by Will Self
4
The Sound Mirror
‘Good evening.’
‘Evening.’
‘D’you mind my asking, what’s the name of the nearest village?’
‘Village?’
He was incredulous – although there were credulous twins in the mirrored lenses of his goggle sunglasses. His hair was bleached at the ends, his wife’s was dark at the roots – she hung back a few yards, troubled by a couple of small sons in tracksuits who butted at her belly and thighs. It struck me that he might think I meant Ringborough, Monkwike or Sand-le-Mere, hamlets long since ground down to silt, and that if he pointed the way towards the shoals to which these place names once applied, I’d strip off and start wading out.
‘Well ... place, then.’
‘Tunstall d’you mean?’
Over his shoulder I could see a battle group of earth movers standing on the brow of a low hill that they appeared to have carved from the cliff. What was this, a projecting horn of the Withernsea sea defences? The tracks of the earth movers zippered across the beach’s cloth of gold – in the evening sunlight all shadows were needlessly prolonged.
‘Um, yeah – but how far is Withernsea?’
‘In a car five minutes, but ahv no ahdëah on foot.’
This was my re-entry to the cities of the plain – I felt it went well, my simplicity provocative of his candour. A mile or so on I took to the low bluffs, then, soon enough, Withernsea lighthouse rose up judiciously from a huddle of houses inland. Next came the sea defences, a steel-and-concrete rampart stretching for hundreds of yards, grossly out of scale with the low-rise blocks of flats and poky houses it had been thrown up to protect.
My feet were incandescent, and with each forward pace I abandoned another husk of myself – the burnt-out shell of a man I had once been, which upon falling to the pathway fluttered into ash. A pair of boys – perhaps eleven-years-old and starveling thin – rose from a bench and flapped after me. The castellated gateway of the long vanished pier ushered in the tired waves. ‘Oi, mister!’ one of the boys cried. ‘Your laces’re undone.’ I ignored the scallywag, then: ‘Oi, mister, there’s sum wooden cocks fallen ahtuv yer rucksack – could be Iron Age, more likely late Bronze Age.’
I stopped, and together with the obliging lads gathered up the curls of petrified wood, which had a smoky patina. I’d no idea where they had come from, or why they had been lodged in the webbing pocket of my rucksack – looking down into the palm of my hand, where one lay, old and enigmatic, it occurred to me that this was a prompt for a tragic history, that inscribed by the cracks in the pine were the strophe and antistrophe of my own past. I explained this to the boys, then together we chanted: ‘On my holiday I took with me a dying seal pup, a rusted flight of metal stairs leading to a beach, a rubber figurine – such as child might play with – wearing a blue siren suit and with a pig’s head –’, but that was all I could remember and when I looked up from the parenthetic penis the boys had gone.
I crept into the town, passing 7’s Smiles – an amusement parlour, Trixter’s Joke Shop & Fancy Dress and a bowling alley. Shop fronts were hiding under the skirts of the older Victorian buildings – it all looked permanent enough, yet I knew Withernsea had waltzed backwards from the waves, that the esplanade had once been the high street, that the current high street had once been a back alley. An enormous plaice was bracketed by seaweed on the gable end of a building, beside the chip shop there was a Chinese, and beside the Chinese the Bengal Lancer was picketed. A square-headed Bengali put me in the window and I looked around appreciatively at the red cloths strewn with white and yellow rice. He brought me a menu and I began to ask him, ‘Why relocate from one flood zone—’ Then was interrupted by the table of teenagers on the far side of the restaurant: ‘If you wanna real laff watch Jackass.’
‘Ooh, no, Ah don’t think that’s foony.’
I found a paperback in my rucksack and began to read: What rotten luck there was in the world! A swirl of mist on a fine evening, a false step – and life came to an end. Two middle-aged men were seated beside me in the window and they pawed at their menus with callused hands. The pallor of approaching death couldn’t disguise the deep tan of the skin. Outside in the gloaming three large combine harvesters charged past scattering clods and chaff.
