by Will Self
No one could be more desolate than I, the not-not other faced by an increasing threat level: the beach widening and the cliffs rising, the misshapen mud lumps sucking in the shallows – then, far off, a small group of figures pinned in the mist. Long minutes passed but it was still not possible to judge their size – were they toys or Titans? They stood at the water’s edge, legs parted, arms held away from the body, swirling all around the nothing made visible. Five of them – so still, with what could be a boat or a canoe pulled up on the shingle at their feet. They inched up on me, so slow they had surrounded me before I ceased expecting lonely sea fishermen and acknowledged that these were wooden figures, none higher than my knee.
Some had arms missing – two round shields lay beside the rough-adzed boat. The figures were obviously of either ancient or aboriginal manufacture – and they possessed a humming resonance. Propped up there, so that the quartzite pebbles embedded in their pinheads were fixed upon where the horizon ought to be, the socket holes in their low pelvises yawned horribly.
It felt as if a small child had leapt upon my back. I turned and turned again, futile as a cat, to see what was there, then realized it was a parasitizing rucksack; then realized I was wreathed in lavatory chain. The madman sat a short way off, me yet not, his clothes in tatters, drool in his beard, his sack of manhood dusted with sand. He tugged the chain gently, and so I unwound myself and took off the rucksack. Together we went through it, taking out nylon bags packed with stuff: a mobile phone, a notebook, a radio the madman clicked, listened to for a few moments, then, after the flute and crackle of static, chucked to one side. He scattered the clothing and, crushing the oat cakes in his dirty hands, rubbed the crumbs into his bare chest. There was nothing in this portable world that he wanted, nothing until he discovered the small pine spars and curls in the oilskin bundle; these he urged me – none too gently – to insert: some into the figures’ pelvic sockets, others into their vacant arm holes. The last one I let fall to the beach – what was the point, now?
The madman dragged me to my feet, prodded me until I strapped the empty rucksack to my back. Its unzipped compartments gaped – smelly canvas mouths. He pushed me – so that I might lead him.
If I had had any notion of why it was that I was travelling this lowering and excremental shore, I would’ve had to say that the trip had gone badly – but I didn’t, so only went on until an industrial installation floated slowly by behind a ballast of dragons’ teeth. The haloed safety lights, the alien elbows of steel piping, the cyber-pregnancy of a gas tank – the resources needed to fabricate all these were nowhere to be found on this planetoid, which was a mere 200 yards in diameter. They must have been mined from asteroids, assembled in space – crazy ideas of deevolving gripped me, so painful were my feet. Why should I not remove my useless wooden arms from their sockets, slip into a blubbery body stocking and flip off into the comforting swell?
The beach narrowed once more, the cliffs soared, the sharp triangles of undercut hard standing appeared, silhouetted against the non-Euclidean sky. I came upon two mates, fishing and sharing a can of morning cider. They stood on a tarmac slab, their rods stuck in the muck. By reason of their summery drinking I knew it was getting hotter – we were companions in the sauna, and so I stopped to ask, the coffee sea sipping the soles of my boots, ‘Is there much more beach along this way?’
‘No,’ the bald one in the white T-shirt answered. ‘Yer awl ahtuv it now, lad. But if ewe go oop the cliff, like, u can walk along there.’
I thanked him and went on – but he was wrong: the cliff top had run for only fifty yards beneath my feet when it revealed itself to be nought but a headland, so I was exiled back down to what was no longer a beach at all, only a broad ledge of mud, with teeth cut out of it by longshore drift. Infective fluid surged into these inlets, swirling around the carcasses of rusted engines and jaundiced white goods.
Sand dunes sighed in from the west, their flanks creeping with marram grass, their hummocks and vales networked with paths of wooden slats wired apart. A sign directed me away from a PROTECTED SITE where terns were nesting. Their small white bodies blasted their black heads into grey space; then they fell to earth and resumed their positions, fluffuzzling up beside thistles and Flora margarine tubs. Could this go on indefinitely? Ignorant as I was, I doubted it – besides, who was the second who walked alongside me, skipping through the misty drapes, taunting the periphery of my vision? When I did the head-count there was only the one – still, there he was, sometimes dragging behind, other times scampering ahead along the muddy ledge. I didn’t trust him.
