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

Shabbat.’
    I was merciless. ‘Or bus, or train.’
    ‘Or bus, or train.’
    ‘You’ll have to stay out here at the airport.’
    ‘No, no, I can’t do that, it’s a really important Shabbat, the last before my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, I must get home.’
    ‘Well, you should’ve thought about that before you booked a flight with an insufficient margin of safety.’
    ‘I know, I know,’ he moaned.
    ‘Of course’ – I looked towards the main doors where gentile-mobiles were pulling away from the kerb with unholy despatch – ‘you could always walk.’
    ‘Walk ...’ He savoured the word in a prayerful way.
    ‘Yup’ – plunged my hands into the pockets of the Barbour – ‘walk – I think I’ll walk into town, the weather’s OK and I could do with stretching my legs. You’re welcome to come with, but I’d advise you to check that into left luggage – it’s a good seventeen miles.’
    ‘Walk ...’ I hadn’t noticed the flattened vowels of his Canadian accent before, the
a
cowering as if an umlaut had been fired over its head. ‘Yes, I guess I could walk, but I’ll have to bring my bag, it’s got valuable, uh, stuff in it.’
    ‘Stuff, or a valuable person?’
    ‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
    One of his fish-belly-white hands flipped towards me. ‘My name’s Reichman, Howard Reichman, and ... well, it’s an awfully big favour to ask but would you consider helping me with the bag – unless, that is, you keep Shabbat yourself?’
    I shook my head.

    ‘And I could pay you—’
    I shook it again. I felt guilty – but then I always do. In this instance it was guilt over my snide thoughts. However, it wasn’t this that motivated me, but the sheer challenge. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Reichman,’ I said. ‘Now let’s get going.’
    As I took the flight bag’s handle and trundled away, I wondered: was this one of the Reichmann brothers who ran Olympia & York, at one time the largest property developer in the world? If so, it was a curious coincidence; after all, before they went bust in the recession of ’92 they had built the biggest skyscraper London had ever seen, Canary Wharf; not only the biggest – the most banal. I looked back; he was struggling along in my wake. His coat looked hot – his hat hotter; he was as ill-equipped for exodus as anyone I’d ever seen.

     

    On we went along Airport Road, then Silver Dart, before crossing beneath the 427 expressway. To begin with I waited for Reichman to come puffing up in his woefully constricting cummerbund, but soon enough I was struggling with the dumb bag, which lurched from one tiny wheel to the other, yanking my arm in its socket as if it were a drunkenly dependent toddler. I had to lift it over the cobbled ravelins under freeway bridges and hump it up grassy embankments. He was tirelessly grateful. ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, most kind,’ he kept saying as we rumbled between the down-at-heel warehouses and unbusinesslike premises that lined International Boulevard. When I looked back, the sun was setting behind the airport and the jets coming into land incandesced in its last gleaming.
    We reached the Royal Woodbine golf course and I yanked the bag along aggregate paths to a culvert containing Mimico Creek, a rivulet of tea-coloured water that a hundred yards further on disappeared into darkness under Highway 27. ‘Surely,’ Reichman said, ‘you don’t mean to ...’ But I did, and so manhandled the bag down to the flat bottom, then dragged it splashing through the shallows, while the observant corvid flapped blackly along behind me.
    The Kufic script of aerosol graffiti rippled on the concrete walls; ducklings paddled serenely past. On the far side of Highway 401 I weight-lifted the bag up the embankment and clambered after it, to discover that, although we were now benighted, we were nonetheless entering a kind of Eden – vetch tangled with brambles, maple saplings and the occasional