Then I was sitting on the seawall watching the tide lap back from muddy shingle. The wall was in three smooth tiers, with orange-painted steel gates set on mammoth hinges in the uppermost one. The sunlight was bright enough to strike sparks on the wavelets, yet overall visibility was only a couple of hundred yards, the sea mist enclosing what might be — for all I knew — an isolated section of coral reef. I peered closely at the smooth whiteness between my thighs — was it concrete, or the massively compacted exoskeletons of myriad antediluvian crustaceans?
I was getting out my oat cakes and the sweating cheese I’d bought in Skipsea, when a family came trundling out of the mist and sat right beside me. There was a chocolate-smeared three-year-old in a pushchair, its feet trailing along the path. Too bloody big for it, I thought, it’ll end up fat as its mother — who was mountainous in a bright red blouse and black slacks. A sixtyish mother-in-law was in attendance, her senior hair set hard. Her hovering around the pushchair was a mute agony: she mustn’t interfere, although everything her daughter-in-law did was wrong as wrong could be.
A short way off, on the steel stairway down to the strand, a skinny husband in a bowling shirt fiddled with a tacky kite. The six-year-old boy pestering him was equally skinny — all bone struts, stringy tendons and plastic skin. I watched them get tangled up in each other, while I removed from my rucksack my tea-making kit, a paperback thriller and a small oilcloth bundle, which when I unrolled it contained what appeared to be the detachable wooden penises of some Bronze Age figurines.
‘D’you want yer bap now?’ The mountainous mummy thrust the white roll at the child in the pushchair.
‘I thought, maybe—’ the mother-in-law ventured, then was silenced by a furious glare.
‘Go on, ’ave yer bap now!’ the mother insisted, kneading love and hatred together.
‘Ah, well,’ the mother-in-law sighed.
‘Whaddya mean by that?’ the mother snapped, and as the mother-in-law quailed I thought it will always be thus, until one or the other of them dies.
I couldn’t remember acquiring the Agatha Christie or the bundle of wooden penises. I knew that on my holiday I had taken with me a formerly lascivious madman, a neurofibrillary tangle, a pig-headed rubber figurine and a dead porpoise rescued from the long fetch of the German Ocean — but these?
While I was playing the memory game the skinny husband came up to get his own bap, abandoning the older kid to crunch along the shingle, the kite nipping at his heels.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ the man said when he saw me. ‘What’re you doing up this way again?’
I was grateful to him for two things: first, his bowling shirt, which was lilac with a blue revere collar, cuffs and pocket-facing; it was also monogrammed ‘Derek’ across the breast pocket. Secondly, there was Derek’s low-key reaction to what I assumed must be a quite a coincidence. I imagined he was responding intuitively to my blank expression, and fed me this easy question so I could skirt whatever mutual history we had, leaving it for him to unearth later.
I began explaining that I was taking a few days out to walk the Holderness coast, but no sooner had I begun talking than Derek interrupted me, turning to the uncongenial woman-mountain and blurting, ‘Look, it’s ’im who came round that evening we ’ad the bees.’
‘Oh, ho!’ she laughed. ‘It’s you — I didn’t even notice you sitting there all quiet, like. ’Ow yer doin’? Still writing your cra-azy books?’
Her sudden warmth was overpowering — I thought, how sad she has so little of this for her own, and also for an instant — could I spill it all out? My deteriorating memory — the quixotic quest for the man in the scrap of photograph I’d found in the gutter of St Rule Street? Might I throw myself on the soft mercy of her bosom?
‘It weren’t ’til well after midnight that the police got hold of some feller who knew how to deal wi’ it,’ Derek was saying.
In the course of a few more exchanges I gathered this: that he had gone to see me give a book reading at the Pave Café in Hull the previous summer. She — Karen, that is — would’ve gone too, were it not for a swarm of bees that had blanketed the front of the house: ‘The babysitter were absolutely bloody terrified.’ I, however, had risen to the challenge, and when I heard the tale accompanied Derek home and gave an impromptu recital in the kitchen, ‘While me an’ my mate drank oor gin.’
As this was transpiring the mother-in-law, released from her daughter-in-law’s cage of contempt, escaped with the pushchair. Wheeling it twenty yards off, she snatched back the child’s bap and began vigorously to wipe the chocolate from its mouth with an index finger cowled in saliva-dampened cloth.
My lips felt sore and I was walking along the cliff top. The tide was still too high to risk the beach. Another caravan park rolled towards me, but this time there was no fencing between the static homes — which were arranged side-on — and the precipice. Hard standings overhung the abyss — and one had recently collapsed together with the ruptured diaphragm of a paddling pool, the shards of fake-marble planters, a toilet seat and a yucca, which still alive had replanted itself in the mudface, near to a swollen and putrefying hand — or rubber glove.
The dregs of an army camp marched through the badlands towards me. There were overgrown trenches and ramparts studded with sentinel towers, redbrick revetments crumbled into the ruderals, and the heat shimmered over the hedgerows — crystal stairs for flies to shimmy on. The black outline of a man punched a hole in a tower’s doorway. A gun nut. Spent all morning at home, up in his bedroom. ‘Gary!’ his old man called up. ‘’Ave you ’ad yer breakfast, oor what?’ Or what. He came along the flatland from Rolston on a mountain bike, a shotgun slung around one shoulder, a.22 rifle round the other, the pockets of his unseasonable parka bulging with ammunition. He stands in the doorway watching me come on in my Union Army-blue uniform T-shirt, my head full of deep-laid plans for world Zionist domination. He stands stock still, not wanting to aim then track me, but postponing the ecstasy of fluid movement, and so on I come, at every pace expecting his big chin to bristle from the shadows, the nostrils of his shotgun to sneeze snotty lead, his parenthetic shoulders to shrug with the recoil — and so bracket my expiration.
It wasn’t until I was within ten paces of the tower that the gun nut resolved into nothing but the outline of a man bashed in the old steel door. I went on, quaking, and debouched into the road by Mappleton village hall, a Wesleyan chapel dated 1830. Along the road a car slowed beside me and the driver asked if I knew of a petrol station nearby; I said I didn’t, walked on and discovered a jolly little Prius dealership around the next bend, its eco-bunting limp on this hot afternoon, the cars hunched and shiny, the prices exorbitant.
Down a lane, past raggle-taggle cottages, I came upon a declivity leading to the beach. The tide had turned; looking south I could pick out a route worming around the mud slid down, so, despite the prominent signs warning of unexploded ordinance, I set off into the daymare of my own relentless velleity.
At first there were a few dog walkers, some swimmers waisthigh in the churned cream waves and a pod of sunbathers cast ashore on cushions of sea-worn concrete — but soon enough I was utterly alone, picking my way between pinnacles of dried mud studded with pebbles of all colours, from bone-white through eggshell to carmine, mahogany and black. To my right the cliff swooped up, to my left the sea rippled away, while before my eyes the sea fret coiled and shredded — a miasma at once nothingy and permanent; as each buttress of hardened mud formed the flats of this set, so the mist appeared always on the point of being whisked away to reveal the audience of giants seated in the deep.