Walking to Hollywood

1. Daycare

It was not long after I returned from Los Angeles, in the middle of June 2008, that I began to suspect there was something wrong — with the wider world, certainly, but perhaps also with me. At first I linked the fuzziness and forgetfulness that increasingly plagued me with the bizarre experience of walking to Hollywood; it seemed only just that the extraordinarily rich ebullition gifted me — particularly on the morning when I walked from the Chateau Marmont to Venice along Santa Monica Boulevard — should be compensated for by mental impoverishment.

The body, always a sturdier vessel, had righted itself soon enough: the superpowers I had possessed in LA — enabling me to leap tall buildings, stop buses with the palm of my hand and warp the trajectory of bullets — faded as soon as I reached home. When I tried to show my smaller sons what a hero I’d become by leaping over the wire-mesh fence of the all-weather football pitch in the local park, I threw myself straight into it. The five-a-side players left their ball pattering and came over to mock me where I lay.

But, while physically I simply returned to normal — the dull accommodation of my body, its strip-lit limbs and identical en suite organs — my mental faculties continued to deteriorate. When I came to consider the matter, the fact was that my memory had been eroding for some time: the grey waters of Lethe undercutting its soft cliffs, so that individual recollections — which, no matter how tasteless and bogus, nonetheless had the virtue of being owned outright, not mortgaged — tumbled on to the beach below. I could only posit forgetfulness-withinamnesia to explain how I had confused this with the standardissue agnosia of middle age: names and faces shuffled together, so that I often spent a half-hour or more at a party talking to someone I knew perfectly well, yet whose identity remained obstinately hidden.

Stupidly, I had indulged in special pleading on my own behalf — and for several years this did act as a groyne with which to impede the longshore drift. There was my notoriety, which served to make me more memorable to those I had met than I would’ve been otherwise, and so encouraged them to come forward: ‘You don’t remember me, do you, but… ’ Then there was also the nature of my work, which meant that either I was in solitary reclusion, or else revolving around the country promoting my novels at bookshops and literary festivals. Thrust, blinking, on to podium after stage, I suspected that, while I might be providing sharply etched vignettes for audiences, to me the experience was but part of an on-blurring.

It was true that in the decade since I had stopped drinking and taking drugs my short-term memory seemed to have improved; at any rate, I no longer needed the elaborate system of Post-it notes stuck to the walls of my writing room that had for years served me as a kind of random access. If I maintained this, it was more as an art installation, or magic ritual, designed both to represent the combinatorial powers of the imagination — and to stimulate them to order, then reorder, the tropes, gags, metaphors and observations with which I built my papery habitations. Recency may have been a slippery proposition, happy sociable families a demanding game, but I cleaved to the notion that my textual memory was better than ever. Sadly, this was a delusion; rather, it was my skill alone that had improved: I now wrote books with the workmanlike despatch of a carpenter turning out tables, this busy practice obscuring the loss of much I had once known.

In London, walking from the tube station, before I reached the grey whales’ backs of Frederick Button’s 1952 ferroconcrete bus garage, I passed a row of lime trees planted in circular beds raised above the pavement. Around the low brick walls the tarmac writhed with the slow subterranean flexing of the limes’ roots; while at the base of their trunks was all manner of rubbish: cigarette packets, aluminium cans, beer bottles and sweet wrappers were impaled on spiky shoots. It made an arresting image — this coppicing of trash — and ever since the winter, when I’d first noticed it, I’d reminded myself almost daily to go and photograph the waste-withies. Now it was summer and a thick canopy of leaves hid the mundane fruit. Now it was foetid summer — the atmosphere super-saturated with sweat-metal — and I realized, belatedly, that I had taken the limes for granted.

It was the same with the trees in the local park. As evening shadows flowed between the tower blocks, young men would bring their Staffordshire bull terriers out to be exercised. They tacked back and forth along the spore-smelling streets, human leaning away from canine as if hauling on a rope attached to a wayward boom. Then, in the park, the boys would complacently observe the dogs as they shat, before urging them on to attack the trees. The dogs broke the boughs’ necks, they gored the wrinkled hides — when they were done the oaks, rowans and birches looked as if a shell had exploded nearby, stripping long, white-green slats from their trunks. Eventually, these fell away, leaving only a necklace of dead bark immediately beneath the crown of the tree — and it was this that I forgot to record.

I couldn’t remember names, faces, places I had been and books I had read — but there was also a sinister awareness of estrangement from my immediate vicinity. London, the city of my birth — which I knew, not exhaustively, but well enough to set out from home and find my way almost anywhere intuitively — was becoming alien to me. Weaving among the lunchtime joggers along Rotten Row, then rounding Wellington’s old gaff at Number One, London, I would find myself in uncharted waters, with the effortlessly oriented gulls wheeling insultingly overhead: ‘Heeeere! Heeeere! Heeeere!’ That middle-aged Italian couple — he with puff of smoky beard, she with too youthful T-shirt and bum-bag — would it be too perverse to enquire if I might consult the map they held stretched between them? For I no longer recognized this city, this Londra.

At home, every day I expected to be exposed: my wife or children to arrest me on the stairs and cry, ‘I do not know you!’ Or, worse still, ‘You do not know me, do you?’ Basic mnemonics, long used by me to recall PIN numbers, or the name of the man in the bike shop, now had to be contrived for my nearest and dearest: she is not fat; fat people are D-shaped side on — therefore, her name begins with a D.

I linked the amnesia and the facial agnosia with my growing myopia. Print wasn’t attending to personal grooming: the index of the A-Z began to grow stubble; next it was the turn of the thesaurus. There seemed some logic to this: first I became disoriented — then I was unable to check my orientation; first I failed to recognize my interlocutors — then I was unable to search for synonyms, and so all shades of meaning were balled into monism. ‘This,’ as De Niro’s character in The Deer Hunter philosophized upon a bullet, ‘is this.’ But what did ‘this’ mean? I’d forgotten and could no longer consult the dictionary without glasses.

Still, I kept writing. I was correcting the proofs for a storycycle that was to be published that autumn. For all that I professed — to friends, colleagues, whoever would listen — that I was no longer focused on producing books (like tables, or bullets), but rather thought of the work as my fundamental praxis, my way of mixing my mind with the world and so extending my being — bits of text still had titles, the author’s name and my mugshot on the jacket.

The only memory I could summon with complete clarity was of a series of events that hadn’t happened to me at all, scenes from a documentary about a woman suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s that had been made — simply and affectingly — by her daughter. The woman was still feisty at the beginning of the film; thrice-married, but now on her own, she was only in her late fifties. She had her house, her garden, a job as a librarian in the university town where she lived. After her diagnosis, with sickening rapidity, she tipped backward into the coalhole of amnesia.

To begin with she was giddy with the fall — amused by her own forgetfulness. Like me, she devised mnemonics and stuck up Post-it notes; she kept a laboriously calibrated chart attached to the fridge, so she could discover what she should be — or actually was — doing. At first she checked this from day to day, then hour to hour, and eventually moment to moment. Soon enough she became depressed — and this coincided with her trips to a daycare centre, her raven hair nestling on the minibus beside all those snowy cowls.

Depressed and distressed. She sought alleviation, and throughout her miserable deterioration kept asking her daughter to take her to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, a picturesque resort where they had often holidayed and she had loved to sea bathe. But her daughter — in frank asides to the camera — explained that this was a wish she felt unable to accede to, for fear that her beloved mother would simply swim out to sea and submerge her own incomprehension in the liquid unknown.

Mercifully, the woman’s memory quickly became so circumscribed that she was encased in a mere droplet of self-awareness, a permanent Now, the silvery surface tension of which gifted her once more with girlish high spirits. Purged of foresight and all but a few dregs of sensual recollection, she was free to simply Be; and it was then, finally, that her daughter no longer fearful that she would commit suicide, for she lacked the capacity to formulate a plan — granted her boon.

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 BBCI 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.)’

There was a raw constructivism to the Nationwide title sequence — and a peculiar masculinity also. There were no women nationwide — at least, not in this erect procession of images, whose subtext was a series of phallicisms: Progress, the well-lubricated interpenetration of Town and Country, Benign Paternalism. I loved Nationwide; my brother and I would watch it whenever we could — which wasn’t often, because our insufferably bien-pensant parents had, in their infinite snobbery, got rid of our television. Usually, the current affairs the show reported were emphatically soft and mushy: items about skateboarding ducks, or a monastic order that manufactured toothbrushes; hard news resounded elsewhere. It was presumably in this spirit of quirky human interest that the man at Skipsea Sands on the Holderness coast had been interviewed.

Middle age — the fulcrum around which the mind-world turns. In youth the future is murky, while the past has a seeming clarity — but now it’s the future that becomes crystal clear: blackberries shining in a hawthorn hedge after sudden autumnal rain. Decline — then death. Meanwhile the past recedes, lapping back from a muddied shore across which it’s unsafe to wade — who knows what might have happened there?

At New Year there had been a photograph in the newspaper headed ‘Hazardous New Year’ and captioned ‘Houses close to a cliff in Skipsea, Yorkshire, have been gradually falling over the edge and it is thought unlikely that they will survive the year.’ They? Survive? Echoes surely of the personification of property that had dominated Britain in the early years of the century, but, setting this to one side, there remained the uncanny feeling that while the householders had been watching for years as the void encroached on their loved ones — undercutting the gardens, munching on the rockeries, crunching up the cucumber frames, then picking its teeth with raspberry canes — I had been watching them watch.

I conceived of taking a walk from Flamborough Head, north of Bridlington, where the chalk synclines of the Yorkshire Wolds are sheered off by the brown sea, to Spurn Head, that peculiar three-mile shingle bracket that hooks round into the wide mouth of the River Humber. It occurred to me that were I to keep for the entire distance within six feet of either cliff edge or shoreline, I would, very likely, have completed a journey it would be impossible for anyone to ever make again. By the time another year had passed the solid ground that had risen up to meet my feet would have disappeared forever.

This would be a unique walk of erasure — a forty-mile extended metaphor for my own embattled persona, as its foundations were washed away by what I suspected was earlyonset Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was also sympathetic magic: the walk devised as a ritualized erection of groynes, which might impede the longshore drift of my psyche.

To counter this — frankly morbid — self-absorption, I scanned the data on long-, short- and medium-term cliff erosion rates. I checked out coastal evolution and beach plan shape modelling. I examined the evidence of site inspections, and the various proposals — including the Mappleton coastal defences — that had been advanced against the ceding of solid to liquid. I read the reports of expert witnesses, and looked at the aerial photographs they had posted on the web, marked up so as to make explicit the underlying dynamics.

The names of the towns and villages that had been inundated since the medieval era were legion: Wilsthorpe, Hartburn, Hyde, Withow and Cleton; Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe; Great Golden, Golden Parva and Old Aldborough — and so on; like mortality itself, the sea had ground into utter oblivion, these, the habitations of already faceless villeins. Near to Spurn Head itself had stood the substantial town of Ravenser, a sturdy plantation of spires and spars where Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399, and which, until the rise of Hull, was the principal port of Yorkshire. Since the Roman occupation more than fifty square miles of land had gone from Holderness, and still it disintegrated, clods and stones plash-plopping into the shallow sea.

As I undertook these researches the conviction grew in me that far from the erosion of two yards of land every year being a tragedy, it should be regarded as uplifting — for here was a landscape that was more transient than an individual human. The bungalows would be rebuilt inland, the UPVC windows reinstalled, the caravans would head north to Filey — only the earth was drowning.

I had never visited the Holderness coast, although, on a couple of occasions, I’d gone up to Hull to do book readings. The first time I went the crowd at the bar where I read seemed convivial, and afterwards I fell into conversation with a local man, talk that — I now realize — had itself been rendered parenthetical by the great bracketing of nearby Spurn Head. (He was a tall British-Asian with angular, faceted looks that mirrored my own — including the sunken cheeks, pockmarked with old acne scars.)

The man explained how he and his son liked to drive out on a Sunday, through the lush reclaimed lowland of Sunk Island to the peninsula, and how the sense of abandonment and loss they both felt — the family was broken, they were deracinated — was almost pleasurably compounded by Spurn Head itself, where on the eastern flank of the peninsula a Victorian lighthouse stood, surrounded at high tide by the waters of the estuary, for the shingle and sand spit where it had once rested had wavered away to the west.

