Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  ‘Medieval!’ the warder guffawed. ‘Don’t be soft, lad – ’ow could they last? No, these togs are theatrical clobber; soom joker put them on ’im back in the day – the fifties weren’t it?’

  ‘Aye,’ his companion concurred, ‘the fifties.’

  The bigger piggier warder gathered the cloth above either hip of his siren suit in his trotters and adopted an oratorical stance, turning so as show his DEMENTIA ADVISORY to me. It was clear, on this most obscurely ephemeral of days, that I was about to be privileged with an insight into deep and pellucid time.

  ‘Soom folk,’ the warder said, ‘claim ’e’s the old hermit that lived here in the fifteenth century, the wun mentioned in the chronicle of Mo. Personally, I don’t believe it. My granddad, well, before ’e lost ’is own bluddy marbles, ’e told me what the Struldbrug were like when ’e were a nipper. Back then this chap ’ere still ’ad a tooth in ’is head. Now, that wouldn’t put ’im much over the two-hundred mark.’

  The sea fret had finally and entirely dispersed. The Struldbrug’s horny toes scrabbled in the sand, the yellow flowering birefringence hung on the neurofibrillary tangle of the gorse, the berries of the sea buckthorn were as shiny-yellow as benzodiazepine capsules. The wallpaper of the sky wrapped around our little colloquy, and for a moment it fooled me with its cloudy furbelows into thinking the three-bladed buckthorns were painted along the skirting board of the nursery, then I regained my sense of scale and grasped that these were massive wind turbines, a long parenthetic curve of them, tending towards the point of Spurn Head. How could I have not noticed these things during my tramp along the coast? Or even heard about them before I left ... before I left ... wherever it was that I had left.

  ‘You’re coming on down to the memory clinic with uz and the Struldbrug now – that’s what yer doing,’ the dementia advisor said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall having posed.

  ‘Aye,’ his number two pitched in, ‘’course you canav a cuppa and sum cayk.’

  ‘Cayk! Cayk!’ the Struldbrug crowed.

  ‘What other facilities are there at the ... memory clinic?’ My voice swooped up into the interrogative, borne on thermals of hot, moist distress.

  ‘There’re digital enhancement programmes and neuralactivated webcam systems—’

  I whimpered, and the senior advisor silenced his subordinate with a glare, then reassured me, ‘Aye, and there’s uz, uz dementia advisors to help you learn it all, after all, it can be a lot to take on board.’

  We were within a few hundred paces of the clinic now, and it seemed to me that I must be a merman, for there were daggers thrust into the soles of my newborn feet, the attendants held me under either arm and I’d all but surrendered the power of speech when, seeing that the Struldbrug had lurched on ahead, I broke away and ran after him.

  The ancient clattered along a walkway between thick gorse, and although I soon lost him I also lost my pursuers. I could hear them wandering around in the crannies between the bushes – one of them must have picked up a stick, because there was swishing, smiting and cracking as he cried, ‘Cummon ahtuv it you daft booger!’ and ‘No cake fer you if you don’t cum soon!’ But they soon tired of looking for us, and one of the dementia advisors called to the other, ‘I’m fed oop. He’ll cum back when ’e’s ’ungree.’

  I was left alone in the desiccated undergrowth and crawled out from the sandy cave beneath a root system, then limped through this fine dust of ages towards a crest from where I could see the whole semicircular sweep of the beach. The Struldbrug was down there already, paddling in the shallows, his shaggy head dangling low. I wondered what he could be looking for so intently, and felt frustrated by the pointlessness of asking him.

  I took off the empty rucksack, unlaced the stabbing boots and cast them aside, to be followed by T-shirt, trousers, smalls unlaundered for the entire trip, all of which I left behind me on top of the gorse bushes, like the pathetic unpacking of a plane-crash victim, compelled by Death. All I hung on to was a notebook. I needn’t have felt frustrated, because as I walked towards the Struldbrug I grasped what it was that he sought, first peering into the ripples, then rearing back: the end of the peninsula. The shoreline curved so symmetrically that the exact point where the sea met the waters of the estuary was impossible to gauge.

  I shared his obsession, and so the two of us moved back and forth in the shallows, crossing and recrossing, intent on the elusive terminus. After some time we had achieved a consensus and stood confronting one another – I naked, he in his rags. I dared to look upon his medieval features. The next stop is Victoria, change here for District, Circle and Piccadilly lines and mainline rail services ... I opened the notebook and a scrap of black-and-white photograph fell on to the water between us and floated there. I stooped to peer at a scraggy beard, an attempt at a quiff, a row of optics. I looked up at the Struldbrug and thought I could see a resemblance, but when I glanced back at the scrap it had been spun away by the wavelets, leaving me behind, paddling in the Now.

