Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  I don’t believe in originality, just product. The book I was about to abandon – stones in the throat – all my useless research, confirmed one fact: my failure to rewrite Nostromo. Yes, you could construct a graph of rough equivalents, but there was no elegance in the match. Something missing: life. Forward momentum, a reason to turn the page. An absence at the centre: the human heart (as factored by Ford Madox Ford). I needed a collaborator, badly. I needed Jos Kaporal. Reborn. Brought home. On the case.

  This is what I scribbled in my notebook:

  Hastings = Sulaco

  Brink’s–Mat Gold = Silver Ingots

  Mickey O’Driscoll = The bandit Hernandez

  Mocatta = Charles Gould

  Norton = Nostromo

  Hugo Manning = Captain Mitchell

  Jos Kaporal (journalist, exile) = Martin Decoud

  Olivia Fairlight-Jones = Antonia Avellanos

  Arthur Norton (great-grandfather) = Dr Monygham

  I’m not happy, for one very good reason, with this mirror-world: I should be Decoud – the cynicism, the fatal passion for Antonia (the dark lady). Antonia must be Ruth. Ruth Alsop. A splash of duty-free perfume (Calvin Kline One) on the inside of her left wrist. That man Decoud should never have left Paris. He should have retained Antonia: as a memory, a perfume to chase (through piano bars and bordellos).

  His suicide, returned to Sulaco, is inevitable. The ‘triple death’ of Welsh mythology: gunshot while sitting on edge of boat (+ drowning) while dying of thirst. Decoud couldn’t hack loneliness, the bitter Crusoe existence of the sunbaked islet: ‘The solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands.’

  I took a turn of the deck (the narrow balcony that ran from sea-facing view to town view). A photographer could do something with this, curves, sharp angles, balconies, railings. Whiteness. Light. Can’t you imagine those haughty nudes – in heels and sailors’ caps? Hastings was moving, walkers, cyclists, clrinking schools. Kaporal’s attic was still blue: an ultraviolet tanning cubicle.

  And somebody -I fetched the binoculars … Ollie! – was in there, in the room. With a man. They were embracing. A large man in a black shirt: allowing himself to be hugged by a small, neat, agitated woman. A swimmer, who has been too far out, grabbing for a rock. If I didn’t know better – and my ability to connect names with faces was famously awful – I’d say: ‘Kaporal’. Another revenant. Another example of narrative punctuation refusing to stay punctuated.

  Kaporal with Mocatta’s daughter, my fiancée? Ludicrous. The mother of my first child? My daughter. Under sleep, where all waters meet. I hope they call the babe Marina.

  Conflicting emotions somersault, shirts in a washing-machine, as I run down the stairs. Jealousy, anger, relief: that Kaporal should return from the dead to rescue the stalled novel, that he should take Ollie off my hands – leaving the way clear for my pursuit of Marina Fountain.

  But why, I wanted to know, was Kaporal waving? Looking up at my balcony, waving his arms as extravagantly as the propellers of the yellow plastic bird.

  The Ridge

  The house had changed. It wasn’t the house to which the journalist had brought me. This section of outer-rim Hastings, the Ridge, was dedicated to obscurity, anchored in failure: empty hospitals, retirement homes that had themselves retired. Laurel and bay. Ivy creepers. Planting strategies that screened detached properties, sparing them spectacular views of a glassy sea; saving them from the curiosity of the vulgar.

  ‘Are you sure it’s this one?’ I asked.

  Kaporal’s black T-shirt was several shades blacker around the armpits, an inverse pyramid of bodydamp on his broad back: sticky and steaming. We were so close, I didn’t want there to be any mistake. Close to resolution: a set of photographs to spread on the table. Those are the finishes to which I aspire – pictures, not words. Pictures taken by another hand. Found footage. The shock of recognition. Broken sentences knitting together like a stop-motion Polish cartoon.

  ‘That’s what the woman said. Stonestile Lane.’

  Expectation, the rush, carried us to the top of the hill, more than an hour’s hard walk-but Kaporal’s interpretation of his phone conversation made me feel that there was no time to spare. This was a very old lady. The trawlings on the net, adverts placed in local papers along the south coast, the printed leaflets he had distributed in retirement homes and dying farms, had paid off. A relative of Arthur Norton, in possession of an early Kodak camera, had made contact. She refused the reward. She wanted to meet – in person -the last male Norton, to take tea with him. She lived in Hastings.

