Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

On we went along Airport Road, then Silver Dart, before crossing beneath the 427 expressway. To begin with I waited for Reichman to come puffing up in his woefully constricting cummerbund, but soon enough I was struggling with the dumb bag, which lurched from one tiny wheel to the other, yanking my arm in its socket as if it were a drunkenly dependent toddler. I had to lift it over the cobbled ravelins under freeway bridges and hump it up grassy embankments. He was tirelessly grateful. ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, most kind,’ he kept saying as we rumbled between the down-at-heel warehouses and unbusinesslike premises that lined International Boulevard. When I looked back, the sun was setting behind the airport and the jets coming into land incandesced in its last gleaming.

We reached the Royal Woodbine golf course and I yanked the bag along aggregate paths to a culvert containing Mimico Creek, a rivulet of tea-coloured water that a hundred yards further on disappeared into darkness under Highway 27. ‘Surely,’ Reichman said, ‘you don’t mean to…’ But I did, and so manhandled the bag down to the flat bottom, then dragged it splashing through the shallows, while the observant corvid flapped blackly along behind me.

The Kufic script of aerosol graffiti rippled on the concrete walls; ducklings paddled serenely past. On the far side of Highway 401 I weight-lifted the bag up the embankment and clambered after it, to discover that, although we were now benighted, we were nonetheless entering a kind of Eden — vetch tangled with brambles, maple saplings and the occasional wild iris. We were both entranced: the mondial groan and turbofart of the Lester B. Pearson International Airport had been utterly abstracted by this profound localism. In place of multi-storey car parks there was only an ear of wild wheat bowed to listen to the breeze.

Despite the season and the hour we were both sweating now, and I envied Reichman, because he was able to remove his coat, hat and cummerbund, then, with his back obscuring my view, unzip his case and pack them away inside. I sat groggily on the ground. When Reichman straightened up, Sherman was lying there in the long grass, naked in the half-light save for a skullcap — a newborn, middle-aged savant, with his clever thumb in his intelligent mouth. Nothing is ever funny twice, but it was cheering to hear that immortal line once again: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’

But of course he wasn’t there — any more than my companion had disrobed outside on Shabbat; both visions were products of my fervid expectation, cooked up in waxed cotton. If I’d taken the Barbour off, I would have to have carried it over my shoulder like a child that had to be returned to its bed — and there was no bed to be found. Still, I went on half expecting Sherman, as all that long Saturday evening I continued hauling the frummer’s case through West Deane Park, Ravenscrest Park, Thomas Riley Park, until we eventually reached a jollily lit convenience store on Bloor Street, where I bought a bottle of Evian. He davened, I drank, then we went on again past apartment blocks and monstrous Tudorbethan houses further and further into the city.

Reichman may have been grateful to me for leading him through this suburban netherworld, but I was equally grateful to him. His sanctity enfolded me and I felt as hermetically sealed as a suitcase encased in polythene by one of those weird machines at the airport. I needed this: I needed my cheating heart to remain safely inside of me, foetally curled in my own dirty laundry. I had foolishly craved the freedom of travelling light, yet arrived in the New World more encumbered than ever. It was better to at least share the psychic burden, and so we went on until we reached the junction of Dundas and Spadina in Chinatown, where our ways naturally divided. Reichman got me to drag the bag the last few yards to where it could be temporarily entrusted to the doorman of an apartment block where some friends of his lived. Then, back out in the street, he turned to face me and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough. You’ve performed a great mitzvah — you will be blessed.’

He offered me his hand, but I had to restrain myself from grabbing his shirtfront and nestling into his beard.

‘You never told me your name,’ he said.

‘No,’ I answered. ‘I never did. But listen, leave me alone now like a good chap, will you. I’m footsore and sad, and I want…’ I nodded to the restaurant beside us, its window hung with orange-glazed ducks, ‘… to eat some pork.’

*I’d never owned one of these waxed cotton jackets before — they were standard-issue country kit for the scions of the British upper and upper-middle classes and as such an anathema; but I needed a garment versatile enough to cope with a 30-degree temperature range and all kinds of precipitation. After the success of Stephen Frears’s The Queen (2006), in which Helen Mirren, looking frumpily monarchical, sported a Barbour while staring balefully at Scots glens cluttered with antlers, Americans couldn’t get enough of them and Stateside sales increased by 400 per cent. 40 per cent would’ve been too much — and yet, curiously, 4,000 per cent still credible — these were after all boom years .

*Which is Vesper Enfärhschein’s edition of fifty copies of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Settlement’, each a 45-page book, with 22 lines of type per page, each book measuring.45 of a millimetre square, leather bound, gilt-tooled and slip-covered.

Tony Blair stood, his Church’s shoes squishing into the Albertan muskeg, all his vaulting ambitions reduced to this halting lecture tour, all the breadth of his vision focused now on the 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen — but why not 17,000,000,000,000, or 170,000,000,000? — that constitute the world’s largest oil deposit, the Athabasca Tar Sands. Meanwhile I rode up to the twenty-second floor of the Westin Harbour Castle Hotel — but why not the 220th, or a queered mezzanine between the second and third storeys? — already straitjacketed by Canadian politeness.

Inside the room there were the little comforts, the scaled-down soaps, the cotton buds and the sewing set borrowed from the Borrowers. On the back of the bathroom door hung a terrytowelling robe with a monogram that implied the hotel and I were one. Outside a window that had been shut for thirty-three years genotypic skyscrapers stood about the lake front, awaiting the call to stand in as parts of New York or Chicago.

By way of unpacking I took off the loathsome Barbour; then I rode the elevator up to the penthouse suite, where I registered for the book festival and received my folder full of never-to-be-read info-sheets. The roomesque space was dominated by paper doilies, muffins and a tub of vicious poinsettia; in the corner a tablet computer linked to a desktop computer sitting on a workstation. ‘The LongPen,’ a functionary in a knee-length cardigan dripped (Canadian gushing). ‘You’ve heard about it? Peggy Atwood’s invention so that authors can sign their books long distance.’

‘…’

‘We’re very excited to have it here — Peggy herself will be doing some signing during the festival.’

I was excited as well — sexually excited. I felt my penis sleepily unfurl in its 92 per cent cotton, 8 per cent Lycra burrow. I hadn’t had any erotic thoughts in a while — or, rather, I had repressed them savagely, since the adrenalized counting of licks, tweaks and caresses was a torment, let alone the division of caresses by licks, or the multiplication of tweaks by… grunts. But the LongPen could well be the solution, interposing thousands of miles between the infinitesimal motions of a single fingertip and the 8,000 nerve endings packed into a few thousandths of an inch of tissue. Although why not…?