On their walks along the beaches, the man and his son happened upon slimed reefs of discarded chattels — fridges, televisions, washing machines, the dinosaur bones of antediluvian agricultural equipment — all of it caught in serried piles, which in previous centuries had been driven into this skittish land in a forlorn attempt to pin it down. And as I listened to the man talk — he was not articulate, but expressive, what with his shrugs and hand-chops and hesitations — I was thrust back to the Paragon Station at which I had arrived a couple of hours previously.

It was a proper terminus — emphatically at the end of the line. As I had lurched stiffly from the train, I was struck by how lofty the vaulted roof seemed; tiny humans beetled along the grey platforms beside the worms’ casts of the rolling stock, while from up on high cold loads of light were let down through translucent perspex. By the time I had reached the booking hall the fugue had intensified: the old oaken island of a branch of W. H. Smith’s and the blind arches along the walls faced with caramel-brown tiling shored up the mounting sensation that I had arrived too late; that this was the voided — although not yet decaying — outpost of an empire that, rather than being overthrown, had been undermined by creeping indifference.

That was the first visit. The second time I went to Hull I was early for my event and so walked through the shopping zone to visit the museum down by the old dock area, passing a pub that advertised Lindisfarne Fruit Wines and mixed drinks with names such as ‘Dr Pepper’s Depth Charge’ and ‘Shit-on-the-Grass’. In the cobbled streets of the eighteenth-century town the silence was louder than bombs.

It was a quiet weekday afternoon in summer, and almost museum closing time. Once I’d passed the somnolent staff in the shop full of moulded plastic and printed cotton, I found myself alone in a series of comfortingly predictable spaces. Polystyrene rocks housed dioramas of the Holderness coast of 120,000 years previously, when elephants wandered the jungly cliff that ran miles to the west of the present-day coastline. Then came a dummy of a Holocene mammoth, standing foursquare on the linoleum tiles; then there were Neolithic artefacts and a life-sized, mop-topped human dummy that had been buried in a fibreglass sarcophagus.

Passing between the glass cases full of earthenware and bronze anklets, I became aware of an eerie hissing sound and a woman muttering in a half-foreign tongue. Exactly at the moment I realized this must be a recording, I saw the lit-up glass case containing the late Bronze Age wooden figurines known — after the Holderness drainage ditch where they were discovered in 1836 — as the Roos Carr Figures.

As I read the information cards, and stared at the curious spindly men, carved from pine over 2,000 years previously, I found that my mind was racing — forward in time, back in time, circling my own lifetime, then plotting its curve on to the widening gyre of history itself — while my body was paralysed, drenched in sweat.

The pebble eyes inserted in the pinheads of the four figures that had been placed upright in the carved boat held me captive for long minutes, then released me to stagger into the mockup of an Iron Age village. The muttering was, as I suspected, a curator’s notion of proto-English, placed in the mouth of a manikin at a treadle. I stood gathering my wits for a while, under the cutaway thatch of a newly ancient hovel, until the staff member assigned to check the galleries were empty came past me. ‘Oh! You frightened me,’ she said, and then: ‘I suppose I should be used to it by now.’ It being, I supposed, the presence of live humans in among the instructional dummies.

Later on, I was approached after the reading by a man who told me that his wife had very much wanted to attend but was unable to do so because she was trapped in their house by a swarm of bees. It was a warm evening and it took us about ten minutes to walk there. The bees were densely clustered on the front door of the two-up, two-down, their translucent wings, gingery bodies and black extremities conveying an impression that this living micro-mosaic was but a detail of a far larger picture.

We went round to the back door and found his wife drinking gin with a friend in the kitchen, while clearly relishing her predicament. ‘I called the police hours ago,’ she said. ‘But they’ve not sent anyone yet.

I pictured the beekeepers who must be on stand-by during the swarming season; half dreading, half hoping that they would be called upon to go and twirl the living candyloss on to a stick, put it in a box, put the box in the back of a small van. The bespoke suit of tiny bodies agitating your skin… the galvanic stress of knowing they are about to poison you from every angle.

That night I ate in an empty Bengali restaurant. There were overhead strip-lights, and neon tubes rimmed the plate-glass windows. The tablecloth fluoresced beneath my sad hands as I ate far more chana masala than I’d intended. Later, my belly slopped in my dinkily awful room at the Royal, which was one of those hotels built into the wall of a station like the Grosvenor at London’s Victoria Station, or the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. As a child the Grosvenor had entranced me; its fusty reception rooms and wide staircases seemed doubly interior — rooms inside a big building that was itself inside a bigger building. Yet Victoria, like the Paragon Station in Hull, was open to the elements, swirling with soot and pigeons, and so the hotels were perhaps only gatehouses between one world and the next.

In the predawn I awoke to crouch grimly for a rope-burn of an evacuation, then slept again, uneasily, and dreamt I was standing in the booking hall of the station, staring up through the oculus. I was aware of the tremendous emptiness of sky over sea, and, on stepping out through the main doors, I discovered not the expected thuggery of the shopping centre opposite, but the peninsula of Spurn Head tapering into the distance, its shingle, furze and sand a collage that had no relief or hue but lay Rat on the still Ratter sea. Just visible, at the very end of the spit, was a vapour trail such as you sometimes see streaming from the tip of an aircraft wing, or a Himalayan peak.

2. Static Homes

I left home at 7.00 a.m. on the Thursday, 24 July 2008. It had been a damp summer and, perversely, I was hoping for poor weather — a Hollywood rain of milky droplets to veil my departure, through which I could scuttle along shining pavements before burrowing into the tube. Down there, in the hypocaust of the city, warmed by the commuters’ foodybreath — well, it would be like relapsing into sleep once more; then, I’d reawaken to the sooty chill of King’s Cross, a space that no amount of renovation could ever rejuvenate.

Instead there was bright sunlight and butterflies clipped the flowering buddleia by the front gate with their bladethin wings. At the end of our block there was a pavement shrine: a score of cellophane-wrapped bouquets leant against the iron railings, the spikes of which were festooned with T-shirts, wristbands and laminated cards covered in rap poetry. Spreading out almost to the kerb were tea lights arranged to form the slogan I LOVE FREDDY. There were two or three brightly coloured plastic water guns propped among the shrivelled floral tributes, and as I passed by one of a pair of youths who were contemplating the shrine bent to touch a play weapon, while remarking to his companion, ‘’E turned ’is back an’ ven vay plunged ’im.’

I had with me a notebook and considered stopping to note this down — but then forgot all about it within yards. In the past, at the start of a journey, its pages would be blankly awaiting the obsessively tight stitching of my handwriting as I tried to sew observation to thought. But now it was already quite full of train times, the places I intended visiting and those where I was booked to stay; a detailed itinerary that was necessary, lest, from one hour to the next, I forgot why it was I had gone to East Yorkshire, where I hailed from — and so was lost entirely.

If I were to be found wandering, mute and disoriented, I wondered what my rescuer might make of those pages where, in anticipation of being unable to recall the right words or phrases, I had pre-emptively set out a multiple-choice list of alternative descriptions, thus:

Flamborough Head is: (a) impressive (b) windy and desolate (c) desolate and oppressive (d) a jolly place, what with the wheeling gulls and the trippers taking tea beneath a candy-striped lighthouse (e) with its humped back and baleen cliffs, suggestive of a beached leviathan.

There were also examples of credible self-knowledge that I could select from upon waking, either from sleep or an amnesiac spell, such as: (a) I dreamt of the lost children again — is there something I am repressing? (b) I have my father’s powerful self-absorption together with my mother’s fearful neurosis. (c) The anger I felt when the woman in the newsagent’s sniggered at me was qualitatively exactly the same as that I experienced aged eleven when teased because of my haircut. (d) Impotence can be a refuge. (e) There is no time left now — yet self-obsession is a dimension of its own.

All I had to do — or so I had convinced myself — was circle the appropriate letter and I would add another niblet of commentary to the great multi-and-no-faith Talmud. Yet, by the time I was sprawled on the chequerboard of sweaty plush, the scheme seemed at best unworkable — at worst futile. As the train pulled away from Victoria a recorded announcement intoned: ‘The next stop is Victoria, change here for District, Circle and Piccadilly lines and mainline rail services.’ At the time I thought it was a mistake.

The east coast line franchise had been won that summer by a company called Grand Central. The ends of the carriages bore blown-up photographs of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean; passengers — had there been any besides me — might have meditated on the desirability of self-murder and good looks, or else played upon the Monopoly and chess boards incorporated into the tables. As I say, the train was nearly empty, yet still it strained to achieve escape velocity, struggling through Camden Town and past Alexandra Palace before leaving the planetoid of London brick behind around Watford.

At Hitchin a Montessori school and a pole-dancing club shared the same single-storey premises. I wondered idly which institution the sign on the flat roof — ‘Wonderland’ — referred to. Ash trees did a dusty hula-hula along the field margins, gloss-black cattle stood in the deep shadow beneath the massy crowns of oaks. I went to the buffet car in my socks. The steward placed a lidded styrofoam cup in a small paper carrier bag, together with a tea bag in a sachet, a tube of UHT milk and another sachet — this one of sugar. I explained to him — as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag — that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously — his appeal to health and safety was the hiss of a cornered snake. My probing head felt small, hard, shiny and wedged into the top corner of the carriage like a security camera. I knew — without being able to recall a single instance — that I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute’s stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England. The steward’s glare cut me into diamond shapes that sparkled in the sunlight, then condensed into droplets whipped away from the carriage window — a vaporous trail.

I grabbed a complimentary copy of The Times from the counter and beat a retreat to my seat.

The fight went out of the train and it sidled to a halt beside an irrigation system that was jetting liquid assets over a field full of subsidies. I rattled the paper open on this headline: ‘Scepticism Mounts over Installation of Holderness Wind Turbines’. There was an aerial photograph showing the thirty-mile outer curve being described by the giant turbines as they were implanted in the seabed between Flamborough Head and Spurn Head.

How could I have forgotten this? The largest public works project in living memory, one that had been compared in its scale and dynamism to the Tennessee Valley Authority or, more tendentiously, the Mittelbau- Dora labour camps that served the V-2 rocket factories. The government’s commitment to generate 10 per cent of the nation’s electricity using renewable technologies had been the centrepiece of its regeneration programme and seldom out of the news. The long-term unemployed of Tyneside and South Shields had been dragooned back into work, and by some accounts were being treated by the contractors — a German company — with a toughness bordering on brutality. Others said that this was nonsense, that the 30,000-strong workforce was being either newly inducted or retrained in an exemplary fashion and to the highest standards. Once the turbines had been built and installed, these men and women would form the core of a fully revitalized heavy-industry sector in the Northeast: a new generation of welders, fabricators and turners who would rival — then exceed — the output of those who had built the great warships and artillery pieces of the Imperial era.

When they came on-line, each one of the massive, three-bladed turbines would generate five megawatts of clean power — and there were to be a hundred of them strung along the Holderness coast alone. Naturally there was opposition; an uneasy alliance had sprung up between the power station workers — who saw their jobs blowing away in the wind — and the more extreme environmentalists, who, while they may have campaigned aggressively for renewable energy, never envisaged it being generated on quite this scale, nor predicated upon a gargantuan reindustrialization. And then there were the inhabitants — the operators of shrinking caravan parks and the farmers of diminishing acreages, aghast that so much tax payers’ money should be poured into the German Ocean, while their own sea defences — with the exception of those at Hornsea and Withernsea — had been abandoned on the grounds that they weren’t cost-effective. In the pubs and golf club bars from Bridlington to Easington it was reported that dark mutterings could be heard, of sabotage — and worse.

