Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (49 page)

A Struldbrug came towards me, his tattered clothing – hose, doublet, shirt and jerkin – as wispy as the sea fret. He paused fifty paces away, panting, one arm against a pile for support – his bent back and the curving upright parenthesizing the waves – then came on again, the black spot above his left eyebrow a gun barrel levelled at me. My impulse was to run, however ... too late, he was upon me, his palsied claw rattling my shoulder, as he thrust his face into mine. Its features fell like wormy clods from the winding sheet of ancient skin.

From his clothing I judged him to be above 600 years old, but whether the mushy sounds that fell from his mouth were the authentic accents of the late medieval tongue, or only the consequence of toothlessness, I couldn’t say. There were a few words I could make out – playce, cum, stä – by which, combined with his erratic gestures, I understood that he wished me to accompany him to his abode. I was sorely tempted – my feet were killing me – but then, through the curtains of mist being swept up by unseen cables, there came hurrying a pair of attendants wearing blue siren suits.

They spotted me and the Struldbrug, adjusted their course and made straight for us, coming up puffing.

‘’E’s a sly wun, ’e is,’ the first attendant said, although whether to me or as a general observation was ambiguous. He had a piggy head, this fellow, and his wide nostrils quivered, sucking in everything.

‘C’mon ewe daft booger,’ his equally piggy colleague said. ‘Yul miss ewer soup, woncha.’

Taking the Struldbrug by either arm, they began to lead him away. Across their shoulders both attendants had the words
DEMENTIA ADVISORY
picked out in white letters. But the old man kept on babbling. ‘Playce! Cum! Stä!’ and trying to
break away, so they stopped and the pig-headed figure in the Churchillian siren suit called back, ‘’E wants yet t’cum oop t’clinic. Willya, lad? It’ll mekk ’im ever so ’appy.’

On my walking tour – a journey I made without maps – I forgot who I was and where I was going. Nevertheless, I carried with me for the entire time a damp and writhing burden of guilt, together with the mental picture of a baby lying in the wrack at the high tide mark, with a kitchen knife planted between its shoulder blades. I acquired a handful of carved wooden penises and arms – late Bronze Age, I thought – that I made a gift of to some fishermen I met. And I bought an Agatha Christie thriller in a junk shop in Hornsea that I read a few pages of before discarding in a bin, beside the shower block in a caravan park.

The lead attendant explained everything as we padded along the beach, trying to maintain headway despite the Struldbrug, who kept veering off, his anachronistic clothes flapped mournfully in the breeze. On we went towards the lighthouse, which was climbing out of its humid raiment so that it stood, if not exactly proud, at least prominent against the fast-bluing sky.

‘There’s bin a memory clinic out on Spurn for a while now,’ the attendant said. ‘There was always a lot of older folk in Holderness anyway – retirees an’ that – but when the noombers wi’ Altzheimer’s began to get ... well, out of ‘and, like, the clinic were the logical place to put ’em, so the facility were expanded.’

Despite the Struldbrug’s wayward progress, we had gained the dunes and picked our way through the muffled defiles, our ankles scratched by the lyme grass and sea holly. There
was homely flybuzz and butterflies swirling in the warming air, then, from top of an acclivity, we could see the whole hummocky panhandle.

‘It’s glacial, yer see,’ the second attendant was moved to explain. ‘The point, that is – it’s a glacial moraine, so it’s stable. It’s only the beach that moves around. Any road’ – he threw his arm wide to bracket the mismatched buildings, some prefabs, some concrete, some stone, that were huddled at the foot of the lighthouse – ‘there were all these here lying empty, so it were a logical idea to put the clinic here. Besides, it’s less institutional.’

‘Less instëtewshunal – that were it.’ His colleague snorted. ‘Patients can get aht, tek the air. It’s dead restful here – calm, like – and if they aren’t too distressed they can have the run of the place. Sort of folk who cwm aht to Spurn, well, they’re nature lovers, twitchers – oonderstandin’ when it cums dahn t’it.’

‘They’ve gotta be!’ the other fellow laughed bitterly. ‘Chances are there’s wunnov their own here, or they’re headed this way themselves. How many is it now with t’dementia, over two million – and rising all the time.’

