London Overground (27 page)

Andrew spurned leg coverings, to show off the wound, describing it, to strangers on the street, as the aftermath of a battle with a marine predator. When forced to wear trousers for some lecture or assault on a commissioning editor, he dropped them like a red-nose clown.

Now he hobbled to the stove to make me a cup of coffee. And explained how he intended, at the end of the week, to drag himself into a Hastings cave, in hospital gown, to project images from Pyrenean caverns – bison, aurochs, antlered shamen – on the damp walls.

I photographed the over-shiny, razored leg. There were puncture holes on either side of a central track of thread, angler's twine, with which they had stitched up the evidence of their fishing for veins. Sculpted, in ridges of angry flesh, was the perfect symbol of our walk, a railway map in meat. A fly, miming the action of a furious washing of hands, licked and sampled. Before setting off on an epic journey down the film-maker's mutilated thigh.

The
day's tramp around the London Overground circuit wouldn't have happened, or not in this way, without the presence and witness of Andrew Kötting. For better or worse, he made the labour of documentation and debate into a mind-film. He resurrected never-forgotten Deptford days and Camberwell nights. And like the unfortunate lady tapped so frequently for dropsy, and now resting in a stone tank in Bunhill Fields, he never repined at his case.

I am grateful to Anonymous Bosch, pinhole wizard, for returning with me to a number of significant locations, to make a record of things that should have happened. He is an unrivalled tapper of ghosts and spectral traces.

Thanks also, for advice, company, connections, books, to: James Campbell, B. Catling, Michael Corby, Gareth Evans, Stephen Gill, Antony Gormley, Leon Kossoff, Leila McMillan, MacGillivray, Bill Parry-Davies, Anthony Rudolf, Anna Sinclair, Marina Warner. And, for permission to quote from works of inspiration and information, my thanks to: Allen Fisher, Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit and Will Self.

Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard and Bill Griffiths provide the dominant sonar echoes of certain territories we passed through on our circuit. They are the true figures of place.

As ever, I'd like to thank my editors, Simon Prosser and Anna Kelly, my copy-editor, Sarah Coward, and my agent, Laura Longrigg.

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First published 2015

Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2015

Inside photographs © Anonymous Bosch

The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-97150-5