I looked up from the article to discover that the train had slow-danced into the flatlands of the Humber estuary. The green corduroy of the fields smoothed away on either side; to the east there squatted the fat-bellied cooling towers of the Drax power station at Selby, belching smoke; while to the west an obese grey-white cloud waddled up into the blue sky, its source the Ferrybridge power station at Knottingley. Was it possible, I mused, to judge by eye alone which of these genies was bigger, or to distinguish limbs from heads? Or was this anthropomorphizing itself evidence of my part in a futile collective denial? For they were nothing, really, these clouds — only a portion of the thirty million tons of carbon the pair vomited out every year.

Not just the Drax and the Ferrybridge — hereabouts the coal-fired power stations were as windmills in a Dutch landscape; there was the Eggborough at Goole and the Salt End in Hull itself. All those trillions of carbon particles roiling up, then caught by the wind shear and so driven offshore into the turbine blades; dirty power twined by clean into a vaporous trail that wavered over the waves. In the synoptic eye of my fervid mind the turbines became the propellers of a monstrous airship — or landship, for the craft was the seabed and the Holderness coast; straining, the turbines wrenched the crumbling cliffs, the caravans’ hard standings, even entire flintknapped churches away from the East Riding, away from the desert island of Britain.

Under the elegant glass and cast-iron roof of York Station I bought a medium latte with a triple shot of espresso. The caffeine was a bad idea — my bowels liquefied, but the platforms were thronged and there was no time to queue for the toilets, so I pressed in among day trippers who were crowding against the doors of the small, five-coach Scarborough train. Then I struggled past bare arms as pendulous as fat bellies to achieve a single seat. I opened The Times again, and as the train chuckled away from York read that the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho would be screened on a cable channel that evening. ‘It’s a fascinating insight into an inhuman mind,’ the previewer wittered, ‘with a late twist revealing the sheer insanity at the core of Bateman’s character.’

Bateman? Ellis? The names had a certain familiarity, as did the vignette-sized photograph of a chubby-cheeked man not unlike the young Orson Welles — yet I couldn’t pin down the facts: did I know either of them, or had I only seen the movie?

On family car journeys we played the memory game. Each member, in turn, recited the formula ‘On my holiday I took with me… ‘, then added their own item, whether bucket, spade or pink sun dress. The next player had to remember all the previous things and then add another. Could this be a useful strategy for me, one to add to the mnemonics, the lists of routine activities, and the technique — which I had easily mastered — of not asking myself any questions, or contradicting myself, only supplying a steady flow of reassuring answers?

The passengers sat surrounding me, jammed into the smoothly adzed wooden vessel; their torsos were rigid, their arm-length detachable penises lay by their feet. Their quartzite eyes flickered as cuttings, embankments, trees and barns hurried past the little train, which was mounting now, up into the Yorkshire Wolds. Had they all faked their own deaths, I wondered. If so, where were those things they had taken on their holiday, the floating buckets, the sinking spades, the billowing sun dresses — if not scattered on the cold green waves?

Besides, if I listed everything — a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke, a tracksuit top with trompe l’œil chainmail sleeves, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig — wasn’t there my paramnesia to contend with? Might I incorporate things that didn’t belong to me — and had never even been in my visual field? And so I dredged up an unimpeachable memory: the British Ghanaian writer who had accosted me at a West London summer party, where the guests sheltered from the rain in a palatial playhouse, and, his jaw prognathous with cocaine gurning, clutched my arm as he explained his failure to publish was a result of ‘My fatal flaw, see, it’s girls in boots with guns. Before the internet it wasn’t a problem — I mean, I could control it — access was difficult; but now… Man! There’s too much — a superabundance!’

So I took his flaw with me on my holiday, together with the five empty Ribena cartons that clustered in the rain hood of a Maclaren buggy. Further along the carriage one of the wooden idols cracked its mouth and said, ‘I’m a systems analyst.’ While I thought, aren’t we all?

At Seamer I left the train, laced my boots, then went away through a metal gate to piss among nettles and brambles, their stems and thorns trussed with flung silage. Not good, this modern Millais, the white rim of a discarded paper cup beaded with urine taking the place of Ophelia’s wrist, breaking the surface of the pool. The next train was full of commuters heading south to Hull — they took me with them on their business trips, together with the boots, the guns, the girls and the child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig.

I detrained at Bempton. The landscape rolled modestly through the final waves of syncline and anticline before the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head. I had envisioned the train chugging around the crescent bay of Filey, holidaymakers saluting it with uplifted spades, a portly McGill man in a onepiece striped bathing costume leaping, crab nipping his big toe. Instead, there was only this: thick white cumuli tumbling down on the spectral willows, a monotonous breeze, and pebble-dashed bungalows, each neat front garden equipped with a paddling pool and a trampoline. I edged past, stopping every hundred yards or so to see if, by some minor adjustment, I could make my boots more comfortable.

Most of the trampolines had security netting both at the sides and overhead. I was still perplexed; surely the parents were being irresponsible, there had been over 4,000 disappearances this year already. One moment the child happily bouncing, the next raised up not in Rapture but abject terror. Up and up they flew, human balloons trailing thin screams. They never came down again. Inevitably there were many occasions when a sibling or playmate grabbed hold of those about to be disappeared by their trainers, only to let go when too far up. One little girl who had survived the fall was in the hospital at York. Interviewed by detectives, she said she saw nothing, knew nothing and felt nothing but pain. Still the children went on trampolining.

The straight way between two nondescript Yorkshire villages, drivers’ mouths wobbling as they swerved to avoid me; a group of sinisterly black toadstools in the grooves of a felled ash; the elongated barrow of an overgrown old railway embankment; the beige earth littered with plough-sharehalved flints; Seaways Farm, Home of Agricycle, WARNING: GUARD DOGS, WARNING C.C.T.V. installed on these premises. Then Flamborough village clustered around two fish and chip shops, its peripheral brick semis tucked like Monopoly properties in the corner of raggedy fields. The old octagonal lighthouse tipped above the horizon, quaint as a doge’s hat; next golfers grazing on their fairways, after that the new lighthouse and after this the cold and salty shock of the whiteflecked waves retreating towards a hazy horizon guarded by — Oh! How could I have forgotten them?

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of girls in boots with guns, quartzite eyes, a detachable wooden penis, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig — and these: beyond the whitewashed Coastguard station, and the steely latticing of a pair of radio masts, came marching the tripods with their three-bladed heads. I was shocked by their size — at least 500 feet high, the ones closest to Flamborough Head stood wave-waisted, entire, while those further out each had a bobbing flotilla of barges and service vessels. Further still, where the vast parenthesis tended to the south, the turbines were still being erected; the floating cranes’ platforms were measurable by acreage, their davits implausible — their being of human manufacture, that is.

Cheery walkers — ‘Hello, matey’ — passed me by as I scooted over the headland, my eyes not on grassy quiff but the great bracket of the turbines wavering away in the sea haze. At the cliff edge, I stopped, got out my stove and made tea. Sipping and smoking, I checked the three, shiny-new maps I’d brought, counting the kilometre squares to Bridlington, then Bramston, then on to Skipsea, where I planned staying the night. While I stared into the map’s pale clarity of line and colour factoring all dimensions into two, everything appeared intelligible; yet if I peered over my paper lap, down to the shattered chalk at the cliff base, it looked uncannily like broken-up blocks of old metal type. This place, far from legitimizing my amnesia, might prove a fatal shore for my comprehension. I packed up and pressed on, leaving the maps lying on the fan of grass where I’d been sitting.

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw — not girls in boots with guns, but Socrates’ cashiered madman, who had to be yanked along behind me, drool on his chin, roused only by the surreal lubrications I whispered in his ugly ear. Then there was the rubber figurine — at most two or three inches high — sporting a navy blue siren suit buttoned tightly to the neck and with the head of a pig. However, I forgot the maps and by the time I noticed I’d walked on a couple of miles along the declining cliffs — drawing level with Sewerby Hall, a stately enough pile, although now surrounded by the pavilions and pennants of a caravanning jamboree — and it was pointless going back. My way was physically straightforward and temporally warped; no mapping could explain the grinding away to silt and sand of all those generations who had toiled in the lost fields and beaten back the vanished hedgerows.

My breath in my ears, the rhythm of the waves, the steady tramp of my molars on latex impregnated with nicotine. I still smoked, a bit, but this gum was the scrag-end of my addiction. I had sucked in clouds of self-absorption for decades, shaped then moulded them with tooth, tongue and lip, until finally they were compacted into this dense yet mutable wad.

The cliff face grew fuller and was grassed over. I was in a municipal park where serious pilots had ambitions completely out of scale with their model planes; would-be paragliders hopped about, adipose as bumblebees, their black nylon suits striped with logos, their empty wing cases sagging on their backs. One had managed to get his glider aloft, and it filled out, then curled into a 25-foot parenthesis; he tugged on the guidelines and made local leaps, but I doubted he’d ever get aloft — his chute bracketed him with the land.

The path became lined with benches towards which I felt great compassion. I knew the Yorkshire folk took their passing over seriously and carted their senescent ones here, to the east, where they drowsed out the balance of their lives; becoming stiffer, squatter, more wooden in the sun porches of residential care homes, days and nights speeding across their faces, until, at the moment of expiration, they metamorphosed into these noble sit-upons, at the ends of which their descendants could prop floral offerings.

I’d assumed from the gull cries of the children skating across the slick beach that the town was crowded — then suddenly I was in among the smoked-glass barns full of slot machines and the bits of Victorian terrace, and there was hardly anyone about. Along the front there was a handful of family groups, most consisting of elderly parents eating donuts and a grown-up Down’s child with a toffee apple. Lumpy teens jostled in the finely drawn shadows, their cheeks livid with candyfloss. The atmosphere was so sugary the air was granulated, then, at the funfair, the Jungle Ride’s dugout canoes were all screamingly empty as they were winched on their cataract over the beach.

I sat down by the old harbour, savouring the fishy smell. A few remaining inshore boats were jostled by a clinking mass of sailing dinghies with aluminium masts, which in turn had been pushed to the barnacled seawall by two giant, crudely formed steel feet. Rising, I went down to the quayside so that the feet towered four storeys above me, rust-streaked rivets running around the insteps and up the shins. To seaward the swell of the calves almost blocked the harbour entrance, but I could make out the thickening thighs, the oil rig of the hips and pelvis, and beyond this the tanker-sized chest stranded on the sands.

It was less the anthropoid form of the turbine that bothered me than the fact of it being there at all. Even if the structure was hollow the highest of tides still wouldn’t float it. How had it come to be beached here in Bridlington, rather than implanted with its robotic fellows, the long line of which I could see stitching the horizon with their slow-revolving blades? I wanted to ask someone what the hell was going on. How long had the turbine been run aground here? Was it under repair? I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a crowd of gawpers — at the very least a fisherman coiling a rope or chipping paint, but there was no one, and when I reached the top of the harbour wall the entire disconcerting length of the turbine was revealed: it was decapitated, bladeless — or armless — and with its slightly bandy legs and deep chest appeared out of kilter. The enormous turbine reminded me of someone, but who? I resolved to find out when I reached Skipsea.

The last Michelin people rolled past me along the low concrete walls bounding some defunct fast-food joints, the beach blew out before me, a quarter- then a half-mile wide. Families were silhouetted behind the bellying canvas of their windbreaks, while lone men flew their outsized kites, each another ellipsis added to the gulls’ wings quoting the sky. The lone men staggered, skidded, the kites sliced down on to the sand. The lone men went to curl up behind them.

Inching towards me at my own dogged pace came some stuff washed up along the tide line. Was it frills of seaweed or more durable wrack, detergent bottles and car tyres? The dogs had dragged their walkers off, the kite flyers had skittered away, the wind was rising, and there were no particulars anymore with which to judge the scale of things, only the universals of sea, sand and sky. I started when the first pillbox popped up at my feet, tilted, its single oblong eye black and weeping. Beyond this sentinel there were more and still more hammered down into the wet sand, limpid pools at their gnarled feet. Were they mourning their failure — not to defend the country, for no invasion had ever been mounted — but the land itself, land that, in the seventy years since they had been built, had been driven back a hundred yards to where it now cowered, its raised hackles a field of barley?

I went up there and laid some apostrophic turds among the crop. There was no one around; besides, I doubted that I could really be leaving any spoor. I sensed already that the walk was doing its own mysterious business, so that with each step I took, far from creating a footprint, I rubbed away whatever marks had been left on my memory, leaving it as smooth as the sable plain ahead.

