by Will Self
If I were to be found wandering, mute and disoriented, I wondered what my rescuer might make of those pages where, in anticipation of being unable to recall the right words or phrases, I had pre-emptively set out a multiple-choice list of alternative descriptions, thus:
Flamborough Head is: (a) impressive (b) windy and desolate (c) desolate and oppressive (d) a jolly place, what with the wheeling gulls and the trippers taking tea beneath a candy-striped lighthouse (e) with its humped back and baleen cliffs, suggestive of a beached leviathan.
There were also examples of credible self-knowledge that I could select from upon waking, either from sleep or an amnesiac spell, such as: (a) I dreamt of the lost children again – is there something I am repressing? (b) I have my father’s powerful self-absorption together with my mother’s fearful neurosis. (c) The anger I felt when the woman in the newsagent’s sniggered at me was qualitatively exactly the same as that I experienced aged eleven when teased because of my haircut. (d) Impotence can be a refuge. (e) There is no time left now – yet self-obsession is a dimension of its own.
All I had to do – or so I had convinced myself – was circle the appropriate letter and I would add another niblet of commentary to the great multi-and-no-faith Talmud. Yet, by the time I was sprawled on the chequerboard of sweaty plush, the scheme seemed at best unworkable – at worst futile. As the train pulled away from Victoria a recorded announcement intoned: ‘The next stop is Victoria, change here for District, Circle and Piccadilly lines and mainline rail services.’ At the time I thought it was a mistake.
The east coast line franchise had been won that summer by a company called Grand Central. The ends of the carriages bore blown-up photographs of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean; passengers – had there been any besides me – might have meditated on the desirability of self-murder and good looks, or else played upon the Monopoly and chess boards incorporated into the tables. As I say, the train was nearly empty, yet still it strained to achieve escape velocity, struggling through Camden Town and past Alexandra Palace before leaving the planetoid of London brick behind around Watford.
At Hitchin a Montessori school and a pole-dancing club shared the same single-storey premises. I wondered idly which institution the sign on the flat roof – ‘Wonderland’ – referred to. Ash trees did a dusty hula-hula along the field margins, gloss-black cattle stood in the deep shadow beneath the massy crowns of oaks. I went to the buffet car in my socks. The steward placed a lidded styrofoam cup in a small paper carrier bag, together with a tea bag in a sachet, a tube of UHT milk and another sachet – this one of sugar. I explained to him – as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag – that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously – his appeal to health and safety was the hiss of a cornered snake. My probing head felt small, hard, shiny and wedged into the top corner of the carriage like a security camera. I knew – without being able to recall a single instance – that I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute’s stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England. The steward’s glare cut me into diamond shapes that sparkled in the sunlight, then condensed into droplets whipped away from the carriage window – a vaporous trail.
I grabbed a complimentary copy of The Times from the counter and beat a retreat to my seat.
The fight went out of the train and it sidled to a halt beside an irrigation system that was jetting liquid assets over a field full of subsidies. I rattled the paper open on this headline: ‘Scepticism Mounts over Installation of Holderness Wind Turbines’. There was an aerial photograph showing the thirty-mile outer curve being described by the giant turbines as they were implanted in the seabed between Flamborough Head and Spurn Head.
How could I have forgotten this? The largest public works project in living memory, one that had been compared in its scale and dynamism to the Tennessee Valley Authority or, more tendentiously, the Mittelbau- Dora labour camps that served the V-2 rocket factories. The government’s commitment to generate 10 per cent of the nation’s electricity using renewable technologies had been the centrepiece of its regeneration programme and seldom out of the news. The long-term unemployed of Tyneside and South Shields had been dragooned back into work, and by some accounts were being treated by the contractors – a German company – with a toughness bordering on brutality. Others said that this was nonsense, that the 30,000-strong workforce was being either newly inducted or retrained in an exemplary fashion and to the highest standards. Once the turbines had been built and installed, these men and women would form the core of a fully revitalized heavy-industry sector in the Northeast: a new generation of welders, fabricators and turners who would rival – then exceed – the output of those who had built the great warships and artillery pieces of the Imperial era.
When they came on-line, each one of the massive, three-bladed turbines would generate five megawatts of clean power – and there were to be a hundred of them strung along the Holderness coast alone. Naturally there was opposition; an uneasy alliance had sprung up between the power station workers – who saw their jobs blowing away in the wind – and the more extreme environmentalists, who, while they may have campaigned aggressively for renewable energy, never envisaged it being generated on quite this scale, nor predicated upon a gargantuan reindustrialization. And then there were the inhabitants – the operators of shrinking caravan parks and the farmers of diminishing acreages, aghast that so much tax payers’ money should be poured into the German Ocean, while their own sea defences – with the exception of those at Hornsea and Withernsea – had been abandoned on the grounds that they weren’t cost-effective. In the pubs and golf club bars from Bridlington to Easington it was reported that dark mutterings could be heard, of sabotage – and worse.
