Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (5 page)

We were expected, and an amiable youth met us at the headmaster’s office then guided us around the flint-knapped quads. He was possessed of sufficient sangfroid not to react to our oddness as a couple, while I found myself unbearably affected by the large spot on his neck to which a concealer had been uselessly applied, and also by the Windsor knot of his school tie. By the time the lad had itemized the crests and memorials and was leading us back through swags of drizzle towards the chapel I was openly weeping.

‘Buck up!’ Sherman snapped.

Inside the chapel the organ pipes were wrapped in translucent plastic – it was more than a century since Canon Woodard’s death and still the biggering continued. I found his tomb and pressed my ear to his bronze breast, beside where his married
hands rose, the keel of this capsized prayer boat. Sherman took a photo with his iPhone, and said, ‘Very good.’

Afterwards Baltie drove us into Brighton and dropped us on the edge of the Lanes. Sherman and I walked through the quaint zone to English’s, the fish restaurant. We ate on the second floor, sitting side by side with our backs to the window, and observing the sole other table of diners as if they were a repertory play – which in a way I suppose they were. Sherman didn’t help my digestion by whispering improvised dialogue for these two couples, most of which was obscene. He also professed himself to be delighted with our outing as he snidely dissected his own Dover sole.

I had my doubts – I was beginning to suspect that Sherman was toying with me, just as he toyed with the Californian ephebe who phoned during dinner, and whom Sherman had assured would be in receipt of a body form that was
633.333
recurring feet high within the month.
But why not 6,333, or 63.3?
‘Believe it!’ He belched as the other diners looked at us for a change. ‘This mother is so big it’ll be able to lean its elbow on the roadway of the Golden Gate as if it were a
bar
.’

Baltie drove us back to London and when they dropped me off I said goodbye to Sherman casually, without making any arrangement for the future. But I felt certain we would meet again soon – a reckoning of some kind was long overdue.

Eleven days later, despite all my queer resistances and awkward premonitions, I left for Canada. I took no luggage with me, only a Barbour jacket
^*
I had bought from their concession in Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods department store, the capacious pockets of which I intended to fill with a few essential things. But, despite this simple solution to my luggage phobia, I still lay awake night after night obsessing in nauseating detail how I would ‘pack’ the jacket.

It didn’t help that it was hot in the bed – an emperor-sized cherrywood
lit bateau
. None of our four children had ever quite managed to make it through the night in their own beds. No matter how many times I lifted them up, their sweaty thighs clamped about my hips, and laboured upstairs to put them down again, they still came creeping back and wormed their way in. Our eldest son was away at university; however, he not only walked but entrained in his sleep, and often in the small hours I would hear his key in the lock, followed by the heavy tramp of his feet, he would push the dog aside and insinuate his adult form so that the six of us lay tightly packed, like the
victims of a civil disaster laid out on the varnished floorboards of a school gymnasium.

I visualized filling the pockets, then emptying them, filling them – then emptying them, over and over again. Should I put that in there, or this? I fretted until the predawn, when I heard the milkman wheedle open the gate and set down three bottles of half-fat,
or was it a third of a bottle or thirty?
In the half-light the methane off the entire family lay in a mustard haze atop the Flanders of the duvet, my sons’ bayonets digging into me from either side, my mind roved across the terrain of the past:
The human race was doomed, the only link with survival passed through time
.

My obsessions with bigness, with littleness, with all distortions in scale – surely this was only a spatial expression of my own arrested development? In my mid-twenties I had still been living in my mother’s flat and speaking a shared idiolect of mushy diminutives – ‘-kins’, ‘-ums’ and ‘noo-noo’ – with her that we referred to shamelessly as ‘baby talk’. Had her premature death not thrust me into the actual-sized world, we might’ve been there still, me with my collections of Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries, she with her hefty Henry James novels. While I remained in the spare bedroom – which, due to the botched conversion of the Victorian house, had the proportions of an upright cereal box – dreamily making little tableaux with trolls, pencil erasers and .002-scale plastic soldiers, she would sit in the front room, concentrating hard on the subtle velleities of James’s characters.

It was not to be. Instead, it was ‘Off with her head!’ as the cancer shot up through the meningeal fluids of her spine to her brain, and I was thrust through the little door and into the caucus race of adulthood, which has no precise start or finish,
and although everyone is promised a prize, only a select few ever receive them.

A minute envelope materializes, the flap of which opens and closes while arrows arc up and down, conveying the strong impression to the user – and the suggestion of physiological addiction is highly appropriate – that vital communications are being transmitted through the ether. She sits there, radiation pinging off the back of her retinas, unable to tear her eyes from this very little thing – the envelope icon – which is an insult to the illustrious history of the epistolary – I mean to say: who’s this email from, Laclos?

Of course, of course, all new technologies cannibalize their predecessors: the horses are put down and the carriage rolls on complete with postilions and oil lamps. If futurological imaginings establish anything at all, it’s woe betide anyone who dares to conceive of the un become in too great a detail – and yet here we are, with the entire Library of Babel inscribed on a pin, and a trillion web pages expressed by the digits 1 and 0.

A few days later I set off, leaving wife, children and dog, all laid out on this weekend morning like idols in their great bed of wear. The last vision of home I took with me was of the fat woman who lives in the block of flats opposite, and whose bedroom window is exactly level with that of my writing room. As I slid notebook, passport, etc. into the pockets of my waxy jacket she swished back her curtains then proceeded to plump up her duvet, punching the white slug with her yellowy-black fists.