Local Indians stood by their quad-bike steeds, their squaws danced to a boom box; an arrow of WWII fighters flew overhead. This was all: the hours filed by me, the beach narrowed, its innumerable grains flowing through the glassy pinch-point of my contemplation. The shoreline humped up into a muddy cliff of domestic proportions — maybe only sixty feet high. On my holiday I took with me the madman on his chain, the rubber figurine, these clayey flotches and bulbous little stalagmites, in among them the slow surge of the long-since broken waves. I took entire sections of brick wall, washed round and smooth as cushions, tight ribbons of mortar cutting into them.

The muddy cliff morphed into thousands of dragons’ teeth, then concrete-filled oil cans; a slipway staggered past, atop it a compound of caravans reached by a rusty iron flight. The cliff slid on, and now up above me lanced the spars and beams of structures recently undermined. Drainpipes thrust up from the mud, together with coils of wire, dead-birds’-wings of polythene, three courses of a garden wall complete with curlicues of cast-iron decoration spanned a gulch in the mudface, above this the nibbled end of a road to nowhere. To the west, unseen, the sun was setting into this clag, the sky silvered, then greiged.

Surely by now I must be near to Tipsea? Dipsea? Skipsea? whatever the place was called. Even if I wasn’t, I’d have to head inland, for darkness was coming and the tide had risen to within twenty yards of the cliff, while up above hung the outlines of half-shacks, quarter-bungalows and the oblongs of hard standings recently abandoned by static homes. The one-sided alleyway of dereliction was stark against the evening sky. I had been walking for over seven hours since I stepped down from the train; landward there was nothing I could recall, while to the east, I knew, lay Wilsthorpe and Auburn, Hartburn, Hyde and Withow, their salted fields and silted cottages, their shingle-filled belfries and long-rotted inhabitants, whose grinning skulls were stuffed with seaweed and crabs.

I worked my way up the cleft of a drainage ditch and so came to the cliff top. The bisected alley was still gloomier up close: the abandoned chicken coops, their tarpaper roofs lifting away like scabs; the epidermal layers of linoleum left exposed in the corpse of a bungalow. I thought I heard footsteps in this half a home, a muttered curse, a shoulder roughing up a wall. I felt no inclination to investigate — in the declining light the turbines stood along the horizon like gibbets, or crucifixes. All but one had been anchored for the night, and as I turned inland its blades waved goodbye.

At the Board Inn the liqueur coffees were £3.10 and the girl in the big white blouse said, ‘Ahl av a loook faw ya,’ and went off to see if the lamb balti was on. I sat, staring blankly at the raffia placemats and the bentwood chairs gathered around them. I was the sole customer for the mini savouries combi platter, the only person who could be urged, ‘Treat Yourself to Spanish “Rioja”’. As someone schooled in the Oxford Analytic tradition, I feared that punctuation might well be logic, and so these quotation marks implied a certain dubiety, that the wine was indeed Rioja was only hearsay.

The girl returned with an affirmative and took my order, then a while later she came back again with a little karahi on a plate, a stack of tiny rotis beside it and a small mound of white rice. I decanted the meaty sludge and began eating with the laboured precision that is the very hallmark of solitude. This stuff — the lamp contrived from four bunches of metal grapes, a fish tank in a gilt frame, photographs of the Inn in the 1960s showing Morris Travellers plumping up soft verges — all of it swirled briny before my tired eyes.

And then, a few tables away, there was a quartet of large German engineers in tartan shirts, upsetting stonewashed jeans and high-topped lace-up rubber boots. They were getting physical with pints of lager and a bottle of ‘Rioja’. One second — as I chased rice grain with tine around the stadium of my plate — they weren’t there, the next they were, decompressing from the day’s exertion, their mud-smeared fingers definite, feeling. They hadn’t simply materialized, for there was their Toyota pickup, outside the window, the treads of its outsized tyres knobbly like tripe.

The place name ‘Bridlington’ projected from the erosive wash of their German, and so I went over and, excusing myself, asked if, by any chance, they were working on the wind farm project? Absolutely! They invited me to join them — what was I drinking, would I take some wine? (Although, confidentially, they very much doubted it was Rioja.) I retrieved my tonic water from my own table, leery of too great an intimacy. I might be asked questions about myself that I could only answer by consulting my notebook.

The big feet stamping in Bridlington harbour, had they been a summer madness of mine? No, they reassured me, this turbine was indeed human-shaped. ‘To be precise,’ the most academic-looking of the engineers said, ‘it is the body form of a famous British artist.’ He mentioned a name, but it meant nothing to me. ‘He is doing this kind of thing all over the places, I think — all these big statues, scaled up from a cast of his own body. It is very interesting I think that he is also, how you say… ein Zwerg?’

‘A dwarf, I think.’ One of his colleagues offered.

‘A dwarf, exactly so.’

The German had bifocals, an upswept wispy moustache. He spoke with no malice, and I noticed then that his companions’ faces were in fact equally refined, altogether at variance with their rough hands and workmen’s clothing.

He continued, explaining that the famous artist was very driven, and that his specifications for the anthropoid turbine had to be met with great precision. ‘The oxidization, you are knowing this has to be all over the same, so…’ This was why it had to be beached at Bridlington: it was waiting to be rusty. ‘Unt then, the fixing of the blades, two only, so they will… how you say? Anheln, yes, resemble, so they will resemble arms, this is so very difficult, while the costing, this is “phut!”’ He held up his hands, grabbing at bunches of cash. ‘I do not know why your government is paying for this — not now.’

I had left my rucksack at the bed and breakfast opposite the pub. When I’d arrived, Pauline, who was whippet-thin, had asked me a trifle shamefacedly to go round to the back of the substantial brick farmhouse, and I obliged, musing on how like genteel pimping keeping a B&B was: you give me £30, I let you sleep with my sheets.

The room was in an annexe. It was a new conversion, spic and span with recessed spotlights and varnished blond wood. A basket of potpourri sat on the lid of the cistern in the wet room. There could be no question of spending any time there other than to sleep, so after leaving the Board Inn I resisted the ebb back to the sea and dragged myself further inland, through the village, then across the fields to Skipsea Brough, a substantial Norman mott-and-bailey that stood, overgrown with gorse and brambles, in misty cow pasture. The light, which down on the beach had been fast fading, endured here, and I sat on top of the old cone for a while, puffing away, and hanging on for grim death while a glossy crew of rooks made misery in the trees.

Yet still the light quivered, and eventually I could no longer resist it and set off back to the cliff. By the time I got there night had fallen and I could hear the relentless pulsion of the longshore drift, the grumbling into nothing of the friable land. Out of the darkness an image came to me of the cascade arcade game I’d played as a child on Brighton’s West Pier, the heavy old pennies, with their tarnished heads of Georges, Edwards and even Victoria, all of them clunking down from one moving platform to the next.

My boots were pinching and I could feel blisters forming on my insteps — yet still I went on, intent on that shattered alley where I had heard something moving in the bisected bungalow. There it was, dirty poplin curtains whiting the sad little eyes of the windows in its porch. I forced the rotten front door and spilled into a mildewed parlour. The lino was scattered with fallen plaster and an open doorway opposite framed a dead mackerel sky above leaden waters; dominating this queer pictorial space — as if the subject of cosmic portraiture — loomed the head of a turbine.

I froze listening to my own wheezing, then heard the snaps and crackles of someone else’s bronchial misery. I moved forward and discovered him on the far side of the doorway, his back against the externalized wallpaper, his feet dangling in the void. Without looking at me he said abruptly, ‘Have you any water?’

I gave him my naive bottle and he took a slug, then, wiping his mouth, he said in a voice flattened by fear, ‘What does it mean? What do these things mean?’

Keeping my back against the wall I hunkered down, earthy granules rattling away over the flopping old lino. I knew the drop was only sixty feet or so, and that the soft mud slumped, rather than fell sheer, to the shingle — but no one wants to fall from half a house. Sensing me beside him, the man extended a nocturnal hand, which crawled on to my sleeve.

‘Why are these things permitted?’ he continued. ‘What’ve we done wrong? It was only a little place, somewhere to relax and do some painting. I come back from a walk this afternoon and it’d collapsed! Like I were being punished — all my work, down there’ — the hand leapt into the air — ‘trashed! What are these bloody things!’ The hand grabbed at the turbine head on the horizon.

‘What’re we?’ I answered, clearing my throat. I had an acute sense of this fellow, the water colourist, as pale, freckled, softfeatured, thirtyish, liberal and impotent. He put his arms around the dark hillock of his legs and pulled them close. I felt his pale eyes on me.

‘I went in t’village to have a pint,’ he said.

‘What, to the Board Inn?’ I replied, eager to show I had local knowledge, and so gain mastery.

‘No’ — he gestured — ‘along t’top to Skipsea Sands, there’s a leisure centre there that’s got a licence. There’s a bunch of us that drink there — we’ve all been under threat. I must’ve ‘ad a few — too many.’ Suddenly, he spasmed, then spat, ‘Fuck the fucking Micronesians! Fuck ’em!’ Then he shook his head and went on levelly, ‘I went out walking along t’roads — to clear me head, like; then, when I got back here it were like a fucking earthquake, everything trashed! The little studio we built only three year ago, we put in UPVC windows and all sorts. Gone! Swept out of existence, and all because of those little brown buggers!’

I felt the floor move beneath my backside, a slight undulation suggesting a reposing giant about to turn in its sleep. Yet I felt no especial fear — possibly I was partaking of the water colourist’s despair, and for him the worst had already happened, everything — teacups, forks, paints, brushes, unused prophylactics, towels, rubber bones — had slid away.

‘Surely,’ I said, adopting a conciliatory tone for a harsh message, ‘you can’t blame the turbines for this; this coastline has been eroding for centuries — millennia; you must’ve known this when you came here?’

‘’Course,’ he spat again, a feeble little flob. ‘But the erosion was steady enough, a few feet every year, it were predictable, like — we knew ’ow long we’d got. When they rebuilt the coastal defences up at Scarborough it got a bit worse — pushed the longshore drift down here, see — but when they began sinking the piles for those bloody monsters. I dunno, it must be ’cause they sorta funnel the current or summat. This stuff, it’s nowt but muck, really. It’s like playing a bloody hose on a bloody sandcastle. I’m a foolish fucking man!’ he cried. ‘Built my house upon the sand, and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house; and it fell, and great was the falling of it!’

I’d got his number by this time. For him the domestic tragedy of the earth’s overcooked fate was as nothing — it was only this: his own stupidly spilt milk that had driven him to the brink of his reason.

‘How long will it take me to walk along the beach to Hornsea?’ I asked matter-of-factly.

‘Beach!’ he guffawed bitterly. ‘There’s no beach at this time — can’t you hear the sea, man?’

Strange to relate, I hadn’t heard it — I’d entirely forgotten the rising tide that had hustled me up only a couple of hours earlier. Now canting forward, I could make out beyond the lip of lino the gargling of foam, and my ears filled with the rhythmic chuntering.

‘Things have changed,’ I said to the water colourist, while slowly easing myself back along the wall to the doorway. ‘You must get a grip on yourself.’ I gripped the exposed brickwork of the lintel, vibrantly aware that if it were to fall nothing could be more ridiculous than my holding on to it.

‘These things are everywhere,’ he wailed. ‘There’s hundreds of ’em up on the North York moors already — and for why? What do I care about the fucking Bangladeshis? I just wanted somewhere quiet to paint! I tellya, man, this is the beginning of the end — it’s not just Skipsea that’s gonna be washed away, they’ll put these things right along the east coast, then you fancy pants down in London’ll know all about it, you’ll wake up drowned in your fucking beds!’

I’d made it through the doorway and was levering myself backwards across the parlour. I stood and dusted the plaster and earth from my trousers. ‘Be a man,’ I said caustically. ‘You quote the Bible, eh? Well, what good is religion if it falls apart in a calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to people. Did you think God was going to factor Skipsea out of the equation — he’s not a fucking actuary, or a loss adjuster for that matter!’

