Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Instant paralysis should rightfully ensue, not this marvellous bit of choreography: the two of us leaping away from one another, so that upright we circle the pit, searching for secure purchase in the slag heap of plastic, then ‘Whack!’ as a steelcapped leather shoe lashes out, breaking my sternum so cleanly that a shard spears my superior vena cava. Despite the plume of blood jetting from my ruptured chest, I drop back on to one leg and whip my own foot round at shoulder height in an expert taekwondo that propels his humerus — like a battering ram — into his scapula, a blow so devastating that the tendons snap with the resonant ‘pings’ of piano wires breaking.

Still, as he closes in to deliver a chop certain to crush my trachea, I realize this can’t continue indefinitely; for a start, it’s getting boring, so I pull the automatic from the stunt double’s shoulder holster and wildly discharge three or four rounds. I know they’ll only be blanks — but I’ve remembered the fuel cells.

J. M. W. Turner and Vincent van Gogh aren’t names you see on movie credits that often — but you should. The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol caught by the lens at 24 frames per second owes a lot to their impressionism — red, orange, yellow deliquescing in an expanding volume of white phosphorescence analogous to the primed canvas: these painterly effects were well hung in the salon of the Atacama desert resort beneath a shower of tinkling glass and the hiss of the sprinklers.

Doubled over, the stunt double ducks beneath the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame — only the sleeveless anorak (or gilet) keeps his nerve, summoning a camera that comes nosing in further to capture Scooby and me, trapped in the pit, the Evian bottles melting all Dalí about us. Scooby, mute and suppliant, yet not reproachful: he trusted me, I had liberated him from the set of The Wolfman , we danced on blue screen and now it’s ended up like this! I cock the automatic and above the roar of the flames we hear the round slide into the breach. I lay the barrel along his foamy muzzle; he ducks his head acquiescing to the inevitable.

Which was never going to happen — for moments earlier I’d noticed a fuel cell still intact on the far side of the salon; when I expertly shot and hit it the ejaculation of flame that propelled us through the wall of the burning hotel, then through the wall of the 007 sound stage, was one of those… those sleights-of-mind without which not only action movies but the entire mystery of life itself would be unsustainable. As we wandered dazedly across Broccoli Road and turned into Bond Drive, I noticed first that Scooby was naked once more and I back in my kidult walking garb of shorts and T-shirt, then that we had returned to a simpler past. I looked back to see the sound stage peeled open, blackened and belching inky smoke — a tin can on a homeless person’s fire.

Karen caught up with us as we reached the security barriers; she was waving a clipboard. ‘I hope you enjoyed your visit,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ I replied laconically.

‘I’m sorry Dan wasn’t, um, chattier — but there’s only two more days’ shooting and he has a lot on his mind.’

‘Sure,’ I reiterated.

‘D’you mind signing this release form?’ She thrust the clipboard at me. ‘I’m afraid you can’t write anything about what you’ve seen without the producers’ approval.’

‘Sure.’ I whistled for Scooby, and when he came lolloping over I took his paw in mine, thrust it in the soft mud edging a puddle and then pressed it on to the form. Karen didn’t seem to mind — if she noticed at all.

We wandered off down the road, crossed a field and worked our way through Iver via drowsy paths and somnolent streets. As we were passing a bungalow with a sign outside advertising KOI FOR SALE, Scooby veered off. I like to think that he hung on to his liberty, but I doubt it: even in this age of unfettered personal freedom there are still the small-minded mobs of Transylvanian peasants who object to hell hounds on the loose.

As for me, what was I? A passer by Skoda showrooms whose middle-aged face bore nothing but the impress of a lifetime’s affluent typing. A contemplator of the way the blades of grass fringed the lettering of a discarded crisp packet, FLAME-GRILLED STEAK FLAVOUR. A stopper on footbridges across dual carriageways, taken by the way the railings formed a cage for a shabby pony cropping a balding pasture. And then transfixed by the lilyfringed banks of the Grand Union Canal, above which dragonflies hung in a pattern that held all beauty — and then abandoned in a lost landscape of pylons and alders beside the Colne; and then squatting beneath the concrete caissons of the M4 to leave a spiral offering close to where flies spiralled over a dead rabbit. And then slipping into Sipson, past the picture postcard of church, village green and Five Bells pub, soon to be buried beneath the global tarmacslide of another runway. And then following the distrail across a field as wide as the sky to where the Marriotts and Hiltons stood in line along the Peripheral Road.

The cab driver who took me the short distance from the Renaissance Hotel through the tunnel and into the terminal was palpably disturbed; his wide red neck radiated waves of psychosis through the glass partition. He twisted his hands on the steering wheel while muttering obscenities that, if I chose to hear them, had a disconcertingly gynaecological specificity. Pubic symphysis … External urinary meatus . . Cunt! He wouldn’t look me in the eye when I paid the fare.

And then I was aboard a taxiing Air France jet, grumbling past the old shell of a plane used for fire brigade practice, while the man in the seat beside me yattered on about the air traffic controllers who had been brought over to Pinewood to play the parts of the air traffic controllers in United 93 (2006). I thought of the air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies.

As we banked and turned to the north-west over the Thames Valley, I saw the film studios laid out far below. Had I been hoping for circling helicopters, the sparkle of emergency services’ lights, a tumescent smokestack and all the other set dressing of civil disaster? ‘Are you on your way to Los Angeles to do some filming, Pete?’ asked my neighbour, and while the clouds tore ragged chunks out of England I made it clear that such familiarity was less than welcome.

He wasn’t to be dissuaded, this plump, white haired, Rolex-wrist-watched, beige-linen-trousered, twenty-seven-years-in-senior-management-once-drunkenly-fucked-a-whore-on-the-Reeperbahn-then-went-on-Seroxat-while-he-waited-for-the-AIDS-test-result man. But when the seatbelt light was extinguished I forced him to withdraw the LCD screen from his armrest, manipulate it into his eye line and begin to watch a Harry Potter film, while I filled my mind with Balyk salmon cooked in crème fraiche with chives and watercress salad, the confit de canard enhanced in honey sauce accompanied by sautéed potatoes and French green beans.

Eleven hours later the pilot pointed out to us the nuages maritimes creeping across the darkling plain. The Sierra zigmauved along the horizon, Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust. Not long after that we touched down at LAX.

* Dinotopia (2002), a TV miniseries in which David Thewlis played the part of Cyrus Crabb, one of the people shipwrecked on an island where dinosaurs and humans have coevolved and founded a society somewhere between Periclean Athens and Disneyland. It need hardly be remarked here that this conceit is far more imaginative than anything conceived of by Ian Fleming, and that, while the screen adaptation involved a certain bowdlerization of the original illustrated books by James Gurney, I had no reason to feel any shame for having portrayed Crabb.