Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I countered. ‘I like my delusions. They’re a form of entertainment for me – what the hell else is there to amuse me any more, now that film is dead?’

  This seemed to stymie Mukti and he left off his doodling to examine me more intently through his antiquated pince-nez. Really, it was a ludicrous bit of miscasting: the white skin, the fluting voice, the thinning hair and the hoary old comic delivery – still, I was happy with it if it kept the credits sequence short. What I was less happy with was my trousers, which were painfully tight. Holding Mukti’s gaze, I surreptitiously loosened my belt – it wouldn’t be good if he realized that I had realized that he was being played by Will Hay.

  Spurn Head

  And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

  Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

  Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

  Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

  – Philip Larkin, ‘Here’

  1

  Daycare

  It was not long after I returned from Los Angeles, in the middle of June 2008, that I began to suspect there was something wrong – with the wider world, certainly, but perhaps also with me. At first I linked the fuzziness and forgetfulness that increasingly plagued me with the bizarre experience of walking to Hollywood; it seemed only just that the extraordinarily rich ebullition gifted me – particularly on the morning when I walked from the Chateau Marmont to Venice along Santa Monica Boulevard – should be compensated for by mental impoverishment.

  The body, always a sturdier vessel, had righted itself soon enough: the superpowers I had possessed in LA – enabling me to leap tall buildings, stop buses with the palm of my hand and warp the trajectory of bullets – faded as soon as I reached home. When I tried to show my smaller sons what a hero I’d become by leaping over the wire-mesh fence of the all-weather football pitch in the local park, I threw myself straight into it. The five-a-side players left their ball pattering and came over to mock me where I lay.

  But, while physically I simply returned to normal – the dull accommodation of my body, its strip-lit limbs and identical en suite organs – my mental faculties continued to deteriorate. When I came to consider the matter, the fact was that my memory had been eroding for some time: the grey waters of Lethe undercutting its soft cliffs, so that individual recollections – which, no matter how tasteless and bogus, nonetheless had the virtue of being owned outright, not mortgaged – tumbled on to the beach below. I could only posit forgetfulness-withinamnesia to explain how I had confused this with the standardissue agnosia of middle age: names and faces shuffled together, so that I often spent a half-hour or more at a party talking to someone I knew perfectly well, yet whose identity remained obstinately hidden.

  Stupidly, I had indulged in special pleading on my own behalf – and for several years this did act as a groyne with which to impede the longshore drift. There was my notoriety, which served to make me more memorable to those I had met than I would’ve been otherwise, and so encouraged them to come forward: ‘You don’t remember me, do you, but ... ’ Then there was also the nature of my work, which meant that either I was in solitary reclusion, or else revolving around the country promoting my novels at bookshops and literary festivals. Thrust, blinking, on to podium after stage, I suspected that, while I might be providing sharply etched vignettes for audiences, to me the experience was but part of an on-blurring.

  It was true that in the decade since I had stopped drinking and taking drugs my short-term memory seemed to have improved; at any rate, I no longer needed the elaborate system of Post-it notes stuck to the walls of my writing room that had for years served me as a kind of random access. If I maintained this, it was more as an art installation, or magic ritual, designed both to represent the combinatorial powers of the imagination – and to stimulate them to order, then reorder, the tropes, gags, metaphors and observations with which I built my papery habitations. Recency may have been a slippery proposition, happy sociable families a demanding game, but I cleaved to the notion that my textual memory was better than ever. Sadly, this was a delusion; rather, it was my skill alone that had improved: I now wrote books with the workmanlike despatch of a carpenter turning out tables, this busy practice obscuring the loss of much I had once known.

  In London, walking from the tube station, before I reached the grey whales’ backs of Frederick Button’s 1952 ferroconcrete bus garage, I passed a row of lime trees planted in circular beds raised above the pavement. Around the low brick walls the tarmac writhed with the slow subterranean flexing of the limes’ roots; while at the base of their trunks was all manner of rubbish: cigarette packets, aluminium cans, beer bottles and sweet wrappers were impaled on spiky shoots. It made an arresting image – this coppicing of trash – and ever since the winter, when I’d first noticed it, I’d reminded myself almost daily to go and photograph the waste-withies. Now it was summer and a thick canopy of leaves hid the mundane fruit. Now it was foetid summer – the atmosphere super-saturated with sweat-metal – and I realized, belatedly, that I had taken the limes for granted.

  It was the same with the trees in the local park. As evening shadows flowed between the tower blocks, young men would bring their Staffordshire bull terriers out to be exercised. They tacked back and forth along the spore-smelling streets, human leaning away from canine as if hauling on a rope attached to a wayward boom. Then, in the park, the boys would complacently observe the dogs as they shat, before urging them on to attack the trees. The dogs broke the boughs’ necks, they gored the wrinkled hides – when they were done the oaks, rowans and birches looked as if a shell had exploded nearby, stripping long, white-green slats from their trunks. Eventually, these fell away, leaving only a necklace of dead bark immediately beneath the crown of the tree – and it was this that I forgot to record.

