Dining on Stones Read online

  The glass was smeared, clean it as often as you like, the same pattern of suicidal insects. As if there was something wrong with my eyes: no middle distance. I’d lost that register. Flies and clouds. Heavy sky-fleece mimicked the breaking-up of ice floes, seen from under deep blue water. On the horizon, twelve miles out, a procession of toy boats on their superhighway voyages.

  There were other rooms. From the kitchen, I could gaze at the Old Town, cliffs, marine architecture, bourgeois and full-skirted in the French style (discreet behind flapping polythene); the sun, on good days, climbed out of the sea behind a skeletal pier. A bright rule across the crests of ever-shifting wavelets. I stood at that sink for hours – until the sun moved on towards Pevensey and Beachy Head. I watched, with autistic fascination, lines of stationary traffic, red lights and dirty gold. I noticed windows, shadows of strangers, blue television screens; the occasional solitary stepped out on a balcony, yawning, to test the evening air. There were always couples, all ages, moving along the seafront. Drinking schools kept to themselves, in caves and shelters beneath the promenade, out of sight, unrowdy, working hard at the daylong business of taking the edge off things.

  The blight of vision: tide-race, scoured sand. Each morning the shingle combed like a gravel drive. A rattle of pebbles in the night. Weary mortals drawn to the shoreline. Resistance drained, they hooked themselves over the guard-rail, white-knuckled against the pull of the wind. Modest in bus shelters. Boarding houses. At high windows.

  My reflection, in towelling bathrobe (think Joseph Cotten, age thirty-six, playing a sick old man in Citizen Kane), is convalescent. Solid to the shoulder, a thick white ghost looking for its head. A reflection that stays lodged in the glass. I can’t move away until the job is done, the dreams of Hackney extinguished. Warm breath smears the gap where my face should appear. I creep, soundlessly, across rough matting, relishing the Weetabix texture. Down here, it’s all sea news, crinkles.

  What was her name? The woman Jimmy’s students were always banging on about, their model: Marina? A bit of cultural freight there, be careful. A woman liked by other women, her attitude, her way of dressing. Fur hat with charity shop coat, fingerless gloves, workman’s boots. The feeling that she’d got away with something, taken risks they appreciated without daring to imitate.

  To the west, a black stone table set in a flowerbed, opposite the hotel. Table or altar? I cricked my neck to find it, get it into focus. I would have to do something about my eyes, keep the appointment I’d made with the optician. And then on, no choice, to the meeting with Kaporal. Jos had been on the coast long enough to pass as a native: no papers, no previous, no attachments. A sleepwalker with no short-term memory, misinformation on everything. Kaporal was a human computer, redundant but functioning perfectly – if you treated him with respect. Cash in advance. Wedge folded inside a used paperback, a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett that he would never read. My first choice, a Patrick Hamilton, I decided to keep. The strolling pace of the narrative appealed, crimes were cruel but casual, fitted to a period and a location that solicited them. Stupidity was punished. The crimes Kaporal logged in my adopted seaside home were random and merciless: a vicar chopped into pieces and scattered over the county, a builder’s yard dug up to search for missing gold bars from the Heathrow bullion robbery, a shipment of Samurai armour hijacked on the coast road, lorry dumped in a retail park outside Bexhill.

  Kaporal told his tales without animation, heavy features sagging, thick fingers grooming a bald spot. I felt like a monster for disturbing his hibernation. Seated alongside him in a bar or café – he wasn’t a drinker, but he perked up whenever he had a fork in his hand – I thought about a remark the critic David Thomson made about a ‘maverick’ American film director: ‘Henry Jaglom is not a good enough actor to play Henry Jaglom.’

  It had been a long time (and several unearned advances) since Estuarial Lives, my meditations on borderland psychoses, land piracy. I had to come up with something fresh (more of the same). Sixty miles out, on the leash, still attached to the hot core of London, but far enough away to appreciate the red glow in the sky, I lost my soul. What I needed now was an easy strike – six weeks max – doctoring Kaporal’s research. New territory, salt in the air, small mysteries to unravel.

  Coffee cup in hand, I limped down the corridor to my writing room; I cramped. Seizure of the bowels. Postpone the evacuation to catch that rush of energy and insight. Scribble notes – standing up, rubbing belly – in ruled notebook. Light a cigar, step out onto the balcony. Leave the smoking stub in an aluminium ashtray, scamper to the bathroom.

