Two tendencies, Stephen noted, from his own flat, the high balcony where he flinched from the morning air. Fitness masochism and elective cancer. Obsessive hard-track joggers, hitting against the wind, tough women (weights attached to wrists) and old, weathered men (fit paunches, curved but unwobbly). Tanned, stained, toasted: by hazy sunshine and nicotine. Active early, die late: the concept.
‘The motherfucker won’t read it, fuck him. We don’t need him, right? Script is king. He won’t fly to Hong Kong, fuck him. We take it elsewhere.’
Stone-bald, ungay, an American Jew. In black T-shirt, white trainers. Talking to – what? – a blond German accountant. Young, clean. Disturbingly good-looking. With overdefined, spookily well-distributed features. Actor turned to script doctoring? Executive producer (without product). A deal-maker in a third-class hotel with an optional view of the sea.
A patrol boat, out of Dover, the kind Charles Windsor once skippered, which had held its position, close in to shore, all day, was riding at anchor. Lights on the bow. Rocking gently on the evening tide.
‘We’re here, on the spot. We’ve wasted months in this craphole reading transcripts, interviewing witnesses, going through the goddamn files. What we got? The fucking story, man. The story. We got reality. This is a headline play. It happened, right?’
‘No, actually, I would not say so. I don’t for sure see that. He won’t buy. It is still, I think, too loose.’
‘Loose? Fuck you loose.’
The bald man tried to push back the table, spilling his untouched drink. He stood up, a stain (the shape of Cuba) in the lap of his sand-coloured shorts. He stormed the corner, disappeared from Stephen’s view. And was still swearing when he returned with a fresh cocktail, which he put down beside the other. He brought nothing for the German, who was scorning a cup of cold coffee. Pleased with his reflection in the long window, comfortable with his partner’s discomfort, the accountant lit a fresh cigarette. Long and very white. The atmosphere of the upstairs lounge was freshened by this novelty, American tobacco.
For the first time, Stephen couldn’t take the sea. Even of favourite things, you can have too much. The sea was a cipher. It was implacable. He’d interviewed, out at Pevensey Bay, the woman (without a dog) who had found the butchered clergyman’s arm. Stephen had been admitted to a beach hut on stilts that, miraculously, became part of the beach, the pepper-coloured shingle shelf.
An unbroken spider’s-web protected wooden steps that led up from a bare garden. This woman, quite evidently, had not been out for days. One of those non-eaters, non-movers, who find their place. And abdicate. Turn away, resolutely, from other potentialities. Sniff creosote and ozone, sit by a half-open door, freshening a large blue mug of tea.
The kitchen door was wide to the road and the marshes, the Pevensey Levels – where the crudely amputated limb had been discovered, lying across the path, dragged from the undergrowth by some animal.
She saw what it was, but she didn’t react. She listened to the noise the wind made in the reeds – and tried to think of a way to remember that sound. If she accepted the validity of the grand guignol token, she would have to do something. The blue arm was a barrier, that much was clear. But she was reluctant to abort her walk, the two hours in the weather that she allowed herself. On a weekly basis.
The view through that door, democratic shingle, curve of beach, would act as a prompt. For Stephen. Let her bring out the story in her own time. His book, his comeback, was already in ruins; a thing of fragments, false starts, muffled echoes. The Pevensey woman, in her unconvinced actuality, was a sidebar. And better for it.
She wasn’t dressed, dressed to receive visitors, when Stephen knocked. She’d forgotten the appointment. Another woman, stepping out of the dim interior, took over. And Stephen played along. Shock, trauma, terrible thing to witness. He toyed with his striped mug (she’d omitted to add the tea bag which would flavour the hot water).
Stephen sipped and waited. Something was wrong. Nobody was smoking. The furniture was unsaturated, minimalist. Londoners in retreat.
After an hour or so it became obvious, even to Stephen, that the women were not in shock, or in any way distressed. They were drunk -just slightly, becomingly, a day or two into the session, pacing themselves. It was Stephen who was edgy, a non-smoker hurting for a passive blast of nicotine (plus woman-breath).