  That’s why Kaporal waved at me with atypical vigour when I stood on the balcony. Not, as I thought, because he was still alive. Nor because Ollie had chosen him. (He couldn’t be sure they hadn’t been married before, mislaid each other. Somewhere between the language student and the lost weekend in Las Vegas.) The researcher was ecstatic, he had found the final piece of the jigsaw, Arthur Norton’s Kodak. He was off the case. He could return to London.

  O’Driscoll wouldn’t bother him now. Alby Sleeman was banged up. Phil Tock had decided on a sex-change operation, relocation to Thailand. They weren’t killers. Like everybody else in Essex, they had ambitions to make it in the media (red letters on black gloss, hardmen doing the Look). When you’ve been banned for life from the Basildon Festival Park there’s nowhere to go, not really, it’s all downhill.

  Mickey kept Mocatta’s motor. He was intended to use it running passengers between the City Airport (Silvertown) and the ibis hotel (Thurrock). A circuit of Travelodges. Mocatta had lost the plot. The guy who wrote his scripts, back in the Sixties, had skipped the country, opened a breakfast bar in Corpus Christi, Texas – where he growled his way through sentimental border ballads and recited cowboy poetry. Without the paperback mythology, the romance of his career as hired assassin, rock star, property developer and cross-dresser, Mocatta was just another anal retentive who lived in retirement with his old mum.

  Jos and Mickey parted on the best of terms. Kaporal promised to deliver the numbers of a documentary director, a production company, a literary agent. There might be a part, funeral scene, in a two-hour thing they were doing on the Swanley road-rage killing. A definite maybe, as talking head, in the reconstruction of the Rettendon Range Rover slaughter.

  This climb was different. Kaporal, if he could help it, never walked; he waddled to the pasta place, sat on a bench and stared at the sea. With Ollie beside him, the man bustled like Werner Herzog on the snowy road between Munich and Paris. Up from the park through suburbs of quirky, non-regulation housing stock: villas, bungalows, castles, haciendas. Towers, conservatories. A restaurant that converted a Tudorbethan pub into the set for 55 Days at Peking. There were allotments (memories of Roy Porter), football grounds carved out of the high ground (Machu Picchu). A long leafy lane that weaved alongside properties customised by a benign plutocracy: the secret serenity of swimming pools, decks, pension funds paying off, golden handshakes for shamed quango vermin.

  I couldn’t help myself, I yapped about the Nostromoners: my theories. The former Kaporal had a taste for conspiracy. Now he frowned, let Ollie take his arm – as if she needed his strength to get her over the rough stones.

  ‘So they’re all male, your Nostromoners?’ she said.

  I was still a little raw, after our broken engagement, but I did my best to disguise it.

  ‘Females and gay men use Virginia Woolf in the same way – as a portal. Headaches, seasonal tensions and so on. Hypersensitivity to loud-print dresses, vulgarity, the lower orders. Fondness for untipped cigarettes, hats, cottage gardens, painted furniture. They call them, Virginia’s camp followers, the Wolverines.’

  A silly revenge for my lover’s desertion. Ollie was unimpressed. She had as much trouble as I did in sitting through stream-of-consciousness, multiple-narrative, death-by-drowning, putty nose Bloomsbury necrophilia.

  ‘Was Kurtz a Jew?’
Kaporal asked. The politics of colonialism, race and gender had, of late, called Conrad’s status into question.

  A good question. Conrad’s Marlow, we know, was an Englishman. He was drawn from the novelist’s sailing partner and fellow cigar smoker, George Fountaine Weare Hope.

  ‘All Europe,’ Marlow said, ‘contributed to the making of Kurtz.’ The anti-Semites of High Modernism ran with Kurtz, the upriver trader, as man of straw, stuffed guy, symbol of defeated capitalism and its blood-drenched voodoo. Was Kurtz based on Klein, the chief of the ‘Inner Station’, met by Conrad at Stanley Falls, on his own Congo expedition? Or on a fellow lodger in Stoke Newington? One of the Undead taking possession, slipping through at a time of weakness and malarial fever. Dark stains in the glass of the German Hospital. Stains shaped like a river.

