by Will Self
I drew back, half blinded, then the water colourist cried out again and I returned: the entire file of turbines, as far in either direction as I could see, was being lit up. A pulse of brilliance streaked from one to the next along the Holderness coastline. ‘We’re in the midst of it,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Quiet as it is, this is the gathering storm.’ And I turned on my hurting heels, exited the sagging bungalow and made my way back along the alley to the single-track road. If I turned left I would reach the village in half an hour; if I turned right I would come soon enough to the bitten-off edge of tarmac, and beyond that a traveller needs must skip from wave crest to crest, if he wanted to reach the place where Withow once was.
On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of not altogether caring; a rubber figurine only two or three inches high and clad in a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig. I had a 1.5 litre bottle that I filled from a tap whenever I had the opportunity, and three water colours – sea scenes, amateurish to begin with and now badly muddied, of no real merit, certainly, but a convenient size to tuck under one arm.
As I gained the road I thought I heard a low rumble, a fusilade of falling pebbles and a high, wild cry. These sounds were open to more than one interpretation – I chose the most obvious, and so pressed on, intent on the late television news, a mug of tea and a packet of shortbread.
3
The Seal Pup
Fruit pudding, white pudding, black pudding, bacon, sausage, two fried eggs, three rounds of toast, a grilled tomato, mushrooms and beans – all of it washed down with orange juice and a cafetière of coffee. During the night I had forgotten about all this chomping, had dreamt of butterfly girls sipping viridian nectar, and android men who only needed the monthly replacement of one rusty fuel cell with another shiny one. I had forgotten also Pauline, who stood over me freshly scrubbed, slim and shiny as a PVC drainpipe in her tightly tied plastic apron, urging me to eat more while she told me about her childhood in Driffield, and how having grown up on the coast she never found its steady disappearance that peculiar.
‘Fair enough,’ she said, placing her fists where her hips ought to have been. ‘When they put the Millennium Stone in at Barmston, and I saw a couple of year later how much closer the cliff had got, well ... made me think a little.’
So I left her in her well-equipped kitchen, in its gravelled courtyard, which lay within the larger enclosure of Skipsea itself, with its painted paling fences, pink hollyhocks and silver-metallic Nissan hatchbacks circled in the cul-de-sacs. The means of mobility employed as a defence – could there be any better bulwark against what was going under a mile to the east?
I hurriedly bought an apple and some cheese at the village store and set off, desperate to return to the coast. I had not time for rape fields or poplar rows – besides, field margins were overgrown, convolvulus snaked across the lanes, a sewer stank, and pigeons gorged themselves on ripening wheat. The countryside seemed proud purely on the basis that it was, rather than was not, and taking a path running alongside a grassy knoll I looked at the caravans thereon, each complacently yoked to the national grid. Yet what were they, that they should only be tacked on behind, the appendices of hearth and home?
The farmer’s wife had been up at six to stuff me; now I paid her back with my most liquid currency: amnesia. Why was I, I mused, so flatulent? Why was my belly so uncomfortably swollen? I fixated on the exposed coils of an electricity substation humming in nettles, and so was quite unprepared for the moto enclosure that lay beyond this.
The big old boar lay half inside a corrugated-iron humpy; the sow wallowed in a muddy slough. She was suckling a pair of mopeds, who, rears wriggling, gored her with their greed.
‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd?’ she lisped as I strode past, and, pausing long enough to confront her bristly baby face, I replied, ‘Yes, I mean to get as far as ...’, then faltered, because of course I couldn’t remember where it was I was going, so had to get my notebook out and check, all the while cursing myself for the ridiculousness of engaging in conversation with a creature that couldn’t possibly understand.
‘Yes.’ I found the entry. ‘I’m going as far as Hollym today.’
The sow raised herself up on her elbow, fluttering her thick eyelashes, a coquettishness at odds with the pleated gash of her exposed genitals. ‘Thee-thyd,’ she mused. ‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd.’
The mopeds grunted and squealed.
‘Well,’ I snapped, ‘that’s quite enough of that!’
I put the notebook away and headed on, although as I continued along the path, kicking out distractedly at molehills, I could still hear her maddening singsong, ‘Thee-thyd, thee-thyd, thee-thyd ...’ and the gobbling of her young.