Maybe I was a little harsh, but I wanted to jerk him out of his self-pity. I meant it as a parting shot, yet lingered expecting an angry retort. He only sat for a while in blank silence, then asked, ‘What’s that flicker in the sky?’ Moving back to the doorway at first I saw nothing, then around the head of the turbine straight ahead of us there gathered a ghostly luminescence, arteries of galvanic lightning that intensified, white-bright as a military flare, and sent beams skipping across the wave peaks towards us.

I drew back, half blinded, then the water colourist cried out again and I returned: the entire file of turbines, as far in either direction as I could see, was being lit up. A pulse of brilliance streaked from one to the next along the Holderness coastline. ‘We’re in the midst of it,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Quiet as it is, this is the gathering storm.’ And I turned on my hurting heels, exited the sagging bungalow and made my way back along the alley to the single-track road. If I turned left I would reach the village in half an hour; if I turned right I would come soon enough to the bitten-off edge of tarmac, and beyond that a traveller needs must skip from wave crest to crest, if he wanted to reach the place where Withow once was.

On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of not altogether caring; a rubber figurine only two or three inches high and clad in a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig. I had a 1.5 litre bottle that I filled from a tap whenever I had the opportunity, and three water colours — sea scenes, amateurish to begin with and now badly muddied, of no real merit, certainly, but a convenient size to tuck under one arm.

As I gained the road I thought I heard a low rumble, a fusilade of falling pebbles and a high, wild cry. These sounds were open to more than one interpretation — I chose the most obvious, and so pressed on, intent on the late television news, a mug of tea and a packet of shortbread.

3. The Seal Pup

Fruit pudding, white pudding, black pudding, bacon, sausage, two fried eggs, three rounds of toast, a grilled tomato, mushrooms and beans — all of it washed down with orange juice and a cafetière of coffee. During the night I had forgotten about all this chomping, had dreamt of butterfly girls sipping viridian nectar, and android men who only needed the monthly replacement of one rusty fuel cell with another shiny one. I had forgotten also Pauline, who stood over me freshly scrubbed, slim and shiny as a PVC drainpipe in her tightly tied plastic apron, urging me to eat more while she told me about her childhood in Driffield, and how having grown up on the coast she never found its steady disappearance that peculiar.

‘Fair enough,’ she said, placing her fists where her hips ought to have been. ‘When they put the Millennium Stone in at Barmston, and I saw a couple of year later how much closer the cliff had got, well… made me think a little.’

So I left her in her well-equipped kitchen, in its gravelled courtyard, which lay within the larger enclosure of Skipsea itself, with its painted paling fences, pink hollyhocks and silver-metallic Nissan hatchbacks circled in the cul-de-sacs. The means of mobility employed as a defence — could there be any better bulwark against what was going under a mile to the east?

I hurriedly bought an apple and some cheese at the village store and set off, desperate to return to the coast. I had not time for rape fields or poplar rows — besides, field margins were overgrown, convolvulus snaked across the lanes, a sewer stank, and pigeons gorged themselves on ripening wheat. The countryside seemed proud purely on the basis that it was, rather than was not, and taking a path running alongside a grassy knoll I looked at the caravans thereon, each complacently yoked to the national grid. Yet what were they, that they should only be tacked on behind, the appendices of hearth and home?

The farmer’s wife had been up at six to stuff me; now I paid her back with my most liquid currency: amnesia. Why was I, I mused, so flatulent? Why was my belly so uncomfortably swollen? I fixated on the exposed coils of an electricity substation humming in nettles, and so was quite unprepared for the moto enclosure that lay beyond this.

The big old boar lay half inside a corrugated-iron humpy; the sow wallowed in a muddy slough. She was suckling a pair of mopeds, who, rears wriggling, gored her with their greed.

‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd?’ she lisped as I strode past, and, pausing long enough to confront her bristly baby face, I replied, ‘Yes, I mean to get as far as…’, then faltered, because of course I couldn’t remember where it was I was going, so had to get my notebook out and check, all the while cursing myself for the ridiculousness of engaging in conversation with a creature that couldn’t possibly understand.

‘Yes.’ I found the entry. ‘I’m going as far as Hollym today.’

The sow raised herself up on her elbow, fluttering her thick eyelashes, a coquettishness at odds with the pleated gash of her exposed genitals. ‘Thee-thyd,’ she mused. ‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd.’

The mopeds grunted and squealed.

‘Well,’ I snapped, ‘that’s quite enough of that!’

I put the notebook away and headed on, although as I continued along the path, kicking out distractedly at molehills, I could still hear her maddening singsong, ‘Thee-thyd, thee-thyd, thee-thyd…’ and the gobbling of her young.

At the seaside the mist was plumped up, a sweaty pillow on the wrinkled sheet of the waves. North along the bluff I could make out the leftovers of a hamlet; on the landward side of an alley there were wooden shacks and tiny bungalows, while to seaward only broken walls, a few fence posts, a hopeless ‘For Sale’ sign, and detritus strewn over the edge of the cliff. The tide was in, undercutting the bellying mudface that in other places had splurged down in a slow-motion convulsion. Observing the saturated postage stamps of useless water colours floating on the swell, the phrase ‘rotational slumping’ slid into my mind, and so I turned south under a Teflon sky.

I had cosseted the Granny Smith apple in my palm since Skipsea, and now bit into it, releasing a sour concomitant: a bad news thread that spooled in front of my eyes, Deposits of amyloid visible as apple-green yellow birefringence under polarized light. The amyloid forms plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that progress through the centres of the brain. Bite of apple, wet and sharp — bite of boots, the stupid costly bespoke things. Somewhere in the Midlands there was a last, a scale wooden model of my foot growing dusty on a shelf. I’d stretched plaster across the hard ridges of the metatarsals that morning. It didn’t matter — I knew the skin would break before the end of the walking tour and I, an immigrant merman who’d never seen my submarine homeland, would be condemned to walk on knives.

A golf course arrived, heralded by CCTV cameras and signs WARNING of crumpling cliff edges and flying golf balls. Next came a caravan park, with long lanes between the vans that followed the contour lines of the increasingly high and sheer cliff. It was past eight, and I greeted the dog walkers who were about, but they were having none of it. They stuck close to their metal hutches, while I was beyond the chain-link fence, hard by the cliff edge, a creature of sea and sky.

Then another park, the inhabitants of which were more rooted still, their static homes girded round with mini-picket fences, behind which sprouted potted gardens — wincey shrubberies and shocks of pampas grass. Aspen, Vogue, Celebration and Windsor all went by. Windsor had a nautical air, and the standard of St George stiffly riffled beside its jutting prow. A man stood watch outside its picture window, his feet spread on hardwood decking, his elbows propped on a taffrail. He looked like the bulldog on his tea mug, the same barrel chest, slope shoulders and bowlegs. His muzzle — red as the Holderness loess — was amiable enough, and so I hailed him, ‘Don’t you ever get worried?’

He raised a monobrow.

‘About the cliff?’

Was this perhaps a ridiculous solecism, as talk of carcinogens might be to a man riddled with cancer? For the neatly mown grass terminated a few paces from where we stood in a ragged tear that zigged towards one static home, then zagged away from its neighbour.

‘Me, wurried? No, lad,’ he laughed. ‘There’s a good forty-six feet there. It’s him oop there should wurry, he’s only got twelve and he isn’t even chained!’

I looked where he pointed and saw the unchained fool and the beckoning crevice.

‘See,’ the English bulldog resumed, ‘it goes pretty regular; true, I did lose nine feet last year, but that were exceptional.’

I shook my head, bedevilled by such sangfroid: ‘But look, with that crack coming in there, and this one over here, won’t it—’

‘Oh aye, it’ll even up — these hard standings’ll be gone before the year’s out’.

He nodded to the concrete platforms teetering over the abyss; they had the evil air of concentration camp ruins.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what happened to the static homes that were on them?’

‘Well, they joost move us back when we get too near— winch us oop, move us back. It’s all in the contract, like — part of the deal.’

Move us back, part of the deal. Death came wading through the sea fret; at first it was featureless, a blur of black robe and steel scythe, then it was right before me, elbows planted on the cliff edge the way any normally sized person might lean upon a bar. Death’s skull loomed, ivory in its house-sized hood, and it stretched out a bony grabber to wrench Aspen from its hard standing, then place it on a vacant square three rows back.

Glimpsed over my retreating shoulder, this looked to be a tender act, the merciful forestalling of these retirees’ inevitable decline, then fall. But it came at a cost, for Death completed this outsized chequers move by snatching up the two static homes it had taken and casting them into the sea. The cacophony — the pitiful screams, the smash and the clatter — stayed with me for a while, then they became the seagulls’ ordinary savagery, the mist drew back from the horizon, and there were no personifications to be seen except the turbines with their blades feathered, standing sentinel and still.

Stalks swarmed on the wide deck of a wheat field, then marched to the brink, where fluting away from their roots were buttresses and cornices of quick-setting mud. Away in their dense ranks the parentheses inscribed by last winter’s tractors referenced the remaining rags of mist, and so seemed like earthy vapour trails scored in a green-gold sky.

Ten yards of beach hauled themselves clear from the long fetch of the waves — I longed to descend, yet feared being trapped between cliff and sea. But then a dead porpoise swam into view, and as there was a way to scrabble down nearby I took it, then knelt on the shingle to contemplate its gouged flanks and parched spiracle. It was too silly to impute all evils to the turbines — no sea creature could have leapt into their blades — but the wounds seemed to have been made by a boatman’s gaff and there were few fishermen abroad on the water — although plenty of contractors.

I scrabbled back up and the cliff went on. The dead porpoise had shaken me and to steady myself I consulted my notebook, which suggested I try this mental exercise: On my holiday I took with me a neurofibrillary tangle that was awkward to manoeuvre — like a large bunch of twisted wire — and when I reached a gate or a stile I would have to wrangle it over, often tearing my clothing as the loose ends caught in the loops of my wicking T-shirt. Then there were the UPVC windows, three of them framed in white plastic, 140cm × 260cm, far too unwieldy for a walking tour. Not forgetting the parish records of Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe — the soggy ledgers from which leaves kept dropping, each veined with the calligraphy of birth, death and marriage; they were God-fearing parishes, these, yet all were sucked upon by the sea’s salty mouth, rod after rod, until they were dissolute. Finally, there was the rubber figurine, which, if meant as a child’s toy, was scarcely fit for purpose, being — despite its three-inch stature — a bulky, imposing thing, garbed in a skin-tight Churchillian siren suit, and, most disturbing of all, with a pig’s head, not a man’s.

The North Cliff Boat Club stood fifty feet above the waves, its yard a jumble of fibreglass hulls trapped behind corrugated iron and barbed wire. To escape into the sea the craft would have to be manhandled over the fence, then dragged down a steep concrete slipway — and what pleasure could there be in that?

The path drew me capriciously along a choked alley between two caravan parks, bindweed caught then snapped between my ankles, my clothes snagged at brambles and snatched up burrs, my bare arms lunged at nettles — then I found myself on the long dusty road into Hornsea, sweating in the noonday sun, as some obese people gathered round a cake stall beside the fire station waddled towards me and then past.

A street of redbrick two-up, two-downs, the deeply conservative impasto of road markings in yellow and white, the Floral Hall with ‘1911’ worked into its pediment — I had hoped, devoutly, for the respite of the town, the smell of car exhaust in the tarshadow of Nonconformist chapels, string shopping bags dangling along the high street. Instead, Hornsea Mere appeared between Belle-Époque yews, and, while I saw that model boats were abroad on its sweet waters, I knew that below them lay the Cainozoic mush of drowned woodlands and impacted reed beds, all the ebb and flow of millennia.

Along the high street there were no string shopping bags, only people yanking money from the cash points and running the next relay leg to the shops. I paused by the window of a secondhand one: 35mm cameras, some Spode. Inside tweed jackets clubbed together on hangars. As soon as the door tinged shut I hid behind a freestanding bookcase stuffed with paperbacks — but the tall, potbellied man who supervised the place hadn’t noticed me; he was involved with a peer in a corduroy cap. The pair were unwrapping a series of objects swathed in green recycling bags. The shopkeeper’s sleeves were rolled up almost to his armpits and his arms disturbed me.

