Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (39 page)

The last we, the viewers, saw of the woman was her entering the glaucous waters, looking baby-like in her one-piece black bathing costume, and striking out for the horizon through the gentle swell. The entire film was unutterably poignant, but what struck me most forcibly was that she swam with the same idiosyncratic stroke as my father used to; a sort of sideways doggy paddle, hands pawing at the water, feet ambling through it. And like my long-dead father, the senile woman had an expression that was at once effortful and seraphic.

This image, the woman’s joyful face as her mind swam in the Now, and her body in the enduring sea, as I say, returned to me again and again, breaking the silvery surface of the bathroom mirror on the mornings when I remembered to shave; and, had I known of the malaise termed ‘paramnesia’, I would’ve
understood that these things – the checklist on the fridge, the trips to the Cambridge daycare centre, the awkward hobble down over the Southwold shingle, my adipose body, seal-black and seal-slick in its nylon skin – hadn’t happened to me at all.

Someone had sent me – in the way that kindly people do – a book on coping with Alzheimer’s. I read it and wondered if my wife had read it as well. Either she had, or she understood intuitively that the way to deal with people who are confused and upset is to provide them with simple cues from their concretized past that match currently baffling situations.

Who is that child?

Why, it’s your friend julian. You love playing with your friend Julian, don’t you? Riding your bikes through Sandy Wood, climbing trees and making secret dens.

She stopped asking me questions and only provided answers:
You’d like to go upstairs now and do some typing
.

She grasped that properly managed I could spend all day existing solely in the manifold of those things that I had once enjoyed: typing in my secret den, while prattling to childhood companions who were, in fact, my own children.

Nevertheless, as the surface tension of June bulged seamlessly into July, I made the decision to undertake another walking tour; one that would, I hoped, either heal, or at least legitimize, what was happening to me.

Of course, all of my little walking tours were methods of legitimizing. Towards the end of my drug addiction it had occurred to me that the manias of cocaine, the torpors of heroin and the psychoses of the hallucinogens – all these were pre-existing states of mental anguish that only appeared
to be self-induced, and so, perhaps, controllable, because of the drugs. So it was with the walking, which was a busman’s holiday; for, while I trudged along, through fields, over hills, beside bypasses, I remained sunk deep in my own solipsism – then I returned to the chronic, elective loneliness of the writing life. The only real difference I could see between walking and writing was that engaged in the former my digestion achieved a certain ... regularity, while when I wrote I became terribly constipated: a stylite typing atop a column of his own shit.

Walking my six-year-old son to his school, I held his hand fiercely. I ran my fingers over his knuckles, acutely sensitized to skin, bone, muscle and tendons; hugely aware of scale, the way his hand was a smaller version of my own. Yet, while he sought my big hand out – a gentle fluttering – it was I who needed his small one to make love intelligible.

He asked me to resume the story I had been telling him the previous morning, ‘George and the Dragon’. With their fierily seductive breath, dragons had burnt up his previous passion, puppies; but, of course, I couldn’t remember to what point the free-forming narrative had progressed. ‘The cardboard dragon,’ he prompted me – and then I got it: George had flown to the top of the mountain. The little dragons had wings, but George, being a human boy alone in Dragonia, had been given a balloon made from sloughed-off dragon skin. Little George had a special mouthpiece, which meant he could breath fire and so fill the balloon with hot air.

At the summit they discovered a whitewashed cottage with a neat garden. The little dragons flew back down – the mountaintop was taboo – but Little George landed his balloon
and encountered old Sir George, the knight, who had come to Dragonia many years before in pursuit of dragons and ended up exiled here. However, he told Little George that his reclusion hadn’t been too awful, for every day the dragons brought him a packed lunch consisting of a cheese sandwich, a Nutri-Grain bar, a shiny red apple and a carton of mango juice. Sir George had saved all the empty cartons, and over the years used them to build a spectacularly realistic, near-life-sized model of a dragon.

As usual, after filling in the back-story, then adding a few trivial embellishments, we had reached the school. I handed my son his packed lunch and book bag, then he scampered through the gates into the playground.

The dog was straining at the leash, and I had already turned towards the little park near the school when I spotted something lying in the gutter. I stooped to pick it up. It was a scrap of a black-and-white photograph – the top-right-hand corner, implying that the whole had been torn in half and then half again. I looked at it wonderingly. There was the anachronism of a print in this digital age, and there was the still more old-fashioned
feel
of the monochrome image.

I seized upon it – as if it might be a clue of a special kind. Not that it portrayed anything remarkable: only most of the head of a fleshy-faced white man in his mid-thirties; a man who sported a scraggy beard that kept to the bottom of his chin, and whose scalp was outflanking – on both sides – an attempt at a quiff. He looked amiable enough – or, harmless until proved psychopathic by the legwork the clue seemed to demand. He wore a watch with a steel strap; the ragged tear at the bottom and side of the scrap framed the shoulder and cuff of a chequered shirt; behind him were lager bottles, the handles
of beer taps and, dimly, what must be shelves of glasses. Above his head a row of optics gleamed.

I found the scrap of photograph unsettling – wrong, even. Once I’d taken it home and clipped it to the shade of an Anglepoise lamp in my writing room, far from receding into the rest of the tat, the man in it forced himself into my consciousness, his eyes frequently catching mine. The mirror behind the bar he sat at, unseen in the photograph, but perceptible as a luminescence countering the camera flash on the beer taps; the utter anonymity of the man, the image created by impulse, in two rips – all this made of it a contemporary version of those painted Russian icons where perspective is deformed in the service of worship. This outsized and hieratic figure was, I concluded, a saint, to be viewed through a hagioscope from the side aisle where I sat, worshipfully typing.