  A necklace of stones, picked up from the beach, my morning swim, hangs from the wall. A yellow-beaked gull lands on the balcony rail. The screech of another gull, swooping on the jagged spine of rocks, now revealed by a retreating tide, dissolves into the urgent bark of a chained dog, a city beast. Sixty miles away, where the real story begins.

  Hackney Road

  One dog barked but nobody heard it. The sound was part of the immediate acoustic landscape: aircraft circling, waiting for clearance, drills, sirens. A hair-trigger seethe of vehicles on Hackney Road (the only place in London where pedestrian crossings operate on a twice-daily basis). Restless humans. Groups forming, breaking, touching knuckles, outside the pub (the pool hall), grunting obscenities into unfamiliar mobiles.

  The second dog, an Alsatian with dry snout and the eyes of Neville Chamberlain, was being teased, through the bars of the gate, by a young girl whose boredom was encroaching on hysteria. She poked, prodded, smooched endearments, made kissy-kissy sounds. The dog stayed aloof. But its smaller associate, given the run of the yard, went crazy: yelped, bounced off the wall of tyres, rushed at its tormentor, skidded, rolled, wallowed in mud, shook itself, backed away to the shed … leapt, snarling, at a frayed end-of-rope, hanging from a tarpaulin sheet: so that a puddle of trapped rainwater cascaded over its filthy fur. The girl, who might have been as old as eight or nine, turned her back on the spectacle, to bum a cigarette from her distracted mother. This woman, not dressed for outdoors, the weather, rattled a warder-sized bunch of keys … smoke-breathing, staring at her little pink phone: a powder compact mirror with the wrong face. The gates to the yard were open but the woman wouldn’t go inside, move out of sight of her vehicle. Chilled nipples, mature, prominent, the colour of rich chocolate, diverted a carload of excitable Brick Laners.

  Parked across the ramp, neither in nor out, denying access to other potential customers, primed for rapid retreat, was a motor stacked with ostentatiously hormonal Asian males. Senior rude boys. Fat, white-wall tyres: the nearside front, detumescent. Windows like gun-ports. Loud anti-music: a challenge. The youths twitched, suffered, the cranked-up adolescent’s inability to sit still: three out, one in. All in, all out … And down the road towards the pub, back. Shoulder-shuffling, nudging. A quick dart to the shed at the end of the yard. No sign of the mechanic. Peep through dirty window, return to base, whack up the sound system. Scratch scrota. In unison.

  Nothing is happening here and happening very fast. A soap opera badly mangled in an editing suit. Vital plot lines have been lost or suppressed, leaving a non-specific aura of panic that seems to hinge on the missing tyre technician. Alternate frames of EastEnders cut against structuralist slomo.

  While I’m watching all this free television, Jimmy Seed is tapping a coin on the pad that cushions his hobbled electric window. The unofficial armrest has a groove fitted precisely to the shape of a pound coin, leading me to assume, by the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he keeps a mistress, or hideaway, on the south coast. The coin is the fee for the QEII Bridge, Purfieet to Dartford. But I was wrong. He did cross water on a regular basis, but his purpose was speculation: ex-industrial properties in the Thames Gateway zone. Bounty-hunting with a Polaroid. Jimmy had a talent for sniffing out units that would otherwise be wasted on housing economic migrants or Balkan sex slaves.

  The girls on the back seat didn’t talk much, the only still p
oints in an edgy scene. They lounged: I stole a surreptitious glance in Jimmy’s driving mirror. They whispered, tracked the tight-skinned youth who circled the Volvo on his bike, before looping back to the pub. This was an establishment where punters stayed outside, anyone who drank at the bar, in a jacket, a shirt, was a nonce. Or a fixture. Under-age lads played pool. Strays, remnants, the unlanguaged: they stared at a large screen that showed 24-hour football from elsewhere. The cyclist was their outrider, snaking into the world, bringing back news. Which he kept to himself.

  ‘Explain again exactly where we’re going.’

  The tall young woman who asked the question might have been American, once. She had the kind of face in which you could trace the history of a solitary child coming to terms with life, haunted by atavistic fears, standing at the edge of town, watching a river. Thick red hair bravely unattended. An embargo on cosmetic enhancement. Her friend – I made that assumption on very little evidence – was English, ex-established. The woman she would one day become vividly present in her features; an inherited smoothness that would remain, points of colour on sculpted cheeks, dark lashes and a small pert mouth: the limits of her tolerance of Hackney inadequately disguised. They were both attractive. To me. To Jimmy (childlike and paternal in his off-hand courtesies). And also, perhaps, to each other.