At the seaside the mist was plumped up, a sweaty pillow on the wrinkled sheet of the waves. North along the bluff I could make out the leftovers of a hamlet; on the landward side of an alley there were wooden shacks and tiny bungalows, while to seaward only broken walls, a few fence posts, a hopeless ‘For Sale’ sign, and detritus strewn over the edge of the cliff. The tide was in, undercutting the bellying mudface that in other places had splurged down in a slow-motion convulsion. Observing the saturated postage stamps of useless water colours floating on the swell, the phrase ‘rotational slumping’ slid into my mind, and so I turned south under a Teflon sky.
I had cosseted the Granny Smith apple in my palm since Skipsea, and now bit into it, releasing a sour concomitant: a bad news thread that spooled in front of my eyes, Deposits of amyloid visible as apple-green yellow birefringence under polarized light. The amyloid forms plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that progress through the centres of the brain. Bite of apple, wet and sharp – bite of boots, the stupid costly bespoke things. Somewhere in the Midlands there was a last, a scale wooden model of my foot growing dusty on a shelf. I’d stretched plaster across the hard ridges of the metatarsals that morning. It didn’t matter – I knew the skin would break before the end of the walking tour and I, an immigrant merman who’d never seen my submarine homeland, would be condemned to walk on knives.
A golf course arrived, heralded by CCTV cameras and signs WARNING of crumpling cliff edges and flying golf balls. Next came a caravan park, with long lanes between the vans that followed the contour lines of the increasingly high and sheer cliff. It was past eight, and I greeted the dog walkers who were about, but they were having none of it. They stuck close to their metal hutches, while I was beyond the chain-link fence, hard by the cliff edge, a creature of sea and sky.
Then another park, the inhabitants of which were more rooted still, their static homes girded round with mini-picket fences, behind which sprouted potted gardens – wincey shrubberies and shocks of pampas grass. Aspen, Vogue, Celebration and Windsor all went by. Windsor had a nautical air, and the standard of St George stiffly riffled beside its jutting prow. A man stood watch outside its picture window, his feet spread on hardwood decking, his elbows propped on a taffrail. He looked like the bulldog on his tea mug, the same barrel chest, slope shoulders and bowlegs. His muzzle – red as the Holderness loess – was amiable enough, and so I hailed him, ‘Don’t you ever get worried?’
He raised a monobrow.
‘About the cliff?’
Was this perhaps a ridiculous solecism, as talk of carcinogens might be to a man riddled with cancer? For the neatly mown grass terminated a few paces from where we stood in a ragged tear that zigged towards one static home, then zagged away from its neighbour.
‘Me, wurried? No, lad,’ he laughed. ‘There’s a good forty-six feet there. It’s him oop there should wurry, he’s only got twelve and he isn’t even chained!’
I looked where he pointed and saw the unchained fool and the beckoning crevice.
‘See,’ the English bulldog resumed, ‘it goes pretty regular; true, I did lose nine feet last year, but that were exceptional.’
I shook my head, bedevilled by such sangfroid: ‘But look, with that crack coming in there, and this one over here, won’t it�
�’
‘Oh aye, it’ll even up – these hard standings’ll be gone before the year’s out’.
He nodded to the concrete platforms teetering over the abyss; they had the evil air of concentration camp ruins.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what happened to the static homes that were on them?’
‘Well, they joost move us back when we get too near– winch us oop, move us back. It’s all in the contract, like – part of the deal.’
Move us back, part of the deal. Death came wading through the sea fret; at first it was featureless, a blur of black robe and steel scythe, then it was right before me, elbows planted on the cliff edge the way any normally sized person might lean upon a bar. Death’s skull loomed, ivory in its house-sized hood, and it stretched out a bony grabber to wrench Aspen from its hard standing, then place it on a vacant square three rows back.
Glimpsed over my retreating shoulder, this looked to be a tender act, the merciful forestalling of these retirees’ inevitable decline, then fall. But it came at a cost, for Death completed this outsized chequers move by snatching up the two static homes it had taken and casting them into the sea. The cacophony – the pitiful screams, the smash and the clatter – stayed with me for a while, then they became the seagulls’ ordinary savagery, the mist drew back from the horizon, and there were no personifications to be seen except the turbines with their blades feathered, standing sentinel and still.
