Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (43 page)

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.

‘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.