‘Ahl av that wun lahk the boxer,’ said the younger of the men.
‘Boxer?’ his companion replied – he was seated so close to me I could have put an arm around the nylon shoulders of his windcheater, and in a way it seemed rude not to.
Bobby shuddered and brought his eyes up again to the face. An attractive face, humorous, determined, resourceful—
‘Jalfrezi.’
‘Boxer?’
‘Aye, y’know – Joe Frazier.’
The eyes, he thought, were probably blue –
And just as he reached that point in his thoughts, the eyes suddenly opened.
‘Chicken jalfrezi.’
They were watchful and at the same time seemed to be asking a question.
Bobby got up quickly and came towards the man.
They were riggers working on a civil engineering contract of some kind. From what they said I gathered the work was dangerous, requiring them to ascend hundreds of feet in cradles. I couldn’t understand why, but the site they were working on was fundamentally unstable. I pictured an alien planet, its colloidal surface shifting and buckling in a nearinfinite series of peaks and troughs that seemed always on the verge of an apprehensible pattern – yet never quite there.
‘... an Audi TT’ – they were discussing their gaffer, a German – ‘that don’t even leave the garage.’
‘’E’s got three fookin’ cars.’
Before he got there the other spoke. His voice was not weak – it came out clear and resonant.
‘Least we’re not at the beck and bluddy call uv wassisface.’
‘Oo?’
‘That scoolptur chap oo’s got the turbine in at Bridlington – they say’ e’s a complete fookin’ nooter.’
‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ he said.
And then a queer little shudder passed over him, the eyelids dropped, the jaw fell ...
The man was dead.
A woman was charging across the road towards the Bengal Lancer. She had a fake tan the colour of the Holderness mud and her enormous breasts and belly – veiled by the diaphanous sea fret of a three-tiered white blouse – rotationally slumped. Her scary makeup recalled eyes painted on the prows of Athenian ships. I drew the waiter into me conspiratorially by his small arm. ‘For Chrissakes,’ I said as she tinkle-banged through the door. ‘Whatever you do, don’t feed her.’
Punctured, the waiter hissed embarrassment.
Then I was walking out of Withernsea, tending inland, the concrete stanchions of chain-link fences the only things I had ever known in the warm sodium-orange silence of suburban nightfall, the chocolate bar bought from the convenience store where I stopped to ask directions the only solid thing I had ever hungered for, the agony of my blistered feet and the nettle stings pricking my calves the only sensations I had ever felt, as the headlights of oncoming cars planted magenta blooms on the retinas of my dilated eyes.
Beyond the final caravan park the village of Hollym appeared as a black smudge of woodland on the night. Then I was on a long lane footing past a flint church. I sat down on the bench outside the Plough Inn and rolled a cigarette, and was joined by a second smoke-sucker who didn’t speak but paced up and down, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, while behind us the bar billiards rumbled and clacked.
‘Steve was a geography teacher in Stanford-le-Hope for thirty years, but once the kids were off to uni we began looking around. To begin with we ignored the ad – because of the new house, we didn’t fancy that.’
Another rumble of bar billiards – this time from below. The two of us stood looking at the two narrow single beds, the three white towels, the Country Crunch biscuits, the individual UHT milk cartons, the tea bags
and sugar in sachets. She wasn’t exactly friendly, yet competent in the domestic science of pimping.
‘Well,’ she said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall asking, ‘I think the farmers are philosophical about the loss of their land.’
What does she know, I thought. Here in Hollym she’s a good mile from the sea; even given the faster rate of erosion down drift from the Withernsea defences it’ll still be 400 years before the German Ocean marches into the Plough Inn, bellowing, ‘I don’t need a drink – I am the fucking drink!’
