Dining on Stones Read online

  The photographs that haunted me were the ones that got away. The new mountain range of smouldering waste, lava trails of burst black bags, between Rainham Marshes and Dagenham, reminded me of one roll in particular. A strange story, a voyage out from Limehouse to Southend, to the mouth of the Thames, the North Sea, in search of an off-shore fort. Our craft, a fishing-boat brought back from Yarmouth, was on its last voyage. The skipper, drunk at the start and getting drunker, was preparing himself for that lashed-to-the-mast Dracula gig. Most of my shipmates, it soon became apparent, had signed on to locate and confront their demons. And they were making a very good job of it. A shivering photographer, inadequately accoutred in a thin T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, having puked himself dry, was hidden (from the rest of us, from the sea) under a dog blanket. A video director, incapable of taking his camera out of the satchel, droned through the long night, an Ingmar Bergman recital of dreams, phobias, confessions, visions of existential horror. He hated boats, loathed the river (with reason: accidental deaths of loved ones, drownings witnessed at close hand). He suffered from a recurrent nightmare of being trapped for hours, midstream, watching the dim lights of a shoreline he would never reach. This moment, he informed us, recognising the never-extinguished fires of the Rainham Marshes landfill site, was the realisation of his trauma. Talked out, the man slept, tossed and turned, returned to the borders of consciousness – and there it was: the oil refineries. Canvey. Prospero’s island, abandoned by its devils, left to burn and smoulder for ever.

  As the only photographic amateur aboard, strong stomach, no imagination, I kept on snapping. Registering the details of this lunatic voyage. But I didn’t secure the rolls of completed film. What was the point? We were never coming back, onwards and outwards. I saw those little black plastic containers floating ashore, in Suffolk or Denmark, with their obscure messages. Like suicide notes in miniature whisky bottles thrown over the side of a Channel ferry.

  By the time we reached Leigh-on-Sea, the neurasthenics had given up their ghosts; you could hear teeth chattering like ill-fitting computer keys. The photographer was laughing hysterically and banging his head against the deckboards. I wanted a couple of shots of the women – bad luck – who had smuggled themselves aboard to keep the captain company, to steady the wheel while he opened another bottle. He demanded oral satisfaction while he dodged oil tankers in the narrow channel off Gravesend. But there was no film left. I decided that, in the circumstances, I’d have to reuse a roll I’d shot in Howard Marks’s borrowed flat in West London. A pity, really, but the random superimpositions would give whoever found my floating canister something to analyse. Derrida or Sontag. Let them quote their way out of that mess with Walter Benjamin and Schopenhauer. Howard, it was generally acknowledged, dues paid, was the acceptable (out-of-focus) face of cannabis culture, reform of soft drug legislation. New Labour s favourite anarchist. On the road, on message: on the money.

  Marks had been in splendid form, talking freely, exhaling dense clouds of herbal nostalgia, saying nothing. The London light was exquisite, verging on excess. It seemed to imply: you can get away with it, walk free, sunshine on old wood, interior jungles, quiet streets. You can come home again to make a career out of bent memory; telling it how we’d like it to be. Howard twinned nicely with Alex Garland, Irvine Welsh, Danny Boyle: he anticipated the era (pre-terror) of hallucinogenic tourism (Thailand, Bali, Edinburgh). Sheiks and falconers sharing a lift in the Cairo Hilton. Airports, massage parlours, record collections and favourite paperbacks: Lord of the Flies, soft punk, Bill Wyman barnet. The ideal is to stay in prison – or smacked out of your head – long enough for retro to come back as this week’s tendency. J.G. Ballard-lite: tropic beaches, tourism as a life style, business-class flights, the discretion of the suburbs (where all the best conspiracies are hatched).

  It was as difficult to dislike Howard Marks as it was to take the right photo. That’s why I left the film so long in the camera, an abandoned essay. Huge smile (new teeth better than the originals), expansive gestures. A girl in a scarlet PVC raincoat, bottle blonde, sitting with him at the table, was pretending, for the purposes of a documentary film, to be the interviewer. Neither acting nor reacting, she was a more potent reality than the Marksian hologram with its Mediterranean tan, twinkly eyes and contradictory semaphore of hands and shoulders. The mobile bleeped at regular intervals.