I took a book from the case at random; it was Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie. The cover depicted a seagull nesting at the edge of a cliff; between its legs were a speckled egg and a golf ball. Down below, a man in a two-piece suit was plunging, tie flapping, and with more gulls bothering his blank face. The illustrator, working in pen and wash, had placed a nasty black outcrop in the waters, waters he had also embellished with the black swirls of an impact that was yet to occur.

The sixth impression of a Fontana paperback published in 1972, I had read it in this very edition, concurrently with my father, when we were rained in during a Cornish walking tour. Can there ever have been anywhere more subdued than that parlour, with its carriage clock’s gold-balled gimbals slowrevolving on the mantelpiece, and the superfluity of Windsor and wing chairs? We had lingered over breakfast as long as we could, my father, as was his way, elaborately buttering a single, mouthful-sized section of toast, then anointing it with marmalade, before finally and reverently consuming it. The rain lulled outside gathering its strength, then gushed. My father went out to negotiate with the lady of the house — we were permitted to stay but confined to the parlour, where we sat all that long day, either side of an electric fire, its bars furry with summer dust, and read alternate chapters of the Christie, the contest being — with my father there always had to be competition — to see who could guess the murderer first.

Night fell with the rain. A flyer in the bus shelter promised a choral performance at the village hall. We sallied out along oilskin roads from Trebetherick to Rock. I was so bored by then that even the red-faced farmer’s wives belting out Handel pleased me, while as for my dad—

‘These might interest you.’

‘I’m sorry’.

‘These may interest you — these here.’

The Elastoplast he had wrapped around the bridge of his spectacles fitted precisely in the groove of his frown. His eyes — of an awesome mildness — held me as he leant forward over the counter. At the base of the triangle formed by his forearms, between the heels of his liver-spotted hands, were five wood carvings of etiolated human figures. They were perhaps a foot to eighteen inches long and lay in a pile like outsized spillikins. There was also a larger piece of wood: one end curved into a stern, while the prow had been whittled into a serpent’s streamlined head. There were also three discs that, if shields, were to scale with the figures. To one side lay a little heap of what looked like spare limbs — or possibly clubs.

The man wearing the corduroy cap had gone. Outside the lunchtime shoppers had evaporated, while in front of the newsagent opposite a handwritten shout for the Hornsea Echo lamented: THREE SISTERS DISAPPEAR IN BEWHOLME. ‘Pick one up,’ the shopkeeper ordered me. ‘D’you recognize it?’

Fragments of quartzite had been rammed into the figure’s roughly carved pinhead, a head reduced by bronze blade to its essential planes: a sharp chin, a triangular nose, the oval slot of a mouth. It lay on its back in my palm. The wood was warm to the touch, fine-fissured pine. I hefted the figurine — it was perfectly balanced, more like a tool than anything decorative. I guessed it must be very old, although the neoteny of the head, the armless shoulder sockets, the notched crotch and legs that tapered to a point also called to mind wavering aliens silhouetted in the molten light spilling from the cracked shell of a flying saucer.

I gingerly set the figure down on the counter and said, ‘I think I’d remember that.’

Then I was sitting on the seawall watching the tide lap back from muddy shingle. The wall was in three smooth tiers, with orange-painted steel gates set on mammoth hinges in the uppermost one. The sunlight was bright enough to strike sparks on the wavelets, yet overall visibility was only a couple of hundred yards, the sea mist enclosing what might be — for all I knew — an isolated section of coral reef. I peered closely at the smooth whiteness between my thighs — was it concrete, or the massively compacted exoskeletons of myriad antediluvian crustaceans?

I was getting out my oat cakes and the sweating cheese I’d bought in Skipsea, when a family came trundling out of the mist and sat right beside me. There was a chocolate-smeared three-year-old in a pushchair, its feet trailing along the path. Too bloody big for it, I thought, it’ll end up fat as its mother — who was mountainous in a bright red blouse and black slacks. A sixtyish mother-in-law was in attendance, her senior hair set hard. Her hovering around the pushchair was a mute agony: she mustn’t interfere, although everything her daughter-in-law did was wrong as wrong could be.

A short way off, on the steel stairway down to the strand, a skinny husband in a bowling shirt fiddled with a tacky kite. The six-year-old boy pestering him was equally skinny — all bone struts, stringy tendons and plastic skin. I watched them get tangled up in each other, while I removed from my rucksack my tea-making kit, a paperback thriller and a small oilcloth bundle, which when I unrolled it contained what appeared to be the detachable wooden penises of some Bronze Age figurines.

‘D’you want yer bap now?’ The mountainous mummy thrust the white roll at the child in the pushchair.

‘I thought, maybe—’ the mother-in-law ventured, then was silenced by a furious glare.

‘Go on, ’ave yer bap now!’ the mother insisted, kneading love and hatred together.

‘Ah, well,’ the mother-in-law sighed.

‘Whaddya mean by that?’ the mother snapped, and as the mother-in-law quailed I thought it will always be thus, until one or the other of them dies.

I couldn’t remember acquiring the Agatha Christie or the bundle of wooden penises. I knew that on my holiday I had taken with me a formerly lascivious madman, a neurofibrillary tangle, a pig-headed rubber figurine and a dead porpoise rescued from the long fetch of the German Ocean — but these?

While I was playing the memory game the skinny husband came up to get his own bap, abandoning the older kid to crunch along the shingle, the kite nipping at his heels.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ the man said when he saw me. ‘What’re you doing up this way again?’

I was grateful to him for two things: first, his bowling shirt, which was lilac with a blue revere collar, cuffs and pocket-facing; it was also monogrammed ‘Derek’ across the breast pocket. Secondly, there was Derek’s low-key reaction to what I assumed must be a quite a coincidence. I imagined he was responding intuitively to my blank expression, and fed me this easy question so I could skirt whatever mutual history we had, leaving it for him to unearth later.

I began explaining that I was taking a few days out to walk the Holderness coast, but no sooner had I begun talking than Derek interrupted me, turning to the uncongenial woman-mountain and blurting, ‘Look, it’s ’im who came round that evening we ’ad the bees.’

‘Oh, ho!’ she laughed. ‘It’s you — I didn’t even notice you sitting there all quiet, like. ’Ow yer doin’? Still writing your cra-azy books?’

Her sudden warmth was overpowering — I thought, how sad she has so little of this for her own, and also for an instant — could I spill it all out? My deteriorating memory — the quixotic quest for the man in the scrap of photograph I’d found in the gutter of St Rule Street? Might I throw myself on the soft mercy of her bosom?

‘It weren’t ’til well after midnight that the police got hold of some feller who knew how to deal wi’ it,’ Derek was saying.

In the course of a few more exchanges I gathered this: that he had gone to see me give a book reading at the Pave Café in Hull the previous summer. She — Karen, that is — would’ve gone too, were it not for a swarm of bees that had blanketed the front of the house: ‘The babysitter were absolutely bloody terrified.’ I, however, had risen to the challenge, and when I heard the tale accompanied Derek home and gave an impromptu recital in the kitchen, ‘While me an’ my mate drank oor gin.’

As this was transpiring the mother-in-law, released from her daughter-in-law’s cage of contempt, escaped with the pushchair. Wheeling it twenty yards off, she snatched back the child’s bap and began vigorously to wipe the chocolate from its mouth with an index finger cowled in saliva-dampened cloth.

My lips felt sore and I was walking along the cliff top. The tide was still too high to risk the beach. Another caravan park rolled towards me, but this time there was no fencing between the static homes — which were arranged side-on — and the precipice. Hard standings overhung the abyss — and one had recently collapsed together with the ruptured diaphragm of a paddling pool, the shards of fake-marble planters, a toilet seat and a yucca, which still alive had replanted itself in the mudface, near to a swollen and putrefying hand — or rubber glove.

The dregs of an army camp marched through the badlands towards me. There were overgrown trenches and ramparts studded with sentinel towers, redbrick revetments crumbled into the ruderals, and the heat shimmered over the hedgerows — crystal stairs for flies to shimmy on. The black outline of a man punched a hole in a tower’s doorway. A gun nut. Spent all morning at home, up in his bedroom. ‘Gary!’ his old man called up. ‘’Ave you ’ad yer breakfast, oor what?’ Or what. He came along the flatland from Rolston on a mountain bike, a shotgun slung around one shoulder, a.22 rifle round the other, the pockets of his unseasonable parka bulging with ammunition. He stands in the doorway watching me come on in my Union Army-blue uniform T-shirt, my head full of deep-laid plans for world Zionist domination. He stands stock still, not wanting to aim then track me, but postponing the ecstasy of fluid movement, and so on I come, at every pace expecting his big chin to bristle from the shadows, the nostrils of his shotgun to sneeze snotty lead, his parenthetic shoulders to shrug with the recoil — and so bracket my expiration.

It wasn’t until I was within ten paces of the tower that the gun nut resolved into nothing but the outline of a man bashed in the old steel door. I went on, quaking, and debouched into the road by Mappleton village hall, a Wesleyan chapel dated 1830. Along the road a car slowed beside me and the driver asked if I knew of a petrol station nearby; I said I didn’t, walked on and discovered a jolly little Prius dealership around the next bend, its eco-bunting limp on this hot afternoon, the cars hunched and shiny, the prices exorbitant.

Down a lane, past raggle-taggle cottages, I came upon a declivity leading to the beach. The tide had turned; looking south I could pick out a route worming around the mud slid down, so, despite the prominent signs warning of unexploded ordinance, I set off into the daymare of my own relentless velleity.

At first there were a few dog walkers, some swimmers waisthigh in the churned cream waves and a pod of sunbathers cast ashore on cushions of sea-worn concrete — but soon enough I was utterly alone, picking my way between pinnacles of dried mud studded with pebbles of all colours, from bone-white through eggshell to carmine, mahogany and black. To my right the cliff swooped up, to my left the sea rippled away, while before my eyes the sea fret coiled and shredded — a miasma at once nothingy and permanent; as each buttress of hardened mud formed the flats of this set, so the mist appeared always on the point of being whisked away to reveal the audience of giants seated in the deep.

During the Second War there had been extensive defences along this stretch of the coast; now sections of wall — concrete Z’s, L’s and double U’s, bearded with reinforcing — and even entire blockhouses were embedded in the beach. For a while the mudface was scattered with a selection of the things I had brought with me on my holiday — girders, spars, plastic sheeting, the neuritic plaques, the senile plaques, the braindruse — which, while soiled, nonetheless anchored this liminal desert to the world up above, to the kitchens still fitted, the carports yet intact, beside the bungalows that crouched well away from the edge. Soon enough, though, these relics of the distant present had tumbled by, while the fret still draped offshore, hiding the turbines, and the only player was me, walking on the spot as one shingle spit then the next revolved towards me, each a miniature Spurn Head.

If before I had been held by the loess, now it sucked me in; I had only to let my glimpse penetrate its moist gashes for the entire body to shiver, then contort, as if it were a monstrous and living thing. The heat mounted, the beery waves frothed on the rim of the land, my vain boots ate my feet, while, incontinently, the Andante of Mahler’s Sixth began to syringe my ears — at first a slow seep of syrupy violins and sucrose melody, but then, with recursive eddies of flute and woodwind, larger flows of sound began sloshing around my brainpan, rocking then floating my hollow soul.

Spooked, I gripped the plastic water bottle that had served me for the entire walk as something to hold on to, the all-too-real limb of that phantom body, the Other, who walked beside me yet said nought. The bottle crackled — the Andante flooded on, its cascades of sweet sadness spurting through my eyes, mouth and nose. I put the bottle down on a mud plinth, hoping its mundane shape would trump all this amorphous weirdness. This didn’t work: the Mahler became more turbulent; I slid across glassy sound-boils, whipping into whirlpools of timpani — massed triangles, cow bells and old hubcaps smitten with fenders: ‘Zing! Boom! Tanta-ra!’ A cartoon Cleopatra was hauled towards me reclining on a pyramidal juggernaut drawn by naked and burnished Nubians. ‘Zing! Boom! Tan-ta-ra!’ And although she vanished into the haze, once she was gone the patterns of the pebbles, the gulls twisting into the sky at my approach, the very winding of the sea fret — all these phenomena assumed a demented congruence with the Andante, responding to its every glissade.

