Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (46 page)

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?

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.’