Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

We were expected, and an amiable youth met us at the headmaster’s office then guided us around the flint-knapped quads. He was possessed of sufficient sangfroid not to react to our oddness as a couple, while I found myself unbearably affected by the large spot on his neck to which a concealer had been uselessly applied, and also by the Windsor knot of his school tie. By the time the lad had itemized the crests and memorials and was leading us back through swags of drizzle towards the chapel I was openly weeping.

‘Buck up!’ Sherman snapped.

Inside the chapel the organ pipes were wrapped in translucent plastic — it was more than a century since Canon Woodard’s death and still the biggering continued. I found his tomb and pressed my ear to his bronze breast, beside where his married hands rose, the keel of this capsized prayer boat. Sherman took a photo with his iPhone, and said, ‘Very good.’

Afterwards Baltie drove us into Brighton and dropped us on the edge of the Lanes. Sherman and I walked through the quaint zone to English’s, the fish restaurant. We ate on the second floor, sitting side by side with our backs to the window, and observing the sole other table of diners as if they were a repertory play — which in a way I suppose they were. Sherman didn’t help my digestion by whispering improvised dialogue for these two couples, most of which was obscene. He also professed himself to be delighted with our outing as he snidely dissected his own Dover sole.

I had my doubts — I was beginning to suspect that Sherman was toying with me, just as he toyed with the Californian ephebe who phoned during dinner, and whom Sherman had assured would be in receipt of a body form that was 633.333 recurring feet high within the month. But why not 6,333, or 63.3? ‘Believe it!’ He belched as the other diners looked at us for a change. ‘This mother is so big it’ll be able to lean its elbow on the roadway of the Golden Gate as if it were a bar .’

Baltie drove us back to London and when they dropped me off I said goodbye to Sherman casually, without making any arrangement for the future. But I felt certain we would meet again soon — a reckoning of some kind was long overdue.

Eleven days later, despite all my queer resistances and awkward premonitions, I left for Canada. I took no luggage with me, only a Barbour jacket *I had bought from their concession in Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods department store, the capacious pockets of which I intended to fill with a few essential things. But, despite this simple solution to my luggage phobia, I still lay awake night after night obsessing in nauseating detail how I would ‘pack’ the jacket.

It didn’t help that it was hot in the bed — an emperor-sized cherrywood lit bateau . None of our four children had ever quite managed to make it through the night in their own beds. No matter how many times I lifted them up, their sweaty thighs clamped about my hips, and laboured upstairs to put them down again, they still came creeping back and wormed their way in. Our eldest son was away at university; however, he not only walked but entrained in his sleep, and often in the small hours I would hear his key in the lock, followed by the heavy tramp of his feet, he would push the dog aside and insinuate his adult form so that the six of us lay tightly packed, like the victims of a civil disaster laid out on the varnished floorboards of a school gymnasium.

I visualized filling the pockets, then emptying them, filling them — then emptying them, over and over again. Should I put that in there, or this? I fretted until the predawn, when I heard the milkman wheedle open the gate and set down three bottles of half-fat, or was it a third of a bottle or thirty? In the half-light the methane off the entire family lay in a mustard haze atop the Flanders of the duvet, my sons’ bayonets digging into me from either side, my mind roved across the terrain of the past: The human race was doomed, the only link with survival passed through time .

My obsessions with bigness, with littleness, with all distortions in scale — surely this was only a spatial expression of my own arrested development? In my mid-twenties I had still been living in my mother’s flat and speaking a shared idiolect of mushy diminutives — ‘-kins’, ‘-ums’ and ‘noo-noo’ — with her that we referred to shamelessly as ‘baby talk’. Had her premature death not thrust me into the actual-sized world, we might’ve been there still, me with my collections of Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries, she with her hefty Henry James novels. While I remained in the spare bedroom — which, due to the botched conversion of the Victorian house, had the proportions of an upright cereal box — dreamily making little tableaux with trolls, pencil erasers and.002-scale plastic soldiers, she would sit in the front room, concentrating hard on the subtle velleities of James’s characters.

It was not to be. Instead, it was ‘Off with her head!’ as the cancer shot up through the meningeal fluids of her spine to her brain, and I was thrust through the little door and into the caucus race of adulthood, which has no precise start or finish, and although everyone is promised a prize, only a select few ever receive them.

A minute envelope materializes, the flap of which opens and closes while arrows arc up and down, conveying the strong impression to the user — and the suggestion of physiological addiction is highly appropriate — that vital communications are being transmitted through the ether. She sits there, radiation pinging off the back of her retinas, unable to tear her eyes from this very little thing — the envelope icon — which is an insult to the illustrious history of the epistolary — I mean to say: who’s this email from, Laclos?

Of course, of course, all new technologies cannibalize their predecessors: the horses are put down and the carriage rolls on complete with postilions and oil lamps. If futurological imaginings establish anything at all, it’s woe betide anyone who dares to conceive of the un become in too great a detail — and yet here we are, with the entire Library of Babel inscribed on a pin, and a trillion web pages expressed by the digits 1 and 0.

A few days later I set off, leaving wife, children and dog, all laid out on this weekend morning like idols in their great bed of wear. The last vision of home I took with me was of the fat woman who lives in the block of flats opposite, and whose bedroom window is exactly level with that of my writing room. As I slid notebook, passport, etc. into the pockets of my waxy jacket she swished back her curtains then proceeded to plump up her duvet, punching the white slug with her yellowy-black fists.

At the end of the road I paused to check I had turned off the cooker, shut the fridge and closed the front door. At my feet a concrete bollard lay toppled on the pavement: the severed penis of a god at once Brutalist and kaloi . I looked for Lysippus among the bus drivers smoking outside their garage… the lime trees in their raised beds were losing their foliage… and then, quite suddenly, I was at Paddington — no, Heathrow, and wandering shoeless and un belted through security.

If I was going to be infantilized, why couldn’t I be miniaturized? Miniaturized along with Jane Fonda in a mini-submarine, then injected into America — but no, there would be no fantastic voyage, only the atomizers of Arpège on the shelves of the Duty Free, why not 5mls or 500? , empty suitcases chained outside a luggage store, and beneath a TV monitor some frummers davening as they laid tefillin. There was the travelator, a grooved tongue glistening as if with saliva, ready to slurp me up into the belly of the beast.