Her brown perm floated away along the corridor ... mouse droppings, rotting lino, an old knitting pattern used to plug a broken pane in the shed where Uncle Charlie did it. She had left me with careful instructions on how to unlock the two doors when I left in the morning, then relock them and post the keys back in. She had left me with an individual box of cornflakes and a small jug of milk.
The plastic sheet in the shower stall clung to me as the shower head became lachrymose over my raw feet. Shriven, I put myself into the right-hand bed and shoved a radio I’d found in my rucksack under the clean, thin pillow. There was a cup of tea I couldn’t for the life of me remember making cooling on the bedside table – next to it the unopened Country Crunch. In the night the Archbishop’s wife whispered through striped cotton, ‘I don’t know how he’s feeling, he’s not here.’
Having walked for four centuries I came to the cliff edge only to discover that it wasn’t there; instead a cartographer’s black ink line was ruled across the field strips. Distance was time, while beyond a screen of crack willows a small mere rippled in the morning sunlight. I struck out to the north-east, heading for the villages of Newsham and Sisterkirke. The going was soft between the tilled strips and soon enough my boots were balled in mud. Away to the north-west, above the unseen Wolds, a cloud host flew, wings outspread. There must have been hail as well as rain in the night because here and there the wheat was mashed to the ground in swirls of stalks; stalks that, when I stooped to examine an ear, I saw were rotten. White grubs wriggled obscenely from the spikelets.
The wind got up, and within sight of Newsham church spire I came upon a gaggle of peasants herding their livestock before them – a few white geese, but mostly motos, their thin withers bloody from the willow switches the peasant women wielded. The motos’ baby faces were contorted with the effort of trotting through the waterlogged fields.
‘’S’all gone,’ the lead moto lisped as it rushed past me, and when the peasants drew level they affirmed this simply by their own flight and the tawdry vessels of Christ’s feast they lugged with them: a tarnished brass ewer and bowl, two hefty leatherbound volumes – the Holy Bible and the parish records. Of their priest there was no sign.
I detained an old man by the sleeve of his smock. ‘’E stayed in the church last night,’ he told me while the others hurried by. ‘Praying, asking God to deliver the village from the sea.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Silly cunt. Come sunup the nave were down on the beach. All our owsez ’n’ all – but God’s got nowt t’do wi’ it.’
‘Really.’ I was keen to interrogate this advanced thinker further. ‘Then what do you imagine he feels about the loss of your village?’
‘I don’t know how he’s feeling,’ Jane Williams whispered, the motion of the news having rolled her back beneath me. ‘He’s not here.’
It was grey dawn and the stiff spear threw me to the partitioned bathroom, where I waited on cold lino until I was able to piss. Back in the winding sheet I lay listening to an owl impersonate a man impersonating the hooting of an owl. Then I rose again, and twitching back the curtains saw a misty back garden lined with trestle tables, each one stabbed by a collapsed sunshade.
I rose once more and returned to the bathroom. There was a small window in the wall above the sink and a man I’d never seen before was looking through it straight at me. He was gaunt and somehow shifty, with lines of incompetence around his eyes – not laughter. We stared at one another in silence for a few minutes, while I took in the saliva, dried white, at the corners of his saturnine mouth. The fellow seemed so confused and drowsy that I felt no fear or exposure. Nonetheless, I quit the bathroom and went into the corridor to have a word with him – but he must have fled at my approach.
Then crept back again, because when I regained the sink he was at the window once more. Tiring of his little game, I undid the catch at the side of the frame and closed the shutter, in the process exposing a curious recess in which three small shelves held individual bars of soap, a tooth mug and a box of pink tissues, its thin cardboard printed with a photograph of a pink rose. So, looking at these items, I shaved myself by touch alone.
