Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

So I took his flaw with me on my holiday, together with the five empty Ribena cartons that clustered in the rain hood of a Maclaren buggy. Further along the carriage one of the wooden idols cracked its mouth and said, ‘I’m a systems analyst.’ While I thought, aren’t we all?

At Seamer I left the train, laced my boots, then went away through a metal gate to piss among nettles and brambles, their stems and thorns trussed with flung silage. Not good, this modern Millais, the white rim of a discarded paper cup beaded with urine taking the place of Ophelia’s wrist, breaking the surface of the pool. The next train was full of commuters heading south to Hull — they took me with them on their business trips, together with the boots, the guns, the girls and the child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig.

I detrained at Bempton. The landscape rolled modestly through the final waves of syncline and anticline before the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head. I had envisioned the train chugging around the crescent bay of Filey, holidaymakers saluting it with uplifted spades, a portly McGill man in a onepiece striped bathing costume leaping, crab nipping his big toe. Instead, there was only this: thick white cumuli tumbling down on the spectral willows, a monotonous breeze, and pebble-dashed bungalows, each neat front garden equipped with a paddling pool and a trampoline. I edged past, stopping every hundred yards or so to see if, by some minor adjustment, I could make my boots more comfortable.

Most of the trampolines had security netting both at the sides and overhead. I was still perplexed; surely the parents were being irresponsible, there had been over 4,000 disappearances this year already. One moment the child happily bouncing, the next raised up not in Rapture but abject terror. Up and up they flew, human balloons trailing thin screams. They never came down again. Inevitably there were many occasions when a sibling or playmate grabbed hold of those about to be disappeared by their trainers, only to let go when too far up. One little girl who had survived the fall was in the hospital at York. Interviewed by detectives, she said she saw nothing, knew nothing and felt nothing but pain. Still the children went on trampolining.

The straight way between two nondescript Yorkshire villages, drivers’ mouths wobbling as they swerved to avoid me; a group of sinisterly black toadstools in the grooves of a felled ash; the elongated barrow of an overgrown old railway embankment; the beige earth littered with plough-sharehalved flints; Seaways Farm, Home of Agricycle, WARNING: GUARD DOGS, WARNING C.C.T.V. installed on these premises. Then Flamborough village clustered around two fish and chip shops, its peripheral brick semis tucked like Monopoly properties in the corner of raggedy fields. The old octagonal lighthouse tipped above the horizon, quaint as a doge’s hat; next golfers grazing on their fairways, after that the new lighthouse and after this the cold and salty shock of the whiteflecked waves retreating towards a hazy horizon guarded by — Oh! How could I have forgotten them?

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of girls in boots with guns, quartzite eyes, a detachable wooden penis, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig — and these: beyond the whitewashed Coastguard station, and the steely latticing of a pair of radio masts, came marching the tripods with their three-bladed heads. I was shocked by their size — at least 500 feet high, the ones closest to Flamborough Head stood wave-waisted, entire, while those further out each had a bobbing flotilla of barges and service vessels. Further still, where the vast parenthesis tended to the south, the turbines were still being erected; the floating cranes’ platforms were measurable by acreage, their davits implausible — their being of human manufacture, that is.

Cheery walkers — ‘Hello, matey’ — passed me by as I scooted over the headland, my eyes not on grassy quiff but the great bracket of the turbines wavering away in the sea haze. At the cliff edge, I stopped, got out my stove and made tea. Sipping and smoking, I checked the three, shiny-new maps I’d brought, counting the kilometre squares to Bridlington, then Bramston, then on to Skipsea, where I planned staying the night. While I stared into the map’s pale clarity of line and colour factoring all dimensions into two, everything appeared intelligible; yet if I peered over my paper lap, down to the shattered chalk at the cliff base, it looked uncannily like broken-up blocks of old metal type. This place, far from legitimizing my amnesia, might prove a fatal shore for my comprehension. I packed up and pressed on, leaving the maps lying on the fan of grass where I’d been sitting.

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw — not girls in boots with guns, but Socrates’ cashiered madman, who had to be yanked along behind me, drool on his chin, roused only by the surreal lubrications I whispered in his ugly ear. Then there was the rubber figurine — at most two or three inches high — sporting a navy blue siren suit buttoned tightly to the neck and with the head of a pig. However, I forgot the maps and by the time I noticed I’d walked on a couple of miles along the declining cliffs — drawing level with Sewerby Hall, a stately enough pile, although now surrounded by the pavilions and pennants of a caravanning jamboree — and it was pointless going back. My way was physically straightforward and temporally warped; no mapping could explain the grinding away to silt and sand of all those generations who had toiled in the lost fields and beaten back the vanished hedgerows.

My breath in my ears, the rhythm of the waves, the steady tramp of my molars on latex impregnated with nicotine. I still smoked, a bit, but this gum was the scrag-end of my addiction. I had sucked in clouds of self-absorption for decades, shaped then moulded them with tooth, tongue and lip, until finally they were compacted into this dense yet mutable wad.

The cliff face grew fuller and was grassed over. I was in a municipal park where serious pilots had ambitions completely out of scale with their model planes; would-be paragliders hopped about, adipose as bumblebees, their black nylon suits striped with logos, their empty wing cases sagging on their backs. One had managed to get his glider aloft, and it filled out, then curled into a 25-foot parenthesis; he tugged on the guidelines and made local leaps, but I doubted he’d ever get aloft — his chute bracketed him with the land.

The path became lined with benches towards which I felt great compassion. I knew the Yorkshire folk took their passing over seriously and carted their senescent ones here, to the east, where they drowsed out the balance of their lives; becoming stiffer, squatter, more wooden in the sun porches of residential care homes, days and nights speeding across their faces, until, at the moment of expiration, they metamorphosed into these noble sit-upons, at the ends of which their descendants could prop floral offerings.

I’d assumed from the gull cries of the children skating across the slick beach that the town was crowded — then suddenly I was in among the smoked-glass barns full of slot machines and the bits of Victorian terrace, and there was hardly anyone about. Along the front there was a handful of family groups, most consisting of elderly parents eating donuts and a grown-up Down’s child with a toffee apple. Lumpy teens jostled in the finely drawn shadows, their cheeks livid with candyfloss. The atmosphere was so sugary the air was granulated, then, at the funfair, the Jungle Ride’s dugout canoes were all screamingly empty as they were winched on their cataract over the beach.