  ‘There’s no exactly about it,’ I said (when Jimmy stayed shtum, measuring the mother with the dark-brown aureoles). ‘The A13 is a tributary of London’s orbital motorway, the M25. But unlike the M25 it goes somewhere. If you can call Southend somewhere.’

  ‘I thought,’ Jimmy mumbled, ‘Dagenham. For starters. Well, Ford’s. Sheds, warehouses. Then the marshes, for Livia, engines buried in mud, all kinds of stuff. Ditches, channels. It’s mysterious. The fiddly details you like to enlarge and … Sorry, that woman. I can’t believe her.’

  ‘Her what? said the American, sharply.

  ‘Stance. Attitude. The gate and the dog. If I did people, I’d have the camera out. That’s prime, that is. Absolutely fucking amazing.’

  I listened, I looked, but I wasn’t part of it. I was reporting on something I’d left behind years ago and could barely remember. We met, early, in Jimmy’s studio, under the arches, striplight, stacked with wine bottles, racks of prodigious canvases, estate agents’ brochures. Three or four paintings were always on the go. He was a traditionalist, a hardworking artisan. Want a petrol station, on Burdett Road, to fit a space on your wall? He’s your man. He’ll do it. Better than the real thing. Call back Thursday. Chop off a couple of inches? Certainly, sir. A different car? No problem, give you a bell as soon as the paint dries.

  Jimmy had this pitch he always came out with when he ran up against artists who wanted to talk art: ‘If you were fixing the wing of a Cortina, you wouldn’t leave brush strokes in the body filler, now would you? Fibreglass sticking out to show how fucking clever you are?’

  Jimmy solicited: absence of signature, a solid frame around an innocent chunk of the world. His truth was thin as prison soup, smooth as satin. More real than the real. Rattle of trains overhead. Car alarms. A private world.

  In this studio, which Jimmy had taken over, so he said, from a crew of over-ambitious crack cocaine dealers (blood on the walls), was a record of everything that was missing from East London: grandiose cinemas, open-air swimming pools (Lansbury’s lidos), Underground stations. There were no people, people gave away the secret, they belonged in a particular time frame. Jimmy’s graffiti-dense canvases, layered in carbon, cheap emulsion, virtual and actual mould and moss, didn’t represent anything; they were that thing. Ugly, mute.

  Here was the source of Jimmy’s unease, his coin-tapping reflexes at the gate of the Hackney tyre yard. All his metaphors belonged to the period when he’d laboured in a garage in Derby. His art confirmed his failure to become a body-shop craftsman, covering up flaws, respraying insurance scam motors. Jimmy, who was short and damaged and hungry for fame and status and property, modelled himself on Steve McQueen: do the art stuff, yes, then get back to a man’s business of bikes and cars, stunting, dirt-tracking. Playing chicken with the Grim Reaper.

  The exiled Scottish painter was one of those unfortunates who had reached the stage of giving up everything that mattered (drink, cigarettes, bad behaviour with women). He felt better, was able to get out of bed in the morning – with absolutely nothing to get out of bed for. Work was never more than work. The steady accumulation of paintings that stood in for a past that was no longer visitable. Good things, houses, families, food on the table: none of it meant as much as the feel of that first glass in the hand, the sudden whiff of cinnamon from the spice warehouses, the muddy drench of the river.

  Lines of cars on Hackney Road stretched back to the boarded-up Children’s Hospital.

  A West African, in a business suit, with his daughter, white ribbons on her pigtails.

  Two geezers taking turns to roll a monster tyre.

  A lad with a beaker of steaming coffee and a bag of rolls.

  He has been tipped off about the arrival of the mechanic. Who leaps from his car, talking: ‘You wouldn’t believe the fucking A13, artic gone off of the ramp at Thurrock, gridlock. Roadworks. Three hours, no word of a lie, from Billericay.’

  Estuarial Lives: the newsreel.

