Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

The big feet stamping in Bridlington harbour, had they been a summer madness of mine? No, they reassured me, this turbine was indeed human-shaped. ‘To be precise,’ the most academic-looking of the engineers said, ‘it is the body form of a famous British artist.’ He mentioned a name, but it meant nothing to me. ‘He is doing this kind of thing all over the places, I think — all these big statues, scaled up from a cast of his own body. It is very interesting I think that he is also, how you say… ein Zwerg? ’

‘A dwarf, I think.’ One of his colleagues offered.

‘A dwarf, exactly so.’

The German had bifocals, an upswept wispy moustache. He spoke with no malice, and I noticed then that his companions’ faces were in fact equally refined, altogether at variance with their rough hands and workmen’s clothing.

He continued, explaining that the famous artist was very driven, and that his specifications for the anthropoid turbine had to be met with great precision. ‘The oxidization, you are knowing this has to be all over the same, so…’ This was why it had to be beached at Bridlington: it was waiting to be rusty. ‘ Unt then, the fixing of the blades, two only, so they will… how you say? Anheln , yes, resemble, so they will resemble arms, this is so very difficult, while the costing, this is “phut!”’ He held up his hands, grabbing at bunches of cash. ‘I do not know why your government is paying for this — not now.’

I had left my rucksack at the bed and breakfast opposite the pub. When I’d arrived, Pauline, who was whippet-thin, had asked me a trifle shamefacedly to go round to the back of the substantial brick farmhouse, and I obliged, musing on how like genteel pimping keeping a B&B was: you give me £30, I let you sleep with my sheets.

The room was in an annexe. It was a new conversion, spic and span with recessed spotlights and varnished blond wood. A basket of potpourri sat on the lid of the cistern in the wet room. There could be no question of spending any time there other than to sleep, so after leaving the Board Inn I resisted the ebb back to the sea and dragged myself further inland, through the village, then across the fields to Skipsea Brough, a substantial Norman mott-and-bailey that stood, overgrown with gorse and brambles, in misty cow pasture. The light, which down on the beach had been fast fading, endured here, and I sat on top of the old cone for a while, puffing away, and hanging on for grim death while a glossy crew of rooks made misery in the trees.

Yet still the light quivered, and eventually I could no longer resist it and set off back to the cliff. By the time I got there night had fallen and I could hear the relentless pulsion of the longshore drift, the grumbling into nothing of the friable land. Out of the darkness an image came to me of the cascade arcade game I’d played as a child on Brighton’s West Pier, the heavy old pennies, with their tarnished heads of Georges, Edwards and even Victoria, all of them clunking down from one moving platform to the next.

My boots were pinching and I could feel blisters forming on my insteps — yet still I went on, intent on that shattered alley where I had heard something moving in the bisected bungalow. There it was, dirty poplin curtains whiting the sad little eyes of the windows in its porch. I forced the rotten front door and spilled into a mildewed parlour. The lino was scattered with fallen plaster and an open doorway opposite framed a dead mackerel sky above leaden waters; dominating this queer pictorial space — as if the subject of cosmic portraiture — loomed the head of a turbine.

I froze listening to my own wheezing, then heard the snaps and crackles of someone else’s bronchial misery. I moved forward and discovered him on the far side of the doorway, his back against the externalized wallpaper, his feet dangling in the void. Without looking at me he said abruptly, ‘Have you any water?’

I gave him my naive bottle and he took a slug, then, wiping his mouth, he said in a voice flattened by fear, ‘What does it mean? What do these things mean?’

Keeping my back against the wall I hunkered down, earthy granules rattling away over the flopping old lino. I knew the drop was only sixty feet or so, and that the soft mud slumped, rather than fell sheer, to the shingle — but no one wants to fall from half a house. Sensing me beside him, the man extended a nocturnal hand, which crawled on to my sleeve.

‘Why are these things permitted?’ he continued. ‘What’ve we done wrong? It was only a little place, somewhere to relax and do some painting. I come back from a walk this afternoon and it’d collapsed! Like I were being punished — all my work, down there’ — the hand leapt into the air — ‘trashed! What are these bloody things !’ The hand grabbed at the turbine head on the horizon.

‘What’re we?’ I answered, clearing my throat. I had an acute sense of this fellow, the water colourist, as pale, freckled, softfeatured, thirtyish, liberal and impotent. He put his arms around the dark hillock of his legs and pulled them close. I felt his pale eyes on me.

‘I went in t’village to have a pint,’ he said.

‘What, to the Board Inn?’ I replied, eager to show I had local knowledge, and so gain mastery.

‘No’ — he gestured — ‘along t’top to Skipsea Sands, there’s a leisure centre there that’s got a licence. There’s a bunch of us that drink there — we’ve all been under threat. I must’ve ‘ad a few — too many.’ Suddenly, he spasmed, then spat, ‘Fuck the fucking Micronesians! Fuck ’em!’ Then he shook his head and went on levelly, ‘I went out walking along t’roads — to clear me head, like; then, when I got back here it were like a fucking earthquake, everything trashed! The little studio we built only three year ago, we put in UPVC windows and all sorts. Gone! Swept out of existence, and all because of those little brown buggers!’

I felt the floor move beneath my backside, a slight undulation suggesting a reposing giant about to turn in its sleep. Yet I felt no especial fear — possibly I was partaking of the water colourist’s despair, and for him the worst had already happened, everything — teacups, forks, paints, brushes, unused prophylactics, towels, rubber bones — had slid away.

‘Surely,’ I said, adopting a conciliatory tone for a harsh message, ‘you can’t blame the turbines for this; this coastline has been eroding for centuries — millennia; you must’ve known this when you came here?’

‘’Course,’ he spat again, a feeble little flob. ‘But the erosion was steady enough, a few feet every year, it were predictable, like — we knew ’ow long we’d got. When they rebuilt the coastal defences up at Scarborough it got a bit worse — pushed the longshore drift down here, see — but when they began sinking the piles for those bloody monsters. I dunno, it must be ’cause they sorta funnel the current or summat. This stuff, it’s nowt but muck, really. It’s like playing a bloody hose on a bloody sandcastle. I’m a foolish fucking man!’ he cried. ‘Built my house upon the sand, and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the falling of it!’

I’d got his number by this time. For him the domestic tragedy of the earth’s overcooked fate was as nothing — it was only this: his own stupidly spilt milk that had driven him to the brink of his reason.

‘How long will it take me to walk along the beach to Hornsea?’ I asked matter-of-factly.

‘Beach!’ he guffawed bitterly. ‘There’s no beach at this time — can’t you hear the sea, man?’

Strange to relate, I hadn’t heard it — I’d entirely forgotten the rising tide that had hustled me up only a couple of hours earlier. Now canting forward, I could make out beyond the lip of lino the gargling of foam, and my ears filled with the rhythmic chuntering.