Will Self - Walking to Hollywood

The stranger and I nodded curtly to one another, then simultaneously stepped away from the window.

I found myself on the outskirts of a village that was shrouded in dense morning mist with no awareness of how I might have got there. I was dressed appropriately for a walking tour in green Gore-Tex trousers, thick socks, viciously uncomfortable leather boots, a blue wicking T-shirt and a black cagoule. It was chilly and although the trees and hedges had a midsummer density for a while I equivocated: was the cobweb stretched between the bars of a gate jewelled with frost or dew?

I couldn’t remember my name, where I had come from or where I was going. I didn’t know whether I was old or young. I unfastened my trousers and pulled them and my underpants down enough to expose a penis between blanched thighs — so discovered I was a man, and a white one. One memory I also retained: that both doors had to have been locked before I left wherever it was I’d been and the keys then posted back into the building. Had I done this?

A neoprene pouch sagged in the half-masted folds of my nether garments. I unzipped it, discovered a digital camera and prodded it on. Adjusting it so I could access the images already saved on its memory card, I flicked through them. My hunch had been correct: there were pictures of a lock with a hand inserting a key in it, then the same hand poked inside a letterbox. I compared the hand in the photo with the one on the end of my arm — they matched.

Replacing the camera and rearranging my clothing, I discovered a paper napkin on which was scrawled a crude map with arrows, approximate distances and a wavy line for the seaside. No other plan presented itself — I was an enigma to myself, swathed in the silence of this strange place; nevertheless, in choosing to follow the map forward, along the lane between the knapped-flint walls, I knew that I conformed to the paradigm for people like me — white men like me. At a crossroads a simple roundel annulled limits on speed but my pace remained constant as I moved into open country. Whoever had bequeathed me these feet had done me no favours, as with every step they cut into me like knives.

Peacocks roosted on the pantiled roof of a cottage — how did I know these terms? Away in the unvarying stubble a hare searched for a shadow to box, and the sodden umbels of the cow parsley were as still as any living thing could be. I reached a T-junction and obeying the napkin turned to the right. Now, in back of wide verges, bungalows lay behind privet hedges; beside a carport I glimpsed a trampoline festooned in old police crime scene tape. A blackbird fidgeted in a hawthorn, a blackboard was scratch-marked ‘Clematis’, ‘Alpines’, ‘Laxton Fortunes’ — all items priced at 50p.

A stile hopped towards me, crept under me, and I was on a drainage ditch the banks of which were massed with marsh marigolds, yarrow, thistles and nettles — all their flowers monochrome in the mist, all their scent as fresh as air freshener. I went on and in due course a pillbox canted in a cleft came upon me; here the path terminated in a muddy chute that slid me the twenty feet down to the beach.

No sooner had my smouldering feet been stubbed out in the grubby sand than I felt at ease: extinguished. I set off towards the south, moving swiftly along the tide line, and soon became utterly absorbed by the way the wrack of seaweed and driftwood resolved into a jumble of letters, which then became legible as words: amygoid nucleus, sucli of cortex, senile and neuritic plaques, senile and braindruse.

The disc of the sun appeared high up in the eastern quadrant of the sky, a duct sucking in the sea fret — but, suck as it might, visibility remained only a few score yards, with the world remaining all that was at my hurting feet. Amnesia was a belief system — an ideology all its own. I believed, fervently, in my inability to recall anything of significance, and this functioned as a heuristic, allowing me to operate effectively in a world that to anyone armed with prior knowledge would be frighteningly incomprehensible.

No one could be more desolate than I, the not-not other faced by an increasing threat level: the beach widening and the cliffs rising, the misshapen mud lumps sucking in the shallows — then, far off, a small group of figures pinned in the mist. Long minutes passed but it was still not possible to judge their size — were they toys or Titans? They stood at the water’s edge, legs parted, arms held away from the body, swirling all around the nothing made visible. Five of them — so still, with what could be a boat or a canoe pulled up on the shingle at their feet. They inched up on me, so slow they had surrounded me before I ceased expecting lonely sea fishermen and acknowledged that these were wooden figures, none higher than my knee.

Some had arms missing — two round shields lay beside the rough-adzed boat. The figures were obviously of either ancient or aboriginal manufacture — and they possessed a humming resonance. Propped up there, so that the quartzite pebbles embedded in their pinheads were fixed upon where the horizon ought to be, the socket holes in their low pelvises yawned horribly.

It felt as if a small child had leapt upon my back. I turned and turned again, futile as a cat, to see what was there, then realized it was a parasitizing rucksack; then realized I was wreathed in lavatory chain. The madman sat a short way off, me yet not, his clothes in tatters, drool in his beard, his sack of manhood dusted with sand. He tugged the chain gently, and so I unwound myself and took off the rucksack. Together we went through it, taking out nylon bags packed with stuff: a mobile phone, a notebook, a radio the madman clicked, listened to for a few moments, then, after the flute and crackle of static, chucked to one side. He scattered the clothing and, crushing the oat cakes in his dirty hands, rubbed the crumbs into his bare chest. There was nothing in this portable world that he wanted, nothing until he discovered the small pine spars and curls in the oilskin bundle; these he urged me — none too gently — to insert: some into the figures’ pelvic sockets, others into their vacant arm holes. The last one I let fall to the beach — what was the point, now?

The madman dragged me to my feet, prodded me until I strapped the empty rucksack to my back. Its unzipped compartments gaped — smelly canvas mouths. He pushed me — so that I might lead him.

If I had had any notion of why it was that I was travelling this lowering and excremental shore, I would’ve had to say that the trip had gone badly — but I didn’t, so only went on until an industrial installation floated slowly by behind a ballast of dragons’ teeth. The haloed safety lights, the alien elbows of steel piping, the cyber-pregnancy of a gas tank — the resources needed to fabricate all these were nowhere to be found on this planetoid, which was a mere 200 yards in diameter. They must have been mined from asteroids, assembled in space — crazy ideas of deevolving gripped me, so painful were my feet. Why should I not remove my useless wooden arms from their sockets, slip into a blubbery body stocking and flip off into the comforting swell?

The beach narrowed once more, the cliffs soared, the sharp triangles of undercut hard standing appeared, silhouetted against the non-Euclidean sky. I came upon two mates, fishing and sharing a can of morning cider. They stood on a tarmac slab, their rods stuck in the muck. By reason of their summery drinking I knew it was getting hotter — we were companions in the sauna, and so I stopped to ask, the coffee sea sipping the soles of my boots, ‘Is there much more beach along this way?’