A heavy glass of cordial, Ribena, baby juice, turned out – as the woman confessed, giggling – to be kir. She dosed herself at regular intervals. They’d been indoors, so the friend said, for the entire weekend, snacking on junk TV, voting celebrities out of self-inflicted hellholes, reading extracts aloud, celeb-lit, Zelda, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, all the wild women. Time out, away from the metropolis, relationships. In their own bodies. Relaxed to the point of becoming invertebrate.
What, the friend wanted to know, book in one hand, drink in the other, was Stephen doing here? Who was he? The period of comfort and sisterly support for the woman who had found the distressed body part was coming to an end. Outsiders were invading their sanctuary. The friend pulled on a child’s anorak when she heard the knock at the door.
‘When I was young, so high, and saw the sea for the first time, so my mother said, I threw open my arms and rushed at it. I wanted to embrace the whole affair, take it home with me.’
She laughed. And went outside to smoke, sitting uncomfortably on sharp stones.
Stephen, starting a head cold, remembered this, the woman’s words, that night in the Royal Hotel. The way she clicked a loose sandal against the sole of a bare brown foot. The sea would outlive him. ‘And ten,’ he muttered. The meter was ticking. But the game wasn’t over yet. Four score years.
‘And ten. Ten for good behaviour.’
Returned from his mildly erotic reverie, Stephen understood that the sea would never be anything but itself. It resisted simile. The lights of small boats, out there, winking. He couldn’t face that window a moment longer, the cinema of ghosts. The unsynchronised conversations of lovers and film-termites, couples who shared tables like prisoner and escort, like day-release lunatics. They were, all of them, unfit for society. They used the seaside hotel as a decompression chamber.
The cocktail bar, hidden around an L-bend, was the only viable solution. Almost empty bottles hung like deserters, dirty glasses caught by the heels. Varnished cherries left so long in the pot that they congealed into a tumour, knobbly cancerous balls. A plastic pineapple, open, in which the ice had melted into slush.
Stephen couldn’t bring himself to register any of it. Everything was looking, looking at him. The bottles, the sticky-slick bar surface, the mirror strip. How was it managed, this exchange, seeing and being seen? Remembering? Describing? Editing? Peripheral vision, field of vision; looking and not looking. Looking aslant, slices of the actual: bamboo-faced bar, red leatherette stools (with chipped chrome), the absence of the sea.
The painting. Stephen noticed the painting. A way out of his dilemma, a false window. A view of the sea. View from My Window. A Tollund. Tollund’s painting. He did not notice the tall woman in the white linen jacket who had stepped up behind him.
‘So there it is,’ she said. ‘It had to be somewhere. But somewhere is never where we expect to find things.’
Stephen had lost interest in Tollund. He despised the man – for trying to fix the future by nailing the absolute to a significant moment, a view. Tollund complemented the murder, a parallel narrative: that’s what he was trying for, just enough artifice to give spice to a shilling-shocker.
The painting dressed an ugly set.
‘Shall we go back,’ she said, ‘to your place? And decide what we’re going to do about it?’
On the balcony: Cora in a borrowed coat, lifted from a peg by the door, Stephen shivering. They face the sea, a narrow shelf over the coast road, ambulances and squad cars with sirens blaring. The building was floodlit from below, turning Cora, collar up, into a film-noir beauty, a figure of fate. Rain fell in discrete beads
. Stephen reached out for them. Before they disappeared into a fuzz of white light. Heavier beads ran along the balcony rail. The sea was a separateness, in which they were joined. His eyes were scratched like old celluloid. Intimations of advancing cataracts.
It wasn’t working. Stephen was aware, for the first time, of his own smell, that he inhabited it. It had never bothered him before; living alone by choice, it didn’t register. His refusal to bathe, shower, began as distaste for squandering natural resources. The foible matured into habit, obsession; he arranged his life by such minor and unconsidered resolutions. If he looked at the sea, he should respect that substance, water, by leaving it alone. He shaved in whatever was left in the kettle when he’d brewed his morning tea.
Cora’s essence, her ‘principality’ as some film buff used the term (in relation to the young Jane Fonda) , extended a few inches from her skin. This was her place, moving as she moved: rain beads running down a slick collar. Inviolable.