‘Rising all the time,’ said the first, kicking out at a lump of oily driftwood with his boot. The Struldbrug groaned upon impact, and I wondered if over the centuries he had come to identify somatically with things older than humans, wind and wave weathered trees – perhaps Spurn Head itself.

‘What,’ I asked, ‘happens if the patients do get too distressed?’

The first looked at me curiously and a little contemptuously; at times the fletch of a man’s cartilaginous ear is too much to take, along with the toothbrush bristles in the corner of his jaw, and the slow-roasting shoulders bundled in blue cloth. ‘Do-too,
do-too, do-too-too,’ he prated, incorporating my syllables into a parody of just such distress; then, seeing I wasn’t going to rise to it, or laugh, he went on: ‘Bull Sands Fort, out there in the Umber. Filthy big place bang on a sandbank, it were built in the First War – eyronickle, really, weren’t ready ‘til nineteen-nineteen when the show was over.

‘Any road, if any of oor lot get too tricky, like, it’s off to Bull Sands wi’ ’em. I’ve not been out meself, but they say’ – he shuddered – ‘it ain’t pretty – ain’t pretty at all.’

‘And the Struldbrug?’ I felt no compunction talking of the aged one as if he weren’t right by us, because in a way he wasn’t, riding his tempest of time with his ragged wings of linen and leather; what could he grasp of mayflies such as us and our dandelion clock concerns?

‘’Im?’ The lipless mouth widened revealing peg teeth. ‘’E’s no trubble – YER NO TRUBBLE, ARE YER?’ he bellowed at the hapless Struldbrug, who hung so slack now I was reminded of a cadaver strung upon wires. ‘No,’ the piggy warder said, resuming at a more reasonable level, ‘over my dead body duzz ’e go aht t’Bull Sands—’ Then he stopped short, shivering at the absurdity of what he’d just said. ‘Whatever. Anyway, he’s a mascot ’e is – bin ’ere before the clinic, before the new lighthouse – before the old wun inall. ‘E was probably ’ere when the light were joost an iron basket fulla burning faggots lifted by a lever.’

‘How old d’you think he is?’ I ventured. ‘His clothes look medieval.’

‘Medieval!’ the warder guffawed. ‘Don’t be soft, lad – ’ow could they last? No, these togs are theatrical clobber; soom joker put them on ’im back in the day – the fifties weren’t it?’

‘Aye,’ his companion concurred, ‘the fifties.’

The bigger piggier warder gathered the cloth above either hip of his siren suit in his trotters and adopted an oratorical stance, turning so as show his
DEMENTIA ADVISORY
to me. It was clear, on this most obscurely ephemeral of days, that I was about to be privileged with an insight into deep and pellucid time.

‘Soom folk,’ the warder said, ‘claim ’e’s the old hermit that lived here in the fifteenth century, the wun mentioned in the chronicle of Mo. Personally, I don’t believe it. My granddad, well, before ’e lost ’is own bluddy marbles, ’e told me what the Struldbrug were like when ’e were a nipper. Back then this chap ’ere still ’ad a tooth in ’is head. Now, that wouldn’t put ’im much over the two-hundred mark.’

The sea fret had finally and entirely dispersed. The Struldbrug’s horny toes scrabbled in the sand, the yellow flowering birefringence hung on the neurofibrillary tangle of the gorse, the berries of the sea buckthorn were as shiny-yellow as benzodiazepine capsules. The wallpaper of the sky wrapped around our little colloquy, and for a moment it fooled me with its cloudy furbelows into thinking the three-bladed buckthorns were painted along the skirting board of the nursery, then I regained my sense of scale and grasped that these were massive wind turbines, a long parenthetic curve of them, tending towards the point of Spurn Head. How could I have not noticed these things during my tramp along the coast? Or even heard about them before I left ... before I left ... wherever it was that I had left.

‘You’re coming on down to the memory clinic with uz and the Struldbrug now – that’s what yer doing,’ the dementia advisor said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall having posed.

‘Aye,’ his number two pitched in, ‘’course you canav a cuppa and sum cayk.’

‘Cayk! Cayk!’ the Struldbrug crowed.

