Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall by Will Self Read Free Book Online

home, the print of a historic map of Worcestershire that had hung above the phone table, a paperback edition of C. E. M. Joad’s
Guide to Modern Wickedness
and my mother’s dentures.
    ‘Can you believe people cross the Atlantic with such tat,’ he spat, ‘and pay for it too!’
    ‘Dentures are pretty much essential,’ I said, ‘if you don’t have any teeth.’

    Sherman slid down the baffler of bags until he was sitting. The cyclopean eye of his torch dazzled me, and his voice – nasal, insistent – soared above the jeremiad of the jets. ‘You and your dumb books!’ he prated. ‘Micro-satire, dirty doodlings in the margins of history!’
    ‘I say, that’s a bit harsh.’
    ‘Is it? When Gutenberg invented the printing press there were at most a hundred titles produced annually; by 1950 this had swollen to a quarter of a million; now a book is published somewhere in this dumb world every twenty seconds, and you have the nerve – no, the
gall
, to contribute to this flood of verbiage that is inexorably inundating the land with ill-contrived metaphors!’
    ‘I – I ...’ I wanted to rebut him forcefully; instead I only spread my hands and said, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else.’
    Add a dream, lose a reader – isn’t that Uncle Vladimir’s line? Well, the lover of
little
girls has aught to teach me. I awoke as the British Airways flight settled down over Toronto and shat its undercarriage, sending said reader end over end, down to where
the survivors had retreated, a network of tunnels deep under Chaillot. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats
. In the half-light before full consciousness I took in the drear panorama of the razed city, the stalk of the CN Tower wilting among the charred stumps of the skyscrapers, the grid pattern of blackened rubble – all of it irradiated by the sickly green glow from Lake Ontario.
    I remembered my first visit to Canada in 1977, with my father. We stayed out in Dundas with his friend, the philosopher George Grant. While they debated Red Toryism, I lay upstairs on an iron bedstead smoking. I loved the Players pack, the way one side read ‘Players Filter’ and the other ‘Players Filtre’ – all of Canadian happenstance seemed bound up in the reversal of
e
and
r
.

     

    I took a bus into town and wandered the Hagia Sophia of the Eaton Center in a consumerist ecstasy – it was big enough to swallow whole five of London’s poxy malls. I bought a disposable lighter for a few bucks – the first I’d ever seen – and when I got back to Dundas I lay back down on the iron bedstead, then held the translucent green canister to my eye so as to look through the liquid gas.
    I left the frummer behind where we had been sitting. He appeared stricken, making none of the phone calls that other passengers had begun the instant the plane had landed; nor did he rise to retrieve his flight bag from the overhead locker. But I couldn’t concern myself with that – the flight had arrived almost two hours late – and so I strode off through the dun corridors, hopping on to travelators with whistling insouciance. The two men crammed into dun uniforms at Immigration only glanced at my passport. I was kicking about in the dun arrivals hall, pondering my transport options, when I became aware of snuffling behind me and turning discovered the frummer looking very down-in-the-beard and accompanied by a member of the airline’s ground staff, who was pushing a wheelchair in which sat the obese flight bag, its front zip creased in a complacent smile.
    ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked brightly.
    ‘It’s dusk ... so, it’s Shabbat,’ he muttered. ‘You must’ve noticed me, on the flight ... as soon as I realized we were gonna be delayed I began trying to get through to someone by phone.’
    ‘And?’

    ‘Yes’ – he stared shamefaced at his black dress shoes – ‘I guess you’re right – it wouldn’t’ve made any difference, I can’t go in any car on