Stalks swarmed on the wide deck of a wheat field, then marched to the brink, where fluting away from their roots were buttresses and cornices of quick-setting mud. Away in their dense ranks the parentheses inscribed by last winter’s tractors referenced the remaining rags of mist, and so seemed like earthy vapour trails scored in a green-gold sky.
Ten yards of beach hauled themselves clear from the long fetch of the waves – I longed to descend, yet feared being trapped between cliff and sea. But then a dead porpoise swam into view, and as there was a way to scrabble down nearby I took it, then knelt on the shingle to contemplate its gouged flanks and parched spiracle. It was too silly to impute all evils to the turbines – no sea creature could have leapt into their blades – but the wounds seemed to have been made by a boatman’s gaff and there were few fishermen abroad on the water – although plenty of contractors.
I scrabbled back up and the cliff went on. The dead porpoise had shaken me and to steady myself I consulted my notebook, which suggested I try this mental exercise: On my holiday I took with me a neurofibrillary tangle that was awkward to manoeuvre – like a large bunch of twisted wire – and when I reached a gate or a stile I would have to wrangle it over, often tearing my clothing as the loose ends caught in the loops of my wicking T-shirt. Then there were the UPVC windows, three of them framed in white plastic, 140cm × 260cm, far too unwieldy for a walking tour. Not forgetting the parish records of Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe – the soggy ledgers from which leaves kept dropping, each veined with the calligraphy of birth, death and marriage; they were God-fearing parishes, these, yet all were sucked upon by the sea’s salty mouth, rod after rod, until they were dissolute. Finally, there was the rubber figurine, which, if meant as a child’s toy, was scarcely fit for purpose, being – despite its three-inch stature – a bulky, imposing thing, garbed in a skin-tight Churchillian siren suit, and, most disturbing of all, with a pig’s head, not a man’s.
The North Cliff Boat Club stood fifty feet above the waves, its yard a jumble of fibreglass hulls trapped behind corrugated iron and barbed wire. To escape into the sea the craft would have to be manhandled over the fence, then dragged down a steep concrete slipway – and what pleasure could there be in that?
The path drew me capriciously along a choked alley between two caravan parks, bindweed caught then snapped between my ankles, my clothes snagged at brambles and snatched up burrs, my bare arms lunged at nettles – then I found myself on the long dusty road into Hornsea, sweating in the noonday sun, as some obese people gathered round a cake stall beside the fire station waddled towards me and then past.
A street of redbrick two-up, two-downs, the deeply conservative impasto of road markings in yellow and white, the Floral Hall with ‘1911’ worked into its pediment – I had hoped, devoutly, for the respite of the town, the smell of car exhaust in the tarshadow of Nonconformist chapels, string shopping bags dangling along the high street. Instead, Hornsea Mere appeared between Belle-Époque yews, and, while I saw that model boats were abroad on its sweet waters, I knew that below them lay the Cainozoic mush of drowned woodlands and impacted reed beds, all the ebb and flow of millennia.
Along the high street there were no string shopping bags, only people yanking money from the cash points and running the next relay leg to the shops. I paused by the window of a secondhand one: 35mm cameras, some Spode. Inside tweed jackets clubbed together on hangars. As soon as the door tinged shut I hid behind a freestanding bookcase stuffed with paperbacks – but the tall, potbellied man who supervised the place hadn’t noticed me; he was involved with a peer in a corduroy cap. The pair were unwrapping a series of objects swathed in green recycling bags. The shopkeeper’s sleeves were rolled up almost to his armpits and his arms disturbed me.
I took a book from the case at random; it was Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie. The cover depicted a seagull nesting at the edge of a cliff; between its legs were a speckled egg and a golf ball. Down below, a man in a two-piece suit was plunging, tie flapping, and with more gulls bothering his blank face. The illustrator, working in pen and wash, had placed a nasty black outcrop in the waters, waters he had also embellished with the black swirls of an impact that was yet to occur.