  So our night voyage on the Thames, dark dreams, lapped over this sunlit room in Earls Court: arbitrary juxtapositions. The film, lost in the bilges, was busy in my memory. Soft evidence transformed into fiction. The image you don’t have, mislaid by chemist, stolen camera, retains its malignancy. It is unappeased. Marks talking, girl listening (with an expression of cynicism, boredom, that is impossible to quantify). The passengers and crew on a small craft, making no headway against a running tide, are tormented by fantasies of death by drowning. A blank sheet in my typewriter. Two stories lost. Two stories that got away. The burning chimneys of the Esso oil refineries at Purfleet. The spontaneous combustions of the landfill site on Rainham Marshes. Seen from the river. The yarns Howard Marks spun, conspiracies, coincidences, scams, going up in smoke. Sound lost with image.

  Marks was one story, but the other was more poignant. More personal. An early Kodak portable with a curious history. It was not the film that was missing, this time, but the camera. My great-grandfather, money dissipated through bad investments, property threatened – he moved south for the winter, from Aberdeen to the English Riviera, Paignton, I think, or Bournemouth – took off on what turned out to be a last, mad journey into the Peruvian interior. The tea interests he’d served so effectively in Ceylon wanted to know if this unmapped territory would be suitable for the cultivation of coffee. With a young man from the company, a small library of botanical books, odd volumes of De Quincey, quinine, salt, pen and ink, rifle and Kodak, he set out from Lima, through Chicla and Tarma, to the Rio Perene, towards land designated for potential exploitation by the commissioners.

  Diaries and photographs and faithful camera were brought back by young Mr Stevenson, when the search for my great-grandfather was abandoned. A second expedition, funded by his widow, found nothing. The Indians retreated into the forest. A terse and unreliable account of the ill-omened river trip was assembled from unposted letters and journal extracts, which my great-grandfather had revised and polished during a month’s stay with a renegade Franciscan, in a district called Chanchamayo, while they waited for the weather to break – and for contact to be established with King Chokery, the Chuncho chief whose goodwill was required for any voyage on the upper reaches of the uncharted Perene.

  The expedition, from the moment the ship sailed from Tilbury, was wrong, malfated. My great-grandfather, softened by the years of his retirement, missing wife and children, paced the deck, struggling for breath, feeling all of his fifty or so years. He was an abstemious man, he took a whisky or two with his dinner and a cigar with the first officer after it. His eyes were still sharp. They watched the stars.

  The first officer, a stocky European with a literary beard and waxed moustache, quoted the painter Delacroix (as my great-grandfather noted in his journal): the light from the star Vega, hurtling through space, set out on its epic voyage twenty years before Monsieur Daguerre invented the process whereby its arrival in Cambridge could be recorded as a pin-sized impression on a metal plate. Something of the sort, so the merchant mariner suggested, should be applied to his conversation. To the tacit understanding that my great-grandfather would record his remarks. And that those insignificant blots on the page would, at some future epoch, be the source of unimaginable revelation.

  Panama was a sink, Colon lived down to its name. The Scots Calvinist felt as if he were crawling into the continent by the back door: caecum to rectum, a yellow worm in a hunk of rotten meat.

  Colon, our first landing port, apart from its luxurious vegetation, is a very wretched spot. It is only in a Spanish Republic that the existence of such a pestiferous place is poss
ible. It is not merely the disreputable appearance of its degenerate people, nor the frequent squabbles dignified by the name of revolutions we have to fear, but the ever present filth, which is much more dangerous to life. Fortunately, a fire has recently burned down and purified a large portion of the town, rendering it, for a time, less dangerous to sojourners.

  Driving east down the A13, past Creekmouth, with Jimmy Seed and the girls, the mess of the sewage outflow, filter beds, new retail parks, coned lanes, uncompleted ramps, I took the Peruvian journals as a literal guide: like for like. A shifting landscape of equivalents. The River Roding, disgorging in a septic scum into the Thames, became the Rio Perene. The man-made, conical alp of the Beckton ski slope stood in for the foothills of the Andes. Stacked container units in dirty primary colours hinted at the roll of film on which my great-grandfather made his survey of the missionary settlement in a jungle clearing.

