Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ the man said when he saw me. ‘What’re you doing up this way again?’

  I was grateful to him for two things: first, his bowling shirt, which was lilac with a blue revere collar, cuffs and pocket-facing; it was also monogrammed ‘Derek’ across the breast pocket. Secondly, there was Derek’s low-key reaction to what I assumed must be a quite a coincidence. I imagined he was responding intuitively to my blank expression, and fed me this easy question so I could skirt whatever mutual history we had, leaving it for him to unearth later.

  I began explaining that I was taking a few days out to walk the Holderness coast, but no sooner had I begun talking than Derek interrupted me, turning to the uncongenial woman-mountain and blurting, ‘Look, it’s ’im who came round that evening we ’ad the bees.’

  ‘Oh, ho!’ she laughed. ‘It’s you – I didn’t even notice you sitting there all quiet, like. ’Ow yer doin’? Still writing your cra-azy books?’

  Her sudden warmth was overpowering – I thought, how sad she has so little of this for her own, and also for an instant – could I spill it all out? My deteriorating memory – the quixotic quest for the man in the scrap of photograph I’d found in the gutter of St Rule Street? Might I throw myself on the soft mercy of her bosom?

  ‘It weren’t ’til well after midnight that the police got hold of some feller who knew how to deal wi’ it,’ Derek was saying.

  In the course of a few more exchanges I gathered this: that he had gone to see me give a book reading at the Pave Café in Hull the previous summer. She – Karen, that is – would’ve gone too, were it not for a swarm of bees that had blanketed the front of the house: ‘The babysitter were absolutely bloody terrified.’ I, however, had risen to the challenge, and when I heard the tale accompanied Derek home and gave an impromptu recital in the kitchen, ‘While me an’ my mate drank oor gin.’

  As this was transpiring the mother-in-law, released from her daughter-in-law’s cage of contempt, escaped with the pushchair. Wheeling it twenty yards off, she snatched back the child’s bap and began vigorously to wipe the chocolate from its mouth with an index finger cowled in saliva-dampened cloth.

  My lips felt sore and I was walking along the cliff top. The tide was still too high to risk the beach. Another caravan park rolled towards me, but this time there was no fencing between the static homes – which were arranged side-on – and the precipice. Hard standings overhung the abyss – and one had recently collapsed together with the ruptured diaphragm of a paddling pool, the shards of fake-marble planters, a toilet seat and a yucca, which still alive had replanted itself in the mudface, near to a swollen and putrefying hand – or rubber glove.

  The dregs of an army camp marched through the badlands towards me. There were overgrown trenches and ramparts studded with sentinel towers, redbrick revetments crumbled into the ruderals, and the heat shimmered over the hedgerows – crystal stairs for flies to shimmy on. The black outline of a man punched a hole in a tower’s doorway. A gun nut. Spent all morning at home, up in his bedroom. ‘Gary!’ his old man called up. ‘’Ave you ’ad yer breakfast, oor what?’ Or what. He came along the flatland from Rolston on a mountain bike, a shotgun slung around one shoulder, a .22 rifle round the other, the pockets of his unseasonable parka bulging with ammunition. He stands in the doorway watching me come on in my Union Army-blue uniform T-shirt, my head full of deep-laid plans for world Zionist domination. He stands stock still, not wanting to aim then track me, but postponing the ecstasy of fluid movement, and so on I come, at every pace expecting his big chin to bristle from the shadows, the nostrils of his shotgun to sneeze snotty lead, his parenthetic shoulders to shrug with the recoil – and so bracket my expiration.

  It wasn’t until I was within ten paces of the tower that the gun nut resolved into nothing but the outline of a man bashed in the old steel door. I went on, quaking, and debouched into the road by Mappleton village hall, a Wesleyan chapel dated 1830. Along the road a car slowed beside me and the driver asked if I knew of a petrol station nearby; I said I didn’t, walked on and discovered a jolly little Prius dealership around the next bend, its eco-bunting limp on this hot afternoon, the cars hunched and shiny, the prices exorbitant.

  Down a lane, past raggle-taggle cottages, I came upon a declivity leading to the beach. The tide had turned; looking south I could pick out a route worming around the mud slid down, so, despite the prominent signs warning of unexploded ordinance, I set off into the daymare of my own relentless velleity.