I came upon an entire forty-foot-long blockhouse that had been abandoned on the beach by the retreating land. Beyond this a phantasmagorical confusion of military concrete – beige discs, rectangles, triangles and trapezoids – was aping a promontory. What was all this – the shattered remains an accident-prone temple?
Clambering about on the heap were a couple of kids, a yapping terrier and a bored dad. I joined them on a ramp that tended at a 20-degree angle to the German Ocean.
‘D’you know where the sound mirror is?’ I asked without preamble or forethought.
‘You don’t want to go bothering with that,’ the dad said, his tone so sharp that at first I thought he was warning off the terrier, which was gnawing at a stalk of seaweed. But no: he meant me.
‘Oh, why’s that, then?’
‘It’s nowt but a stupid lump of concrete – and there’s enough of ’em here.’
‘I thought it was an early-warning device – for zeppelin raids during the First War. They say if you put your ear up against it you can hear ...’ I trailed off, because all of this had come to me unbidden, and I had no idea what could be heard in a sound mirror.
‘Aye, that’s right,’ the dad said snidely. ‘What would you hear – fook awl, there’s fook awl to hear, here, nowt except those fookin turbines out there.’ He jerked a thumb at the crescent of sea.
‘Turbines?’ I queried, but one of the kids had come up to show him something she’d found and he dismissed me with some cursory directions.
To make my way through the caravan park, then along the lane that skirted the bird reserve. There I found a noticeboard that had trapped a heterogeneous flock of seafowl behind its glass, and next to it a handmade way marker that pointed towards THE SOUND MIRROR, and added hopefully, CREAM TEAS.
Out in the wheat field the sound mirror bloomed. Softened by the sea fret it was movingly lovely. The circular depression in its seaward side suggested that somewhere nearby hovered the enormous and comforting breast that had moulded it. I laid my cheek where it once had been and suckled on the sounds: the gull squeak and peewit, the distant groan of heavy machinery, the cries of children, the groans of the dispossessed, and the entreaties of those about to die. Were these the warnings of the deadly paravane, at that very moment being towed through the choppy skies towards me, passing over the silt that was once Northorpe and Hoton? I didn’t know, and besides, even – even! – if I were able to recognize these harbingers I still would not have heeded them, for in the four minutes it took for the zeppelin to arrive, I would’ve forgotten all about it.
5
The Struldbrug
‘D’you mind my asking, but what’re you fishing for?’
‘Dunno, it’s my first time here.’
Here being the tidal flats of the Isle of the Dead, exposed now that filmic civilization is ebbing away, and washed up upon them this marriage on the half shell – a blue nylon one, six feet across, ribbed with fibreglass poles. When I strolled past its lip, there they were – the meaty beings secondarily reliant on the suck of the current, siphoning it in through a taut nylon line and a long bent rod. They were in their fifties, she seated on a folding chair with truncated legs; he on the sand, his ankles boyishly crossed, a cigarette cupped in the half shell of his hand.
‘I thought your gear looked new—’
‘No, not my first time ever – I fish up and down the coast the
whole time.’
Sturdy pride to buoy him up, the shell upended, a coracle now in which they paddle up and down the Holderness.
‘And what do you catch?’
‘This time of t’year, bass.’
Big-mouthed Billy-man, nailed to a plaque. Spasming at the waist, I walked away, my head hammering at the point of my shoulder, then, luminously ascended to a knoll from where I saw the reddest Nissan saloon parked in a sandy car park, beyond it a footprinted shore disappearing into the mist, and over to the right a line of telegraph poles and gorse bushes, the dorsal crest of a peninsula:
Spurn Head.