‘What other facilities are there at the ... memory clinic?’ My voice swooped up into the interrogative, borne on thermals of hot, moist distress.

‘There’re digital enhancement programmes and neuralactivated webcam systems—’

I whimpered, and the senior advisor silenced his subordinate with a glare, then reassured me, ‘Aye, and there’s uz, uz dementia advisors to help you learn it all, after all, it can be a lot to take on board.’

We were within a few hundred paces of the clinic now, and it seemed to me that I must be a merman, for there were daggers thrust into the soles of my newborn feet, the attendants held me under either arm and I’d all but surrendered the power of speech when, seeing that the Struldbrug had lurched on ahead, I broke away and ran after him.

The ancient clattered along a walkway between thick gorse, and although I soon lost him I also lost my pursuers. I could hear them wandering around in the crannies between the bushes – one of them must have picked up a stick, because there was swishing, smiting and cracking as he cried, ‘Cummon ahtuv it you daft booger!’ and ‘No cake fer you if you don’t cum soon!’ But they soon tired of looking for us, and one of the dementia advisors called to the other, ‘I’m fed oop. He’ll cum back when ’e’s ’ungree.’

I was left alone in the desiccated undergrowth and crawled out from the sandy cave beneath a root system, then limped through this fine dust of ages towards a crest from where I
could see the whole semicircular sweep of the beach. The Struldbrug was down there already, paddling in the shallows, his shaggy head dangling low. I wondered what he could be looking for so intently, and felt frustrated by the pointlessness of asking him.

I took off the empty rucksack, unlaced the stabbing boots and cast them aside, to be followed by T-shirt, trousers, smalls unlaundered for the entire trip, all of which I left behind me on top of the gorse bushes, like the pathetic unpacking of a plane-crash victim, compelled by Death. All I hung on to was a notebook. I needn’t have felt frustrated, because as I walked towards the Struldbrug I grasped what it was that he sought, first peering into the ripples, then rearing back: the end of the peninsula. The shoreline curved so symmetrically that the exact point where the sea met the waters of the estuary was impossible to gauge.

I shared his obsession, and so the two of us moved back and forth in the shallows, crossing and recrossing, intent on the elusive terminus. After some time we had achieved a consensus and stood confronting one another – I naked, he in his rags. I dared to look upon his medieval features.
The next stop is Victoria, change here for District, Circle and Piccadilly lines and mainline rail services
... I opened the notebook and a scrap of black-and-white photograph fell on to the water between us and floated there. I stooped to peer at a scraggy beard, an attempt at a quiff, a row of optics. I looked up at the Struldbrug and thought I could see a resemblance, but when I glanced back at the scrap it had been spun away by the wavelets, leaving me behind, paddling in the Now.

On 17 July 2008 I was making my children supper in the basement kitchen of our terraced house in Stockwell, South London, when I heard a commotion in the street outside and the demented shriek of emergency services sirens. When I opened the front door I found some of my neighbours already standing on the front steps of their houses, the street was full of police cars, and an ambulance was parked further up. Very quickly it became clear that a young man had been attacked and stabbed immediately outside the house by a group of youths; he had staggered up the road and collapsed about a hundred yards further on. Paramedics and a doctor who lived locally fought to save his life, but he died three hours later. He was eighteen years old, his name was Frederick Moody Boateng, and he was the twenty-first teenage fatality from a stabbing in London that year.

Freddy’s family lived six doors up from us, and although I’d nodded to him in the street we’d never exchanged a word. In the immediate aftermath of the murder, shocked local people said the usual things about the senselessness of the attack. It was thought the assailants might also have been at a spontaneous water fight in Hyde Park that Freddy had attended that day, and that something had happened there that caused them to lay in wait for him. The suppressed premise, of course, was whether Freddy was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ boy.

Soon enough another narrative emerged: Freddy had been in trouble before, the doorman in the nearby flats alleged
that he had been there immediately before the knifing, and someone else said that rocks of crack cocaine had been found on him. The man in the local park who does youth football coaching told me that Freddy had asked to participate in his sessions, but that ‘He was mixed up in drugs, so I told him no. I won’t take anyone who can’t stay out of trouble.’