  Afterword

  On 17 July 2008 I was making my children supper in the basement kitchen of our terraced house in Stockwell, South London, when I heard a commotion in the street outside and the demented shriek of emergency services sirens. When I opened the front door I found some of my neighbours already standing on the front steps of their houses, the street was full of police cars, and an ambulance was parked further up. Very quickly it became clear that a young man had been attacked and stabbed immediately outside the house by a group of youths; he had staggered up the road and collapsed about a hundred yards further on. Paramedics and a doctor who lived locally fought to save his life, but he died three hours later. He was eighteen years old, his name was Frederick Moody Boateng, and he was the twenty-first teenage fatality from a stabbing in London that year.

  Freddy’s family lived six doors up from us, and although I’d nodded to him in the street we’d never exchanged a word. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, shocked local people said the usual things about the senselessness of the attack. It was thought the assailants might also have been at a spontaneous water fight in Hyde Park that Freddy had attended that day, and that something had happened there that caused them to lay in wait for him. The suppressed premise, of course, was whether Freddy was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ boy.

  Soon enough another narrative emerged: Freddy had been in trouble before, the doorman in the nearby flats alleged that he had been there immediately before the knifing, and someone else said that rocks of crack cocaine had been found on him. The man in the local park who does youth football coaching told me that Freddy had asked to participate in his sessions, but that ‘He was mixed up in drugs, so I told him no. I won’t take anyone who can’t stay out of trouble.’

  Three young men stood trial for the killing in January 2009, all on charges of affray. It was understood that the police had been unable to get sufficient evidence for a murder charge, and besides the actual knifeman was said to have fled to Jamaica. In the event, none of the three accused received more than a three-year sentence. This barely made the news anyway – by then the focus of attention had long since moved on, and there were tens if not scores of stories with more obviously moralistic dramatic arcs to satisfy English connoisseurs of murder.

  But Freddy’s killing stayed with me by reason of proximity alone: this was not murder considered as one of the fine arts, but homicide as interior decoration. The crime scene tape decked the street for a week or more. For the first couple of days we had to be escorted to and from our house by police officers. Then there was the shrine created by Freddy’s friends at the end of the block, with its blooms dying in cellophane, his name outlined in tea lights, and a sad little assemblage of cards, water pistols and handwritten poems. The kids stood vigil for him, at first every night, then weekly, then monthly. There was the funeral, a memorial service – the family were active in a local church – and a march protesting against the epidemic of knife crime. All of these gatherings for
ced an awareness of community on the inhabitants of this very typical – and typically polyglot – inner London residential street.

  I felt an obscure shame about the murder – or, rather, about my detachment from the immediate environment, let alone the wider world. I wasn’t remotely interested in the morality tale used to impose ‘sense’ on this young man’s death; I thought instead of the city, its anonymity, its crisscross currents of physical mortality and psychic violence. Over the preceding few years I had a growing sense of the room where I typed being encircled by homicides: the woman whose smouldering corpse was found in the local park – the victim of an ‘honour’ killing; the young woman strangled in her workplace shower down the road in Vauxhall; the kid shot in his flat at Clapham North by gang members; the doorman of a club on the Wandsworth Road shot in a driveby; and, of course, the young Brazilian electrician shot by police seven times at point-blank range in the nearby tube station.

  All works of fiction represent terrains across which characters travel, and while the writer maps these he is down there on the ground, orienting by compass – whether moral or otherwise – and the familial resemblances of faces, landmarks and geographical features. Only towards the end of the journey, when he climbs the last hill, does he look back to survey the entire territory; only then does he understand the nature of the particular route undertaken.

  When I reached the end of this book – so contorted, wayward and melancholic – I looked back and saw my father-in-law’s death from cancer in November 2007, Freddy Moody’s murder in July 2008, and the death of J. G. Ballard in April of 2009. The mental pathologies that underlie the three memoirs – obsessive-compulsive disorder for ‘Very Little’, psychosis for ‘Walking to Hollywood’ and Alzheimer’s for ‘Spurn Head’ – are themselves displacements of a single phenomenon.

  W. W. S., London, 2009

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Will Self is the author of six short-story collections, a book of novellas, eight novels, and six collections of journalism. His short story collection Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys won the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1998, How the Dead Live was shortlisted for the Whitebread Novel of the Year 2002, and The Butt won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008. He lives in London.