  The road was a villainous rut at a gradient of about one in three, a width of about eighteen inches, and knee deep in something like liquid glue. Before we had gone five miles one-half the cavalcade had come to grief, and it was some weeks ere we saw our pack mules again; indeed I believe some of them lie there still. We soon found out that the padres knew as little about the path as we did ourselves, and the upshot was we were benighted. Shortly after six o’clock we were overtaken in inky darkness, yet we plodded on, bespattered with mud, tired, bitten, and blistered by various insects. Whole boxes of matches were burned in enabling us to scramble over logs or avoid the deepest swamps. At last there was a slight opening in the forest, and the ruins of an old thatched shed were discovered, with one end of a broken beam resting upon an upright post, sufficient to shelter us from the heavy dews. It turned out to be the tomb of some old Inca chief whose bones have lain for over 350 years, and there, on the damp earth, we lay down beside them, just as we were. Our dinner consisted of a few sardines, which we ate, I shall not say greedily, for I felt tired and sulky, keeping a suspicious eye upon the Jesuit priests.

  The Peruvian interior in the late nineteenth century, filtered through the prejudices of a weary Highlander of discounted Jacobite stock, a self-educated plantsman and jobbing author, was a more convincing mindscape than riverine, off-highway Essex. My great-grandfather’s notebooks were livelier than my own, more dyspeptic; he covered more ground (somebody found it worth their while to commission him to do so). The picaresque elements were the by-product of a very practical quest: could coffee be cultivated, cheaply, on this land? The Pampa Hermosa took precedence over the Dagenham Levels. Sepia photographs on wilting card, brought back by Mr Stevenson and spread across my desk, outranked my anaemic Polaroids. A ‘balsa’ on the Perene: loose-robed Indian with pole, great-grandfather squatting low to the water, rifle in lap, boy in prow watching out for submerged trees. The skeletal remains of a burnt-out Ford by the side of the road that led across Rainham Marshes to the landfill site. An orchid on the banks of the turbid stream, decadent, pale, carnivorous. Small blue flowers, soap-bleached, beside the Thames path, in the shadow of the Procter & Gamble factory at West Thurrock. Two of the wives of King Chokery. Jimmy’s postgraduate students, Track and Livia, posing beside an irrigation ditch.

  Three months into the expedition, weak from dysentery, dehydrated, shivering with cold sweats, cursing the Jesuits who had come with him so far, and would go no further, my great-grandfather followed the example of King Chokery’s subjects, the guides who punted him down the dark, creeper-enclosed tunnel of that Stygian river: he took to chewing the leaf.

  Coca, from which the invaluable drug, cocaine, is obtained, is a native of this locality. It is a plant not unlike the Chinese tea, though scarcely so sturdy in habit, growing to a height of from four to five feet, with bright green leaves and white blossoms, followed by reddish berries. The leaves are plucked when well matured, dried in the sun, and simply packed in bundles for use or export. Of the sustaining power of coca there can be no possible doubt; the Chunchos seem not only to exist, but to thrive, upon the stimulant, often travelling for days with very little, if anything else, to sustain them. Unquestionably it is much superior and less liable to abuse than the tobacco, betel, or opium of other nations. The Chuncho is never seen without his wallet containing a stock of dried leaves, a pot of prepared lime, or the ashes of the quinua plant, and he makes a halt about once an hour to replenish his capacious mouth. When I decided, driven by physical necessity, to make a trial of the native habit, I found the flavour bitter and somewhat nauseating at first, but the taste is soon acquired, and if not exactly palatable, the benefit under fatiguing journeys is very palpable. Cold tea is nowhere, and the best of wines worthless in comparison with this pure unfermented heaven-sent reviver.

