‘Fair enough,’ she said, placing her fists where her hips ought to have been. ‘When they put the Millennium Stone in at Barmston, and I saw a couple of year later how much closer the cliff had got, well… made me think a little.’
So I left her in her well-equipped kitchen, in its gravelled courtyard, which lay within the larger enclosure of Skipsea itself, with its painted paling fences, pink hollyhocks and silver-metallic Nissan hatchbacks circled in the cul-de-sacs. The means of mobility employed as a defence — could there be any better bulwark against what was going under a mile to the east?
I hurriedly bought an apple and some cheese at the village store and set off, desperate to return to the coast. I had not time for rape fields or poplar rows — besides, field margins were overgrown, convolvulus snaked across the lanes, a sewer stank, and pigeons gorged themselves on ripening wheat. The countryside seemed proud purely on the basis that it was, rather than was not, and taking a path running alongside a grassy knoll I looked at the caravans thereon, each complacently yoked to the national grid. Yet what were they, that they should only be tacked on behind, the appendices of hearth and home?
The farmer’s wife had been up at six to stuff me; now I paid her back with my most liquid currency: amnesia. Why was I, I mused, so flatulent? Why was my belly so uncomfortably swollen? I fixated on the exposed coils of an electricity substation humming in nettles, and so was quite unprepared for the moto enclosure that lay beyond this.
The big old boar lay half inside a corrugated-iron humpy; the sow wallowed in a muddy slough. She was suckling a pair of mopeds, who, rears wriggling, gored her with their greed.
‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd?’ she lisped as I strode past, and, pausing long enough to confront her bristly baby face, I replied, ‘Yes, I mean to get as far as…’, then faltered, because of course I couldn’t remember where it was I was going, so had to get my notebook out and check, all the while cursing myself for the ridiculousness of engaging in conversation with a creature that couldn’t possibly understand.
‘Yes.’ I found the entry. ‘I’m going as far as Hollym today.’
The sow raised herself up on her elbow, fluttering her thick eyelashes, a coquettishness at odds with the pleated gash of her exposed genitals. ‘Thee-thyd,’ she mused. ‘Oo goin’ thee-thyd.’
The mopeds grunted and squealed.
‘Well,’ I snapped, ‘that’s quite enough of that!’
I put the notebook away and headed on, although as I continued along the path, kicking out distractedly at molehills, I could still hear her maddening singsong, ‘Thee-thyd, thee-thyd, thee-thyd…’ and the gobbling of her young.
At the seaside the mist was plumped up, a sweaty pillow on the wrinkled sheet of the waves. North along the bluff I could make out the leftovers of a hamlet; on the landward side of an alley there were wooden shacks and tiny bungalows, while to seaward only broken walls, a few fence posts, a hopeless ‘For Sale’ sign, and detritus strewn over the edge of the cliff. The tide was in, undercutting the bellying mudface that in other places had splurged down in a slow-motion convulsion. Observing the saturated postage stamps of useless water colours floating on the swell, the phrase ‘rotational slumping’ slid into my mind, and so I turned south under a Teflon sky.
I had cosseted the Granny Smith apple in my palm since Skipsea, and now bit into it, releasing a sour concomitant: a bad news thread that spooled in front of my eyes, Deposits of amyloid visible as apple-green yellow birefringence under polarized light. The amyloid forms plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that progress through the centres of the brain. Bite of apple, wet and sharp — bite of boots, the stupid costly bespoke things. Somewhere in the Midlands there was a last, a scale wooden model of my foot growing dusty on a shelf. I’d stretched plaster across the hard ridges of the metatarsals that morning. It didn’t matter — I knew the skin would break before the end of the walking tour and I, an immigrant merman who’d never seen my submarine homeland, would be condemned to walk on knives.
A golf course arrived, heralded by CCTV cameras and signs WARNING of crumpling cliff edges and flying golf balls. Next came a caravan park, with long lanes between the vans that followed the contour lines of the increasingly high and sheer cliff. It was past eight, and I greeted the dog walkers who were about, but they were having none of it. They stuck close to their metal hutches, while I was beyond the chain-link fence, hard by the cliff edge, a creature of sea and sky.
Then another park, the inhabitants of which were more rooted still, their static homes girded round with mini-picket fences, behind which sprouted potted gardens — wincey shrubberies and shocks of pampas grass. Aspen, Vogue, Celebration and Windsor all went by. Windsor had a nautical air, and the standard of St George stiffly riffled beside its jutting prow. A man stood watch outside its picture window, his feet spread on hardwood decking, his elbows propped on a taffrail. He looked like the bulldog on his tea mug, the same barrel chest, slope shoulders and bowlegs. His muzzle — red as the Holderness loess — was amiable enough, and so I hailed him, ‘Don’t you ever get worried?’
He raised a monobrow.
‘About the cliff?’
Was this perhaps a ridiculous solecism, as talk of carcinogens might be to a man riddled with cancer? For the neatly mown grass terminated a few paces from where we stood in a ragged tear that zigged towards one static home, then zagged away from its neighbour.
‘Me, wurried? No, lad,’ he laughed. ‘There’s a good forty-six feet there. It’s him oop there should wurry, he’s only got twelve and he isn’t even chained!’
I looked where he pointed and saw the unchained fool and the beckoning crevice.
‘See,’ the English bulldog resumed, ‘it goes pretty regular; true, I did lose nine feet last year, but that were exceptional.’
I shook my head, bedevilled by such sangfroid: ‘But look, with that crack coming in there, and this one over here, won’t it—’
‘Oh aye, it’ll even up — these hard standings’ll be gone before the year’s out’.
He nodded to the concrete platforms teetering over the abyss; they had the evil air of concentration camp ruins.
‘So,’ I said, ‘what happened to the static homes that were on them?’
‘Well, they joost move us back when we get too near— winch us oop, move us back. It’s all in the contract, like — part of the deal.’
Move us back, part of the deal. Death came wading through the sea fret; at first it was featureless, a blur of black robe and steel scythe, then it was right before me, elbows planted on the cliff edge the way any normally sized person might lean upon a bar. Death’s skull loomed, ivory in its house-sized hood, and it stretched out a bony grabber to wrench Aspen from its hard standing, then place it on a vacant square three rows back.
Glimpsed over my retreating shoulder, this looked to be a tender act, the merciful forestalling of these retirees’ inevitable decline, then fall. But it came at a cost, for Death completed this outsized chequers move by snatching up the two static homes it had taken and casting them into the sea. The cacophony — the pitiful screams, the smash and the clatter — stayed with me for a while, then they became the seagulls’ ordinary savagery, the mist drew back from the horizon, and there were no personifications to be seen except the turbines with their blades feathered, standing sentinel and still.