Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (50 page)

Three young men stood trial for the killing in January 2009, all on charges of affray. It was understood that the police had been unable to get sufficient evidence for a murder charge, and besides the actual knifeman was said to have fled to Jamaica. In the event, none of the three accused received more than a three-year sentence. This barely made the news anyway – by then the focus of attention had long since moved on, and there were tens if not scores of stories with more obviously moralistic dramatic arcs to satisfy English connoisseurs of murder.

But Freddy’s killing stayed with me by reason of proximity alone: this was not murder considered as one of the fine arts, but homicide as interior decoration. The crime scene tape decked the street for a week or more. For the first couple of days we had to be escorted to and from our house by police officers. Then there was the shrine created by Freddy’s friends at the end of the block, with its blooms dying in cellophane, his name outlined in tea lights, and a sad little assemblage of cards, water pistols and handwritten poems. The kids stood vigil for him, at first every night, then weekly, then monthly. There was the funeral, a memorial service – the family were active in a local church – and a march protesting against the epidemic of knife crime. All of these gatherings forced an awareness of community on the inhabitants of this very typical – and typically polyglot – inner London residential street.

I felt an obscure shame about the murder – or, rather, about my detachment from the immediate environment, let alone the wider world. I wasn’t remotely interested in the morality tale used to impose ‘sense’ on this young man’s death; I thought instead of the city, its anonymity, its crisscross currents of physical mortality and psychic violence. Over the preceding few years I had a growing sense of the room where I typed being encircled by homicides: the woman whose smouldering corpse was found in the local park – the victim of an ‘honour’ killing; the young woman strangled in her workplace shower down the road in Vauxhall; the kid shot in his flat at Clapham North by gang members; the doorman of a club on the Wandsworth Road shot in a driveby; and, of course, the young Brazilian electrician shot by police seven times at point-blank range in the nearby tube station.

All works of fiction represent terrains across which characters travel, and while the writer maps these he is down there on the ground, orienting by compass – whether moral or otherwise – and the familial resemblances of faces, landmarks and geographical features. Only towards the end of the journey, when he climbs the last hill, does he look back to survey the entire territory; only then does he understand the nature of the particular route undertaken.

When I reached the end of this book – so contorted, wayward and melancholic – I looked back and saw my father-in-law’s death from cancer in November 2007, Freddy Moody’s murder in July 2008, and the death of J. G. Ballard in April of 2009. The mental pathologies that underlie the three memoirs – obsessive-compulsive disorder for ‘Very
Little’, psychosis for ‘Walking to Hollywood’ and Alzheimer’s for ‘Spurn Head’ – are themselves displacements of a single phenomenon.

W. W. S., London, 2009

Will Self is the author of six short-story collections, a book of novellas, eight novels, and six collections of journalism. His short story collection
Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys
won the
Paris Review
’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction in 1998,
How the Dead Live
was shortlisted for the Whitebread Novel of the Year 2002, and
The Butt
won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2008. He lives in London.