by Will Self
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.