This much I did know: I had arrived at this wavering landmass, flipped this way and that by the sea for millennia, the tail of the East Riding lashing at Old Kilnsea, Ravenser and Ravenser Odd, so scattering their people on the face of the deep. Ravenser, or Ravensburg, or Ravenseret – it was once one of the wealthiest ports in the kingdom. It returned two members to parliament, held two markets a week and mounted an annual fair that lasted for over a month. ‘Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh!’ cries Northumberland in the opening scene of Act Two of Richard the Second; however, it’s Ravenspurgh that’s been had away, dissolved so completely that by the 1580s there was nothing left, and Shakespeare was name-checking an Atlantis. The last reference to the town was in Leland’s sixteenth-century Itinerary, and presumably by then, Richard Reedbarowe, the hermit of the chapel of Ravenserporne, was long gone.
As early as the 1350s, the chronicler of Meaux wrote, ‘When the inundations of the sea and of the Humber had destroyed the foundations of the chapel of Ravenserre Odd, built in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that the corpses and bones of the dead there buried horribly appeared, and the same inundations daily threatened the destruction of the said town, sacrilegious persons carried off and alienated certain ornaments of the said chapel, without our due consent, and disposed of them for their own pleasure—’
The rubber figurine, with the head of a pig, dressed in a blue Churchillian siren suit; the detachable penises and arms, carved from pinewood, of late Bronze Age votary objects; the neurofibrillary tangle and the amyloid visible as applegreen yellow birefringence; the UPVC windows and the water colours salvaged from the slidden studio at Skipsea; the madman holding a handful of individual UHT milk pots to his face – all mine, he mutters, all mine.
What brings you up here, to an area of land almost equal to that upon which London stands, but which has now been swept away?
Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Algy?
Eaten up by introspection, I frogmarched myself on along the spit; the last few incisive nibbles would soon have done with the amyloid, the core of the present would be consumed, and the simple past would be all that there is, or ever can be. A line of wooden piles stood – stand – in the surf, spiny with iron spikes upon which seaweed and shreds of fishing nets have caught. What was – is – this, some futile attempt to fix the shifting mass to the bedrock? Or were – are – they, the staves of musical notation, a very late Romanticism of surging chords, gut-wrenching melodies and lofty crescendos, the entire gleaming metropolis of sounds long since sunk, church bells withal, beneath the shallow German Ocean?
A Struldbrug came towards me, his tattered clothing – hose, doublet, shirt and jerkin – as wispy as the sea fret. He paused fifty paces away, panting, one arm against a pile for support – his bent back and the curving upright parenthesizing the waves – then came on again, the black spot above his left eyebrow a gun barrel levelled at me. My impulse was to run, however ... too late, he was upon me, his palsied claw rattling my shoulder, as he thrust his face into mine. Its features fell like wormy clods from the winding sheet of ancient skin.
From his clothing I judged him to be above 600 years old, but whether the mushy sounds that fell from his mouth were the authentic accents of the late medieval tongue, or only the consequence of toothlessness, I couldn’t say. There were a few words I could make out – playce, cum, stä – by which, combined with his erratic gestures, I understood that he wished me to accompany him to his abode. I was sorely tempted – my feet were killing me – but then, through the curtains of mist being swept up by unseen cables, there came hurrying a pair of attendants wearing blue siren suits.
They spotted me and the Struldbrug, adjusted their course and made straight for us, coming up puffing.
‘’E’s a sly wun, ’e is,’ the first attendant said, although whether to me or as a general observation was ambiguous. He had a piggy head, this fellow, and his wide nostrils quivered, sucking in everything.
‘C’mon ewe daft booger,’ his equally piggy colleague said. ‘Yul miss ewer soup, woncha.’
Taking the Struldbrug by either arm, they began to lead him away. Across their shoulders both attendants had the words DEMENTIA ADVISORY picked out in white letters. But the old man kept on babbling. ‘Playce! Cum! Stä!’ and trying to break away, so they stopped and the pig-headed figure in the Churchillian siren suit called back, ‘’E wants yet t’cum oop t’clinic. Willya, lad? It’ll mekk ’im ever so ’appy.’
On my walking tour – a journey I made without maps – I forgot who I was and where I was going. Nevertheless, I carried with me for the entire time a damp and writhing burden of guilt, together with the mental picture of a baby lying in the wrack at the high tide mark, with a kitchen knife planted between its shoulder blades. I acquired a handful of carved wooden penises and arms – late Bronze Age, I thought – that I made a gift of to some fishermen I met. And I bought an Agatha Christie thriller in a junk shop in Hornsea that I read a few pages of before discarding in a bin, beside the shower block in a caravan park.
