I looked up from the article to discover that the train had slow-danced into the flatlands of the Humber estuary. The green corduroy of the fields smoothed away on either side; to the east there squatted the fat-bellied cooling towers of the Drax power station at Selby, belching smoke; while to the west an obese grey-white cloud waddled up into the blue sky, its source the Ferrybridge power station at Knottingley. Was it possible, I mused, to judge by eye alone which of these genies was bigger, or to distinguish limbs from heads? Or was this anthropomorphizing itself evidence of my part in a futile collective denial? For they were nothing, really, these clouds — only a portion of the thirty million tons of carbon the pair vomited out every year.
Not just the Drax and the Ferrybridge — hereabouts the coal-fired power stations were as windmills in a Dutch landscape; there was the Eggborough at Goole and the Salt End in Hull itself. All those trillions of carbon particles roiling up, then caught by the wind shear and so driven offshore into the turbine blades; dirty power twined by clean into a vaporous trail that wavered over the waves. In the synoptic eye of my fervid mind the turbines became the propellers of a monstrous airship — or landship, for the craft was the seabed and the Holderness coast; straining, the turbines wrenched the crumbling cliffs, the caravans’ hard standings, even entire flintknapped churches away from the East Riding, away from the desert island of Britain.
Under the elegant glass and cast-iron roof of York Station I bought a medium latte with a triple shot of espresso. The caffeine was a bad idea — my bowels liquefied, but the platforms were thronged and there was no time to queue for the toilets, so I pressed in among day trippers who were crowding against the doors of the small, five-coach Scarborough train. Then I struggled past bare arms as pendulous as fat bellies to achieve a single seat. I opened The Times again, and as the train chuckled away from York read that the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho would be screened on a cable channel that evening. ‘It’s a fascinating insight into an inhuman mind,’ the previewer wittered, ‘with a late twist revealing the sheer insanity at the core of Bateman’s character.’
Bateman? Ellis? The names had a certain familiarity, as did the vignette-sized photograph of a chubby-cheeked man not unlike the young Orson Welles — yet I couldn’t pin down the facts: did I know either of them, or had I only seen the movie?
On family car journeys we played the memory game. Each member, in turn, recited the formula ‘On my holiday I took with me… ‘, then added their own item, whether bucket, spade or pink sun dress. The next player had to remember all the previous things and then add another. Could this be a useful strategy for me, one to add to the mnemonics, the lists of routine activities, and the technique — which I had easily mastered — of not asking myself any questions, or contradicting myself, only supplying a steady flow of reassuring answers?
The passengers sat surrounding me, jammed into the smoothly adzed wooden vessel; their torsos were rigid, their arm-length detachable penises lay by their feet. Their quartzite eyes flickered as cuttings, embankments, trees and barns hurried past the little train, which was mounting now, up into the Yorkshire Wolds. Had they all faked their own deaths, I wondered. If so, where were those things they had taken on their holiday, the floating buckets, the sinking spades, the billowing sun dresses — if not scattered on the cold green waves?
Besides, if I listed everything — a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke, a tracksuit top with trompe l’œil chainmail sleeves, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig — wasn’t there my paramnesia to contend with? Might I incorporate things that didn’t belong to me — and had never even been in my visual field? And so I dredged up an unimpeachable memory: the British Ghanaian writer who had accosted me at a West London summer party, where the guests sheltered from the rain in a palatial playhouse, and, his jaw prognathous with cocaine gurning, clutched my arm as he explained his failure to publish was a result of ‘My fatal flaw, see, it’s girls in boots with guns. Before the internet it wasn’t a problem — I mean, I could control it — access was difficult; but now… Man! There’s too much — a superabundance!’
So I took his flaw with me on my holiday, together with the five empty Ribena cartons that clustered in the rain hood of a Maclaren buggy. Further along the carriage one of the wooden idols cracked its mouth and said, ‘I’m a systems analyst.’ While I thought, aren’t we all?
At Seamer I left the train, laced my boots, then went away through a metal gate to piss among nettles and brambles, their stems and thorns trussed with flung silage. Not good, this modern Millais, the white rim of a discarded paper cup beaded with urine taking the place of Ophelia’s wrist, breaking the surface of the pool. The next train was full of commuters heading south to Hull — they took me with them on their business trips, together with the boots, the guns, the girls and the child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig.
I detrained at Bempton. The landscape rolled modestly through the final waves of syncline and anticline before the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head. I had envisioned the train chugging around the crescent bay of Filey, holidaymakers saluting it with uplifted spades, a portly McGill man in a onepiece striped bathing costume leaping, crab nipping his big toe. Instead, there was only this: thick white cumuli tumbling down on the spectral willows, a monotonous breeze, and pebble-dashed bungalows, each neat front garden equipped with a paddling pool and a trampoline. I edged past, stopping every hundred yards or so to see if, by some minor adjustment, I could make my boots more comfortable.
Most of the trampolines had security netting both at the sides and overhead. I was still perplexed; surely the parents were being irresponsible, there had been over 4,000 disappearances this year already. One moment the child happily bouncing, the next raised up not in Rapture but abject terror. Up and up they flew, human balloons trailing thin screams. They never came down again. Inevitably there were many occasions when a sibling or playmate grabbed hold of those about to be disappeared by their trainers, only to let go when too far up. One little girl who had survived the fall was in the hospital at York. Interviewed by detectives, she said she saw nothing, knew nothing and felt nothing but pain. Still the children went on trampolining.
The straight way between two nondescript Yorkshire villages, drivers’ mouths wobbling as they swerved to avoid me; a group of sinisterly black toadstools in the grooves of a felled ash; the elongated barrow of an overgrown old railway embankment; the beige earth littered with plough-sharehalved flints; Seaways Farm, Home of Agricycle, WARNING: GUARD DOGS, WARNING C.C.T.V. installed on these premises. Then Flamborough village clustered around two fish and chip shops, its peripheral brick semis tucked like Monopoly properties in the corner of raggedy fields. The old octagonal lighthouse tipped above the horizon, quaint as a doge’s hat; next golfers grazing on their fairways, after that the new lighthouse and after this the cold and salty shock of the whiteflecked waves retreating towards a hazy horizon guarded by — Oh! How could I have forgotten them?
On my holiday I took with me the fatal flaw of girls in boots with guns, quartzite eyes, a detachable wooden penis, a child’s rubber figurine wearing a Churchillian siren suit but with the head of a pig — and these: beyond the whitewashed Coastguard station, and the steely latticing of a pair of radio masts, came marching the tripods with their three-bladed heads. I was shocked by their size — at least 500 feet high, the ones closest to Flamborough Head stood wave-waisted, entire, while those further out each had a bobbing flotilla of barges and service vessels. Further still, where the vast parenthesis tended to the south, the turbines were still being erected; the floating cranes’ platforms were measurable by acreage, their davits implausible — their being of human manufacture, that is.