Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (48 page)

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?’

‘No,’ the bald one in the white T-shirt answered. ‘Yer awl ahtuv it now, lad. But if ewe go oop the cliff, like, u can walk along there.’

I thanked him and went on – but he was wrong: the cliff top had run for only fifty yards beneath my feet when it revealed itself to be nought but a headland, so I was exiled back down to what was no longer a beach at all, only a broad ledge of mud, with teeth cut out of it by longshore drift. Infective fluid
surged into these inlets, swirling around the carcasses of rusted engines and jaundiced white goods.

Sand dunes sighed in from the west, their flanks creeping with marram grass, their hummocks and vales networked with paths of wooden slats wired apart. A sign directed me away from a
PROTECTED SITE
where terns were nesting. Their small white bodies blasted their black heads into grey space; then they fell to earth and resumed their positions, fluffuzzling up beside thistles and Flora margarine tubs. Could this go on indefinitely? Ignorant as I was, I doubted it – besides, who was the second who walked alongside me, skipping through the misty drapes, taunting the periphery of my vision? When I did the head-count there was only the one – still, there he was, sometimes dragging behind, other times scampering ahead along the muddy ledge. I didn’t trust him.

I came upon an entire forty-foot-long blockhouse that had been abandoned on the beach by the retreating land. Beyond this a phantasmagorical confusion of military concrete – beige discs, rectangles, triangles and trapezoids – was aping a promontory. What was all this – the shattered remains an accident-prone temple?

Clambering about on the heap were a couple of kids, a yapping terrier and a bored dad. I joined them on a ramp that tended at a 20-degree angle to the German Ocean.

‘D’you know where the sound mirror is?’ I asked without preamble or forethought.

‘You don’t want to go bothering with that,’ the dad said, his tone so sharp that at first I thought he was warning off the terrier, which was gnawing at a stalk of seaweed. But no: he meant me.

‘Oh, why’s that, then?’

‘It’s nowt but a stupid lump of concrete – and there’s enough of ’em here.’

‘I thought it was an early-warning device – for zeppelin raids during the First War. They say if you put your ear up against it you can hear ...’ I trailed off, because all of this had come to me unbidden, and I had no idea what could be heard in a sound mirror.

‘Aye, that’s right,’ the dad said snidely. ‘What
would
you hear – fook awl, there’s fook awl to hear, here, nowt except those fookin turbines out there.’ He jerked a thumb at the crescent of sea.

‘Turbines?’ I queried, but one of the kids had come up to show him something she’d found and he dismissed me with some cursory directions.

To make my way through the caravan park, then along the lane that skirted the bird reserve. There I found a noticeboard that had trapped a heterogeneous flock of seafowl behind its glass, and next to it a handmade way marker that pointed towards
THE SOUND MIRROR
, and added hopefully,
CREAM TEAS
.

Out in the wheat field the sound mirror bloomed. Softened by the sea fret it was movingly lovely. The circular depression in its seaward side suggested that somewhere nearby hovered the enormous and comforting breast that had moulded it. I laid my cheek where it once had been and suckled on the sounds: the gull squeak and peewit, the distant groan of heavy machinery, the cries of children, the groans of the dispossessed, and the entreaties of those about to die. Were these the warnings of the deadly paravane, at that very moment being towed through the choppy skies towards me, passing over the silt that was once Northorpe and Hoton? I didn’t know, and besides, even – even! – if I were able to recognize these harbingers I still would not have heeded them, for in the four minutes it took for the zeppelin to arrive, I would’ve forgotten all about it.

‘D’you mind my asking, but what’re you fishing for?’

‘Dunno, it’s my first time here.’

Here being the tidal flats of the Isle of the Dead, exposed now that filmic civilization is ebbing away, and washed up upon them this marriage on the half shell – a blue nylon one, six feet across, ribbed with fibreglass poles. When I strolled past its lip, there they were – the meaty beings secondarily reliant on the suck of the current, siphoning it in through a taut nylon line and a long bent rod. They were in their fifties, she seated on a folding chair with truncated legs; he on the sand, his ankles boyishly crossed, a cigarette cupped in the half shell of his hand.

‘I thought your gear looked new—’

‘No, not my first time
ever
– I fish up and down the coast the whole time.’

Sturdy pride to buoy him up, the shell upended, a coracle now in which they paddle up and down the Holderness.

‘And what do you catch?’

‘This time of t’year, bass.’

Big-mouthed Billy-man, nailed to a plaque. Spasming at the waist, I walked away, my head hammering at the point of my shoulder, then, luminously ascended to a knoll from where I saw the reddest Nissan saloon parked in a sandy car park, beyond it a footprinted shore disappearing into the mist, and over to the right a line of telegraph poles and gorse bushes, the dorsal crest of a peninsula:

Spurn Head.

This much I did know: I had arrived at this wavering landmass,
flipped this way and that by the sea for millennia, the tail of the East Riding lashing at Old Kilnsea, Ravenser and Ravenser Odd, so scattering their people on the face of the deep. Ravenser, or Ravensburg, or Ravenseret – it was once one of the wealthiest ports in the kingdom. It returned two members to parliament, held two markets a week and mounted an annual fair that lasted for over a month. ‘Away with me in post to Ravenspurgh!’ cries Northumberland in the opening scene of Act Two of
Richard the Second
; however, it’s Ravenspurgh that’s been had away, dissolved so completely that by the 1580s there was nothing left, and Shakespeare was name-checking an Atlantis. The last reference to the town was in Leland’s sixteenth-century
Itinerary
, and presumably by then, Richard Reedbarowe, the hermit of the chapel of Ravenserporne, was long gone.

As early as the 1350s, the chronicler of Meaux wrote, ‘When the inundations of the sea and of the Humber had destroyed the foundations of the chapel of Ravenserre Odd, built in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, so that the corpses and bones of the dead there buried horribly appeared, and the same inundations daily threatened the destruction of the said town, sacrilegious persons carried off and alienated certain ornaments of the said chapel, without our due consent, and disposed of them for their own pleasure—’

The rubber figurine, with the head of a pig, dressed in a blue Churchillian siren suit; the detachable penises and arms, carved from pinewood, of late Bronze Age votary objects; the neurofibrillary tangle and the amyloid visible as applegreen yellow birefringence; the UPVC windows and the water colours salvaged from the slidden studio at Skipsea; the madman holding a handful of individual UHT milk pots to his face – all mine, he mutters, all mine.

What brings you up here, to an area of land almost equal to that upon which London stands, but which has now been swept away?

Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Algy?

Eaten up by introspection, I frogmarched myself on along the spit; the last few incisive nibbles would soon have done with the amyloid, the core of the present would be consumed, and the simple past would be all that there is, or ever can be. A line of wooden piles stood – stand – in the surf, spiny with iron spikes upon which seaweed and shreds of fishing nets have caught. What was – is – this, some futile attempt to fix the shifting mass to the bedrock? Or were – are – they, the staves of musical notation, a very late Romanticism of surging chords, gut-wrenching melodies and lofty crescendos, the entire gleaming metropolis of sounds long since sunk, church bells withal, beneath the shallow German Ocean?