Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘Things have changed,’ I said to the water colourist, while slowly easing myself back along the wall to the doorway. ‘You must get a grip on yourself.’ I gripped the exposed brickwork of the lintel, vibrantly aware that if it were to fall nothing could be more ridiculous than my holding on to it.

‘These things are everywhere,’ he wailed. ‘There’s hundreds of ’em up on the North York moors already — and for why? What do I care about the fucking Bangladeshis? I just wanted somewhere quiet to paint! I tellya, man, this is the beginning of the end — it’s not just Skipsea that’s gonna be washed away, they’ll put these things right along the east coast, then you fancy pants down in London’ll know all about it, you’ll wake up drowned in your fucking beds!’

I’d made it through the doorway and was levering myself backwards across the parlour. I stood and dusted the plaster and earth from my trousers. ‘Be a man,’ I said caustically. ‘You quote the Bible, eh? Well, what good is religion if it falls apart in a calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to people. Did you think God was going to factor Skipsea out of the equation — he’s not a fucking actuary, or a loss adjuster for that matter!’

Maybe I was a little harsh, but I wanted to jerk him out of his self-pity. I meant it as a parting shot, yet lingered expecting an angry retort. He only sat for a while in blank silence, then asked, ‘What’s that flicker in the sky?’ Moving back to the doorway at first I saw nothing, then around the head of the turbine straight ahead of us there gathered a ghostly luminescence, arteries of galvanic lightning that intensified, white-bright as a military flare, and sent beams skipping across the wave peaks towards us.

I drew back, half blinded, then the water colourist cried out again and I returned: the entire file of turbines, as far in either direction as I could see, was being lit up. A pulse of brilliance streaked from one to the next along the Holderness coastline. ‘We’re in the midst of it,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Quiet as it is, this is the gathering storm.’ And I turned on my hurting heels, exited the sagging bungalow and made my way back along the alley to the single-track road. If I turned left I would reach the village in half an hour; if I turned right I would come soon enough to the bitten-off edge of tarmac, and beyond that a traveller needs must skip from wave crest to crest, if he wanted to reach the place where Withow once was.

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of not altogether caring; a rubber figurine only two or three inches high and clad in a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig. I had a 1.5 litre bottle that I filled from a tap whenever I had the opportunity, and three water colours — sea scenes, amateurish to begin with and now badly muddied, of no real merit, certainly, but a convenient size to tuck under one arm.

As I gained the road I thought I heard a low rumble, a fusilade of falling pebbles and a high, wild cry. These sounds were open to more than one interpretation — I chose the most obvious, and so pressed on, intent on the late television news, a mug of tea and a packet of shortbread.

Fruit pudding, white pudding, black pudding, bacon, sausage, two fried eggs, three rounds of toast, a grilled tomato, mushrooms and beans — all of it washed down with orange juice and a cafetière of coffee. During the night I had forgotten about all this chomping, had dreamt of butterfly girls sipping viridian nectar, and android men who only needed the monthly replacement of one rusty fuel cell with another shiny one. I had forgotten also Pauline, who stood over me freshly scrubbed, slim and shiny as a PVC drainpipe in her tightly tied plastic apron, urging me to eat more while she told me about her childhood in Driffield, and how having grown up on the coast she never found its steady disappearance that peculiar.

‘Fair enough,’ she said, placing her fists where her hips ought to have been. ‘When they put the Millennium Stone in at Barmston, and I saw a couple of year later how much closer the cliff had got, well… made me think a little.’

So I left her in her well-equipped kitchen, in its gravelled courtyard, which lay within the larger enclosure of Skipsea itself, with its painted paling fences, pink hollyhocks and silver-metallic Nissan hatchbacks circled in the cul-de-sacs. The means of mobility employed as a defence — could there be any better bulwark against what was going under a mile to the east?

I hurriedly bought an apple and some cheese at the village store and set off, desperate to return to the coast. I had not time for rape fields or poplar rows — besides, field margins were overgrown, convolvulus snaked across the lanes, a sewer stank, and pigeons gorged themselves on ripening wheat. The countryside seemed proud purely on the basis that it was, rather than was not, and taking a path running alongside a grassy knoll I looked at the caravans thereon, each complacently yoked to the national grid. Yet what were they, that they should only be tacked on behind, the appendices of hearth and home?

The farmer’s wife had been up at six to stuff me; now I paid her back with my most liquid currency: amnesia. Why was I, I mused, so flatulent? Why was my belly so uncomfortably swollen? I fixated on the exposed coils of an electricity substation humming in nettles, and so was quite unprepared for the moto enclosure that lay beyond this.

The big old boar lay half inside a corrugated-iron humpy; the sow wallowed in a muddy slough. She was suckling a pair of mopeds, who, rears wriggling, gored her with their greed.

‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd?’ she lisped as I strode past, and, pausing long enough to confront her bristly baby face, I replied, ‘Yes, I mean to get as far as…’, then faltered, because of course I couldn’t remember where it was I was going, so had to get my notebook out and check, all the while cursing myself for the ridiculousness of engaging in conversation with a creature that couldn’t possibly understand.

‘Yes.’ I found the entry. ‘I’m going as far as Hollym today.’

The sow raised herself up on her elbow, fluttering her thick eyelashes, a coquettishness at odds with the pleated gash of her exposed genitals. ‘Thee-thyd,’ she mused. ‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd.’

The mopeds grunted and squealed.

‘Well,’ I snapped, ‘that’s quite enough of that!’

I put the notebook away and headed on, although as I continued along the path, kicking out distractedly at molehills, I could still hear her maddening singsong, ‘Thee-thyd, thee-thyd, thee-thyd…’ and the gobbling of her young.

At the seaside the mist was plumped up, a sweaty pillow on the wrinkled sheet of the waves. North along the bluff I could make out the leftovers of a hamlet; on the landward side of an alley there were wooden shacks and tiny bungalows, while to seaward only broken walls, a few fence posts, a hopeless ‘For Sale’ sign, and detritus strewn over the edge of the cliff. The tide was in, undercutting the bellying mudface that in other places had splurged down in a slow-motion convulsion. Observing the saturated postage stamps of useless water colours floating on the swell, the phrase ‘rotational slumping’ slid into my mind, and so I turned south under a Teflon sky.

I had cosseted the Granny Smith apple in my palm since Skipsea, and now bit into it, releasing a sour concomitant: a bad news thread that spooled in front of my eyes, Deposits of amyloid visible as apple-green yellow birefringence under polarized light. The amyloid forms plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that progress through the centres of the brain. Bite of apple, wet and sharp — bite of boots, the stupid costly bespoke things. Somewhere in the Midlands there was a last, a scale wooden model of my foot growing dusty on a shelf. I’d stretched plaster across the hard ridges of the metatarsals that morning. It didn’t matter — I knew the skin would break before the end of the walking tour and I, an immigrant merman who’d never seen my submarine homeland, would be condemned to walk on knives.