  We wait. The American woman is scribbling in a notebook. Livia is staring out of the window in a freeze-frame reverie. Jimmy’s whistling. I get out, stretch my legs, amble across the yard: steepling walls of tyres, all shapes, sizes and conditions, pressing back, bowing out the brickwork. Mud and oil. Old canvas so gone in colour that Jimmy could chop it into units, nail it onto stretchers, flog it to his collectors without adding a brushstroke. I lift the tent flap over a rickety lean-to, revealing a clean, well-maintained, top-of-the-range powerboat. A craft that would have you across the Channel, from Maldon to the Dutch dunes, in a short night, no questions asked. Fishing trip. 150 hp Yamaha engine, the sort Jimmy would admire. Work being done on extra fuel tanks. No wonder the man in the shed didn’t have time to waste on punctures.

  By now, most of Hackney is waiting. It’s what we do, what we’re good at: post offices, doctors, Town Hall. This little mob, with their various punctures, gathered at the gates, amuse themselves on their mobiles, sending out for coffee, making a run for the pub. Tribal scars. Moustaches and stubble. Hoods. Bleached blondes in loud leather. Chinese families on outings. All with cars slowly sinking into the slurry. Waiting, patiently or otherwise, for the solitary mechanic – who wants to be rid of them, with their favours and credits and promises, so that he can get back to his boat.

  In the Volvo, Livia interrogates Track (the American woman). What on earth is she drawing? What could she possibly find to memorialise in this slow-puncture entropy?

  A sketch for Marina. For Marina’s book. The book Marina was supposed to be writing. A possible illustration. Something Track had noticed in a shop window as they waited at the lights, Westgate Street into Mare Street. A pair of giant spectacles, painted with bright blue, unblinking eyes. Quite surreal. Marina will love them.

  That was her project, gathering random images for a book that Marina hadn’t finished, might never finish. A book that seemed to anticipate the road trip we were never going to complete. Never begin.

  The Missing Kodak

  I was superstitious about lost or undeveloped films, how they displace more memory than faithfully preserved albums of family portraits. They don’t decay. They are imminent. Their potential is absolute. Lost films are dreams that anybody can steal.

  Not trusting my ability to download names, signs, shifting skies, I always carried a small camera in my pocket: Canon Ixus L-1, forty exposures, idiot simple. With time, and Japanese technology, the cameras got smaller, lenses sharper – but it didn’t help. Photography was still, as the man said, ‘a form of bereavement’. The recording instruments shifted from awkward black boxes to silver toys (credit cards that ate light). My snapshots had no pretensions towards art or duplication,
they logged a day out, evidence for narratives I would later subvert.

  Photography, in its brokered aspect, is about exclusion: the high-contrast theatre of Bill Brandt, Eugene Atgèt’s deserted Paris with sharp-prowed buildings like transatlantic liners in dry dock. Keep out the inessential, stay alive to significant accidents. I understood the theory, but I couldn’t live by it. Once you break free of the traditional one-eyed stance, everything loosens up. You breech the middle ground. I abandoned my viewfinder as much too risky in Kingsland Waste Market, Clapton High Street, Green Lanes. The click of a shutter would alert the minder who watched over the contraband peddlers (the Albanian women, the man with one word of English, his mantra: ‘Cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette’). The unrequired flash reflected in the dark glasses of the Black Muslims with their sinister suits and bow ties. The hooded tollers on bikes. The fat man, on his knees behind the video stall, unpacking two carriers of hardcore. The loungers in the doorway of the Kurdish football-club café. The rock sellers yawning outside the newsagent. The police, in their white van, eating pies, ignoring the ratty scavenger who is making off with black bags of clothes donated to Oxfam.

  If photography is a form of masturbation, then exercise your wrist. Imitate the gunfighter, shoot from the hip. The eye in the palm of your hand deflects the victim’s curse.

  I deactivated the flash and learnt to frame by instinct. The result was a pleasing, slapdash, unmediated aesthetic. The prose I contrived from these snapshots would be more provocative, so I hoped, than the awkward blocks of verbless sentences ‘inspired’ by the many thousands of diary-images I’d gathered during the years of my compulsive logging of London and the river. What are we really doing with those handheld obituary lanterns, our cameras? Despoiling virgin topography. Forging, on stiff card, autobiographical confessions. I witnessed it. Every picture a story, every story a lie. Look at them now. Look at the captured rectangles in their prophylactic envelopes. This person, raking over mounds of paperback books, left when the market packs up, is someone I once was: predatory, stooped, close to the pulse of the city. This building charts my ruin, wrecked knees, twisted spine. A failing heart. The fouled stream skulking through Rainham Marshes, a piss-trough, is my lost optimism, my childhood. When the local was eternal, water (clear and fresh) always flowed towards some larger, busier river, a cold grey sea.