It got worse, the mud Romantically writhing, the sandbars flip-flopping, the very rods and cones of my optic nerves made visible, frenziedly dancing to the brassy blare of the movement’s crescendo — until all was blissfully and terribly silenced by the bomb: which lay, small and rusted, a few sustained glockenspiel notes and oboe tones curling into silence around it. I’d nearly trodden on the fucking thing and sat down abruptly, my rucksack marrying my back to the sand, so that I lay panting, parenthesized by my calves.

When I got upright again, I saw there was a shoal of these death fish beached along the tide line — perhaps a hundred in all. Fear renders the body down so that each movement becomes clarified, so, keeping close to the cliff face, I tiptoed past the bombs to the accompaniment of the arrhythmic rasping of my breath in my ears, and atonal cries desiring my life to be not just longer — but forever.

Then the beach was a hard flat pan. Up above on the bluffs stood the stark forms of ruined military installations about to surrender. My bowels slackened and I squatted, back to the cliff, to add my lava to the glacial till. Standing to wipe myself, I saw two small figures coming on along the beach, maybe a quarter of a mile distant. It had been so long since I’d seen another human that, for the aeons until we met, I speculated on what life forms these might be — were they the luminous beings, descended now, their gossamer wings folded into yellow nylon jackets?

It was a Yorkshireman — rotund but hard, like a well-inflated beach ball, his smooth-shaven face cut into by the shadow of his baseball cap. Both he and his son — aged perhaps thirteen — were wearing Hull City football shirts; the black-and-yellow stripes widened over their tummies, then narrowed at the broad leather belts they wore, dangling with chisels and hammers. They rolled towards me across the bled, so at ease that I could not bear to let them pass — had to seize them, tap into their reservoir of honeyed love. As I drew level I cried out, ‘I saw a bomb back there!’

‘Oh, aye,’ the man said. ‘What were it like?’

He had three gold front teeth, two incisors and a canine; also a heavy gold chain in the fold of his thick neck — these I registered, rather than his relaxed manner, so ran on nervously: ‘You see all those signs warning of unexploded ordinance all the time, but I never think anything of them — then I nearly trod on this bomb.’

‘Aye,’ he reiterated, ‘what were it like?’

‘Um… well,’ I flustered, ‘I dunno, about this long,’ I held out my hands to bracket an implausible catch, ‘and sorta bomb-shaped — with tailfins.’

‘Four of ’em, squared off?’

‘Y-yes, four fins, square ones.’

‘That’ll be a tank-buster, an A10. I’ve come out here after a high tide and seen thousands of ’em.’

‘There were at least a hundred of them back there!’ We were both taken aback by my vehemence. ‘Are they, y’know, live?’

‘Soom are, uthers ’re joost dummies — practice bombs.’

The boy stayed a way off, took a rubber-handled hammer from his belt and swung it idly at a mud outcrop — in the seconds it took to connect I saw this as an orbit within an orbit, the boy as a sun, the father as a satellite, myself at the aphelion, the whole as an orrery designed to explain the emotional pull that children exert—

The hammer struck, cleanly splitting the mud to reveal its pebbly lode and we all staggered two steps sideways as the beach jerked beneath our feet. Over the fossicker’s left shoulder a section of the cliff face dematerialized into dirty fret that boiled towards the sea. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but the man — turning to look so that the gold chain was spat from his neck folds — said casually, ‘That were a big one.’

‘Was it a bomb?’ I gasped.

He laughed, ‘That? No, it were only an ordinary fall, haven’t you seen wun yet? ‘Ow long you bin walking?’

The shock of the cliff fall seemed to have jolted my memory and without needing to consult my notebook I was able to explain I’d come from Skipsea that day, and Bempton via Flamborough Head the one before. Thrilled by my own lucidity, I rambled on about the Holderness coast, its strangeness, and how there must be some odd connection between its progressive engulfment and the ignorance of the wider world.

The fossicker was also thrown into loquacity by the cliff fall and spoke of his fossil hunting, how the Yorkshire coast was perfect for this, exhibiting three successive strata — the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Cainozoic — exposed successively from Whitby in the north to the Humber estuary, and how he himself had found, ‘All sorts. I dug up a whole bloody bison in Tunstall mere last year and a fossilized tree the year before.’

He told me that he and his family lived in Goole, and I pictured them there at once: sitting in a conservatory tacked on to the back of a small terraced house beside the docks. The fossicker sat watching the racing on television, the fossilized bison serving him as an awkward sofa. The boy stood by a fulllength UPVC window lazily swinging his steel hammer until it hit the TV set, which neatly split, spilling its ancient microcircuitry of ammonites and trilobites. The father-god and the son-god looked on, one substance, at peace.

Before they walked on the fossicker urged me to visit the sound mirror at Kilnsea. ‘It’s right queer,’ he said. ‘Dirty great big concrete thing — but wunderfully smooth, y’know what it were for?’

I didn’t.

‘Zeppelins, they say if you put your ear to it you could hear a zeppelin four minutes before it reached the coast. Four minutes! What good were that?’

What good indeed. I was alone — the boy and his father were a fast-fading memory, then nothing but the sinusoids of their footprints in the sand, crossing and recrossing into the beige distance. All they had left me was this awful data: that the cliff could fall — and it could fall on me. How dense I must have been to have come this far, contemplating all the erosion that had gone before, yet never taking it personally.

The beach narrowed once more until it became a defile between the solidified brown tsunami to my right and the green waves to the left. Narrowed until I was picking my way among fossilized chunks of the earth’s own shit — that was it! I was to die like this, butt-fucked by frigid Ceres. All along I’d had it wrong — there was a grandeur to the static homes and the caravans toppling over the cliff, whereas to be crushed beneath this anthropomorphic muck, where was the romance in that?

I stopped for my hoosh of oat cake and tea beside a sinking pillbox, gingerly removing boots then socks as a polar explorer might — fearful lest a digit come away. THAT’S LIFE read the graffito above me. I hated the mud now — if it was shapeshifting its transitions were only from one prosaic thing to the next. I looked upon it and saw the hooked noses and chins of storybook witches poking round the archivolt of a chintzy grotto.

I rebandaged my feet, sheathed them in their leather mantraps, packed the rucksack, shouldered it and went on. At a point where the cliff had slumped into two plateaux I saw a way to scramble up — and so did, desperate for reassurance that I was not the sole civilized man left alive on a planet ruled by apes. All I discovered were the wavering legions of wheat, the superstructures of copses cruising along the horizon, enigmatic barns — in short, a world now altogether alien to me, so I slid down once more and set off south along the beach, keeping close to the water’s edge, where one silky wave overlapped the next and the birds’ footprints could be read as hieroglyphs: ‘Bird foot, bird foot, bird foot, bird foot,’ they said.

The afternoon grew duller yet clearer as all the golden sea fret was sucked up into a pewter sky. A line of turbines appeared offshore — very high, at least 400 feet. I supposed they must be part of a renewable energy programme, fostered by a civilization acutely conscious of the fragility of the global ecology, and sensitive to its legacy — the habitat of all those generations to come. The mud was just mud. I thought of nothing — and came upon a seal pup stranded above the tidal wrack, with its strips and stalks and frills of seaweed, the rubber goods of Nature.

The pup’s dirty-white fur was crawling with sea lice, and flies were at its mouth and nostrils. As soon as it registered my presence the poor mite writhed with fear and entreaty, its breath coming in harsh little rasps. Help me, the pup implored, speaking through the brown eyes agonizingly bored in its doggy brow. Help me, please do something — anything!

All the anger and the nihilism, all the alienation and disgust, all the friendships neglected and the lovers abandoned, all the children abused and neglected, all the trans-generational misery of a row that had continued for decade upon decade, sustained by senseless bickering, all of the oily repulsion that kept me from them was crammed into the gap between my palms and the pup’s flanks. All I had to do was squat down and take this baby in my arms — for it was a baby now, a baby with chubby pink legs, tightly encircled by invisible threads. It had a rotting stub of umbilical cord pinched in a yellow plastic clip around which the flies swirled, while those snubby-putty features were almost… my own.

I knelt down and slowly — so as to not alarm the mite — examined it from its hind flippers to its earless head, but could discover no sign of injury or trauma. The seal pup continued to rasp and writhe, I felt the protein-rich milk of sentiment rising up my throat — what to do? If I tried to lift it would it bite me? Should I put it back in the sea, or carry it along the beach to a dispensary for sick animals where an intersex volunteer in a round-collared tunic would feed it formula from a bottle? Or, given it was a member of protected species, would disturbing it in any way be an offence? Would I find myself in the dock — not, I suspected, for the first time — of a magistrates’ court panelled with medium-density fibreboard, my head tilted back on my shoulders, searching for the squiggle of judgement in the flaking paint?

Was there no one besides me to take on the responsibility of the seal pup? I looked out to sea where the turbines stood, complacent and at ease. I took four paces towards them, stopped and brought a handful of cold water to my hot salt brow. I straightened up and silently railed: all those technicians, engineers and workers — yet there was no help available for the seal pup. As I watched a tender cast off from one of the turbines and made course for the Humber mouth — they would be drinking Shits-on-the-Grass in the old town tonight.

I turned back. The seal pup had a kitchen knife rammed to the hilt into what would have been the small of its back were it a human child. How could I have missed this when I examined the creature? And where was the murderer? Still, at least I’d found out what ailed it — the only mystery was why this parenthesis of blubber still encapsulated life at all. I cast around for a rock with which to smash in its brains and put it out of my misery — but there were only pebbles and clods; besides, I’d probably just fuck it up and leave the seal pup to writhe still more horribly. In another seven hours the tide would be in — that would decide the matter; Nature would forge her course, a mudslide, pushing before it the churned-up slurry of lived lives.

4. The Sound Mirror

‘Good evening.’

‘Evening.’

‘D’you mind my asking, what’s the name of the nearest village?’

‘Village?’

He was incredulous — although there were credulous twins in the mirrored lenses of his goggle sunglasses. His hair was bleached at the ends, his wife’s was dark at the roots — she hung back a few yards, troubled by a couple of small sons in tracksuits who butted at her belly and thighs. It struck me that he might think I meant Ringborough, Monkwike or Sand-le-Mere, hamlets long since ground down to silt, and that if he pointed the way towards the shoals to which these place names once applied, I’d strip off and start wading out.

‘Well… place, then.’

‘Tunstall d’you mean?’

Over his shoulder I could see a battle group of earth movers standing on the brow of a low hill that they appeared to have carved from the cliff. What was this, a projecting horn of the Withernsea sea defences? The tracks of the earth movers zippered across the beach’s cloth of gold — in the evening sunlight all shadows were needlessly prolonged.

‘Um, yeah — but how far is Withernsea?’

‘In a car five minutes, but ahv no ahdëah on foot.’

This was my re-entry to the cities of the plain — I felt it went well, my simplicity provocative of his candour. A mile or so on I took to the low bluffs, then, soon enough, Withernsea lighthouse rose up judiciously from a huddle of houses inland. Next came the sea defences, a steel-and-concrete rampart stretching for hundreds of yards, grossly out of scale with the low-rise blocks of flats and poky houses it had been thrown up to protect.

My feet were incandescent, and with each forward pace I abandoned another husk of myself — the burnt-out shell of a man I had once been, which upon falling to the pathway fluttered into ash. A pair of boys — perhaps eleven-years-old and starveling thin — rose from a bench and flapped after me. The castellated gateway of the long vanished pier ushered in the tired waves. ‘Oi, mister!’ one of the boys cried. ‘Your laces’re undone.’ I ignored the scallywag, then: ‘Oi, mister, there’s sum wooden cocks fallen ahtuv yer rucksack — could be Iron Age, more likely late Bronze Age.’