  No leaves on the Eastbury Level, the Hornchurch Marshes, the old firing ranges with their overgrown butts and tattered distance markers: hybrid vegetation, unloved, ungrazed. Thorn bushes. Nettle beds. Nothing to chew. By river, through Tilbury and Silvertown, doctored coca, a synthetic, is smuggled ashore. By container transporter, by white van, by Special Boat Squadron inflatable: sustenance and stimulation for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Freud. Cargo for illicit Range Rovers.

  The balsa, a few twigs roped together, is punted, now drifting, now spinning on the current, towards the white zone. The blank on the map. Noises of the jungle. Shrieks and long silences. The pole sticking in mud. Jimmy parks his Volvo beside Rainham Creek, sleek black crows gather in a naked tree, black plastic flapping on razor wire.

  Like my lost roll of film, out there on the Thames, two journeys overlap: Peru and Essex. Mr Stevenson was in no condition to make his report to the commissioners. He recuperated on the coast, prematurely aged, mimicking the old men, staring for hours at the Channel. Salt-smeared windows framed by faded velvet curtains. Persuaded to take the air, an afternoon constitutional, Stevenson refused to walk along the promenade; he turned his back on the sea, retreated uphill, under an ornate arch, into a small park. He liked the flowers, their teasing scents, regimented profusion: rhododendron, hibiscus. The park, with its gentle microclimate, was a grey-filter Ceylon.

  He reached into the pockets of his long chalky coat and drew out my great-grandfather’s pen-and-ink sketches; as if, by handling them, he could remember what happened, those last days on the Rio Perene. The photographs – King Chokery, the Cholo Highlanders (like dwarfish and displaced Scots), the grave goods, the cathedral square in Lima – had returned to London with Stevenson’s overheated and incomplete report. Acting on some nervous instinct he retained the botanical sketches. Now, in the early-evening chill of an English park, the drawings brought back happier days in Colombo, visiting tea-estates to gather material for articles published by the local press, the Ceylon Observer and the Tropical Agriculturalist. My great-grandfather’s minimalist representations of humble verbena, lobelia, oxalis, calandrinia, substituted for the empty beds in this south-coast garden, the tin labels that designated future plantings.

  I took the phone call late on the Sunday before Christmas, suicide’s eve. You can hear the third gin being poured at the other end of the line, as old folk, solitaries, survivors, work through outdated address books. The second wife, tennis partner, of my great-grandfather’s second son’s only boy, had inherited that early Kodak portable. There was no one else. It should come to me. We’d never met, but my number was in the book. The old lady was in sheltered accommodation, very nice, very warm, a jolly Christmas in prospect: I could hear James Stewart ya-yawing in the background. The camera, that came back from Peru with Stevenson, had passed down through the generations, looked after, polished and put away in the cupboard. Then this woman, no connection of mine by blood, a lovely, no-nonsense (by the sound of it) South Londoner, took her prize possession to a charitable Antiques Road Show, in the church hall. It was certainly worth something, the man with the bow tie said, not in cash necessarily, but as part of a ‘fascinating’ tale. It should be placed in safe hands, the memory should be preserved, of that adventure in … where was it
? … South America, Mexico? And, by the way, he enquired with studied emphasis, did she realise that there was film in the camera? Unexposed film. This was the thing that haunted me, that kept the Peruvian expedition running alongside my trip with Jimmy and the girls to Rainham Marshes. The impulses responsible for those pictures, the heat that caused the shutter mechanism to be pressed, was still active. Floating, unresolved, along the soft verges of the A13.

  ‘Lovely to talk to you, dear, so lovely. One of the ladies here, her daughter’s getting married at Easter, in church, will send you the camera. My husband, your father’s first cousin, wanted you to have it. He always said so. But we weren’t in touch, were we? And then when I heard it might be valuable, well …’

  I was caught off-guard. I stood with the phone in my hand, long after the connection had been broken. I knew that the parcel would never arrive. And I knew that the mystery of those final undeveloped images would never be solved. Next morning, back from a short walk, sitting at my desk, glass in hand, gesture to the season, I remembered. I hadn’t asked for a number, an address. I didn’t even know the old lady’s name. The nuisance of it, my stupidity, ruined my Christmas curry, the traditional cigar and tape of Bresson’s Pickpocket.