The great landlocked mass of the flats, the Ocean Queen, was a speculation that had foundered, too tired, post-historic, botched and patched, even for south-coast property sharks. The white-stone liner was loud with silenced voices. Its client base: the Undead. Very old people, worn to their last layer of skin, keeping deathwatch on a fading sea. Veterans of the Thirties, confined to their cabins, outlived by arthritic pets. Pigeon-squatted shooting-galleries with broken windows. Art Deco cells for asylum-seekers and economic migrants.
Red sails too close to the glass. Tollund, by that time, couldn’t do middle distance. His armchair floated out over the ocean. The busy little yachts of the sailing club were gulls’ wings, blades on an oily sea.
‘Deferred immortality,’ Cora said. ‘Empty chair: death. Yachts: messenger birds, hope of resurrection and eternal life.’
Back inside, they saw that Stephen’s chair was the right chair. Tollund’s chair. The inspiration for the painting that now hung above the bar in the Royal Hotel. Their twin quests – art and murder – fused and fizzled into nothingness. The butchered priest, the boy who hanged himself in his cell, the machinations of bent antique dealers, reduced to fiction. A life, Stephen improvised, to stand for his own.
The woman, spectre or culture vamp, could carry this no further. Two dimmed consciousnesses, in the shadows of an unlit room, focusing on a bright morning scene that had once been captured and was now forgotten, irrelevant.
Tollund’s seascape, Cora understood, had hung in the study of the vicar (private income, hilltop mansion). The painting concealed the peephole through which the murdered man watched boys bathing in the great green enamel tub in which he himself would be strangled and drowned.
Out in the Channel, the boat with the lantern rocked backwards and forwards on the night tide. In a locker, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the head of the painting’s last owner, the benevolent vicar. His eyes were open, clear, blue as a Mediterranean sky. The head faced the scene the painter had sketched for him, on commission, all those years ago. A chair with twin indentations, the wrinkled cheeks of the pillows.
‘Endless,’ he said. It said. ‘I have had a good life.’
Cora sat down, back against the wall, wrapping Stephen’s coat around herself, searching the pockets for a match with which to light a fresh cigarette.
Hackney
This was the place: Schizophrenia. A New Labour council window-dressing Old Tory corruption: holes in the road, burnt-out wrecks, hooded tollers on bikes, red cones for four-wheel drives. Mid-Victorian squares blithely ignoring bandit estates. Pubs demolished. Cop cars screeching. Old folk, unminded, trying to navigate a passage through boarded-up, council-funded enterprises – Kurdish wine bar, Nigerian financial services, nail-extension parlour – that disguised a Sixties piazza, one of those slabs of awkward geometry that operate as rat runs (war-zone rehearsals) for accidental criminals.
How to play inconspicuous among so many professional exhibitionists, the casualties of peace? Mid-road pedestrians. The voices-in-the-head brigade (who now have mobile phones to excuse them). Plotters. Twitchers. Watchers (sponsored and amateur). Skip-raiders. Natty tourists (the shoes give them away) with black cases and clipboards. Those who live far from the action but are paid to find a solution. Taggers who get CUNT back on walls before the whitewash masking their offensive slogan has dried.
Hackney, a Romance. A lifelong affair for the naturally monogamous Mr Norton.
This was the house Hannah Wolf occupied with her paramour, the journalist. The so-called ‘London writer’. A front garden with burger cartons and holes from which bay trees had been lifted. She had left him and moved on, I knew that, further east – Poplar, Bow? I was meeting Hannah at the Docklands Travelodge. I needed to talk. Marina Fountain’s View from My Window typescript was the last straw. It was obvious that the woman had somehow broken into my flat – key from porter? – and found the preliminary notes for my Hastings novel. Then typed them out, fast. The old Borges trick: reproduction as composition. My work became her work – if she was prepared to take that much trouble. She couldn’t resist a few flourishes of her own (the hotel bar I’d never patronised), but what really bothered me was the account of the visit to the women in Pevensey. Fountain must have written it before it happened. Much of the rest felt uncomfortably like dictation, poorly transcribed, from a long-distance telephone call. The marine painter Keith Baynes was nakedly pantomimed as ‘Keith Tollund’; the hints I intended concerning his sexual preferences (Jamesian and oblique) were exposed as Carry On crudity.