The lead attendant explained everything as we padded along the beach, trying to maintain headway despite the Struldbrug, who kept veering off, his anachronistic clothes flapped mournfully in the breeze. On we went towards the lighthouse, which was climbing out of its humid raiment so that it stood, if not exactly proud, at least prominent against the fast-bluing sky.
‘There’s bin a memory clinic out on Spurn for a while now,’ the attendant said. ‘There was always a lot of older folk in Holderness anyway – retirees an’ that – but when the noombers wi’ Altzheimer’s began to get ... well, out of ‘and, like, the clinic were the logical place to put ’em, so the facility were expanded.’
Despite the Struldbrug’s wayward progress, we had gained the dunes and picked our way through the muffled defiles, our ankles scratched by the lyme grass and sea holly. There was homely flybuzz and butterflies swirling in the warming air, then, from top of an acclivity, we could see the whole hummocky panhandle.
‘It’s glacial, yer see,’ the second attendant was moved to explain. ‘The point, that is – it’s a glacial moraine, so it’s stable. It’s only the beach that moves around. Any road’ – he threw his arm wide to bracket the mismatched buildings, some prefabs, some concrete, some stone, that were huddled at the foot of the lighthouse – ‘there were all these here lying empty, so it were a logical idea to put the clinic here. Besides, it’s less institutional.’
‘Less instëtewshunal – that were it.’ His colleague snorted. ‘Patients can get aht, tek the air. It’s dead restful here – calm, like – and if they aren’t too distressed they can have the run of the place. Sort of folk who cwm aht to Spurn, well, they’re nature lovers, twitchers – oonderstandin’ when it cums dahn t’it.’
‘They’ve gotta be!’ the other fellow laughed bitterly. ‘Chances are there’s wunnov their own here, or they’re headed this way themselves. How many is it now with t’dementia, over two million – and rising all the time.’
‘Rising all the time,’ said the first, kicking out at a lump of oily driftwood with his boot. The Struldbrug groaned upon impact, and I wondered if over the centuries he had come to identify somatically with things older than humans, wind and wave weathered trees – perhaps Spurn Head itself.
‘What,’ I asked, ‘happen
s if the patients do get too distressed?’
The first looked at me curiously and a little contemptuously; at times the fletch of a man’s cartilaginous ear is too much to take, along with the toothbrush bristles in the corner of his jaw, and the slow-roasting shoulders bundled in blue cloth. ‘Do-too, do-too, do-too-too,’ he prated, incorporating my syllables into a parody of just such distress; then, seeing I wasn’t going to rise to it, or laugh, he went on: ‘Bull Sands Fort, out there in the Umber. Filthy big place bang on a sandbank, it were built in the First War – eyronickle, really, weren’t ready ‘til nineteen-nineteen when the show was over.
‘Any road, if any of oor lot get too tricky, like, it’s off to Bull Sands wi’ ’em. I’ve not been out meself, but they say’ – he shuddered – ‘it ain’t pretty – ain’t pretty at all.’
‘And the Struldbrug?’ I felt no compunction talking of the aged one as if he weren’t right by us, because in a way he wasn’t, riding his tempest of time with his ragged wings of linen and leather; what could he grasp of mayflies such as us and our dandelion clock concerns?
‘’Im?’ The lipless mouth widened revealing peg teeth. ‘’E’s no trubble – YER NO TRUBBLE, ARE YER?’ he bellowed at the hapless Struldbrug, who hung so slack now I was reminded of a cadaver strung upon wires. ‘No,’ the piggy warder said, resuming at a more reasonable level, ‘over my dead body duzz ’e go aht t’Bull Sands—’ Then he stopped short, shivering at the absurdity of what he’d just said. ‘Whatever. Anyway, he’s a mascot ’e is – bin ’ere before the clinic, before the new lighthouse – before the old wun inall. ‘E was probably ’ere when the light were joost an iron basket fulla burning faggots lifted by a lever.’
‘How old d’you think he is?’ I ventured. ‘His clothes look medieval.’