The sixth impression of a Fontana paperback published in 1972, I had read it in this very edition, concurrently with my father, when we were rained in during a Cornish walking tour. Can there ever have been anywhere more subdued than that parlour, with its carriage clock’s gold-balled gimbals slowrevolving on the mantelpiece, and the superfluity of Windsor and wing chairs? We had lingered over breakfast as long as we could, my father, as was his way, elaborately buttering a single, mouthful-sized section of toast, then anointing it with marmalade, before finally and reverently consuming it. The rain lulled outside gathering its strength, then gushed. My father went out to negotiate with the lady of the house – we were permitted to stay but confined to the parlour, where we sat all that long day, either side of an electric fire, its bars furry with summer dust, and read alternate chapters of the Christie, the contest being – with my father there always had to be competition – to see who could guess the murderer first.
Night fell with the rain. A flyer in the bus shelter promised a choral performance at the village hall. We sallied out along oilskin roads from Trebetherick to Rock. I was so bored by then that even the red-faced farmer’s wives belting out Handel pleased me, while as for my dad—
‘These might interest you.’
‘I’m sorry’.
‘These may interest you – these here.’
The Elastoplast he had wrapped around the bridge of his spectacles fitted precisely in the groove of his frown. His eyes – of an awesome mildness – held me as he leant forward over the counter. At the base of the triangle formed by his forearms, between the heels of his liver-spotted hands, were five wood carvings of etiolated human figures. They were perhaps a foot to eighteen inches long and lay in a pile like outsized spillikins. There was also a larger piece of wood: one end curved into a stern, while the prow had been whittled into a serpent’s streamlined head. There were also three discs that, if shields, were to scale with the figures. To one side lay a little heap of what looked like spare limbs – or possibly clubs.
The man wearing the corduroy cap had gone. Outside the lunchtime shoppers had evaporated, while in front of the newsagent opposite a handwritten shout for the Hornsea Echo lamented: THREE SISTERS DISAPPEAR IN BEWHOLME. ‘Pick one up,’ the shopkeeper ordered me. ‘D’you recognize it?’
Fragments of quartzite had been ram
med into the figure’s roughly carved pinhead, a head reduced by bronze blade to its essential planes: a sharp chin, a triangular nose, the oval slot of a mouth. It lay on its back in my palm. The wood was warm to the touch, fine-fissured pine. I hefted the figurine – it was perfectly balanced, more like a tool than anything decorative. I guessed it must be very old, although the neoteny of the head, the armless shoulder sockets, the notched crotch and legs that tapered to a point also called to mind wavering aliens silhouetted in the molten light spilling from the cracked shell of a flying saucer.
I gingerly set the figure down on the counter and said, ‘I think I’d remember that.’
Then I was sitting on the seawall watching the tide lap back from muddy shingle. The wall was in three smooth tiers, with orange-painted steel gates set on mammoth hinges in the uppermost one. The sunlight was bright enough to strike sparks on the wavelets, yet overall visibility was only a couple of hundred yards, the sea mist enclosing what might be – for all I knew – an isolated section of coral reef. I peered closely at the smooth whiteness between my thighs – was it concrete, or the massively compacted exoskeletons of myriad antediluvian crustaceans?
I was getting out my oat cakes and the sweating cheese I’d bought in Skipsea, when a family came trundling out of the mist and sat right beside me. There was a chocolate-smeared three-year-old in a pushchair, its feet trailing along the path. Too bloody big for it, I thought, it’ll end up fat as its mother – who was mountainous in a bright red blouse and black slacks. A sixtyish mother-in-law was in attendance, her senior hair set hard. Her hovering around the pushchair was a mute agony: she mustn’t interfere, although everything her daughter-in-law did was wrong as wrong could be.
A short way off, on the steel stairway down to the strand, a skinny husband in a bowling shirt fiddled with a tacky kite. The six-year-old boy pestering him was equally skinny – all bone struts, stringy tendons and plastic skin. I watched them get tangled up in each other, while I removed from my rucksack my tea-making kit, a paperback thriller and a small oilcloth bundle, which when I unrolled it contained what appeared to be the detachable wooden penises of some Bronze Age figurines.