  At first there were a few dog walkers, some swimmers waisthigh in the churned cream waves and a pod of sunbathers cast ashore on cushions of sea-worn concrete – but soon enough I was utterly alone, picking my way between pinnacles of dried mud studded with pebbles of all colours, from bone-white through eggshell to carmine, mahogany and black. To my right the cliff swooped up, to my left the sea rippled away, while before my eyes the sea fret coiled and shredded – a miasma at once nothingy and permanent; as each buttress of hardened mud formed the flats of this set, so the mist appeared always on the point of being whisked away to reveal the audience of giants seated in the deep.

  During the Second War there had been extensive defences along this stretch of the coast; now sections of wall – concrete Z’s, L’s and double U’s, bearded with reinforcing – and even entire blockhouses were embedded in the beach. For a while the mudface was scattered with a selection of the things I had brought with me on my holiday – girders, spars, plastic sheeting, the neuritic plaques, the senile plaques, the braindruse – which, while soiled, nonetheless anchored this liminal desert to the world up above, to the kitchens still fitted, the carports yet intact, beside the bungalows that crouched well away from the edge. Soon enough, though, these relics of the distant present had tumbled by, while the fret still draped offshore, hiding the turbines, and the only player was me, walking on the spot as one shingle spit then the next revolved towards me, each a miniature Spurn Head.

  If before I had been held by the loess, now it sucked me in; I had only to let my glimpse penetrate its moist gashes for the entire body to shiver, then contort, as if it were a monstrous and living thing. The heat mounted, the beery waves frothed on the rim of the land, my vain boots ate my feet, while, incontinently, the Andante of Mahler’s Sixth began to syringe my ears – at first a slow seep of syrupy violins and sucrose melody, but then, with recursive eddies of flute and woodwind, larger flows of sound began sloshing around my brainpan, rocking then floating my hollow soul.

  Spooked, I gripped the plastic water bottle that had served me for the entire walk as something to hold on to, the all-too-real limb of that phantom body, the Other, who walked beside me yet said nought. The bottle crackled – the Andante flooded on, its cascades of sweet sadness spurting through my eyes, mouth and nose. I put the bottle down on a mud plinth, hoping its mundane shape would trump all this amorphous weirdness. This didn’t work: the Mahler became more turbulent; I slid across glassy sound-boils, whipping into whirlpools of timpani – massed triangles, cow bells and old hubcaps smitten with fenders: ‘Zing! Boom! Tanta-ra!’ A cartoon Cleopatra was hauled towards me reclining on a pyramidal juggernaut drawn by naked and burnished Nubians. ‘Zing! Boom! Tan-ta-ra!’ And although she vanished into the haze, once she was gone the patterns of the pebbles, the gulls twisting into the sky at my approach, the very winding of the sea fret – all these phenomena assumed a demented congruence with the Andante, responding to its every glissade.

  It got worse, the mud Romantically writhing, the sandbars flip-flopping, the very rods and cones of my optic nerves made visible, frenziedly dancing to the brassy blare of the movement’s crescendo – until all was blissfully and terribly silenced by the bomb: which lay, small and rusted, a few sustained glockenspiel notes and oboe tones curling into silence around it. I’d nearly trodden on the fucking thing and sat down abruptly, my rucksack marrying my back to the sand, so that I lay panting, parenthesized by my calves.

  When I got upright again, I
saw there was a shoal of these death fish beached along the tide line – perhaps a hundred in all. Fear renders the body down so that each movement becomes clarified, so, keeping close to the cliff face, I tiptoed past the bombs to the accompaniment of the arrhythmic rasping of my breath in my ears, and atonal cries desiring my life to be not just longer – but forever.

  Then the beach was a hard flat pan. Up above on the bluffs stood the stark forms of ruined military installations about to surrender. My bowels slackened and I squatted, back to the cliff, to add my lava to the glacial till. Standing to wipe myself, I saw two small figures coming on along the beach, maybe a quarter of a mile distant. It had been so long since I’d seen another human that, for the aeons until we met, I speculated on what life forms these might be – were they the luminous beings, descended now, their gossamer wings folded into yellow nylon jackets?

