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

wild iris. We were both entranced: the mondial groan and turbofart of the Lester B. Pearson International Airport had been utterly abstracted by this profound localism. In place of multi-storeycar parks there was only an ear of wild wheat bowed to listen to the breeze.
    Despite the season and the hour we were both sweating now, and I envied Reichman, because he was able to remove his coat, hat and cummerbund, then, with his back obscuring my view, unzip his case and pack them away inside. I sat groggily on the ground. When Reichman straightened up, Sherman was lying there in the long grass, naked in the half-light save for a skullcap – a newborn, middle-aged savant, with his clever thumb in his intelligent mouth. Nothing is ever funny twice, but it was cheering to hear that immortal line once again: ‘Can you tell me the way to Grods?’
    But of course he wasn’t there – any more than my companion had disrobed outside on Shabbat; both visions were products of my fervid expectation, cooked up in waxed cotton. If I’d taken the Barbour off, I would have to have carried it over my shoulder like a child that had to be returned to its bed – and there was no bed to be found. Still, I went on half expecting Sherman, as all that long Saturday evening I continued hauling the frummer’s case through West Deane Park, Ravenscrest Park, Thomas Riley Park, until we eventually reached a jollily lit convenience store on Bloor Street, where I bought a bottle of Evian. He davened, I drank, then we went on again past apartment blocks and monstrous Tudorbethan houses further and further into the city.
    Reichman may have been grateful to me for leading him through this suburban netherworld, but I was equally grateful to him. His sanctity enfolded me and I felt as hermetically sealed as a suitcase encased in polythene by one of those weird machines at the airport. I needed this: I needed my cheatingheart to remain safely inside of me, foetally curled in my own dirty laundry. I had foolishly craved the freedom of travelling light, yet arrived in the New World more encumbered than ever. It was better to at least share the psychic burden, and so we went on until we reached the junction of Dundas and Spadina in Chinatown, where our ways naturally divided. Reichman got me to drag the bag the last few yards to where it could be temporarily entrusted to the doorman of an apartment block where some friends of his lived. Then, back out in the street, he turned to face me and said, ‘I can’t thank you enough. You’ve performed a great mitzvah – you will be blessed.’
    He offered me his hand, but I had to restrain myself from grabbing his shirtfront and nestling into his beard.
    ‘You never told me your name,’ he said.

     

    ‘No,’ I answered. ‘I never did. But listen, leave me alone now like a good chap, will you. I’m footsore and sad, and I want ...’ I nodded to the restaurant beside us, its window hung with orange-glazed ducks, ‘... to eat some pork.’

* I’d never owned one of these waxed cotton jackets before – they were standard-issue country kit for the scions of the British upper and upper-middle classes and as such an anathema; but I needed a garment versatile enough to cope with a 30-degree temperature range and all kinds of precipitation. After the success of Stephen Frears’s
The Queen
(2006), in which Helen Mirren, looking frumpily monarchical, sported a Barbour while staring balefully at Scots glens cluttered with antlers, Americans couldn’t get enough of them and Stateside sales increased by 400 per cent.
40 per cent would’ve been too much – and yet, curiously, 4,000 per cent still credible – these were after all boom years
.

4
The LongPen
     
    Tony Blair stood, his Church’s shoes squishing into the Albertan muskeg, all his vaulting ambitions reduced to this halting lecture tour, all the breadth of his vision focused now on the 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen –
but why not 17,000,000,000,000,