I corrected the proofs for the new collection, and, although long accustomed to the excruciation of my own prose, there was a fresh focus for this. Previously, it had been the bloody style coagulating on the page – that, and the very grating mechanism of metaphor itself: such and such was like such and such; this was like that ... arrant nonsense! Ask De Niro as Vronsky: this is always this; things are nothing more – or less – than themselves. Now individual words began to get to me. Badly. In this particular text it was ‘even’, as in the sentence, ‘At night, even in the nick, he rubbed whitening powder into his tan cheeks.’ Irrespective of context, changing ‘even’ to ‘especially’ would hardly change the sense – at least, not so as anyone would give a shit. The evens – which were everywhere I looked – were trumpeting to me, if to nobody else, the increasingly parenthetic (and thus provisional) nature of my own work. I even hated the look of the word, a failed palindrome. I stared at it malevolently, willing it to transform into ‘never’.

The very evenness of even disgusted me; a spondee, its syllables equally stressed, I found it doubly
stressful
. It also reminded me of my father, of whom it was often remarked that he had ‘a remarkably even temper’. Even to think of his phlegm was enough to rouse my choler. In the years since his death I had resolved my issues with him, operating like a family therapist who views dysfunction comfortably from behind the mirrored glass of mortality, yet I knew that he’d think the books I was writing exhibited both a profound negativity as well as a satirical miniaturism that he was fairly (fairly!) critical of when alive. True, his mildness meant he was ill cast as a punitive superego, and when I compared his gentle critiques with the execrations that issued forth from the death masks of
friends’ parents, it occurred to me that, although I was losing my memory and my sight, I remained preternaturally sensitive.

So, there were these: the amnesia and agnosia, the myopia and logophobia. I was as disengaged from the zeitgeist as my father – who had been a conscientious objector during the Second War – for, while much of the commonality were passionately engaged with their support for – or alienation from – campaigns against nouns (the ‘War on Drugs’ and that on ‘Terror’ being the most salient), I was trying to defeat
an adverb
. In sum: it was all these yappy feelings that herded sheepy me towards another walking tour, whilst the very erosion of my memory drew me, seemingly ineluctably, towards the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, the 35-mile stretch of crumbling glacial till between the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head and the shingle spit of Spurn Head.

Carried along in the mudslide of my amnesia were pathetic fragments of childhood recall. One was of Michael Barratt, the presenter of the long-lived BBC
I
current affairs programme
Nationwide
, interviewing a man in a house that was tumbling down a clayey cliff. The homeowner was saying, in broad Yorkshire accents, as he stood in one half of a conservatory – the other half was nowt but a jumble of broken spars and cracked panes – ‘I can’t oonderstand it, I only poot those UPVC windows in two year ago – and now loook at the place!’

Even at the time – and I cannot have been more than eleven or twelve – I remember thinking that this fellow must have been formidably stupid to have invested in a property on the brink of a sea cliff; for had Barratt not just told the viewers that this was the fastest-eroding coast in Europe? That its biscuity loess was being dunked, then chomped, by the North Sea at
the prodigious rate of two whole yards every year, as fast, in geological terms, as a speeding bullet?

Then again, I may be giving too much credence to a capacity for retention that I’ve already conceded is ruptured, because, now I come to think of it, Barratt seldom ventured beyond the Lime Grove studios from where
Nationwide
was put out live. These local interviews were conducted by regional reporters and screened via a feed. Barratt, with his distinctively 1970s hairdo – a splodge of ice cream rippling over his forehead – was a rock of a presenter, who, even when the mass medium was only twenty-odd years old, still managed to fuse dash and paternalism in a uniquely televisual way.

A snappy clarion of horns, a rappel of strings: ‘Dadadaaa! Dada-daaa!’ ‘The Good Word’ by Johnny Scott leapt down the scale accompanying the beguiling title sequence. Archetypes of modern Britain appeared in quick succession: a car accelerating up on to the Severn Bridge; a man with a child in his arms; the Tyne at Newcastle; a man speaking on a car phone the size of a small car; electricity pylons stalking across countryside; the ectomorphic cooling towers of a power station with sheep grazing in the foreground; a train disgorging commuters.

These vignettes took up alternate spaces with the
Nationwide
logo in a 3
X
3 grid, the logo being simply the letters ‘NW’, with the arm of the
W
and the leg of
N
curled so as to cuddle the couple. In retrospect this logo was strongly evocative of the Nazi swastika, while the sequence evoked our own naive faith in technological advance. The very rapidity of these images of motion, then the way the ‘NW’ logo multiplied, streaming in threads across the screen to form four revolving cogs, while ‘The Good Word’ went on ‘Dada-daaa! Dada-daaa!’ing – all
this I am able to summon up despite
Nationwide
being closer to the Normandy landings than I am now to it. I wonder, has each generation’s perception of time – its decadences, its stratigraphy – always been like this? Or is our current sense of time piling up into a necessarily terminal moraine of events simply a function of the digitization of knowledge, which makes it inevitable that the entire networked society will end up, like poor Funes in Borges’s tale ‘Funes the Memorious’, unable to delete a single paltry occurrence or cultural factoid?

And so, there will be Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day – until the significance of the Holocaust itself – which no one any longer living has had direct experience of – is quite forgotten.

I repeat, a culture that is afflicted with such a hyperthymestic syndrome will never recoup itself, never experience the necessary downtime for renaissance to occur. ‘It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.)’