After I’d eaten the cornflakes someone had thoughtfully provided, drunk a cup of Nescafé, then taken a miserable shit, I opened the little shutter in the bathroom to see if the man was still there. He was, but appeared fresher-faced, and with a fastscabbing nick in his Adam’s apple that suggested he’d recently shaved. It was the same as before: the two of us enmeshed in a doleful stare; then, unhesitatingly, he reached out his hand towards me, and I, not hesitating either, extended mine to him. On to my open palm rolled a curious little figurine – a child’s toy, presumably, although there was nothing playful about it. The blue Churchillian siren suit with a pig’s head rising from its high collar was redolent of unnatural experiments conducted in secret government laboratories. I had never seen the figurine before, yet sensed that it had talismanic properties, and was a gift the giving of which had to be respected.
The stranger and I nodded curtly to one another, then simultaneously stepped away from the window.
I found myself on the outskirts of a village that was shrouded in dense morning mist with no awareness of how I might have got there. I was dressed appropriately for a walking tour in green Gore-Tex trousers, thick socks, viciously uncomfortable leather boots, a blue wicking T-shirt and a black cagoule. It was chilly and although the trees and hedges had a midsummer density for a while I equivocated: was the cobweb stretched between the bars of a gate jewelled with frost or dew?
I couldn’t remember my name, where I had come from or where I was going. I didn’t know whether I was old or young. I unfastened my trousers and pulled them and my underpants down enough to expose a penis between blanched thighs – so discovered I was a man, and a white one. One memory I also retained: that both doors had to have been locked before I left wherever it was I’d been and the keys then posted back into the building. Had I done this?
A neoprene pouch sagged in the half-masted folds of my nether garments. I unzipped it, discovered a digital camera and prodded it on. Adjusting it so I could access the images already saved on its memory card, I flicked through them. My hunch had been correct: there were pictures of a lock with a hand inserting a key in it, then the same hand poked inside a letterbox. I compared the hand in the photo with the one on the end of my arm – they matched.
Replacing the camera and rearranging my clothing, I discovered a paper napkin on which was scrawled a crude map with arrows, approximate distances and a wavy line for the seaside. No other plan presented itself – I was an enigma to myself, swathed in the silence of this strange place; nevertheless, in choosing to follow the map forward, along the lane between the knapped-flint walls, I knew that I conformed to the paradigm for people like me – white men like me. At a crossroads a simple roundel annulled limits on speed but my pace remained constant as I moved into open country. Whoever had bequeathed me these feet had done me no favours, as with every step they cut into me like knives.
Peacocks roosted on the pantiled roof of a cottage – how did I know these terms? Away in the unvarying stubble a hare searched for a shadow to box, and the sodden umbels of the cow parsley were as still as any living thing could be. I reached a T-junction and obeying the napkin turned to the right. Now, in back of wide verges, bungalows lay behind privet hedges; beside a carport I glimpsed a trampoline festooned in old police crime scene tape. A blackbird fidgeted in a
hawthorn, a blackboard was scratch-marked ‘Clematis’, ‘Alpines’, ‘Laxton Fortunes’ – all items priced at 50p.
A stile hopped towards me, crept under me, and I was on a drainage ditch the banks of which were massed with marsh marigolds, yarrow, thistles and nettles – all their flowers monochrome in the mist, all their scent as fresh as air freshener. I went on and in due course a pillbox canted in a cleft came upon me; here the path terminated in a muddy chute that slid me the twenty feet down to the beach.
No sooner had my smouldering feet been stubbed out in the grubby sand than I felt at ease: extinguished. I set off towards the south, moving swiftly along the tide line, and soon became utterly absorbed by the way the wrack of seaweed and driftwood resolved into a jumble of letters, which then became legible as words: amygoid nucleus, sucli of cortex, senile and neuritic plaques, senile and braindruse.
The disc of the sun appeared high up in the eastern quadrant of the sky, a duct sucking in the sea fret – but, suck as it might, visibility remained only a few score yards, with the world remaining all that was at my hurting feet. Amnesia was a belief system – an ideology all its own. I believed, fervently, in my inability to recall anything of significance, and this functioned as a heuristic, allowing me to operate effectively in a world that to anyone armed with prior knowledge would be frighteningly incomprehensible.
