Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

Was there no one besides me to take on the responsibility of the seal pup? I looked out to sea where the turbines stood, complacent and at ease. I took four paces towards them, stopped and brought a handful of cold water to my hot salt brow. I straightened up and silently railed: all those technicians, engineers and workers — yet there was no help available for the seal pup. As I watched a tender cast off from one of the turbines and made course for the Humber mouth — they would be drinking Shits-on-the-Grass in the old town tonight.

I turned back. The seal pup had a kitchen knife rammed to the hilt into what would have been the small of its back were it a human child. How could I have missed this when I examined the creature? And where was the murderer? Still, at least I’d found out what ailed it — the only mystery was why this parenthesis of blubber still encapsulated life at all. I cast around for a rock with which to smash in its brains and put it out of my misery — but there were only pebbles and clods; besides, I’d probably just fuck it up and leave the seal pup to writhe still more horribly. In another seven hours the tide would be in — that would decide the matter; Nature would forge her course, a mudslide, pushing before it the churned-up slurry of lived lives.

‘Good evening.’

‘Evening.’

‘D’you mind my asking, what’s the name of the nearest village?’

‘Village?’

He was incredulous — although there were credulous twins in the mirrored lenses of his goggle sunglasses. His hair was bleached at the ends, his wife’s was dark at the roots — she hung back a few yards, troubled by a couple of small sons in tracksuits who butted at her belly and thighs. It struck me that he might think I meant Ringborough, Monkwike or Sand-le-Mere, hamlets long since ground down to silt, and that if he pointed the way towards the shoals to which these place names once applied, I’d strip off and start wading out.

‘Well… place, then.’

‘Tunstall d’you mean?’

Over his shoulder I could see a battle group of earth movers standing on the brow of a low hill that they appeared to have carved from the cliff. What was this, a projecting horn of the Withernsea sea defences? The tracks of the earth movers zippered across the beach’s cloth of gold — in the evening sunlight all shadows were needlessly prolonged.

‘Um, yeah — but how far is Withernsea?’

‘In a car five minutes, but ahv no ahdëah on foot.’

This was my re-entry to the cities of the plain — I felt it went well, my simplicity provocative of his candour. A mile or so on I took to the low bluffs, then, soon enough, Withernsea lighthouse rose up judiciously from a huddle of houses inland. Next came the sea defences, a steel-and-concrete rampart stretching for hundreds of yards, grossly out of scale with the low-rise blocks of flats and poky houses it had been thrown up to protect.

My feet were incandescent, and with each forward pace I abandoned another husk of myself — the burnt-out shell of a man I had once been, which upon falling to the pathway fluttered into ash. A pair of boys — perhaps eleven-years-old and starveling thin — rose from a bench and flapped after me. The castellated gateway of the long vanished pier ushered in the tired waves. ‘Oi, mister!’ one of the boys cried. ‘Your laces’re undone.’ I ignored the scallywag, then: ‘Oi, mister, there’s sum wooden cocks fallen ahtuv yer rucksack — could be Iron Age, more likely late Bronze Age.’

I stopped, and together with the obliging lads gathered up the curls of petrified wood, which had a smoky patina. I’d no idea where they had come from, or why they had been lodged in the webbing pocket of my rucksack — looking down into the palm of my hand, where one lay, old and enigmatic, it occurred to me that this was a prompt for a tragic history, that inscribed by the cracks in the pine were the strophe and antistrophe of my own past. I explained this to the boys, then together we chanted: ‘On my holiday I took with me a dying seal pup, a rusted flight of metal stairs leading to a beach, a rubber figurine — such as child might play with — wearing a blue siren suit and with a pig’s head —’, but that was all I could remember and when I looked up from the parenthetic penis the boys had gone.

I crept into the town, passing 7’s Smiles — an amusement parlour, Trixter’s Joke Shop & Fancy Dress and a bowling alley. Shop fronts were hiding under the skirts of the older Victorian buildings — it all looked permanent enough, yet I knew Withernsea had waltzed backwards from the waves, that the esplanade had once been the high street, that the current high street had once been a back alley. An enormous plaice was bracketed by seaweed on the gable end of a building, beside the chip shop there was a Chinese, and beside the Chinese the Bengal Lancer was picketed. A square-headed Bengali put me in the window and I looked around appreciatively at the red cloths strewn with white and yellow rice. He brought me a menu and I began to ask him, ‘Why relocate from one flood zone—’ Then was interrupted by the table of teenagers on the far side of the restaurant: ‘If you wanna real laff watch Jackass .’

‘Ooh, no, Ah don’t think that’s foony.’

I found a paperback in my rucksack and began to read: What rotten luck there was in the world! A swirl of mist on a fine evening, a false step — and life came to an end. Two middle-aged men were seated beside me in the window and they pawed at their menus with callused hands. The pallor of approaching death couldn’t disguise the deep tan of the skin. Outside in the gloaming three large combine harvesters charged past scattering clods and chaff.

‘Ahl av that wun lahk the boxer,’ said the younger of the men.

‘Boxer?’ his companion replied — he was seated so close to me I could have put an arm around the nylon shoulders of his windcheater, and in a way it seemed rude not to.

Bobby shuddered and brought his eyes up again to the face. An attractive face, humorous, determined, resourceful—

‘Jalfrezi.’

‘Boxer?’

‘Aye, y’know — Joe Frazier.’

The eyes, he thought, were probably blue –

And just as he reached that point in his thoughts, the eyes suddenly opened.

‘Chicken jalfrezi.’

They were watchful and at the same time seemed to be asking a question.

Bobby got up quickly and came towards the man.

They were riggers working on a civil engineering contract of some kind. From what they said I gathered the work was dangerous, requiring them to ascend hundreds of feet in cradles. I couldn’t understand why, but the site they were working on was fundamentally unstable. I pictured an alien planet, its colloidal surface shifting and buckling in a nearinfinite series of peaks and troughs that seemed always on the verge of an apprehensible pattern — yet never quite there.

‘… an Audi TT’ — they were discussing their gaffer, a German — ‘that don’t even leave the garage.’

‘’E’s got three fookin’ cars.’

Before he got there the other spoke. His voice was not weak — it came out clear and resonant.

‘Least we’re not at the beck and bluddy call uv wassisface.’

‘Oo?’

‘That scoolptur chap oo’s got the turbine in at Bridlington — they say’ e’s a complete fookin’ nooter.’

‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ he said.

And then a queer little shudder passed over him, the eyelids dropped, the jaw fell …