  It was a Yorkshireman – rotund but hard, like a well-inflated beach ball, his smooth-shaven face cut into by the shadow of his baseball cap. Both he and his son – aged perhaps thirteen – were wearing Hull City football shirts; the black-and-yellow stripes widened over their tummies, then narrowed at the broad leather belts they wore, dangling with chisels and hammers. They rolled towards me across the bled, so at ease that I could not bear to let them pass – had to seize them, tap into their reservoir of honeyed love. As I drew level I cried out, ‘I saw a bomb back there!’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ the man said. ‘What were it like?’

  He had three gold front teeth, two incisors and a canine; also a heavy gold chain in the fold of his thick neck – these I registered, rather than his relaxed manner, so ran on nervously: ‘You see all those signs warning of unexploded ordinance all the time, but I never think anything of them – then I nearly trod on this bomb.’

  ‘Aye,’ he reiterated, ‘what were it like?’

  ‘Um ... well,’ I flustered, ‘I dunno, about this long,’ I held out my hands to bracket an implausible catch, ‘and sorta bomb-shaped – with tailfins.’

  ‘Four of ’em, squared off?’

  ‘Y-yes, four fins, square ones.’

  ‘That’ll be a tank-buster, an A10. I’ve come out here after a high tide and seen thousands of ’em.’

  ‘There were at least a hundred of them back there!’ We were both taken aback by my vehemence. ‘Are they, y’know, live?’

  ‘Soom are, uthers ’re joost dummies – practice bombs.’

  The boy stayed a way off, took a rubber-handled hammer from his belt and swung it idly at a mud outcrop – in the seconds it took to connect I saw this as an orbit within an orbit, the boy as a sun, the father as a satellite, myself at the aphelion, the whole as an orrery designed to explain the emotional pull that children exert—

  The hammer struck, cleanly splitting the mud to reveal its pebbly lode and we all staggered two steps sideways as the beach jerked beneath our feet. Over the fossicker’s left shoulder a section of the cliff face dematerialized into dirty fret that boiled towards the sea. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but the man – turning to look so that the gold chain was spat from his neck folds – said casually, ‘That were a big one.’

  ‘Was it a bomb?’ I gasped.

  He laughed, ‘That? No, it were only an ordinary fall, haven’t you seen wun yet? ‘Ow long you bin walking?’

  The shock of the cliff fall seemed to have jolted my memory and without needing to consult my notebook I was able to explain I’d come from Skipsea that day, and Bempton via Flamborough Head the one before. Thrilled by my own lucidity, I rambled on about the Holderness coast, its strangeness, and how there must be some odd connection between its progressive engulfment and the ignorance of the wider world.

  The fossicker was also thrown into loquacity by the cliff fall and spoke of his fossil hunting, how the Yorkshire coast was perfect for this, exhibiting three successive strata – the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Cainozoic – exposed successively from Whitby in the north to the Humber estuary, and how he himself had found, ‘All sorts. I dug up a whole bloody bison in Tunstall mere last year and a fossilized tree the year before.’

  He told me that he and his family lived in Goole, and I pictured them there at once: sitting in a conservatory tacked on to the back of a small terraced house beside the docks. The fossicker sat watching the racing on television, the fossilized bison serving him as an awkward sofa. The boy stood by a fulllength UPVC window lazily swinging his steel hammer until it hit the TV set, which neatly split, spilling its ancient microcircuitry of ammonites and trilobites. The father-god and the son-god looked on, one substance, at peace.

  Before they walked on the fossicker urged me to visit the sound mirror at Kilnsea. ‘It’s right queer,’ he said. ‘Dirty great big concrete thing – but wunderfully smooth, y’know what it were for?’

  I didn’t.

  ‘Zeppelins, they say if you put your ear to it you could hear a zeppelin four minutes before it reached the coast. Four minutes! What good were that?’

  What good indeed. I was alone – the boy and his father were a fast-fading memory, then nothing but the sinusoids of their footprints in the sand, crossing and recrossing into the beige distance. All they had left me was this awful data: that the cliff could fall – and it could fall on me. How dense I must have been to have come this far, contemplating all the erosion that had gone before, yet never taking it personally.

  The beach narrowed once more until it became a defile between the solidified brown tsunami to my right and the green waves to the left. Narrowed until I was picking my way among fossilized chunks of the earth’s own shit – that was it! I was to die like this, butt-fucked by frigid Ceres. All along I’d had it wrong – there was a grandeur to the static homes and the caravans toppling over the cliff, whereas to be crushed beneath this anthropomorphic muck, where was the romance in that?