I was angry. The victim who had been watched, for so many months, would spy on the person responsible for this web of conspiracy: my namesake, Andy Norton. I had found his house. (Address in phone book. Can you believe it?) If I strolled up and down the road, day and night, mumbling to myself, nobody would notice. I’d fit right in.
No lights, no sign of occupation. Milk hasn’t been delivered. Nor post. The only postman I spotted left his sack on the street, let the buggers sort it out for themselves.
I copied Norton. I tried the walk.
Within seconds, I was hit on for bus fares, taxis for partners who were seriously ill in Tottenham (cash returned within the hour). The time was demanded (no watch) by gum-chewing jailbait in vestigial skirts. Cigarettes were solicited by pre-school toddlers. Lights for beslippered outpatients. I understood all too well where Norton, lazy as most of his profession, found his material. He found it, but didn’t know what to do with it: let it breathe, let germ cultures form their patterns, shape a coherent narrative.
Later that evening the man returned, limping. Rucksacked. With female company. Back from one of his walks. I had him. It was so simple. Try and remember the order of events plotted for my aborted A13 novel: a drift through Whitechapel, a secret stone, Sebald-influenced meditation on Conrad (Heart of Darkness and Hackney’s German Hospital), with mini-climaxes (patterned after Basil Bunting’s mountain range diagram, drawn for his long poem, Briggflatts) at the Travelodge and Beckton Alp – before the big finish (comedy and tragedy, sex and surveillance) at the ibis hotel, West Thurrock.
I agree: predictable, linear, boring. That’s why I abandoned the scheme and took off for the coast, new images. But knowing now that Norton – through some freakish space-time anomaly – was able to read my mind, anticipate my imaginings, steal my glory, I resolved to play him at his own game. I would use insights gained from the Pevensey women, the Bergman films, and rewind the tape: travel back down one of my spiked narrative’s tributaries. Road as river. Walking as the only method of escaping from fate’s gravity.
Through willed remembrance, I could anticipate (and prevent) Norton’s crude plagiarism. What had happened once would happen again: but not necessarily in the same order. Different storyteller, different story. I should have attended more carefully to what Bunting said. He proposed a work in four sections (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter), but arranged for the symmetry to be dislocated by an ambiguous central passage, the equivalent of my Pevensey hinge.
&nbs
p; ‘Take the middle out of it,’ the moustached and bespectacled poet told me, eyes glinting, when I interviewed him for a radio programme (never broadcast). ‘It’s a different thing. The middle one is a nightmare or a dream or whatever you fancy. But once you’ve got that, of course, the chronological structure is obvious.’
I’d worked most of this out on the train from Warrior Square Station to London Bridge (not appreciating that this would involve a tour of Kent and the Isle of Thanet, a two-hour halt in Ashford, a section travelled by bus, change of engine and lengthy halt within sight of our destination). Time enough to think. With nothing to read but the newspaper left by the provocative Marina Fountain (avatar of John Keats’s Isabella Jones) at the window table of the Bo-Peep Inn, Bulverhythe.
You’d forgotten? My obsessive-compulsive desire to hoard scraps of paper (for future interrogation)? The conviction that a coherent explanation of the contemporary world might be assembled from news-clippings, video-pulls, buried quotations. Marina Fountain’s abandoned newspaper was a holy relic.
Bunting too was much on my mind. His lifelong allegiance to shape. Old rogue. He had to play at journalism (alongside the teenage prodigy, Barry MacSweeney): the Newscastle Chronicle. They watched shipping, boats coming up the Tyne. They filed tide times. Bunting was meticulous. MacSweeney learnt the value of getting the smallest details absolutely right. No compromise with reality.
Poets and war. Newspapers and their contraries. Deep truth, the only kind I cared about, belongs with the poets. Basil Bunting, prisoner of conscience in the First War; Quaker, skipper, spy. He worked for The Times in Persia. You want to know about Baghdad? Forget rolling TV reports, fixed documentaries. False authority. Read Bunting’s translations from Firdosi, Rudaki, Hafez. Read The Spoils:
When Tigris floods snakes swarm in the city
Appreciate the vulgarity of the present conflict, study that ancient poem, Gilgamesh. The rivalry and love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
Dining on Stones Page 32