I looked up from the article to discover that the train had slow-danced into the flatlands of the Humber estuary. The green corduroy of the fields smoothed away on either side; to the east there squatted the fat-bellied cooling towers of the Drax power station at Selby, belching smoke; while to the west an obese grey-white cloud waddled up into the blue sky, its source the Ferrybridge power station at Knottingley. Was it possible, I mused, to judge by eye alone which of these genies was bigger, or to distinguish limbs from heads? Or was this anthropomorphizing itself evidence of my part in a futile collective denial? For they were nothing, really, these clouds – only a portion of the thirty million tons of carbon the pair vomited out every year.
Not just the Drax and the Ferrybridge – hereabouts the coal-fired power stations were as windmills in a Dutch landscape; there was the Eggborough at Goole and the Salt End in Hull itself. All those trillions of carbon particles roiling up, then caught by the wind shear and so driven offshore into the turbine blades; dirty power twined by clean into a vaporous trail that wavered over the waves. In the synoptic eye of my fervid mind the turbines became the propellers of a monstrous airship – or landship, for the craft was the seabed and the Holderness coast; straining, the turbines wrenched the crumbling cliffs, the caravans’ hard standings, even entire flintknapped churches away from the East Riding, away from the desert island of Britain.
Under the elegant glass and cast-iron roof of York Station I bought a medium latte with a triple shot of espresso. The caffeine was a bad idea – my bowels liquefied, but the platforms were thronged and there was no time to queue for the toilets, so I pressed in among day trippers who were crowding against the doors of the small, five-coach Scarborough train. Then I struggled past bare arms as pendulous as fat bellies to achieve a single seat. I opened The Times again, and as the train chuckled away from York read that the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho would be screened on a cable channel that evening. ‘It’s a fascinating insight into an inhuman mind,’ the previewer wittered, ‘with a late twist revealing the sheer insanity at the core of Bateman’s character.’
On family car journeys we played the memory game. Each member, in turn, recited the formula ‘On my holiday I took with me ... ‘, then added their own item, whether bucket, spade or pink sun dress. The next player had to remember all the previous things and then add another. Could this be a useful strategy for me, one to add to the mnemonics, the lists of routine activities, and the technique – which I had easily mastered – of not asking myself any questions, or contradicting myself, only supplying a steady flow of reassuring answers?
The passengers sat surrounding me, jammed into the smoothly adzed wooden vessel; their torsos were rigid, their arm-length detachable penises lay by their feet. Their quartzite eyes flickered as cuttings, embankments, trees and barns hurried past the little train, which was mounting now, up into the Yorkshire Wolds. Had they all faked their own deaths, I wondered. If so, where were those things they had taken on their holiday, the floating buckets, the sinking spades, the billowing sun dresses – if not scattered on the cold green waves?
Besides, if I listed everything – a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke, a tracksuit top with trompe l’œil chainmail sleeves, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig – wasn’t there my paramnesia to contend with? Might I incorporate things that didn’t belong to me – and had never even been in my visual field? And so I dredged up an unimpeachable memory: the British Ghanaian writer who had accosted me at a West London summer party, where the guests sheltered from the rain in a palatial playhouse, and, his jaw prognathous with cocaine gurning, clutched my arm as he explained his failure to publish was a result of ‘My fatal flaw, see, it’s girls in boots with guns. Before the internet it wasn’t a problem – I mean, I could control it – access was difficult; but now ... Man! There’s too much – a superabundance!’
So I took his flaw with me on my holiday, together with the five empty Ribena cartons that clustered in the rain hood of a Maclaren buggy. Further along the carriage one of the wooden idols cracked its mouth and said, ‘I’m a systems analyst.’ While I thought, aren’t we all?
At Seamer I left the train, laced my boots, then went away through a metal gate to piss among nettles and brambles, their stems and thorns trussed with flung silage. Not good, this modern Millais, the white rim of a discarded paper cup beaded with urine taking the place of Ophelia’s wrist, breaking the surface of the pool. The next train was full of commuters heading south to Hull – they took me with them on their business trips, together with the boots, the guns, the girls and the child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig.
I detrained at Bempton. The landscape rolled modestly through the final waves of syncline and anticline before the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head. I had envisioned the train chugging around the crescent bay of Filey, holidaymakers saluting it with uplifted spades, a portly McGill man in a onepiece striped bathing costume leaping, crab nipping his big toe. Instead, there was only this: thick white cumuli tumbling down on the spectral willows, a monotonous breeze, and pebble-dashed bungalows, each neat front garden equipped with a paddling pool and a trampoline. I edged past, stopping every hundred yards or so to see if, by some minor adjustment, I could make my boots more comfortable.
Most of the trampolines had security netting both at the sides and overhead. I was still perplexed; surely the parents were being irresponsible, there had been over 4,000 disappearances this year already. One moment the child happily bouncing, the next raised up not in Rapture but abject terror. Up and up they flew, human balloons trailing thin screams. They never came down again. Inevitably there were many occasions when a sibling or playmate grabbed hold of those about to be disappeared by their trainers, only to let go when too far up. One little girl who had survived the fall was in the hospital at York. Interviewed by detectives, she said she saw nothing, knew nothing and felt nothing but pain. Still the children went on trampolining.