  I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration … The glamour’s off.

  Kurtz with his mongrel blood, his terrible end, troubled me. What images were waiting in Arthur Norton’s camera – if that film had not already turned to mush, ink, mud? Kurtz was too close to the lovingly described horrors of the death of poor Hirsch (‘a little hook-nosed man’) in Nostromo. Hirsch is white-world Jewish, irritating, a leather peddler scorned by the silver mine magnate. A coward, a blabbermouth. A victim. The shadow of his broken body, swinging in the torture chamber, strung from a beam, beaten, brutalised, shot.

  ‘The strange, anxious whine’ of Hirsch (the third man in the lighter) wouldn’t leave me alone. Arthur Norton met many such tradesmen and percentage-cutters on his travels, along with Jesuit missionaries and debauched Franciscans; his humour in these circumstances made me uneasy. It was too close to my travesty of Hastings.

  The house was like Balmoral, but bigger and in worse taste: turrets, heraldic shields, French hipped roofs with conical spires and a flurry of exposed black beams. We stood at the top of the drive, looking for an excuse to give it up, turn tail.

  ‘What did the old bird say?’

  ‘Come to tea. Bring your young lady,’ Kaporal replied.

  They couldn’t find stone as grim as this outside a Glasgow necropolis. The lawns, light stolen by dense hedges, were some consolation. A gardener was resting on his rake, staring at us in a manner that verged on autism.

  We crunched gravel. The man, rake gripped like a Morris dancer, moved diagonally across his patch – to protect it and cut us off.

  ‘My friend!’

  His moustache, the absence of it, had me fooled. But Kaporal was better with Identikit portraits.

  ‘Drin?’

  The quiet man, it appeared, spoke fluent – if formal – English: after the fashion of Joseph Conrad. Another caricature I’d miscalculated.

  ‘Jos-eph. And you also, Mr Norton. Mademoiselle, I am charmed.’

  Drin, after the ibis fiasco, had returned to the coast. His six months’ quarantine was over. He was legit: a gardener and handyman taking night classes to reacquire his medical qualifications. Drin was an anaesthetist.

  ‘Achmed?’

  Achmed, it seems, in partnership with some Russians, was managing a video shop in Southend. And telling his story to a scriptwriter who wanted to recreate the adventurous journey to Sangatte as a dramatised documentary.

  We shook hands with the Albanian. He embraced Kaporal, kissed him on both cheeks. They exchanged mobile-phone numbers. And promises neither man would keep.

  Lifting the weight of the brass knocker – a wolf’s head – I had one of those moments: après vu. The conviction that I would be repeating this action for ever. It was so familiar, the way the knocker adhered to the paint. The absence of an electric bell. The longshot from the road: ash, ivy, laurel. That afternoon with the journalist, last year, searching for the boarding house in which Aleister Crowley died. We were, back then, on the wrong side of the Ridge – taking in the seaview, the spread of the town. The kind of houses that become prep schools, retirement homes, sets for Fawlty Towers. The hubris of Edwardian social mobility (cash from the colonies) brought down by a primitive ring road, the continuity of broken traffic.

  Do you find, when you know an author, that you can see precisely how his fictions draw upon experience? The flat in Camden Town that he loans out to his female lead, after a thorough cleaning, belongs to an sf encyclopaedist. The lecture at the ICA – ‘smelling of wet wool’ – is one that he himself delivered, a year earlier. Life is an inadequate rehearsal for text. The unsuspecting reader decides to follow, one bright afternoon, a fictional trail along the canal bank. A photographer, on a whim, after discovering that Compendium Bookshop is now defunct, walks back to Hackney. And notices, months later, toying with a box of prints, the way a woman with a rucksack, eyes on the ground, misses the sinister transaction whereby two men in hooded sweatshirts wrestle a typewriter from the grasp of a fat boy.

  ‘Yes?’

  A woman in black bombazine. Backlit in doorway. Waiting. Door open a slit. Fern in blue pot. Brown envelopes on small table.

  An act of will, a nudge from Ollie: the gears click.

  ‘Mrs Norton. We’ve arranged to see her.’