  I stopped for my hoosh of oat cake and tea beside a sinking pillbox, gingerly removing boots then socks as a polar explorer might – fearful lest a digit come away. THAT’S LIFE read the graffito above me. I hated the mud now – if it was shapeshifting its transitions were only from one prosaic thing to the next. I looked upon it and saw the hooked noses and chins of storybook witches poking round the archivolt of a chintzy grotto.

  I rebandaged my feet, sheathed them in their leather mantraps, packed the rucksack, shouldered it and went on. At a point where the cliff had slumped into two plateaux I saw a way to scramble up – and so did, desperate for reassurance that I was not the sole civilized man left alive on a planet ruled by apes. All I discovered were the wavering legions of wheat, the superstructures of copses cruising along the horizon, enigmatic barns – in short, a world now altogether alien to me, so I slid down once more and set off south along the beach, keeping close to the water’s edge, where one silky wave overlapped the next and the birds’ footprints could be read as hieroglyphs: ‘Bird foot, bird foot, bird foot, bird foot,’ they said.

  The afternoon grew duller yet clearer as all the golden sea fret was sucked up into a pewter sky. A line of turbines appeared offshore – very high, at least 400 feet. I supposed they must be part of a renewable energy programme, fostered by a civilization acutely conscious of the fragility of the global ecology, and sensitive to its legacy – the habitat of all those generations to come. The mud was just mud. I thought of nothing – and came upon a seal pup stranded above the tidal wrack, with its strips and stalks and frills of seaweed, the rubber goods of Nature.

  The pup’s dirty-white fur was crawling with sea lice, and flies were at its mouth and nostrils. As soon as it registered my presence the poor mite writhed with fear and entreaty, its breath coming in harsh little rasps. Help me, the pup implored, speaking through the brown eyes agonizingly bored in its doggy brow. Help me, please do something – anything!

  All the anger and the nihilism, all the alienation and disgust, all the friendships neglected and the lovers abandoned, all the children abused and neglected, all the trans-generational misery of a row that ha
d continued for decade upon decade, sustained by senseless bickering, all of the oily repulsion that kept me from them was crammed into the gap between my palms and the pup’s flanks. All I had to do was squat down and take this baby in my arms – for it was a baby now, a baby with chubby pink legs, tightly encircled by invisible threads. It had a rotting stub of umbilical cord pinched in a yellow plastic clip around which the flies swirled, while those snubby-putty features were almost ... my own.

  I knelt down and slowly – so as to not alarm the mite – examined it from its hind flippers to its earless head, but could discover no sign of injury or trauma. The seal pup continued to rasp and writhe, I felt the protein-rich milk of sentiment rising up my throat – what to do? If I tried to lift it would it bite me? Should I put it back in the sea, or carry it along the beach to a dispensary for sick animals where an intersex volunteer in a round-collared tunic would feed it formula from a bottle? Or, given it was a member of protected species, would disturbing it in any way be an offence? Would I find myself in the dock – not, I suspected, for the first time – of a magistrates’ court panelled with medium-density fibreboard, my head tilted back on my shoulders, searching for the squiggle of judgement in the flaking paint?

  Was there no one besides me to take on the responsibility of the seal pup? I looked out to sea where the turbines stood, complacent and at ease. I took four paces towards them, stopped and brought a handful of cold water to my hot salt brow. I straightened up and silently railed: all those technicians, engineers and workers – yet there was no help available for the seal pup. As I watched a tender cast off from one of the turbines and made course for the Humber mouth – they would be drinking Shits-on-the-Grass in the old town tonight.

  I turned back. The seal pup had a kitchen knife rammed to the hilt into what would have been the small of its back were it a human child. How could I have missed this when I examined the creature? And where was the murderer? Still, at least I’d found out what ailed it – the only mystery was why this parenthesis of blubber still encapsulated life at all. I cast around for a rock with which to smash in its brains and put it out of my misery – but there were only pebbles and clods; besides, I’d probably just fuck it up and leave the seal pup to writhe still more horribly. In another seven hours the tide would be in – that would decide the matter; Nature would forge her course, a mudslide, pushing before it the churned-up slurry of lived lives.