  I couldn’t remember names, faces, places I had been and books I had read – but there was also a sinister awareness of estrangement from my immediate vicinity. London, the city of my birth – which I knew, not exhaustively, but well enough to set out from home and find my way almost anywhere intuitively – was becoming alien to me. Weaving among the lunchtime joggers along Rotten Row, then rounding Wellington’s old gaff at Number One, London, I would find myself in uncharted waters, with the effortlessly oriented gulls wheeling insultingly overhead: ‘Heeeere! Heeeere! Heeeere!’ That middle-aged Italian couple – he with puff of smoky beard, she with too youthful T-shirt and bum-bag – would it be too perverse to enquire if I might consult the map they held stretched between them? For I no longer recognized this city, this Londra.

  At home, every day I expected to be exposed: my wife or children to arrest me on the stairs and cry, ‘I do not know you!’ Or, worse still, ‘You do not know me, do you?’ Basic mnemonics, long used by me to recall PIN numbers, or the name of the man in the bike shop, now had to be contrived for my nearest and dearest: she is not fat; fat people are D-shaped side on – therefore, her name begins with a D.

  I linked the amnesia and the facial agnosia with my growing myopia. Print wasn’t attending to personal grooming: the index of the A-Z began to grow stubble; next it was the turn of the thesaurus. There seemed some logic to this: first I became disoriented – then I was unable to check my orientation; first I failed to recognize my interlocutors – then I was unable to search for synonyms, and so all shades of meaning were balled into monism. ‘This,’ as De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter philosophized upon a bullet, ‘is this.’ But what did ‘this’ mean? I’d forgotten and could no longer consult the dictionary without glasses.

  Still, I kept writing. I was correcting the proofs for a storycycle that was to be published that autumn. For all that I professed – to friends, colleagues, whoever would listen – that I was no longer focused on producing books (like tables, or bullets), but rather thought of the work as my fundamental praxis, my way of mixing my mind with the world and so extending my being – bits of text
still had titles, the author’s name and my mugshot on the jacket.

  The only memory I could summon with complete clarity was of a series of events that hadn’t happened to me at all, scenes from a documentary about a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s that had been made – simply and affectingly – by her daughter. The woman was still feisty at the beginning of the film; thrice-married, but now on her own, she was only in her late fifties. She had her house, her garden, a job as a librarian in the university town where she lived. After her diagnosis, with sickening rapidity, she tipped backward into the coalhole of amnesia.

  To begin with she was giddy with the fall – amused by her own forgetfulness. Like me, she devised mnemonics and stuck up Post-it notes; she kept a laboriously calibrated chart attached to the fridge, so she could discover what she should be – or actually was – doing. At first she checked this from day to day, then hour to hour, and eventually moment to moment. Soon enough she became depressed – and this coincided with her trips to a daycare centre, her raven hair nestling on the minibus beside all those snowy cowls.

  Depressed and distressed. She sought alleviation, and throughout her miserable deterioration kept asking her daughter to take her to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, a picturesque resort where they had often holidayed and she had loved to sea bathe. But her daughter – in frank asides to the camera – explained that this was a wish she felt unable to accede to, for fear that her beloved mother would simply swim out to sea and submerge her own incomprehension in the liquid unknown.

  Mercifully, the woman’s memory quickly became so circumscribed that she was encased in a mere droplet of self-awareness, a permanent Now, the silvery surface tension of which gifted her once more with girlish high spirits. Purged of foresight and all but a few dregs of sensual recollection, she was free to simply Be; and it was then, finally, that her daughter no longer fearful that she would commit suicide, for she lacked the capacity to formulate a plan – granted her boon.

  The last we, the viewers, saw of the woman was her entering the glaucous waters, looking baby-like in her one-piece black bathing costume, and striking out for the horizon through the gentle swell. The entire film was unutterably poignant, but what struck me most forcibly was that she swam with the same idiosyncratic stroke as my father used to; a sort of sideways doggy paddle, hands pawing at the water, feet ambling through it. And like my long-dead father, the senile woman had an expression that was at once effortful and seraphic.

  This image, the woman’s joyful face as her mind swam in the Now, and her body in the enduring sea, as I say, returned to me again and again, breaking the silvery surface of the bathroom mirror on the mornings when I remembered to shave; and, had I known of the malaise termed ‘paramnesia’, I would’ve understood that these things – the checklist on the fridge, the trips to the Cambridge daycare centre, the awkward hobble down over the Southwold shingle, my adipose body, seal-black and seal-slick in its nylon skin – hadn’t happened to me at all.

  Someone had sent me – in the way that kindly people do – a book on coping with Alzheimer’s. I read it and wondered if my wife had read it as well. Either she had, or she understood intuitively that the way to deal with people who are confused and upset is to provide them with simple cues from their concretized past that match currently baffling situations.

  Who is that child?

  Why, it’s your friend julian. You love playing with your friend Julian, don’t you? Riding your bikes through Sandy Wood, climbing trees and making secret dens.

  She stopped asking me questions and only provided answers: You’d like to go upstairs now and do some typing.