  The length of the windows, tall and narrow – are they expecting an imminent attack by archers? The old folk, the few who are inside, are very dapper. The click of croquet balls on the lawn at the back. And the click of false teeth anticipating crumpets.

  Mrs Norton promises a tour of the garden after tea. She’s tanned, check shirt and jeans, and looks much fitter and brighter-eyed than anything I’ve seen recently in my shaving mirror.

  ‘Sit down, dear.’

  ‘What’s that very pleasant smell?’ I said. ‘Leafy, woody. Bit like cinnamon. Wrong season for bonfires, surely?’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be the crematorium. Wind’s from the east today.’ She hoots at my discomfort.

  Our precise relationship takes a while to establish, a question of memory: mine. Her husband is my father’s first cousin. Old Arthur, who had six children (three of each, between voyages), was grandfather to both men. Mrs Norton, Winnie, was young Arthur’s second wife. He’d been gone now twelve years. Tea-blender (family tradition) in the City. Winnie worked in the office. They lived in Wimbledon. For the tennis. Competed twice in the mixed doubles. Won a cup in a tournament sponsored by the Standard. She’ll find the photo later. They retired to a house in Silverhill, near the park, the courts. It got too much when Arthur passed on.

  ‘This is such a lovely place. I have my own bed, flower bed. And I walk to town every Saturday for shopping and a drink. There’s still a few of us left, the tennis crowd. It feels right to live in a house with a family connection. Even if it’s not my family. I’m a Londoner, through and through, Sydenham to Norbiton. End of the line.’

  ‘Family – in Hastings?’

  ‘Oh yes, dear. Old Arthur built this pile when he left Ceylon. Before he went off on his travels. A Mr Stevenson, who was with him in Peru, bought it from the widow. He made the conversion. Apartments. Commercial hotel. Hospital in the Second War. Boarding house. And now apartments again. Some of the girls have been here through all the changes.’

  One of these girls, seventy-plus and rattling the cups on an ebony tray, brought us our tea.

  ‘Thanks, Naomi. Lovely, dear.’

  Winnie Norton took over.

  ‘She struggles backwards and forwards to Ore, poor old thing, every day. Won’t retire.’

  The cake was high-density fruit, black as anthracite. The tea, which Winnie took without milk or sugar, was excellent. It tasted of something strange, the leaf; it cleared the head, unblocked nasal passages, and was both flowery and bitter.

  ‘So this is your young lady?’

  Winnie smiled at Ollie. A conspiracy of diminutives.

  ‘No, actually –’

  ‘I thought not. She’s got a lovely complexion.’

  Winnie asked me to stay where I was, enjoying a second cup, while she took Ollie to her room to fetch Arth
ur’s Kodak and the photo albums. It wouldn’t be right for a gentleman, even a relative, to visit her bedroom in broad daylight.

  When they’d gone, I walked to the window: a view over sloping lawns to woods and a shady valley.

  ‘Shall I clear now, sir?’

  Naomi appeared at my shoulder.

  ‘Thanks, yes. I think they’ve finished.’

  Naomi didn’t move. The furniture in this room, older than the waitress, displaced its own weight in memory; indentations of those who had sat, dreamt, succumbed. I thought of movie stars in old age, letting the booze get its revenge. Mitchum. Sinatra with his rug and belly, broken voice. James Stewart and Richard Widmark on the riverbank in Two Rode Together: silly in hairpieces, unable to hear blind John Ford’s instructions. What does it take to survive the death thing, the human contract? Courage. Forgetfulness. And an open-ended ticket to Switzerland, one of those lakeside clinics.

  ‘He’s there now, the old devil. By the ilex, sir. Staring in,’ Naomi whispered. ‘Eyes like a fox.’

  I couldn’t see anyone in the garden, resident or intruder.

  ‘Where?’ I said. ‘Who are we talking about?’

  But I knew very well who she meant, the Great Beast. Aleister Crowley. Only the dead see the dead. They don’t go away, the more persistent of them, they hang about like old actors who can no longer find the route to the Green Room. Some moan and rattle, most are sad, waiting on the platform of a station where trains don’t stop. Crowley with his glistening bald skull, his shrunken bulk, was trapped in the boredom of endlessness, in the shrubbery. The immortality he always solicited: suburban Hastings.