At the end of the road I paused to check I had turned off the cooker, shut the fridge and closed the front door. At my feet a concrete bollard lay toppled on the pavement: the severed
penis of a god at once Brutalist and
kaloi
. I looked for Lysippus among the bus drivers smoking outside their garage ... the lime trees in their raised beds were losing their foliage ... and then, quite suddenly, I was at Paddington – no, Heathrow, and wandering shoeless and un belted through security.

If I was going to be infantilized, why couldn’t I be miniaturized? Miniaturized along with Jane Fonda in a mini-submarine, then injected into America – but no, there would be no fantastic voyage, only the atomizers of Arpège on the shelves of the Duty Free,
why not 5mls or 500?
, empty suitcases chained outside a luggage store, and beneath a TV monitor some frummers davening as they laid tefillin. There was the travelator, a grooved tongue glistening as if with saliva, ready to slurp me up into the belly of the beast.

Since I’d started to see Sherman again I’d had a revulsion from any ‘humour’ associated with dwarfism. Unfortunately, I’d been at it for so long that people still brought me anecdotes they thought would amuse me. Only the day before I left, a friend told me of a rash of audacious thefts from Scandinavian luxury tourist coaches. The authorities were confounded: the tourists’ suitcases had been in the locked luggage compartment of the coaches all day, yet when they reached their hotel and went to unpack they found all their valuables had been spirited away.

The police could find no leads, until at last an informer of restricted height came forward. He had been, he told them, a member of a gang of dwarfs who had enlisted larger accomplices to go on the tours, while they hid in their suitcases. Once the coaches were under way the dwarfs unzipped themselves and went to work. The inversion of drug smugglers’ modus operandi had a certain symmetry – here was the package that ingested the mule – but I didn’t believe a word of it.

I took off the Barbour and dropped it in the corner of the toilet stall where I squatted shortly before boarding. It was so stiff with stuff and waxing that it leant there – about the height of a small child, or a dwarf. I strained, fixating on the creases in its collar,
pursed black lips
. After only a few days’ ownership the jacket seemed to be taking on a life of its own,
what might it do to me while I sleep?
Then, when I rose to wipe myself and jumped as the toilet automatically flushed, it smirked at me from behind its cuff.

But in club class, with the hateful thing stashed in the overhead locker, I was free of all burdens, free to smirk at the frummer who was making his way awkwardly up the aisle dragging an enormous wheeled case, which bumped against
one seat back and then the next. He was overweight and sweat wormed from beneath his hot homburg, his silk-faced frock coat falling open to reveal a black cummerbund and untuckings of white shirt. He seemed oblivious to the little anguishes he was causing – pre-flight champagne spilled, a laptop jogged – his eyes, in the shadows between his heron’s nest beard and his hat brim, unaffected, or so it seemed to me, by proximate concerns, yet brimming with the awe and anxiety provoked by Yahweh.

Consulting his ticket, he threw himself down beside me, ignoring the bag, which was left for a brace of cabin crew, straining like navvies, to lever into a locker. Then, nothing: we sat eyes front, with nought to meditate on but a spray of plastic flowers in a vase bolted to a bulkhead. The fabric of the aircraft whiningly tensed, groaningly relaxed. The copilot came on the PA: we had, he said, been slow getting away from the gate and now we’d lost our one o’clock slot; as soon as he had any more information he would let us know. But he didn’t. We sat in that rebreathed time, inhaling seconds, then minutes, then half hours. The frummer grew restless and began making a flurry of phone calls, slooshing Yiddish into the only clamshell he was allowed. Finally the stewardess came to tell him to stop phoning because the plane was taxiing, but this too he ignored.

I found the frummer heartening; his contradictory behaviour – at once mystical and insufferably worldly – seemed wholly in keeping with the paradox of modern air travel, whereby millions of pounds of thrust, a galaxy of halogen lights and leagues of concrete encapsulate a mundane environment dominated by the most trivial concerns. And it was while I was reflecting on this that the four merciless deities bolted to
the wings began to howl and the jet trundled along the runway with all the grace of a stolen shopping trolley, then rattled into the clouds.

When a while after takeoff the stewardess came by I ordered herb salad, followed by Vincent Bhatia’s prawn bhuna masala with coconut and curry leaf rice. Oh, and Eton mess to follow. The frummer laid tefillin. Of course, I knew a bit about phylacteries – they were bound to appeal to me – and if I’d ever inclined to observance tying little boxes to my head would’ve been a big part of the draw.

I chewed salad – he lashed the
shel yad
to his arm and the
shel rosh
to his head. I ate curry – he prayed:
And it shall be for a sign for you upon your head, and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the LORD may be in your mouth, for with a strong hand has the LORD brought you out of Egypt. You shall therefore keep this ordinance in its season from year to year
.

This, just one of the injunctions for the faithful to write down on parchment that a box was to be tied to their head, which was then put in a box that was tied to their head – a reduction ad absurdum that made me dizzy with joy. That within the tefillin was a scroll upon which no fewer than 3,188 Hebrew characters were written in kosher ink confirmed the magical intent. After all, it took fifteen hours with a limner’s abject concentration to write them, and if one was wrong, or two were out of order, the juju
wouldn’t work
: no mitzvah! This little black box was the flight recorder for a Haredi jet-propelled through life by the
halacha
, a set of rules so comprehensive – if open to labyrinthine interpretation – that they told him what he should be doing every moment of the day, and exactly how he should be doing it.

What was my own life beside such finicky precision? Cack-handed! Anomic! Eton-messy! True, the parchment scrolls of
Torah verses were by no means the smallest books in existence,
^*
but they had the virtue of being fragments of a single work that was all you ever needed to read – if, that is, you believed the universe had been created by a omnipotent games-playing deity with attention-deficit disorder as a real-time moral-philosophic experiment. I had my doubts.