  She grasped that properly managed I could spend all day existing solely in the manifold of those things that I had once enjoyed: typing in my secret den, while prattling to childhood companions who were, in fact, my own children.

  Nevertheless, as the surface tension of June bulged seamlessly into July, I made the decision to undertake another walking tour; one that would, I hoped, either heal, or at least legitimize, what was happening to me.

  Of course, all of my little walking tours were methods of legitimizing. Towards the end of my drug addiction it had occurred to me that the manias of cocaine, the torpors of heroin and the psychoses of the hallucinogens – all these were pre-existing states of mental anguish that only appeared to be self-induced, and so, perhaps, controllable, because of the drugs. So it was with the walking, which was a busman’s holiday; for, while I trudged along, through fields, over hills, beside bypasses, I remained sunk deep in my own solipsism – then I returned to the chronic, elective loneliness of the writing life. The only real difference I could see between walking and writing was that engaged in the former my digestion achieved a certain ... regularity, while when I wrote I became terribly constipated: a stylite typing atop a column of his own shit.

  Walking my six-year-old son to his school, I held his hand fiercely. I ran my fingers over his knuckles, acutely sensitized to skin, bone, muscle and tendons; hugely aware of scale, the way his hand was a smaller version of my own. Yet, while he sought my big hand out – a gentle fluttering – it was I who needed his small one to make love intelligible.

  He asked me to resume the story I had been telling him the previous morning, ‘George and the Dragon’. With their fierily seductive breath, dragons had burnt up his previous passion, puppies; but, of course, I couldn’t remember to what point the free-forming narrative had progressed. ‘The cardboard dragon,’ he prompted me – and then I got it: George had flown to the top of the mountain. The little dragons had wings, but George, being a human boy alone in Dragonia, had been given a balloon made from sloughed-off dragon skin. Little George had a special mouthpiece, which meant he could breath fire and so fill the balloon with hot air.

  At the summit they discovered a whitewashed cottage with a neat garden. The little dragons flew back down – the mountaintop was taboo – but Little George landed his balloon and encountered old Sir George, the knight, who had come to Dragonia many years before in pursuit of dragons and ended up exiled here. However, he told Little George that his reclusion hadn’t been too awful, for every day the dragons brought him a packed lunch consisting of a cheese sandwich, a Nutri-Grain bar, a shiny red apple and a carton of mango juice. Sir George had saved all the empty cartons, and over the years used them to build a spectacularly realistic, near-life-sized model of a dragon.

  As usual, after filling in the back-story, then adding a few trivial embellishments, we had reached the school. I handed my son his packed lunch and book bag, then he scampered through the gates into the playground.

  The dog was straining at the leash, and I had already turned towards the little park near the school when I spotted something lying in the gutter. I stooped to pick it up. It was a scrap of a black-and-white photograph – the top-right-hand corner, implying that the whole had been torn in half and then half again. I looked at it wonderingly. There was the anachronism of a print in this digital age, and there was the still more old-fashioned feel of the monochrome image.

  I seized upon it – as if it might be a clue of a special kind. Not that it portrayed anything remarkable: only most of the head of a fleshy-faced white man in his mid-thirties; a man who sported a scraggy beard that kept to the bottom of his chin, and whose scalp was outflanking – on both sides – an attempt at a quiff. He looked amiable enough – or, harmless until proved psychopathic by the legwork the clue seemed to demand. He wore a watch with a steel strap; the ragged tear at the bottom and side of the scrap framed the shoulder and cuff of a chequered shirt; behind him were lager bottles, the handles of beer taps and, dimly, what must be shelves of glasses. Above his head a row of optics gleamed.

  I found the scrap of photograph unsettling – wrong, even. Once I’d taken it home and clipped it to the shade of an Anglepoise lamp in my writing room, far from receding into the rest of the tat, the man in it forced himself into my consciousness, his eyes frequently catching mine. The mirror be
hind the bar he sat at, unseen in the photograph, but perceptible as a luminescence countering the camera flash on the beer taps; the utter anonymity of the man, the image created by impulse, in two rips – all this made of it a contemporary version of those painted Russian icons where perspective is deformed in the service of worship. This outsized and hieratic figure was, I concluded, a saint, to be viewed through a hagioscope from the side aisle where I sat, worshipfully typing.

  I corrected the proofs for the new collection, and, although long accustomed to the excruciation of my own prose, there was a fresh focus for this. Previously, it had been the bloody style coagulating on the page – that, and the very grating mechanism of metaphor itself: such and such was like such and such; this was like that ... arrant nonsense! Ask De Niro as Vronsky: this is always this; things are nothing more – or less – than themselves. Now individual words began to get to me. Badly. In this particular text it was ‘even’, as in the sentence, ‘At night, even in the nick, he rubbed whitening powder into his tan cheeks.’ Irrespective of context, changing ‘even’ to ‘especially’ would hardly change the sense – at least, not so as anyone would give a shit. The evens – which were everywhere I looked – were trumpeting to me, if to nobody else, the increasingly parenthetic (and thus provisional) nature of my own work. I even hated the look of the word, a failed palindrome. I stared at it malevolently, willing it to transform into ‘never’.