Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

suppose they were. Sherman didn’t help my digestion by whispering improvised dialogue for these two couples, most of which was obscene. He also professed himself to be delighted with our outing as he snidely dissected his own Dover sole.
    I had my doubts – I was beginning to suspect that Sherman was toying with me, just as he toyed with the Californian ephebe who phoned during dinner, and whom Sherman had assured would be in receipt of a body form that was
633.333
recurring feet high within the month.
But why not 6,333, or 63.3?
‘Believe it!’ He belched as the other diners looked at us for a change. ‘This mother is so big it’ll be able to lean its elbow on the roadway of the Golden Gate as if it were a
bar
.’
    Baltie drove us back to London and when they dropped me off I said goodbye to Sherman casually, without making any arrangement for the future. But I felt certain we would meet again soon – a reckoning of some kind was long overdue.

3
Fin du trottoir roulant
     
    Eleven days later, despite all my queer resistances and awkward premonitions, I left for Canada. I took no luggage with me, only a Barbour jacket * I had bought from their concession in Mohamed Al Fayed’s Harrods department store, the capacious pockets of which I intended to fill with a few essential things. But, despite this simple solution to my luggage phobia, I still lay awake night after night obsessing in nauseating detail how I would ‘pack’ the jacket.
    It didn’t help that it was hot in the bed – an emperor-sized cherrywood
lit bateau
. None of our four children had ever quite managed to make it through the night in their own beds. No matter how many times I lifted them up, their sweaty thighs clamped about my hips, and laboured upstairs to put them down again, they still came creeping back and wormed their way in. Our eldest son was away at university; however, he not only walked but entrained in his sleep, and often in the small hours I would hear his key in the lock, followed by the heavy tramp of his feet, he would push the dog aside and insinuate his adult form so that the six of us lay tightly packed, like thevictims of a civil disaster laid out on the varnished floorboards of a school gymnasium.
    I visualized filling the pockets, then emptying them, filling them – then emptying them, over and over again. Should I put that in there, or this? I fretted until the predawn, when I heard the milkman wheedle open the gate and set down three bottles of half-fat,
or was it a third of a bottle or thirty?
In the half-light the methane off the entire family lay in a mustard haze atop the Flanders of the duvet, my sons’ bayonets digging into me from either side, my mind roved across the terrain of the past:
The human race was doomed, the only link with survival passed through time
.
    My obsessions with bigness, with littleness, with all distortions in scale – surely this was only a spatial expression of my own arrested development? In my mid-twenties I had still been living in my mother’s flat and speaking a shared idiolect of mushy diminutives – ‘-kins’, ‘-ums’ and ‘noo-noo’ – with her that we referred to shamelessly as ‘baby talk’. Had her premature death not thrust me into the actual-sized world, we might’ve been there still, me with my collections of Langenscheidt Lilliput dictionaries, she with her hefty Henry James novels. While I remained in the spare bedroom – which, due to the botched conversion of the Victorian house, had the proportions of an upright cereal box – dreamily making little tableaux with trolls, pencil erasers and .002-scale plastic soldiers, she would sit in the front room, concentrating hard on the subtle velleities of James’s characters.
    It was not to be. Instead, it was ‘Off with her head!’ as the cancer shot up through the meningeal fluids of her spine to her brain, and I was thrust through the little door and into the caucus race of adulthood, which has no precise