The straight way between two nondescript Yorkshire villages, drivers’ mouths wobbling as they swerved to avoid me; a group of sinisterly black toadstools in the grooves of a felled ash; the elongated barrow of an overgrown old railway embankment; the beige earth littered with plough-sharehalved flints; Seaways Farm, Home of Agricycle, WARNING: GUARD DOGS, WARNING C.C.T.V. installed on these premises. Then Flamborough village clustered around two fish and chip shops, its peripheral brick semis tucked like Monopoly properties in the corner of raggedy fields. The old octagonal lighthouse tipped above the horizon, quaint as a doge’s hat; next golfers grazing on their fairways, after that the new lighthouse and after this the cold and salty shock of the whiteflecked waves retreating towards a hazy horizon guarded by – Oh! How could I have forgotten them?
On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of girls in boots with guns, quartzite eyes, a detachable wooden penis, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig – and these: beyond the whitewashed Coastguard station, and the steely latticing of a pair of radio masts, came marching the tripods with their three-bladed heads. I was shocked by their size – at least 500 feet high, the ones closest to Flamborough Head stood wave-waisted, entire, while those further out each had a bobbing flotilla of barges and service vessels. Further still, where the vast parenthesis tended to the south, the turbines were still being erected; the floating cranes’ platforms were measurable by acreage, their davits implausible – their being of human manufacture, that is.
Cheery walkers – ‘Hello, matey’ – passed me by as I scooted over the headland, my eyes not on grassy quiff but the great bracket of the turbines wavering away in the sea haze. At the cliff edge, I stopped, got out my stove and made tea. Sipping and smoking, I checked the three, shiny-new maps I’d brought, counting the kilometre squares to Bridlington, then Bramston, then on to Skipsea, where I planned staying the night. While I stared into the map’s pale clarity of line and colour factoring all dimensions into two, everything appeared intelligible; yet if I peered over my paper lap, down to the shattered chalk at the cliff base, it looked uncannily like broken-up blocks of old metal type. This place, far from legitimizing my amnesia, might prove a fatal shore for my comprehension. I packed up and pressed on, leaving the maps lying on the fan of grass where I’d been sitting.
On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw – not girls in boots with guns, but Socrates’ cashiered madman, who had to be yanked along behind me, drool on his chin, roused only by the surreal lubrications I whispered in his ugly ear. Then there was the rubber figurine – at most two or three inches high – sporting a navy blue siren suit buttoned tightly to the neck and with the head of a pig. However, I forgot the maps and by the time I noticed I’d walked on a couple of miles along the declining cliffs – drawing level with Sewerby Hall, a stately enough pile, although now surrounded by the pavilions and pennants of a caravanning jamboree – and it was pointless going back. My way was physically straightforward and temporally warped; no mapping could explain the grinding away to silt and sand of all those generations who had toiled in the lost fields and beaten back the vanished hedgerows.
My breath in my ears, the rhythm of the waves, the steady tramp of my molars on latex impregnated with nicotine. I still smoked, a bit, but this gum was the scrag-end of my addiction. I had sucked in clouds of self-absorption for decades, shaped then moulded them with tooth, tongue and lip, until finally they were compacted into this dense yet mutable wad.
The cliff face grew fuller and was grassed over. I was in a municipal park where serious pilots had ambitions completely out of scale with their model planes; would-be paragliders hopped about, adipose as bumblebees, their black nylon suits striped with logos, their empty wing cases sagging on their backs. One had managed to get his glider aloft, and it fi
lled out, then curled into a 25-foot parenthesis; he tugged on the guidelines and made local leaps, but I doubted he’d ever get aloft – his chute bracketed him with the land.
The path became lined with benches towards which I felt great compassion. I knew the Yorkshire folk took their passing over seriously and carted their senescent ones here, to the east, where they drowsed out the balance of their lives; becoming stiffer, squatter, more wooden in the sun porches of residential care homes, days and nights speeding across their faces, until, at the moment of expiration, they metamorphosed into these noble sit-upons, at the ends of which their descendants could prop floral offerings.
I’d assumed from the gull cries of the children skating across the slick beach that the town was crowded – then suddenly I was in among the smoked-glass barns full of slot machines and the bits of Victorian terrace, and there was hardly anyone about. Along the front there was a handful of family groups, most consisting of elderly parents eating donuts and a grown-up Down’s child with a toffee apple. Lumpy teens jostled in the finely drawn shadows, their cheeks livid with candyfloss. The atmosphere was so sugary the air was granulated, then, at the funfair, the Jungle Ride’s dugout canoes were all screamingly empty as they were winched on their cataract over the beach.
I sat down by the old harbour, savouring the fishy smell. A few remaining inshore boats were jostled by a clinking mass of sailing dinghies with aluminium masts, which in turn had been pushed to the barnacled seawall by two giant, crudely formed steel feet. Rising, I went down to the quayside so that the feet towered four storeys above me, rust-streaked rivets running around the insteps and up the shins. To seaward the swell of the calves almost blocked the harbour entrance, but I could make out the thickening thighs, the oil rig of the hips and pelvis, and beyond this the tanker-sized chest stranded on the sands.