I stopped, and together with the obliging lads gathered up the curls of petrified wood, which had a smoky patina. I’d no idea where they had come from, or why they had been lodged in the webbing pocket of my rucksack — looking down into the palm of my hand, where one lay, old and enigmatic, it occurred to me that this was a prompt for a tragic history, that inscribed by the cracks in the pine were the strophe and antistrophe of my own past. I explained this to the boys, then together we chanted: ‘On my holiday I took with me a dying seal pup, a rusted flight of metal stairs leading to a beach, a rubber figurine — such as child might play with — wearing a blue siren suit and with a pig’s head —’, but that was all I could remember and when I looked up from the parenthetic penis the boys had gone.

I crept into the town, passing 7’s Smiles — an amusement parlour, Trixter’s Joke Shop & Fancy Dress and a bowling alley. Shop fronts were hiding under the skirts of the older Victorian buildings — it all looked permanent enough, yet I knew Withernsea had waltzed backwards from the waves, that the esplanade had once been the high street, that the current high street had once been a back alley. An enormous plaice was bracketed by seaweed on the gable end of a building, beside the chip shop there was a Chinese, and beside the Chinese the Bengal Lancer was picketed. A square-headed Bengali put me in the window and I looked around appreciatively at the red cloths strewn with white and yellow rice. He brought me a menu and I began to ask him, ‘Why relocate from one flood zone—’ Then was interrupted by the table of teenagers on the far side of the restaurant: ‘If you wanna real laff watch Jackass.’

‘Ooh, no, Ah don’t think that’s foony.’

I found a paperback in my rucksack and began to read: What rotten luck there was in the world! A swirl of mist on a fine evening, a false step — and life came to an end. Two middle-aged men were seated beside me in the window and they pawed at their menus with callused hands. The pallor of approaching death couldn’t disguise the deep tan of the skin. Outside in the gloaming three large combine harvesters charged past scattering clods and chaff.

‘Ahl av that wun lahk the boxer,’ said the younger of the men.

‘Boxer?’ his companion replied — he was seated so close to me I could have put an arm around the nylon shoulders of his windcheater, and in a way it seemed rude not to.

Bobby shuddered and brought his eyes up again to the face. An attractive face, humorous, determined, resourceful—

‘Jalfrezi.’

‘Boxer?’

‘Aye, y’know — Joe Frazier.’

The eyes, he thought, were probably blue –

And just as he reached that point in his thoughts, the eyes suddenly opened.

‘Chicken jalfrezi.’

They were watchful and at the same time seemed to be asking a question.

Bobby got up quickly and came towards the man.

They were riggers working on a civil engineering contract of some kind. From what they said I gathered the work was dangerous, requiring them to ascend hundreds of feet in cradles. I couldn’t understand why, but the site they were working on was fundamentally unstable. I pictured an alien planet, its colloidal surface shifting and buckling in a nearinfinite series of peaks and troughs that seemed always on the verge of an apprehensible pattern — yet never quite there.

‘… an Audi TT’ — they were discussing their gaffer, a German — ‘that don’t even leave the garage.’

‘’E’s got three fookin’ cars.’

Before he got there the other spoke. His voice was not weak — it came out clear and resonant.

‘Least we’re not at the beck and bluddy call uv wassisface.’

‘Oo?’

‘That scoolptur chap oo’s got the turbine in at Bridlington — they say’ e’s a complete fookin’ nooter.’

‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ he said.

And then a queer little shudder passed over him, the eyelids dropped, the jaw fell…

The man was dead.

A woman was charging across the road towards the Bengal Lancer. She had a fake tan the colour of the Holderness mud and her enormous breasts and belly — veiled by the diaphanous sea fret of a three-tiered white blouse — rotationally slumped. Her scary makeup recalled eyes painted on the prows of Athenian ships. I drew the waiter into me conspiratorially by his small arm. ‘For Chrissakes,’ I said as she tinkle-banged through the door. ‘Whatever you do, don’t feed her.’

Punctured, the waiter hissed embarrassment.

Then I was walking out of Withernsea, tending inland, the concrete stanchions of chain-link fences the only things I had ever known in the warm sodium-orange silence of suburban nightfall, the chocolate bar bought from the convenience store where I stopped to ask directions the only solid thing I had ever hungered for, the agony of my blistered feet and the nettle stings pricking my calves the only sensations I had ever felt, as the headlights of oncoming cars planted magenta blooms on the retinas of my dilated eyes.

Beyond the final caravan park the village of Hollym appeared as a black smudge of woodland on the night. Then I was on a long lane footing past a flint church. I sat down on the bench outside the Plough Inn and rolled a cigarette, and was joined by a second smoke-sucker who didn’t speak but paced up and down, thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, while behind us the bar billiards rumbled and clacked.

‘Steve was a geography teacher in Stanford-le-Hope for thirty years, but once the kids were off to uni we began looking around. To begin with we ignored the ad — because of the new house, we didn’t fancy that.’

Another rumble of bar billiards — this time from below. The two of us stood looking at the two narrow single beds, the three white towels, the Country Crunch biscuits, the individual UHT milk cartons, the tea bags and sugar in sachets. She wasn’t exactly friendly, yet competent in the domestic science of pimping.

‘Well,’ she said in answer to a question I couldn’t recall asking, ‘I think the farmers are philosophical about the loss of their land.’

What does she know, I thought. Here in Hollym she’s a good mile from the sea; even given the faster rate of erosion down drift from the Withernsea defences it’ll still be 400 years before the German Ocean marches into the Plough Inn, bellowing, ‘I don’t need a drink — I am the fucking drink!’

Her brown perm floated away along the corridor… mouse droppings, rotting lino, an old knitting pattern used to plug a broken pane in the shed where Uncle Charlie did it. She had left me with careful instructions on how to unlock the two doors when I left in the morning, then relock them and post the keys back in. She had left me with an individual box of cornflakes and a small jug of milk.

The plastic sheet in the shower stall clung to me as the shower head became lachrymose over my raw feet. Shriven, I put myself into the right-hand bed and shoved a radio I’d found in my rucksack under the clean, thin pillow. There was a cup of tea I couldn’t for the life of me remember making cooling on the bedside table — next to it the unopened Country Crunch. In the night the Archbishop’s wife whispered through striped cotton, ‘I don’t know how he’s feeling, he’s not here.’

Having walked for four centuries I came to the cliff edge only to discover that it wasn’t there; instead a cartographer’s black ink line was ruled across the field strips. Distance was time, while beyond a screen of crack willows a small mere rippled in the morning sunlight. I struck out to the north-east, heading for the villages of Newsham and Sisterkirke. The going was soft between the tilled strips and soon enough my boots were balled in mud. Away to the north-west, above the unseen Wolds, a cloud host flew, wings outspread. There must have been hail as well as rain in the night because here and there the wheat was mashed to the ground in swirls of stalks; stalks that, when I stooped to examine an ear, I saw were rotten. White grubs wriggled obscenely from the spikelets.

The wind got up, and within sight of Newsham church spire I came upon a gaggle of peasants herding their livestock before them — a few white geese, but mostly motos, their thin withers bloody from the willow switches the peasant women wielded. The motos’ baby faces were contorted with the effort of trotting through the waterlogged fields.

‘’S’all gone,’ the lead moto lisped as it rushed past me, and when the peasants drew level they affirmed this simply by their own flight and the tawdry vessels of Christ’s feast they lugged with them: a tarnished brass ewer and bowl, two hefty leatherbound volumes — the Holy Bible and the parish records. Of their priest there was no sign.

I detained an old man by the sleeve of his smock. ‘’E stayed in the church last night,’ he told me while the others hurried by. ‘Praying, asking God to deliver the village from the sea.’ As an afterthought he added: ‘Silly cunt. Come sunup the nave were down on the beach. All our owsez ’n’ all — but God’s got nowt t’do wi’ it.’

‘Really.’ I was keen to interrogate this advanced thinker further. ‘Then what do you imagine he feels about the loss of your village?’

‘I don’t know how he’s feeling,’ Jane Williams whispered, the motion of the news having rolled her back beneath me. ‘He’s not here.’

It was grey dawn and the stiff spear threw me to the partitioned bathroom, where I waited on cold lino until I was able to piss. Back in the winding sheet I lay listening to an owl impersonate a man impersonating the hooting of an owl. Then I rose again, and twitching back the curtains saw a misty back garden lined with trestle tables, each one stabbed by a collapsed sunshade.

I rose once more and returned to the bathroom. There was a small window in the wall above the sink and a man I’d never seen before was looking through it straight at me. He was gaunt and somehow shifty, with lines of incompetence around his eyes — not laughter. We stared at one another in silence for a few minutes, while I took in the saliva, dried white, at the corners of his saturnine mouth. The fellow seemed so confused and drowsy that I felt no fear or exposure. Nonetheless, I quit the bathroom and went into the corridor to have a word with him — but he must have fled at my approach.

Then crept back again, because when I regained the sink he was at the window once more. Tiring of his little game, I undid the catch at the side of the frame and closed the shutter, in the process exposing a curious recess in which three small shelves held individual bars of soap, a tooth mug and a box of pink tissues, its thin cardboard printed with a photograph of a pink rose. So, looking at these items, I shaved myself by touch alone.

After I’d eaten the cornflakes someone had thoughtfully provided, drunk a cup of Nescafé, then taken a miserable shit, I opened the little shutter in the bathroom to see if the man was still there. He was, but appeared fresher-faced, and with a fastscabbing nick in his Adam’s apple that suggested he’d recently shaved. It was the same as before: the two of us enmeshed in a doleful stare; then, unhesitatingly, he reached out his hand towards me, and I, not hesitating either, extended mine to him. On to my open palm rolled a curious little figurine — a child’s toy, presumably, although there was nothing playful about it. The blue Churchillian siren suit with a pig’s head rising from its high collar was redolent of unnatural experiments conducted in secret government laboratories. I had never seen the figurine before, yet sensed that it had talismanic properties, and was a gift the giving of which had to be respected.

The stranger and I nodded curtly to one another, then simultaneously stepped away from the window.

I found myself on the outskirts of a village that was shrouded in dense morning mist with no awareness of how I might have got there. I was dressed appropriately for a walking tour in green Gore-Tex trousers, thick socks, viciously uncomfortable leather boots, a blue wicking T-shirt and a black cagoule. It was chilly and although the trees and hedges had a midsummer density for a while I equivocated: was the cobweb stretched between the bars of a gate jewelled with frost or dew?

I couldn’t remember my name, where I had come from or where I was going. I didn’t know whether I was old or young. I unfastened my trousers and pulled them and my underpants down enough to expose a penis between blanched thighs — so discovered I was a man, and a white one. One memory I also retained: that both doors had to have been locked before I left wherever it was I’d been and the keys then posted back into the building. Had I done this?

A neoprene pouch sagged in the half-masted folds of my nether garments. I unzipped it, discovered a digital camera and prodded it on. Adjusting it so I could access the images already saved on its memory card, I flicked through them. My hunch had been correct: there were pictures of a lock with a hand inserting a key in it, then the same hand poked inside a letterbox. I compared the hand in the photo with the one on the end of my arm — they matched.

Replacing the camera and rearranging my clothing, I discovered a paper napkin on which was scrawled a crude map with arrows, approximate distances and a wavy line for the seaside. No other plan presented itself — I was an enigma to myself, swathed in the silence of this strange place; nevertheless, in choosing to follow the map forward, along the lane between the knapped-flint walls, I knew that I conformed to the paradigm for people like me — white men like me. At a crossroads a simple roundel annulled limits on speed but my pace remained constant as I moved into open country. Whoever had bequeathed me these feet had done me no favours, as with every step they cut into me like knives.

Peacocks roosted on the pantiled roof of a cottage — how did I know these terms? Away in the unvarying stubble a hare searched for a shadow to box, and the sodden umbels of the cow parsley were as still as any living thing could be. I reached a T-junction and obeying the napkin turned to the right. Now, in back of wide verges, bungalows lay behind privet hedges; beside a carport I glimpsed a trampoline festooned in old police crime scene tape. A blackbird fidgeted in a hawthorn, a blackboard was scratch-marked ‘Clematis’, ‘Alpines’, ‘Laxton Fortunes’ — all items priced at 50p.

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.

5. The Struldbrug

‘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?

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.