Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

‘Oh, aye,’ the man said. ‘What were it like?’

He had three gold front teeth, two incisors and a canine; also a heavy gold chain in the fold of his thick neck — these I registered, rather than his relaxed manner, so ran on nervously: ‘You see all those signs warning of unexploded ordinance all the time, but I never think anything of them — then I nearly trod on this bomb .’

‘Aye,’ he reiterated, ‘what were it like?’

‘Um… well,’ I flustered, ‘I dunno, about this long,’ I held out my hands to bracket an implausible catch, ‘and sorta bomb-shaped — with tailfins.’

‘Four of ’em, squared off?’

‘Y-yes, four fins, square ones.’

‘That’ll be a tank-buster, an A10. I’ve come out here after a high tide and seen thousands of ’em.’

‘There were at least a hundred of them back there!’ We were both taken aback by my vehemence. ‘Are they, y’know, live ?’

‘Soom are, uthers ’re joost dummies — practice bombs.’

The boy stayed a way off, took a rubber-handled hammer from his belt and swung it idly at a mud outcrop — in the seconds it took to connect I saw this as an orbit within an orbit, the boy as a sun, the father as a satellite, myself at the aphelion, the whole as an orrery designed to explain the emotional pull that children exert—

The hammer struck, cleanly splitting the mud to reveal its pebbly lode and we all staggered two steps sideways as the beach jerked beneath our feet. Over the fossicker’s left shoulder a section of the cliff face dematerialized into dirty fret that boiled towards the sea. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but the man — turning to look so that the gold chain was spat from his neck folds — said casually, ‘That were a big one.’

‘Was it a bomb?’ I gasped.

He laughed, ‘That? No, it were only an ordinary fall, haven’t you seen wun yet? ‘Ow long you bin walking?’

The shock of the cliff fall seemed to have jolted my memory and without needing to consult my notebook I was able to explain I’d come from Skipsea that day, and Bempton via Flamborough Head the one before. Thrilled by my own lucidity, I rambled on about the Holderness coast, its strangeness, and how there must be some odd connection between its progressive engulfment and the ignorance of the wider world.

The fossicker was also thrown into loquacity by the cliff fall and spoke of his fossil hunting, how the Yorkshire coast was perfect for this, exhibiting three successive strata — the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Cainozoic — exposed successively from Whitby in the north to the Humber estuary, and how he himself had found, ‘All sorts. I dug up a whole bloody bison in Tunstall mere last year and a fossilized tree the year before.’

He told me that he and his family lived in Goole, and I pictured them there at once: sitting in a conservatory tacked on to the back of a small terraced house beside the docks. The fossicker sat watching the racing on television, the fossilized bison serving him as an awkward sofa. The boy stood by a fulllength UPVC window lazily swinging his steel hammer until it hit the TV set, which neatly split, spilling its ancient microcircuitry of ammonites and trilobites. The father-god and the son-god looked on, one substance, at peace.

Before they walked on the fossicker urged me to visit the sound mirror at Kilnsea. ‘It’s right queer,’ he said. ‘Dirty great big concrete thing — but wunderfully smooth, y’know what it were for?’

I didn’t.

‘Zeppelins, they say if you put your ear to it you could hear a zeppelin four minutes before it reached the coast. Four minutes! What good were that?’

What good indeed. I was alone — the boy and his father were a fast-fading memory, then nothing but the sinusoids of their footprints in the sand, crossing and recrossing into the beige distance. All they had left me was this awful data: that the cliff could fall — and it could fall on me . How dense I must have been to have come this far, contemplating all the erosion that had gone before, yet never taking it personally.

The beach narrowed once more until it became a defile between the solidified brown tsunami to my right and the green waves to the left. Narrowed until I was picking my way among fossilized chunks of the earth’s own shit — that was it! I was to die like this, butt-fucked by frigid Ceres. All along I’d had it wrong — there was a grandeur to the static homes and the caravans toppling over the cliff, whereas to be crushed beneath this anthropomorphic muck , where was the romance in that?

I stopped for my hoosh of oat cake and tea beside a sinking pillbox, gingerly removing boots then socks as a polar explorer might — fearful lest a digit come away. THAT’S LIFE read the graffito above me. I hated the mud now — if it was shapeshifting its transitions were only from one prosaic thing to the next. I looked upon it and saw the hooked noses and chins of storybook witches poking round the archivolt of a chintzy grotto.

I rebandaged my feet, sheathed them in their leather mantraps, packed the rucksack, shouldered it and went on. At a point where the cliff had slumped into two plateaux I saw a way to scramble up — and so did, desperate for reassurance that I was not the sole civilized man left alive on a planet ruled by apes. All I discovered were the wavering legions of wheat, the superstructures of copses cruising along the horizon, enigmatic barns — in short, a world now altogether alien to me, so I slid down once more and set off south along the beach, keeping close to the water’s edge, where one silky wave overlapped the next and the birds’ footprints could be read as hieroglyphs: ‘Bird foot, bird foot, bird foot, bird foot,’ they said.

The afternoon grew duller yet clearer as all the golden sea fret was sucked up into a pewter sky. A line of turbines appeared offshore — very high, at least 400 feet. I supposed they must be part of a renewable energy programme, fostered by a civilization acutely conscious of the fragility of the global ecology, and sensitive to its legacy — the habitat of all those generations to come. The mud was just mud. I thought of nothing — and came upon a seal pup stranded above the tidal wrack, with its strips and stalks and frills of seaweed, the rubber goods of Nature.

The pup’s dirty-white fur was crawling with sea lice, and flies were at its mouth and nostrils. As soon as it registered my presence the poor mite writhed with fear and entreaty, its breath coming in harsh little rasps. Help me , the pup implored, speaking through the brown eyes agonizingly bored in its doggy brow. Help me, please do something — anything!

All the anger and the nihilism, all the alienation and disgust, all the friendships neglected and the lovers abandoned, all the children abused and neglected, all the trans-generational misery of a row that had continued for decade upon decade, sustained by senseless bickering, all of the oily repulsion that kept me from them was crammed into the gap between my palms and the pup’s flanks. All I had to do was squat down and take this baby in my arms — for it was a baby now, a baby with chubby pink legs, tightly encircled by invisible threads. It had a rotting stub of umbilical cord pinched in a yellow plastic clip around which the flies swirled, while those snubby-putty features were almost… my own.

I knelt down and slowly — so as to not alarm the mite — examined it from its hind flippers to its earless head, but could discover no sign of injury or trauma. The seal pup continued to rasp and writhe, I felt the protein-rich milk of sentiment rising up my throat — what to do? If I tried to lift it would it bite me? Should I put it back in the sea, or carry it along the beach to a dispensary for sick animals where an intersex volunteer in a round-collared tunic would feed it formula from a bottle? Or, given it was a member of protected species, would disturbing it in any way be an offence? Would I find myself in the dock — not, I suspected, for the first time — of a magistrates’ court panelled with medium-density fibreboard, my head tilted back on my shoulders, searching for the squiggle of judgement in the flaking paint?