted partitions; lovely galumphing girls, in white overalls, talking among themselves, ignoring the crusties, brandishers of single coins. You could conjure up, if you pushed it, a cow in the yard.

  Pensioners, unculled, day-released from hostels, hanging on in dowdy seafront flats (owned and operated by teenage villains), hoped they were unnoticed. They mobbed and clustered, heads wobbling, knuckles swollen, joints creaking. The girls behind the counter couldn’t hear what they said. Cuppa. Cuppa. No choice about it. Cuppa to grow cold on a ledge at the back, out of sight, away from the street. The tolerated at the limits of their liberties.

  Cora, in her charity-shop outfit, shoes pointy and pinching, linen impregnated, not unpleasantly so, with another woman’s cheap scent, opened her satchel. Took something out and laid it, between a mug of milky coffee and a large, sugar-glued oat biscuit (dry as hemp and half as appetising) . She dipped and nibbled, flakes lodged between sharp white teeth.

  She tapped the edge of the postcard against the marble, tested it to see if anything would fall from the picture. A seascape: yellow, blue, green, orange-red on the sail. A signature in the bottom-left corner: Keith Tollund. This was a Keith who painted like a Raoul, breezy, confident. Beach boys stripped to the waist, fishermen in brown trousers straining at the rope. Wavelets jaunty as wind-in-corn.

  Befriended by Dufy. Holidays in Dieppe, so they said. Keith Tollund, dead and forgotten, honoured in a municipal gallery (that nobody visited) . Keith was her project. Cora would comb the junks pits of the Old Town, talk to pickled men in blue jerseys, haunt dealers, hoarders, guardians of backrooms: in search of Tollund. Some word, whisper, of a man who had lost his reputation. Another life to be rewritten, invented. Another skin to occupy. A room to be found. Cora traded in discontinued biographies, a cultural bounty-hunter.