As I undertook these researches the conviction grew in me that far from the erosion of two yards of land every year being a tragedy, it should be regarded as uplifting — for here was a landscape that was more transient than an individual human. The bungalows would be rebuilt inland, the UPVC windows reinstalled, the caravans would head north to Filey — only the earth was drowning.
I had never visited the Holderness coast, although, on a couple of occasions, I’d gone up to Hull to do book readings. The first time I went the crowd at the bar where I read seemed convivial, and afterwards I fell into conversation with a local man, talk that — I now realize — had itself been rendered parenthetical by the great bracketing of nearby Spurn Head. (He was a tall British-Asian with angular, faceted looks that mirrored my own — including the sunken cheeks, pockmarked with old acne scars.)
The man explained how he and his son liked to drive out on a Sunday, through the lush reclaimed lowland of Sunk Island to the peninsula, and how the sense of abandonment and loss they both felt — the family was broken, they were deracinated — was almost pleasurably compounded by Spurn Head itself, where on the eastern flank of the peninsula a Victorian lighthouse stood, surrounded at high tide by the waters of the estuary, for the shingle and sand spit where it had once rested had wavered away to the west.
On their walks along the beaches, the man and his son happened upon slimed reefs of discarded chattels — fridges, televisions, washing machines, the dinosaur bones of antediluvian agricultural equipment — all of it caught in serried piles, which in previous centuries had been driven into this skittish land in a forlorn attempt to pin it down. And as I listened to the man talk — he was not articulate, but expressive, what with his shrugs and hand-chops and hesitations — I was thrust back to the Paragon Station at which I had arrived a couple of hours previously.
It was a proper terminus — emphatically at the end of the line. As I had lurched stiffly from the train, I was struck by how lofty the vaulted roof seemed; tiny humans beetled along the grey platforms beside the worms’ casts of the rolling stock, while from up on high cold loads of light were let down through translucent perspex. By the time I had reached the booking hall the fugue had intensified: the old oaken island of a branch of W. H. Smith’s and the blind arches along the walls faced with caramel-brown tiling shored up the mounting sensation that I had arrived too late; that this was the voided — although not yet decaying — outpost of an empire that, rather than being overthrown, had been undermined by creeping indifference.
That was the first visit. The second time I went to Hull I was early for my event and so walked through the shopping zone to visit the museum down by the old dock area, passing a pub that advertised Lindisfarne Fruit Wines and mixed drinks with names such as ‘Dr Pepper’s Depth Charge’ and ‘Shit-on-the-Grass’. In the cobbled streets of the eighteenth-century town the silence was louder than bombs.
It was a quiet weekday afternoon in summer, and almost museum closing time. Once I’d passed the somnolent staff in the shop full of moulded plastic and printed cotton, I found myself alone in a series of comfortingly predictable spaces. Polystyrene rocks housed dioramas of the Holderness coast of 120,000 years previously, when elephants wandered the jungly cliff that ran miles to the west of the present-day coastline. Then came a dummy of a Holocene mammoth, standing foursquare on the linoleum tiles; then there were Neolithic artefacts and a life-sized, mop-topped human dummy that had been buried in a fibreglass sarcophagus.
Passing between the glass cases full of earthenware and bronze anklets, I became aware of an eerie hissing sound and a woman muttering in a half-foreign tongue. Exactly at the moment I realized this must be a recording, I saw the lit-up glass case containing the late Bronze Age wooden figurines known — after the Holderness drainage ditch where they were discovered in 1836 — as the Roos Carr Figures.
As I read the information cards, and stared at the curious spindly men, carved from pine over 2,000 years previously, I found that my mind was racing — forward in time, back in time, circling my own lifetime, then plotting its curve on to the widening gyre of history itself — while my body was paralysed, drenched in sweat.
The pebble eyes inserted in the pinheads of the four figures that had been placed upright in the carved boat held me captive for long minutes, then released me to stagger into the mockup of an Iron Age village. The muttering was, as I suspected, a curator’s notion of proto-English, placed in the mouth of a manikin at a treadle. I stood gathering my wits for a while, under the cutaway thatch of a newly ancient hovel, until the staff member assigned to check the galleries were empty came past me. ‘Oh! You frightened me,’ she said, and then: ‘I suppose I should be used to it by now.’ It being, I supposed, the presence of live humans in among the instructional dummies.
Later on, I was approached after the reading by a man who told me that his wife had very much wanted to attend but was unable to do so because she was trapped in their house by a swarm of bees. It was a warm evening and it took us about ten minutes to walk there. The bees were densely clustered on the front door of the two-up, two-down, their translucent wings, gingery bodies and black extremities conveying an impression that this living micro-mosaic was but a detail of a far larger picture.
We went round to the back door and found his wife drinking gin with a friend in the kitchen, while clearly relishing her predicament. ‘I called the police hours ago,’ she said. ‘But they’ve not sent anyone yet.
I pictured the beekeepers who must be on stand-by during the swarming season; half dreading, half hoping that they would be called upon to go and twirl the living candyloss on to a stick, put it in a box, put the box in the back of a small van. The bespoke suit of tiny bodies agitating your skin… the galvanic stress of knowing they are about to poison you from every angle.
That night I ate in an empty Bengali restaurant. There were overhead strip-lights, and neon tubes rimmed the plate-glass windows. The tablecloth fluoresced beneath my sad hands as I ate far more chana masala than I’d intended. Later, my belly slopped in my dinkily awful room at the Royal, which was one of those hotels built into the wall of a station like the Grosvenor at London’s Victoria Station, or the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. As a child the Grosvenor had entranced me; its fusty reception rooms and wide staircases seemed doubly interior — rooms inside a big building that was itself inside a bigger building. Yet Victoria, like the Paragon Station in Hull, was open to the elements, swirling with soot and pigeons, and so the hotels were perhaps only gatehouses between one world and the next.
In the predawn I awoke to crouch grimly for a rope-burn of an evacuation, then slept again, uneasily, and dreamt I was standing in the booking hall of the station, staring up through the oculus. I was aware of the tremendous emptiness of sky over sea, and, on stepping out through the main doors, I discovered not the expected thuggery of the shopping centre opposite, but the peninsula of Spurn Head tapering into the distance, its shingle, furze and sand a collage that had no relief or hue but lay Rat on the still Ratter sea. Just visible, at the very end of the spit, was a vapour trail such as you sometimes see streaming from the tip of an aircraft wing, or a Himalayan peak.
2. Static Homes
I left home at 7.00 a.m. on the Thursday, 24 July 2008. It had been a damp summer and, perversely, I was hoping for poor weather — a Hollywood rain of milky droplets to veil my departure, through which I could scuttle along shining pavements before burrowing into the tube. Down there, in the hypocaust of the city, warmed by the commuters’ foodybreath — well, it would be like relapsing into sleep once more; then, I’d reawaken to the sooty chill of King’s Cross, a space that no amount of renovation could ever rejuvenate.